A Good Mother

by Lara Bazelon

  “Who?”

  “Michael Ravel,” Shauna repeats, “Sergeant Hollis’s closest friend on the army base and the witness to Sergeant Hollis’s signing of the life insurance policy—the second time around, that is, when he left everything to the defendant. Mr. Ravel is prepared to testify that—”

  Dars says impatiently, “I think I have some idea about what he’s going to testify to.”

  “My assistant has been trying Mr. Ravel’s cell phone and put in a call to the hotel where we’ve put him up at the Olani. When she didn’t get a response, we had the concierge go up to his room. He knocked, but there was no response, and there’s a Do Not Disturb sign on his door.”

  Abby looks at Will, who looks back at her, eyebrows raised.

  “Is he under subpoena?” Dars asks Shauna.

  “Of course.”

  Dars leans forward, a vein throbbing visibly in his forehead. “Then go disturb him.” He jabs his index finger inches from Shauna’s face. “This isn’t a government paid vacation, Ms. Gooden. Send one of the marshals if you have to. I’ll let the jury have a twenty-minute recess, after which he better be sitting in that chair.” Dars jabs his finger again, this time at the empty witness box.

  “Understood, Your Honor.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes pass, then thirty, then forty. Shauna has disappeared from the courtroom. When Will comes out to check, he finds her huddled with Jared and another marshal, a short, heavyset Latino guy he doesn’t recognize, at the far end of the hallway.

  Closing in on their group, he makes sure his heels click loudly on the marble floor to give them plenty of notice before he touches Shauna on the shoulder. But she flinches before looking up, obviously startled.

  “The clerk sent me. The judge wants us back inside.”

  Shauna’s lips are set in a grim line. Without a word, she beckons to the others, and they walk back to the courtroom in a phalanx, leaving Will to trail behind and wonder what the hell is going on.

  * * *

  Dars is looking at Shauna with great displeasure. “I gave you twenty minutes and you took fifty-seven. Fifty-seven minutes,” he repeats, as if each one is a treasured grain of sand lost forever to the hourglass.

  Beside Will, Luz shivers slightly and draws her shoulders in tight. After feeding Cristina, brought by Father Abelard and another member of Luz’s church—a middle-aged sweet-faced woman who is now the baby’s de facto babysitter—along with the disheartening news that there had been no change in Maria Elena’s condition, Luz had lain back in one of the old leather chairs in the attorney lounge and passed out. It had taken both Abby and Will to rouse her, Will repeating her name as Abby shook her by the shoulder. She still hadn’t said anything to either of them, but when she emerged from the bathroom, Will was relieved to see that she had made more of an effort to pull herself together: applying lipstick and tying back her hair.

  Shauna clears her throat. “On Your Honor’s instructions, we sent two marshals to Mr. Ravel’s hotel room. When he did not answer to the door, the desk clerk was summoned with a key. The marshals entered and found Mr. Ravel sprawled on the bed, nonresponsive. Emergency personnel were called immediately. Narcan was administered to reverse the effects of what appeared to be an opioid overdose.”

  “So, he’s come around?”

  “No, Your Honor. He’s dead.”

  Will tries to look suitably somber at the delivery of the news but it is all he can do not to grab Abby’s hand and raise it high in the air. After a nightmarish twenty-four hours in and out of the courtroom, they have caught a break. Ravel could have devastated their careful efforts to portray Luz as the real victim with Shauna using his marginal relevance—witnessing Travis sign a life insurance policy—as a lever to pry open the closed window of Travis Hollis’s misgivings and grievances. Ravel would have been Travis’s voice from the grave, narrating a story of the marriage in which Luz was an instigator who gave as good as she got, alternating red-hot and ice-cold, and using every means at her disposal to get what she wanted. Now that window was glued shut: the waiflike woman-child safe inside. There would be no sharpening of the edges that Will had worked so diligently to plane—not from this witness anyway.

  Abby would have pounded away when it was her turn, probing the dishonorable discharge, the PTSD diagnosis, and portraying Ravel as a drug-addled, memory-ravaged and badly damaged individual who might well have harbored his own feelings for Luz—the beautiful, untouchable wife of his far handsomer best friend, and who was, in any event, way out of his league. But Will had always worried that it would backfire badly. Dishonorable discharge or not, drug addiction or not, Ravel was a veteran who had served his country honorably during two tours in Iraq. He would start with the jury’s sympathy and if he did nothing to squander it, could have made Abby look petty, even mean by comparison.

  Dars swivels his chair and stares up at the ceiling. They are all quiet, waiting. “Well,” he says finally as he turns back to them, “this is quite a turn of events. But while it is no doubt a tragedy for this young man and his family, I see no reason to stop the trial.”

  “Your Honor,” Shauna says, “if we could just have until tomorrow morning. Our next witness is on a flight from Ohio and doesn’t land until this evening.”

  Dars frowns but says, “I see no alternative. Madame Clerk will tell the jurors they are excused for the afternoon and we will reconvene first thing tomorrow morning.”

  Wednesday, March 21, 2007

  4:35 p.m.

  Office of the Federal Public Defender

  Los Angeles, California

  Abby and Luz are sitting in Abby’s office, Abby drinking a can of Ensure, Luz taking sips from a can of a Diet Coke that Cherise had gotten her from the vending machine. Luz’s hair is limp, her mascara has clumped, and her nail polish is chipped. Abby, having glimpsed her own wan reflection in the bathroom mirror, knows she looks no better. So much for that post-baby glow that Jonathan had raved about.

  “How are you holding up?” she asks Luz.

  Luz looks back at her with glazed eyes. “I’m numb,” she says. “It feels like what the dentist does before he uses the drill...” She searches for the word and not finding it, gives up, shrugging her shoulders.

  “The Novocain shot?”

  Luz nods. “But the feeling is—it’s in my brain instead.” She closes her eyes for a moment, then opens them. “I need to get back to the hospital. Father Abelard texted me that he’s waiting downstairs with Cristina.”

  “I know.” Abby had gotten the same text. “I won’t make you stay long but I want to go over what it’s going to be like with Jackie on the stand tomorrow.”

  “We’ve been over it,” Luz says flatly.

  Abby nods. She and Will had stressed to Luz the delicate balance that must be struck. But Luz never seemed to appreciate the gravity of the situation no matter how many times they have warned her of the consequences if she fails to react in exactly the right way.

  “Every time Jackie opens her mouth to answer a question, the jury will be looking to you for your reaction. You can’t stare her down and you can’t look away. You can’t look angry and you can’t look catty.”

  Luz shrugs. “She doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “You keep saying that, which is what worries me.” Denial is not a good thing, not when it could evaporate on sight. Abby leans forward across her desk, trying to close the distance between them. “They are using Jackie to prove that you premeditated in the hours between getting her email and Travis coming home. That you lay in wait. Her testimony is the heart of the first-degree murder charge.”

  Another indifferent shrug. “That’s not what happened.”

  Abby opens her mouth to say, “What did happen?” then thinks about Mr. Estrada and what Luz had said to Abby the last time she and Abby were alone together. He told me to trust you. So if yo
u want to know those things now, I will tell you. Do you want to know?

  Did she want to know?

  Abby looks more closely at Luz, who is taking another sip of her Diet Coke, her eyes moving around the room until they settle on the picture of Abby and Rayshon.

  “That was your big case, right?” she says, and nods toward it.

  Abby doesn’t look at the picture. “Yes.”

  “Mr. Estrada told me that everyone thought the guy was guilty—he was like a stone-cold killer or something.” Her eyes go to Abby’s face. “You don’t like talking about it, though, your big victory with him.”

  “He wasn’t a stone-cold killer and no, I don’t like talking about it.”

  “Why not?”

  Now it’s Abby’s turn to shrug.

  Luz looks at her. “He died right after, so it’s like you lost anyway.”

  Abby says, not exactly knowing why, “He had a little boy—well, his fiancée, Sheila, was pregnant during the trial. He was excited about it.”

  Luz looks interested. “What happened to the baby?”

  “He lives with his mother. The family got a decent-sized settlement, after everything came out about the LAPD and the evidence tampering.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “The baby? Rayshon Jr.”

  Luz nods. “So Rayshon Jr. will be okay?”

  “I think so,” Abby says.

  “Will Cristina be okay?” Luz’s eyes search Abby’s.

  Abby drinks some of her Ensure, sets down the can. “You mean, if you’re...”

  Luz nods.

  “Mr. Estrada and I have done everything we can, I told you.”

  “Is it enough?”

  “I hope so,” Abby says. She rubs absently at the bruise on her jaw. “But I don’t know.”

  They are quiet for a moment.

  Luz says, “I’ve never had a real family. My dad left and my mother killed herself. My grandmother—” She shrugs again. “She’s never had any idea what’s going on with me.”

  Abby nods. “Dr. Cartwright told us.” She pauses. “My father killed himself, too, in a way.”

  Luz looks at her skeptically. “What do you mean ‘in a way’?”

  “One night he was driving home from work, he was very drunk, and he drove into a median on the freeway.”

  “But that was an accident,” Luz says.

  “A single car accident,” Abby says, repeating the words her mother always used, then shakes her head in disbelief. “Do you know how drunk you have to be to drive into a median when there are no cars around you, when all you have to do is drive in a straight line on a flat road?”

  “You’re still mad,” Luz says. “Me, too.”

  “He had a drinking problem and he never dealt with it,” Abby says, knowing she should stop talking. She never talks about her family—not to anyone and especially not to her clients. But this breach feels minor given the weight of all the others in this case, and she keeps going. “My dad picked alcohol over his family. He left my mom alone to raise my brother and me. I grew up hating my father but now—” She stops. “Now I worry that I’m too much like him. He was a trial lawyer, too,” she adds after a moment. “Really gifted.”

  “I grew up hating my mother,” Luz says, “but I know that I am nothing like her.”

  “No,” Abby says, “you’re not.” She thinks that now is the time to steer Luz back to the purpose of this meeting. Instead, almost before Abby realizes the words are coming out of her mouth she says to Luz, “You really don’t give a shit about Jackie Stedman, do you?”

  Luz looks slightly taken aback at Abby’s language, her sharp emphasis on the profanity, but doesn’t say anything.

  “Why not?” Abby says, then answers her own question as the realization sets in. “Because the only thing you care about is Cristina. And that’s always been true, ever since you found out you were pregnant.”

  “All I ever wanted was to have her.” Luz looks at Abby, and the glazed look is gone. “Imagine if this were your baby.”

  “I do,” Abby says, “every day. And then I leave my baby to come here and defend you.”

  Thursday, March 22, 2007

  9:00 a.m.

  United States District Court

  for the Central District of California

  Jackie Stedman is pretty enough: tall, ash-blonde, curvy. But her eyes are a bit small and close-set and she’s made the mistake of over-tweezing her eyebrows. As she makes her way to the witness box in her pink skirt suit and heels-dyed-to-match, she holds her head high, taking small, practiced steps. All eyes are on her as she settles in, tucking a lock of hair behind one ear and placing her hands on her lap. She bites down on her lower lip and casts a quick fluttery glance at Dars, who is regarding her with an interest that borders on covetous.

  Abby watches Jackie put her hand on the Bible, repeating the oath after the clerk in a soft high voice. Like a little girl’s, except for its slight rasp.

  A picture appears on everyone’s computers screens: Jackie in a full-length strapless turquoise gown, smiling at the camera as Travis, grinning in a white tuxedo, pins a corsage to her left breast. She is beautiful, he is handsome, they are happy and in love. The photograph has a poignancy not lost on anyone in the room. Travis Hollis had no idea about the darkness that was coming for him.

  “The prom,” Jackie responds in answer to Shauna’s question about the photograph. “That’s Travis and me in our senior year of high school. My mom snapped that picture out in the backyard of his parents’ house.” Her voice trembles slightly and she bites her lip again.

  “Travis Hollis was your boyfriend?”

  “Yes, we had been dating three years at that point.”

  “Did the relationship continue after high school?”

  “We had the summer together, and then 9/11 happened. I had started at community college to get my associate’s degree in cosmetology. Travis enlisted in the air force.” Another tremor in her voice, another biting down on her lip. “I didn’t want him to go—there was already talk that we would be going to war, but he told me—” she straightens in her seat, eyes steadfast on Shauna “—that it was his duty as a patriotic American to defend his country.”

  To Abby, she sounds as canned as a stumping politician, but the jurors appear to be eating it up.

  Shauna nods sympathetically. “Was Sergeant Hollis ultimately deployed to Iraq?”

  “Yes. After he completed his basic military training in San Antonio, he was sent to the air force base in Minot, North Dakota. In 2003, his unit was called and he went over there for a year.”

  “Did the relationship continue during all of that time?”

  “Yes, long distance. He was home for holidays, I flew to North Dakota when I could afford to. But mostly we talked on the phone and emailed. We wrote letters, too.” Jackie smiles wistfully. “It seems old-fashioned to say that now, but even a couple of years ago, it wasn’t as easy to call, the cell phone plans were expensive, and Travis just loved getting my letters.”

  Abby writes those last words down to use later, then casts a quick glance at Luz, who appears to be listening politely, as if to a speech at the memorial service for a distant cousin.

  “And during the deployment?”

  “It was harder, of course. Travis didn’t talk much about what was happening, but I was following the news and I knew about the IEDs. I knew he was in danger every day he went out on patrol.”

  More nodding from Shauna. “Was his unit directly impacted by IED explosives?”

  Jackie nods. “About six months in, an IED hit the Humvee in front of Travis’s. Two of the men in his unit were killed and Travis’s friend Mike Ravel was hurt pretty bad with head and back injuries. Travis saw it all happen.” Jackie’s smallish eyes are bright with tears and her voice cracks. “He was never th
e same afterward.” Tears roll down her cheeks and Dars’s clerk hands her a Kleenex.

  Shauna waits a respectful few minutes while Jackie dabs at her eyes, blotting carefully so as not to smear her mascara. Abby makes another note, this time to Will. When it’s Luz’s turn, they need to make sure she looks like a train wreck by comparison. Right or wrong, people measure emotional suffering by physical appearance, particularly when it comes to women.

  “Where was he sent when his tour was over?”

  “To Fort Irwin, a base out here in California near Barstow. That was in early 2004. We had been talking about getting married and then—” another lip bite “—he started to change.”

  “Started to change how?”

  “He sounded distracted, upset. Like I said, he was coping with the trauma from the war. He mentioned spending a lot of time at this bar near the base. It made me worry that he was drinking too much and not associating with the best people.” Jackie is pointedly not looking at Luz, but it is clear who she means.

  Shauna decides not to draw things out. “Did there come a time when the relationship ended?”

  Jackie nods tearfully. “A couple of months later, Travis said he had met someone at the bar where he was going. She worked there as some kind of barmaid, I guess.” Jackie’s implication is clear: Luz was, in fact, some kind of prostitute. Abby looks sidelong at Luz, who appears unperturbed, her gaze still trained on Jackie with a polite attentiveness.

  Jackie takes a long, shuddering breath. “I asked him if he loved her, and he said he didn’t think so, but it was like he had a fever. Those were his words. That she had come over him like a fever and he couldn’t shake it. He tried but—” Jackie shrugs her shoulders helplessly.

  “When did it happen, the ending of the relationship?”

  “October 5, 2004. I remember it was a week before my birthday.”

  “How did you feel afterward?”

  “Just devastated. Travis was—is—the only man I’ve ever loved. We were meant to be together. It felt unreal to me. I think it felt unreal to him, to tell you the truth.”