Chapter 8
A Reasonable Doubt About Herself
Dr. Paul Vanterpool charged six hundred dollars an hour and did not hurry.
He arrived in Courtroom B on the fifteenth of September in a grey suit, with a leather satchel and a mask in a pattern of very small blue diamonds, and he took the oath as if he were agreeing to a small favour. He was sixty-one, bald and tanned, with half-moon glasses, and he had written a textbook on the subject of memory that had been assigned in her first-year psychology class at Piedmont. Corinne had read two chapters. She had underlined a sentence in the second, in pencil, in the margin: The mind does not record; it composes.
It had seemed like a lovely idea at the time.
"Dr. Vanterpool," said Hollis Crane. "How would you characterize the state of the science on the reliability of human memory?"
"Humble," said the doctor, and the gallery, which had perhaps nine people in it, laughed.
"Could you explain?"
"Certainly." He turned, with an easy, professorial half-turn, to face the judge. "Most people believe that memory works like a video recording. That if you were present at an event, and paid attention, then a faithful account of it is stored somewhere in the brain, and can be retrieved on request. This is not the case. Memory is not retrieved. It is rebuilt. Every time we recall an event, we reconstruct it from fragments, from inference, from what other people have told us, from what we have read, from what we expect to have happened. The sense of certainty we feel is not a measure of accuracy. In many studies, the two are almost unrelated."
"Almost unrelated."
"A person can be absolutely sincere, completely confident, and wrong."
"Does this apply to everyone?"
"To everyone. But it applies with particular force to individuals who have experienced trauma, to individuals with a history of dissociative symptoms, and to individuals who were intoxicated at the time of the event. In my opinion, the complainant in this matter falls into all three categories."
"Objection," said Lenoir. "Your Honor, the doctor has not examined Ms. Bellamy."
"I have reviewed her records, Counsel."
"You have reviewed a notebook."
"And a great deal of literature," said Dr. Vanterpool, mildly. "I would not, of course, presume to diagnose a woman I have not met. I merely say that the features described in her own contemporaneous writing are consistent with a pattern that is well documented."
"Overruled," said the judge. "Though I'll remind the doctor that this is a hearing, not a trial. Mr. Crane, proceed."
He proceeded. He was very good. He never raised his voice and never made a statement that could have been called an accusation. He simply laid down, one after another, with infinite courtesy, the small flat stones of a path, and let the court find that it was walking along it.
It took an hour and forty minutes. At the end of it, Judge Whitcomb-Rhodes, whose face had not moved, asked a single question.
"Doctor. Is it your opinion that Ms. Bellamy is not telling the truth?"
"Certainly not, Your Honor."
"Then what is it your opinion that she's doing?"
"I believe she is telling you, with complete honesty, what she remembers." He spread his hands. "My concern is only with how much of what she remembers has been assembled after the fact."
"Thank you."
"I wish," said Dr. Vanterpool, with every appearance of sincerity, "that I could be more reassuring."
Iris Okonkwo testified for the State.
She had driven in from Decatur in her own car, and parked it herself, and had spent the previous night alone in a room at the Hampton Inn practising what she would say. She was a small woman with a straight back and a wide, plain, serious face, in a green wool jacket that had once belonged to her mother. She was not afraid of lawyers, but she had never liked being a witness. A witness was a person who had been invited to say what she had seen, and told that the thing she had seen was not important.
"Dr. Okonkwo," said Marcia Lenoir. "You treated the complainant when she was seventeen."
"For forty-one days. And then, as an outpatient, for eleven months."
"Did she ever, in your experience, invent events?"
"No."
"Did she ever lose touch with reality? Lose the capacity to distinguish between what was real and what was imagined?"
"Never."
"Dr. Vanterpool testified that dissociation is a disorder of memory. Is that your understanding?"
"No." She sat a little straighter. "Dissociation is a way of surviving an experience. It's a protective measure. The mind moves away from something it cannot bear. It does not invent what it finds. It leaves a gap. The difference is crucial. A woman who dissociates may not remember what happened to her. But she is almost never able to remember what didn't happen. People with her history do not confabulate events. They fail to record them. They say, I don't know."
"And Ms. Bellamy said I don't know."
"As far as I have read, she said it only once. She said it about four hours of the night. About the rest she was quite specific."
"Thank you."
Hollis Crane rose to cross.
He did it slowly. He stood at the lectern and looked at the witness for a moment, with a kindly, thoughtful expression, as a man looks at a grandmother whose recipe he intends to ask for. Then he said, in his warm quiet voice:
"Doctor, you were very fond of her."
"I was her physician."
"Yes. But fond. It's no crime."
"I care for all of my patients."
"Of course." He smiled. "I only wish to establish that you are not, how shall I put it, a disinterested witness. You wanted her to recover."
"I did."
"You wanted it very much."
"I did."
"And in the eleven months of outpatient treatment, Doctor, you saw a young woman who was, by your own account, remarkably composed."
"She was. She still is."
"Composed. Controlled. Articulate. Able to describe her emotions in precise, measured language."
"That's correct."
"One might say," said Hollis Crane, "that she was a very good patient."
Iris Okonkwo hesitated. It was a small hesitation. It lasted perhaps a second. But the court reporter, who was a stranger to her and very young, would note it, as he noted everything, with a bracket.
[Pause.]
"I wouldn't put it that way," she said.
"How would you put it?"
"I'd say she was a person who had taught herself, at a very young age, to appear in control."
"Taught herself."
"Yes."
"To appear."
"It's a common response to—"
"Thank you, Doctor." He had not raised his voice at all. "No further questions."
He sat down.
For a moment, Iris Okonkwo did not move. She looked, Corinne thought, from the second row, like a woman who has realized a half second too late that she has stepped onto a rug that was lying over a hole.
That night, Corinne could not sleep.
She lay on her back in her bedroom on Dellwood Street with the window open and the box fan on, and listened to the ordinary sounds of the neighbourhood: a dog two yards over, a car with a bad muffler, a television, a long slow freight train passing on the far side of the river. Ada was in Houston. She had been in Houston since March. The house had a hollow, hand-me-down quiet, the quiet of a place where one person lives in rooms meant for two.
The streetlight had been fixed.
It was the strangest thing. Sometime in the last week, without any notice, a city truck had come and a man in a hard hat had climbed up in a bucket and replaced something. The amber stutter was gone. In its place was a hard white even glare, steady, bright, perfectly regular, that came through the curtains and lay across the floor in a long pale rectangle, like a sheet of paper.
She had been awake for six hours.
I need it to blink, she thought. It was absurd. She turned over. She turned again. At twenty past two she sat up, switched on the lamp, and pulled from under the bed the cardboard box in which, since September, she had been keeping the court's copy of her notebook.
It had come in a manila envelope, fastened with a clasp. It was a photocopy, but a good one. Every page had been scanned in colour, so that she could see the faint blue lines of the ruled paper, the pen pressure, a coffee ring on page nine, and the curling, careful, upright handwriting of a girl of seventeen.
She had read it once, in August, quickly, as one swallows medicine. She had not read it since.
She read it now.
Day 3. I counted again. 48. I wonder if the tiles ever get tired.
Day 9. A girl in group said she wanted to die and everyone looked at me. I don't know why. I hadn't said anything. I was sitting very still. I think I'm good at looking like I'm fine.
Day 14. Dr. O says it's all right to feel nothing. She says it's what a person does when too much has happened. I wrote down all the facts of the day my father died. I did it in the order they happened. It took four pages. When I finished I felt calm. I read it over and over. It's like a prayer, only it's true.
Day 22. They think I'm getting better. I'm not. I'm just getting better at it.
She stopped.
She read that last line again, with her finger under it, the way she read a transcript.
I'm not. I'm just getting better at it.
She did not remember writing it. She remembered the notebook, and the blue chair, and the tiles. She remembered the smell of the floor wax, and a girl named Tasha who cried in the shower. But the sentence itself, in her own handwriting, in her own hand at seventeen, was as strange to her as a letter from a stranger.
Better at it.
At what?
She turned the page.
Day 29. I figured something out. I figured out that I can say anything, in a calm voice, and people will believe it. I tested it. I told the nurse I was in a good mood and she smiled and wrote it down. I told Dr. O I'd had a bad night and she wrote that down, too. I could say the opposite and it would be written. I could say anything. It's the voice that does it. I have a voice that sounds like the truth.
She put the pages down on the bed.
She sat very still. Her heart was going slowly and heavily, like a person walking down a long set of stairs. She could feel the exact moment at which Hollis Crane, in Courtroom B, in two weeks' time, in his warm unhurried voice, would stand, and hold up this single page, and ask it, quietly, as if it were an afterthought: Ms. Bellamy. Is it true that you are very good at sounding like the truth?
And she would say yes. Because it was true. And because it was the sentence she had written.
I have a voice that sounds like the truth.
She had meant it as a lament. She had been seventeen. She had meant, nobody can tell when I'm hurting. But on the page, in the bright white light of a courtroom, it would read as a confession.
She sat there for a long time. Then she did something she had not done since the first week.
She went to the kitchen and took a legal pad out of her bag.
It was a yellow pad, the kind Ms. Fairchild made the mock-trial team buy by the dozen, with the words EXHIBIT LOG printed across the top and a column of numbered lines. She set it on the table, and sat down, and uncapped a pen. She did not turn on the light. The streetlight was enough.
She began to write.
She wrote everything she knew. She wrote it in order, the way she had been taught to build a timeline, as flat and unadorned as a police log. Arrived 8:10 p.m. Beer, own, opened myself. Caleb in kitchen. Maya R. in kitchen, said hi. 9:00 text to Ada. 10:00 text to Ada. Owen handed me cup, said seltzer. 10:52 last text, "ok." Dock light yellow. Dock light off.
She stopped there. Her pen hung over the page.
Then she wrote what she knew after.
Voices: Grant. Owen. Tee. Dale, later, called "Dale." One I knew.
When she had finished she held the pages up to the light. It was eleven pages. It was perfectly neat, and perfectly clear, and every word of it was something that she could have sworn to in a court of law.
And in the middle of it, between dock light off and voices, was a gap of eleven blank lines in which there was nothing.
Don't argue the silence, said Ms. Fairchild's voice, in her head. Use it.
She marked it. She wrote in the gap, in small neat letters, [GAP: approx. 3.5 hrs.]
And then, because she was her mother's daughter, and could not leave a thing undone, she wrote underneath, in a different pen, in her ordinary handwriting:
I am not making this up.
The streetlight shone down on the table in its steady white blaze. She looked at the paper for a long time. She counted the letters in the sentence. There were twenty.
It was the first time in her life that she had understood that a true thing, laid out perfectly, could look exactly like a lie.