The Writing on the Wall A Novel - By W. D. Wetherell Page 0,73
the moment she began writing.
I played a game with Cassie when she was little. On Friday nights, as a special treat, we always went out for dinner somewhere simple, a family restaurant where they had a salad bar and brownie sundaes. Dan would meet us there late because of having to square away whatever construction job he was working on before the weekend. Cassie crayoned horses and dogs on her placemat while we waited, and that was fun for a while, but if it got really late and she had already finished her quota of rolls and crackers, I was forced to improvise.
“Watch the people coming in,” I told her. “I bet you the cherry off your sundae that every one of them touches their face when they come through the door.”
Her eyes danced upwards in amazement. The “Cassie dance” we called that, we saw it so often.
“Every single one of them?”
I nodded. “When they get in as far as the cash register and see everyone looking up. Yep, you watch. They touch their nose or ears or glasses and sometimes their chin.”
And of course I won. This was a great revelation to Cassie, that adults could be so nervous in a fussy, impossible-to-control way. Every Friday after that she would stare over her menu at the people coming in, checking out everybody’s little tic, with a wise, knowing expression on her face a lot older than her years.
That’s what I was thinking about when they led her into the courtroom in June, our harmless little game. And what’s more, I knew she was remembering this, too, knowing I was sitting there watching. She must have been nervous, the temptation to touch her hair or nose must have been irresistible, but she wasn’t going to give into it, that simple human weakness. She paraded in, wearing her dress uniform with the flesh-toned stockings, the tightwaisted skirt—paraded in, marching at attention, and just when I thought she was going to at least nod to us or thinly smile she stopped and snapped off a salute toward the flag. Beside it, standing three abreast behind a high metal table, the members of the court martial saluted crisply back.
Not my girl, I remember thinking. It’s impossible to describe how savagely the thought came, and how, for the space of twenty seconds, it afforded me relief. But of course it was my girl, the uniform couldn’t hide that, nor the rigidly obedient way she stood.
Two of the judges were majors, one was a sergeant—all three were female. The MP who followed Cassie in was female, the prosecutor was female, so for a moment it resembled an elaborate sorority initiation during which Cassie had been ordered not to smile. The lieutenant they had assigned to explain things to us was a woman, too, and the defense counsel, Captain Sosa, was the only male in the room besides Dan.
It was a small room, with only three rows of seats. The one spectator was a young, nicely dressed woman who I immediately recognized, though without quite remembering her name. She wasn’t a reporter—she held no laptop or pad—but I had seen her face on television and if I hadn’t been so focused on Cassie I would have come up with her name a lot sooner than I did.
What else? Pear trees out the window, the leaves looking dry and shriveled, though it was only June. The air-conditioning blowing too strong, so even the majors shivered. A tornado warning on the wall telling us where to run if sirens went off. Dan reaching to find my hand, me tugging it back from him. The cricket chirp of the stenographer’s machine. A sign over the judges’ table, Fort Sill Oklahoma, in flowing cowboy script.
The whole atmosphere stayed calm, as if the tornado had come and gone and we the survivors must quietly go about our business. Like that—and like it had all been rigidly choreographed, and everyone, even Dan and me, were playing our assigned parts.
The reporters, cameramen, bloggers and journalists had already left town. Cassie wasn’t pretty enough, her crime wasn’t sufficiently brutal, to capture their interest. It had been the first series of trials, the general court martials held a week ago, that had created all the excitement—Cassie was small potatoes in comparison. She had not tied any of her prisoners to a leash or covered their heads in panties or pissed on the Koran or sodomized them with a broomstick or forced them to adopt “stress