Handle With Care (22 page)

“Willow,” I repeated, feeling the pillow of the consonants and the swing of the vowels. Were you right? Could it drown out everything else I would have to say? “Willow, Willow, Willow,” I sang; a lullaby, a parachute, as if I could cushion you even now from whatever blows were coming.

Marin

October 2007

You have never seen anything like the amount of time and dead trees that go into a civil lawsuit. Once, during a suit brought against a priest for sexual assault, I had sat through a deposition of a psychiatrist that went on for three days. The first question was: What is psychology? The second: What is sociology? The third: Who was Freud? The expert was getting paid $350 an hour and wanted to make damn sure he took his time. I think we lost three stenographers to carpal tunnel syndrome before we finally got his answers on record.

It was eight months since I’d first met with Charlotte O’Keefe and her husband, and we were still in the learning phase. Basically, it involved the clients going about their everyday lives and, every now and then, getting a call from me saying that I needed this document or that information. Sean was promoted to lieutenant. Willow started full-day kindergarten. And Charlotte spent the seven hours that Willow was in school waiting for the phone to ring, in case her daughter had another break.

Part of getting ready for the depositions involved questionnaires called interrogatories that help lawyers like me see the strengths and weaknesses of the case, and whether or not it should settle. Discovery is aptly named: you are meant to find out if your case is a loser, and where the black holes are, before you’re sucked into them.

Piper Reece’s interrogatory had landed in my inbox this morning. I’d heard, through the grapevine, that she had taken a leave of ab
sence from her practice and had her mentor come out of retirement to cover for her.

This entire lawsuit was predicated on the assumption that she had not told Charlotte about her baby’s medical condition early on—had not given her information that might have led to terminating the pregnancy. And there was a little piece of me that wondered if it had been an oversight on the obstetrician’s part or a subconscious slip. Were there obstetricians who—instead of recommending abortions—suggested adoption? Had one of them taken care of my own mother?

I had finally received my nonidentifying letter from Maisie in the Hillsborough County Court Records Office. Dear Ms. Gates, the letter had read.

The following information has been compiled from the court record of your adoption. Information in the record indicates the birth mother’s obstetrician contacted his attorney seeking advice for a patient who was considering adoption. The attorney was aware of the Gateses’ interest in adopting. The attorney met with the birth parents after you were born and made arrangements for the adoption.

You were born in a Nashua hospital at 5:34 p.m. on January 3, 1973. You were discharged from the hospital on January 5, 1973, into the care of Arthur and Yvonne Gates. Their adoption of you became final on July 28, 1973, in Hillsborough County Court.

Information recorded on the original birth certificate indicates the birth mother was seventeen when she gave birth to you. She was a Hillsborough County resident at the time. She was Caucasian, and her occupation was Student. The birth father was not identified on the birth certificate. At the time of the adoption, she was living in Epping, NH. The adoption petition identifies your religious affiliation as Roman Catholic. The birth mother and maternal grandmother signed a consent to your adoption.

Please feel free to contact me if I can be of any additional assistance.

Sincerely, Maisie Donovan

I realized that the point of the nonidentifying letter was to give information that wasn’t specific—but there were so many other things I
wanted to know instead. Had my father and mother broken up during the pregnancy? Had my mother been scared, in that hospital by herself? Had she held me even once, or just let the nurse take me away?

I wondered if my adoptive parents, who had raised me decidedly Protestant, had known I was born Catholic.

I wondered if Piper Reece had figured that, if Charlotte O’Keefe didn’t want to raise a child like Willow, someone else might be more than happy to have the chance.

Clearing my head, I picked up the interrogatory she’d filled out and flipped through the pages to read her side of the story. My questions had begun generically and then gotten more medically specific at the end of the document. The first one, in fact, had been a complete softball: When did you first meet Charlotte O’Keefe?

I scanned the answer and blinked, certain I’d read that wrong.

Picking up the phone, I called Charlotte. “Hello?” she said, breathless.

“It’s Marin Gates,” I said. “We need to talk about the interrogatories.”

“Oh! I’m so glad you called. There must be a mistake, because we got one with Amelia’s name on it.”

“That’s not a mistake,” I explained. “She’s listed as one of our witnesses.”

“Amelia? No, that’s impossible. There is no way she’s testifying in court,” Charlotte said.

“She can describe the quality of life in your family, and how OI has affected her. She can talk about the trip to Disney World, and how traumatic it was to be taken out of your custody and put in a foster home—”

“I don’t want her having to relive that—”

“She’ll be a year older by the time the trial starts,” I said. “And she may not need to be called as a witness. She’s listed just in case, as protocol.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t even tell her, then,” Charlotte murmured, which reminded me why I had called in the first place.

“I need to talk to you about Piper Reece’s interrogatory,” I said. “On it, I asked her when she first met you, and she said that you had been best friends for eight years.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line.

“Best friends?”

“Well,” Charlotte said. “Yes.”

“I’ve been your lawyer for eight months,” I said. “We’ve met half a dozen times in person and talked three times that much on the phone. And you never thought it might be the tiniest bit important to give me that little detail?”

“It has nothing to do with the case, does it?”

“You lied to me, Charlotte!” I said. “That has a hell of a lot to do with the case!”

“You didn’t ask me if I was friends with Piper,” Charlotte argued. “I didn’t lie.”

“It’s a lie of omission.”

I picked up Piper’s interrogatory and read out loud. “‘In all of the years we’ve been friends, I never had any indication that Charlotte felt this way about her prenatal care. In fact, we had been shopping together with our daughters a week before I got served with what I feel is a baseless lawsuit. You can imagine how shocked I was.’ You went shopping with this woman the week before you sued her? Do you have any idea how cold-blooded that’s going to look to a jury?”

“What else did she say? Is she doing all right?”

“She’s not working. She hasn’t worked for two months,” I said.

“Oh,” Charlotte said, her voice small.

“Look, I’m a lawyer. I’m well aware that my job requires destroying the lives of people. But you apparently have a personal connection to this woman, in addition to a professional one. It’s not going to make you sympathetic.”

“Neither is telling a court that I didn’t want Willow,” Charlotte said.

Well, I couldn’t argue with that.

“You may get what you want out of this lawsuit, but it’s going to come at a great cost.”

“You mean everyone’s going to think I’m a bitch,” Charlotte said. “For screwing my best friend. And for using my child’s illness to get money. I’m not stupid, Marin. I know what they’re going to say.”

“Is that going to be a problem?”

Charlotte hesitated. “No,” she said firmly. “No, it’s not.”

She’d already confessed to having problems getting her husband
on board with this lawsuit. Now I’d found out that she had a hidden history with the defendant. What you didn’t tell someone was just as debilitating as what you did; I only had to look as far as my stupid nonidentifying letter to feel it firsthand.

“Charlotte,” I said, “no more secrets.”

The purpose of a deposition is to find out what happens to a person when he or she is thrown into the trenches of a courtroom. Conducted by the opposing party’s lawyer, it involves trying to impeach a potential witness’s credibility based on statements in the interrogatories. The more honest—and unflappable—a person is, the better your case begins to look.

Today, Sean O’Keefe was being deposed, and it scared me to death.

He was tall, strong, handsome—and a wild card. Of all the face-to-face meetings I’d had with Charlotte to prepare, he’d come to only one. “Lieutenant O’Keefe,” I had asked, “are you committed to this lawsuit?”

He had glanced at Charlotte, and an entire conversation had unraveled between them in utter silence. “I’m here, aren’t I?” he had said.

It was my belief that Sean O’Keefe would rather be drawn and quartered than led to a witness stand for this trial, which should not really have been my problem—except it was. Because he was Willow’s father, and if he screwed up on the stand, my case would be ruined. For this suit to succeed, the malpractice lawyers needed to believe that, when it came to wrongful birth, the O’Keefes presented a united front.

Charlotte, Sean, and I rode up in the elevator together. I had specifically scheduled the deposition during the hours you were in school, so child care wasn’t an issue. “Whatever you do,” I said, last-minute quarterbacking, “don’t relax. They’re going to lead you down the path to hell. They’ll twist your words.”

He grinned. “Go ahead, make my day.”

“You can’t play Dirty Harry with these guys,” I said, panicking. “They’ve seen it before, and they’ll trap you with your own bravado. Just remember to keep calm, and to count to ten before you answer anything. And—”

The elevator doors opened before I could finish my sentence. We stepped into the luxurious offices, where a paralegal in a fitted blue suit was already waiting. “Marin Gates?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Mr. Booker’s expecting you.” She led us down the hall to the conference room, a panorama of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out toward the golden dome of the Statehouse. Tucked into one corner was the stenographer. Guy Booker was deep in conversation, his silver head bent. He stood up as we approached, revealing his client.

Piper Reece was prettier than I expected. She was blond, lanky, with dark circles underneath her eyes. She wasn’t smiling; she stared at Charlotte as if she’d just been run through with a sword.

Charlotte, on the other hand, was doing everything possible not to look at her.

“How could you?” Piper accused. “How could you do this?”

Sean narrowed his eyes. “You’d better stop right there, Piper—”

I stepped between them. “Let’s just get this over with, all right?”

“You have nothing to say?” Piper continued, as Charlotte settled herself at the table. “You don’t even have the decency to look me in the eye and tell me off to my face?”

“Piper,” Guy Booker said, putting a hand on her arm.

“If your client is going to be verbally abusive to mine,” I announced, “we’ll walk out of here right now.”

“She wants abusive?” Sean muttered. “I’ll show her abusive…”

I grabbed his arm and pulled him down into a chair. “Shut up,” I whispered.

It was perhaps the first and only time in my life that I would ever have anything in common with Guy Booker—neither one of us relished being present at this deposition. “I’m quite sure my client can restrain herself,” he said, facing Piper as he stressed the last two words. He turned to the stenographer. “Claudia, you ready to get started?”

I looked at Sean and mouthed the word calm. He nodded and cracked his neck on each side, like a prizefighter readying to head into the ring.

That snap, that audible pop: it made me think of you, breaking a bone.

Guy Booker opened a leather folder. It was buttery, most likely
Italian. Part of the reason Booker, Hood & Coates won so many cases was the intimidation factor—they looked like winners, from their opulent offices to their Armani suits and their Waterman pens. They probably even had their legal pads hand-made and watermarked with their corporate seal. Was it any wonder that half the opponents threw in the towel after a single glance?

“Lieutenant O’Keefe,” he said. His voice was smooth, no friction between the words. I’m your pal, I’m your buddy, his tone suggested. “You believe in justice, don’t you?”

“It’s why I’m a police officer,” Sean answered proudly.

“Do you think lawsuits can bring about justice?”

“Sure,” Sean said. “It’s the way this country works.”

“Would you consider yourself particularly litigious?”

“No.”

“I guess you must have had good reason, then, to sue Ford Motor Company in 2003?”

Shocked, I turned toward Sean. “You sued Ford?”

He was scowling. “What does that have to do with my daughter?”

“You received a settlement, didn’t you? Of twenty thousand dollars?” He leafed through his leather folder. “Can you explain the nature of the complaint?”

“I slipped a disk in my back, sitting in the cruiser seat the whole day. Those things are designed for crash test dummies, not real humans doing their jobs.”

I closed my eyes. It would have been really nice, I thought, if either of my clients had been honest with me.

“About Willow,” Guy said. “How many hours per day would you say you spend with her?”

“Maybe twelve,” he said.

“Of those twelve hours, how many is she asleep?”

“I don’t know, eight, if it’s a good night.”

“If it’s not a good night, how many times would you say you have to get up with her?”

“It depends,” Sean said. “Once or twice.”

“So the amount of time you’re with her, and not trying to get her back to sleep—that’s probably about four or five hours a day?”

“Sounds fair.”

“During those hours, what do you and Willow do?”

“We play Nintendo. She beats the pants off me at Super Mario. And we play cards…” He blushed a little. “She’s a natural at Five-Card Stud.”