Dani looked him up on the Martindale Hubbell website, the bible for lawyer resumes. Robert Wilson was a small-town lawyer with one associate and no partners. Most likely, the current associate hadn’t worked there during George’s trial. She copied his phone number, but Jonah interrupted her before she could dial it.
“I’m bored,” he whined. “Why can’t I go to school now? I feel acceptable. I miss my friends. You’re too busy to interplay with me.”
Despite his pouting lips, Jonah looked cherubic, a characteristic common with Williams-syndrome children, whose faces were often described as pixie-like. Dani walked to him and placed the back of her hand on his forehead. It felt cool. She was torn. She wanted to get started with Robert Wilson. The search began with him—the recitation of facts from the man initially charged with defending his client. Did he believe George was innocent? Did he think George was crazy? What had his trial strategy been? The foundation for her attempt to save George’s life, if HIPP decided to take his case, would be contained in Wilson’s files. But she knew Jonah needed her now. He’d never been good at entertaining himself; the desire for social interaction was too strong. Now that his fever had broken, he’d become restless. A familiar feeling washed over Dani—that she was balancing on a seesaw, ten feet in the air, and the slightest movement in the wrong direction would send her tumbling to the unforgiving concrete below.
Reluctantly, Dani turned away from the telephone. “Okay, Jonah, I’ll play a game with you, but just for an hour. Then I’ve got work to do.” Jonah’s face lighted up and Dani pushed aside the knowledge that she was going to play Monopoly while a man awaited his destiny on death row.
After persuading Jonah to entertain himself with computer games, Dani finally returned to George’s case. She picked up the phone in the home office, which had become a tapestry of all the threads that made up their lives. One wall contained the ceiling-to-floor built-in mahogany bookcases they’d promised themselves they’d have once they owned a house. On the opposite wall was another built-in, this one housing a Murphy bed in the center, for rare overnight guests, with large open shelves on either side. The wall opposite the two windows enclosed a twenty-seven-inch television, modest by the standards of the day, along with various knickknacks they’d collected over the years and held on to as memories of their younger days. There was the large conch shell they had found the week they vacationed at the beach in Montauk, when Jonah was a year and a half and just learning to walk. They were so happy when he finally took those awkward baby steps, the kind where he looked like a drunken sailor ready to topple over at any moment. Dani had laughed when he plopped onto the warm sand next to the shell and held it tight to his little body. “Your first shell, Jonah. You can take it home with you.”
When she put the shell next to her ear, she could still hear the waves of the ocean crashing against the sand and see the smile on Jonah’s face as he carried his prize back to the motel. On another shelf were framed photographs of Jonah at various stages of his life. During the years when Dani had stayed home with him, she dabbled in photography, teaching herself the intricacies of apertures and shutter speed, ambient light and artificial light. She set up a darkroom in the basement and experimented with black-and-white film. Jonah was her subject, her muse, and stored in the recesses of her closet were boxes upon boxes of his image.
Once, Dani had fantasized a family of five children. She was an only child and envied her friends with many brothers and sisters. Their homes were always filled with noise and clutter, unlike the serenity of her own home, but it was a pandemonium that seemed infused with joy. From an early age, she knew she wanted a career but somehow thought she could combine that with a large family. That changed after Jonah was diagnosed with Williams syndrome. She knew the physical and emotional toll that would go into raising her son. Having more children would inevitably shortchange Jonah, or shortchange his sibling, she thought at the time. She sometimes wondered whether she’d been right. Looking at Jonah, she rejoiced at his development and knew that the commitment she and