Chapter 10.
10.
Adverse Testimony (n., phrase)
when a witness, expected to be supportive or aligned with the party they are related to, provides testimony that is unfavorable or damaging to that party’s case
fathers who betray their daughters
D amon and I learned of my father’s affair with his mom midway through our sophomore year. We snuck off campus for lunch when Damon asked me to run home with him to grab his bag for lacrosse practice. We were six years in as best friends, on the delicate cusp of something more.
We walked in the front door of his house, two doors down from my own, to find Mallory Bradburn fully naked, bent over the worn leather armchair that Damon’s father always sat in, my father behind her. Unfortunately, my brain registered every detail, like one of those 360-degree cameras with hundreds of flashes going off at once.
My father was supposed to be fixing our leaking kitchen faucet before he left for a four-day trip. She was supposed to be on a conference call or otherwise working from the small desk in the corner of the main bedroom she shared with Mr. Bradburn. Damon and I fully intended to sneak in and out that day without her noticing.
It’s odd, the thing I thought of as they scrambled for their clothes, Mrs. Bradburn’s hair messy and swinging wildly as she searched the floor for each of her garments. I wondered how this man—my father— managed to get so many women to have sex with him. He was, by all accounts, ordinary. No better looking than any other dad on the street. Less so than, say, Mr. Bradburn. My father was polite and even charming, but not in a swoon-worthy way one might expect for a man who had managed to win over so many willing sexual partners.
“What the fuck.” Damon’s voice ping-ponged from every inch of ceiling and floor and wall as if we were pinned inside an echo chamber. I looked at him because I didn’t want to see any more of my father as he fought to step into his boxers. Damon, however, focused in on him, eyebrows pressed so tightly together they merged into one, hands fisted at his sides, eyes searing with a hatred that scared me. He looked like an antagonized bull about to charge, locked in on one specific victim.
I had never seen Damon like that, so full of shock and rage, all of it directed at my father. I’ve never seen anyone as angry as Damon in that moment.
I don’t particularly remember what they said. His mom cried. My father didn’t look me in the eye, instead focusing on whether he’d need to restrain Damon.
For me, the scene was mortifying, but it didn’t change my view of who my father was. I knew he was a cheat. I knew he wasn’t someone who acted by a strong moral code. I was always waiting for him to ruin anything good, terrified his narcissistic behavior might have been genetically passed on to me, all the while still seeking his approval.
But for Damon, the situation sliced him in half. His parents had a loving marriage. They were happy. His family was one that had always been ardently intact. He loved his mom. He saw her as good, and we were still holding on to the days of defining people as good or bad with little conceptual acceptance of gray.
I felt us break right then, Damon and me. Not a fracture or a fissure. No. It was a visceral separation, like a chicken thigh cleaved from its body by a butcher. The door between Damon and me slammed unceremoniously shut, leaving me with the ominous ache of what could have been. Not even our friendship would survive, because I knew, despite how desperately I needed him to, Damon would not be able to look at me without seeing what my father had done.
I thought up so many desperate options. Convincing Damon to run away with me. Investigating an emancipation from my parents—I didn’t need them anyway. Asking his parents if I could move in with them. Ultimately, though, I was too muted to take any real action to save my relationship with Damon. Besides, he should have known. He should have seen without me having to say it: I am not my father .
And, I need you .
For that—for him not being able to look at me and see past the actions of my father, for leaving me to suffocate in the wake of his disgrace—I’ve never forgiven him.
Mallory Bradburn confessed to her husband. I’m unsure who told my mom, but I knew it hadn’t been my dad to share the news. But she knew within twenty-four hours. I heard my parents fight about it. About how he had been fucking the neighbor for months. About how it was sad that was the best he could do. About what a worthless loser he was.
Four days later, there was a FOR SALE sign in the Bradburns’ yard. Two weeks later, a moving truck, and Damon erased from my life, with only a short goodbye in his parents’ driveway.
“I don’t know what to say. I wish I could do something to fix this,” he said, his voice too firm.
I just stood there, staring back, silently begging him to tell me this was all a lie, a well-executed joke.
He stared at me with those eyes, the ones that could always see right into my heart. But it was different. He was different. There was never complication in the way he looked at me before. A mounting interest that was different and unexplored, sure. But his eyes on me had always meant love. Acceptance. Watching him stand with great effort in the driveway of the house that was no longer his home, he looked at me with so much conflict swimming in his eyes that I couldn’t manage a response.
Silently, he wrapped his arms around me, seemingly in defeat, squeezing so hard I lost my breath. He pressed my face to his collar bone, and I fought the urge to press my lips to that spot of skin. I fought the urge to do a lot of things.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered into him.
“Yeah” was all he said back before letting me go. That word echoed within me long after he spoke it, haunting me like an unshakable winter chill.
Our kitchen faucet leaked well past the Bradburns’ permanent departure from the house two doors down.
On the second day of the trial, I head down to breakfast at 8:10, just five minutes before we are meant to leave for the courthouse. I can’t help but notice Damon’s absence.
It’s not until we’re climbing into the vans that Damon emerges, trotting out the front doors and into the line for the second shuttle just as I’m climbing into the first. His usually contained hair is slightly more askew than usual, eyes still carrying the slight swollenness of sleep.
We make eye contact and his gaze lingers, face firm, more alert than the second before. I hold up a box of Corn Pops and toss it in his direction. He catches it with ease, the dimple in his chin pushing deeper. He gives me a nod of appreciation and I nod back, then turn away so I don’t appear overly invested.
My anger toward Damon is something I’ve quickly found myself having to stoke regularly to keep burning, admonishing myself for the lapse each time. It’s tenuous, the unexpected complexity and range of emotions I am carrying as a result of his return to my life.
At the courthouse, as we line up to enter the courtroom, I anticipate Damon’s smell before I actually inhale it. His scent again sends me straight back to Sagawa, to preteen me mucking horseshoes and brush-polishing saddles, to solo rides through the woods and the simultaneous calm and exhilaration I felt out there, alone. No parental anguish in sight, just freedom.
Those were the longest stretches I was ever away from Damon during the six years in which we spent virtually every day together. They were also the longest I spent away from my parents and their crumbling marriage. I think of Echo, my favorite horse—a light brown American quarter with a perfectly symmetrical white stripe up her muzzle. The day I got bucked and earned the scar on my forehead ended up being my last at Sagawa, my parents using the accident as a reason to no longer fund my attendance. The three summers I spent there were the best days of my life, outside of the ones with Damon.
Today, Damon sports a hunter-green wool V-neck sweater, and I’m struck by how flattering it is on him, wondering if he made such a spot-on purchase or if it was some stylish ex.
As if he can feel me observing him, Damon looks down at me over his shoulder. “Thanks for breakfast,” he whispers. “I overslept.”
“I figured,” I whisper back.
His eyes linger another moment, and then he says, “You look nice,” before the courtroom doors open and he faces forward again. I look down at the twist-front heather-gray knit sweater and black wrap skirt I was unsure of as I dressed this morning.
We begin filing in, and I am once again staring at the expanse of Damon’s back. I imagine I’ll know every curve and muscle of his back in great detail by the time the trial is over from how often I will find myself lined up behind him.
Today, I find when we are seated, Margot is dressed in a light pink tweed blazer and matching skirt with black buttons and pocket accents that remind me of the outfit Jackie Kennedy wore the day JFK was shot. I wonder if this was intentional.
At the onset of our second day, we are introduced to Margot’s life story—some details of which I knew, others I am hearing for the first time. I knew Margot came from little means with a humble Minnesotan upbringing. That she is an only child, and her mother passed after a sudden stroke shortly after Margot moved to L.A. when she was twenty-one, right before she met Joe. That she didn’t gain her lifestyle via nepotism or connections, but rather, according to D.A. Stern, all because of Joe Kitsch.
Before the trial, I didn’t know she’d had some challenging teenage years. And I certainly didn’t expect that one of the prosecution’s first witnesses would be Margot’s own father, whom she has been estranged from for nearly twenty years.
Margot’s father, Ken Frankel, steals glances at Margot as he makes his way to the stand. Margot stares at the ground, and I can’t help but see a bashful child. I also can’t help but see ten-year-old me, crying on my closet floor.
As Ken Frankel passes the jury box, I take him in, observing the pockmarks along his cheeks and the wide-set frame of his bulbous nose, porous and red like a strawberry. The loose skin of his eyelids hangs dangerously close to blocking his eyesight. Despite their difference in age, it’s evident he and Margot share the same oval face shape and full lips.
How could he take the stand for the prosecution? He hasn’t even spoken yet, but I feel the betrayal of it burn through me as I look between him and his daughter.
In D.A. Stern’s initial questioning, we learn Ken Frankel is still a laborer in the quarry where he has worked for more than half his life. He’s likely in his early to mid-seventies, given Margot is nearing fifty herself. For a moment, I feel for him, taking in the details of four decades of physical labor—the curve of his spine and round of his shoulders, the wornness of his skin, the fatigue in his eyes that appears as constant as any other feature.
After establishing basic details about Ken Frankel and his relationship with Margot, D.A. Stern asks, “Mr. Frankel, why are you here today?”
I edge an inch forward in my seat.
He seems to hold his breath as he stares at his daughter. “I’m here to answer any questions about Margot,” he says.
I try to read his face, his tone, to see if he offers anything like malice or arrogance. I’ve learned from my profession that people can only just barely hide strong feelings behind facades of harmony. And only for so long. But Ken Frankel remains outwardly calm.
D.A. Stern asks what Margot was like as a kid, and Ken Frankel’s response is what I would expect. “...Audacious, center of attention, outgoing...”
“What was Margot’s home life like?” D.A. Stern asks. “Would you consider it normal?”
What is “normal” exactly? Durrant Hammerstead agrees, objecting and citing the question as ambiguous. Judge Gillespy ponders a moment and ultimately allows it, though tentatively.
Ken Frankel smirks. “It was fairly normal, though not without some mess. Like any family.”
“Could you describe what you mean by ‘mess’?” D.A. Stern urges.
Ken Frankel leans into the microphone. “Margot was never great at following rules. She was a handful. And there were a few situations when Margot was young between her mother and me. Margot’s mother had a penchant for throwing things when we would argue.”
I lean farther forward, the toe of my black ballet flat pressed flush against the jury box. I glance over at Durrant Hammerstead at the defense table, who looks on the verge of bursting from his chair with another objection.
Beside me Damon shifts, crossing his right ankle over his left thigh, his bent knee hovering millimeters from my lap. Part of me wants to shove it back toward him. Another troublesome part urges me to rest my hand across it. I clear my throat, and he releases his leg, realizing he unintentionally crowded my space. He’s like a giant in a dollhouse bumping into everything.
Ken Frankel continues, unprompted. “She threw vases that would shatter. Futile items such as laundry or throw pillows. Books. Anything in reach, really. The hardcover of War and Peace was particularly perilous.”
I look on as D.A. Stern makes his point from this line of questioning. “So, you’re saying Margot grew up with a violent mother?”
Ken Frankel hedges his answer, which seems more like a yes than a no, and fingers of discomfort grab at my neck. Ken Frankel has just pointed to a history of Margot being connected, even secondarily, to violent behavior. Like it’s somehow in her DNA or embedded itself into her through exposure. If such a correlation were accurate, I’d be a philandering narcissist. Stomach acid churns in my gut.