The Hearing
Authors: James Mills
Books by James Mills
NONFICTION
The Underground Empire
On the Edge
The Prosecutor
FICTION
The Hearing
Haywire
The Power
The Truth About Peter Harley
The Seventh Power
One Just Man
Report to the Commissioner
The Panic in Needle Park
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 by James Mills
All rights reserved.
Warner Books, Inc.,
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017
Visit our website at
www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First eBook Edition: November 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-57114-2
To Jill
Contents
G
us Parham felt as if he’d been pushed off a cliff. The air pressure changed, and along with it his orientation, perspective,
priorities. Everything hurtled by, robbing him of breath and reason. He’d be dead in an instant.
“So what that means, Judge Parham, is she’s alive. You want to meet her or not? If you want to meet her, there are certain
conditions.”
“Where? Where is she?”
“Certain conditions, Judge Parham.”
“May I see it again?”
“Certainly.”
So they watched the video again. How beautiful she
was. Eleven years old, short black hair, slender, smiling, going somewhere and happy about it. He had never seen anyone walk
like that. Head, shoulders, hips, legs—everything was in that walk, as if she were headed for a brick wall and knew, just
knew,
she could go right through it.
Gus said, “What do you want?”
“Withdraw.”
“But … How will …” Mumbling, babbling. He was still falling.
“I can’t hear you, Judge.”
“I’m sorry. I just—”
The man punched the eject button and removed the cassette.
Gus said, “I’ll have to talk to my wife.”
“Show her this?” He held out the cassette.
Gus took it.
The man opened his attaché case and handed Gus a manila envelope. “This too.”
Gus took the envelope.
The man said, “You’ve got three days. Close of business Monday, we have to know.”
“And if I say no?”
“Alternatives. You won’t like them.”
An hour later Gus sat with his wife in the kitchen of their rented house in Vienna, Virginia. It was smaller than the kitchen
in their home in Montgomery. The walls were yellow and the table was round and small. They’d moved here three weeks ago when
he’d been nominated for a seat on the Supreme Court. The confirmation hearing was scheduled to begin in a week. And now this.
What would this do to
Michelle? Their marriage was perfect, they had never stopped loving each other.
She looked at him, worried. She could see it in his face.
“Michelle …”
“Gus, what is it? You look like someone died.”
Alternatives.
Television, newspapers, exposure, humiliation.
He put the cassette on the table, reached across for both her hands, and said, “Michelle, I love you. I will always love you.
No matter what.”
“What is it, Gus?” Her eyes fixed on the video. “What is that?”
Thirteen years ago, before they were married, she had said she was ending the pregnancy. He had believed her, for all those
years. She had let him believe the lie—to save his feelings, out of love for him and their marriage, but a lie nevertheless.
He understood, he loved her for taking all the pain on herself, but how would she react? He wasn’t sure.
He stood. “Let’s go in the living room.”
They sat on the sofa, still holding hands. Her face was dark, sensing trouble.
“I’m afraid, Michelle, that when I say what I have to say there may not be a chance to tell you again how much I really love
you.”
She was staring into his eyes, scared to death.
“Tell me, Gus.”
He said, “Honey, I know you didn’t end the pregnancy.”
Her fingers tightened around his hand, but her eyes did not leave his face. “Who … How do you know?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. There’s something else.”
Her eyes went to the video in his other hand. “What is it?”
He got up, put the video in the VCR, and came back and sat next to her with the remote in his hand.
She hugged herself and shivered.
Gus said, “Are you all right?”
“I don’t feel well. I’m freezing.”
“Do you want me to get you something?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head. “Let me see it.”
He pressed the button.
She tilted her head forward, looking up, tentatively. The girl came on the screen, walking. Michelle didn’t move. Her face
didn’t change. Short black hair, slender, smiling, determined. When the screen went blank and it was over, she said, “She’s
very pretty.”
Her face was frozen. Then she smiled, a thin, false smile he had never before seen on her face. She let out a small mirthless
laugh. She laughed again. She put her head on her knees and laughed and laughed and laughed. There was more pain in the laughter
than there would have been in sobs. Gus touched her arm. She jumped from the sofa and ran back into the kitchen. She cleared
the dishes from the table, dumped them noisily into the sink, turned on the water, and began scrubbing blindly.
He didn’t know what to say, what to do.
Her hands full of soap and plates, she put her head back, took a deep breath, and released an almost inaudible shriek of pain.
Gus grabbed her and she collapsed against him, gasping for breath, sobbing. He carried her to the bedroom, laid her on the
bed.
“Michelle, it’s all right.”
She turned onto her stomach, buried her face in the blanket, and cried like a child. Gus dropped to his knees beside the bed,
laid his arm across her shoulders, squeezed her, and pressed his cheek to her hair.
Ten minutes later her breathing steadied. Thinking she had fallen asleep, Gus rose silently and went to a chair by the bed.
Her face still buried in the blanket, she said, “Where is she?”
“I don’t know where she is.”
She turned to face him.
“Who knows where she is?”
“The attorney who gave me the video.”
“Who’s he?”
“Someone who doesn’t want me confirmed, doesn’t want me on the Court. He works with the Freedom Federation.”
“So if you don’t withdraw they won’t tell us where she is.”
“They’ll do worse than that, Michelle.”
G
us’s grandfather had made all the money, and his father took care of it. Gus thought that not having to make any himself had
robbed his father of the joy of struggle and conquest, of his manhood. All he had to do was fight off the vultures, and spend,
spend, spend—more money than anyone in the family could ever need for anything they could ever want. They spent wildly but
quietly, observed only by others doing the same. Don’t let the common people see beyond the iron gates, tinted car windows,
protective expressions of grace and breeding.
Then Gus went to Harvard. Wow! Deep end of the pool, never learned to swim. Who
were
these people?
Where had they
come
from? Across the hall, a Polish boy with a twisted, half-paralyzed face who picked his nose. Upstairs, an eighty-five-pound,
pop-eyed anorexic girl who played the trombone, knew the Koran by heart, and beat everyone at poker. He was outside the gates,
on the other side of the tinted glass, and the sights were shattering. Where had these people
been
all his life? He loved them.
The one he loved most was called Michelle Bart. He met her his senior year. She was a freshman, eighteen, just arrived, beautiful
inside and out. What would his mother say of a girl named Michelle? “Is that—is that
French,
dear?” And what could anyone make of Bart? Even more exotic, she was from Alabama. She was dark and rare. Sultry didn’t begin
to describe it. Her words came out rich, warm, and damp. Just listening to her made him sweat. If she breathed on something,
it began to grow. She breathed on him.
He graduated, moved over to the law school. His destiny appeared to be money management. His father couldn’t go on forever,
and Gus had no brothers or sisters to look after the family’s wealth. He and Michelle kept dating, fell in love. It was months
before she went to bed with him. They were on a skiing weekend in Stowe. After dinner, at the door of her hotel room, the
resistance crumbled. Nine weeks later, when she told him she was pregnant, he was stunned.
“How could you be pregnant?”
“You
know
how I got pregnant, Gus.”
“I mean, you take the pill.”
“Not till we got back from Stowe.”
“Why not?”
“I’d never taken it. I wasn’t having sex.”
“You were—”
“A virgin.”
Could you make love with a virgin and not know it?
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t want you to change your mind. I’d decided.”
“Well, when you decided, you should have decided to take the pill.”
“Don’t be angry.”
“I’m not angry, I’m just—what are you going to do?”
“We can get married and have the baby, or we can not get married and I’ll have the baby by myself.”
“Or you can—”
“I won’t do that, Gus.”
That night he went for a walk. He had solid ideas of how he was going to get married and under what circumstances. He didn’t
want the kind of marriage his parents had, the kind of family it had produced. As long as he could remember, when the bickering
and battles, the accusations and counteraccusations became unbearable (“All you ever had was money!” “All you ever
wanted
was money!”), he comforted himself with the knowledge that this was only half his life, the half he’d been born into, had
no control over. The next half—his own marriage, his own family—was his to pick. He’d pick his wife carefully, take all the
time it took, and he’d be
sure.
He wouldn’t spend the second half of his life the way he’d spent the first.
And now. Pressure. Coercion. Blackmail. Michelle wasn’t blackmailing him, but something was. Circumstances. Violation of a
lifetime promise. The wrong decision, and he’d spend the rest of his life regretting it.
The next day he said, “Michelle, I’ve made a decision, I—”
“Don’t say it, Gus. I’ve changed my mind.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you want to—if you don’t want me to have the baby, I won’t.”
Release.
They went to a doctor and a counselor. Michelle made it clear she wanted to have the baby, but she wouldn’t force him. She
didn’t want a forced marriage, even if he loved her. In the end, she agreed to terminate the pregnancy. “But not around here.
I couldn’t do it here. I’m going home.”
The next day, when he called her, her roommate said she’d packed up and left. She hadn’t even said goodbye. She didn’t want
his help.
M
ichelle saw her coming, Auntie Dana. She wasn’t Michelle’s aunt, she wasn’t anyone’s aunt, everyone just called her Auntie
Dana. She was in her eighties, bald, wore a white wig, never married, a lipsticked mouth pouring forth honied venom and sweet
slander. Wedding receptions like this were her natural habitat. Half of Montgomery was here. She’d have heard of the pregnancy,
come laden with stones to cast.
“Michelle, you’re looking perfectly radiant. How are you, my dear?”
“Pregnant, thanks. How are you?”
“I beg your pardon?”
As if she didn’t know.
“I said, ‘Pregnant, thanks. How are you?’“
“My goodness, I didn’t even know you’d got married.”
“I didn’t get married. I just got pregnant.”
“Is your husband here?”
“I said I’m not married, Auntie Dana. I’m just pregnant.”
“But you can’t be pregnant without a husband.”
“I wasn’t aware of that.”
“Does your mother know?”
Michelle saw her mother bearing down, glaring at Michelle, guessing the worst.