The Good Sister (26 page)

“Bearing that in mind”—Jackson waited a beat—“tell the jury now, did your mother try to drown Olivia?”

The courtroom was perfectly silent except for the sounds of wind and rain.

“No. I only called 911 to find out what would happen.”

T
he next day David Cabot opened his defense.

Speaking to the jury, he said, “I chose to postpone my opening statement until now because I wanted you to have the opportunity
to focus all your attention on what Mr. Jackson and his witnesses had to say. Mr. Jackson wants you to believe that Simone
Duran is a cold-blooded murderer and planned to hurt her children.” He shook his head as if this idea was impossible to grasp.
“When I rest the case for the defense in a few days, you will know how wrongheaded that notion is. You will know that Simone
Duran is a loving mother who would never intentionally harm her children.”

He stood behind Simone and rested his hands on her shoulders.

“When it’s time for you to decide your verdict, you will know all about a condition called learned helplessness. More importantly,
you’ll know about postpartum depression, a mental condition that afflicts
millions
of women
around the world. And you’ll understand that postpartum
psychosis
takes a mother’s natural love for her children and turns it back on itself. It turns a loving mother into a loving killer.”

He let the jury ponder his words.
A loving killer
.

Tomorrow’s headline.

“Don’t misunderstand me. I think anyone, when they hear that a woman is accused of trying to hurt her children, will feel
disgust. Revulsion. It’s a horrifying crime that Mrs. Duran has been accused of, the most unnatural crime there is….” Two
or three jurors sat forward, waiting for him to complete his thought. “That’s why you have to be
insane
to do it.

“So far you’ve seen and heard the prosecutor’s image of Simone Duran. Now I’m asking you to clear any premature judgments
you might have formed and start
again
with open minds. In the next couple of days you’re going to get to know the
real
Simone Duran. I’m going to call her to the stand and she’ll describe the incident in the garage in her own words. One of
the things she’s going to tell you is that her baby, Olivia, was suffering from infantile acid reflux at the time.”

Cabot nodded to his associate at the defense table, who pushed the button of a small recording machine. All at once the courtroom
filled with the sound of an infant’s piercing cries.

Prosecutor Jackson leaped to his feet, and Judge MacArthur’s gavel slammed down; but Cabot went right on
talking to the jury, stepping closer to the jury box and raising his voice to be heard over the recorded screams. “More than
one witness will tell you that Simone Duran’s baby cried like this almost all the time, day and night.”

“Your Honor, this is a mockery! What’s he going to tell us? She tried to kill her children because the baby wouldn’t stop
crying?”

Cabot’s associate shut off the recording.

Roxanne thought she could hear the judge grinding his teeth. He scowled at Cabot. “You get one chance in my courtroom. No
more showboating, or you’ll regret it.”

Cabot dipped his head apologetically, but he didn’t seem overawed.

“With due respect, Your Honor, the jurors can’t understand my client’s frame of mind unless they hear what she heard every
day for months and months. It’s the defense’s intention to repeat this recording at various times throughout the case.”

“Not without my permission you won’t! I’ll entertain a written motion, Counselor, supporting your use of a recording in this
way. Have it on my desk by five this afternoon and not a minute later.”

Cabot’s associate gathered the recorder and her briefcase and hurried out of the courtroom. Roxanne knew that the motion was
already written and ready to be delivered to the judge’s clerk.

MacArthur’s eyes disappeared beneath his lowered
brows. “The defense is warned. I am not in a patient frame of mind.”

Cabot turned back to the jury. “I apologize for that, ladies and gentleman. That’s a terrible sound, I know, and I’m sorry
it’s necessary for you to hear it. But it’s essential you understand that the screams of a baby in pain were a constant in
Simone Duran’s life.”

Cabot paused to glance at a paper on his desk. Roxanne felt the jury’s curiosity quicken. Several shuffled in their chairs,
rearranging themselves to listen more intently. An excited hum of anticipation spiked the crowd in the gallery. To some extent
Jackson’s prosecution had been predictable in its scope, Merell being the only unexpected witness. Cabot’s defense promised
not only surprises but drama and some fireworks.

“Now, it may surprise you to hear that I’m not going to contradict all the prosecution’s evidence. The defense doesn’t dispute
that Simone Duran did something crazy.”

Jackson jumped to his feet again. “I object to the use of the word
crazy
, Your Honor.”

David sighed and dropped his shoulders, looking slightly abused.

“Stay in your seat, Mr. Jackson,” the judge said. “I don’t know how they do it up in San Jose, but down here lawyers don’t
interrupt opening statements. Screaming babies are an exception, of course.” He looked like he was ready to step down from
the bench and take on Jackson, hand to hand.

“But, Judge,” Jackson said, “the defense is mischaracterizing the prosecution’s case. No one ever mentioned the word
crazy
.”

Jackson was whining, and several of the jurors looked impatient. It was not yet noon but in the closed and stuffy room the
day already seemed long, and they were obviously fed up with objections, legitimate or not.

“I know you’re tired of sitting in those chairs day after day and it’s got to be hard to concentrate on expert testimony sometimes.
It can be pretty dry.” Cabot smiled like everyone’s best friend, and Roxanne noted that several on the jury smiled back at
him. “Let me tell you a story.”

“This court does not look kindly upon fiction, Mr. Cabot. Make sure it’s relevant.”

“I will, Your Honor, if you’ll just allow me a little latitude here.”

“Proceed.”

“I was an undergraduate at a school in Ohio. Miami University. Named after the Native American tribe, not the city. I had
to take a music appreciation course. It was what we called a ‘gut course’ and I think even my little daughter could pass it.
But I was a football player, and football was all I really cared about in those days. To make matters worse, this class met
at seven-thirty in the morning and when the prof played Beethoven and Haydn and all the rest of them, I couldn’t stay awake,
much less distinguish one longhair from another. But I was lucky, I had a girlfriend who was much smarter than me.”

“Get on with it, Mr. Cabot.”

“Well, long story short, this girlfriend told me what to listen for, and after that, the music made sense to my ear. Knowing
how to listen gave me focus so I wasn’t just hearing random notes, and thanks to her, I did okay in that class. Now, ladies
and gentlemen, for the next couple of days I want you to focus your listening in the same way. The testimony you’re going
to hear will make more sense to you if you listen for the answer to a question. This question is the key to this trial and
your verdict. We know that Simone Duran tried to hurt her daughters. I’m not going to argue about that. But the important
question is
why. Why did Simone Duran try to hurt her daughters?
”

He walked to the defense table, but he didn’t sit down. Standing behind Simone, enunciating carefully, he said, “
Why
did she do it?”

The following day the defense began calling to the stand the promised experts and authorities, including Dr. Omar, Olivia’s
pediatrician, who testified to the unusual severity of the baby’s acid reflux and the fact that there was, essentially, nothing
to do but hold her and walk her and love her until she outgrew the condition and stopped screaming. Under cross-examination
the psychiatric experts never wavered from their conviction that Simone suffered from postpartum psychosis at the time of
the attempted murders, and that it had rendered her totally unable to distinguish right from wrong.

The defense’s final expert was Dr. Barbara Balch, a dignified, large-boned woman with bright blue eyes and a neat cap of white
hair. She assumed the witness stand with poised assurance, placed her handbag on the floor beside her chair, smoothed her
skirt, and looked up, ready to begin. She told the jury that she had been an obstetrician initially but became a psychiatrist
specializing in postpartum syndromes when she realized that, following the births of their eagerly anticipated infants, many
of her patients who should have been happy instead fell into a deep despondency.

“I discovered, Mr. Cabot, that many, many women begin motherhood feeling as though they’ve been cheated. Pregnancy itself
is an immense physical challenge, but there’s always the promise that at the end of nine months there’ll be a sweet, adorable
baby who will make it all worthwhile. The truth that’s rarely spoken is that a newborn is generally neither sweet nor adorable
except when sleeping, but then a newborn wakes up every two hours, hungry and yelling. Even an orderly household is turned
upside down. And for what? A seven-pound tyrant who cries at all hours and keeps its parents from getting more than an hour
or two of sleep at a time. And even in the most egalitarian home, it is the mother who bears the brunt of this tyranny. Hormonally,
she’s still hooked to this baby. It cries and her hormones go into alarm mode.”

The woman who owned a copy shop seemed ruefully
amused by Dr. Balch’s testimony. Roxanne remembered from
voir dire
that she had four children, now grown.

Dr. Balch said, “The recorded screams you played for the jury were what Simone heard every day and night starting almost as
soon as the baby Olivia was brought home. And to make things more difficult she became pregnant again when Olivia was less
than six months old. Much, much too soon.”

“Why did this make the situation more difficult?” Cabot asked.

“You and I hate the sound of a child in pain. It’s the normal reaction but it’s a mental and emotional reaction. For Simone
it was also physical because she and baby Olivia were still chemically bound to each other.”

Cabot asked her to explain what she meant.

“A pregnant woman goes through system-wide hormonal changes, we’ve talked about that. What most people don’t realize or think
about is that all the major organs—heart, kidney, liver, the whole internal life-support system—have to shift position in
a woman’s body to make room for the growing fetus. Pregnancy alters a woman’s body forever and in ways that can be extremely
upsetting, and while it is entirely possible to conceive just a few months after giving birth, it’s not particularly healthy.
In primitive societies where this is routine, women are either dead or physically aged by the time they’re forty.”

“So it was physical changes that caused the postpartum psychosis?”

“Not at first. At first she would have been merely depressed. And while PPD—postpartum depression—is so common that we might
even think of it as normal, I would call Simone’s situation—physical and emotional—a kind of perfect storm. From the beginning
of her first pregnancy she was headed for disaster.”

“And what do you mean by disaster, Dr. Balch?”

“Psychosis.”

Dr. Balch told the jury that because societies do not encourage a new mother to be honest about her negative feelings, PPP
was almost always a hidden condition until a crisis occurred. “Despite what most people believe, PPP is actually fairly common.
It has been estimated that one or two in every thousand cases of postpartum depression will develop into full-blown psychosis.”

“How many babies are born every year in this country, Dr. Balch?”

“Roughly four million.”

Cabot looked at the jury. “That’s a lot of thousands. And for every thousand, there will be one or two children with a psychotic
mother?”

Jackson stood up. “Objection, Your Honor. These numbers are very general and Dr. Balch has offered no scientific support for
them. Without substantiation—”

“Dr. Balch is an expert in this field. And her statistics represent real mothers and children. When you think of the number
of babies born every year in this country alone—”

“We take your point, Mr. Cabot,” MacArthur said. “I’ll allow the testimony, but from now on, stay away from the math.”

“Doctor, considering all the mothers and babies in the world, why don’t we hear more about women killing their children?”

“My colleagues and I
do
hear. But these are deeply disturbing stories and most people would prefer not to know about them. Every day,” Dr. Balch
said, “infants are born in back alleys and abandoned buildings to girls who have hidden their pregnancies from their families
and friends. They leave their babies in Dumpsters or in the bus or outside a church and go back to school. Every day babies
are smothered and tossed away. For every one we hear about in the news, there are hundreds that go unfound, unnoticed.”

“That sounds like murder, not psychosis.”

“It is murder caused by a profound state of psychosis.”

Outside the courthouse walls, the rain and wind seemed to have stopped for a moment as if to acknowledge the thousands of
babies born unwanted.

“Earlier you said that Simone Duran’s condition was a kind of perfect storm. What did you mean by that?”

“Postpartum depression can be progressive,” Dr. Balch said. “In the case of Mrs. Duran, she has suffered from severe depression
with sporadic mania since adolescence. Following the birth of her first daughter, Merell, her symptoms became more intense.”

“How was that different from her usual mood disorder?”

“During our conversations she revealed to me that she has never believed Merell was her child, but stopped talking about it
because she saw it made her husband think there was something wrong with her mind. She was deeply depressed for the better
part of a year and with every subsequent pregnancy—including the many miscarriages—her depression worsened. But, clinically
speaking, the seeds of her psychosis were sown in her childhood.”