Widows-in-Law

by Michele W. Miller

  Jordan laughed smoke. “You’re whining.”

  Brian grinned, feeling woozy. The weed was strong, and he hadn’t smoked in a long time. “I love a good day in court, especially with the amount of money up for grabs. But the work to get to court, getting prepared, it’s grueling … I truly hate being a lawyer. My wife thinks I’m joking, but if I ever get a big enough payday, I will happily set up a bar and restaurant on an island in the Caribbean. I’ve been stuck on that idea since Jessica and I went to the Chat ’N’ Chill in the Exumas.”

  “Oh yeah, I know the place, on Stocking Island. Owned by a guy with an MA in finance from University of Chicago. An impressive dude. Killer smart. A damn beautiful island to have a restaurant on. I rented a private island near there a couple of years ago.” Jordan accepted the joint and inhaled. “It was a glorious week with a supermodel on the rebound. Thirty-eight thousand a night. Can you believe it?”

  “For the woman?”

  “Ha ha. Dude. Come on. For the island. Although some haters might say it adds up to the same thing … which is like saying Donald Trump pays for it, or Demi Moore.” Jordan patted his own nearly concave chest, grinning. “It’s the whole person they’re attracted to.”

  “You have a point.”

  “Anyway, we would travel to that restaurant by seaplane. The plane and pilot came with the island.” Jordan smiled, nostalgically. “I loved the Exumas.”

  Brian took a long swig of his beer. He imagined getting off the treadmill that was his life, which felt even more like a treadmill now that he was getting a whiff of Jordan’s life. But he knew Jessica would never go along with the kind of simple life he craved. He didn’t need a private island. He just wanted off the treadmill.

  And, of course, it wasn’t only Jessica that tied him down. Emily was in New York. She was growing up fast, a freshman in high school. There would be college tuition in four years. He would be tethered to his job and New York for a long time to come. He knew he should be grateful for his life, which was good by any objective standard, but he found it hard to stay in that attitude. He always felt as if something wasn’t quite right.

  “Gambling, my friend, is the pot at the end of the rainbow,” Jordan continued. “But I read your website bio. You’ve got a lot more karma in the bank than I do. You’re helping people. That’s worth a lot. I try to give away money to good causes, but that’s not the same as actually rolling up your sleeves and helping people.”

  Brian shrugged. Winning for his clients made him euphoric, but he worked years for each victory, and the thrill didn’t last long. Plus, until joining up with Steve Cohen, he’d been on a salary. He was only now working on cases that would give him a piece of the verdicts, which he hoped would make the thrill a lot more thrilling. “That ballplayer I saw in the lobby? Was he a friend of yours?”

  Jordan stretched his legs, crossing them at the ankles, no socks on. “I will say this to you as my attorney. Attorney-client privilege. Yes. A lot of these sports guys are big rollers, but money changes hands the old-fashioned way with them—cash—not credit cards or wire transfers, which are easy to trace. My athletes aren’t fixing games. They just love to gamble and need to keep the appearance of impropriety at bay. Once playing ball in front of forty thousand fans stops doing it for them, and beautiful women become a blur in their beds, the athletes need other activities to spike their adrenaline. They’re adrenaline junkies. Life is boring without risk. But, unlike them, I’m ever mindful that the house always wins, and I’ve chosen to gamble on the house. I just make sure not to trip any land mines belonging to the FBI, IRS, or local district attorneys.” Jordan reached for his open laptop. “Let me show you my site.”

  A couple of clicks past a menu of gaming icons and an online poker game appeared, Jordan’s passion. Cards were moving fast on an animated green table. Brian tried to adjust his eyes to figure out what was going on.

  “We can see all the hands now because I have admin rights,” Jordan said. “It’s unbelievable how much money some of these Chinese guys play in the nosebleed games. They’re not the real pros who make a living at it. Few pros, myself included, would risk a million dollars on a hand. Pros count on natural variation. You win some, you lose some. If you know the game better than the next guy and play it strictly by the numbers, not by emotion, you come out ahead and make a decent living. You’ve got to be a billionaire not to care about losing a million on a hand because of dumb bad luck.” They watched a few hands and Jordan pushed the laptop aside. “I’m starving. You?”

  Brian laughed, his own voice sounding distant. “Starving.”

  “You still like sushi?” Jordan said, scrolling through his contacts. “We can talk about my mother while we wait.”

  “Okay,” Brian said, way too high to return to the office to proof motion papers.

  He was glad to hang out longer too. He wanted to hear more about Jordan’s life. Like Sean Penn chasing El Chapo, Brian always found himself trying to fill a void, searching for something he couldn’t get from his safe life. He wanted to get closer to Jordan’s life, get a taste of the thrill of it. Jordan could see it in him. They could both see it.

  CHAPTER 7

  Monday, October 28

  After a week, Lauren’s daily shivah calls to Jessica’s house ended. On her first day back in Family Court, Lauren was relieved to return to her normal routine, although she missed Emily. Her instinct to protect Emily during a crisis created a painful maternal yearning that felt like a vacuum imploding her chest. Letting Emily go—allowing her to stay with Jessica—was among the hardest things Lauren had ever done, and that said a lot.

  Lauren approached a Haitian woman and showed her the signature page of a document. “Ma’am, did you sign this document, placing your child in foster care?” A Creole interpreter echoed her words.

  The woman appeared sad but sure. “Yes, I did,” she said in accented English.

  Lauren smiled, sympathetically. “Just a few questions then.” Lauren returned to stand beside dozens of overstuffed court files piled on the table. She glanced down at sticky notes on an open file. “Ma’am, why did you place your child into foster care?”

  The woman sighed and teared up, switching to Creole. The male interpreter’s voice followed hers: “My daughter is fifteen years old … She will not obey my husband or me. She will not go to school, and she has already been pregnant once.”

  “Do you want your daughter to remain in placement?”

  The woman paused to listen to the interpreter. “Yes.”

  The case was like most of the voluntary placements: an incorrigible teen and frightened, fed up parents with no escape hatch, as Brian had been for Emily. A group home or residential treatment was the parent’s last resort. In Lauren’s own case, when she was sixteen, city lawyers had to do the same thing with her own mother, although for different reasons. Lauren had signed herself into rehab, but the program needed parental consent. Lauren’s mother had to be tracked down by caseworkers. Lauren imagined them refusing to stop interrupting her mother’s endless crack party until she consented to Lauren’s treatment.

  “Your honor,” Lauren said, “I ask that the court grant the Commissioner’s petition and find that the natural mother knowingly and voluntarily placed her child in care.”

  Judge Quiñones was a grandfatherly man with a deep cappuccino complexion and white, close-cropped hair. He spoke kindly to the mother. “Petition granted. Thank you for coming, ma’am.” He turned to the uniformed bridge officer, who managed the flow of courtroom traffic. “Fifteen minutes, please.”

  “All rise,” the bridge officer said, as the judge stood.

  The moment the judge’s robes disappeared through the chambers door, Lauren pulled her cell from her purse and rushed out, checking for messages while she race-walked through the noisy waiting area full of families. She dodged around a sprinting toddler, an older boy running after him, bef
ore she stepped inside a tiny windowless office with a desk, three vinyl chairs, and a coat locker reserved for the city attorneys while at court. She called Brian’s house landline, now Jessica’s, she mentally corrected herself. She’d left a message for Jessica that morning on her cell but had received no return message. Now, voice mail picked up after the third ring.

  Brian’s voice: “We’re sorry, no one can come to the phone at the moment …”

  Lauren shuddered. The beep sounded. “Is anyone home?”

  A pause, click, and Jessica’s weary voice came on the line. “I just noticed your message, on my cell. Hi.”

  Lauren pushed aside the knee-jerk dislike she felt whenever she first heard Jessica’s voice, even after spending a full week around her. “How are you?”

  “Okay. My parents left this morning. The fire marshal called. They found a cigarette butt.” Jessica’s voice cracked. “That’s what caused the fire. The marshal said that cigarette butts are the most likely thing to survive … the flames and heat.” Jessica exhaled and began to weep. She blew her nose then sniffled. “The filters are designed not to burn so it’s easy for them to tell when a cigarette caused a fire.”

  “I guess we figured that’s what happened,” Lauren said, tearing up, imagining how Emily would feel when she heard what had happened to her father. “Does Emily know?”

  “Yes. She seemed relieved to have an explanation.”

  “Okay … that’s good. How was school?”

  Jessica lowered her voice. “Mr. Manley called and said she was absent. She’s home now. She came back on the bus at the regular time.”

  “Damn.”

  Jessica whispered, “I didn’t say much. It was her first day, and I don’t know how hard to come down on her. She’s really depressed. Mr. Manley thought maybe she should start therapy here—he gave me a couple of names.”

  “If she’ll go along with it … I’ll talk to her. Emily’s on Brian’s health insurance. I’ll call Steve on my next break and find out about her coverage.”

  “She’s in the basement, in Brian’s office. I’ll get her.”

  Lauren looked at her watch, mindful of the time. She had only five minutes before she had to be back in the courtroom.

  The phone clicked, an extension picking up. “Mom?”

  “Hi, honey.”

  “Mom. I’m worried about Jessica. She’s not eating and won’t talk to anyone who calls. You see how she’s screening her calls?”

  Lauren cringed. Was she the only thing keeping Jessica above water? How long could she give Jessica to pull herself together before bringing Emily home? It was Jessica’s first day alone with Emily, and at least Jessica had taken Mr. Manley’s call, but Lauren still worried. Lauren had basically been raised by wolves and knew how bad it was when the adults in your life checked out.

  Of course, Lauren’s situation had been much more extreme than Emily’s. When Lauren was twelve, her parents added crack to their burgeoning drug addictions and completely retired from the real world, locking themselves in their bedroom, smoking obsessively, draining their bank accounts, and selling things out of the apartment if times got rough. Lauren had lived with them in a rent-controlled walk-up in the East Village. They’d managed to pay the rent, but Lauren had to tell herself when to get up in the morning, what to eat, and when to go to school. Her only respite from her constant loneliness and plotting about how to keep her family situation secret occurred during the periods when her father tried twelve-step meetings.

  “You’re the only thing between me and the bad stuff, pumpkin,” he’d say during those phases, taking Lauren with him everywhere like a bulletproof vest.

  But those times never lasted long. Lauren would come home from school after days or weeks of being his bodyguard and find him locked in the bedroom getting high with her mother again, the sweet smell of cocaine smoke inundating the house. Lauren would beat herself up when it happened, thinking she should have stayed home from school with him. Her feelings of frustration and self-hatred were so bad on those days she’d felt as if the inner pressure would bust her wide open.

  Unlike Lauren’s father, her mother never tried to stop smoking coke and never seemed to feel any remorse about what they were both doing to Lauren. But perhaps her mother’s total withdrawal from parenthood was better, less heartbreaking than the hope Lauren’s father generated in her, which he shattered over and over, sending her spinning every time.

  The beginning of the end came when Lauren’s father won a lawsuit, every addict’s dream. He’d been in a car crash six years before that had left him with broken bones and jump-started his addiction. Her father always told her he was going to get clean before the money from the lawsuit came, so they could live happily ever after. Of course, he couldn’t get clean, and when the money came, it wasn’t enough to make two crackhead dope fiends and their daughter live happily ever after. Plus the money attracted an entourage of stinking, conniving addicts who circled around them like restless border collies.

  So while he still had some money, Lauren’s father started copping weight, supposedly selling it, so they could have enough money left over to live happily ever after. A literal pipe dream. He told Lauren about it when he was high, talking at superspeed, licking his lips, pacing their living room. Her father and mother were their own best customers.

  Lauren’s nightmare was totally different than Emily’s, but the rupture of Emily’s family life felt all too familiar. Lauren had to remind herself to separate out her past drama from what was going on in the present or she could misread things entirely. She couldn’t tolerate Emily staying in Westchester for any length of time if Jessica wouldn’t behave like a parent. Lauren was having a hard time tolerating Emily being there at all, but she reminded herself that Emily was not reliving her own adolescence.

  “I think you’re the only one Jessica talks to,” Emily was saying now. “The rest of the time she just stays in bed.”

  “Emmie, listen, don’t worry about Jessica,” Lauren said with more confidence than she felt. “She’ll snap back, she’s a strong woman.”

  “You think?”

  “Have you ever met anyone who could stay on a StairMaster as long as her?”

  “No,” Emily laughed, a good sound to hear. “But no one would want to.”

  “Believe me, that takes a strong will. She’ll be back to her old self in no time. So just try to take care of yourself.”

  “Mom … I’ve been thinking. Will I be able to go to college?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Will we have the money?”

  “We both depended on your dad, but you don’t have to worry about money. Your father has some big cases pending, and then there’s the overall value of his partnership with Steve.”

  “When Steve finishes the cases, we’re still supposed to get Daddy’s share?”

  “Right, or Steve may want to give us a settlement instead of waiting for each case to finish. So what you need to worry about is getting your butt to high school, or there won’t be any college.”

  “Jessica told you?”

  “Mr. Manley said you cut today.”

  “I couldn’t go in.” Emily’s voice lowered, becoming watery, maybe sincere or maybe just to manipulate her way out of trouble. “I couldn’t stand the idea of people saying things to me about Daddy.”

  “The teachers are just concerned and the kids are trying to be nice.”

  “I know.”

  “Where did you go?”

  “Nowhere,” Emily responded, her voice becoming surly.

  “Emily.” Lauren’s exasperation bent the syllables. She listened to the momentary silence. “I know you tried it before, but I think you should try seeing a therapist again.”

  “But, Mom—” Emily started to protest.

  “It doesn’t have to be forever. But they can help you get
through this.”

  Emily sighed. “Okay.”

  “Great. We’ll find someone good. Jessica has some names already. So, please, baby, try not to make things any worse for yourself. Go to school tomorrow.”

  After promising to call again later, Lauren double-timed it back to the courtroom and took her seat at the prosecution bench just as the judge entered. She tried to force her daughter out of her mind for the moment. At least Emily had agreed to accept help. Now Lauren only had to swallow her pride and call Steve.

  She’d never known Steve well. By the time Brian had met Steve, her marriage to Brian had been near its end. She never met up for happy hours with Brian and his friends, pretending to be his Stepford Wife like she’d done before Brian’s cheating had become an open secret. But Brian would still come home from his playdates with Steve and tell her all about the expensive champagne they’d drunk, the yachts his friends owned, and the women who couldn’t smile with their whole faces because of premature Botox. Having powerful acquaintances made Brian feel important, but it was like a tree falling in the woods. It didn’t count unless other people knew, particularly the wife who had little respect for him.

  “They think having money is a sign of superiority,” Lauren remembered telling him once.

  “It’s not a sign of inferiority either, Lauren,” he’d say with disdain. “And I’m helping people. I don’t have to take a vow of poverty to help people.”

  Now, as much as Lauren disliked Steve, she reflected that it was comforting that Brian’s business partner had also been a friend who she and Emily could depend on. The irony wasn’t lost on Lauren, the benefit she still received from Brian’s lifestyle that she held in such low regard. She was wary of Steve though, and his help. She’d learned long ago that there was a cost for everything, and not just the price tag you saw before buying.

  CHAPTER 8