by David Ellis
She watched the clock as it hit seven-thirty. She inhaled and closed her eyes. On her kitchen table, she lit the sole candle and stared into its flame. She did the same thing she did every year on this day, asked for forgiveness and redemption.
God, of all days.
She drove to the detention center and raced to the check-in. “Michelle Trotter,” she said, “here to see my client, Alex Baniewicz.” She looked at the clock. It was three minutes past eight in the morning. She felt dizzy from sleep deprivation but charged with adrenaline.
“He has a visitor,” said the man behind the glass window.
“Who?” Not having enjoyed her own most recent visitors, her mind raced as to who might be paying a call on Alex.
“Ronald Masters.”
Oh. Okay. Ronnie.
She took a seat and felt exhaustion set in. Lack of sleep, tension, and grief had wiped her out, and her day had hardly started. But she felt some measure of relief being here, even if she hadn’t seen Alex yet.
Time moved slowly as she sat in the waiting room with two other women, each of them younger than she. Each of them African American. Neither of them appeared to be filled with hope or enthusiasm. This was not a happy place. If she were her mother, she would be bouncing off the walls right now. She remembered when her mother’s father—Shelly’s grandfather—had passed, and her mother continued to cook the scrambled eggs after receiving the phone call, because she needed to do something. Shelly didn’t mourn that way. She let it swallow her whole, maybe so it would go away more quickly.
Ronnie Masters emerged from a door. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt, which struck Shelly as insufficient for the cold weather; his long, dark hair was hanging all over his face. He saw her and nodded. Shelly greeted him, gave him some empty pleasantries.
“Didn’t know you were gonna be here,” he said, as if there were something meaningful about that. He gave her another look. “Have a rough night?”
“Something like that.”
Ronnie kissed Shelly’s cheek. He probably wanted to beg Shelly to save Alex, to spare him from the consequences of his actions. Whether Ronnie was in denial, Shelly did not know. What a “brother” would feel in such a situation was unfathomable. Little escaped Ronnie, and his presence had nothing to do with Alex’s guilt or innocence.
Shelly touched her eyes as Ronnie left. She felt an excruciating weight as she followed the guard into the interview room. Alex, having had a prior visitor, was already seated in the familiar position, hands cuffed before him. His eyes were swollen and red. Shelly had seen it before—little hurt a young man more than seeing the effects of his actions on his family.
Alex seemed surprised to see her. He started to speak but caught himself. He seemed overly aware of a small bag of items sitting on the floor near him. Shelly saw books, three different used paperbacks, inside the bag with a purple, frilly ribbon hanging out. Come to think of it, the bag was a small plastic one, fire-engine red. She could see a card in the bag as well, a long message in a fancy font.
She looked up at Alex. He smiled apologetically.
She pointed at the bag. “Your—is it—”
He swallowed hard. Their eyes locked on each other as she sank to her seat.
“Happy birthday to me,” Alex sang, an attempt at breaking the sudden tension, with a nervous smile that evaporated as soon as it appeared.
“Seventeen,” she said.
He said nothing. She searched his face, which invited her. The longer they stared at each other, the more uncomfortable she became.
“Were you—” She couldn’t get the word out. “You were—”
He nodded. He smiled at her differently than ever before. The sweetness that Shelly had found so compelling for an unrefined kid, his immediate willingness to open himself to her, held a different meaning now.
“Adopted. Yes.” Alex finished her sentence, pausing first, then slowly saying the words.
They stared at each other without words. She could read it on his face but she couldn’t believe it.
“No,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, not even realizing she uttered the words as the realization had crashed down on her.
“I was gonna tell you, Shelly. A bunch of times.”
Shelly stared at this boy as if he were a work of breathtaking art, a magnificent structure to behold. She brought a hand to her mouth, closed her eyes. Her body began to tremble, but she did not cry. A different feeling gathered over her, a feeling that certainly couldn’t prevail, not under the circumstances, but one that could not be denied temporarily.
When she opened her eyes again, the trembling ceased.
Alex smiled at her, clearly more at ease with the information than Shelly. He’d had a year to digest it, after all. “I suppose it’s time we talked about it,” he said.
Shelly held on to the table as if a strong wind threatened to blow her away. Alex hadn’t really needed a lawyer for that initial disciplinary case at school after all.
He’d just wanted to meet his mother.
PART TWO
Choices
15
Mother
SHE OPENS HER eyes with a start, popping up on the reclined leather chair, staring into the eyes of Dr. Sarah Karpiel. The doctor, her legs crossed, sits on a stool, reading from a clipboard. She is fair-haired, wears glasses and peers through them at her patient.
“What—did I—?” Shelly’s throat closes.
“No.” The doctor sets down her clipboard and leans on her knees.
“No?” Shelly feels a flood of relief. “I—you didn’t—”
“Shelly, we don’t push abortions on people. We don’t even advocate them. We simply provide a medical option at the patient’s request.” There is a hint of rebuke, or maybe frustration, in the doctor’s voice. “Although it would be preferable not to wait until the last moment to tell us.”
“I—I told you.”
“You withdrew consent, Shelly. You started screaming, as best you could, at least.”
Shelly sits up, gathers her gown about her. Her heart is pounding. She places a hand on her belly and looks up at the doctor. “What did I say?”
The doctor shrugs, but surely she recalls the words. Perhaps she doesn’t want to. “You said ‘no.’ You said ‘stop.’ You said, ‘Don’t do it.’” She adjusts her glasses. “At least, as best as we could understand. I wasn’t going to take that chance.”
“Thank you.” Shelly exhales, looks up at the ceiling and maybe beyond.
“You can return, Shelly, but only if you’re sure. You have some thinking to do.”
Shelly manages her way out of the chair and steadies herself. She knows it now with a vision, a clarity she has never known.
16
Son
ALEX EXPLAINED THINGS, moving slowly at first before gaining some comfort. He had been adopted by the people Shelly saw in the photograph at his house—Gerhard and Patricia Baniewicz. Everything he’d told her was true—his dad was an immigrant who sold machine parts, his mother a second-generation Russian who worked at an assembly plant—except that they weren’t his biological parents. They had met in their midthirties—they were only a year apart in age—and married less than a year later. They rented a floor of a small house just south of Mapletown in a heavily concentrated Polish neighborhood.
After several years attempting to conceive, the couple learned that Patty Baniewicz was infertile. They were rejected by adoption agencies because they failed the “rule of seventy” applied by many agencies, which added up the ages of the two parents and disqualified those over a cumulative age of seventy. So they turned to private adoptions—attorney adoptions—and after two years made the connection. Alex came into their lives after eighteen months of waiting, the product of an entirely confidential transaction between attorneys. They didn’t know the name of the family who had brought them Alex, and that family didn’t know them.
Shelly liste
ned intently. She was not surprised at the ages of Alex’s adoptive parents, because she knew well the ins and outs of adoptions. She knew the “rule of seventy” and that most parents who went the private adoption route were older, sometimes in their late forties or even fifties. She also knew that the unintended consequence was that many of these parents passed away when their adopted children were young, leaving the children in an often precarious situation—for the second time in their short lives.
Yes, she had researched it quite a bit herself. She even knew how to find her son, knew the long way and the shortcuts. Either way, it was fairly expensive and difficult. But it could be done. She knew how. She just hadn’t ever done it.
Gerry Baniewicz died, as Alex had originally told her, of an aneurysm when Alex was ten. Three years ago, Patricia died after a very short and unsuccessful bout with pancreatic cancer. By the time it was discovered, the cancer had spread to her lungs and was inoperable. She died 137 days after getting the news. She had made what preparations she could for Alex. Financially, she would leave little behind. Elaine Masters had agreed to take Alex in. She was an alcoholic and everyone knew it, but she was also a kind woman who simply could not keep up with her troubles. It was because of Ronnie, Alex said, that Patricia could die knowing that someone would be looking out for Alex. Alex recalled his mother, at home and near death, grasping Ronnie’s hand and making him promise that he would stay by Alex’s side.
Shelly sat next to Alex. She searched his face as discreetly as possible, for evidence of her parents’ traits, her own characteristics. His strong chin—maybe that was a Trotter trait, like Shelly’s father. The eyes, she could see some of her mother, the shape not the color. His features were primarily dark, however. She didn’t want to say it, even think it: Alex probably looked more like his father, whoever that was.
It had been ninety minutes now, since Shelly had learned. The first hour was a fog; neither of them spoke more than a handful of words. Shelly was absolutely transfixed by him, this boy who had sought her out a year ago under the ruse of needing help with a disciplinary proceeding, when all he really wanted was to meet his mother. This boy who sought Shelly’s approval, who seemed to be making an effort to comply with her wishes for him—at least until—well, that could wait. Her mind, her heart was enough of a tidal wave already.
Oh, look at him! He was a sensitive, compassionate kid.
He was a drug dealer who shot a police officer.
“Tell me how you found me,” she said, though she could probably guess herself.
“Hired a guy,” he told her. “Some of the I-bankers use private investigators when they’re doing due diligence. I used one of them. Put me back about twenty-five hundred. He went to some agency—”
The Department of Public Health, Bureau of Vital Statistics.
“—and got someone to give him a peek at the birth certificates.”
There was a birth certificate for every child born in this state. The certificate contained the birth mother’s name and age, as well as the place of birth. For adopted children, an amended birth certificate was then placed on top of the original, with the adoptive family’s name. The procedure Alex’s investigator undertook was a routine, though technically illegal one, looking at the original birth certificate to find the name of his biological mother.
“So then we knew your name, and it didn’t take us long to find you.”
She nodded. For such a loud-mouthed, opinionated attorney, she was suddenly without words. She knew more about the process of locating a parent or child than he did. She could have found Alex. All these years, she could have and didn’t.
“I just wanted to meet you,” he continued. “That school thing—that fight. That was kind of my excuse. I just wanted to see you in person. I didn’t know if we’d ever get to know each other. I didn’t know if I’d ever tell you.”
She had never felt so disarmed. She wanted to duck under the table in shame. All of the rationalizations she’d lived with seemed empty. She was without excuses or words.
“It’s okay,” Alex said.
Was her remorse that obvious? She couldn’t know. She couldn’t think rationally now. What could she say to this boy? What should she say?
A knock on the door. The five-minute warning. Their time was up.
Shelly could recall the conversation almost verbatim. Last May, before the warm weather had broken. She and Alex were walking along the lake on a Sunday, only a short walk from Alex’s offices at McHenry Stern. She was cold and Alex had given her his long black coat.
She didn’t know, in hindsight, why she had told him. Maybe because she had known, of all people, he would never repeat it. They didn’t share friends or run in the same circles. So he was safe. Yes, that would have been the easy way to rationalize it. But that wasn’t the truth. The truth was, she had always opened herself more to children than adults. She had few close friends, perhaps by choice. The truth was, in the four months she had known Alex up to that point, she had come to rely on the friendship as much as Alex. She’d never told anyone, other than the police, of course. She’d never told anyone and she suddenly felt the urge.
The truth was, she wasn’t just helping Alex get his act together. She’d needed his friendship as much as he needed hers.
I was raped when I was sixteen, she’d told him.
She’d told him everything. The reaction of the police. Her thoughts of abortion. The reaction of her parents. Her life afterward.
I had the baby, she’d said. I gave it up for adoption and never saw it. Not then or ever again. An attorney came in, had me sign the papers, and it was over.
And now, as she sat across from a boy who was her son, she recalled Alex’s reaction. The loss of color to his cheek, the catch in his throat when he tried to vocalize a response. She didn’t discern the subtleties then, the difference between shock and disappointment, or perhaps the mingling of the two.
How, she wondered with the knowledge of hindsight, had that information affected Alex? When she told him of her rape last May, she was telling him he would never know his biological father. And worse. She was telling him that his birth, his very existence, was the product of a criminal act.
It came to her now, the reason for her need to purge to him that day. That hadn’t been just any old Sunday in May. And—yes, now that she thought about it—it had been Alex’s idea to meet on Sunday. He had bought her lunch and given her a small gift, a pair of earrings. She had accepted it for what she thought it was, a gesture of appreciation for everything she had done for him. It had never occurred to her then that it was a Mother’s Day present.
The guard entered the room and unlocked Alex’s handcuffs from the table. Alex stood up in his handcuffs and looked briefly at Shelly before being led out of the room.
17
Plea
JEROD ROMERO HAD a series of routine matters in court this morning. For some of the cases, prisoners in orange jumpsuits were shuffled in, joined by their defense counsel. Romero was all business, no humor, even when the judge was not on the bench.
He finished about noon and saw Shelly as he was gathering his papers. “Ms. Trotter,” he said in his formal courtroom voice.
“I need to know you’re protecting Alex.”
“We are.” Romero looked at her with curiosity. “Why do you mention it?”
Shelly had thought about it over the nine hours that had passed since the two men ambushed her in her apartment. She’d run to Alex to ensure his safety—only to be broad-sided by his revelation—then to work, to do a final run-through for the depositions that would begin today in the deaf-ed case—and then to the federal courthouse, where she had found Jerod Romero.
With the constant shift in focus, she felt punch-drunk, delirious, driven only by adrenaline. She could only imagine the impression she was making on the prosecutor.
She had decided she would not reveal what had happened. Not yet. She couldn’t prove anything and she could only make matters worse.
There was always time to do it. Ways to do it.
“Something happened,” said Romero.
“Just make sure Alex is okay. I’m putting you on notice.”
“You have to tell me if someone threatened him,” he said. “Or you.”
“No, I don’t. But if you don’t give me assurances, right now, that Alex is safe, I’m going to the press. I’m going to the judge. I’m going to tell everyone in town about your operation.”
The prosecutor raised his hand, looked around the emptying courtroom as if he were afraid Shelly might divulge the confidential information right now. From Romero’s perspective, Shelly held a real card here. She had every right to change Alex’s plea to self-defense and to explain in detail the facts of that defense. The federal prosecutor, with all his powers, could not stop her. The U.S. Attorney’s office could not prevent Shelly from revealing the sting operation.
And that was not only important to the U.S. Attorney’s office as a whole, but in particular to this Assistant U.S. Attorney standing before her. This would be a major case, perhaps a career-maker, for Jerod Romero, depending on how many cops were snared in the operation.
“He’s safe,” he told Shelly. “You have my word.”
She was too exhausted to sufficiently read the prosecutor. She took him at his word, mostly because she had no choice. She didn’t want to expose the drug sting, either, and more to the point, she didn’t want to hurt Alex’s chances for a negotiated deal with the county attorney on the murder charge.
Romero motioned for them to sit at one of the rows of spectator seats, which resembled pews in a church. He seemed to appraise her outward appearance more than consider strategy. “You’re right,” he admitted. “I can’t make you tell me. But if someone’s getting nervous about Alex—I need to know that, Shelly. I can help you. And I need to know.”