to any men, especially if they aren’t holding a briefcase. They’re the criminals.”
I nod, hoping he’ll go away soon because I’ve been holding my breath all this time, and I’m positive my face is turning blue.
Court has already started and once the judge sees the back of my father’s head, it’s as if he recognizes it and calls Bared Garrata’s name next.
“Counselor,” the judge begins. “I understand there’s reason for you and your client to be in my courtroom again?”
“Yes, your honor. A very disturbing reason.”
On the way to the defense attorney’s table, my father stops to touch the shoulder of a woman with dark blond hair pulled back in a bun. Gratefully, she takes his hand, and I don’t see how my father stands it, all that emotional pressure from defendants, from their loved ones, looking up to him as their only chance at being cleared of the charges levied against them by the entire State of California.
From a side door, a bald man in an orange jumpsuit appears. His beard is dark and bushy. He stands inside what looks like a jury box except there’s no jurors, no chairs, and there’s metal mesh screen separating him from the rest of the courtroom. Even at this distance, one of his eyes is visibly swollen and closed. A thick scab covers the bridge of his nose.
“Your Honor.” My father levels his arm dramatically toward Bared, leveling his accusation. “Look at my client. He is an innocent man unless proven guilty. Bail must be reduced if he’s to survive until his trial date. Who protected his rights last night while he was getting his face rammed against a steel sink, being called a sand nigger?”
“Enough, Counselor,” admonishes the judge, raising his voice and lowering the gavel. “You will not play the race card in my courtroom.”
My father nods, and something passes between them, the certainty that as a defense attorney it’s my father’s job to be a showman. To distract and offend. The judge looks a little familiar, and I think I’ve seen him once at a party at the home of my Uncle Dimitri—also a lawyer.
The prosecutor, a woman that’s model tall, with short dark hair and pointy glasses, speaks up, forced to deal with my father’s underhanded move.
“If Mr. Garrata surrenders his passports, I find nothing wrong with reducing his bail to three hundred thousand.”
My father cocks his head.
“Three? How about one and a half.” He points again at Bared. “This man has no priors. He’s a family man with two young daughters. He’s an assistant manager at a fan manufacturing plant.” Now my father turns his attention on the prosecutor. “Ms. Tomkins needs to stop blowing hot air, so to speak. My client doesn’t have that kind of collateral.”
Some minor wrangling occurs before the judge ultimately rules in my father’s favor, increasing the bail to one hundred and seventy-five to save face. And although I’m happy to see my father win, it feels like he’s lost. Not only has his client, Bared Garrata, shot and killed someone pointblank, he must’ve blown a hole in the heart of every member of his victim’s family.
Quickly, I turn and head out into the hall before I happen to recognize any of them by their grief.
That afternoon my mother comes home and three days later we are given my brother, all pink, with a clean bill of health, plus a birth certificate with his tiny footprint. Because my mother is still sore from the caesarean and because she wants to keep a closer eye on baby Nick, she has my father move my old mattress out of the garage and into Nick’s room.
At least this is the story they tell me. I want to believe them, yet I can’t help thinking about what Rhea said, how it sounded like he’d done something to hurt our mother. Whether out of necessity or penance, my father sets up my old bed in Nick’s room. He screws in the last bolt of the bed frame, screwing himself, as he must’ve known, along with it. The nights he’d spend alone in the California King for months to come, maybe longer. Last spring for my birthday, my mother was insistent on buying me a waterbed. At the time I was blinded by having been given something so extravagant that I hadn’t even asked for, that I had to actually fill up with a hose. But I see now she might’ve been planning on moving out of her own bedroom since then and the extra bed was no more of a gift to me than it was for herself.
Later in the night I hear them keeping their voices down, and this time it’s my mother who speaks in the low roar.
“You at least could’ve told me what you did. I had to find out from the nurse. You had no plans of ever telling me.”
“Jesus, June. I was only thinking of you.”
“You were thinking of yourself.”
“They already had you open. I didn’t see the point in making you go through that again.”
“It wasn’t your fucking choice to make.”
Rarely have I heard my mother use the F word and when she does, I know at least for her, the fight is over.
Uneasily, I close my eyes as if pretending that I already am might help me fall back asleep.
Within a week my family slips into a certain pattern of taking care of Nicholas—feedings, cradlings in the rocker, late night pacing up and down the hall. He seems to fall asleep to my off-key version of Duran Duran’s ballad “Save a Prayer” so long as I don’t spike my voice toward the high notes I can’t reach. Diaper changes are round the clock, and I quickly learn the hard way, when changing him, to throw another diaper over his privates to stop the geyser that spurts on instinct as soon as I rip off the soiled one. Even my father pitches in when he gets home from work. All of us do except for Rhea.
Her pink window blinds stay clamped shut night and day. She sleeps for the rest of us who aren’t getting much of it because of the baby, and with our mother in full nesting mode, Rhea has no reason to ever emerge from her own isolated nest she’s created out of bed and blankets. If she’s made any friends at her new school, like she claims, we’ve never met them. She even missed her last appointment with her shrink, using Nick’s homecoming as an excuse. It seems she’s even reduced her intake of Diet Coke just so she won’t have to get up and use the bathroom.
One morning around my brother’s third or fourth week home, my mother is in the kitchen fixing breakfast while my father is getting dressed for work. For once he doesn’t have to bang on my sister’s door. She’s already showered and there is the muffled whirring of the blow dryer in the bathroom.
When she appears in the kitchen, she is dressed for school, her short hair finger-styled. The hot pink blouse she’s wearing is new and matches her favorite Clinique lipstick. My mother’s face brightens as she stands over the stove scrambling eggs, with my brother gurgling in his carrier on the floor, her bare foot tipping him contentedly back and forth. One less child she needs to worry about.
“You look pretty,” my mother says. “I like the shirt. That’s a flattering color against your fair skin.”
The compliment makes Rhea’s eyes shine and in those
