by Lara Bazelon
“I want to go back earlier. To try the Luz Rivera Hollis murder case.”
“What are you talking about? They gave it to someone else. The JAG guy.” Nic’s eyes narrow, cut across her face. Cal’s eyes are exactly the same—ocean blue. It unsettles her, the color and the sameness. Eyes like his won’t change color the way most babies’ do, the nurse had told her in the hospital.
“Luz turned down the deal. Her arraignment is tomorrow. I’m going to see Paul afterward. To tell him I’m taking it back.”
“Paul.”
“My supervisor,” she says impatiently.
“Yeah, I know who Paul is. Paul is the reason you didn’t get fired for what happened last time.” Nic shakes his head. “Now you’re going to show up six weeks after giving birth and tell him you want to do it all over again. Why? Come on, Abby, do you really think you have another wrongly accused client who can’t live without you, just like Rayshon?”
Abby takes a breath. It still hurts to hear his name. Worse to have Nic use it in this way. Rayshon is her heartbreak, but he is also their bond.
“This is not about Rayshon,” she says.
Nic lifts his beer bottle again and their eyes meet briefly. “Be honest.”
She feels her face grow hot. “I am. I told you. I need to go back.”
“Why?”
“Because.” She raises a hand to her throat, running the locket on her necklace back and forth nervously. “I’m not supposed to be here. This was—this was a mistake.”
Nic stares at her.
“Not—not, Cal,” she says hastily. “Me being here all day, with nothing to do, with no work to do. It’s like my mind is eating itself. It is making me crazy that someone else is trying my murder case.”
“Your murder case.” Nic says the words slowly.
Abby keeps going. “Something like this comes along maybe once in a lifetime, maybe never. This military statute they’re trying her with—it’s never been used before. There is, literally, no precedent for this case. I’m not giving it up.” She blinks away sudden, angry tears, feels as childish as if she’s fighting a bigger kid for her toy at the playground. She tightens her hold on Cal. “Just because we had a baby together doesn’t give you the right to control my life.”
“Okay, okay.” Nic’s eyes are on Cal. “Look, no one is saying this is easy.” He reaches across the table to put his hand on her upper arm and shakes it gently to relax her grip. “We’ll make some adjustments, give you more of a break. You can ask your mom to help out—”
Abby snorts. “My mom lives on the other side of town. With traffic here, it basically means we are in a long-distance relationship. And she works even more than me. She thinks she’s helping out when she shows up to take Cal for a walk on the weekends.” Roz Rosenberg, the principal of one of the city’s biggest public high schools, was many things, but natural grandma was not one of them.
“A nanny—”
“We can’t afford it, Nicky. You know that, and he’s too young for day care.”
Nic pulls his hand back. “What are you suggesting?”
Cal disengages from her breast with the satisfying pop of a cork releasing from a wine bottle and looks up at her expectantly. Abby carefully wipes the edges of his mouth with her thumb and shifts him to the other side. When he has latched on again and is back at work, she forces herself to look at Nic. “That you stay home instead.”
Nic looks as shocked as if she’s just slapped him. “What are you talking about? I don’t get paternity leave. I’m not—” he gestures at her “—it’s not my body that’s keeping him alive. Yes, I mean, in three months, sure, I can take my vacation, but now, when he needs to eat every three hours? When he needs his mother? That’s crazy.”
“You can take your vacation days now. You can bottle-feed him. And you can take him to see me at work once a day. Or I can come home, we don’t live that far.”
“You want me to stay home and bottle-feed him?” Nic says the words slowly, like he is talking to someone very stupid.
“Yes. I can pump.” She pauses. “Actually, I bought a breast pump yesterday and already started to get a supply going.”
Nic stares at her. “How have you done that and managed to keep breastfeeding?”
“I’m supplementing with formula.”
“You made that decision without telling me? Did you even consider the health consequences for him?”
“Plenty of babies get only formula. It’s not like I’m starving him.”
“But the nurses said that breast milk was the best—”
“Fuck the nurses,” she says harshly. “My brother and I were bottle-fed because my mom couldn’t make enough milk to feed twins. We turned out perfectly fine.”
“You can’t just make these decisions on your own and not talk to me about it.”
“Why not? It’s my body, as you just pointed out. God, I am sick and tired of being told that if I don’t do x, y, or z thing I’m a bad mother.”
“I never said—”
“No, you don’t say it, Nicky. You just look it. Like when you come home and the house is a mess and Cal is asleep on the sofa—”
“Where he could roll off and crack his skull on the wood floor—”
“Or when you get after me because I like to nurse him in the bath.”
“When I walked in on you, you were falling asleep. Do you have any idea how dangerous that is?”
“That’s my favorite time with him,” she whispers. “And yeah, that one time, I got tired.”
“All it takes is one time, Abby. He could have drowned.”
“Fine,” she says, struggling to keep her voice low and not disturb Cal. “I’m selfish. I’m negligent. I suck at this. So let me go back to work.”
Nic sits back in his chair and folds his arms across his chest. “This is wrong. This is really, really wrong.”
She keeps going, talking over him. “There’s already a few bottles of breast milk in the freezer. And I talked to Jonathan. His caseload is slow right now and he’s happy to—he wants to come by in the afternoons and help.”
“You already got a supply going? You already talked to Jonathan? Behind my back? Our son was born six weeks ago. He’s a baby. You’re his mother. Doesn’t that even mean anything to you?”
“Of course, it means something to me,” she snaps. “I love him.” She looks down at Cal’s downy head and tears come into her eyes again. She blinks them back furiously. How could she possibly explain this to Nic? That she loved Cal beyond all reason and at the same time his existence felt entirely unreal to her. That every minute she was with her baby she was also sitting in the audience watching a play that had been terribly miscast. That when she wasn’t too tired to have thoughts, her only thoughts were of work. That she fantasized, not about blissful lazy days adoring this beautiful creature she and Nic had made, but of going back to court and picking Luz’s jury.
“I can’t do this all day every day until February. It’s not who I am. I told you, when we were deciding about whether to—” She stops. “It was a big decision for me. After we found out. Barely having dated for three months—and that was—” she swallows, remembering their first drunken hookup “—a casual thing.”
“Not for me.”
She flushes, keeps going. “Then everything with Rayshon, the investigation, me thinking I might get disbarred. It was—it was crazy. When we talked about it, about what to do, I told you I was going back to work.”
“After your maternity leave. Not five minutes after the fucking epidural wore off.”
“Nicky, you know me—”
“Do I? Jesus Christ, Abby. This is not normal. Maybe you need to see someone. A professional.”
“Because I want to do my job? Having a baby hasn’t changed me, Nicky. I am still the same person. None of this should come as a surpr
ise. You knew, you have always known, what you were getting into with me.”
Nic puts his fingers to his temples, starts massaging the skin around his eyes. “Your life is different now, Abby. We are a family. You can’t—you can’t expect things to go back to the way they were before. You’re a mother now.”
“Do you understand that when you say that,” she says fiercely, “I feel like I am being erased? Like you are erasing me?”
Nic reaches across the table again but Abby sits back, abruptly moving out of his reach. “Look. I love you. I’ve been in love with you since the first day I saw you. You know that.”
“Since the first day you saw me in court. That’s who I am.”
“There are other parts of who you are and they are just as important. You’ve gotten to experience them. With him. With me. It’s been good for you. Healthier. You were—”
“Drinking, I know.”
“Drinking so much. You don’t want to end up like—”
“Don’t.” She puts up her hand. “I know why my father is dead.”
They sit in silence for a minute. Abby says, “This is how you show me you love me. I don’t want a diamond ring or a white dress. I don’t want happily-ever-after. I want to try this case. I want you to make that possible for me.”
“Don’t do this, Abby. There are half a dozen people in your office who would do a great job, including, no doubt, this JAG guy. It doesn’t have to be you.”
She shakes her head. “I’ve tried to tell myself that, too. But I actually think the opposite. I think I can try this case in a way no one else can.”
“Why?” Nic’s voice is cold.
Abby looks down at Cal, passes her fingers lightly over his soft downy head. I love you, darling boy. She wonders if he can hear the unspoken thought, if he knows that the love she feels is deep and desperate and yet driving her away.
“Because I’m a brand-new mother, too. The way Luz was, those few times that I met her—I feel that now. She killed her husband in this horrible, violent way, but she did it to save her baby.”
Nic shakes his head. “You have no idea why she killed her husband.”
“I know that’s the story the jury needs to believe. Before I had Cal, I understood that story as a legal theory. Now I understand it in my bones.”
Monday, December 11, 2006
10:25 a.m.
Office of the Federal Public Defender
Los Angeles, California
Will raises his hand to knock on the closed door, hears arguing, and lowers it. A woman’s voice, raised and angry. Paul, answering her, in his distinct West Indies accent; measured, but testy. Will strains to hear while keeping a respectable distance from the door. A few words come through. Her: “My case,” “you can’t,” “fucking ridiculous.”
Paul: “careful consideration,” “client’s best interests,” “already decided.”
Will waits another minute, then two. The voices continue. He considers leaving, but Paul does not like people to be late for meetings and Will’s excuse—that he delayed after eavesdropping—is not a good one.
He knocks.
A pause and then, “Come in, Will.”
When he opens the door, Will sees an elfin woman standing over Paul’s desk, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, her heart-shaped face pale and devoid of makeup. She’s wearing a flowy long-sleeved tunic top that catches on her small belly, her stick-figure arms and legs made even more stick-figure-like by contrast. Her head swivels in his direction, the gaze warning and accusatory.
Will gives her his warmest wide-open smile before turning smartly to face Paul. “Sir, I’ve just come from Mrs. Rivera Hollis’s arraignment.”
Paul, too, has been standing, but now he sits, gesturing for Will to take one of the two empty chairs opposite. Will sees the flash of gold cuff links, the expensive watch. Paul is neither vain nor materialistic, but everything he owns is of exceptionally fine quality.
“Yes, thanks. We’ll get to that in a minute. Will, this is Abby. Abby Rosenberg.”
Will blinks. This is Abby Rosenberg? Never in a million years had he thought that she would look like some pissed-off chick who thought you’d jumped the line at Starbucks. And her maternity leave had just started. What was she doing here?
“Pleasure to meet you, ma’am.” He steps forward, extending his hand. “And congratulations to you and to Mr. Rosenberg—” Too late, he looks at Paul, who shakes his head slightly. Will stops, looks at her bare hands, and remembers. “I mean, congratulations to you and your—the—to the both of you on the birth of your—” he pauses, decides to guess “—daughter.”
“Son.” She still looks genuinely angry, but also the tiniest bit pleased that he is stepping in it so royally and repeatedly.
Will looks at Paul, but there is no help coming his way. “Well, that’s really, I mean, that’s really terrific.”
“Yeah,” she says flatly, “it’s just great.”
Paul coughs. “Abby’s partner, Nic Mulvaney, is a US marshal. Former military, like you. I bet you’d have a lot in common.”
Abby’s glare is so withering, Will is amazed that Paul isn’t feeling the physical impact. But Paul, as ever, seems unperturbed. “I was just bringing Abby up to date about your work on the case now that you’ve taken it over because of her maternity leave.”
“Which is over. I’m returning next Monday.”
Will tries not to react visibly to this announcement. One of the few perks of working at the federal public defender’s office was that having a baby meant all those months of paid time off. For the dads, too, although he wasn’t sure if any of them actually took it.
Paul smiles, but it looks effortful. “So far ahead of schedule. It’s been—what—six weeks?”
“Forty-six days.”
“Well, we’re delighted to have you back, of course, if that’s what you’ve decided is best for you and your family.”
Abby keeps up the death stare, and Will shrinks back slightly, relieved not to be the target. Paul coughs again. “And, needless to say, there’s no one-size-fits-all with these things.”
“Yes, sir,” Will says cheerfully, though no one is actually soliciting his opinion.
Paul tilts his head at Will, says to Abby, “I’ve been trying to get him to call me Paul, but the first-name thing isn’t easy when you’ve spent your whole life on military bases, like Will has. His dad was a naval officer and he’s lived all over the US and in Japan, Holland, Korea. When he was in JAG, Will was based at Altus Air Force Base and then Maxwell, where he became an instructor.”
“How many trials have you had?” It’s the first time Abby has asked him a question directly and Will decides to try out another smile. No dice.
“Thirteen, ma’am.”
“That’s quite a lot,” Paul points out. “More than you.”
“In military court.” Abby looks disdainful. “It’s different.”
“We’re all here to learn from each other,” Paul says, and a look passes between Paul and Abby that Will can’t parse. “Initially, I thought I would second-chair the trial, but—and actually I was about to tell you this, Abby, when Will walked in—I’ve been promoted. No official announcement until next week, but I’m going to the tenth floor to be the deputy in chief.”
Will knew this already, as did most everyone else in the office through the ever-churning rumor mill, but he tries to look as surprised as Abby. “George is out?” she says.
“His wife has been sick for a while. And he’s eligible for early retirement.”
“Who’s taking your place?”
“Roger.”
“So I’m in his group now?”
“No.” Paul pauses. “You stay with me.” This, too, Will had known. Roger Morrison wouldn’t take Abby and neither would any of the other five supervising attorneys. Th
e DIC was not supposed to supervise because of the administrative workload, but in the end, Paul had had no choice.
Paul and Abby are looking at each other, another unspoken communication passing between them, and then Paul sits back in his chair and closes his eyes. Will and Abby wait, Will looking at the gold-framed picture of Paul, his wife, and their twins on the desk. Paul and Angie—who met when they started the same year at the public defender’s office—are a head-turning couple: she’s blonde and voluble, born and raised in Alabama; he’s deliberative and mild-mannered, born and raised in Haiti. Even Angie, outrageous as she was, still had enough sense to stay home after she’d given birth. She was back now, but only after taking a full year off.
Paul opens his eyes. “Given that this is a somewhat unorthodox arrangement, I’m going to switch things up a bit and have you two try this case as a team. Equal responsibility across the board.” Paul makes a leveling motion with his hand, like he’s sliding onion slices into a frying pan before they can make him cry.
“Paul—”
“That’s the decision, Abby.”
Will swallows. Abby Rosenberg is a brilliant lawyer. People were still talking about her closing argument in the Rayshon Marbury case, the way the words poured out of her like she was giving up her heart, righteously indignant, but deeply moving at the same time.
But there was a seamier side of things, or so he’d been told. Of course, people talked smack, he knew that, particularly to the new guy. In some ways, the federal public defender’s office was no different than the military bases where he’d grown up; everyone perennially in everyone else’s business. The office hookup culture—some of which resulted in marriages like Paul and Angie’s and some of which ended less happily—was rampant. Even so, a woman like Abby—young, pretty, gifted—made for a juicy target. The envy was understandable. A week after Marbury was freed, the LA Times ran a profile of her called Joan of Arc Storms the Public Defender’s Office. He’s seen the framed picture in her office—the only one actually on the wall and not stacked in a corner—a courtroom sketch of Abby with the client, foreheads touching, his fist on top of hers. Celebrating exoneration.
