by Mark Tiro
Maya leaned over in David’s ear, quietly explaining to him what was happening. “If the judge grants his request to dismiss, that means she’s letting the DA re-file the murder charges against you immediately. The case would start all over again from the beginning.” Even after she had finished explaining this to him, she didn’t see even the least bit of concern on his face.
Maya turned back towards the judge now, straining to listen through the noise. Like everybody else in the courtroom, she waited to hear just what the judge would do. Maya braced herself, fully expecting the judge to grant the DA’s request to dismiss. Maya searched her mind, thinking back over all the years. She could not remember the last time she had seen a judge deny the DA an opportunity to re-file.
She didn’t have to wait long.
“Denied.” As the judge said the word, the audience erupted in protest, nearly drowning out the rest of her words. Maya leaned forward as far as she possibly could. In doing so, she was just able to make out the rest of the judge’s words. “The People did a very thorough job presenting this case, and the Court is satisfied, upon hearing your response to the Court’s query. Now, maybe if you had another witness you had inadvertently forgotten to present today? Do you? Have another witness you are ready to call now?”
At the judge’s question, Gevorkian turned downcast. He slumped into his chair and looked down as he mumbled his answer. “No, Your Honor. We have no other witnesses available to call today.”
“I realize just how important it is to you, Mr. Gevorkian, as a prosecutor and as a member of the Bar, to seek justice above all else. Do I have that right?” Judge Elanjian waited patiently for him to look up towards her, but he never did.
“Yes, Your Honor,” he said, looking at the floor and still slumped down in his chair.
Although Judge Elanjian proceeded to hear arguments on the negligence issue from him and from Maya over the next few minutes, he did not stand up, or even look up, again for the rest of the hearing.
33
But for the outburst from the protesters in the audience, the bailiffs rushing in from neighboring courtrooms to subdue and remove the offending parties, the wails and shrieks from David’s wife, and the histrionics from the DA—the plea went off without a hitch.
Later that afternoon, after she had fully delineated the evidence for the record, the judge announced her ruling before the now fully-packed courtroom. She shocked absolutely no one when she dismissed the murder charge against David. It’s what she did next that stunned almost everyone. Maya included. Judge Elanjian ruled that the evidence had established only a vehicular manslaughter. A misdemeanor, with no gross negligence. Basically nothing more than a very tragic accident.
Despite the judge’s pre-lunch comments, Maya had nonetheless expected that she would, at most, reduce David’s charges to a felony manslaughter. She had heard similar comments from judges so many times over the years. Those had turned out to be nothing more than hollow attempts to try to pressure DAs into doing what those judges themselves had the authority, but not the will, or the backbone, to do.
Judge Elanjian, on her last day as a judge—before her retirement became final and before her leftover cake was even gone—had proven that she had an abundance of both.
It’s what she did after that, however, that made Maya lose her breath. Quite simply, in all her years as a lawyer, she had never seen anything like it before. Judge Elanjian turned to her and offered to take David’s plea. To the misdemeanor charge. And to sentence him on the spot, right then and there.
“Of course. My client would appreciate that.” Maya’s voice faltered for the first time that day. “Thank you Your Honor.” It was all she could do to get these last few words out.
A couple minutes later, when the judge had just about finished taking his plea, David leaned over and whispered to Maya, “Thank you. Do you think—”
“Yes David. Yes, I do,” Maya whispered back, not waiting for him to finish his question. “With your credits, you’re maxed out now. They’ll have to release you sometime today. Technically by midnight, but most likely by four or five in the afternoon. Probably from the back of the courthouse here.” She whispered this into his ear, to make sure there was no chance anyone else could overhear. Defeat, Maya had learned the hard way many years earlier, could always be snatched from the jaws of victory—if you pissed off a DA, or even a judge, enough by gloating about it.
David listened to Maya whisper, as the judge went on reading the about-to-be time-served sentence.
“After the DA appeals, or takes a writ or whatever it is, I’m not even sure—at some point I would guess that an appellate court is going to reverse the whole thing, and they’ll try to take you back into custody.”
The judge was done talking now. The bailiff was leading David out of the courtroom, as quickly as she could before the stunned audience had a chance to react to what had just happened.
Maya walked towards the lockup door where David was standing, waiting while Deputy Castaneda unlocked it. Maya didn’t see his mouth move this time. But she did hear his voice. “Forgive your brother for what he hasn’t really done.”
And with that, David disappeared, together with the bailiff, back into the lockup.
After she got up to her office, Maya put her files away and sat down. She thought about going home early, and she would have, but for the fact that once she sat down, she couldn’t find the strength to get back up. She sank into the chair, exhausted, and stared blankly at the walls of her office.
Two hours later, she finally mustered the energy to pull herself up. She headed down towards the elevator. A few moments of waiting later, she was downstairs. Maya turned to walk out of the building, towards the parking lot where her car was waiting for her, to take her home. It was just after 5 o’clock.
As she walked out, Maya caught a glimpse of the protesters who had been kicked out of court earlier. They were still there, as loud as ever. What a mess, she thought, as she headed off towards her car in the opposite direction.
Just then she heard David’s voice, familiar now in her mind. This time however, it was absolutely clear. “Forgive….” All at once, her stomach tightened. She had a sickening feeling. Maya didn’t quite know why, but she felt herself turn around and start to walk back, towards the mob. As she got closer, she could hear them now. “Death to false prophets, glory to he who avenges the innocent.”
She was running now, running to reach the door. But as she turned the last corner, she heard it. The shots—one, two, more—she lost count, and then the mob scattered, trampling past her, pushing away in every direction.
And that’s when she saw. A man was sprawled on the ground. The pavement was turning red from blood seeping out from the cheap clothes inmates received when they got released. She knew, and yet she refused to believe. She kept running towards the body, frantic now. Maya was the only one there—the protesters had all scattered. The police cars and their wailing sirens hadn’t yet arrived.
“David? David?” Maya reached for his head, picked it up to try to roll him over, to talk to him. Everything’s okay. You said everything’s okay, she repeated to herself.
As Maya went to cradle the back of David’s head, her hand went straight through. It came to rest in the wet, warm space where his brain should have been.
And then everything, David, the world—everything, everything—it all collapsed. And Maya collapsed too, right along with it.
Epilogue
A year later, no one had bothered to take down the “out of the office” sign tacked onto Maya and Donald’s office door. Someone had crossed the phrase out, and in its place, had scribbled “Good luck, Goodbye.”
A few months after Maya left, Donald packed up and left also. One morning he came into the office, looked over at Maya’s empty desk, and decided he was done too. He powered up his laptop that morning, and then, for the first and last time in his career, violated the office computer policy against personal use.
&nb
sp; Donald sat down and began typing. It was his early retirement announcement. Despite having long since settled down with his family, even Donald couldn’t go out without one last happy hour at the Little Tokyo bar that had, for so long, been their office away from the office.
Putting the final touches on his happy hour invitation, Donald looked it over and smiled. Then he attached it to an email and hit ‘send’—emailing it out to the entire office. After that, Donald powered down and closed the lid on his city-issued laptop for the final time. I guess I should have paid more attention to that career-suicide prevention training, he smiled to himself, thinking back to the time Maya had first said it.
Three months after that, Donald found himself practicing law together in a small law firm he had started with his wife. They were home, back in the same small Ohio town where they had both grown up. The most serious thing Donald found himself adjudicating now was his daughter’s kindergarten soccer matches.
Maya never went to work at the animal rescue. But it wasn’t from lack of trying.
She had been optimistic when she had submitted her application. Better than therapy, she thought. And I won’t have to deal with trying to explain to the family when I see them at holidays why I’m not working. Apparently though, the animal rescue job market for former Public Defenders with 20 years of formal education wasn’t as strong as Maya had hoped.
She never got a response.
Which was just fine with her, actually. She had enough money saved up to live off for a year, and maybe even to travel. When David died though, the part of her that thought she could understand and navigate the world had died right along with him. There was nowhere she wanted to go. More than anything now, Maya just needed time. Space and time.
Maya did, at last, get a dog. A small puppy. And when the sun started to go down each night, Maya would slip out the side door to take him on a long, slow walk. When she walked, she remembered David’s talks about forgiveness. And remembering them, she practiced. She would practice forgiving everything that annoyed her. The honking cars that stopped to block the middle of the intersection, the neighbor two doors down who never picked up after his dog. Her brother Tom… all of it. Anything that annoyed her, she would practice forgiving.
At first it had taken her weeks, then days, to even see the grievances she was holding. Now though, she had gotten to the point where she was beginning to recognize them, almost as soon as they arose. And with this, it had become quite clear to her just how much they would clutter her mind, until she let them go. Maya wouldn’t always forgive on the spot. But she would try. And at some point, she would always come back around, usually sooner rather than later.
Forgive, and do as you will. This was Maya’s go-to thought now, and she practiced it whenever she felt her old anger coming up. She had substituted the word ‘forgive’ where the old saying had read ‘love’. And each time she did, she would feel peace take up its place where before only pain had been. Her blocks to the awareness of love were dissolving into forgiveness. What had seemed more theory than practical application when David had first come into her life, had by now developed into a powerful force that had peeled away enough layers to reveal a well-spring of love deep within. Her forehead was, indeed, serene. Most of the time, at least. Botox, Maya thought, can wait... might not ever need the stuff…
And that’s how it happened one evening, while she was on a walk with her dog. Maya rounded the corner and sat down in the dog park. An overwhelming thought of her brother Tom streamed into her mind. Instead of the pain that had always accompanied the thought of him before, though, now Maya noticed only a mild curiosity.
And while her dog ran free, Maya closed her eyes, just an instant. She took a breath, then let it go. And she began to float free. Floating there, with her eyes closed, Maya suddenly had a feeling of something... she wasn’t sure what. When she opened her eyes again, she found herself still sitting on the same bench, looking out from the same place as before. What she saw though was not like any dog park she had ever known. The brown grass and dirt that had been there was gone now, replaced by luminous green grass, as far as her eyes could see. Maya couldn’t see any dogs, but she could feel that all the dogs that had been there—and her dog too—were all still there.
And then she looked over and saw him. Tom. She looked up just in time to see him walk over and sit down on the bench next to her. Maya wasn’t angry now, nor was she afraid. She looked up at Tom, and what she saw in him startled her. Unlike Tom in her mind, this time he looked straight into her eyes. And what she saw was very different than the memory she had lived with, all this time. His eyes were clear now. Still, and very clear. And open. Maya looked into his eyes.
“Why?” she asked. It was a question she had wanted to throw at him, out of anger, so many times. But as she looked at her brother, her question dissolved, right along with her need to ask it. She knew. Everything would be okay now.
Just then, she heard her dog start barking. He was full of excitement just like every day when Maya would get home from yoga. She turned reflexively to look for him. She could hear him barking. She looked out, scanning off into the distance, but she couldn’t see him. Maya turned back, to look over at Tom.
But when she did, she saw that, where Tom had been sitting, David now was. And David was radiating the same calm stillness Maya had seen an instant earlier in Tom.
“David! It’s you! You’re alive. You’re here!” She jumped up and threw her arms around him in a bear hug. “I thought, you were… I thought you were gone!”
“Of course I’m here. Where else is there? I’m not alive of course, but you knew that already.”
“I know. I saw them kill you. But you’re here now. I expect they’ll probably put a psych hold on me any second. I’m hallucinating all this, right?”
“Wait, I was killed?” he asked, a playful look in his eyes. “Oh, you did see that, didn’t you? I’m sorry. I hope that wasn’t too… messy.” He smiled slightly at the word. It was a smile Maya remembered. “But please, consider it as my gift to you.”
“Gift? Do you know how long it took me to forgive what I saw David? Do you know how long it took me to get to the point where I could even think to forgive it, less yet actually do it? How was that a gift? They shot you David, right in front of me. I was a basket case.”
“What you don’t see Maya is how many years, how many lifetimes, you saved yourself by even trying to forgive. You made the choice to practice forgiving over and over, despite how it… appeared.” He paused at the word. “And this is despite how you got angry and depressed over and over each time. But what you didn’t see—what you couldn’t have seen—is that each time you even thought to forgive, a little more of your split mind was healed; a little more of the pain was undone. Even though at the time it seemed like nothing was happening.”
“Appeared? I held half your head in my hands David. The other half had been blown all over the pavement. David, I had parts of your brain underneath my fingernails for a week.”
“But look now Maya—lift your hands up a second, I want to show you something. What do you see?”
“That you’re sitting here next to me?”
“No. What I wanted you to see is just how fabulous your fingernails look now.”
“David!” she exclaimed. They laughed together once more, just as she remembered. She was happy.
“Maya! I am not really here, and neither are you. But of course, you know that too. And you also know they didn’t kill me, right? At least I hope you know that by now.”
“Well we’re both sitting here talking, right?”
“You can’t believe everything your eyes show you. That was the main thing I wanted to teach you. Do I look like I suffered?” He was beaming now, radiant. The answer was obvious, and he went right on talking. “The shadows are the only thing blocking the light, keeping you in the dark. And in reality, a little child could make it all disappear just by flipping on a light.”
“We
ll thank you for that vote of confidence David.”
“You were right, at the end there, Maya. Everything’s okay. It can be hard to forgive, to overlook the illusions. Especially when they seem so… vivid… when life itself seems to hang in the balance. It can take some time and effort. I was glad to see you started practicing what we had talked about so quickly.”
“Practicing?” she said. “You mean the forgiving? Yeah, you did teach me that, didn’t you? I’m going to be an old pro soon. Maybe even have a thing or two to teach you,” she said. They both laughed.
After a while, she got serious again. “‘Forgive your brother for what he didn’t really do.’ That seemed so important… for you to tell me that day. Why?”
“Because we’re all brothers,” he answered. “And because forgiving the illusions is the key to undoing the ego—the entire wrong-minded thought system. That’s the way home.” Almost as an afterthought, he asked, “How’s it going by the way?”
“Tough as hell,” she laughed. “But much better than before. I remember to at least try to forgive a lot sooner now. I choose to do it a lot more too.” She felt herself beaming as she said it. A proud student, excited to describe what she’s learned. Then she became quiet again. “You won’t be here when I open my eyes, will you?”
“Your eyes aren’t closed anymore,” he answered. “Sure, they were when I met you. But that was a lifetime ago. And anyway, what you see with your eyes is more a hindrance to sight than anything else.”
“Well after you died—”
“You know I didn’t die. My body was no more real to begin with than yours.”
