“She is,” I interrupt. “At least, she is right now. All my prayers are going to her, because she is the only thing that stands between me and a conviction, Edison, which is why I’m asking—no,beggingyou to do this one thing for me.”
“I got stuff to do.”
I arch a brow. “Like what? Skip school?”
Edison rolls away from me. “Why don’t you just leave?”
“In about a week,” I snap, “your wish might just come true.”
The truth has teeth. I hold my hand over my mouth, like I could will back the words. Edison fights to blink back tears. “I didn’t mean that,” he mumbles.
“I know.”
“I don’t want to go to the trial because I don’t think I can listen to what they say about you,” he confesses.
I put my hands on either side of his face. “Edison, you know me. Theydon’t. No matter what you hear in that courtroom, no matter what lies they try to tell—you remember that everything I have ever done has been for you.” I cup his cheek, follow the track of a tear with the pad of my thumb. “You’re going to make something of yourself. People are going to know your name.”
I can hear the echo of my mama telling me the same thing.Be careful what you wish for,I think. After today, peoplewillknow my name. But not for the reasons she had hoped.
“What happens toyoumatters,” I tell Edison. “What happens to me doesn’t.”
His hand comes up, encircling my wrist. “It matters tome.”
Oh,thereyou are,I think as I look into Edison’s eyes. This is the boy I know. The boy I hooked my star on.
“It seems,” I say lightly, “that I am in need of a date to my own trial.”
Edison lets go of my wrist. He holds out his arm, crooked at the elbow, old-fashioned and courtly, even though he is still wearing his pajamas, even though I have a scarf wrapped around my hair, even though this is not a ball we are attending, but more of a gauntlet to run. “It would be my pleasure,” he says.
—
LAST NIGHT,KENNEDYhad showed up at my house unexpected. Her husband and daughter were with her; she had come straight from some town about two hours away and was bursting to share her news with me: MCADD had shown up in Davis Bauer’s newborn screening.
I stared at the results she showed me, the same ones a doctor friend of her husband’s had explained to her. “But that’s…that’s…”
“Lucky,” she finished. “For you, anyway. I don’t know if these results were missing from the file accidentally, or if someone tanked them purposely because they knew it would make you less culpable. But what’s important is that we have the information now, and we’re going to ride it to an acquittal.”
MCADD is a much more dangerous medical condition than a grade one patent ductus, the heart ailment Kennedy had planned to raise. It is not a lie, anymore, to say that the Bauer baby had had a life-threatening disorder.
She wouldn’t be lying in court. Just me.
I had tried a half dozen times to come clean to Kennedy, especially as our relationship shifted from a professional track into a personal one. But as it turned out, that just made it worse. At first I couldn’t tell her that I had intervened and touched Davis Bauer when he was seizing because I didn’t know if I could trust her, or how the truth would reflect on my case. But now, I couldn’t tell her because I was ashamed to have ever lied in the first place.
I burst into tears.
“Those better be tears of happiness,” she said. “Or gratitude for my remarkable legal talent.”
“That poor baby,” I managed. “It’s so…arbitrary.”
But I wasn’t crying for Davis Bauer, and I wasn’t crying because of my own dishonesty. I was crying because Kennedy had been right all along—it really didn’t matter if the nurse attending to Davis Bauer was Black or white or purple. It didn’t matter if I tried to resuscitate that baby or not. None of it would have made a difference.
She put her hand on my arm. “Ruth,” Kennedy reminded me. “Bad things happen to good people every day.”
—
MY CELLPHONE RINGSjust as the bus pulls up to our stop downtown. Edison and I step off as Adisa’s voice fills my ear. “Girl, you not gonna believe this. Where you at?”
I look at a sign. “College Street.”
