Graham loved it. He absolutely loved it. He turned to Jamie, then looked surreptitiously at the members of the jury, who kept glancing at his client's shirt and letting their eyes slide away. "Jamie," he said, "since a lot of people are wondering, could you tell us why your shirt is on inside out?"
Jamie cleared his throat and flushed. "My uncle Angus told me it's an old Scottish custom: if you put on a piece of clothing inside out, you're not supposed to turn it around because your luck will turn with it. I wasn't taking any chances today."
The juror with the Mickey Mouse tie laughed out loud. A couple of spectators tittered. Graham walked up to the witness stand. "Jamie, on behalf of the court, let me offer my condolences on the loss of your uncle."
"Thank you," Jamie murmured.
"Can you tell the court what your occupation is?"
Jamie cleared his throat. As much as he'd practiced with Graham, he was still nervous. "I run my own computer company," he said. "A conceptual design firm. We create virtual worlds."
"Virtual worlds? As in virtual reality? Sci-fi gloves and headsets and all that?"
"Pretty much."
Graham whistled. "Sounds awfully high-tech. Could you define virtual reality, Jamie?"
Jamie shifted a little. He wondered, not for the first time, why Graham was bothering with questions like these. No one in the jury had a problem with Jamie's business contract with Nintendo. "Virtual reality is the willing suspension of disbelief," he said. "It can take the form of a dream, a book, a movie. The reason people associate the term with computers is because computer technology exists to actually place someone in willing suspension."
"What does that mean?"
"That there are no distractions--the real world isn't visible anymore. The artificial world becomes all you can see, or hear, or feel." He paused, pulled by the implications and ironies of his own definition. Jamie MacDonald, who had been on the cutting edge of virtual reality theme parks and toys, who had designed the Mega-Stick for Sega, and who had reconstructed reality on a ten-inch monitor screen, had never been able to truly dismiss the real world. Not for his wife, and now, not for himself. Whatever he and Maggie had chosen to believe about their actions, it was not enough. Like a conceptually designed toy, once the HMD came off, once the glove and bodysuit were removed, once you shut off the computer, you were only back where you'd started.
Jamie covered his face with his hands. Alarmed, Graham stepped forward, anxious to recapture his client's focus. "I'd like to talk a little about Maggie," Graham said, letting the light that came into Jamie's eyes stand for itself before he pressed on with a question. "How long were you married?"
"Eleven years."
"How did you meet her?"
Jamie smiled. "She was cleaning out a man-made duck pond at the park near my house with a mop. I couldn't take my eyes off her, and I didn't really know what to say, so I picked up one of the scrub brushes lying on the grass and pitched in."
"Why was she cleaning out a duck pond?"
"She said nobody else did it, and she was thinking of the ducks. That was the kind of person she was."
On a yellow pad in front of her, Audra Campbell scrawled, Saint Maggie.
"Did you have a happy marriage?"
"I think so. I think she thought so. I mean, we fought about things--how much money we had, whose turn it was to clean the bathroom--but I guess every couple does that." He glanced at Pauline Cioffi, sitting in the gallery with the other spectators. "She was my best friend, too. After I married Maggie, I didn't understand how I'd lasted twenty-five years without her."
Graham leaned casually against the jury box. "What were your plans for the future?"
Jamie's eyes clouded. "It became fairly clear about a year ago that we didn't have a lot of future left," he said. "But before Maggie got sick, we talked a lot about moving to a bigger house, maybe out of Cummington. Our goal was to have more than one bathroom. And we wanted kids. God, did we want them. We were trying; we had been trying for five years. But Maggie lost one baby, and she couldn't conceive, and then we found out that probably had something to do with the cancer too."
Allie shifted uncomfortably. She remembered the stack of ovulation-predictor tests in the linen closet of Jamie's house. With a child in the picture, Jamie might never have agreed to Maggie's request. With a child, all sorts of outcomes might have been changed. Ducking her head a little, she peered at Cam. If she and Cam had had a baby, would he still have betrayed her?
"Jamie, how did you find out about Maggie's illness?"
For a moment, Jamie didn't speak. Then he closed his eyes and leaned against the witness chair and let words fall from his mouth. They were spoken slowly and without emotion, but his hands were clenched on the wooden railing so tightly that the fingers and knuckles were white. He was telling a story, and even juror number 11, who seemed to have been nodding off, was alert and listening. Jamie created before everyone's eyes a skating pond, a snapped bone, a doctor's solemn conference.
Cam thought of Braebury, of the double skating oval, of Mia. He remembered the ice sculpture. By the time they left the pond, it had grown so warm outside that when he glanced at the melting phoenix before slinging his skates over his shoulder, it did not look at all the way he had remembered.
Graham waited a moment after Jamie fell silent. "When Dr. Wharton told you Maggie's bone lesions were a sign of cancer, how did you feel?"
Jamie shook his head. "I told him he was wrong. I mean, you've seen X-rays, right? How could they possibly pick out a lesion? I suppose it was the word 'cancer' that scared me to death. You hear it, and all of a sudden you aren't breathing anymore." He looked up at Graham. "It didn't much matter that the doctor was telling me it was in Maggie's body, and not mine. It would have hit me the same, either way."
"Did you get a second opinion?"
"Yes, from a doctor in Boston. He said that Maggie's bone lesions were the secondary site of a tumor too." Jamie looked down at his lap.
"How did the news affect Maggie?"
"She was afraid. She drew into a shell for a couple of days and didn't say anything, didn't really let me inside. But then she bounced back, and said she wanted to schedule an operation as quickly as possible. She said she wanted that thing out of her body."
Graham nodded. "What did you decide to do then?"
"She had a mastectomy. That terrified her too--you know, she was still so young, and she thought I would consider her deformed in some way. I kept telling her that it didn't matter, that she could have reconstructive surgery in a year, or whatever, but I think part of the reason that she kept talking about how she would look afterward was because it kept her from facing the fact that even getting rid of a breast wasn't going to take care of a cancer that had already spread."
"Can you describe the treatments Maggie underwent?"
Tenderly, as if they were layers of blankets he was peeling off to reveal his wife, Jamie began to outline the course of Maggie's cancer. He described her lying on the living room couch, doing reaching exercises to build up the muscles beneath her arm and in her chest wall that the mastectomy had severed. He listed the names of the drugs she'd had during chemotherapy as if they were old friends. He talked of driving Maggie home from these treatments, and pulling over to the curb so that she could push open the door and vomit. He described the waiting room of the radiology lab, with bald smiling children and sallow women who wrapped their heads with scarves. He described watching the laser of light, a red knife, spearing the center of Maggie's eye.
"Was there ever a time when your wife was in remission?"
"No," Jamie said. "It got to the point where the cancer became both of our jobs. We couldn't concentrate on anything else, and we didn't have room for anything else. We worked as a team to get rid of what was hurting her. We learned all the back roads to the hospital. The goal for each day was just to get through it."
"When did Maggie know she was going to die?"
Jamie glanced away from Gra
ham. "The doctor told her the tumor was in her brain. She'd been having dizzy spells and then explosions, she called'it, behind her eyes. This was in June of'95. We were in his office after a checkup--we always went in after a checkup--and she asked him flat-out. Wharton told her everyone was going to die, and Maggie got very angry. She said, 'Don't patronize me,' and she stood up to walk out of the room but she fainted." Jamie looked up. "Like I said, that was the problem at the time. When she came to, Wharton told her yes, but he didn't know exactly when,"
"Did she say anything about it to you then?"
Jamie nodded. "In the car, she didn't say a word until we pulled into our driveway. But she didn't unhook her seat belt or make a move to leave the car. And then she looked at me and asked me if I knew what cancer looked like. I shook my head, and she started to cry. 'He's a big, fat, ugly puppeteer,' she told me, 'and he's holding all the strings.' "
Graham scanned the jury. Sympathy on many of the faces; some were leaning forward. A couple of women caught Graham's eye and turned away, as if they knew they were being monitored. He took a deep breath. "Did Maggie ask you to kill her before Sep-tembet of 1995?"
"Yes," Jamie said. "In January. We were on vacation in Quebec."
"What was your response at the time?"
"I told her to stop talking like that." He shook his head. "I knew it was bad for her, but I didn't think it was as bad as all that." He looked to the corner of the courtroom, to the American flag, dusty and still. "I didn't know it was going to get worse."
Allie sat across from Cam at an Armenian diner just around the corner from the superior court. Spread between them were platters of lamb and saffron rice, tabouli, hummus, and a basket of pita. Most of the food remained untouched.
"Do you think we should bring something back for Jamie?" Allie asked.
"I'm sure his lawyer will take care of it," Cam said. He leaned against the banquette and watched his wife. He couldn't quite believe how easily she'd agreed to go out to lunch with him. He must have caught her at a vulnerable moment, worn down from the sharp emotion of Jamie's morning testimony.
"Do you think he's doing okay? How he's talking, and the way he looks up there?"
Cam nodded. "I've been watching the jury. Some of the women on the left side were crying a little when he mentioned the treatments. That has to be a decent sign."
"Graham says you can't trust a jury. They'll act one way one minute and turn around and stab you in the back. Besides, the trial isn't about whether or not Jamie and Maggie were in a difficult, horrible situation. It's about whether or not he was crazy when he killed her."
"Which he wasn't," Cam said.
Allie shot him a look. "Thank God you weren't called to serve."
Cam pushed a wedge of pita bread toward her. "You've got to eat something. You look like you'll keel over if the wind picks up."
Allie stuffed the pita into her mouth. "Thanks a lot," she said sarcastically. She stared at Cam, in full uniform, his heavy gun belt riding high on his hips and his badge catching the reflected light from the window. "You know," she said, smiling shyly, "I always feel awfully safe going places with you when you're dressed like that."
Cam laughed. "You wouldn't believe how many people at the court have asked me where the bathroom is. They think I'm a security guard."
Allie leaned across the table and adjusted his collar. The brush of her fingers beneath his chin sent a chill down his spine. "I don't know if it's the uniform that does it for me. Maybe it's the gun. Maybe it's just you." Maybe it's because when he's dressed like that, it is hard to believe he would lie.
She sank against the seat, and Cam instinctively leaned forward, trying to pull her back and knowing that he'd already lost her. "You realize they came to town the same day," Allie said quietly. "Jamie and Mia."
"I know. I remember asking her if she knew him." His heart was racing again, simply because of the topic. But this time, Allie wasn't yelling at him. She was in a public place and she was speaking softly and holding out a little sliver of trust, just large enough to fit on the small saucer that the waitress had dropped off with their bill.
"Did you laugh at me?" she whispered. "I think of you two, laughing at me."
Cam had listened to heartrending stories all morning, and he didn't think any of Jamie's testimony had cut him as deeply and as painfully as what Allie had just said.
He thought of Mia; of how, when they were together, there was simply no room for anyone else. "No," Cam said. He kept his eyes locked to Allies as he reached across the table and took her hand. For the first time, she did not pull away. Her fingers fluttered against his palm, then came to rest.
"No," he repeated, smiling from the inside out. "Never that."
After lunch, Jamie sat in the witness box and conjured Maggie. Graham asked questions from time to time, but it was only to guide Jamie in the right direction. He began on the night of January fifteenth, when Maggie returned from the doctor; he would finish when he drove up to the Wheelock police and asked for his cousin.
She had been grasping a red polo shirt when she asked him to kill her. The box she was using to store her clothes was about three-quarters full. On the top were the bras she had been able to wear before the operation. He was holding her hands. "I want you to kill me," she said.
"You've got to be kidding," Jamie answered. "Absolutely not."
Maggie pulled away from him, letting the shirt fall between them like a puddle of blood. "Jamie, let me go. You're being selfish."
He watched her frail shoulders tremble with the strength of her certainty and he sat on their bed and realized he was about to say the most awful words he could. "No," he told her. "You are."
She turned around and sank to the edge of the bed on the opposite side. They sat like studied figurines, their hands clasped in their laps, their heads bowed. "I have a right to be selfish," Maggie said bitterly. "It's one of the few privileges my body has left me in possession of."
Jamie picked up the red shirt and threw it back into her drawer. He reached into the liquor box for the bras, which slipped through his fingers like a skein of silken ribbons. He put these back in Maggie's dresser too.
They went to bed and fell asleep the way they were most comfortable: with Maggie's back to his front, one of his arms beneath the pillow, the other cupping her remaining breast. Sometime in the middle of the night, when his fingers relaxed, his hand brushed over the flat plane of her chest. He woke up feeling for her scar.
She drew in a sharp breath.
"Am I hurting you?"
Maggie turned in his arms. "On what level?" she asked, looking directly into his eyes.
She had looked at him before like that. Jamie liked to think of it as her Medusa look, the one that froze him in his tracks and rendered him incapable of thinking. But this time, in the middle of her gaze, her eyes widened just the slightest bit. And he knew that she couldn't even plead with him because of the pain.
He did not know what it would be like to go to sleep each night wondering if you would wake up in the morning. To stare into the bathroom mirror and see the sunken eyes, the bald patches on your scalp, to look at the jagged scar across what used to be your breast--and to thank God you could still stand on your own two feet and see your face clearly.
Jamie did know what it was like, however, to kiss your wife each night in bed and put behind the pressure of your lips a silent, last goodbye, just in case, a sentiment you'd never verbalize because it would feed her fear. He knew how he woke up sometimes to check her breathing. He knew how very tired he was, how he forced himself to drag up just a little more energy.
He was the one who spoke first. "Why can't you take pills? I'll get them for you. I won't call 911." .
In the black night, with the sounds of their house settling around them, even this talk of death had a comfort zone. Maggie touched her hand to his chest. It was a stab in the dark, but her palm landed just over his heart, as if she knew she'd held it all along. "I want you touching
me," she said. "I want your hands on me the minute I go."
She rolled onto her stomach and propped up on her elbows. The prospect of finally controlling this nightmare had her eyes gleaming, her smile sincere. "Do it now," she begged. "Do it before you lose your nerve."
Jamie turned onto his side, where he wouldn't see her. "Sure," he muttered. "Let me just grab my gun and I'll blow off the back of your head. Or I can put my hands around your throat and shake you back and forth until your neck snaps."
He was being crude; he knew it. But he didn't see any other way to shock her back to reality. He felt Maggie slip her arms under his and embrace him. "A pillow. It wouldn't hurt."
He was silent for so long she believed he had fallen asleep. The morning was just unraveling when Jamie turned and drew her close. "I want this weekend with you," he said, slightly nauseated by the nature of the bargain. "I pick the time and I pick the place."
Maggie agreed. Jamie pushed her away, ran into the bathroom, and threw up.
Late Saturday morning, they took everything they could eat from the refrigerator and had a picnic for breakfast. They climbed to the top of the roof, to the big dormer out back that kept the upstairs from having narrow, sloped ceilings. Bud Spitlick saw them when he came out for his paper and told them they'd better watch it or they'd fall. Jamie had instinctively tightened his arms around Maggie, where she sat in the nest of his lap. "I could break my neck," she whispered to him, and she started to giggle. "Think of all the trouble I would save you."
They both laughed then, until they realized exactly what they were laughing at, and then they just fell quiet and held each other.
Jamie asked her what she wanted to do next. Maggie said she should pack up her clothes; he argued that that wasn't the way she should spend her last few days. "Let's do something I've never done," she said, and he wondered what that would be: renting an X-rated film? jumping from an airplane? driving to Florida?
She wanted to go to a movie theater and make out in the back row like a teenager. Jamie couldn't remember the name of the film they picked; it didn't much matter. He unbuttoned her shirt and slipped his fingers into the waist of her jeans and in the end came into Maggie's hand while the movie glowed green and blue on her skin.