Small Great Things(65)
In silence he leads me to a small room that looks like a closet. He hands me a paper grocery bag.
I peek inside to see my nightgown and my slippers. I yank the scrubs off my body, starting to fold them out of habit, and then leave them in a pile on the floor. I pull on my old clothes, my old life.
The CO is waiting when I open the door again. This time he takes me past the cell where I was kept waiting when I first arrived, which has only two women in it now, both curled on the floor asleep, and reeking of alcohol and vomit. Then suddenly we are outside, crossing a fence with a necklace of barbed wire.
I turn to him, panicking. “I don’t have any money,” I say. I know we are an hour or so away from New Haven, and I don’t have bus fare or a phone or even proper clothing.
The CO jerks his head into the distance, and that’s when I notice that the dark is moving, a shadow against a moonless night. The silhouette morphs until I see the outline of a car, and a person inside, who gets out and starts running toward me. “Mama,” Edison says, his face buried in my neck, “let’s go home.”
THERE ARE TWO TYPES OF people who become public defenders: those who believe they can save the world, and those who know damn well they can’t. The former are starry-eyed law school grads convinced they can make a difference. The latter are those of us who have worked in the system and know the problems are so much bigger than we are or the clients we represent. Once a bleeding heart calluses into realism, victories become individual ones: being able to reunite a mom who’s gone through rehab with her kid, who was put in foster care; winning a motion to suppress evidence of a former addiction that might color the odds for a current client; being able to juggle hundreds of cases and triage those that need more than a meet ’em and plead ’em. As it turns out, public defenders are less Superman and more Sisyphus, and there’s no small number of lawyers who wind up crushed under the weight of the infinite caseloads and the crappy hours and the shitty pay. To this end, we learn quickly that if we’re going to keep a tiny bit of our lives sacrosanct, we don’t bring our work home with us.
Which is why, when I dream of Ruth Jefferson for two consecutive nights, I know I’m in trouble.
In the first dream, Ruth and I are having an attorney-client meeting. I ask her the standard set of questions I’d ask of any client, but every time she speaks, it is in a language I don’t understand. It’s not even a language I recognize. Embarrassed, I have to keep asking her to repeat herself. Finally she opens her mouth, and a flock of blue butterflies pours out.
The second night I dream that Ruth has invited me over to dinner. It is the most sumptuous table, with enough food for a football team, and each dish is more delicious than the last. I drink one glass of water, and then another, and a third, and the pitcher is empty. I ask if I can get a refill, and Ruth looks horrified. “I thought you knew,” she says, and when I glance up I realize that we are locked inside a prison cell.
I wake up, dying of thirst. Rolling onto my side, I reach for the glass of water I keep on my nightstand and take a long, cool drink. I feel Micah’s arm slide around my waist and pull me against him. He kisses my neck; his hand slides up my pajama shirt.
“What would you do if I went to prison?” I blurt out.
Micah’s eyes open. “I’m pretty sure since you’re my wife, and over eighteen, this is legal.”
“No.” I roll to face him. “What if I did something…and got convicted?”
“That’s kind of hot.” Micah grins. “Lawyer in prison. Okay, I’ll play. What did you do? Say public indecency. Please say public indecency.” He pulls me flush against him.
“Seriously. What would happen to Violet? How would you explain it to her?”
“K, is this your way of telling me that you actually, finally did kill your boss?”
“It’s a hypothetical.”
“In that case, could we revisit the question in about fifteen minutes?” His eyes darken, and he kisses me.
—
WHILE MICAH SHAVES, I try to pin my hair into a bun. “Going to court today?” he asks.
His face is still flushed; so is mine. “This afternoon. How did you know?”
“You don’t stick needles into your head unless you’re going to court.”
“They’re bobby pins, and that’s because I’m trying to look professional,” I say.
“You’re too sexy to look professional.”
I laugh. “Let’s hope my clients don’t feel the same way.” I spear a flyaway hair into submission and lean my hip against the sink. “I’m thinking of asking Harry to give me a felony.”
“Great idea,” Micah says with mild sarcasm. “I mean, since you already have five hundred open cases, you should definitely take on one that requires even more time and energy.”
It’s true. Being a public defender means I have nearly ten times as many cases as are recommended by the ABA, and that, on average, I have less than an hour to prepare each case that goes to trial. Most of the time I am working, I do not eat lunch, or take a bathroom break.
“If it makes you feel any better, he probably won’t give it to me.”
Micah clatters his razor against the porcelain. When we were first married, I used to stare at the tiny hairs that dried in the bowl of the sink with wonder, thinking that I might read in them our future the way a psychic would read tea leaves. “Does this sudden ambition have anything to do with the question about you going to prison?”