A Good Mother

by Lara Bazelon

  “Mr. who—” Dars turns, looks at Will, then turns back to Estrada. “Do I look like Mr. Ellet to you, sir? Or like Ms. Rosenberg, or Ms. Gooden? I am a federal judge. Appointed by the President, confirmed by the United States Senate. This is my courtroom. It isn’t a request, it’s an order.”

  “I’m sorry, but I won’t be able to comply with it.”

  Dars’s face and neck have turned an unhealthy scarlet and Abby, despite the gravity of the situation, cannot help but take momentary pleasure in the fact that his mask is so badly askew. If Rayshon were here, he would have fist-bumped her under the table.

  “You will comply,” Dars says, his voice raised, “or you will be held in contempt.”

  Estrada shakes his head. “Mrs. Rivera Hollis did not seek my advice for criminal purposes and there has been no fraud perpetrated on this court.”

  Dars points a shaking finger at Estrada. “Are you challenging my authority?”

  Estrada pauses for a moment, then says, “Yes, I suppose I am.”

  Dars leans in, as if to put physical force behind the words. “I am not a potted plant,” he says in a low whisper, and the sound, amplified by the microphone, is so unnerving that Abby wishes he had just yelled instead. “You don’t get to decide what I can and can’t know. You tell me what your client told you, or you go to jail. Do you understand me?”

  Abby feels Luz flinch, puts a restraining hand on her arm. She looks over at Will, who appears to have finally woken up from his stupor. He looks back at her in alarm, then trains his eyes on Estrada.

  Estrada looks several shades paler than he did a moment ago, but his voice is low and even. “My answer is still no. Your order is a violation of my ethical obligations to my client, and I don’t believe it is enforceable.”

  Dars stares at him for another moment, as if waiting for Estrada to correct himself, then slowly shakes his head. “You don’t think my order is enforceable?” He raises his gavel and slams it down. “This witness, Mr. Jorge Estrada, is hereby found in criminal contempt of court and sentenced to fifteen months imprisonment.”

  Luz makes a strangled noise in her throat and Abby is on her feet. “Your Honor, we object—”

  “You don’t have grounds to object.” Dars is yelling now, his finger pointed at her. “You are not his lawyer. Now sit down.”

  “He needs one, Your Honor. I request that the court adjourn so we can find counsel to represent—”

  “Honey, did you hear what I said? Sit down, goddammit, or you are going with him.”

  For a moment, the courtroom is utterly silent. Then Abby hears Will scramble to reach around Luz’s back, feels him grab her by the arm and pull her down into her seat. Dars points to the marshal seated behind them, and Abby turns around. Jared again, looking just as gobsmacked as he did at the bail hearing, albeit for a completely different reason. “You.” Dars makes a lifting motion with one hand. “Take the witness into custody. And you.” He points at Jared’s partner, seated beside him. “Bring Ms. Gooden back in here.”

  As Estrada slowly makes his way down from the witness stand, Jared beckons him over to the back of the courtroom. Shauna, walking inside, does a double take as she sees Estrada surrender his shoes and belt before turning around to have his hands shackled behind his back.

  Dars waits until Jared and his partner have left with Estrada, then says to Shauna, “The witness has been less than forthcoming, and so I’ve decided to give him a little time-out to think things over.”

  Shauna starts, “Your Honor—”

  “Not to worry, Ms. Gooden. It’s all to your benefit.” Dars’s face has returned to its normal color and his smile is back in place. “Mr. Estrada will remain in jail until he decides to divulge the contents of his communications with Mrs. Rivera Hollis. I have no doubt by the time trial starts next week that he’ll be singing like a nightingale. Now, do we have any other business to take up?”

  Abby and Shauna look at each other, say no at the same time.

  “Well, then,” Dars says, as he picks up his gavel and bangs it down again. “This court is adjourned.”

  Abby’s thoughts form and instantly break apart. She looks at Will, who is staring straight ahead of him as he watches Dars walk through the door to his chambers, then at Luz. Her hands are clasped, her eyes closed, her lips moving. When Abby leans toward her, she hears whispered incantations in Spanish.

  Luz is praying.

  Abby looks up, sees Shauna leaving the courtroom, and says to Will, “I’m going to try to catch her. Let’s meet back at the office.”

  * * *

  “Shauna.” Abby’s voice is too loud, echoing off the walls of the hallway. The reporters, who are milling around the elevator bank, now turn to look. A few of them call out to Abby and Shauna, asking for a word on the off chance either of them will make the stupid decision to break the gag order rule. She ignores them. “Can we?” Abby inclines her head toward the women’s bathroom. Shauna pauses for a moment, then walks toward her.

  Once inside, Abby makes sure to lock the door. They stand on opposite sides of the sink outside the single stall, after Abby checks to make sure it is empty. Shauna looks at her steadily. “Well?”

  Abby crosses her arms over her chest. “You can’t let Mr. Estrada go to jail. You know it’s wrong. Just—just withdraw your request for his testimony—”

  “That’s what you brought me in here to say. Really?”

  “Do you think,” Abby says fiercely, “that Dars would do what he just did to Jorge Estrada if he were a white man? And the way he treats both of us—” she draws her hand back and forth between them “—it’s outrageous. He is a racist, sexist, odious—”

  Shauna holds up her hand. “Do not,” she says quietly, but with barely controlled rage, “compare yourself to me.”

  “That’s not—”

  Shauna shakes her head for Abby to be quiet. “When I worked with Dars back when he was in the US Attorney’s Office, he told me that the decision to hire me made him rethink his opposition to affirmative action. Because you know, I’m so competent and articulate.” She smiles mirthlessly. “Oh, and I went to Harvard, too, just so you know. Interesting, though, that Dars makes that connection only with you.”

  “Do you think I enjoy that?” Abby can feel her voice rise in outrage. “That he attempts to imply that we are similar in any way? It makes me sick.”

  “You are. You’re both white.”

  “Jesus, Shauna. Come on.” When Shauna says nothing, just continues to stare back at her, Abby feels her face getting red. “Okay, look. I wasn’t comparing myself to you. I was just saying if we present a united front in the face of—”

  “We are not a united front. We are exactly the opposite of that, in fact. And it is in my interest—the government’s interest—for Mr. Estrada to tell the court what he knows.”

  Abby feels her stomach sink at the depth of her miscalculation, throws a Hail Mary. “You don’t think what is happening is wrong? You don’t think you have an obligation here?”

  “I think a lot of things are wrong. Including your attempt to enlist me in this—” she pauses “—righteous cause of yours.” Shauna shakes her head. “I like you, Abby. I do. But we are adversaries. Not sisters.”

  Wednesday, March 14, 2007

  11:48 p.m.

  Apartment 4F

  Culver City, California

  Will is careful closing the front door, and he takes off his shoes before stepping onto the parquet floor in the hallway.

  But Meredith has waited up for him. He hears the television in the living room, then, “Hon, is that you?”

  His heart falls, dread descending. His legs are still shaking and he stands against the wall for a moment, tensing the muscles in his calves and thighs until they are rigid.

  When he walks into the living room, his wife hits the mute button on the remo
te and Jay Leno’s braying goes quiet. She pats the space beside her on the couch for him to sit, but he can’t bear to, dropping into the leather recliner opposite her. He sees her look of hurt confusion and quickly looks away, to his socked feet.

  “You went to the gym again?” she asks.

  Will runs a hand through his wet hair, nods, tries to smile, and stops when he feels the fresh scratch on the back of his neck. Not a lie, he has gone to the gym. He has been going to the gym every night for the past three weeks. But just to shower.

  “That’s good,” she says encouragingly. “It’s supposed to help with the stress, right?”

  That’s what he had told her in the beginning, although it had never been part of his routine when preparing for any of his other trials. He feels his mouth drying at the thought of adding to the growing pile of lies. “I’m sorry, babe,” he says, “about these last few weeks, I—”

  To his horror, his voice cracks. The room momentarily blurs and he squeezes his eyes shut. Christ, what is happening to him?

  Instantly, Meredith is by his side, kneeling, her face upturned, her hazel eyes fixed steadily on his. She puts her hand on his arm, rubbing it gently, and it takes every ounce of self-control he has not to flinch. “Will, honey, what is it? I know there’s something terribly wrong.”

  Up close, Will can see her smattering of freckles, the incompletely removed bits of mascara sticking to the corners of her eyelashes, her fine, pale hair flattened slightly on one side from resting her head on the couch. This is his wife of five years, his girlfriend of ten, the not-so-distant future mother of his children. The person he has promised to love and cherish forever. Who loves and cherishes him, always has, always will.

  He longs for an answer that is not his fault, an answer that makes him the victim. I was hit by a car. I was robbed at gunpoint. I have an inoperable brain tumor.

  The truth is unspeakable. I spend every night shoving and slapping my client. I call her horrible names, and then we fuck. Luz’s word. Fuck me. Her nipples dark and swollen in his mouth, as he kneads her perfectly round ass, firm in his hands. Fuck me. Her eyes fixed on his, her cheeks burning red where he’d hit her, her panties pushed to one side, her legs wrapped tightly around him, pushing him deeper inside as he holds her down on the conference table.

  Now she no longer wears panties. Just knowing that she comes to meet him wet and ready under her skirt makes him hard. Often and in the most inappropriate moments he stiffens: waiting to meet with one of his other clients at the jail, listening when Abby updates him on some new development, taking—sweet Jesus—the quiz at the end of the mandatory online sexual harassment training for new employees. His mind turns up images of her with the relentless precision of a Vegas dealer flipping cards. A small blessing that, at least right at this moment, his feelings of guilt and the terror of being found out are enough to make his dick shrivel.

  “Will?”

  He blinks. Now it’s Meredith’s eyes that are brimming.

  “Mer,” he says weakly. He should hold her, he knows. He should press her tightly against him and finish his sentence: that the trial was less than a week away, that it would all be over soon, that afterward, everything would go back to normal. But he can’t bring himself to say the words, and the idea of touching his wife fills him with panic. She will want to make love—her word—not out of raw desire but out of a desperate need to reclaim him and feel close again.

  He does a mental inventory of his body: the other places where he has been scratched, bitten, kicked. Meredith knows that he and Luz have been practicing—that was the word he had used excitedly when he’d told her of his idea, too excited by his own brilliance, he realized now, to appreciate that she was apprehensive, as any sane spouse would be. So most of it was explicable, though maybe not the rake lines across his lower back, the purple welt near his collarbone where he saw, in the locker room mirror, the imprint of small, even teeth.

  But these problems, real as they are, are not the only reason he won’t make love to his wife. He doesn’t even know if he could get through the series of rituals that are as familiar as the way he brushes his teeth (back to front) or washes himself in the shower (top to bottom). Worse, he doesn’t want to.

  “I’m sorry,” he says again. But his voice is tired and flat, and he knows the words sound empty. “I’m not myself,” he says, and realizes how deeply true it is. He has become depraved, taken over by a craving for Luz that consumes everything else, even the basic instinct for self-preservation. The craving subsides only right after he comes, still deep inside of her, and for the rest of that night, when he sleeps like a dead man. But in the morning, the craving is back, screaming like a kettle that won’t go off. Again he thinks of Charles and his obsession with Sarah, the French lieutenant’s woman. Never has he identified so closely with someone who—he keeps having to remind himself—is a fictional character.

  A million times in the last three weeks he has told himself to stop. That he has to stop. What he is doing isn’t just a crime against his marriage, it’s a crime against his profession. If anyone found out, he would be dismissed, disbarred, disgraced. Every morning, alone in the small apartment after Meredith has left for school, he stares at his reflection in the mirror, holds the razor up to his face before it begins the first slide through the white foam.

  She’s nineteen.

  She’s your client.

  The last person she fucked, she killed.

  It’s all true, and yet somehow beside the point. The craving isn’t just a heat, it’s a voice, too. This is bigger than him, bigger than his marriage. This is about saving a woman’s life and the life of her child. These are mortal stakes. Abby, Antoine—even Paul—had approved of Will’s strategy, albeit in PG-13 form. They had understood that he and Luz are making a piece of art with the power to change the outcome of the case. And what Will understands in his more lucid moments is that his perfidy adds a kind of demented integrity to the performance—because what he is saying and doing when he acts out the death of Sergeant Travis Hollis has become a kind of absolute truth.

  Now, Will forces himself to keep looking at Meredith. “This is going to be over soon,” he says. He says this because it is true, and because it is meant to offer relief, to his wife, but to himself, as well. It will end; the case, and he prays, his craving, too, breaking like a fever, leaving Will and Meredith to go back to the way things were. But the words offer him no relief; like Charles in the aftermath of Sarah’s abrupt departure, he can think of Luz’s absence from his life only as an incomprehensible loss.

  2006

  Tuesday, May 2, 2006

  12:36 p.m.

  Willowick, Ohio

  From: sexxygirljax@yahoo.com

  To: travman@hotmail.com

  u motherfucker. she’s pregnant and I found out cuz she posts a pic w/ u grinning like an ape on Facebook? all this time I’ve been sending sonograms and belly pix and titty pix to ur lying ass. You done me dirty, t, real dirty, and u are gonna pay.

  Thursday, May 4, 2006

  5:28 p.m.

  Ramstein Air Base

  Ramstein-Miesenbach, Germany

  From: travman@hotmail.com

  To: sexxygirljax@yahoo.com

  do u think i planned this??? do u think I want this??? my life is hell u just dont know im praying to get re-deployed 2 get out and maybe end everything for good by getting blown the fuck up.

  and yea, jaxx, i know all about ur little FB friendship cuz she told me you been posting pix all about ur dr. appts w/ happy baby daddy lance and flashing around sum bling he got u and im the liar??? Or who knows maybe that is the truth after all and u been playin me.

  2007

  Monday, March 19, 2007

  8:30 a.m.

  United States District Court

  for the Central District of California

  Standing at the lectern and prete
nding to organize the notes she won’t be using, Abby sneaks a sidelong glance at the jurors as they settle into their seats. Eight men, four women. The oldest, a retired Black nurse with a tight bun of gray hair and an oversize purse, is seventy-two; the youngest, a Latino computer programmer with several days of stubble and a nose ring, is twenty-four. Everyone else—a real estate agent, a screenwriter, a web designer, an accountant, a community college student, a dentist, a gym teacher, two stay-at-home moms, and one stay-at-home dad—is white.

  Abby does not know what to make of Luz’s chances with these twelve people. But in the end, she’d had little choice in who sat in the box. Even with the gag order, the massive amount of pretrial publicity left many with firm ideas about Luz—in the main, that she was guilty—and most of the people who hadn’t watched the coverage on the news or read about it had their own reasons for wanting out. All day yesterday they had sat while Dars had asked the long list of questions Abby and Shauna had submitted. “Have you ever been a victim of domestic violence or known someone who has been?”

  “What are your feelings about the war in Iraq?”

  “This is a murder case. You are going to see pictures of the victim’s body that you may find gruesome. Will that affect your ability to be impartial?”

  One after the other, the potential jurors had timidly raised their hands and asked to go to sidebar, where they whispered their secrets as the lawyers huddled around the court reporter. I was raped in college. My son died when his Humvee hit an IED. I’m afraid of knives. I’m afraid of blood. I can’t look at a dead body.

  Watching Dars’s fatherly demeanor, listening to his sympathetic murmurs as he excused one after the other and politely instructed the clerk to call out a new round of names, Abby could almost doubt she’d heard correctly his earlier announcement, delivered when it was just the lawyers in the courtroom. “Mr. Estrada has decided to remain silent and in custody,” he informed them, his index finger stabbing in Luz’s direction as if to formally assign her direct responsibility for this travesty. Luz, no longer needing to be told, stared down, her face expressionless as Abby and Will exchanged a quick, relieved glance over her head. Within twenty-four hours of Dars’s decision to jail Estrada, they had contacted an attorney who had filed an emergency appeal, denied the same day in an unsigned order. Every day since, they had waited for Estrada to break.