NINE
"Did you want the milk?" Nathaniel's mother asks. "I already had a bowl of cereal," his father replies.
"Oh." She starts to put it back in the refrigerator, but his father takes it out of her hand. "Maybe I'll have a little more."
They look at each other, and then his mother steps back with a funny too-tight smile. "All right," she says.
Nathaniel watches this the way he would watch a cartoon-knowing in the back of his head that something is not quite real or right, but attracted to the show all the same.
Last summer when he was outside with his father he'd chased an electric green dragonfly all the way across the garden and the pumpkin patch and into the birdbath. There it found a bright blue dragonfly, and for a while they'd watched the two of them nip and thrust at each other, their bodies swords. "Are they fighting?" Nathaniel had asked.
"No, they're mating." Before Nathaniel could even ask, his father explained: It was the way animals and bugs and things made babies.
"But it looks like they're trying to kill each other," Nathaniel pointed out.
Almost as soon as he said it, the two dragonflies hitched together like a shimmering space station, their wings beating like a quartet of hearts and their long tails quivering.
"Sometimes it's like that," his father had answered.
Quentin had spent the night tossing on that godawful mattress, wondering what the hell was keeping the jury. No case was a sure thing, but for God's sake, they had this murder on tape. It should have been pretty simple. Yet the jury had been deliberating since yesterday afternoon; and here it was nearly twenty-four hours later with no verdict.
He has walked past the jury room at least twenty times, trying ESP to will them toward a conviction.
The bailiff posted outside the door is an older man with the ability to sleep on his feet. He snorts his way back to a deadpan position of authority as the prosecutor passes. "Anything?" Quentin asks.
"Lot of yelling. They just ordered lunch. Eleven turkey sandwiches and one roast beef."
Frustrated, Quentin turns on his heel and heads down the hall again, only to crash into his son coming around the corner. "Gideon?"
"What's up."
Gideon, in court. For a moment Quentin's heart stops, like it did a year ago. "What are you doing here?"
The boy shrugs, as if he can't figure it out himself. "I didn't have basketball practice today, and I figured I'd just come over and chill out." He drags his sneaker on the floor to make it squeak. "See what it looks like from the other side, and all."
A slow smile itches its way across Quentin's face as he claps his son on the shoulder. And for the first time in the ten years that Quentin Brown has been in a courthouse, he is rendered speechless.
Twenty-six hours; 1,560 minutes; 93,600 seconds. Call it what you like; waiting in any denomination takes a lifetime. I have memorized every inch of this conference room. I have counted the linoleum tiles on the floor, marked the scars on the ceiling, measured off the width of the windows. What are they doing in there?
When the door opens, I realize that the only thing worse than waiting is the moment that you realize a decision has been made.
A white handkerchief appears in the doorway, followed by Fisher.
"The verdict." The words cut up my tongue. "It's in?"
"Not yet."
Boneless, I sink back in the chair as Fisher tosses the handkerchief at me. "Is this in preparation for their finding?"
"No, it's me, surrendering. I'm sorry about yesterday." He glances at me. "Although a little advance notice that you wanted to do the closing would have been nice."
"I know." I look up at him. "Do you think that's why the jury didn't come back fast with an acquittal?"
Fisher shrugs. "Maybe it's why they didn't come back fast with a conviction."
"Yeah, well. I've always been best at closings."
He smiles at me. "I'm a cross-examination man, myself."
