"Can you tell me about that?"
The man leaned back and set his glass on a coaster made of shellacked beer-bottle caps. "It wasn't a real good time for me. My sister had a stroke and she never came out of it. For a few months there, Marie and me were up at the hospital almost all day long. Maggie took some vacation time off work and ran the store for us, and she got Jamie to clean our house on the weekends. She used to bring those cookies with M & M's in them and big loaves of pound cake, right to the hospital, because she said we needed to keep up our own strength.
"Anyhow," he continued, sighing, "one night when Marie went off for the call of nature, Maggie came closer to the hospital bed than she ever had. She'd come into the room before, but she'd always run away like she was afraid of catching some disease. She looked right down into Frances's face, which was still frowning on the side that got took by the stroke, and touched her cheek. 'That isn't a way to live,' she told me."
Graham whipped a notepad out of his breast pocket and began to scribble down what Watchell Spitlick said. "Anything else?" He tried to keep the excitement out of his voice.
"I told her that Frances would go when God wanted her. And"--he shook his head--"Maggie said to me that if it was her, she'd want someone to wake God up and ask Him what the heck was keeping Him."
Graham leaned forward, balancing his elbows on his knees. He knocked over the eight-tracks, David Cassidy and Joni Mitchell and the Bee Gees spilling over his black loafers. "Mr. Spitlick, would you be willing to testify to all this in court?"
Bud smiled sadly, looking out the window at the empty MacDonald house. "I'd do anything for those two." He stood up and Graham stood with him, then he clapped Graham around the shoulders with a big, work-rough hand. "I figure she's an angel now," he said, his voice sounding oddly thin.
Graham glanced toward Jamie's house, where a bronze wind chime cried on the overhang of the porch. "I figure she is."
Dr. Roanoke Martin was thinking more about his secretary than about the man in front of him. As a psychologist on call for the state of Massachusetts, he had seen his share of deadbeats and schizophrenics and borderline psychotics. Once he'd even interviewed a guy who believed he had been given a transplant of the left side--mind you, only the left side--of Charles Manson's brain. Roanoke Martin had no reason to believe that James MacDonald would be any different, any more or any less than ten minutes he could be putting to better use with a lunchtime fuck.
He had asked the standard questions: Did he know his name? The year? The president? Could he talk a bit about his childhood, his family? The man who sat before him was calm and soft-spoken, although he had a good eight inches on Roanoke, which made the doctor a little nervous--you couldn't be around mentally ill people who flew off the handle without prejudging someone strictly on their size.
"Can you tell me what happened on September nineteenth?" Roanoke asked. He tipped up his thin black watch so that its LED display reflected on his glasses. Angela would be swinging back and forth in his swivel chair by now, her feet propped up on the desk, her skirt hiked to midthigh.
"I killed my wife," Jamie said. "I put a pillow over her face and I smothered her like she'd asked me to."
In spite of himself, the doctor leaned forward. "And are you sorry you did this?"
Jamie made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a snort, but Roanoke knew it wouldn't be that, it couldn't--defendants always knew they were supposed to impress the State, and even the truly crazy ones managed to behave accordingly. "Sorry? That's a loaded word, Doctor"
Roanoke tapped his fingers on the conference room's table. "What does it mean to you?"
"The same thing I imagine it means to everyone else who speaks English," Jamie snapped. He pushed a hand through his hair. "Am I sorry I killed Maggie? No. Am I sorry that I had to? Yes. Am I sorry that she's not here anymore? More than you could possibly know by talking to me for ten fucking minutes."
Roanoke was silent for a moment. "You seem to have a great deal of anger in you."
Jamie laughed. "You went to school for this?"
The doctor shuffled around the papers that comprised the file of James MacDonald. He already knew what he'd write in his report. The defendant was articulate, hostile, and perfectly sane. He was capable of standing trial. He had a full comprehension of what he had done to his wife three months before. And no remorse.
With a sigh he pulled out the morality test he always gave to the state patients pending trial. Kohlberg had created it; it was controversial in his field--something about the scoring that was disadvantageous to women, but Roanoke tended to simply listen to the responses of the patients rather than rating them on a scale of scrupulousness. It involved a hypothetical situation: someone is suffering from a very rare and painful disease. All the medicine in the world to treat this disease is located in a drugstore in Switzerland, kept under lock and key, and is outrageously expensive. Without the medicine, this person will die. Would you steal the medicine?
Morality was judged, supposedly, by the criteria a patient used to make a decision. Some inflexibly refused to break the law. Others said that exceptions could be made. Still others suggested trying to bargain with the owner of the drugstore.
But then you tried to change their answer by giving a name to the person who was ill. What if it was not a stranger, but your friend? Your pet? Your mother?
Roanoke cleared his throat. "I'm going to present a situation to you, I'd like you to tell me what you'd do in the circumstances." He raised the paper to scan it in the original situational form, as Kohlberg had designed it. " 'Your wife,' " he read, " 'is dying of a very rare and painful disease.' "
He stopped when he realized something was casting a shadow on the page. Jamie MacDonald was standing, all six feet four inches of him towering over Roanoke Martin and effectively ending the interview. "You'll forgive me," Jamie said quietly, turning to leave, "but I think we've already covered this."
Was she joking when she said it?" Graham asked. "You know, a funny ha-ha kind of comment you'd make to your best friend?"
He and Allie were sitting on one side of a red plastic booth at the Cummington Taco Bell; Pauline Cioffi was on the other side.
She had come with her children, apologetically saying she really didn't have a choice in the matter; they seemed to be parasitically attached until they got their learner's permits for driving.
"Maggie had a sense of humor," Pauline said, "but she also had taste. You don't say, 'I'm going to ask Jamie to kill me,' in the same breath you'd say you were going to ask him to take the luggage down from the attic and then fix the back sprinkler."
"Those were the words she used?" Allie asked. "Exactly?"
Pauline shook her head. "I can't be entirely sure, but it was close."
"And what did you say?" Graham pressed.
"I offered her the use of my kids for a week," Pauline said. "That would do in Mother Teresa."
Graham scrunched down slightly on the banquette. "So you did make a joke out of it."
"I did, but when I said that, she grabbed my hand. That wasn't something she did a lot--you have to understand, she wasn't one of these touchy-feely friends who hug all the time. Anyway, so she grabbed my hand and she made me look right at her and she said, 'I mean it.' "
From the indoor playground at the back of the restaurant, one of Pauline's children starred wailing. "What made her think Jamie would do it?" Allie asked.
Pauline turned her head in the direction of her crying son. "You're all right," she called out. "Now what was that? Why would Jamie do it?" She shrugged. "Jamie would have slit his own throat if it made Maggie happy, and thought about the consequences after the fact."
Graham made a low, strangled noise. Allie glanced at him, but his fingers were steepled together in front of his face and she could not read him well enough to know what he was thinking. "You'd call their relationship a close one, then?"
Pauline smiled sadly. "Apparently too close for comfort."
&n
bsp; Graham's eyebrows drew together. "So you think what Jamie did was wrong?"
For a long moment, she did not speak. She let her eyes wander over to her children, who were climbing onto an oversized plastic tortilla shell. "No," Pauline said finally. "I don't think what he did was wrong. I think what Maggie did was wrong." She turned back to Graham and Allie, her tired brown eyes rounding softly in a way that almost made her beautiful. "The way I see it, love is just a bigger, stickier form of trust. Maggie promised him it would be all right, and Jamie never thought twice about believing her. But it didn't work out that way, did it? She was my best friend, God help me, but she's the one who ought to be on trial. She took advantage of the fact that her husband was crazy about her, and now he's being called a murderer."
Pauline reached down and blindly found her Coke, taking a long sip before she released it and leaned back against the seat. She closed her eyes, but she was smiling. "Maggie and I used to say that for my fortieth birthday--mine would come three years before hers--we'd go to Hawaii. Just the two of us, she said, and Jamie stowing away in a forty-inch suitcase, since he wouldn't know what to do with himself if she went away." She blinked at Allie and Graham then; her eyes bright, her smile brittle. "Well," she said. "You know what they say about the best-laid plans."
How come doctors," Graham hissed across the waiting room to Allie, "only subscribe to magazines no one wants to read, and even those are from the year one?"
Allie smiled at him. He was a good man; he always offered to pay for lunch and he never complained about the times Allie started questioning the witnesses more than she was supposed to. "It's a conspiracy," she suggested. "They know it pisses you off."
Graham tossed down the magazine--some tiny little thing printed by a Catholic Charities organization--and stretched his legs out in front of him. "Maybe this is how he gets his patients," he mused. "He keeps them waiting until their bodily functions fail from old age."
"I'm sure he'll call us soon. You wouldn't have wanted to go before that little boy, would you?"
Actually, Graham would have preferred it, since that would have meant that he and Allie were through with Cummington after three grueling day trips for interviews. He let his eyes wander over Allie MacDonald. She was only a few years older than he was, and there was a lot to find appealing. She always looked put together, even when she was wearing clunky L.L. Bean boots with a silk shirtwaist so that she could trudge through the snow and the mud. She was a very good copilot when it came to finding shortcuts on a map. And she was remarkably tenacious. "The doctor will see you now."
At the words, Graham bolted to his feet. Allie followed him into the private office where she'd met Dr. Dascomb Wharton more than two months before. He was not eating this time, but his bulk seemed to seep out of the armholes of his swivel chair like poured batter.
Graham extended his hand. "Good afternoon, sir. I'm Graham MacPhee, defense counsel for James MacDonald."
"Cut to the chase," Dr. Wharton said. "I'm a busy man." He sifted through several files on his desk and opened one with a heavy sigh. "Before you ask, the answer is yes, I'll testify, and here's what you want to know. It was a ductal carcinoma, first diagnosed in 1993, although the secondary site was discovered before the lump in the breast." He read through his notes, his florid face rising and falling with the efforts of his lips as he meticulously detailed Maggie's deterioration.
When the doctor finished, Graham shifted slightly. "Did Maggie MacDonald ask you to kill her?"
"Of course not."
"But she asked for pain medication? For radiation treatment?"
The doctor furrowed his brow. "I offered it. It's standard, in cases like hers, to do whatever you can."
"Dr. Wharton," Graham said, "do you believe in euthanasia?"
"I took the Hippocratic oath, Mr. MacPhee. I'm always going to favor living."
Allie let her eyes dart over the doctor's diplomas, wondering where Graham was going with this. He sounded like he was practicing for the real thing, although she didn't really see the point of antagonizing a defense witness.
"You've never upped a morphine dosage for an elderly patient? You've never, well, speeded things along?"
"Excuse me," the doctor said. "I didn't realize I was the one being prosecuted."
Graham had the grace to blush. It was a lovely thing, in Allies opinion, the way the dull red worked its way from his collar to the middle of his ears. Cam never blushed.
"I'm just trying to figure out what was going on in Maggie's head," Graham explained. "Why she picked this particular option, versus another more orthodox one."
"I don't imagine there was much going on in her mind at all at that point," Wharton said. "She was in a considerable amount of pain; she was living with the fact that she was going to die, but not knowing how or when it was going to happen. Doesn't leave a lot of room for extraneous thought."
"Maggie knew she was going to die?" Graham asked.
Wharton looked at him strangely. "I would think that was obvious."
"But did she ever come out and tell you she knew that she was going to die? For that matter, did you tell her that it was going to happen by a certain date?"
The doctor removed his glasses and began to polish the lenses on the front of his white smock. "We talked about it the last time I saw her. You have to understand that her system was just shutting off, bit by bit. And I mean what I say when I tell you that I'll fight to keep someone alive, no matter what, but that doesn't mean I don't see gradients in the quality of life. What I said to Maggie, specifically, was that nobody knew the answer. The cancer was going to surface again, but it was anybody's guess where and when. It could have been that afternoon; it could have been three months from then." He glanced up. "I imagine it was a bit like being locked in the dark with a rattlesnake you could hear but never see."
Allie winced. Graham reached over instinctively and knotted his bony fingers around her hand. "When was the last time you saw Maggie MacDonald?"
Wharton looked down at the file. "September fifteenth," he said. "She had the last appointment of the day."
Allie and Graham glanced at each other. "That gave her three days," Allie murmured. "Three days to make it happen."
It was the longest period of time they had spent together with
their clothes on.
Mia arrived two hours after Allie had gone off for the third day in Graham MacPhee's car, headed to Cummington overnight. She didn't carry a suitcase--that would have been presumptuous and obvious to the neighbors. But Kafka was in her knapsack, and a change of underwear.
She was giddy with the idea of playing house. She was going to cook for Cam and sleep next to him the whole night long and sit in front of a fire with him, their feet tangled together on the floor while they read Cam's travel magazines.
"I love this," she said on Sunday morning. There were waffles cooking in a Belgian waffle maker that had been stashed behind a broken Mr. Coffee in one of the kitchen cupboards. "I may never move out."
Cam wrapped his hand around his mug of hot chocolate. "Now that would prove interesting."
He hadn't left the house all weekend. There was something about seeing Mia in his own bathrobe, his own shower, his own bed, that made him feel like a teenager doing something illicit. The house was beginning to smell of her, and instead of wondering if Allie would notice the difference, he found himself questioning how long it would last for him to enjoy.
She had her nose stuck into a cookbook now. Both of them were admittedly inept when it came to cooking, so they'd had to rely on the arsenal of texts Allie kept on a shelf beside the microwave. "We're going to burn these," she said, sniffing.
Cam stared down at the machine, a big black thing that was emitting smoke at a frightening rate. "We should have stuck to eggs."
Mia turned in his arms and locked her wrists behind his neck. She grinned at him, "Oh, I don't know. When you dream, you're supposed to dream big."
Cam wrapped his hands aroun
d her bottom and boosted her up onto the kitchen counter. "If you could go anywhere, where would you go?"
Mia smiled down at him. It was warming up outside, and the sun was melting the snow on the roof, sending it in a steady drip past the kitchen window. "Are you coming too?"
"I might," he said. "Depends on the destination."
"Okay, then . . . Turkey." She closed her eyes, remembering the little villa on the sea that she had rented for the month she could stand being a paid escort for visiting Arab oil magnates. It had been white; everything had been white, except for the bright poppies on the front stoop and the remarkable blue of the sea, which faded so seamlessly into the sky it was difficult to see where one ended and the other began. "You'd wear baggy pajama bottoms and drink iced coffee on the lanai."
"I wear boxers to bed and I don't like iced coffee," Cam said.
Mia jumped off the counter and slid down the length of him. "It's my fantasy. Don't spoil it." She cocked her head. "Where would you go?"
He thought about it for a moment. He pictured Mia on the Italian Alps, her skis dangling from a gondola. He pictured her in Tokyo, surrounded by giggling Japanese schoolchildren who pointed to her bright blue eyes. He pictured her being tugged by his own hand through the halls of Carrymuir.
"Eight years back," he said simply. "That's where I'd want to go."
He did not know if what he was implying was true; if, given the chance, he would have done things differently. Even with Mia in his arms, he could not completely forget Allie, who held the spatula a different way and who had spackled the splashboard tiles behind the sink herself while sashaying around the kitchen to a Motown CD. It was difficult to imagine a life that hadn't been shaped by Allie; it was equally impossible to consider how he had survived all this time without Mia.
He looked at her, wondering what might have been set into motion if he had stopped at The Devil's Hand for a latte. What if he'd brought her back to Wheelock when his father died, and had married her instead of Allie? Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that it would not have happened; that part of his attraction to Mia was the fact that she moved as freely as she pleased. She would not have been the same woman if he had created her boundaries.
He was overcome with a desire to keep her with him for a little while. His eyes darkened at the edges and Mia's mouth quirked as he bullied her down to the floor--not gracefully, like in the movies, but heavily, falling hard the last foot so that their breath came out in a collective whoosh.