an art historian with an interest in Early Renaissance Italian art, which happened to be Dana’s field. Or would be, once she finished her thesis. Were it not for Bailey, she would be sitting in Bella Luna drinking a double capp, discussing the influence of Giotto.
She believed she was not cut out for a life of self-sacrifice. Almost any woman would be a better mother than she for a child like Bailey.
She did not socialize with mothers from Phillips Academy. She told herself she did not want to hear them complain. Secretly she feared conversations with those women would reveal that they never complained at all, that only she resented her child’s demands.
Dana blamed Bailey’s disability on her side of the chromosome equation. In the North Park neighborhood where she grew up, kids had called her grandmother “loony” because she’d dressed like a bag lady and yelled at them and shook her fist if they walked or rode their bikes across her pitiful square of front lawn. As for her mother, on any test for mental health she would definitely score on the peculiar side of the bell curve. She had abandoned Dana, her only child, before Dana was five years old.
When Bailey’s medical and psychological reports came in, David Cabot had sprung into defense mode before anyone could accuse him of contributing to her problems. Not only did he personally possess all the requisite DNA for scholarship, ordered thinking, and rationality, but every single person in his family was smart and accomplished. David’s brother and sister held advanced degrees, and he had been an honor student and a star athlete, accepted by Law Review, and Order of the Coif. His father had been a judge, albeit a certifiable sexist, racist, and workaholic. His mother wrote poetry and chaired committees and sang in the community choir. She spoke four languages, and Dana had never seen her when she wasn’t stoned on Valium.
The phone rang.
“Hi, Mrs. Cabot. We’re at the stoplight, Washington and Goldfinch. See you in two.”
San Diego’s chilly spring fog had burned off, leaving behind a misty blue sky; a cool breeze disturbed the pipe chimes in the olive tree in the front yard. Dana wished she had worn a sweater.
She slapped Moby’s bony hindquarters. “Let’s run, kiddo.” He took off at a lope, Dana following.
Before Bailey was born Dana had run several half-marathons, but since then she rarely had the time for more than a mile or two. Often she ran at night or at dawn through the Mission Hills neighborhood. As if she were visiting an aquarium, she looked in the windows of the houses she passed. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Validation perhaps. Some indication that her childhood had not been wacko as David claimed. In the kitchens and living rooms of strangers’ homes she wanted to see another little girl eating a macaroni-and-ketchup sandwich, another grandmother asleep in front of the television with a yellow cat around her shoulders like a fur collar.
On the far side of the park the cherry red Phillips Academy minibus idled at curbside. Dana waved to the driver, and the pneumatic doors wheezed open. Bailey bounded out and hurled herself at her mother, grabbing her around the hips and almost toppling her.
“I played football, Mommy.”
At the end of the day, Bailey was always a beautiful mess. One butterfly barrette gone, hair wild and tangled, the buckle on one of her beloved shocking pink, strappy plastic sandals hanging by a stitch.
Resentment and ambivalence and dreams of Giotto vanished, incinerated by a love so fiercely protective it rocked Dana. “What happened to your shoe?”
“I was like Daddy.” Moby trotted beside Bailey closely enough so her hand skimmed the back of his neck.
“I didn’t know they let you play football at Phillips.”
“I ran, and then I fell down.” Bailey stopped and pulled up the leg of her size-six cargo pants, revealing a knee covered with pink and yellow bandages and layers of gauze. Looking up at her mother, dark eyes alight with gold flecks in the park’s dappled sunlight, she said, “I’m brave, Mommy. Like Daddy.”
Dana whisked her up into her arms and spun around, then made a controlled tumble onto the grass with herself on top, buzz-blowing into Bailey’s neck while the little girl squealed joyfully and Moby barked and pranced on his toes. Before the squeals turned to tears—the change could occur in a millisecond—Dana let Bailey go.
At the same moment a white van turned onto Miranda Street and paused in front of their house.
Bailey began shouting, “S’cream man, s’cream man.”
Several things happened at the same time.
Dana saw that the rear bumper of the van had a sticker on it.
There was a crash of glass and a squeal of brakes.
Moby barked furiously and dashed in front of the van.
Dana heard Moby’s sharp kye-eye cry; the van swerved and sped off; and Bailey began to scream.
Chapter 4
At about the same time, in an interview room in San Diego’s downtown jail, David Cabot studied his client across a Formica-topped table and through the bars separating them.
It was a crappy place to be on a beautiful May afternoon.
The prosecutor had argued that a man with Frank Filmore’s financial resources and international connections constituted a bail risk, so this Ph.D. chemist was spending the months before his trial downtown in the county lockup, wearing a two-piece cotton uniform that made him look more like an emergency-room nurse in scrubs than a man accused of a capital crime. David’s associate, Gracie Perez, sat beside him in the small room, asking the questions—essentially the same questions they’d been asking since taking on the case. No fact or gap or contradiction in Filmore’s story could be overlooked. It was the same way in football. All it took was a hole in the line and the other guy was in for the TD.
To David most of life could be compared to football. Gracie, the whole office, and half the San Diego bar laughed at his metaphors, but for him football comparisons were a useful way of sorting life out; and if some people thought he was a half-smart jock, he didn’t care. In the courtroom they discovered how wrong they were.
To the right of Gracie and David, near the door of the cramped and windowless room, Allison, a paralegal, was taking down questions and answers on a steno pad. An audio recorder would be easier, but David had yet to meet a defendant willing to be taped.
David listened to Filmore talk and assumed that three quarters of what he heard was either a bald lie or a cheap wig. Guilty or innocent, rich or destitute, you put a guy in jail and he forgot how to tell the truth. And the longer you gave him to think about his answers, the more he’d make it up and bullshit. The unjustly accused lied because they were afraid; the guilty lied because they thought they were smarter than the system. They were also afraid, but they’d never admit it. David didn’t want to get too jaundiced in his view of the men and women he defended, but he doubted Filmore was the one in a million actually telling the truth. Although he had sworn he wouldn’t let the law make him a cynic, there were days—like today and yesterday and probably tomorrow—when he could feel the negativity creeping up on him like mold.
It had been a long day, and his neck and shoulders were tight. He glanced at his watch. God willing, in an hour he’d be at the club playing racquetball with his law partner, Marcus Klinger. Then a sauna and a massage. He had a regular weekly appointment with a therapist whose thumbs knew how to find the knot at the nape of his neck. She didn’t talk. She wouldn’t ask him how he could stand to be in the same room with a man like Frank Filmore.
He imagined his father laughing and shaking his fat index finger in his face. Scum of the earth, boy. Watch it don’t rub off. Claybourne Cabot had been a hanging West Virginia judge whose best friends were the coal-mine owners in the southern part of the state. When he got drunk, which was once a week on Sunday starting right after church and going on until he passed out, he would tell anyone in earshot that the government could save a heap of cash if it would dispense with courts and lawyers for