“Look,” he said to Ryan. “About the PTSD, we’d be satisfied with NGI. If you get Michalik a good doctor to evaluate his mental health, we won’t contest the doc’s opinion.” Not guilty by reason of insanity, otherwise known as NGI, seemed like a fair and proper resolution to Michalik’s case, given the catalog of evidence against him. Though Ziegler would want some greater sense of justice for cruelty to her cats, Joseph Michalik was the father of her unborn child, and Ryan hoped NGI would provide a satisfying settlement all around. For a moment we thought we heard a bugler playing “Taps” in the background, not for a soldier having died but for his resurrection.
An orange-and-black stray cat began living in our garage around the time Ryan arranged for Michalik’s psychiatric evaluation. I remembered Ryan—at ages eleven, twelve, thirteen—attending parties at my house. In self-imposed exile on our porch, he rubbed his swollen eyes and rasped, misery to which he subjected himself for six more years before I’d euthanize an ailing Fluffy. His allergies were so serious, sometimes an eye would swell shut and we’d be forced to try home remedies like Preparation H. Between dating and marriage, we broke up once, and I immediately adopted a cat, as Ryan was the only reason I wasn’t already raising one. When he and I reconciled fully within a couple of months, I reluctantly gave Mr. Bay to a neighbor—inadequate, even pathetic consolation for a late miscarriage she’d suffered.
The kids and I never named the stray in our garage because we lacked consensus, Irie, Leo, and Fern jostling over favorite candy names: Reese’s, Skittles, and Milky Way. Not to mention Ryan’s adamant opposition to the stray. “We’re not keeping that mangy varmint,” he’d mutter, as we ignored his wishes, feeding her cold cuts and milk, filling an old toaster box with hearty plaid and inviting her to roam the house. Irie had learned to whistle and would crouch on our driveway, fish-mouthed, until the cat slinked into view, an ethereal rebuke of Ryan’s good intentions to exonerate Michalik. A week later, however, much to our children’s disappointment but Ryan’s relief, we entrusted her to the Humane Society, where she was christened Tess and adopted immediately. The children felt sad, but I taught them as my parents taught me: cats, dogs, rabbits, and other pets were worthy of love and affection, but relinquishing a pet to a shelter or to euthanasia was just another practice test for “real pain.”
At times, Ryan was an irritable husband, and I was a mean wife. He’d overreact to spilled milk, and I’d call him a “baby,” an ironic and harsh epithet Irie once shared at circle time in pre-kindergarten, as in, “My mom says my dad is a big baby.” When exercise and diet management seemed impossible, Ryan procured a prescription for Valium; he was supposed to pop one if he felt an anxiety attack coming on as he rushed between courtrooms in the train-wrecked schedule of preliminary hearings. Even when he swallowed only half a dose, he’d wind up cashed on his office sofa, without even flipping the OPEN sign to CLOSED, his body paralyzed in the deep afternoon light. When I married Ryan, he was easy-go-peasy and patient with my volatile moods, but by now we had swapped roles. Weary of his bad temper, I could be hard on Ryan, but I was surprisingly blithe with the children in ways he couldn’t pretend to be. When something thudded, he’d wince and clench his fists, as if he himself suffered the PTSD of combat. Since I’d become pregnant with Irie, I’d passed my disquietude on to him.
Ryan was especially nervous about the Michalik case. Based on his litigation experience, jurors in small Midwestern cities respond not to evidence, as judges must, but rather to personally tailored versions of how the world ought to be. What then, he wondered, would this mean for Joseph Michalik, our Iraq War veteran, whose wartime experience was more complicated than anybody at home could fully imagine? Would it hit a nerve to suggest that punishing Joseph Michalik was like punishing our own zealous support of a foreign war?
If it were not for Cali Ziegler’s second phone call to Oshkosh police, Ryan would have added Joseph Michalik to his long list of sorry scofflaws. In the evenings, when our children slept, Joseph Michalik and uterine magic were what remained in our clouded minds. Ryan pasted his palm between my legs, Francis’s kicks strongest where my body opened, life tied perpetually to intimacy. Though Michalik would never feel his baby’s limbs inside Ziegler’s body, I imagined his boy marching like a soldier inside her womb.
Ryan had become increasingly suspicious of Ziegler. The evidence against Michalik appeared more like choreography than like discovery. Wasn’t it awfully suspicious that Ziegler managed to gather clues so quickly once that police officer arrived at her apartment? Ryan speculated that forty-eight hours between investigations was certainly sufficient time for Ziegler to have manipulated evidence and staged her apartment. Ziegler, not the Oshkosh Police Department, suggested rummaging through her garbage for additional proof; and Ziegler, not the officer, unearthed the sofa mesh and Michalik’s name tape, pulled from the bathtub drain like sleight of hand.
Ryan began to poke holes in Ziegler’s version of events, slowly and methodically, as if plugging brightly colored pegs into the dots on a Lite-Brite. If Ziegler found the name tape in the officer’s presence, this meant Ziegler had not bathed in forty-eight hours. And if Michalik’s name tape had been used to plug the drain, this meant one of two possibilities: Michalik had dressed in his uniform to kill Molly, and the five-pound kitten had yanked the name tape from his uniform with her tiny claws; or Michalik himself had sliced it from his clothes to plug the drain,
