Adele pulled to the far corner of his driveway across from the garage and near the redwood play gym. Porter walked up to her car as soon as she got out. She could smell liquor on his breath. She couldn’t recall ever seeing him drunk before, not even at parties. If anything, he always looked like he could have used a drink.
“Get out of here, Adele. This doesn’t concern you.” His thinning blond hair was tousled. There was a wild look to his eyes. “I mean it. Go home.”
“What’s wrong? Are you going somewhere?” He had no business driving in his condition.
“Not me. Just Linda and Olivia.”
The door from the house to the garage opened and Linda stepped out with Olivia in hand, their golden retriever on a leash. Linda was dressed in jeans and a shapeless oversized sweater. Her hair was pulled back into a haphazard ponytail. It looked stringy and unwashed and plastered to her face at the edges as if she’d just splashed cold water on herself. Olivia was wearing pajamas with cupcakes all over them. She had a pink-and-blue stuffed cow under one arm. She looked like she’d just woken up from a deep sleep. The dog encircled their legs, nearly tripping Linda with the leash.
Linda hesitated when she saw Adele standing there. She gave her husband a searching look and Porter nodded. The interchange surprised Adele. She had assumed the Porters had been fighting, assumed Linda was maybe spending the night at her parents’ or something. That’s why Scott had been drinking. That’s why she was leaving with their daughter and the dog. But the look between them was a shared one. They had agreed to this, whatever it was, however painful it was. Linda helped her daughter into the rear seat of the minivan and belted her in. The dog climbed in after the child. Then Linda went around to the driver’s side and opened her door.
“Let her get down the driveway first,” said Porter. “Then you can leave.”
“I don’t understand,” Adele said softly. “You missed a board meeting. I was worried about you.”
“Believe me, that’s the least of my troubles—or yours.”
Linda paused for a moment before she got into the car and faced her husband across the floodlit blacktop of their driveway. Something passed between them, something so intimate that Adele felt she had to look away. Porter cleared his throat as if to speak—or cry—she wasn’t sure which. He did neither, instead giving his wife a slight nod of the head. She stepped into the car and started the engine. Her headlamps reflected back the contents of their garage: bicycles, sleds, Hula-Hoops. The plyboard from a long-ago puppet theater. A Dora-the-Explorer scooter Olivia had probably outgrown three years ago. Linda reversed out of the garage and did a three-point turn before shifting into drive. Then, without looking back, she started down the hill. The sound of the engine floated up to them, dying by inches as the minivan pushed aside the stillness of the night.
Porter turned away from Adele and pulled off his glasses. He ran the back of his sweatshirt sleeve across his eyes.
“Are you okay?” Adele didn’t know what else to say. She shouldn’t have barged in like this. “If there’s anything I can do—”
“—I didn’t do it,” he said thickly. “I should tell you that now before you hear anything to the contrary.” His voice was slurred slightly from alcohol and nasal from crying.
“What are you talking about?”
“The police are going to say I killed Maria. Because of Olivia. They’re going to take me down and the whole damn center with me. But I didn’t kill her. That’s the truth.”
Adele fell back against her car, as disoriented as a child playing pin-the-tail. She’d thought she’d interrupted a domestic dispute. She was blindsided by the gravity of what she was hearing. “What are you saying, Scott? Are you saying what I think you’re saying?”
“I’m saying that I gave Olivia a better life than Maria ever could have. Two parents. A beautiful home. A good education. Love. What could Maria give?”
“You don’t mean . . . ?” Adele felt sick to her stomach. “Please don’t tell me you stole an undocumented woman’s baby.”
“Olivia was eighteen months old when Maria got out of prison,” said Porter. “By that point, she’d spent almost half her life with us. Half her life. Maria would have taken her back to a dirt-floor shack in Guatemala. What I did—that’s not stealing. That’s rescuing.”
“But if Olivia was her child—”
“—She was the product of a rape, Adele.”
“Maria told you that?”
“She didn’t have to. She got pregnant on the journey from Guatemala to Iowa. That shit doesn’t happen by choice. You know that. We’ve both heard enough clients’ stories. Imagine going through life knowing your father raped your mother. Knowing that’s the sole reason for your existence. And Olivia would have known—or guessed it—or other kids would have told her. Don’t kid yourself. She would have been an outcast. This was the life I saved her from.”
“And Linda? She knew about what you’d done?”
Scott leaned against Adele’s car. He put his hands on his thighs and bent over. He looked like he might throw up. “She does now,” he said thickly.
“Is that why she left you?”
“She didn’t leave. I ordered her to go. I don’t want her and Olivia involved in this. My choices. My mistakes.”
“But Olivia is involved,” said Adele. “She’s another woman’s child.”
Porter straightened. “That woman was a stranger to her. We’re her mom and dad—no one else. This is the only life she knows.”
Adele’s head was pounding. She tried to imagine how she was going to explain this—to La Casa’s benefactors, to her clients, to the Lake Holly immigrant community. Scott Porter had earned a reputation for empowering people who were powerless, giving a voice to the voiceless. Yet all the good he’d done seemed to pale before this great evil. He had stolen a poor, defenseless woman’s baby—and maybe, just maybe—he’d done something far worse. She stood in front of him, her rage as strong as if someone had plucked Sophia from her own arms, her muscles aching as if they bore the strain.
“You bastard!” Adele slapped him. She had never done anything like that before—not even during the darkest days of her marriage. Her fury startled both of them. Porter’s face turned bright red where she’d hit him, like a bad sunburn. He covered it with his hand.
“How dare you stand there and feed me this bullshit about how you saved Olivia, how you gave her a better life. You wanted to give her a better life? You could have mailed Maria a check every month to care for her daughter. You could have offered to bring the child to the United States when she was eighteen and pay for her education. This has nothing to do with any charitable impulse, Scott. You didn’t save Olivia for her sake. You saved her for your own! Because you and Linda wanted a baby. Because everything people like you want, you get. You didn’t care who you hurt or whose life you destroyed. It was all about you—your needs, your desires. Don’t play the hero, Scott. There are no heroes here.”
Porter sank down on the curb of the driveway and put his head in his hands. The fight had left him. The fight had left them both. “Maybe you’re right,” he said softly. “Maybe the love wasn’t so much for Olivia. But it wasn’t for me, either. It was for Linda. She’d been through so much trying to have a baby, then trying to adopt one. I knew she’d die if I took Olivia away from her. Olivia was ten months old when Maria asked me to find someone to care for her while she was detained. By the time Maria was ready to be deported, we were Olivia’s family. I didn’t create the circumstances.”
“No, but you exploited them. You made a judge believe the child’s mother had given her up for adoption when she hadn’t. They’ll disbar you for that. They’ll send you to prison.”
Porter shook his head. “I never filed any false paperwork with the courts. As far as the court was concerned, Maria had had no contact with her daughter for over a year. That’s the legal definition of abandonment, Adele. I used our daughter’s real birth certificate, her real everything f
or the adoption. Did I lie to my wife? Yes. I had a dead client with no baby and a live one with a baby and I switched them as far as Linda was concerned. She’d have never agreed to the adoption otherwise. But did I lie to the court? No.”
“Maria would have contacted Olivia if she could have and you know it, Scott. You let her go back to Guatemala thinking her baby was dead, didn’t you?” She read her hunch in Porter’s eyes, the way they slid away from her, the way he covered his red cheek as if he expected Adele to hit him again. “I’ll bet her name wasn’t even Olivia, was it?”
“It was Luz Maria Santos,” Porter said evenly. “Like I said, I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“Nothing to hide? You lied to a judge and to the birth mother—not to mention your wife.”
“You can theorize, Adele. But you can’t prove a damn thing and neither can anyone else.” Adele watched him trying on different excuses in his head, reframing the facts to fit the image he wanted to portray. Once a criminal defense attorney, always a criminal defense attorney.
“Are you asking if what I did was moral? No. Are you asking if what I did was legal? Yes. I’m an American citizen. Luz Maria Santos was an American citizen. Her undocumented birth mother had been deported by that point and, as far as the courts were concerned, she’d had no contact with the child for over a year. The adoption will not be nullified. I told Maria the same thing on several occasions.”
“And then killed her when she threatened to ruin your career.”
“No. I didn’t. We talked back and forth. She came to see me. She wanted to see Olivia but I said no. It would be too confusing for her. I offered Maria money. She got offended and left and I didn’t hear from her after that. I didn’t know what had happened until that cop, Vega, showed me her photograph. The police will charge me with obstruction of justice for withholding information in a criminal investigation. Depending on the judge, I’ll probably do some jail time and maybe get disbarred. But Olivia will have Linda and Linda will have Olivia. Nothing will ever change that.”
“Then why did you send them away?”
“Because the cops will try to separate Olivia from Linda until the paperwork gets sorted out. Maybe put her in foster care, I don’t know. This way, by the time the cops find them, they’ll see there’s nothing anyone can do. She’s ours and she’ll stay ours.”
“What about when Olivia gets older and starts asking a lot of questions or wants to search for her birth mother? How’s she going to feel when she learns the truth?”
“Who says she has to know? You think all these Chinese adopted kids know where they come from? You think a few of them aren’t better off not knowing? The truth’s overrated, Adele. You’re a lawyer. You should know that.”
Adele’s voice trembled. She couldn’t remember ever being so angry. “This is different, Scott. Olivia had a mother who loved her. She had a name. A history. That’s all a poor person has—their history. And you stole it.”
“Correction: I rewrote it. Luz Maria Santos had a past. Olivia Porter has a future.”
Adele heard a squeal of car tires turning onto Porter’s road. The vehicle was traveling fast in their direction, slicing the air with an urgency that was hard to miss.
“I stood the cops up too this evening,” said Porter. “I had a feeling they wouldn’t take it well.” He tried for a light touch but his voice came off as shaky. He pushed himself to his feet. “For what it’s worth, I never meant to hurt anybody. I didn’t expect it to come to this.”
“This will close down the community center,” said Adele. Red and blue flashers slit open the darkness, aborting any sense of normalcy left between them. Adele’s heart beat faster as if she were the one getting arrested.
“Consider my resignation, effective immediately.”
“A lot of good that will do.”
“Adele.” Porter gave up any show of bravado and kept his eyes on the driveway. They could hear the police cruiser making its way up the hill, jewel-colored lights bouncing off tree trunks like in a pinball game. Porter looked scared, dismantled, as if some piece of him were already missing. He kept his arms plastered to his sides. He knew enough about the police to make sure he made no sudden moves. “La Casa was never about me or the other board members. It was always about you. You can keep that place alive. I know you can.”
Adele faced the cruiser’s headlamps and shielded her eyes from their brightness. She felt as Maria Elena must have felt on the night she walked along Lake Holly Road, a whole world of hurt, anger, and frustration on her shoulders. She must have noted the glare as the car barreled toward her or perhaps lit her up from behind, the push of displaced air that heralded the onslaught. There had to be a fraction of a second before impact when life cruelly presented its irony: she was about to die two thousand miles from home in search of a daughter who was less than a mile away—a daughter who would never know who she was.
Chapter 28
“Look, Scott,” Vega said, straddling a chair backward. “We’ve put an AMBER Alert out on Olivia. You have to know we’re going to find her and Linda.” He and Greco were in the same interrogation room with Porter that Morales had sat in forty-eight hours ago. Only Porter was no Morales. He’d spent his whole career pleading with clients not to open their mouths to the police without a lawyer present. He spoke off-handedly only once to Vega and Greco and that was to deny he’d killed Maria.
“All you can charge me with—all you’ll ever be able to charge me with—is obstruction of justice.”
It pained Vega and Greco to admit for the moment that he was right. They would have preferred to hold off making any sort of arrest until they could have built up a murder case against him. But when Porter stood them up this evening, they were forced to arrest him on a lesser charge rather than run the risk that he and his family might flee. Still, Vega wasn’t willing to back off just yet.
“You had motive up the ying-yang, Scott. You were the last person to speak to Maria. She died near your house.”
“Yeah? Well, whatever you think you’ve got in the way of evidence, it’s not going to match up to me. I know you’re gonna try hard—you especially, Vega.” Porter pointed a finger at him. “You’d love to see me take the hit for this, wouldn’t you?”
Vega saw Greco frowning at him. He pushed himself off the back of the chair and said nothing.
“You think I don’t know?” Porter glared at him. “About you and my wife?”
“That was in high school, Scott. Not now. She and I never—”
“—I see the way you look at her. I’m not blind, Vega. You want me? Get me. But if you care about Linda the way you seem to, leave her alone.”
Vega and Greco were hoping their subpoenas would produce a paper trail of forgery and deceit. But as far as the state of Iowa was concerned, Olivia’s adoption was textbook legal. Her unsealed adoption records correctly identified her as Luz Maria Santos, the child of Maria Elena Santos. Scott and Linda were Luz Maria’s lawfully designated foster parents before they filed for adoption. Her mother was alleged to have abandoned the child because she’d had no contact with her for over a year after her arrest. The only person who could have testified that Porter had lied or misrepresented that abandonment was Maria, and she was dead.
Porter had covered his tracks well in everything. Vega and Greco got the lab reports back from the accident investigation and they too were disappointing. The paint chips recovered at the scene could be matched to any black Acura model in a five-year production range—good news, since Porter owned a black Acura RL. The problem was, his car was in pristine condition and they had no insurance claims of any damage to his vehicle in the past six months. They still needed to check directly with auto-body repair shops, however. Porter could have paid for the repairs in cash.
An assistant district attorney showed up at Lake Holly town court and Porter was arraigned on obstruction of justice. He agreed to surrender his passport in exchange for being released on bail. The alerts were out for Linda and O
livia. There was little more either of the detectives could do this evening. They’d get a fresh start in the morning.
Vega walked out to his pickup in the parking lot. It was past eleven p.m.—too late to call Wendy and Joy and try to work things out. His mind was drifting, asking questions that had no answers, a habit he had when he was exhausted. He imagined what would have happened if Maria had lived. Would she have gone to court to get custody of Olivia and take her back to Guatemala? Was that even desirable anymore? Olivia was an upper-middle-class American girl now. English was her primary language. Taylor Swift and Justin Bieber were her cultural references. She texted. She tweeted. She wouldn’t know how to survive in a world where iPads, iPhones, and Instagram didn’t exist, not to mention indoor plumbing, higher education, and twenty-first-century medical care. Scott Porter had done a terrible thing, but there was no way now to undo it—not without traumatizing that girl for the rest of her life. The mold was set. The cement had hardened. Olivia Porter was not Maria’s any longer.
Sometimes when Vega looked at Joy, he felt a little bit of that same sense of loss. He could locate parts of himself in his daughter: her talent for math, her fiery temper, the way her skin bronzed easily in the sun. But the culture that had spawned him was as foreign to her as a Spanish-language soap opera.
Maybe it was necessary, this shedding of the old ways with each generation. He had abandoned so much of what defined his mother: her religious faith, her kinship ties, her attachment to their old neighborhood in the Bronx. But lately, he’d begun to wonder if he’d abandoned too much. He felt like there was a box inside of him that had been locked away for so long, he’d forgotten where he’d put the key. There were things he treasured in that box: the sultry music of his childhood, the playfulness and sensuality of his culture. He longed to open himself up to these things again, to find comfort and acceptance in who he was rather than in what others wanted him to be.
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