Chapter Nineteen
Jonah didn’t say anything for eleven minutes.
Ruby was out cold before we got off Delmar, head over sideways with the seatbelt across her cheek, so it was the two of us and the wipers.
At the light at Delmar and Ninth he said, “Do I have to say it again on Tuesday?”
“Say what again?”
“What I said in there.”
“No. There’s no kids at Tuesday. That’s just lawyers and a magistrate and about forty minutes.”
“Okay.”
The light changed. I went.
“I told her I don’t want to live with him.”
I kept my hands at ten and two and my eyes on the back of a landscaping trailer and I did not turn my head, because if I had turned my head he’d have stopped.
“Okay.”
“She asked me why and I said because of how he holds you.”
I did not know what my face was doing so I let it do it.
“And because he says we’re not real.”
Then a long piece of nothing, four or five blocks of it.
“She asked me a lot of stuff,” he said. “About before. About the other places.”
“You didn’t have to answer that.”
“She said that too.” He was looking out the passenger window. “I answered it.”
I turned onto Route 8.
“Mom.”
“Yeah.”
“I asked her a question.”
“Okay.”
“I asked her if we go with him, do me and Ruby go together.”
I got over into the right lane and slowed down, because I was not going to have this conversation at fifty-five.
“What did she say?”
“She said she couldn’t promise me anything, because she doesn’t decide, a judge decides.” He said it very evenly. He’d clearly been carrying it around in that exact shape for two hours. “And I said, okay, but is it a thing that happens. And she said yes. Sometimes.”
He turned around and looked at his sister asleep in the back with her chin on the strap.
“So that’s a thing that happens,” he said.
I pulled into the Sunoco on Route 8 and parked next to the air pump and put it in park, and I turned all the way around in my seat so I was facing him.
“Look at me.”
He looked at me.
“For three years I have been telling you that can’t happen. I was wrong to say it that way and I’m going to say it right now instead, because you’re nine and you’re smarter than the thing I was telling you.
“It can happen. To some kids it does happen. It is not going to happen to you two, and the reason it’s not going to happen is not because I promised. It’s because I am going to make it not happen, and there is a difference, and you are old enough to know what the difference is.”
He looked at me a while.
“How,” he said.
“With paper,” I said. “Mostly with paper.”
He thought about that.
“Okay,” he said.
And something came off his shoulders about a quarter inch. Not because I’d comforted him. Because I’d finally answered the actual question.
Bernie put a sticky note in my hand on Friday morning with a name and a number on it in her handwriting.
“She did my niece’s. Two years, ugly one, kid involved.” She went back to the schedule board. “She’s not nice. You don’t need nice.”
Roz Petrakis has an office on the second floor over Bower’s Pharmacy on Delmar, up a staircase with a rubber tread that has come loose at the top, and the whole floor smells faintly of the pharmacy, which is a smell like cardboard and cough drops.
She’s fifty-four. Reading glasses shoved up in gray hair. Cardigan with a pen mark on the cuff. There were two coffee cups on that desk and both of them were cold and one of them had been there long enough that I looked at it twice.
“Sit. Talk fast, I’ve got a pretrial at eleven.”
I talked fast.
Eight minutes, everything, in order, no adjectives. I had gotten good at that by then.
She wrote about six words down the entire time.
When I finished she took the glasses off her head and put them on her face and looked at the ceiling for a second.
“Okay. Money.”
“I have two hundred and fifty-one dollars.”
“Retainer’s thirty-five hundred.”
“I know. I read your website in a parking lot.”
“Mm.” She pulled a form out of a drawer.
“Here’s how we’re doing this. You give me two hundred today so there’s consideration on the agreement and you’re a client and everything you say in this room stops in this room.
Three hundred a month starting December fifteenth, and I want it on the fifteenth, not the twentieth, and if you’re going to be late you call me before it’s late.
“And in Ohio I can ask the court to make him contribute to your fees, and in a case where one side is a captain with a household income of a hundred and forty and the other side makes seventeen dollars an hour, I generally get some of it. Not all. Some.”
“And if I lose?”
“Then you owe me money and we’ll figure it out, and I’ll still be sitting in this office in a year.” She spun the form around. “Sign both.”
I signed both.
“Now,” Roz said. “What have you got that you haven’t told me about.”
I looked at her.
“Mrs. Kessler, you came up my stairs holding your phone in your hand instead of in your bag. Give it to me.”
So I told her about the kitchen.
She stopped me twice. Once to ask whether I’d been in the room the entire time. Once to ask whether anybody else had heard it.
Then she said, “Play it.”
I put the phone on the desk between the two cold coffee cups and I pressed it.
I have never listened to the whole thing in one sitting. Not before that morning and not since. That morning I had to, because she needed me in the room, and it is nine minutes and forty-one seconds long and I sat in a chair on Delmar Street and heard my husband say all of it again.
You wanted kids. I got you kids, Nora. What else did you need.
Yeah. I needed you occupied.
They’ll get out of the habit.
I’m having a kid, Nora. My own. A real one.
You stay quiet. And I stay out of your life with those two.
I just need you out of the way.
And then the fingers. One through five. The house, the money, the accounts, the three years, and every building in the county.
And the last of it.
Jonah is scared to death of one thing in this world. One. That somebody’s going to separate him from his sister.
One word from me in the right office and it can happen.
It stopped. There was a click on the recording where I’d turned it off with my hand in my pocket.
The room was very quiet after. Downstairs somebody’s cart went over the threshold at the pharmacy door and the bell on it rang.
I had my hands folded on my bag and I was looking at a filing cabinet with a dead plant on it, and I was thinking, with the part of my head that was still working, that hearing it a second time was worse than the first, and that this was going to be true every time, and that a person could get used to almost anything except their own kitchen.
Roz Petrakis did not move for about four seconds.
Then she reached over and took her glasses off and set them on the desk, which I did not know her well enough yet to understand was significant.
“Play the last thirty seconds again.”
I played it again.
She listened with her chin down and one hand flat on the desk.
“He says it out loud,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He says he took two children out of the foster system to keep his wife busy, and then he says he can get anything he wants out of her through them, and he says the boy’s specific fear and how he’d use it.”
“Yes.”
“In his own kitchen. In his own voice.”
She sat back.
“Mrs. Kessler, I have been doing this for twenty-nine years and I have never had one of these. Not once. They don’t say it.
Men like that know exactly what they’re doing and they know not to put it in the air, and half my job is standing in front of a magistrate trying to describe a thing that has never once been written down. ”
“Is it legal?”
“Ohio’s a one-party consent state.” She said it the way you’d give somebody a bus number.
“You were a participant in the conversation. You can record a conversation you’re part of without telling the other person, and it is not a crime and it is not inadmissible.
He would know that. He’d know it cold. He just never thought about it, because it never occurred to that man that you were somebody who does things. ”
“That’s what I thought too.”
“Well, you were right.”
She pulled a legal pad over.
“Here’s what happens now. You don’t touch that file again. I want the original device, I want it turned over to my office, and I want the chain of it clean, because the first thing Preston Calloway is going to do is say you edited it.”
“Who?”
“Calloway and Stern. That’s who he’s hired, I looked it up this morning.
Four attorneys and a paralegal. Very good, very expensive, and a nine-thirty tee time.
” She was writing. “I’ll have it transcribed by a certified transcriptionist with time codes on every line, and I’ll have both the audio and the transcript, and the transcript is what I hand up, because a magistrate will read four pages and a magistrate will not sit in a courtroom and listen to nine minutes of a man being himself.
“You will not play this for anybody. Not the guardian ad litem. Not the caseworker. Not your friend, not your boss, not that landlady. Nobody.”
“Why not the GAL?”
“Because everybody I show it to is another person who might mention it, and the day he finds out it exists is the day he starts building a story about you having provoked it, or spliced it, or gotten it under duress.” She stopped writing.
“Right now the single most valuable thing about that recording is that he does not know it exists. That is worth more than the recording.”
“Okay.”
She looked at me over the glasses she’d put back on at some point.
“Now the other thing.”
“All right.”
“Tuesday.”
She put the pen down.
“You’re going to lose Tuesday.”