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

the last time he was this jacked up with adrenaline. His blood isn’t pulsing, it’s sizzling in his veins. The jurors are looking at him now, their eyes widening in surprise. Behind him, he hears murmuring from the packed gallery.

Will bypasses the lectern in strides longer than he’d usually take and plants himself directly in front of the witness box, shoulders squared.

“What am I wearing?”

Luz looks at him, her eyes dark and enormous. “Wrangler jeans,” she whispers, “a brown belt, and a Pearl Jam tee shirt.”

“Speak up. Now, why am I dressed this way?”

Luz leans into the microphone. “Because that’s what—that’s what Travis was wearing the night he died.”

“Are these his actual clothes?”

She shakes her head. “He’s bigger than you and his actual clothes are—they’re evidence.”

Black and stiff from having absorbed a geyser of blood. But, of course, Shauna has made sure that the jury knows this already. How many times had Will objected when their positions were reversed? Cumulative, waste of time, unduly prejudicial. Those had been his arguments, rejected by Dars. The jury had seen all of it, even gotten to pass around the horribly crusted plastic-bagged pieces—what is left of the tee shirt that had been slit in two when the doctors cut it off Travis’s body.

“How much bigger was Sergeant Hollis than me?”

“Two inches taller and about eighty-five pounds heavier.” Luz had measured and weighed Will herself, using—God help him—the scale Meredith kept in their bathroom, the tape measure she stored in her sewing box.

“What are you wearing?”

“One of Travis’s tee shirts that I kept.” Luz’s eyes are glittering now. She swallows and Will can feel it in his own throat, the enormity of what she is forcing down. “A pair of sweats I used to wear when I was heavier. Right after the baby.”

“That is how you were dressed the night your husband died?”

“Yes.”

Will looks at Dars. “At this time, we ask the court to permit the witness to step down.” Dars’s eyebrow goes up, and Will takes a breath. “For demonstrative purposes.”

Shauna is on her feet, as Will knew she would be, a mind-numbing list of objections shooting from her mouth. Improper, no foundation, relevance, prejudice. Again he looks at Dars, tensing. You let the government put on their show. Now it’s our turn. All along he has been betting on Dars—that he won’t dare refuse because it will allow them to once again raise the issue of his bias—but if Will has bet wrong, it’s game over.

“Overruled.”

Luz descends the steps and stands rigid facing Will, her face unreadable. He feels a rush of affection, a need to offer some kind of reassurance, but they are firmly in role now and his job is to crush her.

Keeping his eyes fixed on her face, Will backs up to the low swinging door that separates the courtroom from the spectator benches. “Do you know the distance between the witness stand and where I am now?”

“Twenty feet.”

“Is that approximately the length of the hallway of the house you shared with Sergeant Hollis on the base in Germany?”

“Yes.”

Without moving his body, Will shifts his gaze to the bench. “We seek permission to use the items already entered into evidence. The steak knife, the flower vase, the cordless phone, and the moving boxes. We ask that the government provide these items to the witness to set up in the appropriate places.”

That request draws another slew of objections from Shauna. Will says nothing, and after a pause, Dars says, “So ordered.”

A silence gathers as Shauna stacks the boxes in front of Luz and puts the other objects on top of them. Will waits until she retakes her seat, then walks Luz through the steps of setting the scene. In response to curt commands from Will, she silently places one of the smaller boxes close to Will to serve as the tiny hallway table, then puts a vase—they had bought a replica to replace the smashed one—on top of it. After each action, Will says, “Let the record reflect,” and intones aloud what she has done. After getting Dars’s permission, they repeat the steps in the baby’s room: at Will’s instruction, Luz identifies the crib, the baby, and the phone, which she puts down on the floor.

When Luz has taken her original place twenty feet away from him and restacked the remaining cardboard boxes beside her, he says, “What are those?”

“The actual boxes we used to move. I was packing to leave Travis. Some of the boxes I had never gotten a chance to open so I was reopening them.”

“Why?”

“To see if there were things I could take out to make more space for Cristina’s things. That’s what I was doing when Travis came home from the party.”

“What time was that?”

“A little before three in the morning.”

“Why were you awake?”

They have practiced this answer a thousand times, and yet she seems to stumble, staring at Will blankly for a moment before answering in a halting voice. “He hadn’t come home. I had fallen asleep around 11:30, but then I woke up around 2:00 and he still wasn’t there. Cristina was crying. She was hungry, so I fed her and put her back down, but afterward, I couldn’t go back to sleep.”

“Why not?”

She lifts her shoulders slightly. “He hadn’t returned my calls since the first one. I had called him starting around 10:30, six, maybe seven times. I didn’t know where he was.”

“Were you worried?”

“I was—I was a lot of things.” She looks down, twists again at her wedding ring. “Worried, upset, scared.”

“Because of the email messages from Jackie?”

Her lips tighten. “Not about what was in them as much as what I was going to do. What I was going to say, I mean. When he got home.”

“Which was what?”

“That Cristina and I were going back to California. That I had called my grandmother and she had said it was okay to move back in with her for a while, with Cristina, and so...” Luz’s voice trails off.

“So that was your plan,”