Sam turned those brown eyes on me now, and my heart raced as I felt horror, guilt, and even pity.
I dropped my gaze to the humming respiratory ventilator just below the seat of Sam’s chair. It was a heavy metal box with dials and gauges and a thin plastic air hose snaking up from the machine to where it was clipped right beside Sam’s left cheek.
A small electronically assisted voice box was positioned in front of his lips.
Sam locked his lips around his air tube. A ghastly sucking sound came from his ventilator as compressed air was pumped into his lungs. It was a sound that was repeated every three or four seconds, every time Sam Cabot needed to draw breath.
I watched as the attendant wheeled Sam up to the witness stand.
“Your Honor,” Mason Broyles said, “since we don’t know how long Sam will be asked to testify, we’d like to plug his ventilator into an electric socket to preserve the battery.”
“Of course,” said the judge.
The technician snaked a long orange cord into a wall socket and then sat down behind Andrew and Eva Cabot.
There was no place for me to look but at Sam.
His neck was stiff, and his head was braced to the back of his chair with a halo traction device strapped across his forehead. It looked like some kind of medieval torture, and I’m sure it felt that way to Sam.
The bailiff, a tall young man in a green uniform, approached Sam.
“Please raise your right hand.”
Sam Cabot cast his eyes wildly from side to side. He sucked in some air and spoke into the small green voice box. The voice that came out was an eerie and unnerving mechanical sound.
“I can’t,” Sam said.
Chapter 90
SAM’S VOICE NO LONGER sounded completely human, but his young face and his small frail body made him seem more fragile and vulnerable than any other person in the room. The people in the gallery murmured in sympathy as the bailiff turned to Judge Achacoso.
“Judge?”
“Administer the oath, bailiff.”
“Do you swear to tell the truth, so help you God?”
“I do,” said Sam Cabot.
Broyles smiled at Sam, giving the jury enough time to really hear, see, and absorb the pitiful state of Sam Cabot’s body and imagine what a hell his life had become.
“Don’t be nervous,” Broyles said to Sam. “Just tell the truth. Tell us what happened that night, Sam.”
Broyles took Sam
through a set of warm-up questions, waiting as the boy closed his mouth around the air tube. His answers came in broken sentences, the length of each phrase determined by the amount of air he could hold in his lungs before drawing on the mouthpiece again.
Broyles asked Sam how old he was, where he lived, what school he went to, before he got to the meat of his interrogation.
“Sam, do you remember what happened on the night of May tenth?”
“I’ll never forget it . . . as long as I live,” Sam said, sucking air from the tube, expelling his words in bursts through the voice box. “It’s all I think of . . . and no matter how hard I try . . . I can’t get it out of my mind. . . . That’s the night she killed my sister . . . and ruined my life, too.”
“Objection, Your Honor,” Yuki rose and said.
“Young man,” said the judge, “I know this is difficult, but please try to confine your answers to the questions.”
“Sam, let’s back up,” said Mason Broyles kindly. “Can you tell us the events of that night, and please take it step-by-step.”