Unintended Consequences (10 page)

He looked different from what Dani had expected. She’d imagined George would resemble his wife: slightly built, with brown mousy hair and deeply recessed eyes. Instead, he was short but burly, with a muscled chest and forearms. His hair, a sandy-brown color, had probably been blond as a child. Unlike his wife with her receding posture, George seemed like a bull waiting to be released into the arena.

Dani didn’t need to proceed slowly with him. She could see he wanted to tell his story. As soon as introductions were finished, Dani began with the question that had been unanswered for nineteen years. “George, tell me what happened to Angelina.”

He tapped his foot on the floor. He didn’t speak for a long time, and when he did he asked Dani, “Do you have any children?”

“I do. I have a son.”

“Is there anything you wouldn’t do for him?”

“I wouldn’t kill for him,” she answered quickly.

George nodded his head slowly. “That’s fair.” He leaned forward on the table. All motion had stopped. “There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for Angelina.” The words were spit off his tongue like an accusation seeking its target.

Dani asked again. “What happened to your daughter?”

George sat up straight, his shoulders pulled back. “We did what we had to do. To help our little girl. So she’d have a chance.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I expect most people wouldn’t.”

For a moment, Dani feared that they’d leave the prison as confused as they had been on leaving Sallie. If that happened, her decision would be clear: HIPP would decline to take his case. “George, please, I want to understand. I want to try and help you. The only way I can is if you tell me about Angelina.”

George slumped in his chair, the belligerence sucked out of him like the air from a punctured tire. When he started to speak, in a voice soft but with firm resolve, he said, “We wanted a baby so bad. We tried and tried for so long.”

“And then Angelina was born?”

“Yes, ma’am. But not before we’d been married a real long time. Sallie and me, we were just out of high school when we married. It wasn’t like we had to, like some of our friends. We were just madly in love with each other. College wasn’t something we’d planned on, so it just seemed to make sense to tie the knot. I mean, why wait? I’d been working on cars since I could hold a wrench in my hands. Every garage in town offered me a job. Sallie never was much of a student. She couldn’t even type straight. But we hadn’t figured on her working much anyway. Just a few years till we could save up some money for a down payment on a house, and then we’d try for a baby. Well, a few years turned into almost fifteen before Sallie got pregnant. We’d just about given up trying at that point.” George stopped speaking and stared into space.

“You must have been thrilled when Angelina was born,” Dani said, prompting him to continue.

“It was nothing short of a miracle—that’s what we thought. I broke down and sobbed when I saw her the first time. I held that precious little girl in my arms and just wouldn’t let go. I tell you, I’d never seen anything so beautiful.” George stared at the table. Dani could see his hands, still handcuffed behind his back, squeezed tightly together. “It wasn’t a miracle, we learned soon enough. Miracles are supposed to last, aren’t they?”

Dani shrugged.

“Sallie, she’d been waitressing before the baby came. When we brought Angelina home, she up and quit that job, swore she’d never take another while she had our baby to care for.”

Sallie had told Dani she’d worked after Angelina was born. Something had changed her mind. “Why did Sallie go back to work?”

“We had bills that needed to be paid. Doctor bills. Hospital bills. See, our precious Angelina got sick. Unless you have a sick child, you can’t know how it feels. To watch your baby all weak and crying and you helpless to stop it.”

Although life with Jonah had made Dani all too aware of that feeling of despair, she didn’t want to interrupt George. Melanie took notes so nothing would distract Dani as she listened to him.

George looked up at Dani and she saw his eyes burn with a searing intensity. “Before it happened, before she got sick, we were never so happy. Every day I’d come home from work and Sallie would say to me, ‘Look what Angelina did today,’ and I’d see my baby roll herself over, and later sit up all by herself, and Sallie would have a great big grin on her face. When Angelina took her first step and didn’t fall down, well, it was as if she’d walked on the moon or something, it seemed so incredible.”

“And then she got sick?”

George nodded. “The doctor said she had to have chemotherapy. I knew how bad that was. My uncle, he had cancer in his lungs, from smoking too many cigarettes, I suppose. He got awfully sick from the chemotherapy and then he up and died anyway. But Angelina’s doctor, he was hopeful.”

“George, let’s step back. Why did Angelina need chemotherapy?”

“She got leukemia.”

Dani glanced at Melanie and saw she’d stopped taking notes. She suspected George’s revelation had shaken Melanie as much as her. “I’m sorry, George. I’m truly sorry.” Dani waited a moment. “When was she diagnosed with it?”

“Just after her second birthday. We had a little party for her, just us celebrating, but we had balloons all over the house and a big chocolate cake that Sallie baked. Couldn’t have been more than a week later Sallie called me at work. And she’s crying on the phone that Angelina is sick, she has a fever, a really high fever, like one hundred and four degrees. Now, our little girl, she’d been sick a lot, always getting colds and sniffles, but we didn’t have health insurance. I’m just a mechanic, you know. So every time the baby got sick, we’d treat her at home, and she’d always get better. But she never had a fever that high before, and it scared Sallie, so we took her to the emergency room. The doctor, he said Angelina had an ear infection, and he gave Sallie medicine for the baby. But she didn’t get better when she should have.”

“Do you remember the doctor’s name?”

George remained quiet for a moment. “I can’t seem to bring it to mind. Everything else is so clear from that time, everything he said and all. I can picture what he looked like, but his name—it’s just gone.”

“Did you bring Angelina back to the doctor?”

“Yes, ma’am. About four or five days later I took a few hours off from work and we took Angelina back to that same doctor, and now he looked her all over, you know, more careful, and he saw these red spots on her skin. And he asked us a bunch a questions. ‘Does she get tired easy? How’s her appetite? Do you ever see her limp?’ Things like that. And now we’re getting scared, but the doctor said we shouldn’t worry. He said he had to do some tests. Tests cost money, but it didn’t matter, because nothing was more important to us than Angelina. Nothing. So the doctor took some blood from her arm and she kept screaming while Sallie held her, but we were thinking all this time, ‘Please, God, don’t let anything be wrong with our baby.’ We said that over and over and just tried to close our ears to her screaming.

“Well, it didn’t matter how much we prayed, because when we went back to the doctor, he said to us, ‘Your daughter has leukemia.’” George stopped, took a deep breath, and dropped his head to his chest. They all waited silently for him to continue. When he looked up, his eyes were liquid pools of anguish. “Do you know what it feels like to be told your baby might die? Your precious baby that you waited fifteen years for and then comes to you as a gift from God?”

Dani did know what that felt like. When Jonah’s doctor had told them that their child had a heart defect, that their five-year-old son needed surgery, that surgery always had risks, her own heart had stopped. It felt as if the walls of the room closed in on her, trapping her in a tiny space with no light or air. No parent should ever be faced with a child’s life-threatening illness. No parent should ever be faced with the death of a child. It turned the natural order of the universe on its head.

She didn’t tell George how deeply she empathized with his plight. Instead, she murmured, “I’m so sorry.”

“We had no money and no insurance, so we signed some agreement to pay for the treatment over time. They put that stuff in her body—it was supposed to cure her—but I tell you, it was near impossible to watch what it did to our baby. She threw up day and night. Her poor little body could barely take it. By the second month, her beautiful blond hair fell out, and her mouth was full of sores. She cried all the time and there wasn’t anything we could do for her.”

“How long was she on the chemo?”

“Six months. And when it was all done, the doctor said she was fine. In remission, he called it. Her hair came back along with her smile, and everything seemed good again. But there were bills we owed. Big bills for her treatment, you know. I told Sallie she had to go back to work. She didn’t want to. Leaving our baby with someone else—well, it just broke our hearts. There wasn’t any choice, though. Sallie tried awfully hard to find a job with health insurance, but the only work she’d ever done was waitressing. She ended up taking a night job at the diner. That way she took care of Angelina during the day and I stayed home with her at night. We were so happy that next year.” George stopped and smiled. “You see, God had given us back our little girl.”

Once again Dani asked the question still unanswered. “I understand. Angelina was very sick and you both were very frightened. She got better, though. So what happened to her?”

George shook his head. “We just thought she was better. But the leukemia—it came back. Along about the time she was nearing her fourth birthday, Angelina started falling down a lot. We thought it was just growing pains—you know, they grow so fast, they’re falling all over themselves. We weren’t worried when we took her back to the doctor. That was stupid of us. It was like we got too cocky and had to get our comeuppance. The leukemia—it’d gone to her brain. The doctor said she had to start with that chemotherapy again. Radiation too. And a bone-marrow transplant—that’s what she really needed. But we had to find some that matched. Sallie and I, we were both tested, but ours wasn’t right for Angelina. We were still paying back the doctor for the first round, and now there’d be hospital bills too. The doctor said we shouldn’t worry about him but that we had to come up with money for the hospital. He said they’d need proof we could pay before they’d treat her.”

“Did you get the money for her treatment?”

“No, ma’am. We tried everything. We even went to the Medicaid office, but they said we earned too much money. Too much money! Can you believe that? We didn’t have one extra cent in our pockets.” George shook his head. “I asked you before if there was anything you wouldn’t do for your child. Well, there’s nothing I wouldn’t of done for Angelina. She would die if she didn’t get treatment. The doctor didn’t come out and say that, but it was clear in his voice.”

“Did Angelina die?” Dani asked softly.

“I don’t know,” George answered, his voice flat.

They were all puzzled, and for a moment Dani was at a loss for words. Finally, she once again asked the question she had begun with. “What happened to Angelina?”

“You have to understand. We were desperate. No hospital would treat her. I went to the library and read up on her illness. I read how bad it was when the cancer went to the brain. I read that the Mayo Clinic was the best, that their doctors were saving kids like mine. But they would want money too. So we drove, all of us, we drove to Minnesota. And we took all her medical records and all her tests and we blacked out all the names—Angelina’s, the doctor, the hospital, even the laboratory—so no one could bring her back to us. We put it all in a pouch and tied it around her waist. And we put a letter in the pouch, not with our names or anything, not even Angelina’s name, and we said in the letter that we were leaving our daughter with them, that they needed to fix her, make her better. We knew that if she didn’t have parents, it wouldn’t matter that she didn’t have insurance. If she was all alone, they’d have to help her. Medicaid would pay for her because she’d have no income. We thought, they’ll put her in a foster home, and then maybe if she got better, someone would adopt her. And we left her there, in the hospital, and told her we loved her, would always love her, but she had to wait there until someone came to help her. We told her no matter what, don’t tell anyone your name. And then we walked away. We never saw her again.”

Dani’s head spun. How could a parent leave a child, only four years old, alone in a hospital? How agonizing it had to have been for George and Sallie, faced with a Hobson’s choice of watching their child certainly die without treatment or abandoning their beloved daughter.

Could the story be true? Or was this a last-ditch effort to avoid a lethal injection? Watching the anguish on George’s face made Dani believe his nightmare was real. But after seventeen years in prison, it was the first time he’d offered this explanation for his daughter’s disappearance. “Why haven’t you told anyone this before?” she asked. “You were on trial for murdering Angelina. You knew you were facing the death penalty. How could you not tell your lawyer? Or explain to the jury what you told us today?”

“Tell them what? That we left our daughter—sick and alone—and just walked away? My Sallie sure had a hard time accepting why we had to do that. I didn’t expect any folks not in our shoes to understand. Especially if our baby had died there. And if she was getting treatment and doing okay? Well, then I was afraid if I told them where she was, they’d stop treating her. I couldn’t take a chance on that. No matter what it meant for me. When I thought it was safe, when my telling couldn’t harm her, I tried telling my lawyer. If she lived, she’d have been 18 then. They couldn’t return her to us if she still needed treatment. My lawyer, he sure didn’t believe me, but I guess I can’t blame him.”

“Couldn’t you have pushed him, gotten him to pay attention?” Dani said.

George shook his head. “It wouldn’t have mattered.”

Dani realized he was right. By then, Wilson’s mind had been closed to the possibility of his client’s innocence.

“After the jury came back and they sent me here, I’d fall asleep every night thinking that my Angelina didn’t die, that she was taken in by a nice family that loved her and had means to keep her healthy. How could I take her away from that? I told you I’d do anything for my child. And I meant it. I was willing to die so my little angel had a chance to live.”