September 7, Monday
COURT WAS dark for the holiday, which meant an entire day stretching out ahead of me with nothing on it but my own name.
It felt luxurious.
I started at the hotel gym, a cramped room with two treadmills and a rack of dumbbells that had clearly seen better decades, tucked at the end of a hallway near the service elevator.
Deputy Wells was posted near the door when I arrived, which I hadn't expected on a holiday.
I was suddenly self-conscious of the leggings I'd packed almost as an afterthought.
And I was aware of my breathing as I climbed onto the treadmill, aware of him in my peripheral vision the entire forty minutes I spent working up a sweat.
He never looked at me directly but knowing he was there made me hyperconscious of how I moved, how I looked doing it.
I told myself it didn't matter. If the man was looking at me, all he saw was another juror among the hundreds, maybe thousands of jurors he'd guarded over the years.
When I left, I nodded briefly and he nodded back.
Nothing special.
Later in the day I drew myself a warm bath and poured a glass of the cheap chardonnay from the mini fridge that the hotel stocked for jurors who needed exactly this kind of small mercy.
I sat in the water until my fingertips pruned, refilled the glass once the water had gone lukewarm, and by the time I climbed out I had a pleasant, unfamiliar looseness in my limbs.
I wrapped myself in the hotel robe, settled into the armchair by the window, and pulled out the notebook Jill Mathers had given me. Consider it a place to get things out of your head.
I wrote without any plan, the wine loosening whatever filter usually stood between my thoughts and the page.
I don't know who decided motherhood meant disappearing, I scrawled, the letters slanting more than usual.
Nobody handed me that rule. I think I just absorbed it, the way you absorb weather.
I wrote about my guilt over the lack of guilt I felt about leaving my family.
I wrote about Lily's tears and Josh's avoidance and Warren's accusation that I never listened to him.
The sentences ran together, lost their punctuation, wandered into places I hadn't meant to go and then, somewhere in the middle of a thought about my mother's hands teaching mine to cast on stitches, the words simply stopped coming.
I woke an hour later with the notebook slid halfway off my lap and a faint crease from the chair's arm printed into my cheek.
When the dinner hour came around, I heard the others gathering down the hall and I decided I'd rather eat alone.
I ordered a club sandwich, ate it cross-legged on the bed straight from the tray, and put on a movie I'd been meaning to watch for two years and never had the uninterrupted quiet for.
I watched the whole thing start to finish without pausing once.
By the time I climbed into bed, the sheets cool and the room dark except for the sliver of light under the bathroom door, a small voice surfaced in the back of my mind—the one that keeps a running tally of everyone else's needs against my own indulgences, the one that wanted to know how I could justify a day like this while my kids were at home melting down.
I couldn't. And I didn't want to.
I turned off the lamp, pulled the covers up, and let myself simply be a woman who'd had a pleasant, unbothered day.