A Good Mother

by Lara Bazelon

  “Was the end result that she stopped going out as much?” Will can hear his voice go from irritated to pleading.

  Dr. Cartwright shakes her head. “Most battered women eventually cut off their socializing completely, particularly if it involves other men. The abuser exerts tremendous psychological pressure on the woman he batters. He alienates those closest to her. He cuts off avenues of escape. Mrs. Rivera Hollis says she remained quite defiant and continued to engage in her social activities even though she knew it made Sergeant Hollis angry.”

  Will shakes his head. “Why would she bring that on herself? There was that incident in August 2005 at the bar where Travis broke some dude’s nose in a barroom brawl after the guy made a comment about her—” He reddens.

  “Juicy Latina ass,” Dr. Cartwright supplies. “Yes, she mentioned that incident, and also that Sergeant Hollis was written up for it and referred, I think, to some kind of anger management. It was at that point that the fighting between them began to escalate, often when he had been drinking heavily. Sergeant Hollis began to slap her, using his open palm so that it wouldn’t leave a mark. He would push her to the ground and get on top of her.”

  “That’s a lot of weight,” Will says. “Travis was at least 260, and she’s not much bigger than—than you two.” He gestures awkwardly.

  Dr. Cartwright waits a beat, then says, “Mrs. Rivera Hollis also said he would try to choke her, sometimes when he was on top of her and sometimes after he would push her up against a wall. Every time, she said, she would scratch him, rake her nails down his back and arms, pull his hair, spit at him, and he would get off her.”

  For the first time that morning, Will is starting to feel better. “So he was abusive,” he says, trying and failing to stifle the note of triumph. He looks pointedly at Abby, who has returned her gaze to Dr. Cartwright and is still refusing to look at him.

  Dr. Cartwright takes off her glasses, polishes them, and puts them back on. “Even if I were to take every report of domestic violence by Mrs. Rivera Hollis as the absolute truth, none of it comes close to the level of severity experienced by battered women who kill their abusers. We are talking about chronic, horrific abuse in which the woman’s life is threatened and she experiences intense fear and helplessness, usually on a daily basis. I would advise you to look at the metrics used by Dr. Barbara Bowen in her 2004 study—”

  Will interrupts, “We understand, but things got worse over time.”

  “Yes, and then again, no.” Dr. Cartwright makes a weighing motion with her small hands, lifting them up and down, then level with each other. “Mrs. Rivera Hollis reports that the relationship deteriorated further after Sergeant Hollis’s father died unexpectedly and he returned to the States for the funeral. Apparently, they were so estranged that Mrs. Rivera Hollis elected not to go.”

  Will considers pointing out that Travis took that opportunity to impregnate Jackie, but takes another look at Dr. Cartwright and decides to stay quiet.

  Dr. Cartwright pauses. “It is also worth pointing out that nearly all of these fights were resolved through sex, which often occurred immediately afterward. Mrs. Rivera Hollis describes the sex as rough and at times violent but is adamant it was not rape.”

  Will feels his face reddening again both in embarrassment and anger. God, this woman was so obtuse. “Of course Luz doesn’t call it rape. She can’t even admit it to herself because what he did to her was so degrading...” He trails off as both Dr. Cartwright and Abby fix him with hard stares. A silence falls.

  “It may be,” Dr. Cartwright says finally, “that your views about sexual relationships between married couples hew to a more traditional view. But let me assure you, there are many, many people who engage in this kind of sexual activity because they find it genuinely pleasurable.”

  Will opens his mouth and shuts it again.

  Abby says, “It seems like they were at a low point when he went back to the US for his father’s funeral and had the affair with Jackie.”

  Dr. Cartwright nods. “That was in early October of 2005. There was serious contemplation of divorce on both sides during that time.”

  “Which changed in the beginning of December when Luz told Travis she was pregnant with Cristina, right?”

  Dr. Cartwright nods approvingly at Abby, and Will has to suppress the urge to roll his eyes. “That’s right. And in the meantime, and we are talking about a period of weeks here, the level of violence when they fought remained virtually the same. Mrs. Rivera Hollis was always clear with me that she believed the situation could be brought quickly under control. She wasn’t afraid to confront her husband when he did something to make her angry, like criticize one of her outfits as too suggestive or when he didn’t pick up after himself. She didn’t hesitate to express anger toward him. Again, this is atypical. Battered women walk on eggshells, blaming themselves for the tiniest mistake, so inhibited they no longer are aware they have feelings to express, other than shame and fear.”

  “Was he abusive during the pregnancy?” Will asks.

  “She says no. It was not an easy pregnancy, extreme morning sickness in the first trimester. At first, she says, he was excited, very supportive, and their relationship improved, but after a couple of weeks he was often distracted, would drift off in the middle of a conversation. Around Christmas, he started having nightmares and yelling in his sleep. It got bad enough that she asked him to sleep on the living room couch.”

  “When he got the news that Jackie was also pregnant,” Abby says.

  Dr. Cartwright nods, goes back to her notes. “Which Ms. Stedman told her by email the night of the murder.”

  “Which the prosecution is going to argue is her motive for killing him. Not fear, revenge.” Abby rubs her temples. “There’s a four-hour window between Jackie’s email and Travis coming home drunk from the party. Four hours of Luz stewing in the news that her husband not only had an affair with his ex-girlfriend, but fathered a child with her, and at least for a while, was even giving her the idea that he would—”

  “Leave Luz for a new family,” Will interrupts, thinking aloud. “Just like her dad.”

  “As you might expect,” Dr. Cartwright says, “I asked Mrs. Rivera Hollis a number of questions about how she felt when she found out. And about the way she found out, which must have been rather shocking and humiliating. And, yes, infuriating. She said, ‘I was angry at myself more than anything. I made a bad choice. I thought he was a strong person, but he was a weak person.’”

  “Did she think Travis was going to leave her for Jackie?” Will asks.

  “Interestingly, no. She did not seem worried about that possibility at all. I think she might actually have been alright if Travis had come clean and taken responsibility even if that meant making child support payments. What angered Mrs. Rivera Hollis was the continuing contact, her husband’s inability to end the affair. She told me, ‘It showed me that me and Cristina weren’t enough for him. And that, you know, that was really disappointing.’”

  But Abby is still fixed on the point that Will had stopped her from making. “Four hours is an eternity. Two hundred and forty minutes to go from boiling to ice-cold. To think. To plan.” She looks pointedly at Dr. Cartwright. “That email plus four hours is why she’s getting convicted of first-degree murder unless we can offer up a more compelling story.”

  Dr. Cartwright’s expression—really a study in non-expression—remains unchanged. They are all quiet for a moment, Dr. Cartwright continuing to look at Will and Abby with her sharp, unblinking owl’s eyes. She is waiting, accustomed, no doubt, to long silences. Will fidgets, picking lint off the sleeve of his suit jacket.

  Beside him, Abby takes a deep breath. “She’s not a battered woman. That’s what you’ve been saying ever since we sat down. We can’t make that argument.”

  Will looks at Abby, annoyed. “Hold on—”

  But Dr. Cartwright inte
rrupts him, “Based on my clinical observations, she’s not. And there is no data to support a diagnosis of battered woman’s syndrome. Her levels were not elevated on the MMPI-2, or the MCMI-III, and her Rorschach is outside even the margins. She scores at the bottom range on the Spousal Assault Violent Acts Scale. If called to testify, I would say that her state of mind at the time of the offense was not impacted by that kind of trauma.”

  Dr. Cartwright pauses. “And there’s something else. The tests I administered have controls in place to assess malingering—that is, making up, masking, or exaggerating symptoms.”

  “Masking.” Will jumps on the word like a life raft. “Right. She could be in complete denial.” He is beyond caring what Abby or Dr. Cartwright thinks, about his outdated ideas about sex, about his white male privilege. He drives on. “I’m sure that’s common.”

  “She is in denial,” Dr. Cartwright agrees. “But not about the abuse. The tests show malingering in only one respect—the description of anger. It isn’t inward, as she described. It’s outward, in the way she speaks and describes Sergeant Hollis, particularly when it comes to the infidelity. And it isn’t a burning fury, either. Based on observing her and reviewing these test results, I think it is more probable than not that what she felt toward him, more than anything, was a high level of contempt.”

  * * *

  In the car ride back to the office, Abby and Will tear into each other just like the unhappy couple Will had imagined them to be when they were sitting on Dr. Cartwright’s couch.

  “Fuck fuck fuck.” Abby is trying unsuccessfully to back the car out of a tight space in the parking garage.

  “Watch it,” he yells. “You just friggin’ sideswiped that BMW.” He opens his door, looks at the other car, and starts to get out.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Leaving a note on the guy’s dashboard. There’s a huge scratch on the driver’s-side door.”

  She revs the engine.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Leaving.”

  “No.” He shuts his door and turns to her but her eyes are firmly on the rearview mirror. She finishes backing up and heads down the twisting ramp, the parking ticket on the dashboard.

  “You can’t leave the scene of an accident, Abby. That’s a crime.”

  She continues to speed toward the exit.

  Will tries speaking calmly, like he’s addressing a tantrumming child. “Just stop the car when we get to the next level so I can get out, leave a note, and then I’ll take over driving. You’re too excitable right now to think clearly.”

  She brakes hard, mid-descent, and Will jerks forward in his seat, the tight belt across his chest the only thing keeping his head from hitting the windshield.

  “Excitable? What is wrong with you? It’s like you’re some kind of relic, transplanted from the 1850s. And yes, I am sure you are all too happy to take over, Mr. JAG-thirteen-trials-Captain America. You’ve been trying to fucking take over from the beginning. Guess what? That is not going to happen.”

  “Trying to take over—are you kidding me? You think I would ask for this? To have to—” He stops himself, trying again to be matter-of-fact, but firmer. “The only reason I am on this case is because Paul asked me. You were on maternity leave, remember?”

  “Which you still think I should be.”

  The car behind them is now honking continuously. Abby finishes descending, then speeds toward the ticket machine, lowering her window. They are several feet away from the machine and she can’t reach the slot to insert the ticket. “Jesus.” She motions at the driver to back up, reverses, and tries again. And again. Finally the ticket is jabbed into the slot, then Abby’s credit card, and the safety bar releases, allowing them to exit.

  “Third time’s the charm.”

  Abby ignores him, making a series of turns until they pick up the freeway on Robertson and join a line of cars backed up as far as the eye can see.

  Will slides down in his seat, rests his cheek against the glass. “You should have taken Beverly Boulevard instead of the 10. Even I know that and I’ve lived in LA for five minutes.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Will stares at her, speechless, then turns to look out the passenger-side window. In addition to being a bitch, Abby is a terrible driver. She has no judgment, no sense of direction, and no sense of space between her car and other cars. Or objects. Even objects that aren’t moving. But responding, he knows, will only make an unsafe situation worse.

  Abby’s phone rings and she reaches into the back seat to pick up her purse, rooting through it unsuccessfully with one hand. The car swerves into the other lane.

  Will grabs the purse, locates her phone, and holds up the screen so she can read it, then, gratuitously, reads it himself. It’s from Nic. A missed call followed by a text. When are you coming home? They crawl forward, stop, crawl forward again. The minutes on the dashboard tick by.

  Abby keeps her eyes on the road. “We need to have a sit-down with Luz. A real come-to-Jesus moment. We are going to have to lay out the stakes and make her answer for herself.”

  “What about all the race and patriarchy talk back in Cartwright’s office? Are you going to take some kind of sensitivity class on white privilege before we do this?”

  “No. Marinating in it isn’t going to get us anywhere. The fact that Luz may feel that way doesn’t change the fact that if she doesn’t talk to us she is going down.”

  Will feels his heart beating fast. Abby is going to run over Luz like a train. She is going to ruin her. The grilling, the lack of empathy, the demand for a legally satisfying explanation from a traumatized girl. He thinks again of the French Lieutenant’s Woman, which he had picked back up the other night and started to reread. Charles, the protagonist, had made it his mission to understand the perpetually misunderstood Sarah. He had ignored the judgments—whore, witch, evildoer—heaped upon her by a society that could not understand why a woman would behave as she had. And the answer, that Sarah was truly broken through no fault of her own, was something that Charles was ultimately able to draw out of her. It was Charles who freed Sarah to show that truth, and her remarkable resilience, to others. Luz was the same. Like a good stone in a cheap ring she could be removed, reset, restored.

  Will shakes his head as his certainty crystalizes. “You don’t know how to connect with her. It would be better if it were me.”

  Abby snorts.

  “The two of you are so far apart,” Will says, “especially when it comes to being mothers.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” Abruptly, Abby’s tone changes and she is practically hissing at him.

  Will feels his own anger surge. “Just look at her choices compared to yours. Her baby is her whole life, you heard Dr. Cartwright. She would do anything to be with Cristina. Anything to protect her.”

  “And I wouldn’t?” Abby nearly rear-ends the car in front of them and slams on the brakes. For a second time, Will feels the press of his seat belt as he is thrown forward.

  “How dare you judge me?”

  “Because what you’re doing is wrong. You are so selfish. Luz thinks so, too.” In fact, Luz has never said anything of the sort, but as soon as he says the words Will believes in their powerful toxicity, almost as if they had appeared like graffiti on his garage door.

  Abby turns pale but says nothing.

  “For crissakes,” Will continues, “you should have exited stage left as soon as you found out who the trial judge was. What do you think is going to happen in that courtroom after everything that went down in Rayshon Marbury’s case between you two? It is going to be a bloodbath and it’s going to be at her expense.”

  “To the contrary,” she says coldly. “Dars said on the record that he would be fair. You told me so yourself.”

  Will laughs bitterly. “You’re always betting, aren’t you? Betting Dars wil
l fear the optics too much to work us over. Betting you won’t get caught for your reckless behavior, like that little hit-and-run back in the parking garage, or whatever unholy thing you did to win Rayshon Marbury’s case. Maybe you’ll get lucky again, maybe not. I don’t really care one way or the other. But I’m no fool, so don’t think for a second about pulling any of that with me. Or dragging me down with you.”

  A silence falls, lasting for several slowly driven miles.

  “And what is it,” she says icily, “that you think you can do to reach Luz?”

  The question catches Will up short because he hasn’t thought it through fully. His focus was on getting Abby away from Luz, not what he would do if he succeeded. “I would—” he stops to gather his thoughts “—develop a relationship with her based on sympathy and trust. I’ve already started to do that, in our earlier meetings. We have a strong connection.” As he says these words he almost believes them. “I can help her tell the story of the worst night of her life in a way that will make the women on the jury feel an instant connection to her and will make the men on the jury feel outrage on her behalf.”

  “How will you do that?” Abby’s tone is still cold but she also sounds genuinely curious.

  “I am going to keep working with her, every day, to break down the barriers that are preventing her from talking to us—to overcome the fear and anxiety and the sense that no one understands her. I think,” he says, and pauses, “I think I do understand her.” The time in Dr. Cartwright’s office was not a waste. She has given Will a window. A way in.

  “Okay.”

  Will looks over at Abby but her face is expressionless. “Okay, what?”

  Abby signals, shifts two lanes to the right, and takes the downtown exit. She pulls over to the side of the road next to a no parking sign, turns on her hazard lights, and shuts off the engine. The expression on her face is the same as when she was staring out the window in Dr. Cartwright’s office—she’s gone somewhere else, isn’t seeing Will at all.