After Before and After

Phase 4: Chapter 122

It was surprising how fast the last ten days of November went by, especially considering how action and emotion-packed the first three weeks were. The week after Jack's testimony, Jeremy Reynolds concluded Jack's defense and moved onto number nineteen on the roster.

Then twenty.

Then twenty-one.

And finally, twenty-two.

The week in question was a short week in court due to Thanksgiving. The holiday fell on a Thursday that year, and so court was only in session from Monday to Wednesday. In that time, Reynolds pursued the start of his defense for Will. As one of the older boys, Will's innocence was not established by his age alone. Reynolds had to call on witnesses to confirm this for the jury, as he did with Ralph and Jack and Roger and anyone else who was older than eleven at the time of the plane crash.

This year, Langley family hosted Thanksgiving in their family home in East Point, and all of their relatives and close friends who attended Ralph's fifteenth birthday celebration in February were in attendance this time around too. Also in attendance were both Jack and Paige. Surprisingly, Laurie proposed the idea before Jeffery could. With the unraveling of the Merridew family, a depressing Thanksgiving weekend was in their forecast before Laurie asked them to come along.

It was a quieter Thanksgiving in the Langley house than usual this year. The heaviness of the trial was weighing even on those who weren't apart of it. The boys were still on edge from the impact of Jack's testimony, and they blew the rest of the family's guests off to be alone more often than was polite. Laurie whispered an embarrassed threat to slap the rudeness out of the both of them to her husband, and Jeffery reminded her of their ages and their mental states regularly that weekend. The difference between disrespectful and coping was hard to see, but it was night and day when you could see it.

Court was back in session on Monday the 29th, the last Monday of November. Reynolds picked up where he left off with Will's defense, and by the end of the week, Will himself had his turn in the hot seat. To his and all the older boys' relief, Reynolds completely bypassed the questions about the plane crash itself. Enough tears had been shed over it in this room, and every head in the room knew it.

Tuesday, the last day of November 1993, was the last day of the Will Owens case. That same afternoon, the defense attorney moved onto the first of the last three little ones.

And combined, their defenses only took seven and a half business days. Reynolds finished with the last defendant, the twenty-second boy on the roster, at the end of the day on Thursday, December 9th. Only two days earlier was the one year mark of when the trial first began.

Three hundred and sixty-seven days.

Three hundred and sixty-seven days not a single one of them would ever get back. Three hundred and sixty-seven days some of them wouldn't recover from, if they got to walk away from it at all.

"Court is adjourned until 9 AM tomorrow for closing arguments" Judge Eldeson banged his gavel, a signal that made the end of the last three hundred and sixty-seven days official.

It was a weird feeling, to know that the trial was so close to over, they could practically taste it. They needn't look far ahead for the ending. It was right there in front of them. The future. The rest of their lives. Weekday mornings spent somewhere other than the pews of Courtroom 4 at the Chatham County Juvenile Courthouse in Savannah, Georgia.

It didn't seem real. It was too long ago to be real; freedom from this little bubble of a world.

Ralph had forgotten what his old life had felt like, what it was like to wake up every morning in a bed that felt like home, to be able to hold Jack's hand between 0900 and 1700 hours each day, to pick outfits that didn't require shoulder pads or ties.