Daughter's Keeper (25 page)

Olivia paused, a forkful of pancakes halfway to her mouth. While he waited for her to answer him, he watched a bead of syrup gather under the bowl of the fork and then drop off. It landed on the placemat in front of her.

“Watch out. You're dripping,” he said.

She looked at him quizzically and then shoved the food into her mouth. “I'm not getting an abortion,” she said, her mouth full.

“I can't believe it,” he said. But of course, he could. If he had sat down and tried to figure out a way for Olivia to make ­matters even worse than they already were, he might well have arrived at this particular scenario. Of course she wasn't going to have an abortion; that would have simplified things.

“Believe it,” Olivia said, in precisely the same tone of defensive smugness she'd adopted when confronted with a bad report card or a letter from the university notifying Elaine that her civil disobedience had gotten her placed on academic
probation.

“Are you okay?” he asked Elaine, leaning over to look at her face.

“I'm fine,” she said. “Olivia has decided not to have the ­abortion, but she hasn't yet decided to keep the baby. Right, Olivia?”

The girl shrugged and nodded. Arthur felt an intense rush of relief. When she said she wasn't having the abortion, he hadn't thought of adoption. But that's what she would do, of course. She'd give the baby up for adoption. It would not be Elaine's responsibility.

“Does your lawyer know you're pregnant?” Arthur asked.

“No,” Olivia said

“You should tell him. I'll bet it will help with the trial. You know, make you more sympathetic or something. No judge is going to put a pregnant woman away for ten years.”

***

Izaya was working late when Olivia called him. His cell phone rang, to the shrill tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” and it took a minute for him to find it. He reminded himself, for perhaps the twenty or thirtieth time, to change the ringer setting.

“Hey,” he said into the phone when he finally dug it out of the pocket of his leather jacket.

“Um, is Izaya there?”

“This is Izaya.”

“Oh, great.”

“Who is this?” he asked, although he recognized her voice.

Olivia identified herself, and then, without any preamble, and not particularly gracefully, she told him she was pregnant.

“You are not serious,” he said, and then frowned at his reaction. His client's pregnancy had nothing whatsoever to do with him. Why, then, had it inspired in him an emotion that felt entirely too akin to anger?

“Yes. I'm serious.”

He rubbed his hands across his jaw. “What are you going to do?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean are you going to go through with it? Are you going to have this guy's baby?” He winced at his own words and was ­immediately sorry he'd said anything. She didn't answer. “God, I'm such an asshole. I'm sorry. What I should have said is, congratulations.”

There was a moment of silence on the line. Then Olivia said, “Thank you. I just thought you should know in case it makes any difference. You know, for my case.”

He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the pocked tile of the dropped ceiling. “Right. Well, thanks for telling me,” he said.

“Okay.”

He flipped forward and rested his elbows on his desk. “Listen, I've got to go. I've got piles of work here.” He flicked at the papers lying in front of him as though she could see them.

He ended the call and then turned off his phone. Reaching one hand around the back of his head, he snapped the rubber band off his dreadlocks and ran his fingers through them, loosening them around his face. Izaya never wore his locks down at work and almost never wore them that way at all. He kept them tied back off his head in a neat band. The truth was, he was not entirely comfortable with the heavy weight of his hair. He had started growing it in high school, while in the throes of a short-lived Ziggy Marley obsession. He had not anticipated how much work it would take to grow dreadlocks, how each lock had to be twisted and waxed, meticulously constructed and maintained. While he took pleasure in the clarity of this identifiable badge of his African-American identity, it was really the thought of the years of wasted effort that kept him from cutting his hair.

He pulled at his soft, spongy locks and thought of Olivia. This particular client seemed to consume far more of his energy, of his emotions, than any other. He had no explanation for his curious devotion. It was not merely that she was pretty; the world was full of pretty girls, girls the dating of whom would not result in disbarment and the loss of his job. Neither was it entirely the fact of her dependence on him. Over his years as a public defender, Izaya had become inured to his role as champion. But Olivia possessed an adamant innocence that compelled his attention. She was so certain, so sure of her righteousness, and at the same time so vulnerable.

Whatever he felt for this young woman, when the case ended, so would their relationship. That he had to remind himself of this and of the fact that he had absolutely no business being jealous because she had gotten herself knocked up by an incompetent fool of a boyfriend who couldn't even manage to do a simple drug deal without getting the two of them busted, was troubling to say the least.

He gathered his hair in his fist and snapped the rubber band back around it. He flipped through his Rolodex until he found Olivia's number. She answered almost immediately.

“Hey, I just had a thought,” he said, his voice falsely jovial. “This pregnancy is the best thing that could possibly have happened, at least from the perspective of the case.”

“What do you mean?”

“It's just one more reason for the jury to love you. You're just a poor, innocent, pregnant little white girl.”

He was greeted with a burst of laughter, a giggle really. And he smiled.

“I'm telling you, girl, this is going to push the jurors right over the edge. They'll be knitting you baby booties.”

“I hope you're right. I could use some booties. I've never knitted anything in my life.”

When he hung up the phone, he stopped smiling. He leaned back in his chair and stared up at the ceiling. After a moment or two, he grabbed his Rolodex and started flipping through it, searching for a number to call. Finally, he found what he was looking for. Patrice Lajoie, a sweet-tempered woman who had never once, since they had met in their first year of law school, turned down his last-minute invitations. Izaya left his briefcase on the desk and spent the night in her friendly, comforting embrace. It was the first time in weeks that he hadn't taken work home with him.

***

Almost as soon as she made the decision not to terminate the pregnancy, as if the baby had been waiting for her to make up her mind before it began to grow in earnest, Olivia found herself unable to fit into her clothes. Even the waist of the overalls that she had adopted as a uniform once she could no longer button her jeans began to cut into her burgeoning belly. After a frustrating afternoon at the Goodwill store sifting through the piles of ruffled tops and stretched-out skirts in the maternity section, she gave up and bought a few oversized T-shirts and a pair of huge men's jeans that she cut off at her ankles and belted over the top of her belly with an old webbed belt the cashier had thrown into her bag for free. She wore her “new” clothes down to breakfast the morning after she bought them. Elaine looked at her, aghast, but said nothing.

That evening, Olivia, still wearing the jeans and a vast T-shirt with a decal of Ziggy Marley that had cracked and faded from a stranger's wearings and washings, sat in the kitchen, eating a pre-dinner snack of cereal and milk. She was baking a pan of chicken enchiladas for dinner, and the tangy smell of the
tomatillo
sauce had piqued her appetite. Not that it took much to do that. She was pretty much always hungry. Elaine bustled in the front door, her arms laden with shopping bags. She raised her eyebrows when she saw Olivia.

“Is that your dinner?” she asked.

“No, this is just kind of my appetizer. I made us enchiladas and red beans and rice. I'm going to serve that with a salad. Does that sound okay?”

“Sure, honey. It's sweet of you to make dinner.”

“It's the least I could do,” Olivia said. “And, anyway, I like to cook.”

Elaine grimaced in mock horror. “God, you and Arthur. I don't know how you can stand it. I'd be happy never to cook my own food again.”

“Well, Mom, it's no wonder. I mean, if you limit yourself to macaroni and cheese and spaghetti, it can get old pretty quickly.”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Olivia realized that her mother would mistake her jocular comment for criticism. Elaine's smile grew stiff, and she began unpacking her bags with short, jerky gestures, not looking at Olivia.

“Sometimes I served you better food than that, I think,” Elaine said.

“You did. You did. I was just kidding. Really.” Olivia pushed her cereal bowl away and plastered a smile on her face. “I used to love your tuna noodle casserole, remember?”

Elaine glanced up as if to make sure Olivia was serious. “That's true. You did. Although I think that was because of the potato chips I used to crumble on the top.” She pulled two trim cardboard boxes out of the shopping bag and slid them across the counter to Olivia.

“I got you something,” she said.

Olivia looked at the boxes. They were decorated with sketches of pregnant bellies and the words “Pregnancy Survival Kit.” She opened them up. Each box contained a complete maternity outfit: leggings, skirt, two shirts, and a dress, one in black and one in navy blue. She pulled out the black dress and held it up to her body. It was made of cotton shot through with Lycra and was soft and comfortable. She glanced down at the tattered, second-hand jeans and ugly T-shirt she was wearing.

For a moment, Olivia felt a familiar flash of irritation with her mother. It was hard not to feel that these clothes were a reproach, an expression of the disgust Elaine felt for Olivia's Goodwill purchases. But then Olivia looked up at her mother. Her face bore an expression at once anxious and wistful, as if she were waiting for Olivia to find fault with her gift, as if she knew she could expect nothing else, but nonetheless imagined some different kind of reception, even some different kind of relationship, where a mother and daughter's offerings to one another were received with ease and comfort and nothing but thanks.

Olivia reached her arms around her mother and hugged her, tight.

“They're perfect,” she said. “Thank you so much.”

Elaine hugged her back, briefly, and then, her face red, reached back into the bag.

“I got you a couple of silk scarves, too,” she said.

Izaya had been out of the office the two times Olivia had been by the Federal Building to check in with pretrial services, and she had had to cancel an appointment with him once because it conflicted with a prenatal checkup. He had mailed her the discovery—a thick file of audiotapes, photographs, agents' statements, records and logs of surveillance, transcripts of the informant's prior testimony, and some documents of which she could make neither head nor tail, and which it made her head hurt even to peruse. It was only once she had heard her voice on tape and seen the hazy photographs snapped of her as she waited in the car for Jorge, that Olivia had finally understood that the case wouldn't simply go away, no matter how much she wanted it to. Leafing through the pages of discovery, she'd realized that she had to gird herself for battle.

She and Izaya had spoken on the phone a few times, but their conversations after the one where she had told him she was pregnant, and he'd grown so inexplicably angry, were stiff and awkward. Mostly they communicated via email. She felt more comfortable with him over the ether. He was, somehow, more easygoing, natural even, and she felt free to be as well. His notes were brief, and usually imparted some specific bit of information like that they'd been granted a continuance or had a new date for their motions hearing or trial, but they had a casual, almost breezy quality. Her replies were similar in tone and generally limited to questions about the case or specific aspects of the law that she didn't understand, but she occasionally confided her fears and anxieties to him when they grew too numerous and overwhelming for her to ­contemplate alone. He replied right away and was invariably reassuring and kind.

This email intimacy made her feel close to Izaya, but they had not actually seen each other in weeks.

Olivia walked into Izaya's office wearing one of the dresses Elaine had given her. The gathered empire waist accented her belly and she looked like what she was—almost five months pregnant. Izaya stared at her stomach.

“Wow,” he said. “You really
are
pregnant.”

“I guess I kind of popped,” Olivia said. She could feel herself blushing.

“Jeez, maybe if I use you as a visual aid, Amanda Steele would consider dismissing the indictment.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sorry. I wish I were. So, how are you feeling?” Izaya asked.

“Physically?”

“That, too.”

“Physically, I feel kind of great.” It was true. The morning sickness had disappeared suddenly one day, as if someone had flicked a switch. The crushing exhaustion had departed at more or less the same time. She no longer felt the need for at least two naps a day, satisfying herself with one long one in the early afternoon. Her appetite had, if anything, increased, and she was indulging a series of cravings of the sort you heard about only on television sitcoms. Olivia was convinced that she always hungered after salt and vinegar potato chips mixed with chocolate chip mint ice cream, even when she wasn't pregnant. It was just that now she was ­perfectly willing to get up in the middle of the night and drive down to the 7-Eleven, and was more than able to put away the entire bag of chips and half gallon of ice cream in a single sitting.

“And otherwise?”

Olivia shrugged her shoulders. The answer to that question was strangely complicated. Whenever she thought about the looming trial, she felt the by-now-familiar tug of panic. However, it was oddly easy to keep her mind off the case, off her predicament, even off Jorge: the baby was an all-consuming distraction. All she thought about was the creature that she had nicknamed Dragon Baby, in honor of its due date planted squarely in the middle of the Year of the Dragon. That birthday was, according to Dorothy, the midwife who was providing Olivia's prenatal care at the Temescal Holistic Birthing Center, the most propitious in the Chinese Calendar. Olivia spent hours studying the pile of pregnancy books she'd bought at Pendragon Books on College Avenue—books reflecting every era of philosophies of childbirth from Ina Mae Gaskin's spiritual approach to midwifery to the cloying earnestness of the
What to Expect
library to the modern-woman jokery of the
Girlfriends'
Guide
. She had used up an entire container of white-out erasing another mother's entries into an old day-by-day pregnancy diary, and then laboriously filled in her own symptoms and emotions. Week sixteen, day three: she felt a faint tug low in her pelvis—was it a kick?; took her prenatal vitamin at lunch because she forgot it at breakfast; gained two pounds; felt mild cramping in the late afternoon; drank three glasses of milk; walked for twenty minutes; thought it might be a boy.

Late at night she would lie perfectly still in bed and hold her breath. She was sure she could feel the beat of the baby's heart deep in the center of her body.

“Well, you
look
good,” Izaya said. “You know, fit and healthy.” It was true. Pregnancy suited Olivia. She was good at it. Her pimples had cleared up once her nausea had abated, and a faint pinkness shone through her translucent skin. Her eyes were bright, and her hair hung in bright blond and red ringlets down her back behind the fuchsia scarf she'd used to pull it off her forehead.

Olivia smiled at him. “Thanks.”

“Are you working?”

“At my mother's pharmacy. Behind the lunch counter.”

“How's that going?”

“Okay. I just couldn't go back to the restaurant. You know, where I worked with…him.” Olivia couldn't bring herself to say the informant's name. The thought of Gabriel Contreras sent a worm of rage wriggling through her, eating through her belly and heart. She inhaled slowly and laid her hand upon the reassuring bulge of Dragon Baby in her stomach. She closed her eyes, hoping to feel the gentle flutter that she thought might be a kick. She exhaled, counting, the way the meditation guide in her prenatal yoga book suggested. The book said that a baby could feel its mother's moods, her fears and apprehensions. Olivia wasn't sure she believed it, but at the same time she hated the idea of these dark emotions washing over Dragon Baby, bathing him in her fury and her helpless dread. She had lately, in the times when she came closest to panic, become certain that the fact that Elaine had not wanted to be pregnant, had not loved her husband, had felt trapped and desperate, had mysteriously been communicated to Olivia in utero. She vowed to protect her own child from feeling unloved and resented in its mother's womb.

“Olivia?” Izaya said.

She opened her eyes. “I'm fine. Just feeling the baby.”

His eyes lowered to her belly, and she caught the faintest hint of a smile on his full lips. He leaned forward, and placing his palm against her belly, said, “Can I?” She stiffened under his touch but then willed herself to relax.

“I'm not even sure that's him. It might just be gas.”

Izaya smiled and leaned back in his chair. “Pretty cool.”

She smoothed the fabric of her dress over Dragon Baby's rounded form and placed a protective hand over him. “Yeah.”

“Anyway,” Izaya said, sorting through some papers on his desk and pulling out a single page. “I've got some news.”

“Good news?”

“No.”

“Oh.” She exhaled gently, counting.

“Jorge is pleading guilty.”

“What?” Olivia's face paled. “You said you thought he had a good entrapment claim.”

“I did. I still do. But, like I told you, those cases are hard to win. The defendant has to prove that he had absolutely no predisposition to commit the crime. That means that without the informant, he never would have done anything.”

“He wouldn't have!
I
wouldn't have. None of this would have happened if Gabriel hadn't suckered Jorge into it.”

“I know, believe me. I know. But let's try to look at this from the perspective of your typical jury. What counts in your favor is that neither of you has any kind of a dope record. But, the prosecution is going to ask about drug use, too. Have you or Jorge ever used drugs…don't answer that!” Izaya squawked. Olivia snapped her mouth shut. “Remember what I told you about testifying,” he continued. “I can't allow you to testify if I know for a fact that what you're saying isn't true.”

Olivia nodded her head. “Jorge's never done drugs. He's never even smoked pot.” She was sure Izaya noticed that she said nothing about herself, and she blushed.

Izaya nodded. “Well, the prosecution will harp on Jorge's failure to find work. They'll make it seem like he was looking for easy money. Maybe Jorge and his lawyer didn't feel like it was a strong enough case. Maybe they didn't trust Jorge to testify on his own behalf. Whatever. Right now we can't worry about him. We have to worry about you.”

“What does his plea have to do with me?”

“He'll be looking for a substantial assistance departure, or at the very least an agreement from the prosecutor to ask for the safety valve.”

Olivia shook her head. “So?”

Izaya knotted his hands loosely in front of him and looked at her. “You understand that to get either of those things he's going to have to tell Amanda Steele everything he knows.”

Olivia shrugged. “Well, that won't be too hard. He doesn't know anything.”

“That's the problem. Because he doesn't know much, he's going to have to scramble to find something to tell her. He's going to implicate anyone he can think of.”

She shrugged again. “So?”

Izaya's gaze was sympathetic, pitying even, and she felt a flash of impatience with him.

“So what?” she said again.

“I think we can expect him to provide testimony against you.”

Olivia sat back, stunned. She immediately shook her head. “I can't believe he would do that,” she said, and the words sounded, even to her own ear, hollow and false. If she'd learned anything over the course of the past few months, it was that she didn't know Jorge Rodriguez at all.

After she had finally understood that she was not to be allowed to speak to him in person, Olivia had written to him to tell him she was pregnant with his child. Long after she had stopped expecting a reply, a plain white envelope arrived in the mail. It had been forwarded from their Oakland address.

Olivia had torn open the envelope immediately, not waiting even to sit down. She stood in the front hall and read the single page of precise, beautiful script. Her Spanish was rusty, and she had to read it a few times before she was sure she had milked every possible nuance from the brief lines.

Olivia:

Time has passed, and I hope you are no longer so very angry with me. I received your letter a few weeks ago, and it has taken me until now to figure out what to say. After everything that has happened, I thought it might be best for us not to be in contact, and my lawyer thought the same. But, of course, I had to answer. Because of the baby. I don't know what to tell you, Olivia. Even if the baby is mine, I am not able to be its father, am I?

You must decide for yourself what to do. Maybe one day, when this is over, we will meet again, and you will introduce me to our son or daughter.

I'm so sorry Olivia, for everything that has happened, and for everything that will happen.

Jorge

Love is so short and oblivion so long.

The letter enraged her. Surely he knew her well enough to be certain that she had been faithful to him. She assumed the postscript was his way of telling her that he no longer loved her, and although she had long since realized that she felt the same, she was nonetheless hurt and angry. She realized that she no longer had any idea of what he was capable of, what he would do to save himself. She understood that his apology had been for this, for the betrayal that was to come.

Izaya said, “I know his panel lawyer, the lawyer appointed to represent him, pretty well. He's an old friend of my dad's. He's a decent guy, and he gave me the heads-up. He told me to expect the worst. We won't know for sure until we see Amanda's witness list, but I'd be surprised if Jorge wasn't on it.”

Olivia shook her head. “
He'
s testifying against
me?
” The injustice of it was so pronounced as to be almost absurd. “He decided to do the deal without telling me. He found Oreste. He figured it all out. And
he
's testifying against
me
.”

“I can't tell you how many times I've seen the same thing. Every defendant high enough on the food chain to know something can weasel his way into a lower sentence. The only people who end up getting screwed are the ones who have no information they can trade. The defendants with the least involvement, the ones who are least culpable, end up with the longest sentences.” He suddenly seemed to realize what it was that he was saying and laid a reassuring hand on hers. “But I'm not going to let that happen to you.”

“So what do we do now?”

“This is it, Olivia. Do-or-die time. The government's plea offer is on the table. We have to decide whether we're going to take it.”

“I plead guilty to the indictment, and Steele agrees to recommend the safety valve, right?”

“Right.”

“And my sentence? What would my sentence be?”

“Between five and eight years.”

“And if we lose at trial?”

“You'll most likely get the mandatory minimum.”

“The mandatory minimum.”

“Yes.”

“Ten years,” she said, to herself.

“Yes.”

He looked at her expectantly.

She sat very still, her palms resting on her belly. As they watched, her stomach rippled.

“Did you see that?” Olivia asked. “That was a foot, I think.”

Olivia closed her eyes. She thought about five years and how long that was, and then she thought about ten. Five years ago she had been in high school; ten years ago she had been a child. Five years ago she had had her first serious boyfriend; ten years ago she had not even begun to notice boys. Five years ago she had been thinking of going away to college; ten years ago she had only just begun sleeping over at friends' houses. Olivia considered what it would mean to stand up in court and tell the judge, the prosecutor, her family, the world, that she was guilty of the crime of drug distribution. She considered the act of testifying against Jorge, how it would feel to commit such an ultimate and foul betrayal. She pressed her hands into her belly, feeling for the knob of the baby's tiny foot. Then she opened her eyes.