A Good Mother

met.
He gestures again toward the chair and Luz finally sits down, crossing her right leg over her left, and exposing the bulky square box of the ankle monitor wrapped around the sharply tapered bottom of her jeans. She sees him looking and says, eyes narrowing, “I hate this stupid thing. And it’s making me crazy, being in the house all day, not allowed to go anywhere unless it’s here or a doctor’s appointment or church. I can’t even take Cristina to the park.”
“I can only imagine,” Will says mildly, thinking that Luz should feel damn lucky that Cristina wasn’t nestled in the eager arms of Travis Hollis’s mother right at this moment. Had Abby not managed, somewhat miraculously in Will’s opinion, to get Luz out on bail, the only other viable option would have been the child’s great-grandmother. It was all too easy to see how Luz could have lost Cristina to her mother-in-law, at least temporarily, and that was assuming the absolute best-case scenario—an acquittal.
He looks briefly at his watch; less than an hour until he has to be in court on another case. “Mrs. Rivera Hollis—”
She looks at him as if he has just said something silly. “Call me Luz,” she says.
“Okay,” he says, “sure,” though he feels unsure, and has in fact never called any client by a first name. “Look, we need to talk about the case. Have you had a chance to go over the discovery—the paperwork—I gave you?”
She bites her lip, shaking her head.
She’s not going to read any of it, he thinks. Probably ever. Maybe it’s better that way, although he had spared her the worst: the autopsy photographs of Travis’s chest, sawed open from neck to navel, the ribs snapped like wishbones where the doctors had forced them apart with some medieval-looking device so they could grab his heart in their hands in a final desperate attempt to make it start beating again. If the case goes to trial, he will of course file a motion to keep the pictures out—they are gruesome beyond belief—but he will lose. The government, after all, has a right to put on its case.
“What about the plea offer?” he prods. “Have you read that?”
Her face hardens. “They want me to plead guilty to murder. I won’t.”
“Manslaughter,” Will says.
“Whatever.”
Will feels it again, a stab of impatience, that she could be so obstinate, even juvenile, continuing to reject any attempt on his part to get her to engage in a meaningful way and talking instead about something as banal as people’s looks. Then he remembers with a sudden jolt that she is only nineteen. He is talking to a teenager.
“Luz,” he says gently. “It makes a big difference. They are offering you a ten-year deal. With good behavior you’d be out in eight.”
“Ten years?” She is looking at him like he’s crazy.
“I know it sounds like a long time, but if you are convicted you will go to prison for the rest of your life.”
“Manslaughter,” she says, as if trying out the word. And then, tinkering with it, “Man. Slaughtered.” She looks at him. “That’s supposed to be better?”
“Yes,” he says, realizing suddenly how strange the word is, how bizarre the idea that it might be an improvement. “It’s when one person kills another person during a fight. In the heat of passion. There’s less blame because it wasn’t necessarily on purpose, wasn’t, you know, well-thought-out.”
Luz appears to have no reaction to his explanation, her gaze has turned away, upward to the window at Will’s back with its view of the skyline. For a government office, at a government salary, the view of downtown Los Angeles is unparalleled, particularly at night. But he doubts she is seeing it; her stare is utterly blank, almost as if she is blind.
“There is evidence to support a manslaughter plea,” Will continues into the silence. “Furniture knocked over, a broken lamp, and Sergeant Hollis himself, he didn’t have his shirt on, his belt was undone, and his pants were—”
“He always takes his clothes off when he comes home drunk,” she says. “He always wants to fuck then.”
Will blinks, trying not to be thrown by the crude language or the sudden image he has of this reeking, beefy man climbing on top of her. He was too big. I couldn’t get him off me. Will had known guys like this when he was in the military. Dozens of them. All assholes. “And maybe you, you didn’t, and there was a struggle—”
“No.” She is still staring at the window.
“Okay,” he says, “I’m just—speculating here because you haven’t told me. And I know it’s hard to talk about, but we have to, Luz. And about your juvenile matter. We still don’t have the file from the government, so I’m hoping you can tell me what to expect.”
She does not appear to have heard him and again, Will feels his frustration building. “And then there are the emails,” he says, plowing on, hoping to provoke her. “I know you didn’t read the paperwork, Luz, so I’ll just tell you. They searched your computer. They found the email from Jackie Stedman, your late husband’s—”
“I know who she is,” Luz says coldly.
“Right, sorry.” He flushes again. “The government knows that Jackie forwarded you the email chain of messages between her and Travis, the ones you opened while Sergeant Hollis was at the party, just hours before you—before he died. That’s motive. That is a powerful motive.”
“That’s not what happened.” She is looking at him now, her expression unreadable.
“That is what the government is going to say happened. That it was planned. An—an ambush.”
“No,” she says again. Will wants her to be angry but she isn’t, she just looks annoyed by his stupidity. Flailing at a guessing game she does not want to play. Am I getting warm? Cold. Warmer? Colder.
“We have to talk about exactly what did happen,” he says. “You have to tell me.” Normally, he would never demand that kind of accounting from a client, believing