A Map of the World - Jane Hamilton [97]
“Yes, Ma’am.”
“You understand that people who lie in court get punished too?”
“I know.”
“Of course you do. You are a smart six-year-old. I need you to concentrate very hard now, to do your best to remember, and always to tell the truth.”
“Okay,” he said.
“Do you know the lady in the orange outfit, sitting at the table there?”
Outfit was a generous term to describe Alice’s garment. One of the strange things about Robbie was his gaze, and the fact that throughout the proceedings he didn’t alter his position more than two or three inches. He turned his head away from Alice, and then looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “Yeah,” he said.
“How do you know her, Robbie?”
He resumed looking at the floor by his own feet. “She’s the nurse.”
“Where is she the nurse?”
“At my school.”
“What was your teacher’s name last year, Robbie, in kindergarten at Blackwell Elementary?”
“Mrs. Ritter.”
“Mrs. Ritter. Did you like going to kindergarten?”
Rafferty was tipping back in his chair. His hands were stretched out in front of him, folded on his clear desk top. He seemed preternaturally calm sitting like that next to Alice. She had not once raised her head since Robbie had first answered Mrs. Dirks with a “Yes, Ma’am.” I wished she would lift herself up and watch. It didn’t look good. The judge wouldn’t think well of her, unable to face her accuser.
“Why was Mrs. Ritter your friend?” Susan asked.
“She was nice to me. She said I didn’t have to finish my work sheet sometimes.”
“I see. And was there any other reason you thought she was nice?”
“She gave me snacks.”
“She gave you snacks, or everyone in the class snacks?”
“Everyday we had cookies and popcorn and crackers. You had to go in the hall to get the milk.”
“So Mrs. Ritter was a friendly, pleasant person to be around?”
“She had a gerbil in a cage. You could take it home on weekends.”
“At your school, Robbie, you remember that you get to the nurse’s office by walking down the corridor, past the second-grade classrooms.”
“Uh huh.”
“Then there’s another narrow little hallway.”
“Yeah.”
“There’s a set of rooms in that area, isn’t there, for the principal and the secretary and the guidance counselor and the nurse?”
“I think so.”
“The nurse’s office is the first one.”
“Yeah, the first one.”
“You visited the nurse’s office many times last year.”
Although Robbie was looking at the floor he lowered his eyes still further. It was an eerie change. It was like something coming down, a curtain coming down and hiding him. “She was bad to me,” he said.
“Who was bad to you?”
“She was. The nurse.”
“How was she bad to you?”
“She hollered at me.”
“Where did she holler?”
“In the nurse’s office.”
“Why did she shout at you? Do you know why she would need to holler?”
As I said, I had had plenty of experience watching Perry Mason as a youth. It seemed to me that Rafferty should have been objecting to some of Mrs. Dirks’s questions.
“To get me to do stuff that I didn’t want to.”
“What did she want you to do, Robbie?”
Mechanically, as if he’d been told to do this, he stuck his fist into his own stomach. “It hurts,” he said dully, “like uuuuuugh.” His mother kissed his ear and then wiped her eyes with her palm.
Rafferty moved right to the judge’s bench. He pointed to Mrs. Mackessy as he spoke. He rarely shouted, but there was a thickness in his voice when he meant to object strenuously. “Objection, Your Honor. Dirks is bolstering the case by having Mom up in the box. Is the court paying for her tissues? I’d like my client’s friends and relations to be allowed up in the box at trial time for her moral support after she’s been in jail for months.”
“Simmer down,” the judge snapped. “I’ll ask you to please remember the age of the witness.”
“I know it hurts,” Mrs. Dirks said to Robbie after Rafferty was seated. “I’m sorry, sweetheart.” Her term of endearment sounded as if it had been generated by a computer for the phone company. “But your being here will help us find out the truth so that it won’t hurt again, so that other children won’t be hurt.”
There was disgust