I take a deep breath, let it out slowly, then repeat the process, like I’m back at yoga.
“Thanking you for what, exactly?” I ask.
“You wanted me out of her life and now I’m officially out of her life.”
“Brigid is dying,” I say quietly.
“Listen, I know she’s dying, okay?” he says. “And I feel badly about that, I do, whether you want to believe me or not. But it’s not as if I don’t have my own problems.”
I lean an elbow on the table and cup my chin in my hand, as if fascinated by him. Just because I so often am.
“And so, what, you don’t have the time or the energy for a dying friend?” I ask.
“I know you’re being sarcastic,” he says. “But I really don’t have it right now, as a matter of fact.”
“The time or the energy?” I say. “Or maybe just the humanity?”
He says, “By now you should know me well enough to know that I really don’t have it in me to deal with a dying chick, even if she is your sister.”
I do push my chair back now, and stand, and see him flinching as I reach for the bag I’d set down next to me on the table. Then walk around the table and around him to the door.
“You know you’re the one I really want in my bed,” he says.
I stop, my hand on the doorknob. I turn around. He turns around in his chair to face me.
“I’d have to be dead already,” I say.
I smile and shrug.
“But who knows, Rob? Maybe you’re into that, too.”
NINETY-FIVE
IT WAS A LONG day in Judge Michael Horton’s courtroom that has felt more like a long night, meaning the night the Carsons died.
Katherine Welsh has artfully put the cops on the stand and then led them and the computer expert through the events of that bloody night, in the same artful way she keeps bringing the whole thing back to Rob Jacobson’s DNA every chance she gets.
It finally reached the point where I thought that if these three words—“the defendant’s DNA”—were the trigger for a drinking game, we’d all leave Judge Horton’s courtroom drunker than St. Patrick’s Day.
I offered as many objections as I could along the way, especially during the animated video, trying to slow her roll, but realized the entire time that my client and I were the ones getting rolled today, something I warned him in advance was about to happen.
In normal circumstances, my only immediate goal once this day in court had mercifully ended at five o’clock would be getting home, getting in a long beach walk with Rip no matter what the hour, followed by an even longer hot bath, followed by rice and beans from Fondita that I’ve been saving as comfort food.
But these are certainly not normal circumstances, whichis why instead of being back in my own home, I’m in Claire Jacobson’s, in the living room of the big house in Sagaponack, uninvited and unannounced, after her husband told me she is back in town, listening to her explain to me, chapter and verse, why she wants to testify in her husband’s defense, even though she’ll be called to the stand by Katherine Welsh and not me.
“Let me help you,” she says.
“No,” I say.
I tell her I’d use stronger language, but that I’m a lady.
“Since when?” Claire Jacobson asks.
She is dressed as if on her way out to dinner, and not just for rice and beans from Fondita:
Black minidress with three-quarter sleeves that I am almost positive I eyeballed recently at Giorgio Armani in the city. Low heels the same color as the dress. Pearls. Her hair looks freshly done.
No wedding ring.
