A Good Mother

congratulations on the BWLA award. I heard it was a very fancy lunch at Shutters.”
Shauna smiles. “They went all out. Black Women Lawyers of LA, you know, a small but mighty sisterhood.” She takes another look at Abby and shakes her head. “There is no way you got this case by accident. And weren’t you supposed to pop the little sucker out last week?”
Abby grins. She genuinely likes Shauna, which is saying something. Abby doesn’t care for many of the prosecutors in the United States Attorney’s Office, particularly the young self-righteous ones who come straight off the assembly line from Stanford or one of the fancier East Coast law schools: conservative suits, conservative haircuts, conservative sense of humor. Which is to say none at all, as far as Abby can tell. Shauna, though, has been doing the job for more than twenty years and has a reputation for being honest and fair. But in court she takes no prisoners.
“I’m due in five days,” Abby says. “And yes, random assignment.”
Shauna raises an eyebrow. “More like a blatant ploy to get Judge Richards’s sympathy. I know Paul.” She shakes her head. “The man is shameless.”
At this reference to her ever-canny supervisor, Abby grins but says nothing.
“I can just see you now, having contractions at the lectern.” Shauna starts laughing, and the heads turn to look.
“Not to worry,” Abby says, “I haven’t had my bloody show yet.”
“Your what?”
Abby smiles. “The red clump of mucus that shows up in your underwear the day before you go into labor? C’mon now, you remember.”
Shauna, still laughing, offers to hold Abby’s briefcase as they walk inside, an offer she declines. As they wave through security with their badges, one of security guards calls out to Abby. “Ms. Rosenberg, you need a hand with anything?”
It’s Rex James, one of Abby’s favorites, a middle-aged, heavyset guy with a modified salt-and-pepper Afro. Abby smiles, placing a hand gently on her belly. “No, but thank you,” she says.
“Sweet Jesus,” Shauna says, rolling her eyes as she strides off toward the elevator. But when it arrives, she makes sure to hold the door.
“All rise.”
They stand as Judge Richards ascends the bench, Abby feeling rushed. She had hoped to have a few minutes alone with her client. Since Luz Rivera Hollis was arrested seventy-two hours ago on a US Air Force base in Germany and sent back to Los Angeles, Abby has seen her twice in a grimy, glassed-off attorney-client visiting room at the Metropolitan Detention Center. On both visits, they had spoken of nothing but the bail hearing, purposefully myopic conversations trained at the immediate crisis at hand: freeing Luz to take care of her infant daughter while the case trundles forward.
Both times, Luz answered Abby’s questions steadily, providing the basic facts requested: the estimated market value of her grandmother’s house, the status of the custody dispute that had been launched immediately by her dead husband’s mother, the absence in her life of any other act of violence toward another human being. Swimming in her too-large prison scrubs, long dark hair a tangled mess, eyes rimmed with purple half-moons, she looked like a frightened child, which Abby supposes she is. Luz Rivera Hollis is nineteen years old.
There had been no crying, no asking of any of the questions that Abby would expect from someone in her situation. What is the evidence against me? What are my chances? There had been no pleading, either. Please, please help me. Do everything you can. There had been, Abby realizes now, no curiosity about the legal machine that had been set in motion. Luz’s terror showed only in her eyes, which were dark and depthless. Midconversation, midsentence even, they would go vacant, causing Abby to have to repeat Luz’s name, loudly, several times. The only thing Luz had wanted to know was when she could see her baby, Cristina. That question she had asked over and over.
You’ll see her when I get you out on bail, Abby had told her. At those words, Luz’s face had lit up. But it is not at all clear that Abby could get Luz out on bail. The charge against her is first-degree murder. Abby turns to Luz now, puts a hand on her back as they retake their seats next to each other. Luz looks no better today than she had at the jail the day before. Through the worn material of her jail-issue jumpsuit, Abby can feel her trembling.
Magistrate judges assigned to hear bail motions get the smaller courtrooms on the upper floors. Judge Richards’s is packed. There are the usual suspects with their press credentials on lanyards around their necks. The Hollis family is there, too, in force, the victim’s mother, gray-blonde, grim, and gray-faced, braced by her two daughters, all of them wearing American flag pins. But most of the spectators are members of Luz’s church, more than two dozen, dressed formally, wearing sober expressions. Abby smiles at them, relieved, but not surprised that they had agreed to come. Abby, knowing Travis’s family would be there, had intended to pack the other side of the courtroom. That they had turned out in those numbers will signal to the judge—especially this judge—that Luz has an important constituency of supporters.
Judge Richards, fortysomething and wholesome-looking with a still thick, still brown head of hair, looks down at them under straight dark brows. Devout Catholic and the father of eight children. Abby glances over at Luz, who is nervously fiddling at the gold cross on the slender chain around her neck.
The clerk calls the case and says, “Counsel, appearances please.”
“Shauna Gooden, for the government.”
“Abby Rosenberg, Deputy Federal Public Defender, on behalf of Luz Rivera Hollis.”
As if on cue, the courtroom door opens, and a priest walks in escorting Luz’s grandmother Maria Elena, who holds Luz’s baby in one of those pop-out car seat carriers on her skinny wrinkled arm. Asleep, thankfully. They all turn, and Abby notices Judge Richards’s clerk, a grandmotherly type herself, giving little Cristina an involuntary