“There, there,” she said. “It’s going to be OK. Just make a fist for me.” She spiked my arm with birdie powder, and I rose up, leaving the ER for brown-sugar skies. Being loaded onto another gurney, being wheeled away for a CT scan, and passing a three-millimeter stone from my kidney through my ureter and out the tiny pinprick hole of my urethra were the easy parts.
“It will be a little gritty and sore for the next couple of days,” the doctor told me. It was 4:00 AM by now, and I was on my second dose of pain meds. I was not allowed to drive due to the potency of my medication. We called on Gabby once again as chauffeur. That Sunday, neither Ryan nor I could drive anywhere, and we tried to imagine what life with five kids would be like if we were permanently as sidelined and powerless as we were then. In the evening, I read my discharge report and discovered my kidney stone was one of many calcified little eggs hiding inside my vital organs.
“Supposedly passing a kidney stone is like giving birth,” people said. “Is that true?”
“It’s worse. After birth, you have a baby to show for your trouble, and after this, all you have is a pinch of sand.”
Much as I inherited depression from my mom’s side of the family, my dad had long since suffered kidney stones. The most I could do to prevent them was to hydrate. My biggest fear was that passing more stones would make me wish for the productive pain of labor and the five babies I wanted to birth all over again. But by the end of June, I was so tired from the lice-broken-ankle-kidney-stone trifecta, I didn’t want another baby for the moment, and this was something new.
Sometimes, as a joke, I’d roll over in bed and whisper to Ryan, “How did we end up with all these kids?” We were exhausted. To make matters worse, Reginald Price had not paid Ryan a dime, offering up instead a pair of one-carat diamond earrings complete with a certificate of authenticity appraising them at $8,000 as collateral for his legal fees. All he’d need to do was sell or pawn them, but Ryan quickly found the markup on diamonds in retail is so exorbitant, he’d be lucky to get $1,000. He set aside innumerable hours that summer, driving as far north as Green Bay and as far south as Milwaukee to present the diamonds to jewelers. Nobody would pay much more than the cost of gasoline he spent showcasing them. Pawnshops wouldn’t take them either. It wasn’t that the diamonds weren’t worth $8,000 in the retail market, but Zales, and other jewelry stores, could purchase these rocks wholesale for a fraction of the retail amount.
From June until August, as Ryan, loyal to a fault, worked on Price’s case, we spent our scant savings paying off car loans and other debt, at our mortgage broker’s suggestion, in order to bring our credit up to a manageable score before securing our new mortgage. We invested every penny in paving the way to move, eager to sell our house. When Ryan finally sold Reggie Price’s earrings on eBay, he earned only $1,800, the single payment Price made, even though his case remained at the top of Ryan’s docket for nine full months.
The deal Ryan procured involved Price pleading to two lesser felonies, reckless driving causing great bodily harm and recklessly endangering safety. Attempted homicide charges would be dismissed. I’d never seen Ryan argue so tenaciously or file so many motions leading up to the plea deal. The assistant DA seemed almost intentionally vague on his definitions for reckless driving and endangering safety.
“Just tell me where you allege the crime took place,” Ryan said to the DA. “Was it recklessly endangering safety when he drove off the road? Was it saying, ‘We’re all going to die’ before jerking the wheel? Or was it simply driving a hundred miles per hour with passengers in the car?”
Ryan was confident that if he could pin the state down on when exactly Price crossed the line from speeding, which would result in nothing more than an expensive traffic ticket, to recklessly endangering safety, he could convince a jury that Krumenauer’s SUV ending up in a ditch was an accident.
“If Reggie Price was just speeding, and he also happened to be a white guy, with a professional job in the Oshkosh community instead of a criminal record, we’d probably call this an accident, right?” Further complicating the case was that Autumn Krumenauer was white. Whom would we more likely forgive: the driver or the passenger; the ex-boyfriend or the mother; the black man or the white woman?
Ryan felt the same mixed bag of emotions as always. Price was needy and emotionally manipulative. “You’re the only chance I got, Mr. Ulrich,” he’d say with pleading eyes, but unlike his associate Terrell Knight, Price had nobody surfacing to help pay his bills. Ryan imagined survey questions he’d ask potential jurors: “Raise your hand if you’ve driven over the speed limit before. Now raise your hand if you’ve been in a heated conversation while driving over the speed limit.” Only liars wouldn’t lift their arms high. They call jury selection voir dire, from Old French—literally, “to see, to say”—and derived from Latin for “to speak the truth.”
“It’s also called planting seeds,” Ryan said, when he explained his jury-selection strategy to me. “That’s my job when interviewing a jury—planting the
