A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [183]
“I’m hurting you?”
“I SAID, ‘YOU’RE HURTING ME.’ ”
There was a hush over the room. “No further questions, your honor,” Rafferty said, after a decent interval.
Over the noon hour Howard and I sat by the lake in the cold and I wondered out loud what the jurors were eating, and were they bonding over their boxed lunches, and had the leader already emerged? I tried to flesh out the few I’d taken an interest in, tried to imagine their home life, but Howard wasn’t listening. If I said much more, he would ask me how I could be detached at a time like this. And I’d have to say that if I thought about the trial too hard I’d be so nervous I’d have to consider drastic alternatives. I’d be seriously tempted to flee. There was among the jurors a woman with graying curly hair and half-glasses, who always seemed to be paying attention, who looked intelligent. Perhaps she would be the one to guide the group to an informed decision. Howard and I had ham-and-cheese sandwiches, which we ate in the bitter wind. We passed the Thermos back and forth, clutching the cylinder for the last warmth of the coffee. We were out of sync with our surroundings, having the kind of picnic people have when they are in love, when it’s worth braving the cold, when you’re so happy you don’t notice the stale bread or the temperature of the drink. I stopped talking and we ate, watching the gulls.
Mrs. Dirks called the child protection worker that first afternoon. Myra Flint was a broad woman with a turned-up nose, nothing like Mrs. Mackessy to feast our eyes upon. She clumped to the witness box in blue clogs, the noise of which somehow penetrated the carpet. A good deal of her testimony was about interviewing techniques she had used to elicit Robbie’s confession. The technical nature of the questions may have disappointed those few observers who had hoped for the lurid stuff of TV dramas, but I found that I could fasten on her, that for the most part I could follow the concrete and suffocatingly tedious and repetitive questions and answers. The judge had to reprimand one of the jurors, an older man, because he was snoring.
“Children’s memories,” Myra Flint explained, “can become locked inside their minds. One possible key to unlocking those memories is to ask very specific questions, or even leading questions. In the legal context, of course, we are not allowed to do so. Consequently, one set of techniques I use provides children with retrieval strategies and cues, while at the same time steering clear of leading questions. The cognitive interview is a technique I use on older children, but with some modifications it is also useful on someone Robbie’s age.
“Context reinstatement,” Myra droned on, “is another technique I use, when appropriate, for improving children’s recall. Taking a child back to the scene of an event helps to reinstate, if you will, the child’s memory.”
“So you helped him, didn’t you?” Rafferty asked at the start of a series of questions. “Spent quite a lot of time with him? In fact, this is how you make your living, in part, helping children to recall?”
“It can be a long process, Mr. Rafferty, helping children through the trauma of abuse.”
“It takes many sessions to enhance their memories?”
“That is not what I said.”
“In fact, isn’t it fair to say that oftentimes it is your work that allows someone like Robbie to recall enough to allow him to testify at all?” He was always hinting at, but never asking the question: Without your work, Ms. Flint, Robbie is like a ventriloquist’s dummy? “Isn’t it right that without your skill in memory enhancement children would not be able to come up with the specifics necessary for believable testimony?”
The accusations had been shocking in the beginning, but they had lost their sting the second time around. The details seemed flat, without meaning. I tried again to think what the trial was actually about. I had thought that it was about hate, pure, undiluted hatred: hate for the joyous sake of hatred—but I wasn