Off the Record

Maryjane Stone had typed roughly four million words of other people's worst days, and she had never once made a sound.

That was the job. A court reporter was a pair of hands with a pulse. Lawyers shouted, witnesses wept, defendants called their mothers names that would strip varnish, and Maryjane sat at the little oak desk below the bench and put it all down at 225 words a minute with her face arranged like a closed door.

She was twenty-nine and she was good at it. She was, if she had to be honest (and she did, because she was inside her own head), a little proud of how good she was at it.

At 8:15 on Monday she pushed through the revolving doors of the Greaves County Courthouse with her steno machine in a canvas tote. It weighed twelve pounds. After five years her shoulder didn't even notice.

"Morning, Ms. Stone," Dennis Harlow said from behind the metal detector.

Dennis was fifty-two, divorced, and built like a retired linebacker who'd made peace with doughnuts. He'd been a bailiff in Greaves County for twenty-one years and ran security in the mornings because, as he put it, somebody had to tell the lawyers to take their belts off.

"Morning, Dennis."

"Big day in Courtroom 7." He slid a plastic bin toward her. "Hendricks. They're putting the widow up first."

"I brought extra water."

"You're a pro." He waved her through. "Vellacott's got the whole week blocked. Bring a cushion."

"I don't need a cushion."

"Nobody needs a cushion till Thursday," Dennis said. "Then everybody needs a cushion."

Courtroom 7 was the old one, all dark wood and brass and a flag that never moved because the air in there didn't either. Maryjane set up the way she always did. Machine first, dead center on the desk. The backup recorder to the left, plugged in, not on. Water beyond the recorder, cap tight. Steno pad open to a fresh page, pencil in the spiral.

She ran her fingers over the keys once. Clack-clack-clack. Then she folded her hands in her lap and waited.

State v. Hendricks was a jury trial and an ugly one. Kyle Hendricks, forty-four, had drunk eight beers at a sports bar on Route 9, gotten behind the wheel of his pickup, and run a red light at 11:40 on a Tuesday night. Walter Pryce, sixty-three, a retired mail carrier, had been in the crosswalk with his beagle. The beagle survived.

"All rise," Dennis called at 8:58. "Greaves County Circuit Court is now in session, the Honorable Conrad Vellacott presiding."

Judge Vellacott came in through the side door with his robe moving behind him. He was fifty-four and six-two, with gray at the temples and a face that belonged on a coin. He didn't smile on the bench. He didn't frown either. Lawyers who'd been practicing for thirty years still straightened their ties when he looked at them.

"Be seated," he said, and they all sat.

Linda Pryce took the stand at 9:10. She was small and neat and wore a cardigan with a brooch shaped like a mailbox, which Maryjane suspected had been a gift from her husband. Her voice shook for the first twenty minutes and then went flat, which was worse.

"He always walked Biscuit at eleven-thirty," Linda said. "Every night. Thirty-one years of eleven-thirty."

Maryjane typed it. She typed the 911 call, the hospital, and the hour Linda had spent in a plastic chair holding a leash with no dog on it because a nurse had taken Biscuit to the back. She typed the defense attorney's objection and the judge's flat "Overruled." Her jaw wanted to clench. She kept it loose. Her throat wanted to close. She swallowed once and kept going.

Did anyone in the room ever look at her? Of course not. That was the point. She was furniture that spelled.

Maryjane had a private name for it. There was the record, and there was off the record. The record was the official transcript, every word, nothing added, nothing left out. Off the record was everything else, which in her case was not much. She kept very little off the record. She kept her face on the record too.

At 11:45 the gavel came down and the judge said, "We'll break for lunch. Back at one."

She rolled her neck and felt it pop. Her shoulders were two knots under her blouse. She ate a yogurt at her desk and didn't taste it.

***

She unlocked apartment 4C at 6:30 and dropped her keys in the blue bowl by the door. The place smelled like garlic and tomato.

"In here," Chris called.

Chris Albee was thirty-two and studying for his Series 7, which meant the coffee table had been buried under finance textbooks since March. He wore a blue T-shirt with a small stain near the hem and stirred a pot of sauce with total concentration. His hair was getting long. She liked it long. She'd never told him.

"Spaghetti," he said, and kissed her. He tasted like the pinot he'd opened. "How was court?"

"Fine."

What was she supposed to say? That she'd spent the morning typing a woman's description of a dog leash? That her fingers were still stiff from holding her face still?

"The Hendricks thing?" he asked.

"The widow was on all morning."

"Oof. That's rough." He drained the pasta. "Good thing they've got you. Best reporter in the county."

"That's what they tell me."

The wedding magazine was open on the counter. Chris had circled The Larkspur in red pen. It was a hotel downtown with a ballroom that held two hundred and a chandelier that had its own insurance policy.

"They emailed me back," he said. "They've got a Saturday in April. Two grand to hold it."

"April's good."

"I was thinking… peonies? The pink ones you like?"

"They're out of season in April."

"Oh." His face fell a little. "Right. Yeah."

She squeezed his hand. "We can fly them in. Whatever you want, babe."

"Really?"

"Really."

That was how most of their conversations went. Chris wanted things, warmly and specifically, and Maryjane made sure he got them. It was a system. It worked. They'd been together three years and engaged for eight months, and nobody had ever had to raise their voice.

At 10:00 they went to bed. Chris set his tablet on the nightstand and reached for her hip under the covers.

"Hey," he said.

"Hey."

His kiss was warm and familiar. His hand slid under her sleep shirt and found her left tit, and his thumb rubbed her nipple in the small circle he'd been using since their second date. Maryjane made the noise. She'd perfected the noise over three years. It wasn't too loud and it wasn't too fake. It said yes, more, good job in a tone that didn't require follow-up questions.

Chris rolled on top of her. His cock was already hard against her thigh. She pushed his boxers down and guided him in, and he groaned into her shoulder.

"God, you feel good," he said.

He fucked her the way he always did. Eight thrusts, a pause, eight more. She'd counted enough times to know the pattern. She could have transcribed it. She circled her clit with two fingers, not because it would make her cum (it wouldn't) but because Chris liked to watch her do it, and watching made him faster.

"I'm close," he said. "You gonna cum for me?"

"Yes," Maryjane said. She arched her back, dug her nails into his shoulders, and gasped, "Oh God, Chris, yes!"

It was a good performance. It was a very good performance. Chris shuddered and came inside her with a long groan, then rolled off and found her hand under the covers.

"That was amazing," he said.

"You too."

"Love you." He was asleep in under a minute.

"Love you too," Maryjane said to his back.

She lay still and looked at the ceiling. Her pussy was wet, mostly from lube, because Chris always used too much. Her clit was a little sore from her own fingers. There were no aftershocks. There was nothing, really, except the familiar hollow feeling of a job done competently.

When had she last cum with a man in the room? Never. That was when. She'd cum alone, with a vibrator and the door locked and the lights off, and even then she had to work at it like a term paper.

Was that normal? Probably. Lots of women faked it, and lots of women were fine.

She was fine.

The clock said 10:17. The Hendricks dailies were due Friday.

***

Day two was the medical examiner.

Dr. Paul Reeves had a gray beard and a laser pointer, and he used both on a diagram of a man's body for three hours. Maryjane typed fractured pelvis, typed lacerated spleen, typed the phrase "inconsistent with survival" eleven times. At one point the defense attorney, a soft-voiced man named Burke, objected that Dr. Reeves was speculating about the speed of the truck.

"Sustained," the judge said, and brought the gavel down once, lightly.

Crack.

Maryjane barely heard it. She heard it about two hundred times a week. It was punctuation.

Court broke at 4:30. The gallery shuffled out, the jury filed back to the deliberation room for their coats, and Maryjane packed her machine with hands that ached to the wrist. She was the last one out, as usual. The hallway was empty, and the late light came in through the transom windows and lay across the marble floor in long stripes.

"Ms. Stone."

She turned. Judge Vellacott stood in the doorway of his chambers in his shirtsleeves with the robe over one arm.

"Your Honor."

"A minute, if you have one."

"Of course."

He didn't come closer. She noticed that. He stayed in his doorway like it was a line on the floor.

"You've had two hard days," he said. "I watch the jury, and I watch the witnesses, and occasionally I watch you. You haven't missed a word."

"Thank you, Your Honor."

"That wasn't a compliment. It was a concern." He shifted the robe to the other arm. "Reporters burn out. Clerks burn out. I burned out about nine years ago, after a trial I won't describe, and a psychologist I trust taught me hypnosis. Self-hypnosis first. Then I trained in it properly, because I'm the kind of person who trains in things properly."

Maryjane blinked. "Hypnosis."

"Hypnosis," he said. "Not a stage act. Nobody clucks like a chicken. You sit in a chair, I talk, you go somewhere quiet for half an hour, and you come back with your shoulders down around where they belong. I've done it for a handful of court staff over the years. Elaine Varga quit smoking with me two years ago."

"Elaine from the clerk's office?"

"Ask her. She'll tell you about it at great length."

Maryjane almost laughed. Elaine told everybody about everything at great length.

"I'm offering," the judge said. "Five o'clock, my chambers, after court. You'd be awake the whole time. You'd remember all of it. You'd have a word that ends it the second you say it." He paused. "And I want to be clear about one thing, because I'm a judge and it's my job to be clear. Your assignments come from Carol Benning in Court Administration, not from me. If you say no, you come to work tomorrow at nine and type. Nothing about that changes. Including what I think of your transcripts."

"I… okay. Wow."

"'Wow' isn't an answer."

"No, Your Honor. It's not."

She looked at him. His eyes were dark brown, close to black in the hallway light. He didn't look like a man selling something. He looked like a man reading a jury instruction.

She should say no. She should thank him and go home to Chris and the peonies and the Saturday in April.

"Can I think about it?"

"Please do."

She thought about it in the elevator, in the parking garage, and on the drive home. She thought about it while Chris told her about a guy at work who microwaved fish. She thought about it with her eyes on the ceiling at 10:17 while Chris snored. What did she even want from it? Half an hour where nobody needed her to be anything?

That sounded nice. That sounded really nice.

At 8:50 the next morning she walked past the open door of his chambers on the way to Courtroom 7, stopped, backed up two steps, and knocked on the frame.

"Yes," she said.

Judge Vellacott looked up from a file. "Five o'clock, then."

"Five o'clock."

She typed the whole morning without a single error, and she spent her lunch break reading about hypnosis on her phone in a bathroom stall with her feet pulled up off the floor.