Daughter's Keeper

by Ayelet Waldman

  Izaya nodded. “Well, it’s brand new. And it’s federal court. More money to spend, I guess. Anyway, how are you? Are you okay?”

  Olivia placed a hand on her belly. “I’m okay,” she said.

  “He’s really not a bad judge.”

  “It could be worse.”

  “Right.”

  A door across the hall burst open, and two men in almost identical navy-blue suits walked out, arguing vociferously about the A’s chances of winning a pennant any time in the next few years. Izaya and Olivia stood silently as the men made their boisterous way to the elevator bank.

  Once they were gone, Izaya said, “Now’s when we’ve really got to get cracking. I’ve already filed a discovery request with the government, and I’m going to ride them to get me the evidence sooner rather than later. I’m also going to get everything I can on the informant. We may need to go to court for that, but trust me, I’ll get it.”

  “I trust you,” Olivia said.

  He nodded. “Good. We’re going to need to work together on this. I’m counting on you to help me prepare the case.”

  “Okay.”

  He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small hammered-silver card case. “I’m going to give you my cell phone number. If I’m not in the office, I’m generally reachable on my cell. Call me if you think of something important, or if you just need to talk. Or anything. And my email address is on the card, too. You can always email me, although I’m a little leery of that. I know I’m probably being paranoid, but I try not to put anything in an email that I wouldn’t want to hear read out in court.”

  He scrawled a telephone number on the card and handed it to her. As she took it, she ran her fingers across the silver case.

  “This is nice,” she said.

  “Yeah, it was a present from my dad. When I won my first trial.” He flipped it open and showed her the inscription engraved under the top. To a Chip Off the Old Block.

  “Pretty fucking corny,” he said.

  “Is your father a lawyer, too?”

  Izaya nodded. “My dad is Ervin T. Upchurch.”

  “Who?”

  Izaya laughed. “I’ll have to tell him you said that. He’s a private criminal-defense lawyer. He’s kind of famous. He’s a commentator for CNN. He pretty much does only high-profile cases. You know, if the vice president’s kid gets busted or if some rap star kills his girlfriend. That kind of thing.”

  “I think I’ve heard of him,” Olivia said. “How come you don’t work for him?”

  “Because this is what I want to be doing. I’d rather be representing somebody like you than the types my dad defends.”

  “What type am I?”

  “The type that’s getting screwed by the system. The type that deserves a lot better.”

  “Do I deserve you?” she asked.

  “You deserve the best.”

  “And are you the best?”

  Izaya blushed and looked down at his shoes. Olivia put her hand on his sleeve, and he raised his eyes to hers.

  “Are you the best?” she asked again, not breaking her gaze.

  He looked back and then smiled. “I’m pretty good. Listen, I’d better get inside or my other client will think he deserves someone else. I’ll call you soon, okay?”

  He patted her hand with his and gently returned it to her. Then he slipped inside the courtroom, leaving Olivia alone in the hall. For a moment or two she thought about their conversation. She was embarrassed at the thought that Izaya might think she had been flirting with him, and at the knowledge that she had been. The last thing she had time to think about now was a man, and her lawyer was the last man she should fixate on. Except, of course, that he wasn’t the least obvious choice, by any means. He was young, and he was handsome. He was taking care of her. That was not something she was accustomed to. He was the only person in the calamity that her life had become who both knew what he was doing and was on her side. But, Olivia reminded herself, if he was standing by her, it was only because that was his job; he was paid to be on her team. She determined to dismiss anything she felt toward him as a kind of attorney-client transference, like when you fell in love with your shrink—only more dangerous.

  Olivia pushed thoughts of Izaya out of her mind and concentrated on Jorge. She didn’t want to leave before she’d had a chance to talk to him. It was a long wait; the U.S. Marshals only took the line of inmates out after the judge had worked his way through the entire calendar. She stood there in the empty hallway, chewing on the fingernails of one hand, the other pressed into her belly to quiet the nausea that had overcome her again as soon as Izaya had gone. The air was redolent of a musty, not unpleasant odor, like wood chips or sawdust. In the silent, empty hallway, Olivia slowly became aware of a humming noise, a throbbing, as if the building were breathing along with her. At first the sound bothered her, but the longer she waited the more she began to find it comforting. She leaned back against the wall, and by the time the doors opened and Jorge and the other inmates filed out past her, it had lulled her almost to sleep. Olivia jerked her eyes open and grabbed Jorge’s arm.

  “Jorge, I went to visit you but you didn’t put me on your visitors list. I need to talk to you.” Her voice came out in a rush of angry Spanish.

  Jorge’s brown eyes looked wet, as if he were trying not to cry. He wrenched his arm out of her hand and kept walking. Olivia ran after him.

  “Jorge! Stop! I need to talk to you!” she shouted.

  “Move away from the inmate!”

  She looked into the ruddy face of the guard who’d been almost kind to her when she’d first been arrested. He lowered his voice. “Move away, Miss.”

  She backed up, slowly. “I need to talk to him,” she said.

  The guard shook his head. “You can’t, not here. And you won’t be allowed to visit him. Not with an indictment pending against you.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  The guard turned back to the row of inmates and led them down the hall. She watched Jorge’s back in its orange jumpsuit as he walked away from her. He did not turn around.

  Olivia felt her rage ebb away, leaving behind a calm hollowness. She picked up her bag from the floor where she left it and walked to the bank of payphones lined up against the far wall of the hallway. She hauled up the torn phone book that hung by a chain from a hook in the wall and leafed through it. To her surprise, there, on the very first page of listings, was a section called Abortion Services. She looked at the large ads with the faces of smiling, relieved-looking women. She chose one called Family Choices, because the young black woman in the ad was being counseled by a woman who resembled Elaine.

  To Olivia’s consternation, they gave her an appointment for the following morning.

  ***

  When he left Olivia, Izaya was smiling. It wasn’t until he was sitting on the bench behind the defense table with the other attorneys that his smile faded, and he began to wonder what exactly was going on between him and his pretty young client. Izaya loved being in court; even the most mundane of appearances, like this morning’s perfunctory arraignments, gave him a buzz, a jolt of electric vigor. He sometimes suspected that this enthusiasm often made him seem inappropriately cheerful, given the circumstances in which his clients found themselves. He could not help but enjoy, however, how women looked at him when he was in the courtroom. He knew he was a fine-looking man, and he made very conscious use of that, filling his jury with women and enjoying in particular his appearances before female judges. Female opposing counsel made for good opponents, too, although Amanda Steele seemed utterly immune to his charms.

  He was, thus, not surprised at the frisson of sexual tension that had hummed between him and Olivia. What was startling, however, was his discomposure. Izaya had represented only a couple of female clients—there were, relatively, so few women arrested for federal crimes that a public
defender could go his entire career representing only men. Izaya had almost certainly engaged in a mild flirtation with the other women he’d represented—it was an almost unconscious behavior on his part. He couldn’t help it. But for some reason, with Olivia, it felt different: it felt wrong. Perhaps because she was so appealing and from more or less the same background as he was. They had gone to the same high school, after all. Perhaps because under different circumstances, and if he hadn’t sworn off white girls, he might actually have taken her out. Whatever the reason, he felt bad about flirting with her, and he vowed not to do it again.

  Izaya’s other client was last on the calendar, so he had plenty of time to affirm that vow before he had to step up to the podium. Rondell Duffin stood before the court with his hands shoved into the pockets of his North Face down jacket, his chin thrust out, and his eyes half-closed. Izaya made a mental note to give the kid a lesson in respecting the judge, or at least pretending to. Gang-banger attitude didn’t generally go over too well with the federal judiciary. When the magistrate announced the case assignment, Izaya had to stifle a grunt of frustration. Sure, this kid, whose open-and-shut bank robbery was going to result in a quick plea and a three-year sentence no matter which judge he got, ended up with the softest touch, while Olivia drew Horowitz, a rigid by-the-book authoritarian who seemed to delight in computing the sentencing guidelines with an inflexible precision.

  After the magistrate left the courtroom, Izaya sat for a moment with his young client and the boy’s grandmother.

  “I’ll call the prosecutor today about our plea,” Izaya said, his voice sliding into the rhythms the other attorneys in his office laughingly referred to as I-bonics. He neither took offense, nor paid much attention to the teasing. Izaya spoke to his people in the way that made them and him most comfortable, and if he didn’t exactly come by the accent naturally, what did that matter?

  Izaya looked at the young man sitting glumly next to his grandmother. His hair was done in cornrows like fat caterpillars, tied at the ends with little red elastic bands. His lips were pooched out in an expression of tough nonchalance, but Izaya knew just how scared he was under the bluster. This young man was precisely the kind of client he’d come to the public defender’s office to represent, Izaya reminded himself. He was here to help his black brothers in their struggles with the monolithic government that seemed hell-bent on incarcerating as many of them as humanly possible, not to help white kids who managed, despite every advantage, to screw things up enough to find themselves in jail.

  “It’s going to be all right, little brother,” Izaya said.

  His client shrugged his shoulders, and the old woman nodded.

  “You gon’ ask for that low end, right?” she said anxiously, the flower in her hat bobbing on its pipe cleaner stem.

  Izaya explained once again the formula through which the court would reach her grandson’s sentence. It didn’t bother him that this was easily the fourth or fifth time. He knew how hard it was to grasp, and how anxious the woman was.

  The old woman took his hand in hers and squeezed it. “You’re a good boy,” she said. “Your mama and daddy must be proud. Ervin T. Upchurch, that’s your daddy?”

  Izaya nodded, and saw the woman taking stock of his café au lait skin and the gold-brown highlights in his hair. He knew right away what the woman was wondering—was it possible that famous attorney, guest at the White House, winner of the NAACP image award, was yet another black man who had chosen to compromise himself and his people by marrying a white woman? There was, of course, no way that Izaya could answer her unasked question. The explanation was far too complicated, and too painful. Corinne Upchurch was precisely the upstanding, church-going, African-American woman Rondell’s grandmother would have wanted her to be. Izaya had met his father’s wife only once. It was at Corinne’s insistence that he had never met his two younger half-sisters, Monique and Tamra, nor his older half-brother Ervin Jr. Ervin T. Upchurch had taken up with Ruth Feingold when he was a young man, not yet married to the woman with whom he would spend his life, but already the father of her son. He had not been living with Corinne at the time, but Izaya knew that his father nonetheless kept his relationship with the white woman a secret, even after he had fathered a son with her, and especially after he had left her and gone back and married Corinne. Izaya figured that his father had kept quiet about the child-support payments he paid with admirable regularity, too, although Corinne’s equanimity when the three of them had finally shared a single, uncomfortable meal made him wonder if she had known about him all along.

  “Yup, Ervin T. Upchurch is my father,” he said.

  His client’s grandmother nodded. “He a proud man to have you as his son,” she said, again.

  Izaya wondered if that were true, if his graduation from Harvard, his clerkship on the Ninth Circuit, his success at the federal defender’s office, had managed to dispel the ­embarrassment of having fathered a child with a white woman who was not his wife. He didn’t think so. He saw his father every few months or so, whenever the man came to town. Ervin invariably took Izaya shopping at Wilkes Bashford, and most but not all of the thousand-dollar suits and two-hundred-dollar ties in Izaya’s wardrobe had been purchased for him by his father. The man always seemed to hear about Izaya’s victories almost as soon as they happened and greeted each with a congratulatory phone call and an expensive gift. But his interest seemed more avuncular than paternal, and he had never once broached the possibility of Izaya coming to work for him.

  Izaya told himself that he had no interest in his father’s high-end private practice, that he had become a public defender because he wanted to serve the people, his people. He did his best to pretend that Ervin’s failure to make the offer did not cause him pain.

  “That white girl—she in trouble?” the woman asked, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Excuse me?” he said.

  “That pretty little white girl with all the blond curls. She going to jail?”

  “Not if I can help it,” Izaya said.

  ***

  Jorge leaned his head back against the torn vinyl seat of the bus and angled his knees to one side. In its previous incarnation, the bus had obviously ferried children, not felons. The modifications required by its rebirth had included bars on the windows and a metal grill separating the driver from his presumably dangerous cargo, but no one had bothered to consider the seating requirements of men twice the size of the pint-sized passengers for whom the bus had originally been designed. Jorge shifted his legs to avoid the similarly cramped ones of his seatmate, a tall black man whose forearms and knuckles were decorated with the ink-blue lines of jailhouse ­tattoos. The man grunted and glared at Jorge. Jorge bent his legs farther under his own body and pressed his palms against his neck, reflexively protecting his most vulnerable area. He felt the dull ache of the razor-burned skin of his throat. The disposable razors they gave him were worthless, the blades dull and pitted, and no matter how hard he rubbed his hands with the pale gray soap, he couldn’t work up a lather. His skin was tugged and raw, and he’d cut himself at least three times. He looked worse than before he’d shaved. No wonder so many of the other inmates grew scraggly beards.

  He flexed his fingers and wriggled his wrists. It depressed him that he had grown accustomed enough to the handcuffs that they no longer chaffed quite so badly. The shackles around his ankles were new, however. He supposed that he’d only have to wear those when he went to court. He wasn’t sure how often that would be, however. His lawyer had come to visit him once in jail, but the man had been in such an obvious hurry, and their three-way conversation with the interpreter had been so awkward, that Jorge had forgotten to ask most of the questions that had been plaguing him since he’d been arrested. He’d tried to talk to the interpreter after the lawyer had shuffled the papers into his briefcase and moved on to another client, but the Spanish-speaking young woman had told him that she wasn’t al
lowed to give him advice or even information. Her job was to translate, and that was all.

  There were plenty of other prisoners who spoke Spanish, but Jorge was afraid to ask them about his case. Fear was too mild a word for the state of constant, soul-crushing terror in which he found himself at the North County Jail. He thanked the Virgin for Oreste, who seemed less scared, more composed. They weren’t in the same cell, but Oreste had somehow worked it so the two of them were ­assimilated into a group of Mexican men who were from the same part of Michoacán as Oreste. Jorge was sure that without Oreste’s benediction, these very same men would have turned on him, would have beaten him, or worse. He tried, however, not to think about that.

  There was a lot about which he was trying not to think. First and foremost was the brief and horrible explanation his lawyer had given of the mandatory sentences for drug dealing. He was trying not to think about the letter to his parents he’d begun and torn up more times than he could count. And most importantly, he was trying not to think about Olivia. This was a constant effort of will. He had to consciously force her from his mind, because thinking of her caused him to be overcome by a humiliated panic that he knew the other inmates could smell on him. The guilt about what he’d done to her made him weak, and, while he knew very little about being a prisoner, he knew enough to understand that weakness was a fatal condition.

  On the bus back to the jail from court, however, he indulged himself. He allowed himself to wonder what was happening to her. Oreste was convinced that Olivia had snitched on them; otherwise, he argued, how could she have gotten out on bail when the two of them were forced to stay inside? He’d taken to calling her la puta rubia, not at all worried that Jorge would object to his girlfriend being referred to as a blond whore. And Jorge did not, of course, defend her. Oreste was the only thing standing between him and utter isolation, and the last thing he could do was alienate the man. Besides, Jorge told himself, it wasn’t impossible that Olivia had given information against them. The girl had a self-righteous streak that had lately grown to wear on him. He could imagine her testifying against them in the name of honesty.