A Good Mother

by Lara Bazelon

  Will hadn’t stayed long that time, though the meeting had been planned in advance to go over the government’s written plea offer and the stack of additional documents Shauna had provided to Abby, and Will had driven a good ninety minutes to get to the nondescript ranch-style house, which was situated in a dusty cul-de-sac a few twisting miles off the freeway. Luz had taken her time settling the baby in a wicker basket on the couch before turning to accept the paperwork.

  “This is the evidence they have against me?” she had asked, and he felt compelled to answer, “So far.”

  Then the grandmother had come in, firing indignant questions at Will in Spanish. How could the prosecutors possibly believe that Luz would do such an evil thing? Why hadn’t Will gotten the charges dismissed? When would all of this be over? Will waited for Luz to translate, then answered with halting evasions, trying to say as little as possible while not appearing rude. Then Cristina had started wailing and Luz had excused herself. After several minutes of increasingly uncomfortable silence with the grandmother, who was now clearly displeased with him, Will had taken his leave, having learned exactly zero about his client or what she thought should be done with her case.

  Today they are on Will’s turf, no grandma, no baby. He is firmly in control over the situation. Still, he’s irritated by Luz’s lateness, which is both unapologetic and nonchalant, as if she’s here to discuss a contested parking ticket, not a murder charge that could send her to prison for the rest of her life.

  Will says, more heartily than he’d intended, “You can go ahead and close the door. Come over and sit down, please.”

  Luz closes the door but she doesn’t sit, choosing to walk slowly around the room, a shiny black handbag slung over one shoulder, examining his row of framed diplomas, hung perfectly straight and equidistant in a line on the wall. “You have a lot of these,” she says. “West Point. Judge Advocate General’s Corps.” She turns. “You used to be in JAG, defending soldiers?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She nods. “That’s why they picked you to take over from her.” A pause and then, “Did she have the baby?”

  “Um, yes, yes she did.” There had been an office-wide email announcement from Jonathan, Abby’s closest—and maybe only—friend in the office. Will doesn’t know what to make of Jonathan, the only out gay guy in their office whose acidic takedowns—of prosecutors, his own colleagues, and the cruel absurdities of the work they do—he finds simultaneously hilarious and terrifying, knowing he could be next. Not Abby, though. There is a tie between those two, held fast and twisted hard, Will’s heard, by what happened in Rayshon Marbury’s case.

  “A boy or a girl?”

  With some effort, Will summons the image Jonathan had attached: a red squished-up face and a tuft of yellow hair. Measurements had been provided, as well as the baby’s name, none of which Will recalls. He doesn’t know Abby, only of her. She was gone on maternity leave when he started. Not that he would say any of this; Luz is not likely to appreciate that he is new. But only to this job, he reminds himself. It isn’t as if he hasn’t got more experience under harsher conditions than many of the attorneys who are now his colleagues.

  “I don’t remember,” he admits.

  Luz has turned back to the wall, continuing to read aloud. “University of Oklahoma Law School. Summa cum laude.” She pronounces it “summer cum loud.”

  Will feels his face flush, says, “That’s just a Latin phrase. They put it there to make it look fancy.”

  “What does it mean?” She turns, looking at him curiously.

  She has eyes a man could drown in. Out of nowhere, Will is reminded of that phrase from The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Not a compliment, the words had been a warning to the protagonist from his friend. Beware, Charles, of this loose and depraved woman: Sarah Woodruff. Will had read the novel for a class called Male Images of Women, taken only to fulfill his English requirement, never expecting that what he read would ignite a passion for reading British literature that continued to the present day.

  Will’s wife, Meredith, liked to tease him about it—the collection of thick dusty books he insisted on taking from move to move; evidence of his otherwise undetectable sensitive side, she said. And she was right; he did hide it. But he identified with those male protagonists: their good taste and gallantry; their quests for self-discovery and elevation of romantic love. Meredith herself did not care much for these kinds of books, her taste ran more to Jackie Collins and Danielle Steele.

  Will snaps back to the present. He’s thinking too much, wandering around like a man hoping to get lost. The odd combination of cheesiness and high culture he confronts daily in LA is dislocating—the muscle guys and boob-tube-top girls on the Venice Beach boardwalk, the coastal-born Ivy League elites who surround him at work. For the first time in his life, Will doesn’t fit. And neither does Meredith, who comes home every day from teaching second grade at an elite private prep school with yet another breathless story about the squad of blonde moms who arrive to scoop up their children at pickup time, with their Uggs, and Juicy Couture outfits; their lifted, plumped, and lineless skin. Meredith’s country-girl cluelessness makes him feel embarrassed, then ashamed of feeling embarrassed. The last thing he wants is a wife with $300 yoga pants and a body sculpted by a plastic surgeon. He feels Luz’s eyes on him as she waits for an answer.

  “It doesn’t mean much of anything,” he says curtly. “Just that I did well at school.”

  Luz has moved now, back to his desk, picking up a framed picture of Will and Meredith on their honeymoon in Hawaii, both of them in bathing suits and leis, holding piña coladas as they sat on lounge chairs by the hotel pool. She puts it back down. “Did the army pay for all that school?”

  “They did.”

  “After you became a lieutenant?”

  “A captain. And did three years of active duty. Never deployed, though.” Will feels the class chasm opening. Luz’s husband would never have been a captain. Had he lived, the guy was staying where he was, an enlisted man.

  Will’s trajectory was different. The son of a military man, Will had applied himself with a cold fury to everything the army threw at him: forget basic training, he’d run eighteen miles wearing a sixty-pound backpack and spent days alone in the woods, sleep-deprived and without food, to complete the infamous Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape program. When he felt weak or afraid he took care to hide it, just like his novels.

  Luz looks at the framed photograph again, then back at Will. “When you smile like that, you look like one of those actors.” She snaps her fingers. “The one in—what was it—X-Men?”

  Will flushes. He got this all the time. Neither of his parents was particularly attractive, yet somehow he had ended up resembling a guy on a movie poster: square jaw, gray eyes, perfectly chiseled features. At six feet two inches, he is broad-shouldered with a six-pack that, embarrassingly, he does not have to do much to maintain.

  Luz takes in his look, then says, “You hate it when people tell you that, huh?”

  “Yeah,” he says flatly, “I do.”

  As far back as he could remember, boys on the various bases where Will and his family had lived had taunted him: Adam Levine, Justin Timberlake, name-your-boy-band frontman. Everyone should have your problems, his mother told him once, but Will had looked at his father and seen in his face what he already knew to be true. It was far better in the military—and, Will found, life in general—to be rugged than beautiful.

  “Men have told me my whole life that I’m beautiful.” Luz shrugs. “It’s so expected it doesn’t even mean anything to me anymore, you know?”

  Will nods, trying not to show that her statement, delivered in a matter-of-fact manner devoid of any self-effacing disclaimer, makes him uncomfortable. What woman just outright said things like that? None he’d ever met.

  He gestures again toward the chair and Luz finally s
its down, crossing her right leg over her left, and exposing the bulky square box of the ankle monitor wrapped around the sharply tapered bottom of her jeans. She sees him looking and says, eyes narrowing, “I hate this stupid thing. And it’s making me crazy, being in the house all day, not allowed to go anywhere unless it’s here or a doctor’s appointment or church. I can’t even take Cristina to the park.”

  “I can only imagine,” Will says mildly, thinking that Luz should feel damn lucky that Cristina wasn’t nestled in the eager arms of Travis Hollis’s mother right at this moment. Had Abby not managed, somewhat miraculously in Will’s opinion, to get Luz out on bail, the only other viable option would have been the child’s great-grandmother. It was all too easy to see how Luz could have lost Cristina to her mother-in-law, at least temporarily, and that was assuming the absolute best-case scenario—an acquittal.

  He looks briefly at his watch; less than an hour until he has to be in court on another case. “Mrs. Rivera Hollis—”

  She looks at him as if he has just said something silly. “Call me Luz,” she says.

  “Okay,” he says, “sure,” though he feels unsure, and has in fact never called any client by a first name. “Look, we need to talk about the case. Have you had a chance to go over the discovery—the paperwork—I gave you?”

  She bites her lip, shaking her head.

  She’s not going to read any of it, he thinks. Probably ever. Maybe it’s better that way, although he had spared her the worst: the autopsy photographs of Travis’s chest, sawed open from neck to navel, the ribs snapped like wishbones where the doctors had forced them apart with some medieval-looking device so they could grab his heart in their hands in a final desperate attempt to make it start beating again. If the case goes to trial, he will of course file a motion to keep the pictures out—they are gruesome beyond belief—but he will lose. The government, after all, has a right to put on its case.

  “What about the plea offer?” he prods. “Have you read that?”

  Her face hardens. “They want me to plead guilty to murder. I won’t.”

  “Manslaughter,” Will says.

  “Whatever.”

  Will feels it again, a stab of impatience, that she could be so obstinate, even juvenile, continuing to reject any attempt on his part to get her to engage in a meaningful way and talking instead about something as banal as people’s looks. Then he remembers with a sudden jolt that she is only nineteen. He is talking to a teenager.

  “Luz,” he says gently. “It makes a big difference. They are offering you a ten-year deal. With good behavior you’d be out in eight.”

  “Ten years?” She is looking at him like he’s crazy.

  “I know it sounds like a long time, but if you are convicted you will go to prison for the rest of your life.”

  “Manslaughter,” she says, as if trying out the word. And then, tinkering with it, “Man. Slaughtered.” She looks at him. “That’s supposed to be better?”

  “Yes,” he says, realizing suddenly how strange the word is, how bizarre the idea that it might be an improvement. “It’s when one person kills another person during a fight. In the heat of passion. There’s less blame because it wasn’t necessarily on purpose, wasn’t, you know, well-thought-out.”

  Luz appears to have no reaction to his explanation, her gaze has turned away, upward to the window at Will’s back with its view of the skyline. For a government office, at a government salary, the view of downtown Los Angeles is unparalleled, particularly at night. But he doubts she is seeing it; her stare is utterly blank, almost as if she is blind.

  “There is evidence to support a manslaughter plea,” Will continues into the silence. “Furniture knocked over, a broken lamp, and Sergeant Hollis himself, he didn’t have his shirt on, his belt was undone, and his pants were—”

  “He always takes his clothes off when he comes home drunk,” she says. “He always wants to fuck then.”

  Will blinks, trying not to be thrown by the crude language or the sudden image he has of this reeking, beefy man climbing on top of her. He was too big. I couldn’t get him off me. Will had known guys like this when he was in the military. Dozens of them. All assholes. “And maybe you, you didn’t, and there was a struggle—”

  “No.” She is still staring at the window.

  “Okay,” he says, “I’m just—speculating here because you haven’t told me. And I know it’s hard to talk about, but we have to, Luz. And about your juvenile matter. We still don’t have the file from the government, so I’m hoping you can tell me what to expect.”

  She does not appear to have heard him and again, Will feels his frustration building. “And then there are the emails,” he says, plowing on, hoping to provoke her. “I know you didn’t read the paperwork, Luz, so I’ll just tell you. They searched your computer. They found the email from Jackie Stedman, your late husband’s—”

  “I know who she is,” Luz says coldly.

  “Right, sorry.” He flushes again. “The government knows that Jackie forwarded you the email chain of messages between her and Travis, the ones you opened while Sergeant Hollis was at the party, just hours before you—before he died. That’s motive. That is a powerful motive.”

  “That’s not what happened.” She is looking at him now, her expression unreadable.

  “That is what the government is going to say happened. That it was planned. An—an ambush.”

  “No,” she says again. Will wants her to be angry but she isn’t, she just looks annoyed by his stupidity. Flailing at a guessing game she does not want to play. Am I getting warm? Cold. Warmer? Colder.

  “We have to talk about exactly what did happen,” he says. “You have to tell me.” Normally, he would never demand that kind of accounting from a client, believing like most defense lawyers that it is better not to know, or to know only what is absolutely necessary. Normally, he does not call his clients to testify; there are too many unknowns, too many risks. It is the government that has the burden, why help them out by having your client say something really, really stupid, or worse, lie and get caught, which makes the likelihood of conviction and a bad sentence all the greater? But this is not a normal case. The victim is a decorated combat veteran who drowned in his own blood and his client is on a recorded call saying she killed him.

  He clears his throat, tries again. “If you turn down this deal, we go to trial. And if we don’t have a story to tell the jury, a very different kind of story, you will be convicted.”

  “I am not pleading guilty,” she says. “Never.”

  The vehemence alarms him. That, combined with her refusal to talk about what actually happened, suggests a high degree of irrationality and denial. “I know ten years away sounds like forever when you have a baby—”

  “I won’t have a baby if I go to prison. Travis’s mother will get custody. She’ll take Cristina back with her to Ohio.” As if reading Will’s thoughts, she adds, “If it comes down to siding between that lady and my grandmother, the judge will pick the white lady who speaks English.”

  Will nods. It’s a real risk. But is that the only reason she is turning down the offer? An answer he would like to hear in response to a question he would never ask. Instead he says, “Alright then. We go to trial.”

  “Yes,” she agrees.

  He takes out his notepad and picks up a pen. He considers asking again about her juvenile conviction, still sealed, then decides to wait. Better to go with what is easiest. “Let’s talk about your relationship with Travis,” he says. “Start from the beginning, when you met.”

  Luz, ignoring him, has picked up Will’s honeymoon picture again, is studying it closely.

  “What’s your wife’s name?” she says.

  Will tries not to look irritated at her pointed refusal to focus. What’s next, a request to look at the wedding album? “Meredith.”

  “I feel bad for he
r,” Luz says. “I bet she gets jealous.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” he shoots back defensively and then, against his better judgment, “Why would you say that? You don’t even know her.”

  Luz meets his gaze head-on. “Because,” she says. “You’re so much better than she is.”

  “That is not true,” Will insists, a buzzing in his brain like a fly set loose in a closed room. This woman has no right to speak this way about his marriage. But he feels compelled to protect Meredith against Luz’s accusation, and his visceral sense that she might not be wrong. He gives Luz a hard, disapproving stare, pen and notepad forgotten on the desktop. “It’s the opposite of what you’re saying.”

  Luz shrugs. “Sometimes,” she says, “it’s hard for people to see what’s right in front of them.”

  Sunday, December 10, 2006

  6:30 p.m.

  1710 Vestal Street

  Los Angeles

  “I’m going back.”

  Nic takes a pull from his beer bottle. “Back where?”

  Abby swallows, pulls Cal more tightly against her. He is a good nurser, had taken the breast from the beginning. Now he is working away quietly, eyes shut tight in concentration, his cheeks filling and emptying as he swallows. She can feel the whisper-fast beat of his heart and louder than that, her own.

  “Back to work.”

  “Right.” Nic looks at her quizzically. “When your maternity leave is over. In February.”

  Abby looks away from him. They are sitting at the kitchen table, the remains of Chinese takeout still in the white boxes, chopsticks protruding like scrawny legs. Neither of them had bothered to transfer the food to plates. Cal was a better eater than a sleeper. Last night he had woken up three times, leaving them both exhausted. But Abby, determined to have this overdue conversation, is pulsing with adrenaline. For weeks now, she’s promised herself she would tell Nic, only to put it off. The truth is that she vastly prefers her confrontations in the courtroom, with fixed rules and a referee, particularly when she knows her argument will be an unwelcome surprise.