Mothers and Other Liars

by Amy Bourret

  John interrupts before he even stands this time. “Your Honor, the defense stipulates to the facts at bar.”

  “Well, then.” The judge folds his arms on the benchtop.

  Noble riffles through the papers on his desk. His assistant hands him a thin plastic sleeve. “Your Honor, as to the charge of possession of false documentation, we would offer into evidence this document marked Exhibit B, a copy of the counterfeit birth certificate the defendant presented to the Santa Fe school district to enroll the victim’s child in school, with attendant affidavits establishing authenticity and custody of same.”

  John stands again, repeats what he said earlier about stipulation.

  Noble tugs at his jacket, throws back his shoulders. “The prosecution rests.”

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  “Your Honor,” John says, “at this time the defense moves to dismiss the kidnapping count. The prosecution has failed to establish the required elements of the offense with which Ms. Leander has been charged.” With which, Ruby notes, no dangling preposition; her high school English teacher would love this guy. “Specifically, they have failed to show that Ms. Leander possessed the applicable mens rea at the time she rescued that infant from a garbage can.”

  John has explained all this to her, the legal maneuvering. He will make this motion; in all likelihood the judge will deny it. Judges are generally reluctant to cut the prosecution off at the knees, deprive the jury of the chance to weigh in on the case.

  “Denied. We’ll let the jury decide that.” The judge looks at his watch, leans over to whisper with the bailiff. “On that note, we’ll adjourn for the day, pick up with the defense tomorrow morning at nine o’clock sharp.” He cautions the jury not to discuss the case with anyone, sweeps down from the dais and through the back door, robe flying out like the wings of a giant black bird.

  The courtroom is an impaled anthill, jurors scurrying from their tiered swivel seats, reporters fleeing out the main door. Ruby and John wait for the swarm of people to subside, then step out into the hall, just in time to see the Tinsdales and their entourage. Mr. Tinsdale leads his tiny parade like a drum major—a sleek briefcase his baton—across the shiny tiles, around the corner, and out of sight. Ruby gulps tepid water from a drinking fountain, waits on a heavy bench while John steps into the men’s room.

  John returns, retrieves his cell phone from the marshal’s desk, and they take the elevator down to the first floor. Outside, the furnace is still oppressive. The air is a damp wool blanket thrown in Ruby’s face.

  While John steps off to the side to check messages and return calls, Ruby waits beside one of the concrete barricades that stands sentry in front of the glass doors. To her left is a McDonald’s and just beyond, a bus station, and proof that Dallas is indeed populated. A cluster of black women pushes out the door of the restaurant, some with toothpick legs and scrawny bodies, some dirigibles ready to burst, all wearing tight working-girl skirts and genuine smiles. A scattering of rough-looking men, the inner-city huddled masses, hoot at the women as they pass.

  Ruby feels the cooler shadow of another body step between her and the shimmering heat. She turns, expecting Little Miss Red Suit or some other pest, but finds instead Darla Tinsdale.

  “I want to hate you.” Darla’s voice is fuzzy. “I want to…”

  “I’m sorry.” These are the only words that can form in Ruby’s mouth. “I am so sorry.”

  Darla raises a hand. For a moment Ruby thinks the woman is going to slap her. Then she realizes her intent is to halt Ruby’s words, a crossing guard stopping tongue traffic.

  “I thought she’d come home, and everything would be all right, that it would be like she’d been there all along. She’s a good kid.” An almost-smile ripples across Darla’s lips, then melts away. “But she…Philip…we don’t know her.” Her tranquilizer-clouded eyes shift to Ruby’s belly.

  “Boy or girl?”

  “Girl,” Ruby says.

  Darla lifts her head, looks straight at Ruby. “I want you to know…we’re trying.” She tells Ruby that they are meeting with a family therapist, trying to make Lark—yes, they are calling her Lark as the counselor suggested—feel at home, trying to make a family.

  This woman, Ruby realizes, is not the enemy. She’s just an ordinary mother trying to do her best under extraordinary circumstances. Ruby can’t hate her, either, even if she is keeping Ruby from Lark.

  Darla drops her gaze to Ruby’s belly again. “I want my baby back.”

  “Please—” Before Ruby can finish her sentence, Philip Tinsdale encircles Darla’s upper arm with his quarterback hand and pulls her away.

  What would she have asked for anyway? Please let me help you know each other? Please let me see her again? Please give her back?

  FIFTY-NINE

  The light is unnerving. Yellow and orange quiver against the walls; a patch of blue twitches on the blanket. And outside the window, Erector Set buildings lit up like Christmas trees. This is not a nightscape Mother Nature created.

  Ruby paces the hotel carpet from bed to dresser to window. Across the street, walls of glass are fluorescent-bright; a cleaning crew works their way through a maze of cubicles, dumping wastebaskets into bulky gray rolling bins, pushing vacuum cleaners around desks and chairs. She can’t hear the roar of the machines, yet her room is anything but quiet. A TV droning through the adjacent wall, creaking and clomping from above. A siren wails. No cricket chirp, owl screech, or plaintive cry of a coyote to be heard here. Though the street below is empty of cars, the humming and buzzing and throbbing of City persists.

  Yet all that noise doesn’t begin to dampen the clamor in Ruby’s head.

  Do something. The picture of Lark is indelible, there on the wall, on the carpet, on Ruby’s eyelids if she dares close them for even a moment. She can’t remember what Lark was wearing, whether her hair had been trimmed, but she can’t forget the too-thin face, the sallow skin, those sooty crescents that have no right being under the eyes of a nine-year-old. And the words. Do something.

  She pictures, too, Darla Tinsdale. None of this is fair to that poor woman, either. Ruby’s legs are as heavy as the cement barricades lining the street below, fireplug-high cylinders that protect the buildings from crashing cars. She sinks to the floor, leans against the mattress. Do something. Inside her, that other life shimmies in protest.

  Then, like an August thunderhead rolling across the Sangre de Cristo mountains, it comes to her. Ruby knows the something she has to do.

  SIXTY

  Ruby’s body feels as if it’s been through an old laundry mangle. Her second time ever in a hotel room was no more pleasant than the first. If she slept at all, she did so in meager snatches, in between reliving those precious, awful minutes with Lark.

  The courtroom emanates a sense of déjà vu. The assistant prosecutor sits in another power suit behind the same stacks of files and notebooks. The jury members have reclaimed their same places, creatures of habit formed in just a day. The judge, the bailiff, the benches of reporters, it is déjà vu all over again. Except this time, Ruby will take the stand.

  John wanted to call the addict’s girlfriend to establish on the record that she put the baby in the trash can where Ruby found Lark, but he couldn’t track her down. Apparently she didn’t make it up all those steps; her rehabilitation didn’t stick. They don’t really have much of a defense to present without Ruby’s own testimony, and John said putting her on the stand will “humanize” her before the jury, shifting the focus from statute numbers to real people. This is why Noble was so determined to show the Tinsdales’ pain. But, while the prosecution cannot call Ruby to the stand directly, if John calls her as a witness, Noble can cross-examine her. And that could get ugly.

  They have prepared, practiced for hours. John cautioned her about getting flustered and saying something that could be used against her in the civil case. He has left the final decision, though, to Ruby. Now he looks down at her. Ruby feels fortified by last night’s resol
ve; finally she can take action, instead of letting herself be swept along by a river of events. And testifying is just the first step of the plan she formulated last night. She takes a deep breath and nods her head.

  After she is sworn in, she smoothes her skirt, this one with gray diagonal stripes, and readies herself to regurgitate the answers they have practiced.

  The first questions center on that morning at the rest stop, simple questions to let Ruby get comfortable—or as comfortable as she is ever going to be on a witness stand trying to justify her life. Where was the rest stop? What time of day did she pull into the rest stop? Was anyone else around? Where did she find Lark?

  Then John shifts to the more narrative questions. “How old were you when you found Lark in that trash can?”

  Ruby hates hearing again and again that her daughter started their life in a trash bin, but John told her it was important to keep the image in the juror’s minds. “I had just turned nineteen.”

  John moves to the jury box, places a hand on the rail. “And why were you driving across Oklahoma that day?”

  “My grandmother died. She was my only family. The house…it was too hard to stay there without her. So I decided to move away.”

  “So you were all alone, then you found another child all alone in the trash.”

  “Ob-jec-tion, your honor,” Noble sputters.

  John says his “sorry” as quickly as the judge says “sustained.” “The jury will disregard Mr. Brainard’s statement.”

  At the rail, John pauses before he walks back toward Ruby. He told her he would do this, make sure the jury connects the two images, the pitiful orphan and the baby thrown out, not even with the bath-water. Yet Ruby still bristles at how he makes her look like a victim.

  “You were nineteen when you found Lark. Do you think you would have made the same decisions today?”

  Noble jumps to his feet again. “Objection. This is asking for complete conjecture. And it doesn’t matter what the defendant would do today; she’s on trial for what she did do then.”

  “Your Honor,” John says. “What Ms. Leander was thinking at the time is paramount to establishing that she did not willfully intend to kidnap a child, a required element of the crime with which she has been wrongly accused. How she thinks about it now helps flesh out how she was thinking then.”

  “I’ll give you a little latitude here, emphasis on the little.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor,” John says. “Ms. Leander, looking back on that day, how would you have responded to the situation, knowing what you know now?”

  SIXTY-ONE

  This is the tough one. Ruby feels as if she is abandoning Lark all over again, but she knows what the jury wants to hear. “It’s hard to picture how things would have been without Lark. She and I…we were family. But knowing everything, how it would turn out, yeah, I would have gone to a police station in the first town.”

  “Thank you, Ruby. I know this is difficult. Describe for us, in your own words, your life with Lark over the past nine years.”

  Noble stands, objects that the question is irrelevant. “We will stipulate that the child was not harmed while in Ms. Leander’s possession, other than, of course, the incalculable emotional harm of keeping her away from her real family.”

  John looks at Noble, then the judge. “Who’s testifying here?”

  The judge puts on his stern-grandfather face. “Enough, both of you. The jury will disregard Mr. Noble’s last statement. But I have to agree, Mr. Brainard, that the child’s well-being was adequately established yesterday. Let’s move on.”

  John doesn’t appear at all perturbed by the ruling. He exudes calm, control. “Okay then. Ms. Leander, are you in possession of any fraudulent documents related to Lark?”

  “No.”

  “What about the birth certificate, a copy of which was presented yesterday?”

  “I only used it that one time, to enroll Lark in school. Then, I don’t know, I guess I misplaced it when we moved to our new house.”

  “And how long ago was it, since you enrolled Lark in school?”

  “Well, she’ll be starting fourth grade this fall, and I enrolled her in the district’s pre-K program because she was so inquisitive and already reading, so that would be six years ago this September.”

  “Thank you. Ruby, from the moment you found Lark in that trash can to the moment you found that article, did you ever think she was anything but abandoned?”

  “No.”

  “Did you intend to kidnap her, to interfere with a relationship between her and her biological parents?”

  “No.” Ruby shakes her head. “No. I wanted to rescue her.”

  John starts in with questions about finding the article, how terrible she felt about learning the truth, how she came forward voluntarily.

  “Since Lark left…I only wish I could say I don’t know how they felt when they lost their baby.” Ruby’s voice creaks like an old rocking chair during this telling; she swipes at tears with the back of her hand.

  “Thank you. I know you’re tired from this ordeal and have a baby on the way to look out for—”

  “Objection,” Noble shrieks.

  The judge raises an eyebrow at John. “Watch yourself.”

  John tries to look chagrined. “I’m sorry, Your Honor.” He slides in closer to Ruby. “One final question. Ruby, did finding that baby in that trash can bring out a particular memory from your own childhood?”

  Noble is only halfway to his feet when John adds, “Going to the state of mind of my client, a door the prosecution opened.” Noble finishes his upward bob and sinks back to his chair in one fluid motion, his mouth opening and closing with a mechanical click.

  Ruby can feel the panic flashing in her eyes. They have talked about this. John said it was important for the jury to understand everything, that it could make a difference in how they decide her case. Ruby resisted at first. This other part is her story; she has owned it, lived with it all these years. Somehow using it as a play for sympathy seems wrong, diminishes it. Now, though, the stakes are even higher; she can’t execute her plan from a jail cell.

  “Ruby, were you abandoned as a child, placed in foster care?”

  She wraps her arms around the bulge of her belly, as much to shelter the child she once was as the baby in her womb, and, through the answers to John’s probing questions, Ruby tells that other story from long ago.

  SIXTY-TWO

  She climbed onto the chair and looked through the curtains. Nothing but concrete and a row of parked cars, none of them red with a roof that folded down. When her mama tucked her into the itchy sheets the night before, she said Mama and Daddy were going out for a grown-up dinner. Mama said they would be back before Ruby woke up. But now it was morning, and she was alone in a strange room. She was hungry. She was scared. Ruby cried for a while, and she waited in the center of the big empty bed.

  A lady with a stack of towels found her there, led her down to the motel office. Bits of breakfast clung to the beard of the man at the desk. Ruby sat in an orange plastic chair, like the kind at the Dairy Dog, and tried to be as small and quiet as she could. She felt funny sitting there in her jammies, and she was afraid to ask the man to use his potty.

  The police who came were nicer than the man. One was a man with a Frito-Bandito mustache and the other was a lady with a ponytail that swished almost to her bum like a real pony’s tail. The lady took Ruby back to the room and let her go potty and put on the pretty sundress her mama had packed for her. The lady emptied out all the suitcases and looked all through the piles, even in pockets. Then she put some of Ruby’s clothes in one of the suitcases and they went back to the office.

  Ruby sat again in the orange chair and the police kneeled down in front of her and asked her questions.

  How old was she? She was three.

  Did she know her whole name? Her name was Ruby.

  Did she know where she lived? Of course she did. She lived with her mama and daddy in a compa
rtment. Except one time when her mama called her daddy a drunk and threw the bottle of whiskers at him, she and her mama took a train and lived with Nana and Grandpa until Mama got mad at them, and then Mama and Ruby took a different train and then a bus back to Daddy’s compartment. But now they were all going to live in California and Ruby was going to swim in the ocean.

  Did she know her mama’s and daddy’s other names? Nana called her mama Annie. And her mama called her daddy Jack, or sometimes Jack Daniel. The policeman snorted in his nose when Ruby said her daddy called her mama Muffin.

  Did she know her nana and grandpa’s other names? Her mama called Nana Mother and called Grandpa Dad. Ruby couldn’t remember her daddy calling them anything at all.

  The grown-ups shook their heads at one another, and the policeman went behind the counter and talked on the telephone. They took her to the restaurant next door to the motel, and Ruby ate a hot dog and the waitress wore a pink shiny dress and carried a whole line of plates on one arm.

  Then they got in the police car and drove down the big road. The lady sat in back with Ruby, and the man drove. He turned on his siren for just a minute. They both laughed when Ruby put her hands over her ears. Their car passed lots of other motels and some stores. They hadn’t driven very long when Ruby saw a gas station with a big truck parked beside it. And dangling from the truck, like a fish on a pole, was a red car that looked just like her daddy’s. Except this one was all smashed up. Her daddy was going to be really mad if someone broke his special car.