Chapter 11: Stamford

The women held the ring for forty minutes.

Security came and stood in the doorway and didn't know what to do with nine women and a wheelchair.

Then the psychiatrist came, in his cardigan, with a phone to his ear.

He looked at us for a long time.

"Fourteen goes to Stamford," he said at last. "The court wants her. Twelve can wait for Monday."

The van left empty.

The girl cried in the middle of the ring, quietly, into the old woman's cardigan.

At one o'clock the day nurse put a clean gown on me and a blanket over my knees.

She buckled me into the back of a clinic car.

She didn't bother to brush my hair.

The family courthouse in Stamford was a brown brick box with a flag out front.

They wheeled me in through a side door and down a hallway that smelled of floor wax and old coffee.

People in suits stepped aside.

Some of them looked at me. Most of them looked away fast.

Courtroom 3 was smaller than I'd pictured. Wood paneling. A seal on the wall. Rows of benches, half full.

The nurse parked me in the aisle beside the front row, facing the bench.

On my right, at the counsel's table, sat my husband.

Navy suit. Pressed shirt. The thin steel watch I'd given him on our fifth anniversary.

He didn't look at me.

Beside him, in a camel coat with her hair in a sleek chestnut bob, sat Alicia.

She did look at me.

She looked me up and down, from my tangled hair to my gray socks.

Then she leaned to Stewart's ear and said something that made the corner of his mouth lift.

Behind them, at the end of the second row, sat a straight-backed gray-haired woman in a charcoal coat.

My grandmother's attorney didn't look at me either.

She was reading a folder in her lap.

"All rise."

The judge came in. A woman about sixty, reading glasses on a chain, a face.

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