Our group will be the first to join Essos, and I hope for everyone’s sake that what we see today isn’t as horrifying as some of what I heard the night before.
“Ladies, Essos is waiting for you. I understand that we have not been forthcoming on details about today, but you will see firsthand some of the responsibilities that Essos has to attend to. No one will think any less of you if you feel the need to bow out afterward. This experience has stopped the journey for many girls. There are no wrong decisions, remember that.” Sybil leads us toward Essos’s office.
Galen is sitting on a couch when we walk by, and when he catches sight of me, he stands up. His gaze follows me closely.
We pass Essos’s office and the gallery and walk down a flight of spiral stairs, each of us careful not to fall. Every day brings us new unexplored places in the house. I don’t think a millennium in this house would be enough time to discover all the nooks and crannies.
We enter a room smaller than I was expecting. I had imagined another courthouse-like space with countless people waiting to be called. Instead, it is just us three girls, Essos and Sybil.
Essos gives us a cursory glance, as if to ensure we’re in proper attire, and he does a double take when he sees me. He might not have taken advantage of the fact that my clothes were see-through earlier, but now he drinks in the sight of me. The obvious longing on his face makes me want to reach out and do something about it. Now is not the time, though. He clears his throat, the look gone suddenly, and straightens his suit.
“Today, I have been asked to adjudicate a man's life. You will hear the crimes he has committed during his lifetime and his defense for why he doesn’t deserve to be punished for eternity in the worst of the afterlives. Cases like this are part of what you will be asked to oversee with me. You will need to be open-minded and unbiased before passing judgment. Before I administer my decision, I will ask each of you what your decision would be. You will hear only one case this session, but know that it is often many times more than one. I’ve sat in on as many as a thousand in one day, but doing so requires a certain level of emotional endurance, one I’ve built over thousands of years. As a new queen, you will not be expected to do nearly as much, but over time, you will. This is, of course, just one facet of what I do on a day-to-day basis. Most of the time it’s endless paperwork.”
Essos turns from us.
“Dell McMann,” he calls, using the same detached voice from the day before. A man appears, and I’m surprised, because he’s unlike the others yesterday who were bucking under the weight of their crimes, dirty with guilt. He’s clean-shaven, standing tall in a polo and khakis, as if he were headed off to play a round of golf.
“Dell McMann,” Essos repeats, confirming that the man before him is Dell. “You are disputing your punishment. Do you know your crime?”
I expect the man to nod; most of the people the day before were unable to speak, their shame preventing it.
“Yessir.” Dell’s hands are folded behind his back. “I killed a man with my car when I was 22 and fled the scene.”
Zara’s jaw drops in horror at this man’s open confession. Cat looks uncomfortable, while I muse that this is much milder than the day before. Essos is going easy on us. I wonder what it means that he was willing to show me some of the more depraved situations.
“Were you ever caught?” Essos questions.
“No, sir.”
Essos looks at the papers before him, flipping them and turning them over, pretending to study what is in them. The night before, I caught sight of what was on the pages—information about the person before him: their likes, their dislikes, their small crimes and their larger ones, the sum of a person in a folder for his judgment. Essos didn’t show me these pages directly, but he held them in such a manner that I could easily read the content. Today, I sit tall, my back straight with my hands in my lap, so I might have a better view of them over his shoulder.
“Do you understand that you are to serve your punishment now? How did you come to hit this man with your car?” Essos continues with his relentless questioning. I was in awe, watching him work last night. He was quick with questions with very little time to prepare.
“I do understand, sir. It was an accident, sir. I looked at my phone, sir.”
I can tell that Essos has already made his decision. This entire thing is a charade. I want to be angry with him for putting on a show, but I can’t. If someone can’t handle a case like this, how will they be able to handle someone like James Blane?
“And why did you look at your phone?”
These are all pointed questions that Essos already knows the answers to.
The man swallows. “My wife had called me earlier to say that our baby was sick and she needed me to get home so we could go to the doctor. I heard apingon my phone, and I thought it might be her, but it wasn’t. I saw lights coming toward me, so I swerved to avoid the car and hit something. I didn’t know it was a person until I saw it on the news.” Dell hangs his head, trying to fight tears.
“Knowing now what you do, that you hit a man, would you have stopped?”
Dell looks Essos dead in the eye, never wavering, “I would like to say that I would have stopped, that I would have been the better man and waited for the police or an ambulance, but I can’t ascertain that. You see, we only had one car at the time. I can’t say with confidence that I would have, though I wish with all my heart that I could.”
“What do you know of the man you hit?”
“His name was Gideon Corrodino. He was a 67-year-old Navy vet. His car had broken down a few miles behind where I hit him. He was walking to get help. His wife passed away from lung cancer, and he lived alone with two Australian shepherds named Winnie and Church, named for Winston Churchill. Before retiring, he worked as a fisherman, taking tourists out to sea. He was planning to buy a boat and live out the rest of his days on the water.”
The amount of detail that Dell knows about this man’s life is astounding. He tells us that he and his wife found out their baby had a heart condition that night and, after he confessed to his wife, she told him he couldn’t go to the police because it would tear their family apart. They would lose their insurance and their child would die. What man wouldn’t succumb to that pressure?
“If you didn’t confess to the police, what did you do to repent?” This line of questioning is purely for our benefit, meant to muddle the water.
“I adopted Winnie and Church and joined the Navy, because I didn’t know what else to do at that age. I served for 20 years before retiring. I helped turn an empty plot of land into a memorial garden for Mr. Corrodino, with space for children to play and a dog park for them to run in.”
I do my best to keep my face impassive as Dell continues to detail the good works he did to try to balance out the karmic wrong he had done.