Spilled Milk: Based on a true story (25 page)

“My Aunt Jean.
She was the one I told first, when I went to New York, so she’s going to
testify about what I told her?”

“Exactly. And
how you acted when you were there, your demeanor, that kind of thing.” Heather
nodded. “I know I said it would be an uphill battle, because we have no DNA, no
witness that was right there in the room with you, it’s your word against his.”
She closed a file that was sitting on her desk. “But you have a damn good
voice, and we’re gonna make it sing.”

Evidence was
presented for two days before both lawyers made their closing statements to the
jury. Rob met us upstairs when he was finished and the jury had been given
their instructions. Throbbing pulses raced through my temple and I rubbed the
bridge of my nose as I fought to stay awake. Rob checked his watch. “Now, we
wait. Anyone hungry? There’s a pub on the corner.”

I ordered a
sandwich just to have something in front of me since everyone was concerned
about me not eating. There was no way I could stomach food right now, and it
made it easier to listen to Rob talk to Heather as I pretended to eat.

“I hope they
have an answer soon,” said Mom.

“We don’t want
them to call us back too early, it’s not a good sign.” He whispered and munched
on a chip. “Short deliberations usually come back with an innocent verdict.
It’s the lengthy jury deliberations that have the guilty verdicts. It takes
them longer to justify sending a man to jail then it does to set them free.”
Heather nodded in agreement.

Rob’s cell
phone rang just as we paid. His raised his eyes in surprise and flipped his
phone shut. “The jury is back. Verdict is in.” I checked my phone. The jury had
only been deliberating for three hours.

Everyone was
allowed in the courtroom when they read the verdict and I sat between Mom and
Gina. Heather and Rob stood in front of us and mumbled whispers continued until
the jury filed into the courtroom. Two women in particular stared at me without
blinking for several long seconds. They didn’t smile or offer any signs of
encouragement. Gina squeezed my hand. “This is it,” she said when the judge
walked in.

The judge never
smiled or looked up. She moved her cloak over her chair and shifted papers
around on her bench.

“Has the jury
come to a unanimous decision?”

The foreman of the jury stood up. She towered above
the podium and I thought she looked professional in her blue skirt. I targeted
the piece of paper floating in her hand that revealed what twelve people
thought should happen to a man they didn’t even know. “We have your honor,” she
said.

Her focus remained on the
judge, and never once lingered to Earl sitting only a few feet from the jurors.
His focus remained on his thumbs. The tipstaff handed the paper to the judge
and she looked it over. After a minute’s pause she looked at the foreman.“And
you’re sure that the jury has made every reasonable attempt to reach its
verdict?”

“We have your Honor.” The
foreman, for the first time, looked at me.

“Very well. It is with
great regret that I inform the court that the jury has remained deadlocked and
issues a verdict of a hung jury. Unable to
agree upon a verdict after an
extended period of deliberation and unable to change its votes due to severe
differences of opinion, it is issued from this court that the trial be
classified as a mistrial and any re-trial will be done at the discretion of the
plaintiff.”

While the judge thanked the jury for their time and gave
them their dismissal instructions, Heather and Gina rushed me from the room. I
couldn’t see through the tears and even though I didn’t completely understand
what had happened, I knew they didn’t say guilty, and for me it meant my world
was ending.

“We’ll do it again, we’ll just have to come back at them
again. It’s okay Brooke, we’ll do it again if we have to.” Gina tried to wipe
the mascara running down her face.

Heather lead me into her office. “It’s not necessarily a
bad thing. It means the jury couldn’t come to a decision, so we’ll re-group,
patch any holes, and next time…”

“I can’t do this again!” I cried. I buried my face.
“This can’t be happening, I can’t go through all this again.”

It had been well over a year since I went to the police.
I’ve had to stand in front of countless strangers, time and time again, to tell
them intimate details about my body and what happened to me. It never got
easier, the same words still stuck to the roof of my mouth when I tried to say
them, the pain was always full torque.

“You can.” Heather grabbed my shoulders and held back
her own tears. “You can because you’re such a strong person. I’ve never seen
someone testify the way you do.”

“Miss Heather, we have an issue out here?” The secretary
from the front room pointed toward the front of the building as she walked into
the office.

“Not now Melinda.”

“Miss but it’s important. It’s the jury. They’re outside
the courthouse. They want to talk to Brooke.”

Heather met Melinda’s gaze. “They want to what?”

As I approached the double doors leading to the front of
the courthouse I could hear Heather behind me. “My word, in the fifteen years
I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anything like this.”

When I stepped outside, I was surrounded and hugged by
twelve complete strangers. The women were crying, the men were crying, and they
all took turns shaking my hand. “You are the bravest girl we’ve ever met,” said
a curly blonde woman.

“Don’t think for one second we didn’t believe you.” A
latino man crossed his arms in front of his chest. “We believed you, okay?”

An older man with white hair and a beard to match knelt
on the ground in front of me and took my hand in his. “I am so sorry, please
forgive me. I had so many questions, and the jury can’t ask questions.” He
looked at the other eleven people above him. “I was the one they couldn’t
convince. I’m so sorry.”

“I don’t understand.” If they believed me, why didn’t
they convict him? Why were they here?

“We’re going to help. We want to meet with the D.A’s
office so next time, there’s no questions, no doubt in
any
jurors mind
that that monster is guilty.”

Heathers mouth dropped. “Really?”

Two women pushed to the front of the crowd. “Really. We
want to be there when he’s put away. We’ll meet with the lawyer as early as
tomorrow if you need us.”

“Wow. Okay, well let’s get your names and numbers then.”

A woman who smelled like jasmine touched my shoulder. “I
knew from the second I heard you speak that he was guilty, there was no way I
was going to let anyone sway me. I’m sorry we had to put you through that. I
was trying to make eye contact with you without coming off as too obvious, to
let you know I believed you.”

“I was too,” said the curly haired lady.

“Would explain the stares I was getting,” I confessed.
“It kinda looked like you were mad or something though.”

She shook her head. “I’m Dawn, by the way. And don’t
worry. Next time, we’ll get him.”

A trial was
rescheduled for three months later, should I choose to testify again. I stopped
answering my phone and spent the next few days hidden beneath the darkness of
my comforter. Calls from my boss went to voicemail and Cristin stopped sending
texts after the fifth day.

Over a year was
a long time to fight, to constantly have your guard up. The nightmares
diminished a bit since I moved out but they came back full force after the hung
jury.

“Brooke, you
failed your algebra class? Didn’t you go up to pre-calc in high school?” Jason
read over the sheet of paper in his hand.

I eyed the
print out of my grades sitting on the floor of the bedroom and muffled my
response into a pillow. “Apparently some professors have attendance rules.
Don’t show up so many times and they fail you.”

“Why didn’t you
give him the letters from Heather, she wrote your excuse letters right?”

“I can’t do
this anymore.”

I felt Jason’s
weight next to me on the bed, but I didn’t look up. He rubbed the top of the
comforter that I hid beneath. “What can’t you do?”

“Everything.”

“What’s
everything?”

“College,
apparently. Court. My family. You.”

“Me?”

I ignored the
hurt in his voice. “I can’t do this anymore. It’s too much.”

“You think it
would be easier if I wasn’t here?”

“I think it
would be easier if I didn’t have to worry about anyone but myself. I screw
everything up. Everything is just happening so fast. It’s so hard, all the
time. When does it end?”

“You don’t have
to worry about me, I’m not going anywhere.” His hand stroked my face and I knew
he meant it. “And you didn’t screw anything up. This wasn’t your fault.”

“Really? What’s
not
my fault?”

Midge told me I
would get to a point where I would feel real anger, a fury so deep about
everything that I wouldn’t know where it came from. It wasn’t like me to be
like that, so I never believed her. Suddenly it was very plausible.

“My mom can
barely
survive. She’s got four kids living in her house now that she’s struggling to
feed because of
me.
She’s so money hungry all the time she’s sacrificing
the relationships she has with her own children just to make a buck. My older
brother is in complete denial of everything that has ever happened in our life.
Did I tell you that he told me he wouldn’t believe the accusations I was making
until a jury decided? He still keeps in contact with Earl, can you believe
that? Not to mention that he’s eating himself into a coma. My own siblings
don’t even believe me because he’s their father, and it didn’t happen to them,
so they can’t even imagine something like that going on right under their nose.”

“You can’t help
how they are,” Jason replied.

“Kat has
started to cut herself. She told my mom it makes her feel good. And Thomas is
in his
second
juvenile detention center in less than two years. I’m
eighteen and engaged but there have been so many times I’ve cried to you, cried
to
you
, over Paul and I don’t even know why.”

I threw my
hands up in the air. “How is that fair even to you Jason? I’m failing my
classes, I can’t even get my own fiancé to touch me anymore because you’re
afraid I’ll start crying or that you’ll do something to sexually trigger me in
the wrong way, and I’m pretty sure at this point I don’t even have a job.”

Jason opened
his mouth but I cut him off. “Ask me for a list of things I
didn’t
screw
up next time, it’ll be shorter.”

Jason grabbed
me on my upper right arm to spin me toward him and I flung myself towards him.
“Don’t ever touch me there. Don’t you ever grab my arm like that.”

“I’m sorry, I’m
sorry, did I hurt you?” His voice cracked as I placed a hand over where he
touched me.

The one time I
tried to get away from Earl, the one window of opportunity where I actually
fought back, he had grabbed me in the same spot. His grimy hands seized my arm and
he was able to pin me back down on the bed like a ragdoll. Jason couldn’t have
known that, but I was past any form of rational thinking at that point.

I took the ring
off my finger and slammed it down on the desk next to the bed. Jason looked at
it, terrified. “Baby you’re upset, I know, but-”

“But what?
You’ll never understand. No one will ever understand. I don’t even understand!”
I blindly searched for my car keys.

“You can’t
drive like that, Brooke you stay, I’ll leave. Please.”

“I need to get
out of here.”

The door
slammed behind me as I pulled on a jacket. My accelerator touched the floor and
I fumbled my phone out of my purse. “Gina!” I cried when she picked up. “I need
you.”

***

“So, you
finally got angry huh?” Gina filled my second cup of wine. “I was wondering
when that was going to happen.”

“I was horrible
to him, Gina. He won’t take me back. I wouldn’t take me back.” I swirled my
hand and watched the wine flow off the sides of the glass like Lou had taught
me.

“Oh, he’ll take
you back. That’s not even a question. Question is do you
want
him back?”

“I don’t know.
I don’t know anything anymore.”

“You still
think about Paul?”

“I have dreams
about him sometimes, I’ve cried to Jason about missing Paul. Isn’t that screwed
up? But Jason just tells me he understands that he realizes he was part of my
life and he wouldn’t expect me to forget he existed. Then I remember how he
treated me when we broke up and I just, I don’t know. Can you love two people
at once?”

Gina raised an
eyebrow. “You were both so young, ya know?”

I knew Gina wanted
me as a daughter-in-law. She always hinted that she thought there would be a
day that we would rekindle our relationship, and when we did, she would be
anticipating lots of grandbabies.

“I know. I know
me and Jason won’t get married anytime soon anyway, I’d lose my financial aid
for college.” Gina and I were three glasses of wine in when she approached the
next topic.

“You know the
jurors are trying to meet with the D.A’s office this week. They can tell Rob
exactly what he needs to clarify next time. There’s no way he’ll walk next
time, no way.”

“How am I
supposed to do that all over again? I’ve been a wreck. I can’t even remember
the last time I didn’t have to schedule a day of court into my life. I throw up
before going in to see him. The nightmares just won’t go away.”

“Don’t rub your
face like that, you’ll get wrinkles. And you
will
do it again, because
you have people there to support you. Would you rather him out on the streets,
finding other little girls and boys to molest? I don’t think so.”