I filled out the request on Monday morning. On Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, a clerk named Mr. Tibbs called me from the records center and said, in a bored voice, "Your microfilm's here, and there's a transcript too, a bound one, two volumes. You want it pulled or you want to come look at it? Can't leave the building."
I drove out that afternoon. Mr. Tibbs put me in a little room with a reader and a metal table and a chair with one short leg, and went away, and I sat down and opened the first volume of the transcript, which was bound in a blue paper cover gone soft and furry at the corners, and the first thing I saw was my own name.
IN THE MATTER OF THE CUSTODY OF ELAINE MARIE HADEK, A MINOR CHILD.
CLAUDETTE A. SEVERANCE, PETITIONER, v. STANLEY J. HADEK, RESPONDENT.
The microfilm told the shape of it, and I read the microfilm first, the way you read the docket first, so that you know where you are. In September of 2000, my mother, Courtney Severance, nineteen years old, had left the duplex on Weber Road in the middle of the night and not come back. In November of 2000, her mother had filed a petition in the Domestic Relations court for legal custody of her granddaughter, then eleven months old. The petition alleged that the child's father was a twenty-year-old warehouse laborer with no high school diploma, no vehicle, no savings, a rented half of a duplex, seven hundred square feet, in a neighborhood the petition described as having "elevated rates of violent and property crime," a work schedule that left the child in the care of "a rotating series of unlicensed and unrelated individuals," and a father of his own, my grandfather, whom I had never known, with a record of two convictions for operating a vehicle under the influence. It alleged that the child had been seen by an urgent care twice in three months for ear infections. It alleged that the petitioner could provide a stable home with a full-time nanny, private schooling, and "every advantage," and that she was the child's closest living blood relation other than the respondent, "the child's mother being at present unlocated." It asked the court to find the respondent unsuitable.
It was, I noticed, from my new professional distance, a well-drafted petition. It was signed by an attorney named Preston Hargis, of a firm whose name I knew, because three of its old partners had merged a decade later into Ruhl Benning.
There was a guardian ad litem appointed, a home study done, a series of continuances. My father's attorney was a woman from the Legal Aid Society named Hedda Takacs. There was a temporary order in December leaving me with my father pending a hearing. There was a hearing in January, continued. There was a hearing on March 14, 2001, which was the one in the transcript, a full-day trial before Judge Harold Ambler, and after that there was a decision and judgment entry, dated March 30, denying the petition. There was a notice of appeal filed by Mr. Hargis on behalf of Mrs. Severance, which was why the transcript had been prepared and bound. Then, six weeks later, there was a notice of voluntary dismissal of the appeal, a single page, with no reason given.
Then nothing. The file closed. The child, eleven months old, then fifteen months old, then sixteen, went home to Weber Road and grew up.
I opened the transcript.
I'm not going to give you all of it. It was two hundred and eleven pages, and much of it was the guardian ad litem, who had visited the duplex three times and found it "small but clean" and the child "well-nourished, appropriately dressed, and clearly bonded to the father," and the pediatric nurse from the urgent care, who said that ear infections in daycare-age children were common as dirt, her words, and that the father had brought the child in promptly both times and filled the prescriptions the same day. There was Claudette, on the stand for most of the morning, and I read her testimony with my hand over my mouth, because I knew her voice so well, and it was there on the page, the same voice, twenty-four years younger and already exactly itself.