—

IN THE LAST few weeks of Brit’s pregnancy, our neighbors—a pair of beaners from Guatemala who’d probably jumped a barbed-wire fence to get into this country—got a new puppy. It was one of those little fluffy things that looks like an evil cotton ball with teeth, and never stopped barking. Frida, that was the dog’s name, and it used to come into our yard and shit on our lawn, and when it wasn’t doing that, it was yipping. Every time Brit lay down to take a nap, that stupid mop head would start up again and wake her. She’d get pissed, and then I’d get pissed, and I’d stomp over and bang on the door and tell them if they didn’t muzzle their goddamned animal I would get rid of it.

Then one day, I came home from a drywall job to find the beaner digging a hole under an azalea bush, and his hysterical wife holding a shoe box in her arms. When I came into the house, Brit was sitting on the couch. “Guess their dog died,” she announced.

“So I see.”

She reached behind her and held up a bottle of antifreeze. “Tastes sweet, you know. Daddy told me to keep it away from our puppy, when I was little.”

I stared at her for a second. “You poisoned Frida?”

Brit met my gaze with so much nerve that for a second, I could only see Francis in her. “I couldn’t get any sleep,” she said. “It was either our baby, or that fucking dog.”

—

KENNEDY MCQUARRIE PROBABLY drinks pumpkin spice lattes. I bet she voted for Obama and donates after watching those commercials about sad dogs and believes the world would be a bright shiny place if we all could just get along.

She’s exactly the kind of bleeding-heart liberal I can’t stand.

I keep this front and center in my head as she walks toward me. “You heard Dr. Atkins testify that your son had a condition called MCADD, didn’t you?”

“Well,” I say. “I heard her say that he screened positive for it.”

The prosecutor’s coached me on that one.

“Do you understand, Mr. Bauer, that a baby with undiagnosed MCADD whose blood sugar drops might go into respiratory failure?”

“Yes.”

“And do you understand that a baby who goes into respiratory failure might go into cardiac failure?”

“Yes.”

“And that same baby might die?”

I nod. “Yeah.”

“Do you also understand, Mr. Bauer, that in none of those events would it make a difference whether or not a nurse attempted every medical intervention possible to save that baby’s life? That the baby could still possibly die?”

“Possibly,” I repeat.

“Do you realize that in that scenario, if your son was that baby, Mother Teresa herself could not have saved him?”

I fold my arms. “But that wasn’t my son.”

She cocks her head. “You heard the medical testimony from Dr. Atkins, which was corroborated by Dr. Binnie. Your baby did indeed have MCADD, Mr. Bauer, isn’t that true?”

“I don’t know.” I jerk my head toward Ruth Jefferson. “She killed him before he could get tested for sure.”

“You really, truly believe that?” she asks. “In the face of scientific evidence?”

“I do,” I grit out.

Her eyes spark. “You do,” she repeats, “or you have to?”

“What?”

“You believe in God, Mr. Bauer, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“And you believe things happen for a reason?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Bauer, do you use the Twitter handle @WhiteMight?”

“Yeah,” I say, but I have no idea what that has to do with her questions. They feel like a blast of wind that comes from a different direction every time.

She enters a computer printout into evidence. “Is this a post from your Twitter account, made last July?” I nod. “Can you read it out loud?”

“?‘We all get what’s coming to us,’?” I say.

“Then I guess your son got what was coming to him, right?”

My hands clench on the railing of the witness stand. “What did you say?” My voice is low, hot.

“I said your son must have gotten what he deserved,” she repeats.

“My son was innocent. An Aryan warrior.”

She ignores my response. “Come to think of it, I guess you got what you deserved, too…”

“Shut your mouth.”

“That’s why you’re accusing an innocent woman of a death that was completely and utterly arbitrary, isn’t it? Because if you believe instead what’s really true—namely that your son carried a genetic disease—”

I stand up, fuming. “Shut up—”