Family Law

by Gin Phillips

  “I’ll drive home, Lucia. I’ll tell her when I get there. It’ll be worse if you tell her over the phone. It’ll be worse if she comes by. Do you know what she’ll do if she sees that window blown out?”

  “I have some idea.”

  “I’ll be fine,” Rachel said.

  “I should drive you home,” Lucia repeated.

  “Then I’ll have to deal with coming back for my car,” Rachel said. “I’ll tell her when I get home, and she’ll see I’m safe, so she won’t be able to hallucinate any terrible things. I’ll tell her—I don’t know, but, Lucia, seriously—someone was shooting at you. Why are we talking about me?”

  Every word came out clear and calm. Rachel did not seem to be in shock, either.

  “Don’t worry about Lucia,” Evan said, stepping closer to them. “She comes from strong stock. Did she ever tell you about her grandmother?”

  “Her grandmother?” said Rachel.

  “She got her dress caught in the tractor she was driving,” he said. A breeze pushed past, lifting hair and shirt tails, like a whole wall had vanished instead of a window. “No one was around. She managed to cut the engine, but her leg was mangled and they had to amputate.”

  “She was eighty,” said Lucia.

  “A year later, she was back driving the tractor,” Evan said. “Strong stock.”

  The familiar rhythm was a relief. Evan had always loved this story, and Rachel had her head tilted, soaking up every word. If they could all keep playing their parts, everything would settle.

  “You always use that phrase,” Lucia said. “It’s like saying I have good birthing hips.”

  “Your grandmother drove a tractor?” Rachel said.

  “Hell, yes,” Lucia said.

  She wouldn’t normally say “hell” in front of the girl. She wondered if Evan and Rachel had the same thought, because the silence thickened like custard, a few seconds changing the texture entirely. They remembered. They stood, unmoving and dry mouthed, until sirens cut through the quiet. The wails seemed to be coming from miles away, but it took less than a minute before the police car slid to a stop along the curb.

  Lucia rushed to the not-there window. One police car. She had expected more.

  Two men in blue, in no hurry to get out of the car. Adjusting the visors, reaching toward the floorboards or the glove compartment, and what might they be doing—Spitting out gum? Pulling out paperwork?

  Lucia watched the one on the passenger side climb from the car, his every movement careful. She watched his black shoes ease onto the pavement. The way he boosted himself with a hand on the door. The way he ducked his head down, saying something to his partner, who was still inside the car. The two of them strolled up the driveway at a comfortable pace. Still, they’d arrived here very quickly.

  She wondered if she was judging time poorly.

  She stood by the door, aware of Evan tugging Moxie toward the guest bedroom. She waited for the policemen to knock and then she could not wait any longer, and she yanked the door open before they’d reached the welcome mat. She answered their hello and studied their faces: she didn’t know them. She’d had a passing thought that she might. In the old days, she’d spent plenty of time with policemen. These two looked to be in their early thirties, soft-faced and unfamiliar.

  Everything picked up speed.

  The patrolmen came inside and looked through the sunroom, picking their way through the glass, and they called out a question every now and then but not many. They ran their fingers over the bullet holes in the wall and doorframe. They nodded and said they’d take a look outside the house and then come back. When Evan asked if he and Lucia could come as well, the men waved them forward. Lucia asked Rachel to stay inside with Moxie and, shockingly, the girl agreed with hardly a word. She curled up on the den sofa before Lucia had even closed the kitchen door.

  Six bullets, the policemen counted. Lucia hadn’t remembered that many shots. One lodged in the fence around the backyard. One stuck in a wooden column of the carport. Three in the wall of the sunroom, and the one wedged in the doorframe.

  Did you see the car?

  No.

  Do you have any reason to believe someone would be targeting you, Mrs. Gilbert?

  No.

  Do you have any guess about who might have done it?

  No.

  Because it feels personal.

  Well, yes, it did.

  Lucia felt a burst of interest when they said they would go question the neighbors: she should have thought of it herself. She watched the officers cut across her yard, and then she went inside, washed her hands, and poured three glasses of ice water. Evan and Rachel took their glasses and went to check on Moxie, and Lucia wandered through the den, finishing off her water.

  When the policemen came back, they stood in the driveway and told her that Mrs. Jackson across the street had looked out her window and seen a large, dark car, probably navy blue or black. It was a four-door, she said, but she wasn’t good with car names. She’d seen it driving away, only from the back, and she had no idea who was driving. One person? More? She couldn’t say.

  No one else had seen anything, although several people had heard the shots, including Marlon, who came by with the beagles. At that point, the policemen were talking through the science of bullets.

  “Was it the Buick?” Marlon yelled from a good twenty feet away.

  “That’s Marlon Reynolds,” Lucia said quickly, taking in Marlon’s less-than-pristine beard and ragged shorts. She did not want anyone to shoot him accidentally. “He lives down the street.”

  Both policemen signaled for him to come closer. One of them reached down and patted a beagle. Inside, Moxie went nuclear.

  Marlon told them exactly what he’d told Lucia a few weeks earlier. One of the officers took notes, and the other one—the beagle petter—flexed and unflexed his right hand, like maybe he had some arthritis, even though he was surely too young for it. Lucia watched his hand curl and straighten, and something about the movement pulled at her. His face was familiar after all. A hallway started to coalesce, and she tried to bring the setting into focus.

  There.

  She’d been passing a defendant in the corridor before his arraignment; he’d gotten hold of a box of Junior Mints, shaking them into his mouth straight from the box. His aim had not been good, and chocolates had bounced from his chest onto the floor. A policeman had yanked the candy away from him, and that policeman had been doing this same thing with his hand. He’d caught her eye and they’d shared a moment of silent disbelief over the candy, and she’d seen him a few other times after that in the hallways. She thought he’d mentioned saving up vacation time for a honeymoon in Mexico.

  She looked at the policeman in her driveway, curling and straightening his fingers. He wore a wedding ring.

  “I know you, don’t I?” she said.

  “I was wondering if you’d remember me, Mrs. Gilbert,” he said. “Matt Atkinson. It’s been a long time.”

  “We met back—” she started.

  “Honestly,” he said, stretching out his fingers. “I don’t remember the details. I do remember you, of course.”

  She hadn’t remembered him, though, and that shook her. These men had asked questions and she had answered them, but she had little faith that their questions were the right ones, and now she wondered if she could even trust her answers.

  Evan’s hand at her back, between her shoulder blades. A solid touch.

  Marlon touched her shoulder, too, as he left. The beagles’ claws clicked on the concrete.

  “What happens next?” Evan asked.

  “There’s a chance that the bullets will tell us something,” said the policeman Lucia didn’t know. He had mentioned his name and she had already forgotten it. “We’ll see if they lead us to someone who’s been in trouble before.”

&nb
sp; “You’ll leave some sort of guard here, right?” Evan said. “In case whoever did this comes back?”

  Both policemen shook their heads.

  “There’s no reason to believe they’d come back,” said Matt Atkinson. “That’s not how this sort of thing usually works.”

  “You said it felt personal,” said Evan, and he was furious. Lucia doubted the policemen could tell from his tone, but his overpronounced words were as good as screaming. “If it’s personal, there’s a very good chance he’ll come back, whoever he is. I don’t understand why you’re acting like this happens every day.”

  The officers said a patrol car would be circling the neighborhood. They said the presence of the car would certainly be a deterrent. They said Lucia and Evan should call if they saw anything out of the ordinary.

  By the time the men climbed back into their cruiser, Evan was nearly shaking with anger. Lucia, too, was ready for them to leave. They had nothing else to offer. What she most wanted, at this moment, was for the details of the shooting not to appear in the newspaper the next morning. As the patrol car veered around a pothole, brake lights flashing, Evan kicked at the splinters flecking the carport. She thought of Chris Sanderson with his Tom Selleck mustache and meticulous handwriting. He’d been a police sergeant when they first met during an assault case years ago, but he’d been promoted to lieutenant this past spring.

  She turned toward the door, wood bits crunching under her sandals. She checked her watch and hoped that Chris was at the station. She likely had his direct number at her office, but she’d just call the front desk—

  “You getting a broom?” asked Evan as she brushed past him.

  She nodded. Yes, a broom would be good. She’d get one after she called the police station. But first she would check on Rachel—the officers hadn’t asked the girl a single question, so there’d been absolutely no reason for her to wait around this long. If she still couldn’t convince Rachel to accept a ride home, Lucia would at least walk her to her car. And then she’d call Chris Sanderson, who had always exuded competence. No whining or excuses—he just did what needed to be done, and she’d always appreciated that.

  II.

  She couldn’t sleep. At 1:00 a.m. she was pulling the Yellow Pages out of the drawer, turning to W for “windows,” then switching to the Gs for “glass.” Glass repair? Or would that only involve windshields? She smoothed down the pages, centering the phone book on the counter. She’d leave it open, and that would be one less thing for the morning. She’d at least caught Chris Sanderson at his desk, and he’d promised to keep the incident out of the papers.

  On the couch, Moxie snored, back legs twitching.

  Lucia jerked at a quick, dark movement just inside the sliding doors, expecting a roach. It was only the shadow of her arm, stretching.

  She had kept out of the sunroom for as long as she could. Now she gave in to its pull, swatting at the overhead light switch. The duct tape and tarp had been more successful than she’d expected: although the tarp rippled slightly with the breeze, the tape held firm. The effect was to make the room seem not so much damaged as under construction. Neither sweeping nor vacuuming had gotten rid of all the glass on the carpet and sofa. When she ran a hand over the cushions, invisible shards pricked her palm. She backed away, pressing herself against the wall, not so far from bullet hole number one, which had been stripped of its actual bullet.

  A little plaster would fix the holes. And she’d need to repot the chin cactus, which was dented, but all in all, the room did not look like near murder.

  She heard footsteps.

  “Lucia,” said Evan, the floor creaking under him as he came toward her. His boxer shorts were off-kilter, rucked around the crotch.

  “I’m going to call someone about the window first thing in the morning,” she said.

  “Lucia.”

  He leaned against the wall next to her. She slanted into him.

  “You really have no clue?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  His hand skimmed up her leg, then slid under her T-shirt. “I love this thigh. It’s the most perfect thigh in the universe. Your right thigh, I mean. The left one—it’s adequate, I suppose.”

  Even now, he could make her laugh.

  “We do have to actually talk about it,” he said.

  “I don’t know what to say. I don’t have an answer.”

  “I’m not looking for an answer.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  She saw Rachel’s hair, frizzing at the neck, copper curls. A spill of dirt, gray and dry, the chin cactus round and red like her mother’s ancient pin cushion. The groove of Rachel’s button carved into her arm, dog hair like a tumbleweed. The dry skin of Evan’s naked knee.

  “Thoughts,” he said. “Any thoughts at all.”

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said.

  “It doesn’t have to be right now,” he said, and God, she loved this man.

  The tarp rattled like paper, the sound of someone searching for the right page.

  “I know I have this ability,” she said. “To, you know, close the door when something is too hard. To block it out.”

  His fingers curled around hers. “I had no idea.”

  They stayed against the wall for several quiet minutes, and then he asked her if she’d like him to make coffee and keep her company. She told him to get some sleep, and eventually he disappeared through the doorway and she was left alone with the tarp and other things.

  She had nearly forgotten the feel of 3:00 a.m., how the streets and the skies and even the insects were silent, how your arms were heavier and your head was thick. During law school and the first years of her career, she’d been well acquainted with this syrupy time of night. One year at Legal Aid. Two years in the district attorney’s office, first with family court and then with juvenile court. She hadn’t lasted long. She—pretty little blonde—would lie in bed and discover that some child had burrowed into her brain, maybe Bequeatha Long with her doll’s face and swollen eye. Maybe Alicia Redmont, who shot her father after he kicked her pregnant mother in the stomach, or maybe Jed Louis, who robbed a man at gunpoint but still slept with a Winnie-the-Pooh bear in tenth grade—and how was she supposed to have known those sorts of stories existed? She would sit at this same dining-room table and think of how she might make a difference—such simple, stupid, nursery-rhyme morality, a near impossibility with the children, who—before she ever met them—had been broken into so many pieces that neither she nor all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could have put them back together again. She’d tried. She’d listened. She’d remembered the names of their sisters and mothers and best friends, and she’d carefully explained their options, and she’d always shown up when she said she would. She’d played a silent game as she walked through the county jail—Who would kill me? And she’d look at face after face and think, He would. He would. Maybe not him. And sometimes then and sometimes now she cringed at herself, wondering if she should have done it all differently, because she had not turned into a crusader, at least not the kind who could have helped those children. She did not work for the Southern Poverty Law Center, which was walking distance from her office. If she had aimed for that path, she could have made it happen, surely. But she hadn’t, so what possible use was there in wondering?

  She could sleep at night now. Normally. Her clients wished for things that she—and the courts—could possibly grant. When she flipped through her stacks of paper, she found answers in them.

  She had no desire to relearn this time of night.

  She had a good view of the partial wall between the small foyer and the sunroom. The cream-colored molding that set off the gold walls did not look as pristine from this angle. She stared at the decades of paint. How had she never noticed the pockmarks and bubbles? The molding looked fine from a distance, but up close, it was all fl
aws. The paint had peeled away completely in some patches, and Lucia could see down to the naked wood, the old iterations of paint exposed, archaeological.

  She might as well make a call to a housepainter after she called the window repairmen.

  III.

  On Saturday, three days after the shooting, Lucia’s father called to ask if she and Evan would be home that afternoon. Her parents had visited once already: her father had run his finger down the splintered post of the carport, and her mother had started many sentences she didn’t finish.

  Lucia wasn’t surprised that they needed more shoring up. She was standing in the kitchen when her father opened the door. He was inside so fast that Moxie never made a sound.

  “It’s not locked?” he asked, incredulous.

  “I saw you pull up,” Lucia said, wrapping her arms around him and kissing his rough cheek. How did he always smell of grass, she wondered, even when he’d just showered?

  “You keep it locked, though?” he said.

  “I’m not an idiot, Dad,” she said.

  “I know that.”

  Her mother pushed in, too, and her hug was longer than usual.

  “Are you all right?” Caroline asked, breath in Lucia’s ear. “Are you doing all right, really?”

  “I’m fine, Mother,” Lucia said. “I promise. It’s all over with, and the police are checking on us, making sure nothing else happens. It was just a fluke.”

  “Oliver,” Evan called out, rounding the corner of the hallway. “Come have a seat.”

  “No need,” said her father. “This won’t take long. I tell you, though, I still can’t get that game out of my head. I hate to admit it, but he’s the best that’s ever been.”

  It took Lucia longer than it should have to realize that he was talking about the Iron Bowl. The Auburn-Alabama football game had been two weeks ago, but both her husband and her father were still talking about Bear Bryant, as if there were anything left to say that had not been printed a thousand times.