by KG MacGregor
“I’ve got to hand it to Anna, though. She’s wanted me to quit work from day one, and she didn’t even gloat. Not one single ‘I told you so.’”
“So you’re out the door the second this trial wraps up?”
Lily nodded emphatically. “A woman of leisure.”
Chapter 9
Anna released Alice’s car seat from the seat belt, pausing as usual to inhale her glorious scent. Little boys were delightful in their own way, but she secretly hoped for one of these. The odds were good—three out of four—they would have at least one girl. She had even settled on a name.
As she fussed with the hooks and straps of the baby carrier, Andy helped Jonah with his car seat and both boys scooted out the other door, eager for the fun awaiting them on the Santa Monica Pier. “Can Jonah and me drive the cars?”
“You both can do everything if you’re good listeners,” Lily said gently. When the boys were together, it was especially important to set the rules early. They could be out of control in no time.
“And what happens if you’re not?” Anna asked.
“Andy gets a whipping,” Jonah said with a snicker.
“I do not!”
Lily shot her an incredulous look and turned back to Jonah. “What do you know about whippings?”
“Marcus—he’s my friend—he gets them when he’s bad.”
“We don’t give whippings. But if you aren’t good listeners, you don’t get to ride on the rides. Is that clear?” Lily pressed both boys to answer that they understood.
Anna situated the car seat onto the stroller and pushed it through the parking lot as Lily held hands with the boys. This would be their life soon, except one of them would walk with Andy while the other pushed a double stroller. Every single errand or trip to see family and friends would be like today, a gigantic production in which she had to double-check that everyone was secure, and that everything they could possibly need to raise children was loaded into the diaper bag.
First stop was the carousel, where Lily stood watch over Alice while Anna got the boys situated.
“Take the blue one, Mom,” Andy shouted, pointing to the brightly painted horse closest to Jonah’s. “I can ride by myself.”
Had it been only Andy, she would have stepped off altogether and let him ride alone, but she didn’t trust her nephew to stay put once the ride started. She loved Jonah dearly, all the while thanking her lucky stars for Andy’s calm and quiet demeanor. At least Kim’s puppy ploy had worked, according to Hal. Jonah was sleeping better, and so was everyone else…everyone but Peanut, who was getting a much needed break today.
Andy insisted on two rides so he could try a different horse, but then they moved on to the arcade. With all the bells and sirens of the video games blaring, Lily pushed the sleeping Alice on through to the rear exit. Anna herded the boys toward the age-appropriate games, but they lost interest the second Andy glimpsed the bumper cars through the open rear door.
She leaned over the rail and watched as Andy carefully selected his car, one exactly like all the others but for its blazing orange paint. Jonah was less discriminating, choosing the closest, which he used to ram Andy as soon as the power engaged. No matter how Andy maneuvered he could not escape his cousin’s attacks, and when the ride finished he was in tears.
“It’s part of the game, pal. That’s why they call it bumper cars.”
“But I wanted to drive.”
She explained to Jonah that Andy enjoyed the cars for a different reason and sent them back for another, more peaceful turn. Behind her, Lily had struck up a conversation with another woman, obviously pregnant, whose small daughter was driving a bumper car as well. She felt a pang of envy—not jealousy—just a wish that she could share the kinship between the two women, even though they were total strangers to one another. Lily waved in her direction and in a matter of seconds the woman left her to stand at the rail.
With the boys engrossed in their ride, she joined Lily on the bench. “You made a friend.”
“Not exactly.” She kicked off her slip-on sneakers and shifted the stroller so that Alice’s face was shaded. “We started talking about our due dates and I told her that Alice was actually my niece, and then I pointed to you and the boys. She asked if you were Alice’s mother and I told her no, that you were my wife. Things went downhill from there.”
Anna glared at the woman, who had plucked her daughter from the ride and was heading back through the arcade. “She actually said something about us?”
“No, she didn’t say jack shit,” she huffed, lowering her voice for the curse word. “She just got up and walked off.”
“Wish I’d known. I would have blown you a kiss.”
“And if you’d come over here, I would have shoved my tongue down your throat.”
“Now you tell me.” Lily had taught her not to waste energy on the bigotry of others, just to laugh it off and move on. “Say, did you happen to notice how nicely the X3 handled two car seats? Pretty nifty, huh?”
“Maybe that’s what you should borrow when it’s your turn to pick up all the kids.”
Anna had to hand it to her. Her mind was made up and she wasn’t taking no for an answer, so it was no longer a question of if they would get a minivan, but when. Just this morning, Lily had cut out an ad for a Honda Odyssey from the LA Times and left it on her placemat at breakfast. “What’s so special about the Odyssey?”
“I like the seat configuration. Andy can have the whole backseat to himself, or if he feels left out he can move up and sit between the babies.”
“He turns six this summer. He can ride in the front seat then.”
“Hmm…I hadn’t thought about that.”
“Have you seen the Routan?”
“No, who makes it?”
“D’oh! I do. There’s probably one in the showroom down at the VW lot right now.”
Lily’s face brightened as Andy and Jonah emerged from the ride. She slipped on her shoes, and with a barely perceptible grunt, pushed herself off the bench. “As long as it has the SEL Premium package with running boards…I’m not particular about the color.”
Anna took exactly four steps behind them before realizing she had been set up.
Lily gritted her teeth and rode out the contraction in her lower abdomen.
“All rise!”
The change in position was just what she needed, and her cramping dissipated. Braxton Hicks contractions they were called, perfectly normal for someone entering the third trimester. In her office she managed the pain by walking around for a few minutes, and at home she stretched out on her side. Neither of those were options in the courtroom.
Rod Samuels was wearing a new suit today. She knew—and so did everyone else in the courtroom—because the price tag bobbed from the armpit every time he raised his hand to make a point. Two of the women on the jury had traded smirks, which Lily chalked up in her column of intangibles. It wasn’t something they would consider in deliberations, but every tiny detail left an impression, and this one would take him down a notch.
Though Maria had refused Samuels’s offer of a guilty plea in exchange for a shorter sentence, the state had nonetheless reduced the charges to second-degree murder, and thus its burden of proof. No longer was Maria accused of luring Miguel to his death. Instead Samuels hoped to prove she had purchased the gun in anticipation of the opportunity to use it. He followed that conjecture with the trite charge she had “taken the law into her own hands” instead of calling the police.
The more she had reviewed the prosecution’s case leading up to trial, the more irritated she had become that the state had filed any charges at all. Scuttlebutt around the courthouse was that Samuels had an uncle somewhere in the system who might have hastened his nephew’s promotion to felonies. Rod was therefore anxious to prove himself, but in this case had clearly overreached with a first-degree murder charge. Someone in the DA’s office had persuaded him to dial it back, but not far enough. She predicted he would come to her soon with a manslaugh
ter offer, and if their first few days went well, she would advise Maria to decline that too.
His remarks were mercifully brief—in line with his evidence, she thought. Now it was her turn to stand in judgment before the jury. They likely wouldn’t notice much about her suit, a dark brown jacket and skirt with a crème-colored top underneath. A mother-of-pearl sea horse, a Christmas gift from Andy, was pinned to her lapel, the only jewelry other than her wedding ring and gold post earrings. The only odd pieces to her ensemble were her shoes, sturdy black slip-on flats that clashed horribly with her otherwise professional look, but she wasn’t worried it would cost her any points. The women on the jury would understand, and the men probably wouldn’t notice.
“There is no instinct in nature stronger than a mother’s need to protect her children, and nothing she won’t do. Mr. Samuels would have you believe that’s a crime, but you know better. He would have you believe Mrs. Esperanza intentionally exaggerated the risk to her children in order to fabricate an excuse to kill her former husband, but our evidence will show that she understood the risk all too well.”
Lily paced before the jury box with her fingertips pressed together as if praying. It was a trick she had learned from Tony to keep from pointing or wagging her finger, something the jury might find condescending. “Undeniably…”—she lingered on the word to underscore her concession—“Mrs. Esperanza has made mistakes in judgment in her life, chief among them marrying Miguel Esperanza not once but twice. Their life together was punctuated with four domestic violence calls to the police. Four. That’s a lot of experience to know what to expect from a police dispatcher and a responding officer. Mr. Samuels says she took the law into her own hands. I say she took her children’s safety into her hands…like any good mother would do.”
Point by point she named Miguel’s violent offenses against Maria, which spanned seven years and concluded with his jail sentence. “While he was incarcerated, his children flourished. For the first time in their lives they were safe from the threat of his violence, and from watching that violence perpetrated against their mother. All that changed when he was paroled and reappeared at their home brandishing a gun and threatening to make his ex-wife sorry—think about that—to make her sorry for all the trouble she’d caused him.” She paused for dramatic effect. “What would make a mother sorry? Simple…you harm her children.”
She walked to the table to glance at notes she had made during Samuels’s opening remarks. It was important to head off his evidence in advance so the jurors would view it with skepticism. “Mr. Samuels intends to call police witnesses who will testify that Mrs. Esperanza reported recent threats by her ex-husband, threats that involved a handgun. He’ll tell you they searched for a gun in Mr. Esperanza’s home and car, but never found it. He will ask you to conclude that it didn’t exist, that she cunningly concocted her story in order to set up a justification for one day killing him. But the fact that no gun was found didn’t change her perspective because she had seen it with her own eyes. If it wasn’t in his possession, then he had access to it through an acquaintance or he had hidden it very well from police. Either way it made her vulnerable…so vulnerable she sought and was granted a permanent restraining order, one that Miguel Esperanza blatantly violated on the day he was killed. He had subsequently lost visitation privileges with his children and was desperate to reassert his control…to make her sorry.”
Maria sat at the defense table with her hands folded and chin poised defiantly. Now was not the time to show remorse or shame, Lily had told her. The jury needed to see a woman who had acted decisively to protect her children, a woman who would do it again.
“Mr. Samuels will call witnesses to tell you that Miguel Esperanza had turned his life around, and had moved on from his troubles with his ex-wife. We’ll show you a man who defied a restraining order to threaten her…to make her sorry.” She paused again so people could study on the threat as Maria saw it. “We shouldn’t even be here today. Maria Esperanza sensed a threat from a threatening man who was taking her children from her home against a court order. How many stories have we read of men who did unspeakable things to their own children in order to make their ex-wives sorry? The defendant wasn’t going to let that happen to her children. She acted to protect them, and that isn’t a crime. It’s an instinct.”
Anna turned off her office light and skipped down the stairs to the media room, where Andy was engrossed in a sales film for the 760Li sedan, his grandfather’s car. “Let’s go, pal. I’ve made us late.” They were meeting the family at Empyre’s to celebrate Hal’s birthday, but she had been dragged into an e-mail spat between co-chairs of the Chamber’s awards committee and lost track of the time.
Their new family routine was working out just fine. Andy loved spending afternoons at the dealership, and her father didn’t mind at all cutting out for a few minutes in the afternoon to pick him up from school. Since neither she nor Lily had to pick him up from the Big House after work, they all had an extra half hour together at home. Her on-the-job kitchen training was coming along nicely too. She had even mastered Andy’s favorite dish, macaroni and cheese, and she no longer took for granted the opportunity to eat out in a nice restaurant.
“Did you get your homework done?”
Andy clicked his seat belt and stretched his neck to look out the side window. He loved riding in the Z8 because he got to sit in the front seat. “We don’t have homework on Friday.”
They caught every stoplight between the dealership and Empyre’s, which made them ten minutes late. A young valet, dressed in dark shorts and a crisp white shirt with gold piping on the shoulders, sprang to greet her as she pulled into the circle. He was new to Empyre’s, something she took as a good sign—businesses were hiring again.
Andy dashed ahead as soon as he spotted the others at the big round table in the back. Lily had saved his seat between her and Jonah, as well as the one on the other side.
Anna leaned down and eyed Lily apologetically. “Excuse me, madam. Is this seat taken?”
Lily gave her a sidelong look. “I’ve been saving that for someone but she’s very late. Go ahead and take it. We’ll teach her a lesson.”
The waiter took their drink orders, sparkling water, iced tea and sodas for the boys. For three years now the whole clan had passed on wine and cocktails whenever they gathered. They drank at home and out with others but never in Lily’s presence. Though Lily insisted it didn’t matter, Anna appreciated her family’s gesture very much.
Her father immediately became engrossed in his grandsons while Martine entertained Alice in her high chair. Getting together with their parents gave the four of them a parenting vacation of sorts, since they could turn their attention to each other without worrying whether the children were being watched. It wouldn’t be so easy to leave twins under her mom and dad’s care, at least not for two or three years, but every set of hands and eyes lightened the load. She had learned that from her sister, because every time she showed up for a visit, Kim took a few minutes of time for herself.
Hal tapped his glass with his knife for everyone’s attention. “We have something to celebrate today besides me getting older. All four dealerships posted profits in February. Sales were eight percent higher than last year—which isn’t saying all that much since they were in the toilet—but now that we’ve adjusted our workforce we’re happily back in the black.”
Anna had been sneaking peeks at the numbers and had a feeling things were looking up. It was a relief to get his confirmation. “How are we trending?”
“Up three months in a row. And March is on pace to be our best month yet.”
She stretched across the table to touch her glass to Hal’s. “I would be willing to get older too for news like that.”
No sooner had the waiter delivered their entrees than Alice pounded the table from her high chair, demanding something to eat. Kim set down her fork and began tearing off pieces of bread and bits of cheese. “Enjoy it now, you two,” she sai
d, directing her remarks to Anna and Lily. “Life as you know it is about to change.”
Anna dug into her piping hot souvlaki. “At least you don’t have to worry that your Greek salad will get cold.”
“And you think that’s an accident? I haven’t ordered hot food in five years. Babies have a sixth sense about these things. They get hungry the minute your plate comes, they wake up the second your bathtub is filled, and they wet themselves the instant you fall asleep. Without fail.”
Hal nodded along. “She’s right, you know. You probably think you’ve got this handled because there are two of you, but you’re having two kids.”
“Go home and go to bed now while you still can,” Kim added.
After dinner they gathered in the parking circle. “Andy wants to ride with me because I drive the cool car,” she whispered to Lily.
“Just wait till I get my Routan. He’ll be begging me to take the long way home.”
Anna handed her ticket to the valet, who looked at her with confusion.
“Do you have a red ticket?” the young man asked.
She felt her jacket pocket for a ticket she knew wasn’t there, noticing with a sinking feeling that his sleeves didn’t have gold piping like the other man’s. “No, he gave me this blue one.”
“Who did? I’m the only one working tonight.”
“The State calls Serena Langdon.”
Lily gave Maria a look of consolation at seeing her sister take the stand as a witness against her. Samuels had scoured social service records and found a reference to a threat Maria had made four years ago to kill Miguel if he ever laid a hand on her children. The context was a custody issue, in which Serena argued that Sofia and Roberto needed to stay with her until the relationship between Miguel and Maria calmed down. They listened patiently as Samuels cherry-picked her testimony from the report.
Then it was Lily’s turn. She didn’t care that Maria had threatened to kill Miguel, and she didn’t want the jury to care either.