A Good Mother

by Lara Bazelon

  Over the course of the morning, the pool of jurors shrank to a puddle, with only a few people remaining in the benches when it was time to break for lunch. At 1:30 p.m. a whole new group was brought in and Dars had given up the act. Midafternoon, after yet another hushed conversation at sidebar that resulted in the dismissal of a teary-eyed juror, Dars had snapped, “This courtroom is turning into a confessional. I should have ignored the both of you ladies and your ridiculous ideas—” he’d waggled a forefinger at Abby and Shauna “—and just asked the regular questions: name, address, phone number, can you be fair, the end.” Abby had glanced pointedly at Shauna, then watched as the court reporter raised her hands to the stenographer’s machine and replaced them primly in her lap without typing anything at all. They were all the same: editing out the worst of all of the judge’s outbursts. The transcript Abby received of the proceeding with Estrada had been curiously free of epithets—or the word honey.

  Now Dars is nodding curtly in Abby’s direction. Showtime.

  In her mind, Abby has gone over her opening statement countless times. In the dead of night, she practiced aloud sitting in the bathtub while Cal nursed. The sound of rushing water calmed him, the rising steam calmed her. They fell into a rhythm; Cal, seemingly on the brink of sleep, eyelids fluttering, Abby laying out her case in a soft low voice—a lullaby about a killing. Once in a while she would stop mid-sentence, feeling him release her breast and looking down to find him staring up at her, entranced. Holding tight to his little body, now grown plump and sturdy, gave her an unexpected surge of strength. The source of her terrible ambivalence, Cal is also her greatest achievement, the tiny person who holds all of her heart-smashed love.

  I made this beautiful boy. I can do anything.

  Now she is feeling less sure. Shauna had gone first, and she had been strong. There had been a slideshow: Travis as a baby, Travis as a soldier, Travis as a stabbed man, his blood-soaked body curled in the fetal position. And finally, Travis as a cadaver, broken open on the medical examiner’s table. At the last picture, which Shauna left projected on the screen for several minutes, Luz had made a sound that Abby did not recognize, canting forward before Will reached out to grab her wrist. Shauna told the jury, “There is no dispute about how Sergeant Hollis died and who killed him. Ask yourself, how did the defendant summon the strength to shove this knife through layers of skin and muscle, through bone? That’s not fear, ladies and gentlemen. That is cold, hard anger. Hours earlier, the defendant had settled on her target and when the time came, she drove toward that target with malice and deliberation and deadly accuracy.”

  Abby looks at the jurors. With the fingers of her left hand, she worries at the gold locket hanging from a chain around her neck, pressing it deeply into the base of her throat.

  She begins, “There is a saying about marriage—we all have our opinions, but no one knows what goes on behind closed doors.” Abby leaves the lectern and walks over to the jurors. She is wearing a muted navy dress and matching jacket, has taken care with her hair and makeup, going for polished and minimal. Just a bit of foundation to hide the circles under her eyes, a dusting of blush to give her some color; no lipstick, no mascara, no nail polish. Standing before these jurors—her jurors—Abby hopes to signal the unsexed version of Luz that she and Will are hoping to sell: slight, sweet, utterly unthreatening.

  “In this trial, we are going to take you behind the closed doors of the marriage between my client, Luz Rivera Hollis, and her husband, Sergeant Travis Hollis. You will hear what they said to each other, you will see how they treated each other. Not in public, not how the government’s witnesses will describe it, but when they were alone together.

  “You will bear witness to the most intimate moments of their lives. You will know about the kind of sex they had, about the birth of the child they conceived, about Sergeant Hollis’s infidelity, and about the tremendous stress brought on by his deployment to Iraq. Most of all, you will learn what it was like for my nineteen-year-old client to live with this man. A man who was more than a foot taller and outweighed her by a hundred and fifty pounds. A man with a drinking problem that turned him jealous, angry, and violent.

  “Ms. Gooden would have you believe that Sergeant Hollis was planning to leave my client for another woman. But the facts will show otherwise. Sergeant Hollis was never going to let go of his wife, a person he was determined to possess—to own. Like all young love, the love that Sergeant Hollis felt for Luz Rivera was romantic, urgent, and overwhelming. But because of who he was and what he had been through, that love became a darkness. It became a sickness that consumed his body and his mind. When Sergeant Hollis felt hopeless and out of control—and that was increasingly often in the months leading up to his death—he drank. Not modest amounts. The amount of alcohol he consumed in a single night would kill any one of you. And when he drank, he became abusive to his wife, his most treasured possession, not just verbally, but physically.”

  Abby puts both hands on the railing and leans forward. Her voice has been rising, the words coming faster, and she knows she has to soften her tone, that she has to slow down. She thinks of Cal looking up at her in the bathtub like he’s hanging on her every word and takes a breath, letting her gaze travel across the back row and then the front, making eye contact with each juror.

  “The pictures that the prosecutor showed you just now are powerful, powerful images. Sergeant Hollis was handsome. Sergeant Hollis was brave. Sergeant Hollis died a horrible death. No one is disputing any of that.

  “But what you will come to find out,” she continues, “is that, behind closed doors, Sergeant Hollis was also a nasty, belligerent drunk. When he was drunk, Sergeant Hollis forced himself on his wife. He hit her. He choked her. He called her terrible names. And she tried to handle it, as best as she could. Behind closed doors. Because that’s what a marriage was to my client, a nineteen-year-old devout Catholic girl with a new baby. Marriage is between two people, and it was her job to manage it, to find a way to survive.”

  Abby steps back from the railing, lets her hands fall to her sides. “In the early morning hours of October 14, 2006, it was no longer possible to manage Sergeant Travis Hollis. He had a blood alcohol level of .26. He was coming at his wife, all six foot four and 260 pounds of him. He was beating her, and he was going to kill her. And while this is happening, their baby was asleep just a few feet away.

  “Only one of them was going to walk out alive from behind those closed doors. When Luz Rivera Hollis grabbed that knife and stabbed her husband, she did not commit a crime. She did not even make a choice. Because it isn’t a crime to save your own life and there is no choice when the alternative is death. There is only survival.”

  Abby watches the jurors react and feels the familiar surge of adrenaline course through her. Dars can say all he likes that it’s his courtroom, but when she’s in front of the jury, she owns every inch of it. The power she has right now, to hold the jurors’ attention with the story she is telling, is a high she is always chasing. She loves these moments the way that some people love drugs or sex or money. There is nothing else in the world that exhilarates her like performing for an audience in trial.

  “Thank you for listening so carefully,” she says, and she means it.

  Monday, March 19, 2007

  6:30 p.m.

  1710 Vestal Street

  Los Angeles

  Will makes the mistake of parking on Echo Park Avenue, figuring the walk up to Vestal Street would be insignificant. In fact, the small, Spanish-style bungalow Abby shares with Nic is nearly at the top of the hill and the longer-than-expected climb is unforgivingly steep.

  Vestal Street is pretty. Leafy trees rise from sidewalk planters and Will can hear crickets in the quiet dark. There’s little hint that ten years ago the neighborhood was torn apart by shootings from rival Latino gangs. Gentrification has made its way steadily east to Echo Park, pushing out the working-cla
ss families who had lived there for generations with rising rents. Replacing them are people like Abby: young, overwhelmingly white professionals with low six-figure incomes willing to bargain for spectacular views, ready access to upmarket restaurants, and convenience to downtown jobs by tolerating occasional outbreaks of the old violence and more common low-level street crime—graffiti, vandalism, littering.

  Not Will. When apartment-hunting last summer with Meredith, he had immediately written off Echo Park as grimy and unsafe. Now—as it seems with so many aspects of his life—he finds himself taking a closer look and having second thoughts. Up here, high in the hills, any danger seems remote and the view is indeed spectacular. Pausing to catch his breath, Will looks out at the ugly city, transformed at nightfall into a galaxy of lights twinkling along the serpentine freeways that coil and cross as they make their separate paths to the horizon. He thinks about his and Meredith’s bland apartment in the outskirts of the Mid-Wilshire district and its single notable attraction: proximity to The Grove, a Disney-fied outdoor shopping mall that teems with tourists buying tee shirts emblazoned with the Hollywood sign and lining up to see the latest superhero movie. There is no need to join a gym in Echo Park, either; just a few sharply graded streets away there is Elysian Park with its miles of rocky trails. Abby has mentioned in passing that Nic often goes mountain biking there, and that they have walked to games at Dodger Stadium.

  The idea of Abby and Nic doing something as normal as going to a baseball game together is hard for Will to imagine. Nic himself is hard to imagine. The domestic situation Will has pieced together from Abby’s occasional references and the office rumor mill seems like something only a spineless sap would tolerate.

  And so it is with some surprise when the door opens and Will confronts the Nic who looks every bit his biography: federal cop and ex-marine—a type well-known to Will from his years in the military. He’s wearing a gray tee shirt tucked into faded camouflage pants, his brown hair cut close. Nic is well over six feet, and while not big, not skinny, either. When he reaches out to shake Will’s hand, his grip is firm, the arm sinewy with muscle. His blue eyes bore a hole into Will’s skull, either because they are so blue or because the gaze is so direct, Will isn’t sure.

  They are standing in a living room, decently sized, with smooth hardwood floors and a wall of windows that open out onto a back garden. But baby things have been allowed to accumulate, shrinking and crowding the space. The chairs and coffee table have been pushed aside to make way for a playpen and a bouncy chair, there are piles of blankets on the sofa, and toys are strewn everywhere. Boxes of infant diapers are stacked on top of the bookshelves.

  Abby appears from what Will assumes is the bedroom. A blue pouch is fastened to her body by straps that wind around her waist and shoulders. The pouch has a bulge in the center, and Will can just make out a few wisps of blond hair over the top. Even with the mommy apparatus, Abby still manages to look distinctly unmaternal: she’s wearing jeans and a hoodie. Her professional look, he realizes, is a kind of costume. Bare of makeup with her peaked, unlined face and dark shadowed eyes, she could almost pass for a teenager; defiant and hard-edged.

  “Cal just went to sleep,” she says, nodding toward the pouch, “so we should keep our voices down.”

  “You should put him down in his crib,” Nic says. “He’ll sleep better lying flat somewhere quiet.”

  “He’s fine here. Anyway, he might wake up if we try to move him and I don’t want to deal with that again today.”

  Will watches, increasingly uncomfortable, as Abby and Nic stare each other down. Finally, Abby says, “Just go, Nicky. It’s your night out and Jared’s waiting for you at the Short Stop. If Cal starts screaming, it’s my problem.”

  Nic rubs his jaw for a moment. “It’s your problem,” he says finally. There is no inflection in his tone, but his eyes are hard. “Alrighty then.” He opens the door, turning back once to look at Will. “Good to meet you.”

  “Likewise,” Will manages. The door shuts.

  The ensuing silence is noisy with unsaid words. Will looks back to Abby. Her eyelids, he now notices, are swollen, from crying or lack of sleep he can’t tell, and her hair looks like it could use a good brushing. Will, who has spent the past month racked with guilt and shame, feels something akin to happiness that Abby’s personal life has also taken a hit as the result of desires she has indulged in at the expense of her family. But then his brain freezes on the word desires and its wildly different application to his own situation, and the schadenfreude evaporates.

  Abby stands there for a moment, staring at the closed door and worrying at her locket, sliding it back and forth on its gold chain. Then she looks at Will and says, “Let’s talk in the kitchen. I have the case file there.”

  Will follows her obediently through an open doorway into a small L-shaped room. Appliances line up along the longer wall, and at the shorter end, there is a table with a massive accordion file on it and two chairs by a window. He moves to pull out one of the chairs for her but she shakes her head. “Cal likes motion.” She pauses. “At least with me he does.” She looks pointedly in the direction of the door that Nic has just walked through, then goes to the refrigerator and opens it. “What can I get you? Jonathan made meat loaf the other day and we still have some leftovers.”

  “Just a beer if you have one,” he says. Will has found eating a difficult task lately, more of an ordeal. No matter how hungry he gets, he can’t seem to finish a meal, the food sitting in his stomach like a lead ball. The other night, working late, he’d tried to force down a hamburger at his desk and choked midway through, then thrown it up in the men’s bathroom, thankful there was no one still around to hear him retch.

  Seeming to sense what he’s thinking, Abby says sympathetically, “I have trouble eating when I’m in trial, too. And about to be in trial. It didn’t used to be as big of a problem because I wasn’t responsible for feeding someone else.” She reappears from behind the refrigerator door, holding a bottle of Sam Adams. “Now I’m supposed to be consuming, like, 3,000 calories a day.” She roots around in the silverware drawer for a bottle opener, pops the top, and hands the beer to Will.

  “How do you manage that?” Will asks. “They can’t be from—” He hesitates.

  “Calories from alcohol?” Abby smiles. “None of them can be, I know.”

  Will flushes. “I just meant, it must be hard to eat that much.”

  Abby picks up a tin can from the counter and holds it up. “Protein shakes.” She smiles thinly. “Nic buys me cartons of Ensure. Kind of like a chalky milkshake. This one’s vanilla, I think.” She tips the can toward her mouth. “The more real food I eat the less of them I have to drink, so that’s some incentive. Also, being on a liquid diet makes me feel like an old person.”

  “Or a baby,” Will says without thinking.

  “Or a baby,” Abby agrees. She puts the can down, wipes her mouth with the back of her hoodie sleeve. “Well, thanks for trekking out here. I wouldn’t have asked, but I haven’t been home much—”

  “It’s fine.” Will doesn’t add that he has no desire to be at home himself. He sits down, pushes the case file aside, and takes a sip of his beer. It is silk-smooth in his mouth, crisp and delicious going down.

  Abby pushes her hair off her face, raising her arms to twist it into a knot at the back of her head. The shorter pieces come loose and she shakes them back impatiently. “Shauna starts putting on her case tomorrow, so we should take stock.”

  “What’s the status with Travis’s best buddy Mike Ravel?” he says. Ravel had walked out of an Arizona rehab facility earlier that week, and after spending a few days on the streets had voluntarily checked himself back in.

  “I think we have to assume he’ll be testifying.” Abby takes another swig of Ensure and rocks the bundle in the pouch slightly back and forth.

  They are silent a moment, considering this. Ravel
is not a good witness for them.

  “There is an obvious bias,” Abby says. “Back when Antoine went to see him in Arizona last month, remember he told us that Ravel came off like someone holding a grudge?”

  Will shrugs. “Of course. He loved Travis like a brother and he’s angry about what happened to him. I completely understand that.”

  “But his thinking is so distorted.”

  Will shakes his head. Military relationships are like a brotherhood, but someone like Abby would never understand. He doubts Nic has ever tried to explain it to her. In Will’s experience it’s a bad idea to try. I can’t even imagine, the response always begins, before going on to imagine with clumsy analogies that make Will cringe. Then don’t. Don’t imagine, he always thinks as he nods politely.

  “Ravel minimizes Travis’s drinking,” Abby continues, “and says Luz is to blame for the jealousy. That she caused it by flirting with other guys. That she asked for it.”

  “Asked for Travis to abuse her, you mean?”

  Abby looks at Will. “Do you think that’s what it was, abuse?”

  “What would you call it?” Will wishes he’d kept the edge out of his voice. For once, he and Abby had actually been getting along.

  Abby, her fingertips grazing the baby’s hair, does not answer. She says, “We know that Ravel is going to say that Luz put pressure on Travis to change his will. That it was her idea after talking to Estrada and she badgered Travis until he did it.”