Chapter Twenty-Five
Roz had it transcribed by a woman in Canton who does depositions and charges by the audio minute.
She had it back Wednesday morning. Nine minutes and forty-one seconds came out to four and a half pages.
I read it in that office with the pharmacy smell coming up through the floor, and something happens when you see a thing like that as text that is not the same as hearing it, and nobody warns you.
On the recording it’s a man’s voice, and a voice has a bad night in it. A voice has whiskey in it and a kitchen and eleven years of familiarity, and some part of my head had been quietly filing the whole thing under that was a terrible night the entire time.
On paper there is no whiskey. There is no kitchen. There is a left margin, and a speaker label, and a time code every fifteen seconds, and it looks like a transcript of a deposition, which is exactly what it looks like because that is the software she uses.
W. KESSLER: You wanted kids. I got you kids, Nora. What else did you need?
N. KESSLER: You didn’t get them for me. You got them for you. So I’d be busy with them and quit counting your nights.
W. KESSLER: Fast. [pause] Yeah. I needed you occupied.
And further down, at 00:06:52:
W. KESSLER: They stay with her. That’s what I got them for.
And at 00:08:40:
W. KESSLER: Jonah is scared to death of one thing in this world. One. That somebody’s going to separate him from his sister.
W. KESSLER: One word from me in the right office and it can happen.
There’s a bracket at 00:09:38 that says [audio ends].
Four and a half pages. Double spaced, with a header on every one of them and a line number down the side and the case caption at the top, and my name on it, and his.
I sat in a chair over a pharmacy on Delmar Street and read the worst night of my life set in twelve-point Times New Roman with a certification page stapled to the back, and it looked like every other document in that office, and I understood something that took me a while to be able to say out loud.
That was the point.
That was the entire point of all of it. The lease with my name on the tenant line, the attendance record with the zeros, the notebook with the four-word entries, the offer letter on the letterhead with the crooked sun.
None of it is true because I say it’s true. It’s true because it exists on paper, filed, dated, and stamped, and can be handed to a stranger who has never met me and does not care what kind of woman I am.
He had known that his whole life. It was his entire job. It took me forty-nine days.
Roz let me read the whole thing without saying anything, which took about six minutes, and when I put it down she pushed a box of the cheap tissues across the desk without looking up from her own copy.
I didn’t use them. But I have thought about the fact that she got them within reach first.
“Here’s what I’m filing,” she said. “And here’s what I’m not, so you don’t get your hopes anywhere they shouldn’t be.
“I’m filing a response to the alienation motion. I’m attaching the transcript and the audio and the examiner’s certification. And I’m making three requests.”
She held up fingers, which apparently every lawyer does.
“One. An order that neither parent discuss this litigation with the children. That sounds like nothing. It is not nothing. It’s a specific, enforceable thing with his name on it, and if he does it again after there’s an order, that’s a different conversation with a different word attached to it.
“Two. That Dr. Pruitt be provided the transcript and specifically instructed to assess the father’s conduct toward the children in light of it.
“Three. Temporary support, including a medical provision, because you come off that insurance in twenty-one days.”
“What about supervised.”
“I’m not asking for supervised.”
“He told a nine-year-old—”
“I know what he did.” She took her glasses off.
“Mrs. Kessler, I could ask for supervised. I’d lose.
And the day I lose a supervised-parenting-time request is the day this file has a denied motion in it, and Preston Calloway will put that denial in front of every judicial officer who touches this case for the next two years.
Your Honor, this has been litigated. It was denied.
“You ask for supervised once and you ask for it when you’re going to get it.”
“When is that?”
“After Pruitt’s report,” she said. “If Pruitt’s report says what I think it’s going to say.”
The phone took two days.
She has a man in Akron who does forensic imaging for defense attorneys, and he took the whole device and made a bit-level copy of it and wrote a two-page report saying the file’s creation date and duration and that it had not been altered, and he charged three hundred and fifty dollars.
“I’ll carry it,” Roz said, when I started to say something. “It goes on the bill and the bill is going to get argued about later. Don’t.”
I was without a phone for forty hours. I gave the school and the Hollis Center Priya’s number and I did not sleep either night.
She filed Wednesday the eleventh at 10:40 in the morning.
Wade called me Thursday at 4:15 in the afternoon.
I was in the supply closet again, because that is apparently where my life happens, and I put the box down and sat on the step stool and pressed record before I answered, the same as always.
“You recorded me.”
“Yes.”
“In my house.”
“In our kitchen. I was standing in it.”
A long piece of nothing. I could hear a vehicle behind him, and then a door, and then the vehicle noise stopped, which meant he’d gotten into his truck to have this conversation.
“How long have you had it.”
“Since that night.”
“Since—”
He stopped. I heard him do the arithmetic, all seven weeks of it, and land.
“You had it the whole time.”
“Yes.”
“The welfare check. The GAL. The hearing.” His voice did not go up. It went the other way, which is what it does. “You sat in that courtroom on the twelfth and let Preston talk about you for eleven minutes.”
“Yes.”
“Why.”
“Because my lawyer told me to.”
That landed somewhere. I heard it land.
For eleven years, if you had asked that man what I did with an advantage, he’d have told you I didn’t have any. And in seven weeks I had held one, every day, through a police visit and a county interview and a hearing I lost, and had not once taken it out to feel better.
“Nora. Delete it.”
“No.”
“You made a recording of a private conversation in a marital home.”
“Ohio’s a one-party consent state,” I said. “I was in the conversation.”
There was a silence with a very particular shape to it, and I have thought about that silence since and I believe it was the sound of a police captain of twenty years remembering something he has known since the academy and had never once needed to apply to his own kitchen.
“That’s not the point,” he said.
“I think it’s most of the point.”
“You don’t know what you’ve done.”
“I do.”
“You’ve handed Calloway a story. Drunk, provoked, marital argument, taken out of context. He’ll spend two hours on it.”
“Probably.”
“You think a magistrate is going to sit there and listen to nine minutes of that and come out where you want him.”
“Wade.”
He stopped.
“You said it out loud,” I said. “That’s the whole thing. Nobody made you say any of it and nobody edited it and it’s four and a half pages long and the only person in it who says anything is you.”
Nothing for about five seconds.
Then, and this is the part I did not expect and did not know what to do with:
“Did the kids hear it?”
“What?”
“The recording. Have you played it for them.”
“No.”
“Are you going to.”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“Wade, they were both in the house that night. Jonah stood in the hallway. They don’t need a recording.”
Another pause.
“Okay,” he said.
And he hung up.
He hung up first.
It was the only thing that man won all week and I sat on a step stool in a supply closet at the Hollis Center and let him have it.
Roz called at ten of five, while I was still sitting there.
“Calloway’s office just emailed me.”
“Already?”
“Twenty-six hours.” She sounded like a woman who had eaten something good. “He’s withdrawing the alienation motion. Says his client is ’electing not to pursue that avenue at this time’ and would like to discuss a schedule for the evaluation.”
“That’s it? He just takes it back?”
“Mrs. Kessler, that motion was nine pages arguing that you are poisoning those children against a father who has done nothing to earn it, and as of yesterday morning it has a four-and-a-half-page attachment sitting three inches behind it.” A drawer went.
“Nobody wants to stand up in front of Kearns and read that motion out loud with that transcript in the file. Not for six hundred an hour. Not for any money.”
I sat in the supply closet with my back against the shelf.
“Is that a win?”
“That’s a win,” Roz said. “It’s a small one and you’re going to want a bigger one, and I’m telling you now to take this one and put it somewhere you can find it in February.”