A Good Mother

by Lara Bazelon

  They eat in silence, the mood grim. After Jackie, Shauna had called her final two witnesses, ending on a triumphant note. The first, a mousy-looking woman from Sprint PCS in an ’80s dress-for-success outfit complete with a neck-bow, had testified to the ten phone calls between Luz and Estrada that spanned ten months, ending with the final ninety-seven-minute call on October 10. Over Will’s objection, Shauna had moved Estrada’s billing records into evidence. Without Estrada, there was no context for any of it, but looking at the jury, Will wondered if that made things worse. The absence of information was the absence of an innocent explanation, and there was no getting around the fact that Luz had talked to her lawyer at great length seventy-two hours before stabbing her husband to death.

  Then there was Henry Chu, the twentysomething representative from Servicemembers’ Group Life Insurance; with his crew cut and crisp answers. Chu had met with Travis stateside in 2002 to fill out the original $400,000 life insurance policy naming Travis’s parents as the beneficiaries. He had also taken Travis’s call on September 25, 2006, requesting to change the beneficiary, and duly carried out Travis’s instructions, faxing the paperwork to Germany and receiving it back with Travis’s and Ravel’s signatures a few days later on September 28.

  The dates landed like stones and Shauna drove home the timeline by posting it on the computer screens. Luz’s second-to-last call with Estrada had been placed on September 24, 2006. Twenty-four hours separated that call and Travis’s call to Chu asking to remove his parents as the beneficiaries and replace them with Luz. On cross, Will had done his best. They had introduced Travis’s father’s death certificate into evidence and Will had gotten Chu to admit that the policy ought to be changed under those circumstances. They had also introduced Cristina’s birth certificate, and Chu had stated that, yes, new parents often changed their policies shortly before the birth of children and no, minors could not be named directly and yes, many service members did name their spouses. But the timing. There was no getting around the fact that Travis had made no effort to change his policy after marrying Luz a year earlier, or that nearly a year had passed since his father’s death.

  Will had asked, “If the named beneficiary is convicted of causing the death of the insured, can she collect the proceeds from the life insurance policy?” Chu had replied no.

  “In that circumstance,” Will continued, “the proceeds would go to the alternate named beneficiary, Travis Hollis’s mother, correct?” To which Chu had replied that would in fact be the case.

  But it was Shauna who had the final word on redirect.

  “What would happen if the named beneficiary is charged with murder and found not guilty because she claimed she acted in self-defense?”

  “There is nothing in the policy that would prevent her from collecting.”

  “Meaning she would receive the entirety of the $400,000?”

  “She would, yes.”

  * * *

  When Will speaks now, the sound of his voice is almost startling in the thick silence.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he says, “about the jury instructions.”

  Abby and Antoine look at each other quizzically. Antoine says, as if speaking her thoughts out loud, “It’s a little early for that, man. We haven’t even put on our case.”

  “Luz is our case,” Will points out, “and she starts this afternoon. We could be done as early as Friday.”

  “The jury instructions are the least of our problems,” Abby says icily, amazed that Will would want to talk about something so mundane. Their entire case is about to rise and fall on Luz’s ability to tell her story in a way that will explain how someone with no defensive injuries, tremendous financial incentive, and explosive evidence that her husband had an affair and another baby could have acted without any premeditation or intent to kill. Twinkle twinkle little star. She shoots a glance at Luz, willing her to turn off the music.

  “And anyway,” she adds, “Dars will give all the standard ones, that’s what they all do.”

  “Maybe we don’t want the standard ones,” Will says. “Shauna’s going to ask for the jury to consider every possible formulation of the murder charge—first-degree, second-degree, voluntary manslaughter, and involuntary manslaughter. What if we say no. The jury can convict on first-degree or nothing. No compromise, no middle ground.”

  How I wonder what you are. Abby stares at Will. “That’s insane.”

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot,” Will says evenly. “First-degree was always a reach. I don’t think Shauna’s proved it. But the other counts?” He shrugs. “Criminally negligent homicide—she overreacted to the threat with too much force. Manslaughter? She acted in the heat of passion. After the medical testimony, Jackie, and these last two witnesses, there’s a real risk of conviction on either of those counts, even on second degree. So I say we give them no choice.”

  “No, you say we give them two choices, and one of them is to send her to prison for the rest of her life. That is reckless, that is wrong, and we are not doing it.” Abby looks to Antoine for support, but his eyes are on Will and from his expression she can tell he’s giving it serious consideration.

  Will’s eyes are on Luz. “Your grandmother is dying. You don’t have any other family. If you go down on any count the prosecutor is allowed to argue to the jury, you are going to prison. Maybe for three years, maybe for five, maybe for fifteen, which means Cristina will be taken away and raised by Travis’s family. Your best chance to keep your baby is to do what I’m telling you.”

  Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.

  “That is not true.” But even as Abby says this, she knows there will be no way to convince Will because she hasn’t told him about her visit to the jail and she doesn’t intend to. She looks pointedly at Luz, wishing she hadn’t been so equivocal when Luz had asked her if the legal trick with Estrada would work. “You know that’s not true.”

  Luz is looking back and forth between Abby and Will. “It could be,” she says quietly. “And it is true that I’ll be separated from Cristina if they find me guilty.”

  “This is not her decision,” Abby says to Will.

  “It is if you and I can’t agree.”

  Abby laughs harshly. “What—you think the tie goes to the client? That isn’t how it works.”

  “You want an acquittal, Abby? This is how we get there.”

  “Antoine?” Abby looks to him for help, but he’s shaking his head.

  “I don’t weigh in on the legal questions, you know that. You want me to get Paul?”

  “No, I don’t want you to get Paul,” she snaps. As if that was an option at this point. “What I want is for my client not to spend the rest of her life in a cage.” Abby turns back to Luz, trying for a softer tone. “Listen to me. We could beat the lesser included offenses. And even if we don’t, it’s not the end of your life. Cristina will visit you in prison and when you get out—”

  “I’m not going to prison.” Luz continues to rock the carrier seat in an uninterrupted rhythm, the baby sleeping peacefully throughout. The song ends, starts again. Twinkle twinkle little star.

  “This is her decision, Abby,” Will says, in a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger tone that makes her want to scratch his eyes out, because whatever the legal rules say it is obviously the right answer. It is Luz’s life.

  Luz looks at Cristina for a long moment, and then at Will before turning back to Abby. “I overrule you.”

  Thursday, March 22, 2007

  1:30 p.m.

  United States District Court

  for the Central District of California

  “The defense calls Luz Rivera Hollis.”

  These are Abby’s words. They want the jury’s eyes on Luz, and so had delayed the moment when Will would have to stand up. One surprise at a time. The jurors are still adjusting to the sight of a baby’s crib—complete w
ith a plastic baby doll and white blanket—situated incongruously on the green-carpeted rectangle separating the judge’s dais from the defense and prosecution tables.

  Known as The Well, it is a sacred space that for security reasons can be entered only with judicial permission. Older attorneys gleefully tell tales of the good old days when the US Marshals would tackle novice lawyers who breached the invisible barrier and strode up to the bench unannounced. Getting permission for this setup had been a headache involving additional security officers, who are now seated in the front row and stationed discreetly along the back wall behind Dars.

  Luz walks alone to the witness stand, even more slight-seeming than usual in a man-size white tee shirt and shapeless sweatpants. Her long black hair is tied back in a loose ponytail, the shorter strands lifting and settling around her face as she moves. Bare face. Bare feet. Behind him, Will can hear the murmurs from the packed courtroom. Media coverage, which had escalated when Jackie testified, has reached a whole new level. This was the main show.

  Will watches the jurors watching her. For days they’ve been looking at Luz, but only head-on and chest-up, flat and flimsy as a paper doll. Utterly silent. And now here she is, fully realized in a way that Will and Abby have been doing everything they can to suggest she was on that night.

  He sees Shauna tense, imagines her considering some way to object already, and feels some mixture of scorn and pity. Lady, you have no idea.

  Luz says her name, puts her hand on the Bible, and repeats the clerk’s words about the truth and nothing but. She sits down, head bowed, hands in her lap, twisting at her wedding ring.

  Will stands, removes his suit coat and drops it over the back of the chair. He can’t remember the last time he was this jacked up with adrenaline. His blood isn’t pulsing, it’s sizzling in his veins. The jurors are looking at him now, their eyes widening in surprise. Behind him, he hears murmuring from the packed gallery.

  Will bypasses the lectern in strides longer than he’d usually take and plants himself directly in front of the witness box, shoulders squared.

  “What am I wearing?”

  Luz looks at him, her eyes dark and enormous. “Wrangler jeans,” she whispers, “a brown belt, and a Pearl Jam tee shirt.”

  “Speak up. Now, why am I dressed this way?”

  Luz leans into the microphone. “Because that’s what—that’s what Travis was wearing the night he died.”

  “Are these his actual clothes?”

  She shakes her head. “He’s bigger than you and his actual clothes are—they’re evidence.”

  Black and stiff from having absorbed a geyser of blood. But, of course, Shauna has made sure that the jury knows this already. How many times had Will objected when their positions were reversed? Cumulative, waste of time, unduly prejudicial. Those had been his arguments, rejected by Dars. The jury had seen all of it, even gotten to pass around the horribly crusted plastic-bagged pieces—what is left of the tee shirt that had been slit in two when the doctors cut it off Travis’s body.

  “How much bigger was Sergeant Hollis than me?”

  “Two inches taller and about eighty-five pounds heavier.” Luz had measured and weighed Will herself, using—God help him—the scale Meredith kept in their bathroom, the tape measure she stored in her sewing box.

  “What are you wearing?”

  “One of Travis’s tee shirts that I kept.” Luz’s eyes are glittering now. She swallows and Will can feel it in his own throat, the enormity of what she is forcing down. “A pair of sweats I used to wear when I was heavier. Right after the baby.”

  “That is how you were dressed the night your husband died?”

  “Yes.”

  Will looks at Dars. “At this time, we ask the court to permit the witness to step down.” Dars’s eyebrow goes up, and Will takes a breath. “For demonstrative purposes.”

  Shauna is on her feet, as Will knew she would be, a mind-numbing list of objections shooting from her mouth. Improper, no foundation, relevance, prejudice. Again he looks at Dars, tensing. You let the government put on their show. Now it’s our turn. All along he has been betting on Dars—that he won’t dare refuse because it will allow them to once again raise the issue of his bias—but if Will has bet wrong, it’s game over.

  “Overruled.”

  Luz descends the steps and stands rigid facing Will, her face unreadable. He feels a rush of affection, a need to offer some kind of reassurance, but they are firmly in role now and his job is to crush her.

  Keeping his eyes fixed on her face, Will backs up to the low swinging door that separates the courtroom from the spectator benches. “Do you know the distance between the witness stand and where I am now?”

  “Twenty feet.”

  “Is that approximately the length of the hallway of the house you shared with Sergeant Hollis on the base in Germany?”

  “Yes.”

  Without moving his body, Will shifts his gaze to the bench. “We seek permission to use the items already entered into evidence. The steak knife, the flower vase, the cordless phone, and the moving boxes. We ask that the government provide these items to the witness to set up in the appropriate places.”

  That request draws another slew of objections from Shauna. Will says nothing, and after a pause, Dars says, “So ordered.”

  A silence gathers as Shauna stacks the boxes in front of Luz and puts the other objects on top of them. Will waits until she retakes her seat, then walks Luz through the steps of setting the scene. In response to curt commands from Will, she silently places one of the smaller boxes close to Will to serve as the tiny hallway table, then puts a vase—they had bought a replica to replace the smashed one—on top of it. After each action, Will says, “Let the record reflect,” and intones aloud what she has done. After getting Dars’s permission, they repeat the steps in the baby’s room: at Will’s instruction, Luz identifies the crib, the baby, and the phone, which she puts down on the floor.

  When Luz has taken her original place twenty feet away from him and restacked the remaining cardboard boxes beside her, he says, “What are those?”

  “The actual boxes we used to move. I was packing to leave Travis. Some of the boxes I had never gotten a chance to open so I was reopening them.”

  “Why?”

  “To see if there were things I could take out to make more space for Cristina’s things. That’s what I was doing when Travis came home from the party.”

  “What time was that?”

  “A little before three in the morning.”

  “Why were you awake?”

  They have practiced this answer a thousand times, and yet she seems to stumble, staring at Will blankly for a moment before answering in a halting voice. “He hadn’t come home. I had fallen asleep around 11:30, but then I woke up around 2:00 and he still wasn’t there. Cristina was crying. She was hungry, so I fed her and put her back down, but afterward, I couldn’t go back to sleep.”

  “Why not?”

  She lifts her shoulders slightly. “He hadn’t returned my calls since the first one. I had called him starting around 10:30, six, maybe seven times. I didn’t know where he was.”

  “Were you worried?”

  “I was—I was a lot of things.” She looks down, twists again at her wedding ring. “Worried, upset, scared.”

  “Because of the email messages from Jackie?”

  Her lips tighten. “Not about what was in them as much as what I was going to do. What I was going to say, I mean. When he got home.”

  “Which was what?”

  “That Cristina and I were going back to California. That I had called my grandmother and she had said it was okay to move back in with her for a while, with Cristina, and so...” Luz’s voice trails off.

  “So that was your plan,” Will prompts.

  “Yes,” she says. “As soon as my grandmo
ther could send me money for the tickets.”

  “Okay,” Will says. “Show me how you were reopening the boxes when your husband got home.”

  She crouches down on her knees and moves to open one of the boxes.

  “No,” he says. “You weren’t using your hands. What were you using?”

  A shock of loose hair falls across her face when she looks up at him. She turns her head and gestures at the steak knife lying in a plastic sheath on the floor beside one of the boxes, caked to the handle in a rust of dried blood. She hesitates. Without access to the actual weapon, they have always used a toy version to practice.

  “Pick it up.”

  She closes her fingers over the handle and stares at it.

  “Pick it up,” he says again loudly, and she does, then pantomimes sawing through the tape on the boxes.

  “Then what?”

  She puts the knife down. “I heard Travis outside. He was trying to use his key but he couldn’t get it to work in the lock. It used to stick sometimes. He started banging on the door and cursing.”

  “What curse words did he say?”

  “Shit. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. Shit. Fuck.”

  Will lets the words hang there, waiting for her to go on.

  “I ran to open the door because I didn’t want him to wake the baby. I think he was surprised when it gave way like that because he kind of stumbled into me.”