Mitigating Circumstances

by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

  She ran barefoot, oblivious now to the wetness, to her grandparents’ bedroom down the long, dark hall, looking over her shoulder for the bear, jumping up in the air as she ran so it could not grab her feet. She leaped into the big bed. Safe. “Granny, Granny,” she cried, big sloppy tears running down her face. She remembered: Granny had gone to the neighboring town and would not return until the morning; she had gone to buy presents for her birthday tomorrow. Only the big barrel tummy of her grandfather swelled beneath the sheets. He moaned and turned over onto his side, a big arm reaching out to her, still asleep. “Granddaddy,” she said, poking his stomach with a finger, not really afraid anymore and liking the funny feeling she got when her finger touched the soft flesh, went in and came out, like a pillow. “Granddaddy,” she whispered now. He was breathing funny, rattling and wheezing; the air filled with a sour odor coming from his mouth. She was shivering. She climbed under the thick blankets and felt the dry sheets, shoving the wet part of her gown away from her body. In seconds she was asleep.

  A long time later, while she was dreaming of her birthday party, of the presents and ribbons and cake, she awoke to feel pain somewhere near her bottom, bad pain, the worst pain she had ever felt. The bed was shaking under his weight and she was facedown on the mattress, unable to move, unable to scream, gasping for air; her arms stretched out horizontally, frantically clawing and grabbing. Before everything went black, she heard him call her grandmother’s name: “Lillian.”

  “Lily,” John said, shaking her, hands on her shoulders. “Wake up.” She was sleeping facedown on the pillow, not sleeping really, but drifting in and out of that early morning state of semi-consciousness when dreams, memories, and reality are all intermingled. “You just clawed my arm and your gown is soaking wet. You’re going to be late for work.”

  John knew she was having the nightmare. He was all too familiar with the signs: the sweating, clawing, screaming out in her sleep. She would never tell him or anyone else the whole truth, but he knew that her grandfather had sexually abused her. She raised her head and looked at him as he walked out the door. If he just thought about it, he’d realize that he’d forgotten her birthday. The nightmares always got worse around her birthday.

  Not long after they were married, she’d told him and all it did was support his beliefs about most men and sex. John said he didn’t crave sex like the majority of men. To him it was an act of great beauty and purpose—procreation. During the early years of their marriage, he had rocked her in his arms when she awoke in the middle of the night, sometimes even wetting the bed as she’d done as a child. When she couldn’t go back to sleep, he would go into the kitchen and bring her back a cup of hot chocolate or a grilled cheese sandwich. Then he would gently stroke her and hold her until she fell asleep again. He loved her then, and his love and understanding, his lack of sexual desire, all allowed her to heal and recover from the past. He wanted her to go to law school, had encouraged her, but when she finally graduated, their relationship changed dramatically. Like a cripple who finally walks, she waited for the applause, the tears of joy. They never came. This was when she learned about John. When she had been scared and afraid, John was devoted, loving, supportive. When she broke through the wall of fear and became a confident professional, with a career, a future, a mind of her own, John’s love disappeared. He didn’t want to walk next to her, evidently. He wanted only to carry her.

  By the time she put her feet on the floor, she heard the garage door and knew John had left for work. He had been asleep when she came home the night before, snoring loudly. She’d taken off her clothes in the closet and slipped into the bed, turning him on his side to stop the snoring. Lying right next to him, she’d thought of Richard, wanted John to disappear and Richard to take his place. Everyone thought John was wonderful, a great father, a perfect husband. He’d been the ideal husband for the broken child she had been. But she wanted more. She didn’t want to be that person anymore. Time was running out, the clock was ticking. If she stayed until Shana went to college, she would be forty-one, too old. Sorry, missed the boat, they would say.

  Naked, about to step into the steaming shower, she reached for a towel and observed her reflection in the mirror. Turning sideways, she viewed her profile, placing one hand under a breast and lifting it, then letting it fall. Gravity was pulling her down, her face, her breasts, her behind. John was pulling her down, an albatross around her neck.

  Her head was throbbing, her stomach growling with hunger, but she felt great. Today she had a reason to go to work, and it wasn’t just another hearing, another case. Richard Fowler was there, at the office, in the same building, right down the hall.

  She started searching her closet for something special to wear. She would wear her favorite outfit, the one that made her waist and hips look so thin and that everyone always complimented her on. It had just come back from the cleaners the previous week. Perfect.

  After ten minutes of going through everything wrapped in plastic, she found only the skirt. The top was gone.

  She stomped into Shana’s room, flinging the door open in anger. “Where’s the top to my black-and-white outfit with the buttons up the side?”

  Shana, who had been sound asleep, rolled over and stared at her mother with puffy, unfocused eyes. “What time is it? I don’t have it.” She rolled back over and promptly went back to sleep.

  Lily went to Shana’s closet, piled three feet high with clothes, and started digging through them all on her hands and knees. Seeing three or four items that were hers, she tossed them aside, leaving the rest in the middle of the floor. “I know you have my top. I want to wear that outfit today. You have no right to take my things without my permission, particularly my expensive things—my work clothes.”

  “Chill out, Mom!” Shana screamed at her shrilly. “I loaned it to Charlotte. You’ll get it back.”

  “You’re grounded. Do you hear me? Grounded,” Lily yelled, hating herself for yelling, but it wasn’t an isolated incident. Shana took her clothes almost every day, and on many occasions Lily never saw them again. Every other morning she had to go through Shana’s closet before she could even get dressed to go to work, generally finding her things tossed in a heap, wrinkled and stained. John just shrugged his shoulders and told Lily it was typical, a teenage thing, suggesting they get a lock for their door. He couldn’t fathom that a child might respect another person’s property.

  As she walked out the door, she heard Shana mumble the word “bitch” under her breath and pull the covers over her head.

  Outside the room, Lily leaned against the wall, her eyes moist with tears. What had gone wrong between them? They’d always been so close. She remembered all the Sunday afternoons they’d gone roller skating together in the California sunshine, their hair blowing in the wind, Shana skating as near Lily as possible, so close that she sometimes knocked her down. Until just a few months before, Shana used to come into the bedroom every night while John was still watching television and tell Lily all about her day, jabbering on and on about who said what and who did what at school, asking Lilys advice on everything from homework to boys. Was it all just puberty? Raging hormones? Had Lily’s own childhood been so twisted, so painful, that she couldn’t remember what it was like to be thirteen?

  She wiped her eyes and headed for the kitchen. She popped a slice of wheat bread in the toaster and poured herself a cup of coffee. She was overreacting to everything. It was all her. Shana was just becoming a teenager. Even the situation with the clothes was her fault. She’d always told Shana she could borrow her clothes, had an open-door policy on everything. But back then Shana had respected her. She never took things without asking and absolutely never took her work clothes. She never glared at her and called her names. She never hung up on her. And every day the child seemed to get closer to her father, pushing Lily further and further away.

  It was nothing more than the Oedipal phase of puberty, Lily knew. Shana was daddy’s little darling and now her moth
er was her rival. It all made perfect sense. She even wanted to wear her clothes in order to compete for her father’s love like a woman, not a child.

  She carried the coffee to the Honda in a Styrofoam cup. Then she left it there, sitting on the hood of the car, and returned to the house.

  In her bathrobe, Shana had just stepped out of the shower and was headed back to her room. She saw Lily and stopped, a look that said “what now?” on her face.

  “I’m sorry I screamed at you.”

  Shana did not respond. She stared.

  “All I ask is that you don’t take my clothes without asking me, and that you don’t loan my expensive things to your friends. Every parent wants their child to respect them.” Lily moved a few steps closer, extended her hand, and touched the girl’s shoulder. She smiled. Shana didn’t smile back.

  “Look, if you get your homework done early, maybe we can go to a movie tomorrow night. Just the two of us, like we used to.”

  “I can’t. I’m grounded, remember?”

  “Okay, let’s start over. We’ll pretend this morning never happened. What do you say? Tomorrow night.”

  “Too much homework.”

  Shana had always been an outstanding student, but lately her grades had dropped. According to her, even that was Lily’s fault. It was because she had pushed her into accelerated classes. “I know your classes are hard. We discussed that before you took them. I just want you to have everything in life. That’s why I want you to take school seriously, work at your highest level. You can do it, Shana. You’re a smart girl. I don’t want you to marry someone just to get married. If you have a career, you’ll be your own person. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Lily glanced at her watch. She was going to be late for work.

  “Yeah,” Shana answered, “you’re saying you married Dad just to get married.”

  “No, Shana. When I married your dad I was not the person I am today, but I didn’t marry him just to do it. I married him because I needed him. When I was a young girl, in a way I stopped living. I didn’t know what it meant to be happy. I let something hard and ugly grow inside me. I didn’t take control of my life.”

  “I’m going to be late for school, Mom,” Shana said and started walking to her bedroom. With her back to Lily, she said: “Don’t worry. I’m not going to be a waitress.” Then she closed the door in her mother’s face.

  So much for child psychology, Lily thought, hurrying down the hall to the garage. She was never going to live down the waitress comment. She might have said it, but she owed John for repeating it.

  By the time Lily got to the complex, the parking lot was almost full. After circling a few times and seeing the time on the clock on the dash, Lily headed for the rows directly under the jail, knowing she would find a spot. Looking up at the smoked glass windows, no one could tell it was a jail facility—that is, unless you looked up at the roof, where searchlights were positioned. Other than that, it looked exactly like the rest of the modern complex. Prisoners were moved through an underground tunnel to the courts and back again, never seeing the light of day; law enforcement personnel saved hours traveling from one location to the other, as did the prosecutors and public defenders. During the planning stages many had protested, arguing against housing the prisoners in the same complex. County officials ignored the concerns, pointing out that it was a pre-sentence facility, not a prison. Once a prisoner was convicted, he was transported to the Department of Corrections. Only the lightweight offenders served time here for things like petty theft, parole violations, drunk driving.

  Except for the fact that they were all housed inside, all breathing the same recycled, stuffy air (windows didn’t open anywhere in the complex) and all the offices were now glass-partitioned cubicles which everyone despised, you could say the new center was functioning as designed. Lily hated it. If they had not moved from the old facility, she would now be walking into a prestigious office, complete with real wood paneling and bookcases and a wooden door that shut out the relentless office noise. There would be fresh air drifting in from open windows with ledges where pigeons roosted. But this was progress and it was here to stay, she thought with a sense of loss, getting out and walking across the parking lot in the crisp morning air.

  The meeting with Butler went as she had expected: once she had briefly described the atrocities of the Lopez—McDonald case, he was both shocked and outraged. Sitting in his large corner office, with real leather studded chairs, a desk large enough to play a game of pool on, and the built-in bookcases Lily lusted after, she looked straight into his small dark unblinking eyes and told him the problems she could foresee with the case.

  “The eyewitness was a schoolteacher and she saw, quote: ‘Several Hispanic youths running from the area by the bleachers,’ the area where she made the grisly discovery of the two bodies. She didn’t see five of them, Paul, and she’s uncertain if she saw even three of them. She did tentatively identify three of the suspects from a photo lineup. We need to coach her into saying that she saw three or more and eliminate the word several from her testimony. The police stopped the defendants on an expired registration one block and five minutes from the time the crime was reported. There were five of them in the car, but two insist they were picked up at the corner by the driver only seconds before the stop. Unfortunately, there were no witnesses to this, and it’s our guess that they were all involved. No confessions and no incriminating statements. Paul, these boys are tough.” She stopped, sighing deeply before continuing.

  “Semen extracted from what was left of the murdered girls vagina reflects more than three different blood types. We have powder burns and blood stains from the victim on two of the defendants’ clothing, and what I would call a pretty good case.” Lily paused, waiting for Butler to ask questions, then interjected, “But not a case without pitfalls.”

  Butler leaned back in his chair and gritted his teeth. “The problem lies in convicting all five and not confusing the jury by the eyewitness testimony,” he stated. “Defense is going to use this to the max, trying to make the jury think at least two of these boys are innocent and confusing them about who did what. The optimum situation is to get one of them to roll over for a deal and put the whole thing together air-tight.”

  Exactly what Lily was thinking. “But how far will we go to get what we want? Will we go second-degree, accessory to murder, all the way down to manslaughter?” Lily was still holding the file in her lap, and now opened it and removed the crime-scene photos. Pictures said more than words, and she wanted Butler to have these nightmare images in his mind as he mulled over possible deals. “The problem is not getting someone to talk—any of these animals would sell his own mother down the river to save himself. The problem is knowing which one did the least in this massacre.” She offered the photo and Butler accepted it. “This is a close-up of the tree limb that was shoved into Carmen Lopez’s vagina, piercing her abdominal wall.”

  Butler was visibly shaken and his lower lip trembled slightly. There were leaves on the end of the branch, covered with blood. “God,” he said.

  “And this is a close-up of her breasts—what was left of them after they played target practice on them with a small-caliber handgun.” She handed another photo to Butler.

  “No deals as of right now,” he said flatly. “I want two investigators from our office on this full-time. Question everyone who ever said so much as good morning to these boys and bring me the reports. We’ll pray that forensics comes up with enough to make it stick on all five. Anyone who merely watched this happen and didn’t stop it deserves life, and of course we hope to get the death penalty. If any case merits it, this one does.”

  The meeting was over. They decided that Carol Abrams would handle it due to the sexual nature of the crimes and Marshall Duffy would assist her from homicide.

  When Lily returned to her office, the phone was ringing and she bent over the front of her desk to answer it, dumping the file on top of the existing clutter. It was Richard. “Meet
me in interrogation room three in five minutes. I have to see you.”

  Her heart raced and her breath quickened. “I want to see you, too, but I don’t have a minute to spare.” She paused and then realized that she would never make it through the day without seeing him. “I’ll be there.”

  She carried several files for appearances and walked into the interrogation room, closing the door and taking a seat at the small table, tapping her feet while she was waiting. There was a phone for attorneys to dictate notes on the on-line system to the word-processing pool. Lily had finally settled on a lavender silk dress that clung to every curve, dangling silver earrings, and a big silver clasp tieing her long red hair at the nape of her neck, letting it hang down her back. She knew she looked feminine and attractive. Several people had complimented her already. Richard opened the door, then shut it and locked it behind him. He kissed her, smearing her lipstick, and placed both hands on her breasts beneath the thin silk fabric.

  “I’ve been thinking about you all night. I want you so bad. I cant get your face out of my mind.” He slid his hand up her skirt, along the silk of her panty hose, stopping at her crotch.

  “Stop it, Richard,” she said. “I don’t think it’s my face you’ve been thinking about.” She smiled, trying to remain detached while her body was responding to his every touch. The same reckless abandon she had felt the night before was taking over as he pulled down her panty hose and placed his hand inside, touching her lightly, making her wet, making her ache. His mouth was on her neck, her head thrown back, her hair touching the top of the table. Her blouse was open and his other hand inside. He unzipped his pants and entered her, spread out on the table; it moved beneath them. She was afraid to speak, fearful someone would hear them, unable to stop him.

  He picked up the phone and handed it to her; his face was twisted with passion, his voice deep, his eyes half closed. “Pretend you’re dictating something.”