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

to anyone about what is happening in Luz’s case. About what is happening between Abby and Will, the two of them like drunk drivers fighting for control of the wheel as the car swerves on a switchback. If she tells Jonathan, it will be real.

“Yes, it is.” Jonathan has stopped smiling. He leans forward, elbows on her desk. “Now why don’t you tell me what the fuck is going on. I was in court this morning before I left to go to your house for my mannying duties.”

“Your what?”

“My male nanny duties. With your son. Who is fine by the way, thank you for asking.”

“That’s good, and I—I am so appreciative,” Abby says, trying to make the words sound meaningful. At the mention of Cal, she feels a familiar ache in her breasts, wants nothing more than to be alone with him in the bathtub. “I was on my way home, you know, before you ambushed me.”

Jonathan shakes his head. “As I was saying. Based on what I saw in court, there is no way that either you or Shauna saw what was coming with Aronson.”

“That was a speed bump,” Abby says, her mind sticking with the car metaphor. “But everything’s okay now. Everything is fine.”

“God, you are a crap liar.”

“I’m not lying.”

“Really? Then why ever would it be,” Jonathan asks, lifting an eyebrow, “that you were doing internet searches earlier this afternoon for a California state bar rule about what happens when attorneys have sex with their clients?”

Abby looks at her desktop screen, which has gone black. She hits the return key but there’s nothing to see except the screen-saved picture of Cal in a striped onesie, eyes open wide as saucers, a turquoise seen only in the most faraway and uncorrupted of oceans. She looks back at Jonathan. “You went on my computer—”

“I searched your browser history,” he says. “You should make a habit of erasing that, by the way. Easy to do and prevents, well, snooping. The government says they are going to give us password-protected desktops any day now, but I wouldn’t hold my breath. Until then—” he lifts his shoulders “—I suggest you be more careful.”

“You motherfucker,” she says, but she can’t help the admiring tone that creeps into her voice.

“What are you going to do?”

“Do about?” She opens her eyes as wide as Cal’s.

“You know what.”

“Nothing,” she says. “I am going to do nothing.” She pauses. “And I don’t know. Not for sure.”

“You are such a bad liar it is almost comical. Do you have any idea how many tells you have? You’re like a little kid.” Jonathan shakes his head.

“I’m not lying,” she insists, knowing that she is only proving his point. She can feel the heat spreading from her face to her neck and she can’t meet his eyes.

“You need to disclose this to Paul. He’ll pull Will off the case. Probably, he’ll have to report him, which is unfortunate, but not your problem. Will made his bed, so to speak.”

“No. Dars will have to declare a mistrial.”

“And you think this case is trying so well? After today?”

What she thinks is that the case is completely out of control. But that is just as true for Shauna as it is for Abby, and as a general rule, defense attorneys cope far better than prosecutors with chaos. Because of whom they represent and under what circumstances—outgunned, out-resourced, and on the wrong side of the facts—people like Abby have to have plans B, C, and D through Z. Whereas prosecutors like Shauna have only one plan, and more often than not, they cannot cope when forced to deviate. Shauna is more unflappable than most, but Abby doesn’t doubt that she nearly shat her pantsuit today in court.

“I need Will. He has to do the direct examination of Luz. He has to be the one to protect her on cross. It won’t work if we switch up, not now.” She doesn’t add that she’s never actually seen Will do either of these things because he has prevented her. For all she knows, Will has made as much of a hash of that job as he clearly had with Aronson. But her instincts tell her the opposite. She believes what she said to him that day in the car on the way back from Dr. Cartwright’s office. She believes what he told her that night in her kitchen. Will can embody Travis. She can’t. And that is a powerful visual. The extreme physical mismatch will drive home the mortal stakes in a way that words alone could never express.

Jonathan says, “That’s quite a gamble, isn’t it?”

“Everything’s a gamble in trial, you know that.”

“What about Estrada? What if he breaks?”

“He won’t.” This Abby has real reason to believe, and for a moment, she is sorely tempted to confide everything. To say that, in fact, she has just come from seeing Estrada in the jail. But it’s too risky, even with Jonathan. Instead, she tells the part of the story she can give up easily. By tomorrow, everyone will know anyway.

“Maria Elena had a stroke late this afternoon,” she says. “She’s in the ICU at King.”

Now it is Jonathan’s turn to stare. “A stroke?” he repeats. “And she’s at MLK? They’ll kill her if she wasn’t going to die already anyway.”

That had been Abby’s first thought, too. Martin Luther King Jr.-Harbor Hospital, built in the ’60s to treat the city’s poorest residents, was under federal investigation for a myriad of problems, including abnormally high mortality rates from routine procedures and sanitation that regularly flunked city standards. It was widely rumored to be headed for closure.

“It happened while Father Abelard was helping her into the car after court,” she says. “I guess the EMTs thought it was closest.”

“Is she going to make it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Is Dars going to give you the day off tomorrow?”

“I don’t think so.”

“How is Luz?”

Not knowing how to answer that question, Abby gives logistical information instead. “She’s at the hospital with Father Abelard and