The Simple Truth by David Baldacci
waiting half his life for this. And, in a way, Rider had abandoned him back then. For the rest of the day Rider lay on the couch in his office, in the dark, silently praying that he had done the right thing, and knowing, in his heart, that he had.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ramsey’s clerks have been pestering me about the comment you made the other day, Justice Knight, about the poor being entitled to certain preferences.” Sara looked over at the woman, sitting so calmly behind her desk.
A smile flickered across Knight’s face as she scanned some documents. “I’m sure they have.”
They both knew that Ramsey’s clerks were like a well-trained commando unit. They had feelers out everywhere, looking for anything of interest to the chief justice and his agendas. Almost nothing escaped their notice. Every word, exclamation, meeting or casual corridor conversation was duly noted, analyzed and catalogued away for future use.
“So you intended for that reaction to happen?”
“Sara, as much as I may not like it, there is a certain process at this place that one must struggle through. Some call it a game, I don’t choose to do so. But I can’t ignore its presence. I’m not so much concerned with the chief. The positions I’m thinking about taking on a number of cases Ramsey would never support. I know that and he knows that.”
“So you were floating a trial balloon to the other justices.”
“In part, yes. Oral argument is also an open, public forum.”
“So, to the public.” Sara thought quickly. “And the media?”
Knight put down the papers and clasped her hands together as she stared at the younger woman. “This Court is swayed more by public opinion than many would dare to confess. Some here would like to see the status quo always preserved. But the Court has to move forward.”
“And this ties into the cases you’ve been having me research about equalizing educational rights of the poor?”
“I have a compelling interest in that.” Elizabeth Knight had grown up in East Texas, the middle of nowhere, but her father had had money. Thus, her education had been first-rate, and she had often wondered how her life would have been if her father had been poor like so many of the people she had grown up with. All justices carried psychological baggage to the Court and Elizabeth Knight was no exception. “And that’s all I’m really going to say right now.”
“And Blankley?” Sara said, referring to the affirmative action case Ramsey had so thoroughly decimated.
“We haven’t voted on it yet, of course, Sara, so I can’t say one way or the other how it will turn out.” The voting conferences took place in complete secrecy, without even a stenographer or secretary in residence. However, for those who followed the Court with any consistency, and for the clerks who lived in the place every day, it wasn’t too difficult to predict how votes were lining up, although the justices had surprised people in the past. Justice Knight’s depressed look made it clear, however, which way the votes were aligned on the Blankley case.
And Sara could read the tea leaves as well as anyone. Michael Fiske was right. The only question was how sweeping the opinion would be.
“Too bad I won’t be around to see the results of my research come to fruition,” Sara said.
“You never know. You came back for a second term. Michael Fiske signed up with Tommy for a third. I’d love to have you back again.”
“Funny you should mention him. Michael was also asking about your remarks at oral argument. He thought Murphy might welcome anything you were trying to put together concerning preferences for the poor.”
Knight smiled. “Michael would know. He and Tommy are as close as clerk and justice can be.”
“Michael knows more about the Court than just about anyone. Actually, sometimes he can be a little scary.”
Knight eyed her keenly. “I thought you and Michael were close.”
“We are. I mean, we’re good friends.” Sara blushed as Knight continued to watch her.
“We won’t be getting any announcements from the two of you, will we?” Knight smiled warmly.
“What? No, no. We’re just friends.”
“I see. I’m sorry, Sara, it’s certainly none of my business.”
“It’s okay. We do spend a fair amount of time together. I’m sure some people assume that there’s more there than just friendship. I mean, Michael’s a very attractive man, obviously very smart. Great future.”
“Sara, don’t take this the wrong way, but you sound like you’re trying to convince yourself of something.”
Sara looked down. “I guess I do, don’t I?”
“Take it from someone who has two grown daughters. Don’t rush it. Let it take its natural course. You have plenty of time. End of motherly advice.”
Sara smiled. “Thanks.”
“Now, how is the bench memo coming on Chance v. U.S.?”
“I know Steven’s been working on it nonstop.”
“Steven Wright is not holding up well here.”
“Well, he’s trying really hard.”
“You have to help him, Sara. You’re the senior clerk. I should have had that memo two weeks ago. Ramsey has his ammo bag filled and the precedents are completely on his side. I need to be at least equal to that if I’m going to have a shot.”
“I’ll make it a top priority.”
“Good.”
Sara rose to leave. “And I think you’ll handle the chief justice just fine.”
The women exchanged smiles. Elizabeth Knight had become almost a second mother to Sara Evans, replacing the one she had lost as a young child.
As Sara walked out the door, Knight sat back in her chair. Where she was now was the culmination of a lifetime of work and sacrifice, luck and skill. She was married to a well-respected United States senator, a man she loved and who loved her. She was one of only three women who had ever donned the robes of a Supreme Court justice. She felt humble and empowered at the same time. The president who had nominated her was still in office. He had seen her as a reliable middle-of-the-road jurist. She had not been that active politically, so he could not exactly expect her to toe his party’s line, but he probably expected her to be judicially passive, letting the solution to the really important questions fall to the people’s elected representatives.
She had no deep-set philosophies like Ramsey or Murphy. They decided cases not so much on the facts of each one, but on the broad positions each case represented. Murphy would never vote to uphold or reverse any case in favor of capital punishment. Ramsey would wither and die before he would side with a defendant in a criminal rights case. Knight could not choose her sides in that manner. She took each case, each party, as they came. She agonized over the facts. While she thought about the broader impact of the court’s decisions, she also worried about the fairness to the actual parties. It often meant she was the swing vote on a lot of cases, and she didn’t really mind that. She was no wallflower, and she had come here to make a difference.
Only now was she seeing what a very great impact she could have. And the responsibility that came with such power was what humbled her. And frightened her. Made her stare at the ceiling wide awake as her husband slept soundly beside her. Still, she thought with a smile, there was no other place she would rather be; no other way she would rather be spending her life.
CHAPTER NINE
John Fiske walked into the building located in the West End of Richmond. The place was officially called a rest home, but, plain and simple, it was a place for the elderly to come to die. Fiske tried to ignore the moans and cries as he strode down the corridor. He saw the feeble bodies, heads dipping low, limbs useless, encased in the wheelchairs, stacked like shopping carts against the wall, waiting for a dance partner who was never going to show up.
It had taken all the resolve he and his father had in order to move John’s mother into this place. Michael Fiske had never faced up to the fact that their mother’s mind was gone, eaten away by Alzheimer’s. The good times were easy to enjoy.
He checked in at the desk. “How is she today?” he asked the assistant administrator. As a frequent visitor here, he knew all the staff.
“She’s had better ones, John, but your being here will perk her up,” the woman answered.
“Right,” Fiske muttered as he walked to the visitors’ room.
His mother awaited him there, dressed, as always, in her housecoat and slippers. Her eyes wandered aimlessly, her mouth moving, but no words coming out. When Fiske appeared at the doorway, she looked at him, a smile breaking across her face. He walked over and sat down across from her.
“How’s my Mikey?” Gladys Fiske asked, tenderly rubbing his face. “How’s Momma’s baby?”
Fiske took a deep breath. It was the same damn thing, for the last two years. In Gladys Fiske’s devastated mind he was Mike, he would always be his brother until the very end of his mother’s life. John Fiske had somehow completely vanished from her memory, as if he had never been born.
He gently touched her hands, doing his best to quiet the absolute frustration inside him. “I’m fine. Doing good. Pop’s good too.” He then added quietly, “Johnny’s doing good too, he asked about you. Always does.”
Her stare was blank. “Johnny?”
Fiske attempted this every time, and every time the response was the same. Why did she forget him and not his brother? There had to have been some deep-rooted facet in her that had allowed the Alzheimer’s to erase his identity from her life. Was his existence never that strong, never that important to her? And yet he had been the son who had always been there for his parents. He had helped them as a boy, and continued to be there for them as a man. Everything from giving them a large part of his income to getting up on the roof on a suffocating August day, in the middle of a hellish trial, to help his old man shingle their house, because he didn’t have the cash to pay someone to do it. And Mike, always the favorite, always the one to go his own way, his own selfish way, Fiske thought … Mike was always hailed as the great one, the one who would do the family proud. In reality, his parents had never been that extreme in their views of their sons; Fiske knew that. But his anger had skewed that truth, empowering the bad and subverting the good.
“Mikey?” she said anxiously. “How are the children?”
“They’re fine, they’re good, growing like weeds. They look just like you.” Having to pretend that he was his brother and had fathered children made Fiske want to collapse to the floor bawling.
She smiled and touched her hair.
He picked up on that. “Looks good. Pop says you’re prettier than ever.” Gladys Fiske had been an attractive woman for most of her life, and her appearance had been very important to her. The effects of the Alzheimer’s had, in her case, accelerated the aging process. She would have been terribly upset with how she looked now, Fiske knew. He hoped his mother still saw herself as twenty years old and the prettiest she would ever be.
He held out a package he had brought. She seized it with the glee of a child and tore off the wrapping. She touched the brush delicately and then ran it through her hair very carefully.
“It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
She said that about everything he brought her. Tissues, lipstick, a picture book. The most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Mike. Every time he came here, his brother scored brownie points. Fiske forced these thoughts away and spent a very pleasant hour with his mother. He loved her so much. He would rip from her the disease that had destroyed her brain if he could. Since he couldn’t, he would do anything to spend time with her. Even under another’s name.
* * *
Fiske left the rest home and drove to his father’s house. As he turned onto the familiar street, he looked around the disintegrating boundaries of his first eighteen years of life: dilapidated homes with peeling paint and crumbling porches, sagging wire fences, and dirt front yards running down to narrow, cracked streets where twin streams of ancient, battered Fords and Chevys docked. Fifty years ago, the neighborhood had been a typical starter community for the post–World War II masses filled with the unshakable confidence that life would only get better. For those who hadn’t crossed that bridge of prosperity, the most visible change in their worn-out lives was a wooden wheelchair ramp grafted over the front stoop. As he looked at one of the ramps, Fiske knew he would choose a wheelchair over the rot of his mother’s brain.
He pulled into the driveway of his father’s well-kept home. The more the neighborhood fell apart around him, the harder his old man worked to keep it at bay. Perhaps to keep the past alive a little longer. Maybe hoping his wife would come home twenty years old again with a fresh, healthy mind. The old Buick was in the driveway, its body rusted a little, but the engine in mint condition thanks to its owner’s skills as a master mechanic. Fiske saw his father in the garage, dressed in his usual outfit of white T-shirt and blue work pants, hunkered over some piece of equipment. Retired now, Ed Fiske was at his happiest with his fingers full of grease, the guts of some complex machinery strewn out helter-skelter in front of him.
“Cold beer’s in the fridge,” Ed said without looking up.
Fiske opened the old refrigerator his father kept in the garage and pulled out a Miller. He sat down on a rickety old kitchen chair and watched his father work, just as he had done as a young boy. He had always been fascinated with the skill of his father’s hands, the way the man confidently knew where every piece went.
“Saw Mom today.”
With a practiced roll of his tongue, Ed pushed the cigarette he was puffing on to the right side of his mouth. His muscular forearms flexed and then relaxed as he ratcheted a bolt tight.
“I’m going tomorrow. Thought I’d get all dressed up, bring some flowers, a little boxed dinner Ida is going to make up. Make it real special. Just me and her.”
Ida German was the next-door neighbor. She had lived in the neighborhood longer than anyone else. She had been good company to his father ever since his wife had gone away.
“She’ll love that.” Fiske sipped on his beer and smiled at the picture the two would make together.
Ed finished up what he was doing and took a minute to clean up, using gasoline and a rag to get the grease off his hands. He grabbed a beer and sat down on an old toolbox across from his son.
“Talked to Mike yesterday,” he said.
“Is that right?” Fiske said with no interest.
“He’s doing good up there at the Court. You know they asked him back for another year. He must be good.”
“I’m sure he’s the best they’ve ever had.” Fiske stood up and went over to the open doorway. He took a deep breath, letting his lungs fill with the scent of freshly cut grass. Every Saturday growing up, he and his brother would mow the lawn, do the chores and then the family would pile into the mammoth station wagon for the weekly trip to the A&P grocery store. If they had been really good, done all their chores correctly, not clipped the grass too short, they’d get a soda from the machine next to the paper box outside the A&P. To the boys it was liquid gold. Fiske and his brother would think all week about getting that cold soda. They had been so close growing up. Carried the morning Times Dispatch together, played sports together, though John was three years older than his brother. Mike was so gifted physically that he had played varsity sports as a freshman. The Fiske brothers. Everybody knew them, respected them. Those were happy times. Those times were over. He turned back and looked at his father.
Ed shook his head. “Did you know Mike turned down a teaching job at one of them big law schools, Harvard or something, to stay at the Court? He got a slew of offers from big law firms. He showed me ’em. Lord, they were talking money I can’t even believe.” The pride in his voice was obvious.
“More power to him,” Fiske said dryly.
Ed suddenly slapped his thigh. “What’s wrong
“I’ve got nothing against him.”
“Then why the hell don’t you two get along like you used to? I’ve talked to Mike. It’s not on account of him.”
“Look, Pop, he’s got his life and I’ve got mine. I don’t remember you being all touchy-feely with Uncle Ben.”
“My brother was a bum and a drunk. Your brother ain’t either of those.”
“Being a drunk and a bum aren’t the only vices in the world.”
“Damn, I just don’t understand you, son.”
“Join the crowd.”
Ed put out his cigarette on the concrete floor, stood and leaned against one of the garage’s exposed wall studs. “Jealousy ain’t right between brothers. You should feel good about what he’s done with his life.”
“Oh, so you think I’m jealous?”
“Are you?”
Fiske took another sip of beer and looked over at the belly-button-high wire fence surrounding his father’s small backyard. It was currently painted dark green. Over the years it had seen many different colors. John and Mike had painted it each summer, the color being whatever the trucking firm Ed worked for had left over from its annual office repainting. Fiske looked over at the apple tree that spread over one corner of the yard. He motioned with his beer. “You’ve got caterpillars. Get me a flare.”