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

Shauna waits a respectful few minutes while Jackie dabs at her eyes, blotting carefully so as not to smear her mascara. Abby makes another note, this time to Will. When it’s Luz’s turn, they need to make sure she looks like a train wreck by comparison. Right or wrong, people measure emotional suffering by physical appearance, particularly when it comes to women.

“Where was he sent when his tour was over?”

“To Fort Irwin, a base out here in California near Barstow. That was in early 2004. We had been talking about getting married and then—” another lip bite “—he started to change.”

“Started to change how?”

“He sounded distracted, upset. Like I said, he was coping with the trauma from the war. He mentioned spending a lot of time at this bar near the base. It made me worry that he was drinking too much and not associating with the best people.” Jackie is pointedly not looking at Luz, but it is clear who she means.

Shauna decides not to draw things out. “Did there come a time when the relationship ended?”

Jackie nods tearfully. “A couple of months later, Travis said he had met someone at the bar where he was going. She worked there as some kind of barmaid, I guess.” Jackie’s implication is clear: Luz was, in fact, some kind of prostitute. Abby looks sidelong at Luz, who appears unperturbed, her gaze still trained on Jackie with a polite attentiveness.

Jackie takes a long, shuddering breath. “I asked him if he loved her, and he said he didn’t think so, but it was like he had a fever. Those were his words. That she had come over him like a fever and he couldn’t shake it. He tried but—” Jackie shrugs her shoulders helplessly.

“When did it happen, the ending of the relationship?”

“October 5, 2004. I remember it was a week before my birthday.”

“How did you feel afterward?”

“Just devastated. Travis was—is—the only man I’ve ever loved. We were meant to be together. It felt unreal to me. I think it felt unreal to him, to tell you the truth.”

“Can you briefly describe your contact with Sergeant Hollis over the next year?”

Jackie twists her hands in her lap. “We agreed not to have contact. No calls, emails, letters. But I’m close with his family, and I heard from Travis’s mom that Travis got married to her and they went to Germany when he got stationed there. Of course,” she adds, “I was relieved for his sake that it wasn’t a deployment to another war zone.”

“When did you next see Sergeant Hollis?”

“At his father’s funeral.” Jackie’s eyes well with tears again. “Travis’s dad died of a heart attack, just dropped to the ground one day out of the blue. That was in October, too, in 2005, right after my birthday. Travis flew home and we—we reconnected at the church, after the memorial service.”

Shauna, still in head-nodding sympathy mode, asks, “Can you explain what you mean by reconnected?”

“When we saw each other, it was like no time had passed. He came across the room—there must have been a hundred people—and embraced me the way he used to, in that bear-hug way of his. The attraction between us—there was no denying it, and that night he came over to my place and we—” Jackie’s voice drops “—we were intimate with each other.”

Shauna is leaving nothing to the imagination. “You had sexual intercourse?”

Jackie nods. “Well, yes. But that isn’t all I mean by intimate.” Jackie moistens her lips. “Travis was so sad, so deeply pained, and he told me what was in his heart.”

“What was in his heart?” Shauna is gamely playing along, but Abby can only imagine how painful it is to stick to the paperback novel romance script. She looks at the jurors, trying to assess how Jackie is coming off and concludes that so far, they are buying it. There’s a reason why those dime-store books on the spin rack at Walmart sell millions of copies.

Jackie sighs. “He was miserable in his marriage. He told me—”

Abby is on her feet. “Hearsay, Your Honor.”

“Indeed, it is,” says Dars dryly, “which is because, as you well know, Sergeant Hollis is unable to speak for himself. The objection is overruled.”

Shauna looks to Jackie. “Go on.”

“He told me that she was always changing up on him. Like he never knew who it was that was going to greet him at the door.”

“And by ‘she,’ you mean the defendant?” Shauna turns to look directly at Luz and the jurors shift in their chairs as they follow her gaze. The moment stretches out like pulled elastic and Abby braces for the snap, but Luz only stares demurely down at the table, her eyes unreadable under her half-closed lids, her right hand gently worrying at the cross around her neck.

“Yes. Sometimes she was as sweet as could be and other times she was cold, vicious even, in the things she would say to him. She had violent outbursts where she scratched and bit and kicked and slapped him. She saw other men behind his back but he knew about it. He said he had made the worst mistake of his life marrying her and he was going to file for divorce because every day was like a living hell.”

“How did you leave things when it was time for Sergeant Hollis to go back to Germany?”

“We both cried like babies. It was only four days that we had together and it had been like a taste of heaven. We stayed in touch by email, and I sent him letters with—” Jackie blushes “—some sexy pictures of me that he asked for.”

You sure did, Abby thinks. The Jackie speaking to the jurors bears little resemblance to the Jackie in the naked selfies and pornographic emails collected in her binder. Abby had purposefully picked the color—a brilliant scarlet. Jurors, like everyone else, trafficked in stereotypes, however reductive and demeaning. Abby’s job was to flip the script and show the jurors that it was Jackie, not