To Katelyn
The last chapter is for you, because of you. I hope you like it.
MICHAEL Chapter 1 | October 10, 1989 | Tarson, Georgia
THE FOREMAN LISTS THE CHARGES for which I stand accused. The air in the courtroom is cold and thick. It reminds me of a lightning storm in the dead of winter, the kind that makes people look out their windows, smiling and shivering, watching for the next forked strike, counting until the next big boom.
No one is smiling now.
My attorney, Ama Shoemaker, shifts her weight off her toes for half a second and resettles. The tap of her heels against the sealed concrete floor travels the length of the courtroom. I imagine the vibrations climbing the khaki-colored walls, racing across the ceiling, weaving between fluorescent lights, and fading into oblivion.
I turn my head to stare full-faced at Ama. The side of her cheek slides between her teeth. Her eyes remain fixed on the jury. I’m not sure which aspect makes her more nervous: the fact that my trial is her first big case as a court-appointed defense attorney, or me.
Because I’m guilty as sin, and she knows it.
The foreman finishes the list of charges, and the courtroom falls silent, a string pulled taut to the point of snapping.
“Have you reached a verdict?” the judge asks. Ama doesn’t glance in my direction.
The foreman clears his throat. “We have, Your Honor. In the case of the State of Georgia versus Michael Jeffery Walton, we find the defendant not guilty on all charges.”
Beside me, Ama continues to hold her breath, drawing her torso unnaturally straight. I imagine her weight collecting near the front of her shoes, because by nature, humans are still prey animals, still subliminally answering when a shot of adrenaline chases a prick of fear down a spine.
The room is dismissed, clearing in haste. Ama investigates me from her peripheral vision first, shuffling needlessly through her papers before securing them in her double-buckle briefcase. She drums four fingernails on the strip of metal running across the top. Her thumb ends the run with a thump against the leather underside.
“This is when a client typically says ‘thank you,’ Michael,” she says.
“Thank you, Michael,” I reply, yet my attention is drawn to the far corner of the courtroom, next to the rows reserved for the jury, where piece after piece of evidence was offered as proof. The pictures didn’t do it for me. The visual memory is hazy and far-off, a rumble of distant thunder uncommitted in its future trajectory. But the sounds. Oh, the sounds.
I close my eyes and recount the struggle note for splendid note, the shift into a ragged, exhausted tenor. There’s an optimal volume for the human ear to detect a sound at perfect clarity, and most people don’t realize it’s quite low. At high volume, all one hears is noise. But in that perfect range, the tone comes through on a razor’s edge, straight and unwavering. If only those items of proof had been captured. I would’ve begged for them to be admitted, to play them in this room with an audience, again and again. They’d be spellbound and breathless. Father would be proven right, dead in his grave—all things for a reason, son—and Mother would think there was a sliver of hope for me yet.
“Do me one courtesy,” Ama says. She turns to face me, guarding her squishy, pulsing organs with her briefcase. “Make sure I never see you again.”
We hold eye contact for a full second. Her pupils constrict, doubling the size of her pale gray irises.
Ama rakes her teeth across her lip and glances at her wristwatch. I follow her gaze: 3:33 PM Her mouth opens, an excuse for why she’s about to leave without escorting me out probably floating somewhere in her throat. She won’t need to shield my exit. Tarson is a rural town in the foothills of north Georgia and well over an hour from anywhere that matters. My work didn’t even make for a sentence in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. This isn’t the kind of place where people picket on the courthouse steps. They’ll turn over opinions in church pews and on front porches, in line at the feed store. And I’m a minor. Ama had said she’d move to have the records of this case sealed should I be found not guilty, but that was when she never thought I’d get off.
Ama reaches into the front pocket of her briefcase and extracts a handful of cash.
“I don’t guess your mom is picking you up,” she states.
I flinch at the mention of Mother, and my eyes travel the scale of music notes she branded into my forearm with the end of her cigarette.
CDEFGAB Can you feel it now, Michael?
“I would guess not,” I answer.
Ama sets the money down on the black tabletop. “This should be enough for a cab,” she says. “I meant what I said. This is your second chance. Take it. I never want to have to cross paths again.”
Ama steps out of our row and moves down the center aisle. I turn but don’t follow, keeping my stare where the brown fabric meets in a seam on Ama’s back as she walks to the open doors at the back of the room. Her parting words echo in my skull.
I never want to have to cross paths again.
What if we did? Not orchestrated in any way, but naturally, in a way that would almost suggest fate itself had intervened. Something random. Somewhere new. All things for a reason.
She steps through the doorway without once looking back. I imagine her steps on the polished floor, clicking and clacking down the main corridor, faster and faster as her internal chemistry demands the safety of open space and distance from threat.
If we saw each other again, it could be a coincidence, an accident. An almost. But if our paths crossed a third time… now that would be interesting. Three weeks, three days—the length of the trial. 3:33 PM Mother’s favorite number. Her most important rule: the Rule of Three.
One time is an accident. Two times is a coincidence. Three times is mastery.
If I didn’t know better, I would think Lady Fate is flirting with me.
In my mind, Ama reaches the parking lot and breaks into a run.
You run, Ama.
I can wait.
AMA Chapter 2 | 4:00 PM, December 1, 2006 | Tarson, Georgia
AMA CHAPLIN STEPPED OUT OF her sedan, zipped up her jacket, and slid her sunglasses onto the top of her head. Nearly twenty years and Tarson hadn’t changed a bit. At least the crisp mountain air was clean. She couldn’t say the same for anything else in the town. Ama dropped her sunglasses in place, recalling every reason she shouldn’t be here and wondering how the hell she’d made the nearly two-hour drive north of the city without talking herself into turning around.
Deep down, she knew why: that case, that impossible case, and the wall of evidence she’d somehow managed to topple. The disemboweled cat pinned to a board like a science project found in the crawl space beneath her client’s house, the other small animals in varying stages of decomposition slit into pieces and found heaped in a pile inside a hollow tree just beyond the edge of his yard. The neighbor who watched her client lure a cat with a piece of ham and tuck it inside his jacket.
Still, somehow she’d won. The rookie, the underdog, the outsider, the felon’s daughter, the woman. She’d won.
Maybe she thought that if she came back here, breathed the air, ran the same trail she’d run every morning before heading to the courthouse, she’d rediscover that woman again—the one with barely enough cash in her bank account to fill the tank of her car and an equally empty conscience. Back then she’d had no idea how she’d won, and even now she still didn’t have an answer. But maybe she would be able to unearth the reason she’d lost her case today.