The paparazzi were swarming the front entrance, snapping photos of her on the sidewalk outside of her apartment and calling out to her to look this way or over here, and she always fell for the summoning because of the fast-paced nature of the pandemonium itself. The building personnel surrounded Amara and held out their hands to block the paparazzi and reporters from getting too close to her as she slid into the luxury sedan to go down to Centre Street. Before her passenger door fully closed, a disembodied voice asked her about Hallow’s whereabouts and Amara coarsely told the driver to hurry so she wouldn’t be pictured in tears. She dabbed the sides of her eyes with her fingers and napkins; she didn’t know if Hallow would be coming to support her. If Hallow didn’t come, Amara understood. She didn’t believe that she deserved that kind of grace.
“Are you ready?” the driver asked.
Amara nodded.
A team of police officers assisted in getting Amara inside the courthouse where there were reporters hanging about with cups of coffee and donuts in hand. They hurriedly grabbed their recorders, pencils, and papers when they saw her walking through the entrance. Some ran up to her and unleashed a series of questions that were spoken too quickly for Amara to know where one inquiry ended and another began. The police officers guided her to a small, frigid room by herself, with nothing but a small paper cup of water on a long, wooden table. The clock on the corner of the wall ticked with each second, and the sounds of people shuffling past her room were incessant.
The district attorney kept his hand on the doorknob and half his body on the other side of the threshold. He took one look at Amara, who was hunched over and shaking in her seat, and sighed. “Danville. We’re ready for you now.” She nodded and got to her feet. The walk from that small, frigid room down the corridor and into the press conference room disrupted both time and distance. She knew these steps from memory and how easy it was to get from one end of the hall to the other. On this morning, however, everything stretched like a long rubber band that pulled further back, distorting all the decorative features until finally snapping back to the immediacy of the moment. Everyone in the Polaris Room quieted when Amara entered. She kept her head down until she reached the podium and found both Denise and Laila seated in the front row. Her mother squirmed in her seat to ensure that she could sit as tall as possible, with her neck extending and her nose tipped toward the ceiling. With her shoulders slightly raised, Denise was prepared to carry pride for the whole of her family. And Laila had reinvented herself. No one would have guessed the severity of her history because the lines in her face had vanished and her hair was trimmed and polished, although there resided a hint of sadness that pooled around the corners of her eyes and an unsure smile.
Amara didn’t pay attention to her boss’s opening remarks, the applause, or the silence before it was time for her to speak. She looked at her family, gripped the sides of the podium, and said, “I haven’t prepared that much of a speech for you all today because I honestly didn’t see a point. I apologize to the public for crafting an image that I was this young, single, childless person. Only the first two are true.”
There was sparse laughter in the audience.
“Twenty years ago, I made a decision to give up my child because I thought that being a mother was incompatible with what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to be a prosecutor, and I was inspired to be that because my beloved aunt was taken advantage of by a family who sold parts of themselves for profit. She believed in the power of the caul. I will not tell her story for her because she’s here with us this morning, but what I will say is that my anger fueled my ambition. I wanted to punish that family within the confines of the judicial system.”
There were reporters huddled around the entrance of the press conference room who began to part ways. Amara lifted her head to see what caused the commotion and spotted Hallow in the back of the room. Everyone turned around to get a good look at the disturbance and then did a double take at Amara. Hallow bowed her head as she made her way through the crowd, and once she got to the front, Laila grabbed her hand and said, “You sit right next to me, baby.”
With tears in her eyes, Amara continued her speech of self-abnegation, apologizing to her team and to the public and talking about her oversight in how her ambition outpaced strategy. Laila locked arms with Hallow and rubbed her hand to assure her that everything would be fine. She could feel the caul shielding Hallow’s skin and wiggled in her seat from the delight and irony of their stories.
Hallow inconspicuously passed Laila a small bit of wax paper, which Laila opened. There was a small piece of caul inside, and she teared up at the gift. She held it in both of her palms and remembered all of her children. Remembered the conversation with Landon in the pews of St. Philip’s. Remembered the birth. Remembered the fury. Remembered the screams. Remembered the blood. And when she finally returned to the present moment, she admitted to herself that she had nothing left and
