The Father’s Testimony

The witness stand was smaller than he'd imagined. A wooden box, really, with a microphone on a gooseneck stand that someone had aimed too high, so it pointed at the ceiling. Daniel adjusted it before he sat, a reflexive act of tidiness, and then regretted it because he saw Lillian's attorney, a man named Forsythe, write something on his legal pad.

He tried not to watch the room. He looked at his hands instead.

Julian had coached him on this. "You will want to explain everything," Julian had said, sitting across from him in the Lutheran church basement two nights ago, the same basement where the men's support group met on Thursdays, the folding tables still smelling faintly of coffee. "You'll feel this pull to justify. To contextualize. Don't. Answer the question. Stop. Breathe. Answer again only if I redirect you."

"What if they twist it?"

"They will twist it. The question is whether you hand them the knife."

Now Julian stood at his own table and gave Daniel a single nod. A brief, businesslike nod that said: you're here, you're ready, this is what all of it was for.

Forsythe was already on his feet.

He was a compact man in his late fifties, with the kind of face that conveyed permanent mild disappointment. He wore a tie with a faint diagonal stripe. He had spent two days making Daniel sound like a ghost who haunted his own family, present but never truly there, attentive in ways that were, somehow, sinister. That was the magic of it. Every detail Daniel had ever noted about his children's lives had been reframed, in Forsythe's telling, as surveillance.

"Mr. Mercer," Forsythe said, not looking up from his notes, "directing your attention to the period between January and June of 2024. During that time, were you maintaining a personal log?"

"Yes."

"And what was in this log?"

Daniel looked at the microphone. "Records of my interactions with my daughters. Notes about their routines, their preferences, things they said."

"Every day?"

"Most days, yes."

"Every visit?"

"Yes."

Forsythe let a pause settle over the room. He was good at pauses. He wielded them the way Julian wielded silences. The difference was that Julian's silences invited reflection. Forsythe's silences were accusations waiting for a signature.

"So throughout the period when your wife had primary custody, you were documenting your daughters' lives. Taking notes. Keeping records."

"I was documenting our time together, yes."

"Your wife found this behavior troubling. Correct?"

Julian said, "Objection. Calls for speculation."

The judge, a woman named Callahan with reading glasses on a beaded chain, said, "Sustained. Rephrase."

"Did your wife ever express to you that she found your documentation behavior troubling?"

Daniel thought about the text message from August. He had it memorized. "She said it was 'creepy.'"

"Creepy. Her word."

"Her word."

"And yet you continued."

It wasn't a question. Daniel answered it anyway. "Yes. I continued."

Forsythe returned to his table and picked up a sheet of paper without looking at it. A practiced gesture. Theater.

"Mr. Mercer, do you know what your younger daughter Evan's shoe size is?"

The question landed strangely. Something about its smallness after the big words that had come before. Daniel blinked.

"A two. She was between a one and a two for most of last spring. She moves up to a two-and-a-half next, probably. Her feet are wide, so we usually size up."

Forsythe didn't write anything. He'd expected the answer. "And your older daughter, Mira?"

"Four. She's been a four since last September. She'll be a four-and-a-half by summer."

"And their pediatrician?"

"Dr. Abioye. Westside Pediatrics on Lorain Avenue. We've been with her since Evan was born. She does their physicals every August, before school starts. Mira's asthma inhaler is refilled every six months. She usually doesn't need it in summer, but we keep it in her backpack in the fall because of mold season."

"Mold season."

"Yes. Mira's triggers are mold and cat dander. We don't have a cat, but her friend Sophie does, and after playdates she sometimes—"

"Thank you, Mr. Mercer." Forsythe hadn't expected that one. He shuffled his papers. "I'm sure the court appreciates your thoroughness."

The word thoroughness sat in the room like a thumbtack.

Daniel knew what it was supposed to do. It was supposed to make him sound like a person who had memorized a script, who had prepared answers, who had manufactured the appearance of involvement. He could feel the room hearing it that way. He looked at his hands again. The knuckle of his right index finger had a small scar from a screwdriver slip six years ago. He looked at that instead of Forsythe's face.

Julian stood. "Your Honor, permission to redirect?"

"This is cross, Mr. Reyes. You'll have redirect after."

"Of course."

Forsythe paced slowly in front of the gallery. "Mr. Mercer, Evan had a nightmare on the evening of March 14th, 2024. During a supervised visit at the Garfield Family Services center. Do you recall that?"

"Yes."

"She woke up crying. What did you do?"

"I held her. She'd had a dream about a dog. She's afraid of large dogs. I talked to her about it. We named the dog in the dream. She named him Gerald."

From somewhere in the gallery, a sound. Soft. Not quite a laugh. The judge glanced up.

"You named the dog in her nightmare."

"She did. I just asked her to. It was something my mother used to do for me. If you name the thing that's scaring you, it gets smaller."

Forsythe looked at him for a moment that went on a beat too long. He turned back to his pad. The moment passed, but it had happened, and Daniel had felt it, that slight hesitation in Forsythe's certainty, the way a man checks his footing on ice.

"Your daughters are afraid of you. Isn't that what Dr. Lin's initial assessment stated?"

Julian was on his feet. "Objection. Mischaracterizes the document."

"The document states that Evan exhibited anxiety in the presence of the respondent," the judge said, reading from something without inflection. "That is what it states."

"Were you aware that Evan had expressed fear in Dr. Lin's sessions?"

"I was made aware of it, yes."

"And what did you make of that?"

A silence. Not Forsythe's performed silence. A real one, the kind that had weight and texture. The fluorescent lights above the gallery buzzed at a frequency Daniel associated now with waiting rooms and custody exchanges and the particular quality of institutional air that was neither warm nor cold.

"I thought Evan was telling someone what she'd been told to feel," Daniel said quietly. "I thought she was scared because fear had been put into her. Not by anything I'd done."

"You're saying your seven-year-old daughter made up her fear."

"I'm saying a seven-year-old doesn't know the difference between a memory and a story someone told her about herself."

Forsythe paused. "That's quite a statement, Mr. Mercer."

"It's what I believe."

"You believe your wife coached your daughter."

"I believe my daughter loves her mother very much and was frightened of disappointing her."

The distinction was subtle, and Daniel hadn't planned it. Julian had told him not to accuse Lillian directly from the stand, and he hadn't, technically, but the quiet precision of the statement sat in the courtroom and didn't move.

Forsythe gathered himself. "Let's talk about the reading logs. You kept records of every book you read with your daughters."

"Not a formal record. Notes, sometimes. Mostly so I could remember where we were."

"Where we were," Forsythe echoed.

"In the book. So we didn't lose our place."

"This was necessary for you to write down."

"I read to them most nights when I had them. Sometimes we'd go three or four days without a visit. I didn't want to forget."

"You read to them most nights."

"Yes."

"Even after separation."

"During visits, yes."

"Even after Evan told Dr. Lin she didn't like being alone with you."

Julian said, "Objection. Compound."

"Sustained."

Forsythe looked at his notes. The room was very quiet. Daniel could hear someone in the gallery shift their weight. He could hear his own breath.

"Mr. Mercer," Forsythe said, his voice dropping just slightly, moving into what Daniel recognized as the closing formation, the question you've been walking toward for twenty minutes, "do you consider yourself a good father?"

The silence stretched.

Julian had warned him about this question too. "He'll ask it," Julian had said. "Because any answer sounds either defensive or arrogant. If you say yes, he'll spend ten minutes picking it apart. If you say no, he's done."

"I consider myself a present one," Daniel said. "I don't know if that's the same thing. But I know what my daughters weigh, and I know what they're afraid of, and I know that Mira's second-favorite color is yellow but she won't admit it because Evan likes yellow first, and I know that Evan still sleeps with her left hand under her face, and I know that reading to them at night is the one thing I never missed, not once, not in any year, even the years when Lillian had changed the locks and I was sitting in a rental car in February reading into my phone just so they'd have it when they came back to me."

The room was still.

Forsythe looked at his legal pad. He turned a page. He turned it back.

"No further questions," he said.

The fluorescent light buzzed. Daniel unclenched his hands and looked at Julian, who was already standing, straightening his jacket, the thin manila folder open on the table in front of him.

"Mr. Mercer," Julian said, his voice carrying the particular tone of a man who has been waiting, "I just have a few questions for you. When Mira was seven, she was diagnosed with anxiety. What were her symptoms?"

Daniel settled back slightly in the hard wooden chair. The chair had a wobble on the left rear leg. He'd noticed it when he sat down.

"She couldn't sleep in her own room. She'd wake up and come find me. She'd have stomach aches before school. The school counselor flagged it first. We took her to Dr. Yuen on West 117th."

"What was the treatment plan?"

"Cognitive behavioral therapy, twice a month. She also started a worry journal. Dr. Yuen called it an 'externalizing strategy.' You write the worry down so it lives on paper instead of inside you."

"Did you take her to these appointments?"

"I took her to all of them. Lillian came to the first and third. She didn't like Dr. Yuen."

"Why not?"

"She said Dr. Yuen made Mira too comfortable talking about her feelings. She thought it would make her 'ruminate.'"

Julian nodded, slow and deliberate. "Mr. Mercer, your logs indicate that on April 2nd, 2024, Mira told you something during a supervised visit. Can you tell the court what she said?"

Daniel looked at the microphone. The fluorescent light buzzed.

"She said, 'Dad, I wrote something in my notebook, but Mom says I shouldn't show it to anyone.'"

"And what did you say?"

"I said, 'That's okay. Your notebook is yours.'" He paused. "And then I asked her if she was okay, and she said she was, and we kept reading."

"You didn't ask what she'd written?"

"No."

Julian closed his folder. "Why not?"

Daniel thought about Mira's face that afternoon. The afternoon light through the supervised visit room's single window, laying itself across the linoleum in a pale yellow strip. Her feet not quite reaching the floor.

"Because," he said, "she needed to know there was one person who wasn't trying to get something out of her."

The room absorbed this. The gallery made no sound.

Julian said, "Thank you, Mr. Mercer. No further questions."

Daniel stepped down from the stand. He walked back to the defense table, past the gallery where he did not look for Lillian, past the court reporter bent over her machine, past the smell of old carpet and lemon cleaning fluid. He sat down. Julian slid a glass of water toward him without speaking.

The judge made a note on her pad.

Julian stood and buttoned his jacket, a single deliberate motion, before he addressed the bench.

"Your Honor, at this time the respondent would like to introduce Exhibit 47 into evidence. A video recording, approximately eight minutes in length, time-stamped 3:14 a.m. on October 19th, 2024."

The judge looked up from her pad. Her reading glasses caught the overhead light, two small white discs where her eyes should have been.

"Any objection?"

Forsythe was already rising. He was the kind of man who rose to speak even when sitting would have served him better, as if height gave his arguments structural support. "Your Honor, this video was recorded in the respondent's home without the knowledge or consent of the children or the petitioner."

"The children were not present," Julian said, still addressing the judge, not Forsythe. He had a way of doing that. It made Forsythe seem like an interruption. "As counsel is aware."

"The petitioner has consistently objected to the respondent's self-serving documentation practices."

The judge said, "The court has already addressed the admissibility of the PROOF archive in its preliminary rulings. The question before me now is this specific exhibit." She turned a page. "Mr. Reyes, the children are not present in this recording?"

"Correct, Your Honor. Mr. Mercer is alone."

A pause. The judge considered this the way she seemed to consider everything, not quickly but not slowly either, with a flat and practiced attention that Daniel had spent two days trying to read and failing.

"I'll allow it," she said. "Let's proceed."

The bailiff wheeled a cart to the front of the courtroom. An older cart, with a television mounted at an awkward angle, the kind of setup Daniel associated with conference rooms and substitute teachers. The cart's wheels squeaked across the linoleum. Someone in the gallery coughed.

Daniel stared at the surface of the defense table.

He had watched the video once, three weeks ago, sitting in Julian's office. Julian had played it on his laptop without preamble and then looked at Daniel afterward with an expression Daniel couldn't quite name, something between recognition and restraint. He had said only, "We'll use this last. After the documentation. After the photos and the texts and the therapist notes. We'll end the morning with this."

"Why last?"

"Because it's the only one that doesn't need a caption."

Now the monitor blinked on. A gray rectangle for a moment, then the image resolved: Daniel's apartment, the one he'd moved into in September 2024 after the second rental fell through. He knew every detail of that room from the outside, having lived inside it, but seeing it on a monitor in a courtroom gave it the quality of somewhere he had visited once in a dream. The reading chair angled toward the window. The floor lamp with the yellow shade. The bookshelf he'd built himself from pine boards and brackets because it was cheaper and because building things gave him somewhere to put his hands.

The room was dark except for the floor lamp and the small blue indicator light on the baby monitor sitting on the shelf, which had no child at the other end, only Daniel's phone, recording.

He'd set it up that way because Julian had told him to document everything, and this was everything, which was also nothing.

On the screen, Daniel sat in the chair. He was wearing a gray sweatshirt and the plaid flannel pants Mira had bought him the Christmas before everything started, a seven-dollar find from the sale bin at Target, and he was holding a book open in his lap, and even from the angle of the monitor you could see the pages clearly enough: a paperback spine, soft from use, the cover creased along the title.

The Hobbit.

His voice came out of the television's small speakers and filled the courtroom with a particular quality of sound, thin and domestic and grotesquely intimate, the sound of someone who did not know they were in a public place.

"'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.'"

Someone in the gallery shifted. The court reporter's fingers stopped moving.

On the screen, Daniel read. He read without performance, without the practiced brightness adults deploy when reading to children they know are listening. He read the way people read when they are alone, following the words at his own pace, pausing at the places he wanted to pause, letting the good sentences breathe. His voice was quiet and a little rough, the 3 a.m. roughness that had nothing to do with illness, only with the particular hour. He turned a page. He read about Bilbo's pantry and his armchair and the old maps belonging to his father and his father's father.

Daniel, at the defense table, did not watch the screen.

He looked at the table. There was a faint scratch in the wood near his right hand, a long thin line that curved slightly at one end, like a comma someone had made by accident and then abandoned. He traced the edge of it with the nail of his index finger, very lightly, not pressing. He did not make a sound. He kept his breathing steady and flat, the way Julian had taught him, the technique from the laminated card the therapist had given him at the Westside Lutheran group, the one that said FOUR COUNTS IN, FOUR COUNTS HOLD, FOUR COUNTS OUT in a font someone had chosen for its friendliness.

Across the room, Lillian sat at the petitioner's table with her hands folded, her posture perfect. She was wearing a dark blue cardigan over a white blouse, an outfit Daniel recognized as her court outfit, the one she had worn for all three hearings, the one that said: I am composed and maternal and I do not wish to be here but I am here for my children. She was looking at the monitor. Her expression was precisely neutral, which meant something, though Daniel no longer trusted himself to say what.

On the screen, his voice continued. He was deep in the chapter now, reading about Gandalf at the door, about smoke rings and maps and the word adventure, and there was something in the way he read that word, not leaning on it but not rushing past it either, that made it sound like something a person would want if they had not been afraid for a long time.

The court reporter's fingers had not resumed moving.

Judge Callahan had removed her reading glasses from her nose and was holding them loosely in one hand, watching the monitor. This was the first time in two days Daniel had seen her remove the glasses while the session was active. He did not know if it meant anything. He was trying not to read too much into the small signals the room was sending him, Julian had told him that too, the room will send you signals and half of them will be noise, stay in your body, stay on the question.

He was having trouble staying in his body.

On the screen, the version of himself who did not know he was being watched had reached the part where Bilbo protests. He protests that he is not the sort of person who goes on adventures. He insists on this. Gandalf ignores him with perfect good cheer. The version of Daniel in the chair read Bilbo's protests with something that was almost, not quite, a smile. A pulling at the corner of his mouth that didn't resolve.

"'I am so sorry to disappoint you,' said Bilbo."

He read it carefully. He read it the way you read a line to an empty chair.

Daniel pressed his nail into the scratch in the table and then let it go. Let it go. He could hear the eight-year-old version of Mira in the reading of that line, could hear where she would have interrupted to ask what disappoint meant, her habit of asking the definition of any word she suspected but didn't quite know, her small fierce insistence on having things exactly right. The chair was empty in the video because Lillian had filed for the injunction on October 10th, nine days before, and the supervised visits hadn't been established yet, and there had been two weeks of nothing, two weeks where he had come home to that apartment and sat in that chair and done the one thing that still connected him to the specific gravity of his daughters' lives, which was to read them their chapter whether they were there or not.

He hadn't known, when he set up the phone, that anyone would ever see it.

He had set it up because documenting had become the shape of his love. Because Julian had told him to document and so his love had become documentation. He had recorded it for no one and it had become this, a piece of evidence in a proceeding, eight minutes of a man alone in a chair with a borrowed light reading a story to the air.

On the screen, the chapter ended. Daniel on the screen closed the book and sat for a moment without moving. He put his thumb on the spine, just resting it there. Then he leaned forward and turned off the lamp and the recording went dark and then cut out entirely, a clean black rectangle where the room had been.

The television buzzed faintly, showing nothing.

The courtroom was very quiet. The bailiff, who had positioned himself near the wall during the playback, was looking at his shoes. The court reporter's fingers rested on her machine but did not move. In the gallery, a woman Daniel didn't know had her hand pressed flat to her sternum in an unconscious gesture, as if checking whether her heart was still doing its job.

Julian stood slowly. He let the silence have one more second. Then he said, in his calm gravelly voice, "Your Honor, the respondent has no further questions of this witness at this time. We ask that Exhibit 47 be entered into the evidentiary record."

Forsythe stood. His prepared energy had a different quality now, slightly effortful, as if he had been pulling on a rope and the rope had gone slack.

"Petitioner objects to the characterization of this recording as spontaneous. Mr. Mercer set up recording equipment in his home. This was deliberate documentation."

"The objection regarding admissibility has already been ruled on," the judge said, without looking at Forsythe.

She was looking at Daniel.

He made himself meet her eyes. She had a long, angular face, and her expression was not warm, it was careful, the expression of a person who had spent years training themselves not to be moved too easily in this room because the room was full of people trying to move them. But something in that expression had shifted its angle slightly, the way light changes not because it moves but because a cloud has passed, and the thing that was there now was not sympathy, nothing so simple as that. It was closer to attention. The genuine, uncertain kind, the kind that does not know yet what it is looking at but has decided to keep looking.

"Exhibit 47 is entered into the record," the judge said. She wrote something on her pad. She put her reading glasses back on.

"We'll take fifteen minutes," she said. "Court is in brief recess."

The gavel came down. The sound of chairs and quiet voices filled the room, the ordinary resumption of breath after something has been held. Julian collected his papers and came to stand beside Daniel, not speaking, just standing there.

Daniel's hands were flat on the table. He could feel the scratch under his right palm.

He had not cried. He had told himself before the morning started that he would not cry in this room, not because crying would be shameful but because he had done all his crying already, in the car in the parking garage at six in the morning, with the heater running and his face pressed into the steering wheel, the accumulated weight of two years finding its usual exit before he walked in here and needed to be something other than wrecked. He had nothing left to cry with. He was mostly relief and exhaustion and a strange underwater quality of sensation, as if all of this were happening at a slight remove.

Julian set a hand briefly on his shoulder, a quick, firm contact, and then removed it.

"That was the right call," Julian said quietly, meaning the video. Meaning the decision to include it, a decision they had argued about for two weeks, Daniel insisting it was too private, too raw, too much like showing a wound in public.

Julian had said: "That's exactly why we use it."

Outside the courtroom windows, the November sky over Cleveland was the color of old concrete, and the fluorescent lights made the room its own weather system, airless and bright and sealed from whatever was happening out there, and Daniel sat in it and breathed, four counts in, four counts hold, four counts out, and waited for whatever came next.