Page 53 of Courtroom Drama
“I like to collect things. I have lots of treasures I find, but I only keep the ones I can add more things to.”
“I used to collect key chains when I was your age,” the interviewer comments.
Emblem gives a congenial giggle.
“Do you usually show people your collections?”
“Mmmmmm...” Emblem scrunches her face and cocks her head in consideration. “Sometimes.”
“When your Grandma Kitsch was over the day of your dad’s funeral, did you show her some of your collections?”
Emblem’s face falls, seemingly at the mention of her father, and my heart cracks for her. “I showed her the nanny-cam bear. His name is Taylor Swift.”
“What a lovely name.”
“She’s a real person. A singer.”
“I know. I love her songs.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“What was the collection you kept in the back of Taylor Swift?”
“They were little bottles.” She holds her fingers up about an inch apart to indicate their size. “I thought they’d make good water bottles for my doll to carry in her purse. Her name is Judge Judy. She has high heels.” Emblem begins bouncing her penguin up and down against the table, seemingly losing interest in the interviewer and her line of questioning.
“That’s a very smart idea. Tell me, where did you find those little bottles?”
Emblem continues to bounce her penguin, adding a side-to-side motion, and her face grows serious as if she knows this is a point of contention. “In the garbage. In Mommy’s room.”
I note that she says “Mommy’s room” instead of “Mommy and Daddy’s,” and that crack in my heart widens to a split.
Damon’s knee presses gently into the side of mine. I look up at him, but he’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the defense table. I follow his gaze to find Margot staring straight ahead at her daughter on the screen, tears streaming down her cheeks so easily she doesn’t seem to notice them.
Seeing Margot crack is disturbing. On the show I’ve seen her yell, throw things, attack. But she never cries.
I have to look away so my own composure doesn’t fracture.
“I’m not supposed to take things out of the trash. Daddy used to get mad at me for it. They were under the garbage bag.”
“Underthe bag. Under the trash bag, you mean?”
“Yeah, but in the bin.”
Damon writes this last part down. So does Luis to my right, under his current tic-tac-toe game.
“How many bottles were in that collection of yours?”
“Three.”
“And did you find them all at once or one at a time?”
“All at once, I think.” She fiddles with the hem of the penguin’s red-and-black scarf.
“You think?”
“Yeah, I mean, I don’t know.”
I wonder how she remembers the bottles were under the trash bag, between it and the bin, but not how many there were. I try to think back to Kara at that specific age, the last kid I’ve spent any real amount of time with, but I come up short on pinning down the consistency (or lack thereof) of a five-year-old’s memory and, thus, ability to articulate details from it.
