A Good Mother by Lara Bazelon (different ereaders txt) 📗

Up close, Will can see her smattering of freckles, the incompletely removed bits of mascara sticking to the corners of her eyelashes, her fine, pale hair flattened slightly on one side from resting her head on the couch. This is his wife of five years, his girlfriend of ten, the not-so-distant future mother of his children. The person he has promised to love and cherish forever. Who loves and cherishes him, always has, always will.

He longs for an answer that is not his fault, an answer that makes him the victim. I was hit by a car. I was robbed at gunpoint. I have an inoperable brain tumor.

The truth is unspeakable. I spend every night shoving and slapping my client. I call her horrible names, and then we fuck. Luz’s word. Fuck me. Her nipples dark and swollen in his mouth, as he kneads her perfectly round ass, firm in his hands. Fuck me. Her eyes fixed on his, her cheeks burning red where he’d hit her, her panties pushed to one side, her legs wrapped tightly around him, pushing him deeper inside as he holds her down on the conference table.

Now she no longer wears panties. Just knowing that she comes to meet him wet and ready under her skirt makes him hard. Often and in the most inappropriate moments he stiffens: waiting to meet with one of his other clients at the jail, listening when Abby updates him on some new development, taking—sweet Jesus—the quiz at the end of the mandatory online sexual harassment training for new employees. His mind turns up images of her with the relentless precision of a Vegas dealer flipping cards. A small blessing that, at least right at this moment, his feelings of guilt and the terror of being found out are enough to make his dick shrivel.

“Will?”

He blinks. Now it’s Meredith’s eyes that are brimming.

“Mer,” he says weakly. He should hold her, he knows. He should press her tightly against him and finish his sentence: that the trial was less than a week away, that it would all be over soon, that afterward, everything would go back to normal. But he can’t bring himself to say the words, and the idea of touching his wife fills him with panic. She will want to make love—her word—not out of raw desire but out of a desperate need to reclaim him and feel close again.

He does a mental inventory of his body: the other places where he has been scratched, bitten, kicked. Meredith knows that he and Luz have been practicing—that was the word he had used excitedly when he’d told her of his idea, too excited by his own brilliance, he realized now, to appreciate that she was apprehensive, as any sane spouse would be. So most of it was explicable, though maybe not the rake lines across his lower back, the purple welt near his collarbone where he saw, in the locker room mirror, the imprint of small, even teeth.

But these problems, real as they are, are not the only reason he won’t make love to his wife. He doesn’t even know if he could get through the series of rituals that are as familiar as the way he brushes his teeth (back to front) or washes himself in the shower (top to bottom). Worse, he doesn’t want to.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. But his voice is tired and flat, and he knows the words sound empty. “I’m not myself,” he says, and realizes how deeply true it is. He has become depraved, taken over by a craving for Luz that consumes everything else, even the basic instinct for self-preservation. The craving subsides only right after he comes, still deep inside of her, and for the rest of that night, when he sleeps like a dead man. But in the morning, the craving is back, screaming like a kettle that won’t go off. Again he thinks of Charles and his obsession with Sarah, the French lieutenant’s woman. Never has he identified so closely with someone who—he keeps having to remind himself—is a fictional character.

A million times in the last three weeks he has told himself to stop. That he has to stop. What he is doing isn’t just a crime against his marriage, it’s a crime against his profession. If anyone found out, he would be dismissed, disbarred, disgraced. Every morning, alone in the small apartment after Meredith has left for school, he stares at his reflection in the mirror, holds the razor up to his face before it begins the first slide through the white foam.

She’s nineteen.

She’s your client.

The last person she fucked, she killed.

It’s all true, and yet somehow beside the point. The craving isn’t just a heat, it’s a voice, too. This is bigger than him, bigger than his marriage. This is about saving a woman’s life and the life of her child. These are mortal stakes. Abby, Antoine—even Paul—had approved of Will’s strategy, albeit in PG-13 form. They had understood that he and Luz are making a piece of art with the power to change the outcome of the case. And what Will understands in his more lucid moments is that his perfidy adds a kind of demented integrity to the performance—because what he is saying and doing when he acts out the death of Sergeant Travis Hollis has become a kind of absolute truth.

Now, Will forces himself to keep looking at Meredith. “This is going to be over soon,” he says. He says this because it is true, and because it is meant to offer relief, to his wife, but to himself, as well. It will end; the case, and he prays, his craving, too, breaking like a fever, leaving Will and Meredith to go back to the way things were. But the words offer him no relief; like Charles in the aftermath of Sarah’s abrupt departure, he can think of Luz’s absence from his life only as an incomprehensible loss.