by Michael Nava
“Count one is dismissed,” Judge Ryan said. “The defendant’s plea to voluntary manslaughter is entered into the minutes of the court. How much time for the sentencing hearing, Mr. Rios?”
“I only need a week, Your Honor.”
“You have it,” she said.
I heard my sister quietly weeping.
“Mr. Rios,” the judge said, “I’m going to give your family a few minutes together before I remand the defendant.”
“Thank you, Judge.”
Vicky turned to the gallery and said, “Angel? Mama?”
Her voice catching, Judge Ryan said, “We’re in recess.”
Late that night, after we had put Angel to bed, Elena and I sat on my deck, where she polished off the last of Josh’s Scotch. The night was warm and the blaze of city lights made a red glow in the sky as if from a gigantic furnace.
“I think that’s the first time she ever called me Mama,” Elena said, rattling the ice in her glass. “What will you do at this sentencing hearing, Henry?”
“Try to persuade the judge to give Vicky the least time possible.”
“The judge seems persuadable,” she said. “Do you want me to testify?”
“It would really help if you could track down someone from the women’s shelter she was staying at in San Francisco before she came to you.”
She nodded. “Yes, I have it written down somewhere. Who else will testify?”
“Vicky, of course—”
“What about her privilege against self-incrimination?”
“She waived that right when she pled. Judge Ryan will want to hear her story. She’s really the only one who can tell it. What I need is to support it. I’ll call Socorro Cerda, Reverend Ortega, maybe Edith Rosen. I’ve also got a call in to Pete’s last lawyer in San Francisco, see if I can get any useful information from her to rough him up a little.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sometimes you really do have to blame the victim. This is one of those times.”
“Henry, remember, Angel will be there. Whatever you say about his father will remain with him for the rest of his life.”
I hadn’t thought about that. “You’re right,” I admitted. “I’ll be careful.”
“It’s odd,” she said. “I don’t really have much of an impression of Pete. There must have been some good in him. She did keep going back to him.”
“Aren’t you the one who said it was because she dreamed of creating the family she didn’t have for herself?”
She sipped her drink. “Ironically, she has created a family. The four of us. Joanne. I suppose this is what they call a nontraditional family.”
“What other kind of family could you create out of material like us?”
She looked at me. “And John DeLeon? Will he be part of it?”
“That remains to be seen,” I replied. “He’s up at a monastery in Santa Barbara with his dad, on a retreat. He said he’d pray for us. For him and me, I mean.”
“You sound skeptical.”
“I don’t think God concerns Himself with the details of my love life.”
After a moment, she said, “What do you think God is but the opportunity to love other people? If God’s not interested in those details, then God doesn’t exist.”
“That doesn’t sound like the God I grew up with.”
She smiled. “Then maybe you need a new God.”
17.
ELENA HAD FOUND A COUPLE of schools she thought might be suitable for Angel, and the next morning they went for a preliminary look while I worked. Half-a-dozen calls to friends in San Francisco yielded the name of Pete Trujillo’s public defender, Morgan Yee. I reached her voice mail and left a message. Then I phoned Edith Rosen to ask her to be my expert witness on battered women’s syndrome at the sentencing hearing. I wanted Edith because ordinarily she testified as the court’s expert and commanded more respect than the usual hired guns who made up the expert witness circuit and would say basically what they were paid to say. BWS was a little out of her field of expertise, but I doubted that the D.A. would challenge her qualifications.
“You remember I had my doubts about whether Vicky was battered,” she said.
“She killed her husband after he beat her up,” I said. “Doesn’t that change your opinion?”
“I’d have to know all the facts,” she said. “This isn’t exactly my area. There are more qualified experts.”
“I want you,” I said. “Judge Ryan trusts you and you already know Vicky. Will you at least read the police reports before you make up your mind? I can fax them to you now and you could let me know on Monday.”
“All right” she said. “I can do that. How is everyone bearing up?”
“We’ve decided Angel will live with me while his mother’s in prison.”
“How do you feel about that?”
“Are you asking me as a friend or a therapist?”
She chuckled. “Both.”
“I’m anxious and excited,” I said. “I want to do right by him, but I’m not entirely sure I know how.”
“You can’t know that in advance,” she observed. “Raising a kid is the ultimate exercise in trial and error.” She paused. “The issue I see with Angel is that you’re coming into his life pretty late.”
“I know,” I said. “I also know that he’s had the kind of childhood I usually read about in probation reports, but you’re the one who said he was invulnerable.”
“Surviving trauma doesn’t mean you’re not affected by it,” she said.
“You have any idea what I can expect?”
“There are effects of trauma that don’t become apparent until the traumatizing experience is over. I know you’ll give him a stable and loving home, but don’t be surprised if he responds by acting out.”
“Acting out how?”
“That’s the question,” she said. “One of my kids is in a really good foster home, with fine, experienced foster parents. They discovered she was hoarding food in her room. I’m not talking about candy bars, I mean a pound of lunchmeat, an entire loaf of bread, cans of soup. Her mother was a crackhead and used to leave the girl alone for two or three days at a time without any food. Now that she has access to it, she stockpiles it. Whatever Angel didn’t get, he’ll be greedy for.”
“I don’t think Vicky ever did anything like that to him.”
“I agree,” Edith said. “From what I saw, she was very loving, but I wouldn’t say she was exactly parental. In a way, she and Angel seemed more like siblings than mother and son.”
Or more like conspirators, I thought, remembering the day I had watched them through the mirror at the jail.
“You’re not being very reassuring,” I said.
She laughed. “Not to worry. He is a very bright and resilient boy. If you want, I’d be happy to work with him.”
“I would be grateful.”
“All right,” she said. “You fax me the police reports on Vicky and we’ll talk again on Monday. By the way, Henry, how is your health?”
“I see the doc next week, but I feel almost my old self.”
“You seemed to improve dramatically after Vicky and Angel came into your life,” she observed.
“Don’t you start giving me the family values lecture, too,” I said. “I get enough of that from my sister and John.”
“All right, dear,” she said. “Sometime we’ll talk about denial. Good-bye.”
The doorbell buzzed. I went down the hall to the front door and looked out the peephole. A white-haired, slightly stooped old man stared back. He was wearing a flannel shirt and gray work pants, but even if the clothes hadn’t tipped me off, I would have known who he was from his slanting green eyes. I opened the door.
“Hello,” I said.
“Mr. Rios? I’m Armando DeLeon, John’s dad.”
His voice was deep but suprisingly soft, with a rich timbre I associated with singers and public radio anchors. He spoke English with the rolled “r” and Spanish
intonation of a first-generation immigrant.
“Is John all right?”
“Yes,” he said. “He told me about you. I wanted to meet you.”
“Please come in.”
I took him to my office, thinking that the somber room would level the disadvantage I felt with this handsome old man. He did not appear to be angry, but I felt the tension creeping up my spine into my shoulders. Why was he here? Had John sent him? Or had he come on his own to plead the case for his son’s heterosexuality? He stood for a moment, looking at my degrees, the bookshelves crammed with case reports and treatises and the piles of transcripts.
“Johnny said you were a lawyer. Criminal lawyer, yes?”
“That’s right. Have a seat, Mr. DeLeon. Can I get you some coffee?”
“No, gracias” he said, lowering himself slowly to the sofa. “I came to talk.”
John had said his father was in his seventies; now I saw they were a workingman’s seventies, hard years that had left a worn-out body. He settled into the couch with a grimace.
“Did John send you?”
“John’s not like that,” he replied. “He says what he has to say himself.”
I sat down at the opposite end of the couch and decided to get this over with. “I bet he got that from you.”
I thought that, for an instant, I detected a twinkle in his eyes, but his expression remained somber.
“John says he’s in love with you,” he said, without any kind of emphasis.
“John’s old enough to know what he feels and for whom,” I said, sounding tongue-twistingly lawyerly even to myself. “I love John, too. I’m sorry if that causes problems, but really this is between him and me.”
It was a challenge and I expected some heat in return, but in his mild, rich voice, he said, “Johnny’s my youngest. Thank God, because if he had come first, no more kids for me. When he was a baby, he almost died. The whooping cough, they called it. When he was five, he ran out into the street to catch a baseball and a car hit him.” He touched a spot on his forehead above his right eye. “You can still see the scar. Playing baseball, he was always breaking something until he finally had to quit. That broke his heart. He went wild. His mother suffered. I wasn’t proud of him. Then he got married, had kids, stopped drinking. His mother thought he had straightened himself out. Next thing, he leaves his wife for a man.” He shook his head. “His mother begged him to go to a priest for—what’s is the word? Para tirar el diablo.”
“Exorcism?”
He nodded. “Me, I knew.”
“You knew? What?”
“I knew what my son was. I knew when he was a boy.”
“He likes women, too.” I would have to tell John how I defended his bisexuality to his father.
“Con respecto, señor, usted no es mujer.”
John was right, in Spanish his father was not a tired old man but a formidable patriarch.
“No,” I agreed. “I’m not a woman. How did you know about John?”
Mr. DeLeon shrugged. “My brother was like John.” He looked at me. “My father found him with another boy. My brother hanged himself. I cut his body down. My brother was a good boy, like Johnny. A good boy. I don’t understand why he is un homosexual, and if I could make him different, I would. Pero what happened to my brother will never happen to my son. God gives us children to love, not to hurt.”
“Why are you telling me this, Mr. DeLeon?”
“I don’t want John to stay away from his family because he doesn’t think you will be welcome. In my house, you will always be treated with respect.”
We looked at each other for a moment. He was sizing me up.
“Thank you,” I said. “I will always be respectful in your house and with your family.”
He nodded, then stood up with a grunt. “Damn arthritis. John doesn’t have to know I came to see you.”
“I won’t tell him.”
I walked him to the door where he stopped, turned and shook my hand. “Pues, hasta luego, Rico.”
“Mr. DeLeon,” I said. He hobbled to his car and drove away.
After he left, I scribbled a note for Elena and drove to John’s house. His red truck was parked in the driveway.
“Henry? I thought I heard a car.” He was standing at the railing, looking down. “I just tried to call you. How did you know I was back?”
“ESP. Can I come up?”
He started down the steps as I started up, and we met halfway. He was barefoot, wearing old khakis and a black tank top. Above his right eye was a faint scar. I had never noticed it before. He had a couple of days’ growth of beard and his eyes were even sleepier than usual.
“I missed you,” I said.
Something in my tone alarmed him. “Are you okay?”
“I missed you,” I repeated and embraced him. I held the weight of his body against mine, felt the warmth of his skin and rasp of his breath against my neck, and I was suffused with the joy that comes when everything is as it should be. “I’m glad you’re back.”
He stroked my hair. “I want us to be together. That’s what I was calling to tell you.”
John said, “You sure you have to go?”
He was lying naked on the bed, his hands cupping his head on the pillows, watching me dress. I paused and studied him. I remembered some of the boys I’d slept with in my twenties and thirties, with their hard, perfect bodies, and while perfection has its attractions, it isn’t really lovable. John had golden skin and big arms, but the muscles in his chest sagged a little and there were pockets of flab at his waist and a mesh of fine wrinkles above his eyelids, reminding me whenever I looked at him that among the reasons I loved him were that he spent his days in the sun, loved to eat and was halfway through life.
“You’re looking at me like you’re taking inventory,” he said.
“You’re beautiful.”
“Don’t embarrass me.”
I sat at the edge of the bed. “I love your body.”
“I love yours,” he said. He chuckled. “Man, that’s a hard thing to say to another guy.”
“I know, but I had to tell you at least this once.”
“You tell me every time you look at me,” he said. He started to unbutton my shirt.
“I can’t stay,” I said, stopping him. “Elena will be expecting me. We have to make a decision about where to send Angel to school, and after dinner I have to drive her to the airport. Why don’t you come and eat with us?”
“I have a better idea. Bring your sister and Angel back here and I’ll make dinner.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “Sure. Angel can hang out and watch a game with me while you take your sister to the airport, and then you can come back and we’ll all camp out here tonight.”
“Angel and me stay here?”
“He can sleep in my son’s room.”
“I don’t know, John.”
He frowned. “Henry, what are you trying to protect Angel from? He knows we sleep together. He knows we’re boyfriends.”
“I don’t want him to think there’s some kind of competition going on between you and him for my attention.”
“In the first place, Angel and me are buddies,” he said. “In the second place, I know when to back off.” He studied my face. “You have to get over this, you know. If Angel thinks you’re ashamed of who you are, he won’t respect you.”
“Believe me, John, I know that,” I said. “I’m surprised I feel this way. I thought I’d worked out being gay a long time ago.”
“It’s one thing when you’re on your own,” he said. “It’s another thing when you’ve got kids because you don’t know how something’s going to affect them and you want to protect them against anything that can hurt them.” He touched my hand. “Seeing two people who love each other can’t hurt him.”
“You’re right,” I said. “This can’t hurt him. When am I going to meet your kids, John?”
His face darkened for an instant. “My boy comes home f
rom Spain in a couple of weeks and he’ll be staying with me till school starts. We’ll all go to a game or something. He’ll be cool. With my daughter, it’s gonna take awhile, Henry. Maybe a long while.” He smiled. “We’ll work it out. So, you coming back?”
“Yeah, but we’ll have to leave early in the morning, because we’re going to church.”
“Church? When did that happen?”
I explained about Reverend Ortega.
“That’s not until ten,” he said. “I’ll get you out of here by then. I have to go to church myself with my mom and dad.”
Thinking of his dad, I said, “I’d like to go with you sometime.”
“Really? That would be great. All right, take off, man, so I can figure out what to feed the Rios family.”
“Can I bring anything?”
“Something chocolate for dessert.”
Angel was already excited about staying over at John’s house, but when he saw it, he could scarcely contain himself.
“It’s like a treehouse,” he exclaimed when we pulled up in the driveway.
John called down from the railing, “Hey, Angelito. Elena. Come on up.”
Angel clambered up the stairs while Elena and I followed at a more sedate pace, finishing our conversation about the schools she had visited. The most promising was a boarding school in Pasadena that had a strong commitment to “multicultural diversity.”
“Particularly,” Elena observed, “if the multiculturally diverse can pay the fifteen-thousand-dollar-a-year tuition.”
“That’s more than Stanford charged me for law school,” I said. “Of course, that was a hundred years ago.”
“On the plus side” she said, “the school takes in a lot of scholarship students. Black kids from the inner city and quite a few Central American kids, and they’re used to working with students like Angel who have some ground to make up. They also really want him.”
“Yeah, I bet a mom in jail has a lot of cachet. What did he think?”
From above us, we heard Angel giggling at something John had said.
“He’s going to struggle at any school he goes to for a while,” she said. “At this place, there will be kids struggling along with him and some wonderful teachers. What did he think? He loved the fact that they have a baseball team.”
