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

Abby has to use all of her strength to hold Luz up, her arm tickling as the blood continues to slide down.

“Look at me.” But Luz won’t. Cristina continues to wail.

Abby’s eyes are burning and her throat aches. “Listen to me now,” she says, and she is talking to both of them. “Listen to what I am telling you. I’m going to the bathroom to try to fix what you did. You have a few minutes.”

She tilts Luz’s face upward and presses her uninjured cheek to Luz’s forehead like she’s checking for a fever. “This was your decision. I let you make it. I let you make it,” she repeats as Luz begins to cry and Cristina screams.

Downstairs Will waits with Antoine, his mind going in a thousand directions at once. It’s hard to think, hard to see almost. He presses his palms against his eyes, blinks a few times. The lobby is bustling with lawyers and secretaries, some headed home early, but when they see Luz and Abby step out of the elevator, they go quiet, instinctively clearing a path for them.

Outside the weather is as insipid as always: bright yellow sun, not a cloud in the blue sky. They walk, Abby and Luz in the middle, Antoine and Will on the outside. Luz’s head is down, her shoulders slumped, fingers twisting the gold chain where the cross hangs on her neck.

“What happened to your lip?” Antoine asks Abby.

Abby fishes in her purse, presses a crumpled tissue to her mouth. Her lip has started bleeding again. “Nothing happened. Everything is fine.”

Will turns to look, then quickly looks away.

At the courthouse, it is far worse than he expected. News trucks double-parked, Court TV, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, all the local affiliates. “What about the Spring Street entrance?” Will asks Antoine.

“It’s the same. But I called Jared and he’s meeting us at the corner.”

And sure enough, Jared is standing at the corner of First and Main with six other marshals. “Alright,” he says. “Let’s go.”

Abby takes Luz’s hand, nods at Will to do the same. Antoine falls back as the marshals press in on all sides, taking hold of Will’s and Abby’s upper arms. As they approach the steps, Jared raises his voice. “Step back, let them through. Step back.”

The gaggle moves, but just barely. Then come the questions, like shots fired from a semiautomatic weapon.

“What does it mean that the jury came back so fast?”

“Did you kill your husband?”

“Who will take care of Cristina if you go to prison?”

“Are you afraid of going to prison?”

“Step back,” Jared bellows. He and the other marshals aren’t escorting Abby, Will, and Luz so much as propelling them up the stairs. There are flashbulbs going off, explosions of light and sound. Will watches as Abby shakes her head slightly so that her hair falls over her face and hunches her shoulders, concealing as much as she can. But they aren’t looking at her. Everyone is craning to see Luz, saying her name over and over. “Look down,” Will says to Luz, shouting over the noise, “keep your head down.”

But Luz stares straight ahead, looking neither right nor left as the questions fly. “Was it for the money? Did you do it for the money?”

“Luz, look over here.”

“Luz, can you answer the question?”

“Luz, are you a killer?”

Friday, March 23, 2007

3:51 p.m.

United States District Court

for the Central District of California

In the crush and heat of bodies, the din of voices, and the frog-march up the courthouse steps, Will focuses on holding tight to Luz’s hand, limp in his own. It is the first physical contact they’ve had since his awful mistake that morning, which incredibly, had been only hours ago. This is the longest day of his life.

Inside, security officers wave Abby and Will through the attorney line, but Luz has to be stopped, her shoes removed, the contents of her purse examined. The marshals encircle her to create a pocket of space but the crowd pushes back, swollen in the lobby’s contained entryway, voices echoing off the marble walls and eighteen-foot ceiling.

As they wait on the other side of the metal detector, Will looks at Abby again. He notices for the first time that she is wearing a different blouse than she had been that morning and she’s taken off her stockings. Showing up in federal court with bare legs is almost as bad as showing up drunk, and he briefly wonders whether she’s gone back to her old habits. Abby looks like she’s been in a fight. There is congealed blood on her lower lip and an angry red mark on her cheek. Will swallows, instinctively touches his own face, but it has been long enough that there is nothing there anymore.

“Are you okay?” he says in a low voice.

She turns to look him full in the face. “What do you think?”

Dars’s courtroom is on the second floor but the escalator is mobbed. Jared hustles them into the judges’ elevator, the three of them squeezed together inside a circle of marshals. No one speaks. Luz’s hand is hot inside his own, her eyes trained on the ground.

The doors open and they step out. More madness. Will tries not to look but he can’t help himself. Thank God there are no cameras or microphones allowed in federal court. But the crowd is so dense and loud it is like being surrounded by locusts, an insistent incessant buzzing coupled with a physical pressure of bodies, smells of perfume, cologne, cigarette smoke, and body odor. Jared and his cohorts storm through, forging a knife’s edge path. Will, Abby, and Luz clasp hands, following behind in single file.

Inside the courtroom, Dars is on the bench, the clerk below him, Shauna at her place at the counsel table. Waiting on them. The noise level is lower and subsides altogether as the spectators turn to look at them. Side by side, still holding hands, they walk down the aisle through the short swinging doors that cordon off the gallery,