“Do I have a choice?” Olivia said, her voice tight and grim. The specter of the next months and years loomed over her in a reality so grim, so frightening, that it made her chest cave in with fear. At that moment, she had no confidence at all that she could survive an ordeal the likes of which she found it all too easy to imagine.
***
Arthur liked having his feet rubbed. He had flat, oblong feet with long, skinny toes. He complained that the specially fabricated insoles that he wore in his athletic shoes made his feet hurt, and in the evening he liked nothing better than to stretch out on the couch, watch an A’s game, and have Elaine rub away the knots and aches in his soles and arches. Elaine couldn’t stand having her own feet touched, let alone rubbed. It had taken her a few years to overcome her twinge of revulsion at stroking and kneading Arthur’s so familiarly. Now, however, she found strange comfort in her evening attendance to Arthur’s feet.
Their quiet moment was interrupted by the sound of a key in the front-door lock. Olivia let herself in and sat down in the chintz armchair that Elaine had found years ago in a dumpster on College Avenue. Elaine had spent almost as much money having it restored and restuffed as it would have cost to buy a new one, and her daughter had always claimed that the upholstery still smelled faintly of garbage. Yet Olivia always chose to sit in that chair, despite its phantom odor, or maybe because of it.
“Hi, honey,” Elaine said. She pushed Arthur’s feet off her lap. Rubbing them was too intimate an activity to be engaged in in front of Olivia. Arthur grunted with displeasure and plopped them back across her thighs. She let them lie, but didn’t touch them. Olivia looked wan. Her eyes were puffy, and her face was pale and still marred with the blush of acne she’d acquired in jail.
“Did you see your lawyer today?” Elaine asked.
Olivia nodded.
“And?”
“And I’m going to jail for ten years.”
Elaine gasped.
“Olivia, that’s just ridiculous,” Arthur said. “Exactly what did he say?”
Olivia described to them the intricacies of federal drug sentencing. “It’s all based on quantity. The amount of drugs that Jorge sold them equals a ten-year sentence. Izaya gave me copies of the sections of the laws that deal with methamphetamine.” She passed a wad of folded paper to Elaine. Elaine began to leaf through the pages, and Arthur leaned forward.
“Let me see that,” he said.
She put the papers in Arthur’s outstretched hand.
“Methamphetamine. For God’s sake, how the hell did you get yourself involved with methamphetamine?” Arthur said, shaking his head in disgust.
Olivia didn’t answer him. Elaine put her hand on Arthur’s foot and gave it a squeeze of warning. He ignored her.
“I told you, we need to hire a real lawyer, Elaine. You get what you pay for, and nobody’s paying anything for this Isaac, or whatever his name is.”
“His name is Izaya, and you are paying for him,” Olivia said. “I’m paying for him, and Mom’s paying for him, and the rest of the tax-paying public is paying for him.”
“Fine, Olivia. But do you know anything about his credentials? Where did he go to law school?”
“Uh, let me see. Oh yeah, someplace called, is it—Harvard? Is that any good?”
“Huh,” said Arthur.
Elaine wondered if Olivia was telling the truth. They both knew that the mere mention of the Ivy League would impress Arthur enough to keep him quiet. He’d gotten his own undergraduate degree at Wesleyan University, which he consistently and embarrassingly referred to as one of the “Little Ivies.”
“Anyway, he’s a really good lawyer. I like him.” Something in Olivia’s tone made Elaine look at her more closely, and Olivia blushed under her gaze.
“Were you there all this time, honey? It’s so late.”
“No. I tried to pick up my car after my appointment with Izaya. The fuckers wouldn’t give it back to me. They say it’s forfeited because it was used during a drug deal.”
“But that’s your car! It’s not Jorge’s; what right do they have to seize your car?” Arthur sputtered.
Olivia shrugged.
“After that I tried to visit Jorge at the North County Jail in Oakland.”
“Oh, honey,” Elaine exclaimed. “Is that really a good idea? I mean, given everything that’s happened?” She knew that Olivia was bound to get angry at the question, but she couldn’t help herself. It astonished her that her daughter was still trying to have contact with the man who had so effectively and completely ruined her life.
Olivia surprised her mother by not shouting. She just slumped deeper in the chair. “I don’t know. Maybe not. It doesn’t matter, anyway. I couldn’t get in.”
Elaine sighed with relief. “That’s probably for the best.”
“Why wouldn’t they let you in?” Arthur said.
Elaine nearly pinched him for even asking the question.
Olivia picked at a loose thread on the chair’s armrest. “You’re only allowed in if you’re on the inmate’s visitors list. And I’m not on his.”
“Well, at least the son of a bitch knows enough to be ashamed of himself,” Arthur said.
“Arthur, please,” Elaine said, although of course he had expressed only what she herself was feeling, what any normal person would feel.
“I don’t know if he’s ashamed or not, but I don’t have a choice. I have to talk to him,” Olivia said.
Elaine wanted to slap her daughter. She wanted to get up off the couch, walk across the worn Oriental carpet, grab Olivia by the shoulders, and shake her until her head snapped back and forth. Instead, she crossed her legs and squeezed her hands tightly together. “Why?” she said. “Why do you need to talk to him? Do I really need to remind you that he’s the reason you’re in this horrible mess to begin with? This was all his idea, correct? Unless you lied to me before, you had nothing to do with any of this. It was his plan. You said you didn’t even know what was happening until it was too late.”
“You think I want to talk to him?” Olivia shouted back. Her face was red and her breath came in ragged gasps. “I don’t want to talk to him. I want to kill him! But I told you—I don’t have a choice. I have to see him.”
Olivia’s hysteria had the curious effect of quieting Elaine. She looked levelly at her daughter, and then, in a calm, flat voice, asked, “Why? Why do you have to see him?” Although, of course, she knew.
“Because I need to tell him that I’m pregnant.”
For a moment, Arthur just sat there, his eyebrows raised, face pale. He opened and closed his mouth silently a few times, and then rose slowly to his feet. He padded out of the room and slammed the door behind him.
Elaine considered, for a moment, pretending to be surprised, but somehow she could not seem to summon the strength.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Get an abortion, I guess.”
“You guess?” Elaine said. She was horrified by Olivia’s listless reply, by the girl’s seeming consideration of the possibility of doing anything other than end the pregnancy. “You just said Izaya thinks you might have to go to jail. Maybe for ten years, Olivia. Good God! How can you even consider having a baby?” Elaine tried to modulate her voice, to sound composed and reasonable, but she found, to her dismay, that she was screeching.
Olivia began to weep. “I don’t know, Mommy. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Please help me. Help me.”
Olivia’s cry was a familiar one to Elaine, although she had not heard it in more years than she could count. From the time she could speak, Olivia would wail those words—“Mommy, help me!”—in precisely the same tone of agonized despair that clotted her voice now. At first, Elaine would run to her, panic twisting her innards, terrified that in her moments of inattention the girl had been hurt. She
invariably found Olivia stamping her foot in frustration over a lost Barbie shoe, or crying over a dried-up marker or a broken crayon, or furious with her inability to pull a doll’s dress over her teddy bear’s head. Elaine would kneel down, grab Olivia by her bony shoulders, and say, in as cool a voice as she could muster, given her anger at what proved once again to be an unnecessary alarm, “Don’t yell for me like that when it’s not an emergency. You don’t need my help. You don’t.” Eventually Olivia had gotten the message. By the time she’d started school, in fact, she had grown into a resourceful little girl, perfectly able to make her own chocolate milk, climb on a stool to pull a sweater down from its shelf in her closet, rewind and replay a video on the VCR. Elaine had always been proud of her daughter’s independence and ingenuity—it was the characteristic of Olivia’s for which she felt the most responsible.
But this cry rang with that same ancient, desperate need, as if those intervening years of maturity had never happened. And yet her reaction was not what it had been back then. Elaine got up and crossed the room. This time, instead of shaking Olivia by the shoulders, she kneeled down and opened her arms. Olivia sagged into them and lay her head heavily against Elaine. Elaine stroked her daughter’s rough, uncombed hair. She felt the spreading damp of Olivia’s tears on her shirt. She leaned her cheek against the top of her daughter’s head and crooned softly to her. “It’ll be all right, honey. I promise you. It will all be all right.” And then, when sobs continued to rack Olivia’s delicate frame, and the force of her tears would not lessen, Elaine said, “I’ll help you. I promise. I’ll help you.”
***
Olivia woke on the morning of her arraignment to the sun shining through the slats of her Venetian blinds. She hadn’t bothered to twirl the shades closed—the fog generally clung to the hills of Berkeley until well into the day, and there wasn’t often enough sun to disturb her sleep. But last night she hadn’t fallen asleep until close to dawn, and the unusually brilliant day found her groggy and nervous, her eyes gritty with exhaustion, her stomach in the grip of the now familiar nausea. It was as if the fog that had abandoned its usual post had instead taken up residence in her brain. She lay in bed for a while, her fists balled and pressed into the pit of her stomach. She didn’t stir until she heard a light tap on the door.
“Olivia?” Elaine said, through the closed door.
“Yeah,” she mumbled.
“You need to get up, honey. You have to be in court in a couple of hours.”
Elaine walked into Olivia’s room and stood uncertainly in the middle of the floor, staring around her. Olivia flipped over and attempted a smile.
“Sorry about the mess,” she said, motioning at the piles of clothes and books that were tumbled haphazardly around the room.
Elaine pursed her lips, and Olivia was sure she was about to be treated to the same lecture on tidiness and order she’d received nearly every day of her childhood. Instead, her mother said, “It’s your room, you can keep it however you like.”
Olivia’s eyes widened, and she tried not to smile. “No, really. I’m going to clean it up. I just feel kind of awful right now.”
Elaine came over and sat down on the bed next to her. “Because of today? Because of the arraignment?”
Olivia shook her head. She hadn’t even begun to worry about the arraignment. Izaya had promised her that it would be nothing more than a formality, and she was distracted with other, more pressing things. “No. I’m just really nauseated.”
Elaine inhaled sharply, as if she had forgotten about the pregnancy and Olivia had taken her by surprise. She smoothed the blanket with her hand and then tucked her hair behind her ear. “You should get up,” she said.
Olivia heaved herself up out of bed and stooped down to pick up a pair of jeans from the floor.
“You’re not wearing those!” Elaine said, reaching out a hand and grabbing the jeans. “Olivia, you can’t possibly go to court in jeans.” She sounded almost hysterical.
Olivia hadn’t actually been planning on wearing the dirty pants—she had planned on throwing them in the laundry hamper in the hall, but her mother’s voice inspired in her a familiar petulance. “Why not?” she said. “Half the people there will be in prison jumpsuits. Why shouldn’t I wear jeans?”
Elaine stared at her for a moment and then shrugged. “Because you have to look nice for the judge. You have to, Olivia. This is not a game.”
Olivia dropped the jeans back on the floor and crossed to the desk chair. Before she had gone to bed, she had laid out a long plum-colored peasant skirt she had bought at CP Shades on sale the year before and a matching short-sleeve sweater. She tugged on the clothes and turned back to her mother. “Is this good enough?” she said, peevishly.
“Much better,” Elaine said, rising to her feet and crossing to the door. “I’d like to leave a little early if you don’t mind. I want to stop by the pharmacy and make a few quick calls before we go to the courthouse.”
Olivia shook her head. “You don’t have to go with me, Mom.”
“What?” Elaine asked, her hand on the doorknob. “What are you talking about? Of course I’m coming with you.”
Olivia swept back her hair with one hand and clipped a barrette into place with the other. “Honestly, I’d rather you didn’t. It’s, like, a two-minute hearing. It’s no big deal. I’d just as soon go by myself.” She looked at herself in the mirror and tugged a few hairs into place. She glanced over and saw Elaine’s reflected expression. Her mother’s mouth was pulled into a frown.
“Fine,” Elaine said and walked out the door.
***
Olivia stood at the podium in the magistrate judge’s courtroom pleating the fabric of her skirt in one nervous hand. Jorge huddled off to one side next to his attorney, a florid older man in a crumpled suit, and avoided Olivia’s eye. The indictment charged her with three crimes: conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine, actual distribution of methamphetamine, and use of a communications facility to commit a drug crime. This last offense, Izaya had explained, was legalese for using a telephone to talk about a drug deal. Olivia made certain that she pronounced the words “not guilty” loudly and forcefully, so that everyone in the courtroom would understand who and what she was—an innocent person. No one in the courtroom, however, seemed to notice, apart from Izaya, who squeezed her hand.
The indictment was read to Jorge and Oreste as it had been read to Olivia, and they were asked for their pleas. The proceedings were translated for them by an interpreter, a small, pretty woman in a peach-colored suit and a helmet of blow-dried hair.
“Not guilty,” Oreste said, in a thick, Mexican accent.
His voice so soft that Olivia could not hear him, Jorge muttered directly into the interpreter’s ear. The interpreter’s back was turned to Olivia, and when she bent over to listen to Jorge, Olivia saw the lines of her underwear straining against her tight skirt.
“Not guilty,” the interpreter said, translating Jorge’s whispered words into a loud and certain declamation of innocence that had something false about it, as if she were acting a part.
The judge motioned to the court clerk, who pulled a small wooden stick out of a pile. Olivia felt Izaya holding his breath.
“This case is assigned to the honorable Myron Horowitz, courtroom two.”
Only Olivia could hear Izaya’s muttered, “Fuck.” She blanched and looked at him, but he was busily scrawling down the dates the clerk announced for motions and trial. Once they were dismissed, they walked quickly to the rear of the courtroom.
“Is that a bad judge?” Olivia whispered, wishing now that she’d let her mother come with her this morning.
Izaya pushed his fingers through his hair, disarranging his dreadlocks. “No, no. Not really. He’s fine.”
“But you said, ‘Fuck.’”
“I was just hoping for one of the Carter appointees. They’
re the most liberal judges in the Northern district, but they’re both on senior status and not taking too many cases.”
“Who appointed Horowitz?”
“Reagan.”
“Fuck,” Olivia said.
“No, really, he’s okay. He’s not one of the most liberal guys, but he’s not a conservative demagogue, either. It’s really okay.”
“You said that we’d only get a downward departure if the judge was on our side. Is he going to be on our side?”
“Maybe. Horowitz likes to say that he’s tough but fair. That’s true, for the most part. He’s not some unpredictable wild card like some of the other judges. And it’s not like he never gives any downward departures. He follows the rules, and that means he gives them when he thinks the law warrants it.”
“Fuck,” Olivia said again.
“Not so much. Maybe just a little bit fuck,” said Izaya. “Come on outside so we can talk for a minute.” He took her arm and started to lead her out of the courtroom.
“I thought you said you had another client entering a plea this morning.”
Izaya paused. “Right, shit. Hold on a second.” He hustled up the aisle and motioned discreetly at the court clerk. Olivia watched him whisper a few words to the woman, who nodded and waved him away. He then came back down the aisle, stopping to shake the hand of a young black man wearing a puffy down jacket, sitting next to an elderly woman in a felt hat with a flower on it.
“Okay, I pushed my other arraignment back to the end of the calendar,” Izaya said when he returned to Olivia’s side. “Let’s go.”
They walked out into the hallway and stood against a wall opposite the courtroom. Olivia stared at the marble floor and paneled walls. For the first time, she noticed the elegant appointments, only slightly marred by the panels of fluorescent lighting flickering overhead.
“This is a nice building,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s nice. I mean, it’s not horrible and dingy like the ones you see on Court TV.”
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