The silence that followed was long enough to become its own exhibit. Vivian
looked at the photograph of her own unmarked arm's record. She looked
once, briefly, at the screen where her email still hung. She looked at Jimenez,
and found no rescue there, only attention. Her folded hands unfolded, and set
the folder down on her lap with great care, as if it had become something she
was returning.
"I had decided what must have happened," she said. "The rest arranged
itself."
Nobody moved. The court reporter's hands had stopped, and then,
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professionally, caught up.
"I was scratched," Vivian said, to the room, to the record, to the eleven years.
"I was frightened, and I was angry, and the dog had been a problem in my
mind for a long time, and so — the rest arranged itself. That is the truth as I
am able to give it now."
Jimenez let the silence stand for a count of ten, and then, in the same
ordinary voice, said, "The record will also reflect a letter received this
morning from counsel for Dennis Falk, withdrawing Mr. Falk's statement of
October fourteenth in its entirety. The letter states that Mr. Falk was in
attendance at the association budget meeting at the community center
between 7:00 and 8:15 p.m. on that date, as the meeting minutes confirm,
and did not witness the alleged incident or hear any disturbance. The
statement is withdrawn. No comment is offered, and none will be taken." She
closed the folder on it. "We will recess for ten minutes."
In the corridor, Gabe stood with his back to a wall that had a drinking
fountain on it and drank nothing, and Rook sat against his leg in the working
posture, and people gave them the wide, kind berth that people give a man
and a dog in a courthouse hallway, and Owen Fitzgerald came and stood
nearby without saying anything, which was the Fitzgerald family's entire
liturgy and Gabe was grateful for it. June Park brought him a paper cup of
water and he drank that, because refusing kindness was a skill he was trying
to lose. "He's been so good," she said, of Rook, and then, "We've all been —
Daniel keeps saying we should have given the video to the deputy the first
night, not the second day, and he's right, and I'm sorry." "You gave it," Gabe
said. "That's the whole sentence." When they went back in, Vivian was
already seated. She had repaired herself with the efficiency of long practice;
only the folder was gone from her lap, surrendered somewhere offstage, and
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her bare hands were folded on the table in front of her like two things she had
retired.
It was Jimenez who asked for the dog.
"I want the record to include the animal," she said, "and I am going to ask for
something unusual, and the respondent may decline it and no inference will
be drawn. Mr. Hartman. Would you be willing to work the dog, briefly, here
— the tasks he is trained for? I have read the trainer's certification. I would
like the record to see it rather than only read about it."
Laura looked at Gabe. Gabe looked down. Rook was already looking at him,
which was the entire job description, and after a moment Gabe nodded, once.
"Yes, ma'am," he said. "He'd like the work, honestly. It's been a long
morning of lying still."
He stood, and the room, without being asked, rearranged its attention the way
a field rearranges around weather. Jess Calloway had come in during the
recess and taken the seat directly behind the respondent's table — Gabe had
not seen her arrive and felt steadied by it retroactively, the way he had felt
steadied, years ago, by medics appearing at the edge of scenes — and she sat
with her hands quiet and her face doing nothing at all, a trainer watching a
dog she had made work a room full of strangers.
"Rook," Gabe said. "Block."
Rook rose, turned, and placed himself crosswise behind Gabe's legs, a warm
black wall between Gabe and the rows of chairs, facing outward, scanning
the room with the mild, complete attention of a creature doing arithmetic it
loved. He held it while Gabe stood in the exposed posture that had once cost
him whole supermarkets, and Gabe could feel his own shoulders come down
out of his ears like something being set gently back on a shelf. "Settle." Rook
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folded down where he stood, chin flat, sigh through his nose, theatrically at
rest, at rest in earnest — the two things in him were never entirely separable,
and nobody who had ever loved a Lab would have wanted them to be.
At Jimenez's suggestion, Anton the clerk came out from behind his table, a
young man volunteering out of the exact kindness his eyes had advertised,
and knelt where Gabe showed him, and Gabe gave the pressure cue, and
Rook crossed the small distance and laid his head and the dense front half of
his body across the clerk's lap with a delicacy that made it look easy, and
stayed, breathing slow, while Anton's hand came up, startled, and then settled
into the black coat and stayed there too. "Oh," Anton said, quietly, to no one.
"Okay. Yeah. I get it." Somebody in the second row made the sound people
make at weddings and christenings, and June Park was crying in the
unembarrassed way of a person who has decided the room can have it.
And then, from the corridor, with the timing of a thing arranged by a
malicious understudy, a metal tray went over somewhere beyond the door —