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

minutes to try to get to the bottom of something she should have known months ago. Abby could have killed Luz, but now the person she wants to kill is Will. As soon as he shuts the door to the witness room, before either Abby or Luz has a chance to sit down, the words are out of his mouth.

“Did you sleep with him? Did you?” He is staring at Luz, his face drained of color. Luz, who is putting her phone back in her purse after texting Maria Elena to bring over Cristina, looks up, startled.

As if that were the most important fact—or even a helpful one. Thank God the room—windowless and big enough only for a table and a few chairs—is soundproof. Abby wants to slap Will across the face. “You need to leave,” she says, as calmly as she can manage. “Right now.”

He starts to say something, and she holds up her breast pump. “I have to do this.”

“No, you don’t.”

Abby ignores him and focuses on getting set up. She places the machine on the table, plugs the electrical cord into an outlet, and connects the tubes to the suction cups. She turns to face him as she removes her jacket. “I am going to take off my shirt and bra,” she says. Some men in Abby’s office would have told her to turn around and face the wall—no fucking way were they going anywhere. But not Will. Whatever it is he has done, he remains Will: too modest, prudish even, to fathom staying in a room where his cocounsel’s breasts would be exposed. He turns and walks out without a word, leaving Abby and Luz alone.

Abby undresses from the waist up and hooks up the breast pump. Almost immediately, there’s a knock on the door behind her and Abby motions to Luz to get it. Behind her, she hears a few muffled words in Spanish, inhales the baby shampoo smell of Cristina. It makes her long for Cal. If only she’d known about this break, she could have asked Nic to bring him. She wishes she was holding him right now. Because she loves that time with him and because she has come to believe that Cal is like her secret weapon. The power that comes with the knowledge that she could create and sustain his life pulses through her when she is with him. It makes her feel invincible. Which is not at all the way she feels now.

Instead, Abby is in a baby-feeding face-off with her client—the Good Mom/Bad Mom tableau so bizarre and grotesque she wants to laugh hysterically, but it’s not funny. Instead, Abby forces herself to wait until Cristina latches on, then says to Luz, “I thought I told you never to lie to me again.”

Luz has her eyes on Cristina. “You never asked me anything about him.”

Abby takes a deep breath, but ends up yelling anyway as she slams her hand down on the table. “Do you think this is a fucking game of twenty questions? How the fuck were we supposed to know to ask you if you had an intimate—” Cristina begins crying and Abby breaks off abruptly, trying to gain some control over her language and lower her voice. “How were we supposed to know to ask you if you were—were—close to Captain Aronson?”

Luz resettles Cristina, then looks up, meeting her gaze. “What is it that you want? For me to answer his question?” She lifts her chin slightly in the direction of the door Will had exited.

Abby stops, caught up short. Stalling, she says, “What I need to know is exactly how many times you talked to Captain Aronson about what was going on between you and Travis. As specific as you can remember.”

“I wrote that down,” Luz says, “on the paper.”

“Everything?”

“Do you want me to answer his question?” Luz repeats. “Because you didn’t ask me that.”

Rapidly, Abby tries to calculate. It had to be true, because there is no other reason why Aronson would have hidden these communications from the government. Extramarital affairs are a criminal offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice; Aronson wouldn’t just be out on his ass, he might be charged—never mind the effect on his wife and three kids.

What’s true, though, isn’t necessarily helpful. From the beginning, Abby and Will have made it their mission to portray Luz as a victim. Victims are pure. Victims are innocent. Women who entice married men to cheat, women who cheat themselves, those women are whores, and whores are guilty. And Luz is at a double disadvantage. The hotheaded Latina stereotype Antoine brought up is alive in the courtroom. There is no margin for error; and although the law says that Luz is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, she is unlikely to get it. Not a brown girl accused of killing a white man. Not with a knife through the heart and not a scratch on her.

“No,” Abby says finally.

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t think it would be helpful.”

Luz nods. “Mr. Estrada told me you would say that.”

Abby looks at Luz in surprise. “What?”

“He called me,” Luz says, “after Will came to see him to get my file. He asked me some questions about my case. I told him about the manslaughter deal, that I wasn’t taking it. He explained to me about the law of self-defense.”

Abby holds up her hand, trying to ignore the whining of the breast pump. “What does Mr. Estrada telling you about the law have to do with—”

“He asked me about you,” Luz says, speaking over her. “I guess he knows who you are. That you had a big case once and—” she shrugs “—I don’t know. I told him you came back early for me. To try my case.”

Abby swallows. “What did he say?”

“That you are a holy terror.” Luz takes in Abby’s shocked expression and smiles slightly. “He said that you would fight like hell for me.”

“That’s right,” Abby says, angry all over again, “and