A Good Mother

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2006

Tuesday, May 2, 2006
12:36 p.m.
Willowick, Ohio
From: sexxygirljax@yahoo.com
To: travman@hotmail.com
u motherfucker. she’s pregnant and I found out cuz she posts a pic w/ u grinning like an ape on Facebook? all this time I’ve been sending sonograms and belly pix and titty pix to ur lying ass. You done me dirty, t, real dirty, and u are gonna pay.
Thursday, May 4, 2006
5:28 p.m.
Ramstein Air Base
Ramstein-Miesenbach, Germany
From: travman@hotmail.com
To: sexxygirljax@yahoo.com
do u think i planned this??? do u think I want this??? my life is hell u just dont know im praying to get re-deployed 2 get out and maybe end everything for good by getting blown the fuck up.
and yea, jaxx, i know all about ur little FB friendship cuz she told me you been posting pix all about ur dr. appts w/ happy baby daddy lance and flashing around sum bling he got u and im the liar??? Or who knows maybe that is the truth after all and u been playin me.


2007


Monday, March 19, 2007
8:30 a.m.
United States District Court
for the Central District of California
Standing at the lectern and pretending to organize the notes she won’t be using, Abby sneaks a sidelong glance at the jurors as they settle into their seats. Eight men, four women. The oldest, a retired Black nurse with a tight bun of gray hair and an oversize purse, is seventy-two; the youngest, a Latino computer programmer with several days of stubble and a nose ring, is twenty-four. Everyone else—a real estate agent, a screenwriter, a web designer, an accountant, a community college student, a dentist, a gym teacher, two stay-at-home moms, and one stay-at-home dad—is white.
Abby does not know what to make of Luz’s chances with these twelve people. But in the end, she’d had little choice in who sat in the box. Even with the gag order, the massive amount of pretrial publicity left many with firm ideas about Luz—in the main, that she was guilty—and most of the people who hadn’t watched the coverage on the news or read about it had their own reasons for wanting out. All day yesterday they had sat while Dars had asked the long list of questions Abby and Shauna had submitted. “Have you ever been a victim of domestic violence or known someone who has been?”
“What are your feelings about the war in Iraq?”
“This is a murder case. You are going to see pictures of the victim’s body that you may find gruesome. Will that affect your ability to be impartial?”
One after the other, the potential jurors had timidly raised their hands and asked to go to sidebar, where they whispered their secrets as the lawyers huddled around the court reporter. I was raped in college. My son died when his Humvee hit an IED. I’m afraid of knives. I’m afraid of blood. I can’t look at a dead body.
Watching Dars’s fatherly demeanor, listening to his sympathetic murmurs as he excused one after the other and politely instructed the clerk to call out a new round of names, Abby could almost doubt she’d heard correctly his earlier announcement, delivered when it was just the lawyers in the courtroom. “Mr. Estrada has decided to remain silent and in custody,” he informed them, his index finger stabbing in Luz’s direction as if to formally assign her direct responsibility for this travesty. Luz, no longer needing to be told, stared down, her face expressionless as Abby and Will exchanged a quick, relieved glance over her head. Within twenty-four hours of Dars’s decision to jail Estrada, they had contacted an attorney who had filed an emergency appeal, denied the same day in an unsigned order. Every day since, they had waited for Estrada to break.
Over the course of the morning, the pool of jurors shrank to a puddle, with only a few people remaining in the benches when it was time to break for lunch. At 1:30 p.m. a whole new group was brought in and Dars had given up the act. Midafternoon, after yet another hushed conversation at sidebar that resulted in the dismissal of a teary-eyed juror, Dars had snapped, “This courtroom is turning into a confessional. I should have ignored the both of you ladies and your ridiculous ideas—” he’d waggled a forefinger at Abby and Shauna “—and just asked the regular questions: name, address, phone number, can you be fair, the end.” Abby had glanced pointedly at Shauna, then watched as the court reporter raised her hands to the stenographer’s machine and replaced them primly in her lap without typing anything at all. They were all the same: editing out the worst of all of the judge’s outbursts. The transcript Abby received of the proceeding with Estrada had been curiously free of epithets—or the word honey.
Now Dars is nodding curtly in Abby’s direction. Showtime.
In her mind, Abby has gone over her opening statement countless times. In the dead of night, she practiced aloud sitting in the bathtub while Cal nursed. The sound of rushing water calmed him, the rising steam calmed her. They fell into a rhythm; Cal, seemingly on the brink of sleep, eyelids fluttering, Abby laying out her case in a soft low voice—a lullaby about a killing. Once in a while she would stop mid-sentence, feeling him release her breast and looking down to find him staring up at her, entranced. Holding tight to his little body, now grown plump and sturdy, gave her an unexpected surge of strength. The source of her terrible ambivalence, Cal is also her greatest achievement, the tiny person who holds all of her heart-smashed love.
I made this beautiful boy. I can do anything.
Now she is feeling less sure. Shauna had gone first, and she had been strong. There had been a slideshow: Travis as a baby, Travis as a soldier, Travis as a stabbed man, his blood-soaked body curled in the fetal position. And finally, Travis as a cadaver, broken open on the medical examiner’s table. At the last picture, which Shauna left