A Good Mother

projected on the screen for several minutes, Luz had made a sound that Abby did not recognize, canting forward before Will reached out to grab her wrist. Shauna told the jury, “There is no dispute about how Sergeant Hollis died and who killed him. Ask yourself, how did the defendant summon the strength to shove this knife through layers of skin and muscle, through bone? That’s not fear, ladies and gentlemen. That is cold, hard anger. Hours earlier, the defendant had settled on her target and when the time came, she drove toward that target with malice and deliberation and deadly accuracy.”
Abby looks at the jurors. With the fingers of her left hand, she worries at the gold locket hanging from a chain around her neck, pressing it deeply into the base of her throat.
She begins, “There is a saying about marriage—we all have our opinions, but no one knows what goes on behind closed doors.” Abby leaves the lectern and walks over to the jurors. She is wearing a muted navy dress and matching jacket, has taken care with her hair and makeup, going for polished and minimal. Just a bit of foundation to hide the circles under her eyes, a dusting of blush to give her some color; no lipstick, no mascara, no nail polish. Standing before these jurors—her jurors—Abby hopes to signal the unsexed version of Luz that she and Will are hoping to sell: slight, sweet, utterly unthreatening.
“In this trial, we are going to take you behind the closed doors of the marriage between my client, Luz Rivera Hollis, and her husband, Sergeant Travis Hollis. You will hear what they said to each other, you will see how they treated each other. Not in public, not how the government’s witnesses will describe it, but when they were alone together.
“You will bear witness to the most intimate moments of their lives. You will know about the kind of sex they had, about the birth of the child they conceived, about Sergeant Hollis’s infidelity, and about the tremendous stress brought on by his deployment to Iraq. Most of all, you will learn what it was like for my nineteen-year-old client to live with this man. A man who was more than a foot taller and outweighed her by a hundred and fifty pounds. A man with a drinking problem that turned him jealous, angry, and violent.
“Ms. Gooden would have you believe that Sergeant Hollis was planning to leave my client for another woman. But the facts will show otherwise. Sergeant Hollis was never going to let go of his wife, a person he was determined to possess—to own. Like all young love, the love that Sergeant Hollis felt for Luz Rivera was romantic, urgent, and overwhelming. But because of who he was and what he had been through, that love became a darkness. It became a sickness that consumed his body and his mind. When Sergeant Hollis felt hopeless and out of control—and that was increasingly often in the months leading up to his death—he drank. Not modest amounts. The amount of alcohol he consumed in a single night would kill any one of you. And when he drank, he became abusive to his wife, his most treasured possession, not just verbally, but physically.”
Abby puts both hands on the railing and leans forward. Her voice has been rising, the words coming faster, and she knows she has to soften her tone, that she has to slow down. She thinks of Cal looking up at her in the bathtub like he’s hanging on her every word and takes a breath, letting her gaze travel across the back row and then the front, making eye contact with each juror.
“The pictures that the prosecutor showed you just now are powerful, powerful images. Sergeant Hollis was handsome. Sergeant Hollis was brave. Sergeant Hollis died a horrible death. No one is disputing any of that.
“But what you will come to find out,” she continues, “is that, behind closed doors, Sergeant Hollis was also a nasty, belligerent drunk. When he was drunk, Sergeant Hollis forced himself on his wife. He hit her. He choked her. He called her terrible names. And she tried to handle it, as best as she could. Behind closed doors. Because that’s what a marriage was to my client, a nineteen-year-old devout Catholic girl with a new baby. Marriage is between two people, and it was her job to manage it, to find a way to survive.”
Abby steps back from the railing, lets her hands fall to her sides. “In the early morning hours of October 14, 2006, it was no longer possible to manage Sergeant Travis Hollis. He had a blood alcohol level of .26. He was coming at his wife, all six foot four and 260 pounds of him. He was beating her, and he was going to kill her. And while this is happening, their baby was asleep just a few feet away.
“Only one of them was going to walk out alive from behind those closed doors. When Luz Rivera Hollis grabbed that knife and stabbed her husband, she did not commit a crime. She did not even make a choice. Because it isn’t a crime to save your own life and there is no choice when the alternative is death. There is only survival.”
Abby watches the jurors react and feels the familiar surge of adrenaline course through her. Dars can say all he likes that it’s his courtroom, but when she’s in front of the jury, she owns every inch of it. The power she has right now, to hold the jurors’ attention with the story she is telling, is a high she is always chasing. She loves these moments the way that some people love drugs or sex or money. There is nothing else in the world that exhilarates her like performing for an audience in trial.
“Thank you for listening so carefully,” she says, and she means it.

Monday, March 19, 2007
6:30 p.m.
1710 Vestal Street
Los