SLIVER MOON (Chapter One)
The Santa Rosa Hospital stands on the western edge of downtown San Antonio. The hospital has grown to become a small complex, much of it devoted to the treatment of children. One of the newest buildings, twelve white stories, holds doctors’ offices. Recently, psychiatrist Anne Greenwald had moved her office into this building, after years spent in the hospital building itself. Anne had liked being part of the action of the hospital, close enough to hear the emergency room doors opening to admit a rolling stretcher, but she finally admitted to needing larger, more modern rooms. Some of her patients hadn’t liked entering the hospital to see her. In fact, as Anne readily admitted, many of her patients didn’t like coming to see her at all.
On this Friday afternoon her waiting room stood strangely empty. Within the suite, Anne hummed as she moved around her office, deftly stepping over or around stacks of files. Anne wore a slight smile and her green eyes were lively. She couldn’t have said what made her happy, and wouldn’t want to try. A good mood shouldn’t be analyzed to death. She was getting away early on a Friday, taking Chris out of town. That was enough.
She carried her thinnest briefcase, one not big enough to carry a weekend’s worth of guilt. Anne rarely took off a whole day from work. This weekend she should be writing two reports for court, one other for the state Human Resources Agency, and several private evaluations. But she had decided only to take one little file—if she could find it.
She picked up the stack closest to her desk chair and lifted it up to the desk, began going carefully through the tabs, checking the names on the files. As she thumbed through the cases each name seemed to reach out for her. Every file evoked a memory or the thought of what she might be able to do to help the people, mostly children, whose lives lay embedded in these files.
The humming had stopped. Anne sighed. Then her determination to have a good weekend reasserted itself. “This empathy crap has got to stop,” she muttered to herself.
Just as Anne found the file she wanted, and pulled it triumphantly from the middle of a stack of similar folders, the telephone on her desk rang. Anne looked startled, though on most days the phone rang all the time, and directed a glare in the general direction of the outer office, where her receptionist had been given instructions not to send back any calls except emergencies. The phone jangled again, sounding innocent. Pick me up, it seemed to pipe. Maybe I’m just a friend calling. Maybe it was Chris, calling to confirm their travel plans.
Anne lifted the phone. “Anne Greenwald.”
The pause that followed sounded sinister. But then a child’s voice said, “Hello, Dr. Greenwald, this is Meg.”
It took Anne a minute to place the name, because Meg was a new client who had only come in twice so far. But they had gotten along well; the girl didn’t seem to resent the visits at all. Child Protective Services had recently taken Meg from a home that featured an abusive father and an alcoholic mother, with nine-year-old Meg functioning as the parent-in-fact for her two younger siblings. She had been placed temporarily in a group home with six other girls from similar home environments. In spite of her background, Meg seemed like a cheery, bright girl, always on the lookout to make a new friend. Maybe it was just an act, but it was a good one.
“Hi, Meg. How are you, honey? Is there a problem?”
“No problems,” Meg chirped. “It’s a good day. I’m just calling to tell you happy birthday.”
“Thank you, sweetie, that’s very nice. But it’s not my birthday.”
“I know,” the girl chuckled through the phone line. “It’s my birthday. I called to wish you a happy my birthday!”
Anne’s eyes grew suddenly moist. “Oh, how nice, Meg. Happy birthday! Is it a good one so far?”
“Oh, yes,” the girl said, but Anne knew better. The poor girl must be calling everyone she knew trying to elicit some recognition of her special day. If Anne, who had only met Meg twice in a professional way, had made the girl’s list, it must be a short, depressing list.
Anne had a cheerful, congratulatory conversation with the girl for five minutes, then wished her a good day again and hung up. Immediately she made two more calls, to the group home leader and to Meg’s caseworker, so they could do something to acknowledge the birthday. Was there any family member they could bring to see her, an aunt, maybe her little sister? The caseworker, overwhelmed with crises, said she’d do her best, and the group home leader promised a celebration with cake and ice cream. But still Anne hung up feeling she had to do more, picturing the girl smiling through a birthday in a group home. In Anne’s professional life, the angry kids made life difficult, the withdrawn ones took the most work, but the cheerful ones broke her heart.
The jurors sat in their box looking shy and mean. For the most part they kept their heads down, unwilling to look at the lawyers or the courtroom audience, as if they had done something shameful. But when a juror would shoot a glance around the room, it was defiant. Collectively, the jury in its box looked like a small, fierce animal that had retreated deep within its burrow, that wanted only to be left alone but would attack in another moment.
Chris Sinclair used to think of juries that way, back when he had been a young trial prosecutor. Now he always made a point of looking at jurors as individuals. Sitting at the State’s counsel table as if relaxed, he watched them. Chris shared the jury’s feelings. He wasn’t proud of this week’s work, but it had been necessary.
He listened to the last few stanzas of the defense lawyer’s closing argument. Harry Price was saying just what Chris had known he must say in behalf of his client. The defendant, a young woman with lank brown hair and deep circles under her eyes, slumped listlessly at the defense table, apparently unconcerned about her fate.
The defense lawyer stood directly in front of the jurors, his hands on the front railing of the jury box. “You have found this woman guilty. She accepts your verdict. It took some very good investigative work by the District Attorney’s Office and the medical examiner to determine that a crime had occurred, but as soon as they did she confessed. She didn’t try to hide the truth. She admitted what she had done. The worst crime we can imagine a woman committing: killing her own child.
“She admitted it because she couldn’t help herself. Just as she couldn’t help the killing. It hadn’t been a decision to commit murder; it had been an irresistible impulse. When Marilyn did what she did, she was in such a deep hole of depression that she didn’t see a chance of ever climbing out. She thought the whole world was buried in that blackness. She’s tried to explain to you what she felt, that she was doing a kindness for her baby: taking her out of this world so that she would never have to feel the despair that her mother felt constantly.”
The defense lawyer turned and looked at his client, who didn’t seem to be listening. She appeared more sunken and listless than ever. Price turned back to the jurors and concluded, “I’ve never been in that pit of depression and I hope none of you has either. But you know it was real for Marilyn. Don’t take vengeance on a woman who couldn’t help herself. That won’t help anyone. Sentence her to probation and let her get the treatment she needs. Thank you.”
He sat next to his client, putting a sympathetic hand on her shoulder. The defendant didn’t respond.
Chris Sinclair watched the young woman too. He wanted to go to her, lean down close to her face, and say, Pay attention. Instead he stood briskly and approached the jurors in his turn. They watched him covertly but attentively. Chris Sinclair, the district attorney of Bexar County, looked younger than his thirty-five years and moved gracefully. As he walked, he buttoned the jacket of his brown suit, which made him look thinner. In fact, as usual during a trial like this, he had dropped a couple of pounds. The stress diet. Chris made sure he had the jurors’ attention and began seriously.
“Mr. Price has been eloquent in his client’s defense. But what he has just argued to you is essentially what he presented in the first phase of trial, an insanity defense. You jurors, though, have already rejected that defense by finding the defendant guilty of murder.”
Which accounted for the jury’s hangdog but glaring attitude. Many of them obviously believed that the young woman had been suffering from mental strain when she held a pillow over her baby’s face for ten minutes. But they also believed the act had been murder. Murder required punishment, which was what Chris Sinclair and the defense lawyer were arguing over this morning.
Chris assumed a conversational air in jury argument. He felt the jury’s dilemma. He shared it.
“So what punishment fits this crime? As Mr. Price said, the worst crime we can imagine. A mother killing not just her child, but a helpless, blameless, completely innocent three-month-old infant, one who needed her for nurture and comfort and protection and instead ended her life screaming and choking as her mother’s weight bore down on her.
“But Marilyn Lewis suffered under her own weight, of clinical depression. You’ve heard from the experts for both sides about whether she knew the difference between right and wrong at that moment, but certainly she suffered from depression. We can see it now. We want to pity her as much as condemn her.”
