The final case, p.7
The Final Case, page 7
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We got in the car. “I can’t put Betsy’s mother on the stand,” my father said, before his door was even shut. “Contempt of court would come into play.”
We left the Huber home behind. Everywhere, the fields were flooded and the forests leafless. The fretwork of meadows under reclamation by thorny brush and interlacing, bare vines rose out of dark, spreading pools. It should have been a pleasure to pass through this area—a country where water had its way in fall and winter—but, for me, a pall lay over these inundated, cold pastures in the wake of Mrs. Huber’s tirade. My father couldn’t enjoy our drive, either. He shook his head and rubbed his temples. He’d been working long hours for the past three months, getting up in the dark, packing his briefcase, pulling on his overcoat, and walking to a bus stop, and he was now eighty-three years old, which I think he handled by giving in to the delusion that he could deny age the victory it won over others—namely, by slowing them to the point where their accustomed endeavors felt wearisome. He wouldn’t allow it. He was going to keep going. “Beyond whatever else was wrong about what Betsy’s mother said,” he said now, “I’m her daughter’s lawyer. I’m trying to do whatever I can to make sure facts see the light of day. Is she against that? Is she against a determination of guilt or innocence made on the basis of the facts of the case? She could have been helpful to her daughter on the stand. She could have told the jurors a lot about Betsy, so they could come to understand her better. But no. She’s full of anger instead. The world’s a terrible place in her head, filled with terrible, horrible people who are one hundred percent wrong about absolutely everything. That’s her whole point when I come to her and say, ‘Can you help me put facts in front of the jurors?’ Anger instead of anything else. Plus, she was surly to you, and you’re my son, so that sort of got to me, too.”
It was raining slantwise now—a syncopated tattooing against our windshield. The car rocked leftward in the gusts, and the wipers beat at full throttle. Between that and Mrs. Huber’s verbal harshness, I felt agitated behind the wheel. My father, though, fell asleep with his hands in his lap. His right hand rested on top of his left, and they were both ravaged by years. His knees were pulled up, which made his long legs look more spindly than usual. The ribbing on his stockings showed, as did maybe two inches of his chafed shins. His head was down, so that I could see into his scalp through the striae of gray hair he wore swept back over his pate, where there were knobby protuberances, rough patches, liver spots, scars, gouges, and crevices. That’s right, sleep, I thought. You need more sleep.
Just before I dropped him off that day, my father dug into his pants pocket, pulled something out, and showed it to me. “What do you call this item?” he asked.
“A thumb drive.”
“This thumb drive,” he said, “came in the mail from the adoption agency that sent Abigail to the Harveys, and apparently their file is inside of it.”
“I see.”
“Is it hard to deal with?”
“No.”
“It’s easy to get the file out?”
“Yes.”
“In that case,” said my father, “can you do whatever has to be done so I can look at what’s inside this thing? I don’t want to use up all of your time, so just tell me, if you want, to take a hike.”
“It’ll take one minute.”
“I’m a burden to you,” said my father. “I’m an albatross around your neck. Like when I got vertigo in the middle of the night and your mother made you come over.”
I knew what he was referring to. He was referring to a phone call I’d gotten from my mother about a year before the events I’m now describing. She called to tell me that, while watching late-night television, she’d heard a thump from the bedroom. After rushing in there (which for her meant limping, because of corns and swollen feet), she’d found that my father had fallen onto the shag-carpeted floor between his bed and a wall. There he was, down in that cavity, grimacing and gesticulating—“thrashing,” she said, “through another fit of vertigo.” The situation, said my mother, was impossible, as there was no room for her to take the steps needed—which were anyway steps she wasn’t capable of anymore, she knew that—no space for her to work her way in there and haul him up onto the mattress, which, again, was something she couldn’t do even if such space existed, she didn’t have the strength, but nevertheless the circumstances were such that few choices were available, and so she had sought to help him up and in so doing had stepped on her husband “a little” before giving up in the face of it all and calling me instead of continuing to fail, but not before opening the cedar chest at the foot of the bed, taking from it an ancient quilt, draping this over him (probably in a billow of dust, I thought), and then, from the mattress, in a prone position, with no small difficulty, wedging a pillow under his head, thereafter resting a little before picking up the receiver of the turquoise Princess phone on her nightstand—with its forever tangled rat’s nest of coiled wire—and calling me while my father, from the floor, still flailing, admonished her with “Don’t bother him! It’s the middle of the night!” I heard him say this at my end clearly, and after hanging up told Alison that the call was about vertigo and that I had to go to my parents’ house, prompting her to ask, “Should I come with you?,” the sort of question you ask in response to the premonition that a death is at hand. I understood that, but of course I said what people always say: “There’s no reason, you don’t have to come, I’ll be right back, it shouldn’t take long.”
Then I went, on a night in October when, even with the ambient light of a large city compromising things, it was nevertheless possible to make out stars, a night when everything was sparklingly frigid. I drove over the speed limit in the battered little four-cylinder truck Alison and I used as a workhorse in service to domestic projects, but only after girding ourselves, because the traffic in Seattle is horrendous and we’re exasperated by the throngs of vehicles now filling up even the snaking back avenues of our onetime circumventings. (Alison and I are confounded by all the changes in the city even while telling ourselves, and each other, that such is life, who are we to complain, there is always someone behind you in history who wishes you never came, there is never a point at which you have an intrinsic right to draw a line and demand that the unceasing, disconcerting, and inevitable fact of change must come to a halt at the doorstep you’ve come to think of as your own, no, it doesn’t work like that, we’re all just passing through.)
When I got to my parents’ house, there was frost on their lawn, and the lamp on its post by the steps was out, a circumstance I understood was in my hands to improve. Inside, my mother had turned the heat up on the order of a steam bath, and had maneuvered warm socks onto my father’s feet, and my father’s pallor, where he lay on the floor, was gray, or at least what I could see of him was gray, because for the most part he was swaddled in a quilt of thick batting with a yellowing pattern to the effect of rosebuds, I think, hoary and smelling of mothballs. “His teeth were knocking,” my mother told me. From somewhere in the well beside his bed came my father’s voice, in a muffled rasp, saying, “My teeth weren’t knocking.”
I peeled back the quilt to find my father in his boxer shorts and nothing else, curled on his right side, with his arms wrapped around his shoulders and three curves of rib visible beneath jaundiced-looking skin. I got into the little aisle he lay in by forcing the issue and, back against the wall, picked up my father the way grooms of yore did to carry brides across thresholds, or the way firefighters in advertisements carry limp children from burning houses, and set him down slantwise on his bed before sliding his legs around until he seemed approximately parallel to the bed’s edges, and then, in a series of short full-body jumps, maneuvered him by degrees toward the bed’s center, where the chances of a second fall were minimized, and where he looked even smaller than he had on the floor, and in doing all of this I grasped, frankly with despair, that he was lukewarm to the touch in the manner of a carton of milk left on a kitchen counter for an hour, but anyway, with two blankets and a quilt over him he came to look like a long dimple beneath a smooth, cottony weight, and seemed “stabilized,” as my mother put it, standing alongside with her hands on her hips, redoubtable as always but riven by circumstance, while I, on my side, once things seemed calm, drove home in the dark wondering about my father’s lukewarm skin.
Alison, who was awake when I returned—in bed with a lamp on, reading River of Stars: Selected Poems of Yosano Akiko—listened to my summary rendition of events, then said, “I’m glad he’s all right and it was just his vertigo. Your mom sure stays up late watching television. So they’re okay, you think?”
“They’re okay, I guess. How’s your book?”
“ ‘Concentrated so completely on each other,’ ” Alison read then, “ ‘I can’t tell us apart: you, the white bush clover, from me, the soft white lily.’ That’s the entire poem right there. The whole thing. Just that.”
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On the night I returned home from the Hubers’ double-wide, I went upstairs to my abandoned garret and opened the thumb drive while sitting in darkness. The files included video footage under the heading “Available Children” that began with two sisters in an orphanage in Ethiopia. They were seated on a threadbare sofa, each with her left leg over her right, each with her hand covering her chin, both smiling when asked to smile, and as they sat this way—nervously—someone, from behind the camera, celebrated their characteristics in English. Next came a girl who’d been there for two weeks—“a nice girl, with no siblings, in the fourth grade, ready to go to fifth”—followed by a girl “who gets good grades at school,” by a boy “who is awfully shy and hasn’t wanted to say very much,” by two siblings new to the orphanage (“such cute girls that we will probably have a family in place for them quickly”), and then by Abigail, her hair tightly braided. “This is Abeba,” said whoever was talking. “Abeba is attending sixth grade and seems like a very bright girl, very quick to answer all our questions and learning English quickly. She’s got no siblings. Both her parents are deceased, and no relatives have been able to take her, so they brought her here.”
Abeba looked self-deprecating in a beaten-down way. The composure in her posture might have been exhaustion. Her humility might have really been defeat. She was thin through the face and, though bedraggled, trying hard not to be, in a jacket with a white fringe collar. Twice she looked down—once, near the beginning of her advertisement, like someone adjusting to the reality of these circumstances wherein her merits and biographical data are selling points; and once, a bit later, when her brightness was extolled. Later, she glanced to her right, where you could infer from her reaction—an eye crease of acknowledgment—that someone off-camera was goading her to smile. Finally, just before the camera shut off—at the conclusion of her advertisement, the formal interlude done—Abeba looked relieved. There were dark crescents of sleeplessness under her eyes—eyes conspicuously wide, not in the metaphorical sense of credulity, but literally.
I clicked on another file and opened its first document. A man was identified there as “Solomon Addisu, nearest kin.” It was Solomon Addisu who’d brought Abeba to this orphanage. A social worker there had recorded in her intake notes that, according to Solomon Addisu, Abeba was ten and had no siblings. Her mother had died when she was one and a half. Her father—his brother, Temesgen Addisu—had been dead for three years. During that time, Abeba had lived with Solomon, whose wife was dead, too, and with Solomon’s two daughters and two sons. They lived outside of the town of Sebeta, where Solomon had no work and suffered, at intervals of greater and lesser severity, from tuberculosis. Despite his ill health he grew papayas, teff, and lemons, kept chickens, and sold eggs. His sons and daughters could only find work that was intermittent and paid a subsistence wage, to the point that the family was in arrears and buried in debt to Solomon’s sister, who owned the home they lived in. Solomon’s sister had told him about a year before that her generosity had to end because of health problems that demanded expensive medicines, but that she knew of an office where a person could find work: a company that hired women to serve as domestics in the Middle East. At that point, Solomon’s older daughter, Fasika, went to this company’s office. The people there got her a passport and sent her to Kuwait.
They’d thought they had their financial problems solved, Solomon told the social worker. But then Fasika wrote to say that she worked sixteen hours a day for three families in adjacent flats and was passed between them on a rotating basis, after having been told that she would work eight to ten hours a day for just one family; also, her pay wasn’t what had been promised. One of the Kuwaitis told her that her wages were less than expected because the Ethiopian middleman who collected them was a thief. This middleman, when Solomon went to talk to him about it, said that the Kuwaitis weren’t paying what they were supposed to be paying; that was how things stood, and he was working on it.
The answer to the problem of Fasika’s paltry paycheck, Solomon told the social worker, was for his other daughter, Tigist, to also take a job in Kuwait. There, she slept in her employer’s maintenance closet. She got strep throat and couldn’t work for a while, so they didn’t pay her. She got conjunctivitis, too, and her feet developed fungus. Her back itched. Something small bit or stung her at night, leaving welts. Tigist got back on her feet, though, and started working again, but her employer caught her dozing when she was supposed to be working and punished her by putting a blindfold over her eyes and spanking her with a flat length of wood. In sum, Solomon told the social worker, they had little despite his daughters’ sacrifices.
Abeba was an orphan, Solomon said, and therefore eligible to live in an orphanage. He’d done what was required to establish that she was an orphan by filling out the right forms and procuring the right signatures and getting seals affixed to everything by the chair of the justice committee in his administrative district, who’d written an official letter, which Solomon was now handing over to the orphanage, a letter stating that the committee had confirmed that Abeba was an orphan. On top of that was a second letter, from the manager of social affairs in the town of Sebeta, and a third letter, stamped by an official of the Alemgena District, stating that here was a letter of proof as to the orphaned status of the girl in question, as required by the Federal Ministry of Women’s and Children’s Affairs.
