The Nix(60)

“Faye, listen,” he said, and they both flinched at the use of her name. It was the first time he’d ever done that. “What is going on?”

“Okay. Fine. Here’s what I understand. My case is a seriously complicated one. Many charges of assault and several other charges of battery. Aggravated. First degree. I guess I scared a bunch of people in the park—those are the assaults—but the rocks only struck a few of them—those are the batteries. Plus also charges of, let’s see”—she ticked these off on her fingers one by one—“disturbing the peace, public lewdness, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest. The prosecutor is being unusually aggressive, egged on by the judge, we believe.”

“Judge Charles Brown.”

“That’s him! The sentence for aggravated battery, by the way, is somewhere in between three hundred hours of community service and twenty-five years in prison.”

“That’s a pretty wide range.”

“The judge has a lot of discretion in sentencing. So you know that letter you’re writing to him?”

“Yeah.”

“It better be pretty damn good.”

A whoosh of plumbing now, and the bathroom door opened and the lawyer returned, smiling, wiping his hands on his pants. Faye was right: He had the smallest feet Samuel had ever seen on an adult male.

“Fantastic!” the lawyer said. “This is going really well.” How could he keep steady with those broad shoulders and those tiny feet? He was like a pyramid balancing upside down.

The lawyer sat and drummed his fingers on his briefcase. “On to part two!” he said. He turned on the microphone. “Our new subject, sir, is why your mother is an excellent human being with regards to why she shouldn’t go to prison for upward of twenty years.”

“That’s not really a possibility, right?”

“I believe not, sir, but I’d like to cover all my bases, obviously. Now, would you like to hear about your mother’s charitable giving?”

“I’m sort of more interested in what she’s been up to these last couple decades.”

“The public schools, sir. She’s doing some really excellent work in the public schools. Plus poetry? A real advocate for the arts, let me tell you.”

“This part is going to be tricky for me,” Samuel said. “This whole ‘excellent human being’ part, no offense.”

“And why is that, sir?”

“Well, what am I going to tell the judge? That she’s a great person? A wonderful mother?”

The lawyer smiled. “That’s right. Exactly that.”

“I don’t think that’s something I could truthfully say.”

“And why not?”

Samuel looked from the lawyer to his mother and back again. “Seriously?”

The lawyer nodded, still smiling.

“My mother abandoned me when I was eleven!”

“Yes, sir, and as you can probably imagine it’s best that as little of that information about that part of her life reach the public as possible.”

“She abandoned me without any warning.”

“Perhaps, sir, for our purposes, sir, you shouldn’t think of it as your mother abandoned you. Instead, perhaps think of it as she gave you up for adoption slightly later than usual.”

The lawyer opened his briefcase and produced a pamphlet. “Your mother actually did a lot more legwork than most birth mothers do,” he said, “in terms of looking into prospective adoptee families and ensuring her child landed in a positive environment and such. From a certain standpoint, I’d say her diligence in this matter could be considered above and beyond.”

He handed Samuel the pamphlet. The cover was bright pink with pictures of smiling multicultural families and the words So You’re Adopted! at the top in bubbly type.

“I wasn’t adopted,” Samuel said.

“Not literally, sir.”

The lawyer was sweating again, a shiny film on his skin like what you might find on the ground on a dewy morning. A smear of liquid had now also appeared under his armpit and down his sleeve. It looked like his shirt was being swallowed slowly by a jellyfish.

Samuel looked at his mother, who gave him a sort of shrug like What are you going to do? Behind her, out the bank of windows looking north, was the great gray face of the Sears Tower, hazy in the smoggy distance. It used to be the tallest building in the world, but it no longer was. It wasn’t even in the top five. Come to think of it, it wasn’t even called the Sears Tower anymore.

“It’s quiet in here,” Samuel said.

His mother frowned. “What?”

“No traffic noise, no people noise. It’s very isolated.”

“Oh. They were renovating the building when the housing market collapsed,” she said. “They had only done a couple of units when they just left it, unfinished.”

“So you’re the only one in the building?”

“There’s a married couple two floors up. Bohemian artist types. We mostly ignore each other.”

“Sounds lonely.”

She studied his face for a moment. “It suits me,” she said.

“You know, I’d done a pretty good job forgetting about you,” Samuel said. “Until these recent events.”