Stevens: “How many times did you spank her there?”

  Micah: “Five.”

  Stevens: “Why five?”

  Micah: “Because Mom told me to.”

  Stevens: “And after that?”

  Micah: “I went inside and did homework.”

  * * *

  —

  The oldest of the Harvey children, Ezekiel, had joined the army on his eighteenth birthday, nine months before the trial began. He’d received a writ summoning him to testify, and been granted leave, and now here he was, wearing pressed blue jeans, a short-sleeved plaid shirt, white socks, and boat shoes. Ezekiel strode down the courtroom’s center aisle with stiff poise and took his seat in the stand like a man of the world, and I recognized him as the anguished boy sitting between his grandparents on the day his parents were arraigned. Before long, he was asked if he’d ever seen his parents argue, to which he replied, “Naturally. Though they were very good about keeping their arguments behind closed doors.”

  Ezekiel swiveled in his chair. He touched his buzz cut. His eyes glistened. His face turned pink. “One could say that their arguments became more frequent with time,” he said, “and that these arguments focused on acts of disobedience and on disciplinary measures that were potentially needed. One could say that the balance of authority, the framework of authority, broke down gradually after Abigail was adopted. I cannot say to what degree. I cannot say exactly how, but that is the impression that sticks in my mind—that something shifted.”

  Stevens: “What shifted?”

  Ezekiel: “The balance of power.”

  Stevens: “In terms of your father being the overall boss of the family, you’re indicating that that appeared to change, is that correct?”

  Ezekiel: “Yes.”

  Stevens: “You’re saying your mother became the boss of the family?”

  Ezekiel: “No.”

  Stevens: “Can you clarify for me? What are you saying, then?”

  Ezekiel: “I’m saying that a shift occurred, and that as the difficulties with Abigail became more severe, my mother became a more powerful figure in the decision making about discipline.”

  Stevens: “More powerful than your father?”

  Ezekiel: “Yes.”

  Stevens: “Your father lost his decision-making power?”

  Ezekiel: “No. But he became less powerful.”

  Stevens: “And your mother more powerful?”

  Ezekiel: “Yes. More powerful. Not that she wasn’t powerful already. She was always powerful. She’d always been powerful. But after Abigail came, even more so. She just seemed to gain a lot more power, and my father, he kind of shriveled.”

  * * *

  —

  Forty minutes later, Ezekiel could barely speak through his hysterics. His stiff, formal diction had disintegrated, and he inhaled in gasps. Lincoln Stevens had led him to a kind of brink, where he reeled. He sobbed or held his face in his palms, but a strained insistence was working in him, too, and at intervals it shored him up enough that he could add to his narrative. He said, between convulsions, that on the night Abigail died he’d done exactly what his mother asked: he’d whipped Abigail a dozen times across the calves with the plumbing line. She’d cried, and he’d ordered her to come inside, just as his mother had told him to do. When Abigail refused, he’d whipped her another dozen times, but on the rear, as his mother specified. Again he ordered Abigail to come inside, again she refused, so he gave up, went inside, and, still holding the plumbing line, watched Abigail through a window.

  She took ten or twenty steps, he told the court, and began throwing herself down. “And it wasn’t just like a falling down, where you collapse on the spot. It was a lunging forward, like sliding on a water slide. She would throw herself down on her hands and knees, and get back up. She would walk a few feet or so and do it again. Sometimes she would get up on her knees and crawl, like one crawl or two crawls forward, and then get up. But most of the time she would throw herself down and get right back up. She did that on the gravel, on the slab that went along the back of our house, on the walkway, and on the back patio. She went on throwing herself down, and she hit her forehead, hard, on the concrete. And then my mother came to the window and watched, too, and then she said to me, ‘This has gotten dangerous. Abigail needs to come in immediately,’ and she went out on the patio, and I went, too, and she said, ‘Abigail, apologize and come inside.’ And Abigail just looked at her, and so my mother reached down and put her arms under Abigail’s armpits and tried to lift her, and then Abigail went limp, completely limp, and my mother still tried to lift her, but she couldn’t with Abigail being limp, and I remember my mother grabbed the back of Abigail’s shirt, but that didn’t work, either. So then she said, ‘We’ll go back in the house and get Micah,’ and we did that, and she told us, me and Micah, to go out there and lift Abigail by the armpits, one on each side, but first, me, I was to go out there and take off Abigail’s shoes and socks, because her knees were all scraped up and bloody, and because her clothes were wet from the rain, and water had dripped down and made blood drip all over her shoes, and so I was supposed to take off her shoes before she could come in. But first, my mother told me, I had to put on latex gloves. I had to do that. So I did that, and I went out there and knelt by Abigail and took off her shoes and socks, and she didn’t fight about it or do anything, she just stood there. And I felt kind of funny then, like it was a nightmare, kneeling with her shoes like that, and getting her socks off until her feet were bare, and I knew something was wrong. But, finally, I got her socks and shoes off, and my mother yelled out the window to me to go around the side of the house and put them in the garbage can. So I did that, and then, when I came back around, Micah was there, waiting for me, and we went over there to where Abigail was, and she was down on the patio behind the picnic table now, on the ground, on her back, where there wasn’t a lot of light, but I could see that she’d pulled her pants and underwear down below her knees, and she was looking up at me, and I could see her body, and Micah saw it, too, and then he turned around and bolted. And I yelled to my mother that Abigail was naked on the patio from the waist down, and she said, ‘All right, that’s it, I’ve had enough! If she wants to stay outside, she can stay outside! You come inside!’ And I did—but first I looked at Abigail. It was raining and dark, and things were confused, so I just let my mother kind of fade into the background, and I looked at Abigail where I shouldn’t have looked. And I said to Abigail, ‘Abigail, come in. Come inside now. Come inside. Forget about everything and come inside. Please, come inside, you have to come inside.’ And I was staring at her…at her…at where I shouldn’t have been staring. And what I wanted to do, I wanted to kneel down there and pick her up in my arms, just take her in my arms, but I didn’t do that, and maybe five seconds passed with me looking at her private parts, and my mother yelled, ‘Come in now! If she wants to be outside, she can be outside!’ So I went in. And my mother was by the kitchen window, looking up at the ceiling, whispering, ‘I love Abigail because God made her, I love Abigail because God made her,’ and when she saw me she stopped and said to me, ‘Did you see her private parts?’ And I said yes. And my mother said that it was wrong of me to have looked, and that it was supposed to happen for the first time on my wedding night, and then she gave me a lecture, or a sermon, maybe a three- or four-minute sermon, and meanwhile Abigail was still out there on the ground by the picnic table, naked from the waist down.”

  * * *

  —

  Ezekiel’s testimony ended the day’s proceedings. On my way out, I tapped my father on his shoulder and said that I’d wait for him on the third floor of the courthouse, where it was quiet, and would be sitting there on one of its hallway benches, ready, when he was, to drive home. Then I left and climbed the stairs to where the building felt hushed in an institutional way—a wide marble hall, dusted, mopped and polished, doors along it with frosted privacy windows underneath fluorescent lights that washed over portraits of retired judges—and sat down. It was after four-thirty. No one was around. The offices of the auditor and the county clerk had closed. The processes of county administration were on hold until tomorrow. The heat had been moving up all day, but three silent fans had pushed it around and were still at work steadily and evenly. I didn’t know what to think, and felt bereft, and in the face of that did what I was prone to do at moments like this—that is, I called Alison. I called and told her, first, that I loved her, and then I told her what Ezekiel had said—that he’d wanted to kneel and take Abeba in his arms, that he’d known, in some place, that something was wrong, that he’d had to put on latex gloves and drop Abeba’s shoes in a trash can, and that he’d looked at her the way he’d looked at her, as a boy his age in nightmarish circumstances, as a son who’d followed his mother’s orders to go outside into the dark and rain and whip this girl, his adopted sister, first on her calves a dozen times, and then on her backside a dozen more, all of it under the guiding principle that in doing so he was assisting his parents’ efforts to prevent her from going to hell. To which Alison said, “Are you okay?”

  After I hung up, I went on sitting. A deputy came along with a pistol, handcuffs, and a baton on his belt, and said I had about fifteen minutes before the courthouse closed for the day. He went down the stairs, and my father came up with his briefcase in one hand and his cereal bag in the other. He was wearing what he always wore when it came to any professional matter—a polyester suit, a clip-on tie, and suspenders that always seemed loose. He sat next to me, sighed, and dropped his head, and for at least a full minute, neither of us spoke. We said nothing because it was possible for us to do that. We knew what our mutual silence meant—knew when the time was right for a joint understatement so full it came to zero. We sat there sharing the unspoken observation that everything about this case was sad, and that without much effort you could make the leap from the facts of this case to a very sad portrait of the human race. Which is not to say that my father and I were pessimists in that moment, or even realists, just that we were dumbfounded and appalled, and felt that the more we knew the less we understood; I knew he was thinking all of that while we both said nothing.

  “I’m no psychiatrist,” my father finally said. “I really don’t know the first thing about psychiatry. But I’ll tell you what I think about Delvin and Betsy Harvey. Now that we’ve heard from four of their children, the others being too young to testify. I think Delvin wanted to play the ocarina but that he was also a sadist. I think that, when Abeba refused to go along with the program in his house, he decided to pretend to himself that he was just following Betsy’s lead. I think he was ashamed of the fact that he enjoyed meting out punishment to children. Then there’s Betsy. She knows perfectly well that on the night Abeba died a part of her wanted that to happen. She knew that then and she knows it now. She thought that, if Abeba were to die, that would be bad, but only for a while. Time would go by, and then things would return to how they were before, with everything perfect and under her control. Now, Betsy would never admit this out loud. Not to me, her lawyer, and not to anybody. It’s a secret she carries. A private thing. And it’s a terrible thing to carry around. So terrible that, what a lot of people do, they talk themselves out of things like this—things like what Betsy felt on the night Abeba died. The fact that people do what they do, or think what they think, or say what they say—it can be so inconsistent with their view of themselves that they deny to themselves that it ever happened. They invent a story for themselves in which they didn’t think or feel or do or say anything wrong, and that story becomes reality for them, so real that they’ll defend it to the bitter end, even when the facts in the real world say otherwise. They play this trick on themselves because, if they don’t, they’ll have to accept that they’re not the good person they thought they were. Or, in Betsy’s case, not a perfect person. If they don’t go back to the moment of their bad behavior and erase it forever and pretend it didn’t happen, then they’ll have to accept that they are what they did. They’ll have to accept that they’re flawed and human. Which you would think wouldn’t be that hard for someone of the Christian faith.

  “Think about this,” my father said. “You remember that recording played in court? Betsy is talking to a deputy at the hospital a few hours after Abeba died, and she tells him she thought Abeba was trying to kill herself. That it was similar, in her mind, to a hunger strike. In other words, Betsy understood the danger. It was clear to her that Abeba might die. Yet, despite that, she went right on demanding that Abeba apologize before she could come inside and get warm. Which tells me something about Betsy’s state of mind. She knows Abeba could die out there but isn’t doing all she can to prevent it. Not at that juncture. But then it gets a little later, and her conscience starts to gnaw at her, so she sends her sons out to bring Abeba in. That should have been the end of it. Her conscience should have won at that point. But, unfortunately, it didn’t win, because when her son reported to her that Abeba had removed her pants, Betsy’s conscience lost the upper hand. She told her son to leave Abeba out there, half naked on the ground, when minutes before, she’d said to him that the situation was dangerous and that Abeba needed to be brought in immediately. For me, the linchpin moment in this case is the moment when Betsy tells her son to come inside without bringing Abeba in with him.”

  He paused, shook his head, and clenched his teeth. “So what is that?” he asked. “It’s not Murder One, because there’s no premeditation. Betsy didn’t plan Abeba’s death. Instead, she took advantage of circumstances—that’s what the evidence seems to be telling us. Is it Murder Two? In Murder Two, there doesn’t have to be premeditation, but there does have to be intent. Did Betsy intend for Abeba to die? You might be able to make that case—you might be able to make the case that when she told her son to come in and leave Abeba out there, she fully intended for Abeba to die. Maybe. But Stevens didn’t try for that. He tried instead for homicide by abuse. He’s trying to say there’s a causal connection—that Abeba died because she’d been abused. And, the truth is, I think his case is made. For two reasons. One, the coroner pointed out that Abeba, on the night of her death, was abnormally thin. Food had been withheld, and she was underweight for her age. Two, the physiologist who testified about hypothermia pointed out that the undernourished are more susceptible to hypothermia than the well fed. They don’t have the body mass to fight it off. You put those things together, one and two, and you have the ingredients for homicide by abuse. That’s what Stevens is going to point out when he makes his final speech to the jury, and I don’t think there’s anything to be done about it. I think that, if justice takes its course, Betsy and Delvin Harvey will be found guilty, and you know what? That’s as it should be.”

  He seemed distraught, though. He shook his head, and then he put his elbows on his knees and dropped his chin and said, “Let me rest for a minute. Just for one minute.”

  I figured he needed space. Another person—Alison, for instance—might have opted for more proximity, for putting a hand over his shoulder or against his back, and I wouldn’t blame them, and in retrospect wish I’d done something in that vein, because you never know, but, anyway, I thought just then that all he needed was a little room, so I gave it to him by walking away ten yards and leaning over the broad, yawning stairwell with my phone in my hand so as to check the time, and then I lowered my head, too, like my father, and looked at the floor, and let a full minute pass.

  When I returned to the bench, my father was poised in stillness. His briefcase and bag of bran flakes were on his lap. His head was up. His eyes were open. He looked meditative on first assessment, and then he looked dazed, and then he looked as if paralyzed by hypnosis. I thought to wave a hand in front of his face to see if he might blink, but quelled that urge, possessed as I was, for the moment, by the belief, or hope, that he was merely preoccupied, or that a case of vertigo was starting. On it went, though—my father at a remove, or as if suppressed beneath paralysis, for a duration that was overlong and progressively more troubling, until, at last, I did in fact wave a hand in front of his face, in a tentative way, eliciting nothing—not even a blink—and waved more, until I was forced to accept that my father was in the throes of a disaster, of what sort I couldn’t yet say. At which point he jerked, slumped to his left, and would have hit the ground if I hadn’t put my hands out as a stay against his fall. Which is what I’m still doing.

  Post-Trial

  After two hours at Skagit Valley Hospital, while still in the emergency ward, my father swam up out of unconsciousness long enough to say, “Can you bring me my shoes?” A little later, my mother, Alison, Danielle, and Danielle’s husband, Leonard, arrived, but at that point, unfortunately, my father’s eyes were closed, and they remained closed thereafter, and he never spoke again or moved beyond some twitching of his eyelids, fingers, and toes, and the rising and falling of his chest, and an intermittent pulsing in his gullet. And so his final words were “Can you bring me my shoes?,” to which I’d answered, “Dad,” before he sank again.

  In the wee hours of the night—because, as slowly as things move in a hospital, they never stop—my father was transferred to an intensive-care unit, and there, confronted with the possibility of a mechanical ventilator, my mother produced from her handbag a folded copy of my father’s Directive to Physicians, in which he’d declared, “being of sound mind,” that he was willfully and voluntarily making known his desire that his life not be artificially prolonged and that he be permitted to die naturally. After my mother presented this document, my father was again transferred, this time to a room whose door opened onto the intersection of two corridors. It was a double room. Behind its bisecting curtain, someone else was dying. The window was on her side. Members of her family had to pass the foot of my father’s bed in the course of their vigil. We got to know them a little from milling in the corridor together, and in a way that seemed inevitable. They were the Vargas family. Mrs. Vargas, who had been on dialysis for years, was dying from renal failure, and her two sons and their wives and children came and went while her daughter stayed entrenched, indomitably so, with a quiet insistence. There was something both delicate and intimate about our family interactions. We and the Vargases understood one another in a way not possible under other circumstances. We touched on small things amid the larger ones. It was as though we were traveling together on an oceangoing ship operated by medical personnel. As though we were leaning against its railings, side by side, while passing over depths. We were companionably miserable, though we also spoke, for example, about the contents of the hospital’s vending machines. Then Mrs. Vargas died, and her corpse was wheeled from the room. It went past us slowly, pushed with stately respect. Mrs. Vargas’s daughter quickly picked up the vestiges of her mother’s habitation on the windowed side of the curtain, stuffed them into bags, and said, before exiting for good, that she wished us well and would pray for us. Minutes later, Danielle pulled back the mid-room curtain, and the room became larger and brighter both. The next evening, after all three of Danielle and Leonard’s children had arrived—one from her Peace Corps post in Sierra Leone, and the others from their universities in Montana and Ohio—my father’s breathing slowed, grew faint, then halted, and with astonishing immediacy he became, like Mrs. Vargas, a corpse to be wheeled toward a morgue.