Free Death's Witness by Paul Batista

both edges of the podium. She said into her microphone, “But I’m not going to rule on your question or the objection now, Mr. Sorrentino. And I’m not going to have discussions like this in the presence of the jury.
    If any of you hardworking ladies and gentlemen would like to 53
    write a brief on this subject tonight, have it delivered by eight tomorrow morning to my law clerk. It’s not my business how you spend your nights.”
    Then she swiveled in her high-backed chair and smiled benignly at the jurors. “I told these ladies and gentlemen of the jury that the day was almost over, and here we are sixty-four questions later. We’ll reconvene at ten-thirty tomorrow morning.”
    7.
    Julie had taken Stan Wasserman’s invitation and started working again five weeks after Tom’s burial. She began with only two or three hours a day, trying to adjust Kim and herself to what would have to become longer absences. During her pregnancy, she and Tom had tacitly expected she’d return to work full-time at some point after Kim’s birth. At thirty-six, she was, after all, a career woman. Journalism was her career.
    But they soon developed another tacit understanding after Kim was born. They both fell in love with the new, unexpected depth of their life together. They agreed Julie would stay at home indefinitely, only filling in occasional half-days (the most tenuous of links, making the newsroom like the recurrent dream of a house where she no longer lived), even if that meant that NBC
    might ultimately just let her go entirely. In Julie’s mind, the business world’s glass ceiling was the smile on her child’s face. For both Julie and Tom, Kim was more important than either his work or hers. Almost every day there was an unexpected deepening of the texture which the child’s new presence in their lives brought them.
    In any event, Julie’s feelings about the work she did had always been complex and ambivalent. She started in journalism after she graduated from Wellesley, working first for a moderate-sized newspaper in dreary Manchester, New Hampshire, and then moving to New York a few years later to work for AP. Fluent, well-read, D E AT H ’ S W I T N E S S
    interested in a variety of subjects (but not arts and leisure, cooking, or wine), she had become extremely proficient in weaving together disparate dispatches from multiple sources. She produced seamless copy. Writing in that way never brought her a byline, a name recognition she no longer really desired. By the time she married Tom, she had already joined the newswriting staff at NBC where her job was to prepare words that were ultimately broadcast by the onscreen announcers. The only recognition she received—and it was the only recognition she wanted—was that her name appeared every Friday night at 6:59 on the television screen, rolling quickly 55
    in bright graphics with the fifty-five other names of writers, staffers, and photographers who worked for the station. It was the weekly bouquet to the unseen staff from the egomaniacs on the screen.
    She fell back easily into the ability to turn out short copy that was never altered when it was printed into the black box—called
    “the hole”—from which it was read aloud by the anchors. They were able to give the millions of viewers the impression that they spoke flawlessly, without prompting, the words Julie wrote. Suc-cinct, no embellishment, simple. But, within hours of her return to the high-tech newsroom, with its modern odor of new plastic computers, she felt the encroachment of the old problems that had concerned her before Kim’s birth: the sense that she was not a doer but instead only an anonymous writer; that news organizations and the people who worked in them had an exaggerated sense of their own importance; and that her ability to splice diverse pieces of information into news stories that could be read in twenty seconds or less was not an important talent and not in any acceptable sense a