“Your Honor, I object!”
The prosecutor stands up so fast his chair screeches on the courtroom floor. He has on a silvery suit with a blue tie. If he weren’t trying to kill my brother, I’d probably think he’s handsome in a dull, paper-doll-cutout kind of way. Brown hair that doesn’t move, even when he bangs the state’s table. Brown eyes that make me think of bullets. I’m guessing that he’s not even ten years older than Jeremy, the one sitting behind the defense table, the one on trial for murdering Coach Johnson with a baseball bat, the one this prosecutor would like to execute before he reaches the age of nineteen.
The prosecutor charges the witness box as if he’s coming to get me. His squinty bullet eyes make me scoot back in the chair. “The witness’s regrets about what she may or may not have done a decade ago are immaterial and irrelevant!” he shouts.
“Sit down, Mr. Keller,” the judge says, like she’s tired of saying it because she’s already said it a thousand times this week.
Maybe she has. This is my first day in her courtroom. Since I’m a witness in my brother’s trial, they wouldn’t let me attend until after I testified. So I can’t say the whole truth and nothing but the truth about what’s gone on in this courtroom without me.
“I’ll allow it,” the judge says. “Go ahead, Miss Long.”
I smile up at her, even though she’s not looking. I’m thinking there just might be a nice regular person under that black robe. I try to imagine what she has on under there and decide cutoffs and a T-shirt that reads GRATEFUL DEAD. That’s what I remember seeing on the black shirt of one of Rita’s girlfriends during her trial for solicitation, which is one fancy way of looking at that job. “Thank you, Judge,” I tell her.
Raymond Munroe, attorney for the defense, smiles at me now, but it’s a half smile, the kind a ninety-pound weakling might risk if a bully decided to walk on by instead of pounding him into the sand. Poor Raymond, our court-appointed attorney, looks more out of place than I do in this courtroom. He looked out of place in our house when he made Rita and me practice our testimonies. And he looked out of place when he stood up next to my brother in the Wayne County Courthouse and helped Jeremy plead “not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity.” Raymond’s voice cracked.
I glance over at the table where Jeremy is sitting all by himself. He’s in a constant state of motion-like a hummingbird-his hands patting the table, his knees bouncing, his arms twitching. He’s not like this all the time, only when he gets upset. When Jeremy was little, his face was handsome. Then it took on angles, like his skull rebelled because it couldn’t hold on to the thoughts Jeremy kept inside.
“Hope,” Raymond says, looking at the jury instead of me, “have you always suspected there was something… well, let’s say ‘wrong’… with your brother?”
My brother is staring hard at me, his mouth slightly open, showing too much gum on top. I know Jeremy’s waiting for me to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth because that’s his way.
But it’s not mine. And it hasn’t been for a long time.
So even though I have never even once thought there was something “wrong” with my brother, I nod.
“You’ll have to speak up,” the judge says, leaning over her desk. You can tell she’s not mad, though. “We can’t record gestures,” she explains. “Answer the question with words, please.” She leans back in her big chair and waits for words.
“Sorry,” I say, making sure not to look at my brother again. “Jeremy’s always been different. I guess, like Raymond says, ‘wrong.’ ”
I try to remember the way Raymond and I rehearsed this part of the testimony. This is not how it went. I remember that much.
I have a good memory, but it doesn’t work with words. Just pictures. Like I can picture Raymond sitting at our sticky kitchen table, a pile of papers and a yellow pad in front of him. A full glass of Rita’s too-sweet ice tea is sweating a water ring to the side of Raymond’s notebook. Raymond’s trying to tell me how to support his strategy, which is to convince the jury that Jeremy’s too crazy to be killed by the State of Ohio just because he murdered Mr. Johnson. Raymond wants to make sure we understand that Ohio can give the death penalty to anybody eighteen or over, unless they’re really, really out of it.
I can picture Raymond, Rita, and me at that table as if we were still there. Jeremy’s the same way. He notices details. He can tell when I’m getting a migraine headache even before I feel it, just by seeing the lines on my forehead change. Jeremy used to say God wired us alike, loaded us with the same film. That was before he stopped talking. Jeremy, I mean. But God too, I guess. At least to me.
Raymond’s frowning at me, waiting for me to say what we practiced. I notice the shiny lining of his suit and his skinny black belt. I glimpse Jeremy swaying at his table, his skin drawn too tight over the angles and bones of his face. Two rows back sit three of my teachers from high school, not together but in a blur of other town faces, including T.J., a guy in my class and about the only friend I’ve got in this town. Behind T.J. a row of reporters lean into each other.
And I see Chase, Sheriff Wells’s son, who stands out in this crowd, in any crowd. Even here, with life and death dangling from the courtroom rafters, his face-I notice every line in that face-makes it real hard for me to look back at Raymond.
Raymond clears his throat and glances at the jury, then at me again. “Would you mind giving us an example of how your brother is different?”
I do mind. I know exactly what Raymond wants me to say. He wants me to tell the jury about something that happened when Jeremy was ten. That’s what we rehearsed. Only I don’t want to tell this story. I know it will hurt Jer.
But if I don’t tell it, Rita will. And she’ll get it all wrong, and Jeremy will hate that worse than having me tell it right.
Besides, it’s important to tell it right. Because if I don’t, if the jury doesn’t understand Jeremy, then the State of Ohio will give my brother a shot that will put him to sleep forever. And even if they don’t do that, they’ll put him in a prison with grown men who will crush all the Jeremy out of him, or kill him trying.