The Good Sister (28 page)

“She needed you.”

“You could say that.”

“When did you first realize Mrs. Duran was prone to depression?”

“One time, before we were married, her stepfather told me she had these… spells. He didn’t use the word
depression
. He said she was fragile and didn’t handle stress well.”

“What was your reaction?”

“I wanted to take care of her.” Roxanne heard a hint of belligerence.

“When did you begin to realize your wife was more than simply delicate or fragile?”

Johnny looked at Simone with an expression Roxanne thought was tender. “She had these quirks.”

“Can you give us an example?”

“She never wore sandals or went barefoot. She told me she didn’t like people looking at her feet.”

“Was something wrong with her feet?”

“No, nothing. She had this broken toe that kind of stuck out at a funny angle but it was barely noticeable. She said it wasn’t
really her toe. She said she broke her own and the doctor sewed someone else’s on in its place.”

“What did you think when she said that?”

“I assumed she was joking.”

“What changed your mind?”

“After we were married she always wore a sock on her right foot. In bed. All the time. She was ashamed of that little toe.”

A woman to the right of Roxanne whispered to the man beside her. There were whispers all around.

They think she’s crazy,
Roxanne thought.
Good.

“Were there other little ‘quirks’?”

“Before Merell was born the doctor, the nurse, even the tech who read the ultrasound images, everyone said she was going to
be a boy. When she wasn’t, Simone got it in her head that Merell wasn’t really our baby. It was like the toe thing. At first
I didn’t get that she was serious. But she wouldn’t touch Merell. She let her lay in the crib all day, so my mother had to
come in and help. And then after a while she seemed better and all she could talk about was getting it right next time.”

“Getting it right? What did she mean?”

“We both wanted a son.”

“How many miscarriages did your wife have after that?”

“At least four. Maybe five.”

“That’s a lot, isn’t it? Were these short-term miscarriages?”

Johnny rubbed his forehead. “One of them was far enough along she had to go into the hospital. And a nurse told her it would
have been a boy. It took her months to get over that one.”

“What happened after the twins were born?”

“Like with Merell, she wouldn’t take care of them. She started staying in bed most of the day.”

“A year and a half later, Olivia was born. She had infantile acid reflux. What was that like?”

“She screamed. At night especially. No one got any sleep.”

“What did you do then?”

“Walked her.”

“For how long?”

Johnny shrugged. “I don’t know. Hours. From one end of the hall to the other. Sometimes I fell asleep but I kept walking.”

“Did Simone walk the baby too?”

“She tried. At first. And then she got so she’d just cry every time Olivia started up. Sometimes I’d go downstairs and wake
up the nanny but she had to be with the kids and Simone all day…. It was easier for me to do it.”

“Mr. Duran, is this what you heard?”

Cabot’s associate pressed a button on a tape recorder and a baby’s screams filled the courtroom. Johnny flinched. Inadvertently,
Roxanne put her hands over her ears.

“All right, Counselor,” boomed the judge, “I said you could play it ten seconds. That’s it!” He rapped the gavel and declared
to the noisy gallery, “I’ll clear the courtroom if I have to.”

“What did you do to help your wife cope?”

“I hired a nanny and a housekeeper, we got a vacation house where she could relax. I built an apartment for her mother so
she’d be nearby. For a while I employed someone to cook for us, a personal chef. A whole week of meals was delivered every
Monday morning when she was pregnant with Olivia. It wasn’t junk either. It was good food, lots of vegetables. Nutritious.”

Johnny glared at Cabot, daring him to contradict. Then he seemed to realize that he sounded defensive. He sat back and his
voice cracked with weariness. “I let her stay in bed all day and I never said a word against it. I bought her two new cars
because I thought it might make her want to go out. She used to have a few friends. But…”

“But what, Mr. Duran?”

“She was like one of those walking ghosts. A zombie. She didn’t care about anything, she didn’t
do
anything. Half the time I came home and she was still in her nightgown and she wouldn’t know what time it was. She wouldn’t
even take a bath, for chrissake.”

“The night before the incident did you threaten to bring your sister Alicia into the home?”

“What was I supposed to do? I was at my wit’s end.
The nanny was gone and my mother-in-law was off doing something. I couldn’t leave her alone with the children.”

“How did Simone respond to this idea?”

“She panicked. She didn’t like my sister.”

“Why not?”

“She said if Alicia stayed she’d never leave.”

Cabot turned to the jury and paused in his questioning, letting Johnny’s testimony take hold.

“Did you at any time seek advice regarding your wife?”

“I talked to her doctor and my mother and sisters and they told me a lot of women get depressed after miscarriages and babies.
They all said the same thing. She’d get over it.”

“In fact Simone’s condition grew worse. But you still didn’t go to a psychiatrist or a therapist. Why is that?”

Johnny crossed and uncrossed his legs.

“When I was growing up we didn’t take our problems outside the family. If it was medical, that’s different. This was… personal.”

“Did you fear the doctor would make the situation worse?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Duran, I want you to tell the jury
how
you thought a doctor might make your family situation worse.”

A moment passed.

Johnny cleared his throat. “Way back, when she was having miscarriages, a doctor gave her some pills.”

“Did they make her less depressed?”

“I don’t know.”

“Your attention was focused somewhere else, wasn’t it?”

Johnny stared at the wall at the back of the gallery. Roxanne knew there was a clock over the door there. She imagined him
watching the seconds tick by.

Cabot said, “Your Honor, will you instruct Mr. Duran—”

“You don’t have to instruct me about anything,” he said, straightening. “I’ll say it. I’m not a hero here. The pills made
her cold in bed. I didn’t like it.”

Behind Roxanne a woman whispered something that sounded like “Bastard.”

Cabot had told the family that in a case involving violence to children, the jury needed to assign guilt but not necessarily
to the defendant. They needed someone to blame and Johnny had been assigned that role.

“Did you ever think about not having any more kids? Using birth control?”

“I wanted a son.”

“Did Mrs. Duran object to the lack of birth control?”

“No.”

“She was compliant? Submissive?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“And you didn’t want that to change, did you?”

“No.”

Johnny sat before the jury, exposed as Roxanne had
never seen him. The pride he had taken from his wealth and powerful friends seemed now like a pitiful attempt to compensate
for a profound insecurity. From this day forward there would be no more invitations to golf and tennis with his pals in high
places, and no seats reserved for him at the mayor’s table. The chief of police would not return his calls. He had answered
David Cabot’s questions with unflinching honesty, and given the jury—the press and public—someone to despise instead of Simone.

Cabot sat down. “I have no further questions, Your Honor.”

During his cross-examination, Clark Jackson again brought up the 911 incident. “The attempted drowning of your infant daughter,
Olivia.”

“Objection, Your Honor! The incident reports have been put into evidence. There’s no mention of an attempted drowning. Prosecution
is trying to mislead the jury about what happened that day.”

“Sustained. Jury, you will disregard Mr. Jackson’s last question.”

Johnny blurted, “How many times do you have to hear this? Merell made that story up. She likes attention, she likes to try
things out.”

“Come on, Mr. Duran, you weren’t there. You didn’t actually see what happened, did you?”

Johnny sighed. “No. I wasn’t there.”

“Does Merell love her mother, Mr. Duran?”

“Yes, of course.” He looked at Simone. “We all love her.”

“Have you talked with Merell about what will happen if her mother is found guilty?”

“No.”

“I’m going to ask you a question and I want your opinion as this girl’s father. Do you think it’s possible that she would
lie to protect her mother?”

“Your Honor,” David Cabot said, “Merell Duran is not on trial and Johnny Duran has not been offered as an expert.”

“True.” Judge MacArthur removed his glasses, examined the lenses, and handed them off to his clerk to be wiped clean. “Nevertheless,
he is the girl’s father and I’m going to allow the question.”

“Mr. Duran, would Merell lie to the court if she thought it would keep her mother out of jail?”

“No,” he said. “Of course not.”

Jackson didn’t move for a breath. Then, although addressing his comment to Johnny, he looked at the twelve men and women in
the jury box. “Maybe you don’t know your daughter as well as you think you do.”

J
udge MacArthur recessed the trial until Monday morning, when the jury would hear summations.

Roxanne went straight home and locked the front door of the bungalow. She apologized to Chowder, but there would be no walk
that day. Ty came home after dark and was accosted by a pair of reporters who leaped from their cars parked in front of the
house, but on Saturday he and Roxanne avoided attention, sneaking away early. They drove to the Laguna Mountains and were
rained on as they hiked the trail to the old mine. They lay in the grass by the side of the trail and let the rain come down
on them until they were soaked and chilled and ran the half mile back to the car, laughing, to warm themselves up. On Sunday
Ty built a fire and came back from Theo’s Bakery with chocolate croissants and
The New York Times
. Between them they read every page, even the wedding announcements with their hopeful photos. That night they watched the
entertainment channel and talked
about celebrity shenanigans as if they were a couple with nothing more dramatic than Hollywood gossip to occupy their minds.

It seemed a long time ago that Roxanne and Ty had argued over Simone. Though she still felt close to her sister and during
the trial she had sometimes experienced extraordinary waves of empathy, the calamitous truth exposed by Simone’s crime had
severed the breathing line that had connected the sisters. It was no longer possible for any of the family to pretend that
Simone’s meany-men were trivial. No matter how they might try, they could not be deluded into believing that she was like
other harassed mothers, the women Roxanne saw pushing overloaded carts in supermarkets and shepherding children in and out
of vans and cars.

There was nothing Roxanne could do for Simone now except love and stand by her. And yet she did not feel completely free,
could not deny that she felt culpable. She had been her sister’s caretaker because, from the age of nine until she met Elizabeth,
she believed she had no choice in the matter. Some responsibility for what happened in the garage belonged to her. The certain
knowledge of this was a cramp in her heart that took her unexpectedly, cutting off her breath with its intensity. She didn’t
bother complaining to a doctor. She never complained to Ty. She knew the cause.

On Monday Roxanne didn’t hear much of Jackson’s and Cabot’s summations. Sometimes a particular word or
intonation snagged her attention, but she had been sitting in the same seat in the gallery long enough, heard enough to know
that neither the most bumbling nor the most eloquent summation could save Simone.

However, near the end of David’s summation, his words finally managed to make her listen.

“Simone Duran did not hear voices. She did not suffer hallucinations. But at some point on that hot September day she became
delusional in her conviction that the baby she was carrying, the twins and Olivia, were all doomed to be as helpless and profoundly
unhappy as she was. She ‘knew’ the miserable destiny that lay ahead for her daughters and she ‘knew’ what she could do to
stop it and she ‘knew’ it was the right thing to do.”

Roxanne held her breath.

“It wasn’t rational, this
knowing.
It was terribly wrong, but it couldn’t be debated because it filled her mind and there was no room for any other thought.
When she turned the key in the ignition of the yellow Camaro, she could not
distinguish
right from wrong and under our system of laws, that inability makes her not guilty.”

Judge MacArthur scowled down on the murmuring gallery and tapped his gavel.

“No matter what you decide in this case, Simone Duran will not go free.

“Usually when a person is found not guilty, she can walk out of the courtroom and never look back, but this case is different.
When you find Simone Duran not guilty
by reason of insanity, she will
not go free
. She will immediately be incarcerated—locked up—in a hospital for the criminally insane. And she’ll have to stay there until
a panel of doctors determines she is no longer a danger to herself or others.

“And, ladies and gentlemen, let’s be very clear. This might never happen. She might be locked up for the rest of her life.”

Cabot’s words grabbed Roxanne and shoved her against the chair back.

Cabot said, “So, let me remind you of the question I asked you to focus on when I made my introductory remarks. Why did Simone
Duran try to kill herself and her daughters? I think you have your answer.”