A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [201]
“You hit him?”
“Yes.”
“Are you aware that it is against the law for a school employee to hit a child?”
“Yes, I am.”
“And still you struck him?”
“Yes.”
“Where did you hit him?”
“On the cheek.”
“He was sent to the nurse, to you, and you struck him across the face.”
“That’s correct.”
“You knew it was against the law.”
“Yes.”
“Did you report your conduct?”
“No.”
“Did you notify anyone that you’d broken a state law?”
“No.”
“So you lived with the knowledge that you hurt Robbie Mackessy, just as you lived with the knowledge of the other abuse.”
Rafferty rose with his objection.
“Stick to the facts,” Judge Peterson muttered.
“ ‘I hurt everybody,’ you said in your admission to Officer Melby. That to me suggests something very active.”
“For a parent,” I said, “not taking action, not doing a certain thing, can be just as damaging as willfully striking a child. Not paying attention when they are taking a sharp knife off the counter, turning your back just for a minute when they are in the bath, letting go of their hand when they need you. Sometimes it seems that every minute, every second, there is peril. The officers and I, we were having a general conversation, so I thought. I meant that I was human, and that I had therefore hurt the people closest to me.”
She was about to speak, but I think I’d caught her off guard. “ ‘I hurt everyone,’ you said.”
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you tell your husband that you’d slapped Robbie?”
“No.”
“Did you tell your best friend, the social worker?”
“No.”
“You were secretive about it.”
“Yes,” I said. “I was.”
When I sat back down next to Rafferty at our table he kept his eyes on his legal pad. I didn’t care if he was infuriated, didn’t care if I would always receive a chilly reception at his door. If he had misjudged me, and my acting capabilities, he had only himself to blame. I didn’t know why Dirks hadn’t asked me about Lizzy, and I wondered briefly if it was something again that I had only thought I’d said. But when she mentioned the drowning in her closing statement, Rafferty nodded. It served me right, he seemed to be saying, to have Dirks throwing the accident in the jurors’ laps. He didn’t lean over and whisper in my ear the way he had throughout the previous days. I was certain that for everyone in the courtroom Lizzy was suddenly the only presence. How could the jurors think of anything but the girl who should have been among us? I wanted to stand and do my own part, stand before them and tell them exactly what had happened: I had gone upstairs to look for my swimsuit, and I couldn’t find it, and I had stopped to look at some old pictures from my childhood, and all the while Lizzy was on her way down the lane.
I remember only bits and pieces from Rafferty’s closing statement. After he’d admonished the jury about their duty he said, “All right then, let’s go right to the meat of the prosecution—let’s go down, as the great poet Mr. William Butler Yeats once said, to ‘the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.’ Let us see what, if anything, has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Mrs. Dirks has shown to my satisfaction, and I suggest to yours as well, that Robbie Mackessy has been abused by someone.”
I prayed while he spoke. I stopped listening and prayed for strength and heart. When I was very young I used to sit before my map of the world imagining myself in an ideal country, alone and at peace. Now, if I could make the world over, I said to myself in my prayer—and as always, to Howard—if I could make an impossible, new world, Howard, this is who you would see: You’d see Emma, and Claire, and you’d see yourself, and me, all together, dancing on the porch with the shades down, outcasts making a perfect circle.
Chapter Twenty-two
——
IT HAS TAKEN ME a long time to know how to remember last year. I’ve wondered if I should go back to the newspapers and clip the articles, put them in a scrapbook so that when they get older the girls can see for themselves what happened.