The Year She Left Us (16 page)

“Tuck me in like the old days,” Charlie yawned after we cleared the dishes.

“You look exhausted,” I said, and made to give her a little push, but first, I hugged her.

“Oof,” she said, laughing. “You make me feel every bite.”

Finally she closed her bedroom door, and her calls of good night fell quiet. I packed a bag and counted and recounted the money. I put half in my wallet and the other half in my shoe, and wound a black knit scarf of Charlie's around my neck, telling myself I was cold.

Dear Mom
, I wrote on a piece of notebook paper.
I found the photograph of Aaron and decided I'd like to meet him. I don't want you to stop me, and please don't call him, either. This is something I need to do for myself.
For half a page, I tried to compose an explanation, twisting my mouth harder at every sentence I wrote until the images that had played all night in my head—Aaron greeting me, calling me by name—turned into a bigger movie of Charlie, Les, and Gran huddled together, flapping and cawing, making plans to retrieve me. I stopped writing. It was almost dawn. I ripped up the piece of paper, then grabbed at a scrap on my desk and scribbled:
I have to leave. Don't worry.

I propped the note on the altar table, dropped my keys in the bowl, and headed out for Seattle.

PART TWO

False Outer Point

CHAPTER 17

LES

A
ll eyes were on the woman in the jury box—young, pretty, nervous.
She looks like Ari
, Les thought,
except for the nervous part.

“Do you feel you could keep an open mind, listening to all the evidence in the case before deciding?” Les asked, and eighty pairs of eyes in the courtroom clocked from the box to the bench. Les, in her black robe, raised above the rest, looked down at the woman and waited.

The young woman nodded.

“You have to speak up,” Les said, “so the court reporter can get it.”

“Yes,” the young woman said, looking surprised at the sound of her own strong voice.

“'Atta girl,” Les said, with a warm smile. Everyone in the courtroom laughed. Those who weren't in the jury box itched to turn on their cell phones.
I had jury duty today
, they'd go home and tell their spouses.
A Judge Kong. She was terrific.

“Mr. Gordon?” Les asked.

“No questions, Your Honor.”

“Ms. Cruz?”

“No questions, Your Honor. The defense is very happy with our jury.” Les shot her a warning glance as the D.A. bristled. Ms. Cruz laughed to herself. She knew it was a cheap shot, but hey, why not take it? Judge Kong didn't get hung up on a little gamesmanship in her courtroom. She was a stickler for procedure, though—you better know your rules of evidence—and she protected the jury. Their time is as valuable as anyone else's in this case, she often chided the lawyers. Have your witnesses ready to go, or I'll let the jury know why we're sitting around, waiting. On the law, she was brilliant. Ms. Cruz straightened her shoulders. She wondered if the judge knew her name outside the courtroom.

“Then, ladies and gentlemen, I think we have a jury,” Les said. The clerk of court swore them in. She thanked the rest of the group and excused them. They shuffled out, half sorry to go because the case sounded scary—home invasion—and the defendant, a white guy, was a former Saint Ignatius football player (some of the men remembered), and it was going to be fun, watching the judge keep those lawyers in line. It was almost as good as TV.

Les conferred with counsel, then excused the jury, telling them to be back at nine a.m., sharp. “Today and every day that we're together, I'll remind you not to discuss the case with anyone.” She surveyed them briefly, making sure their eyes met hers. Except for juror number six, they all nodded. Sometimes there was a man who didn't come around right away. She'd keep alert to him, try for some connection. It was critical for the defendant that juror number six listen to the court, and, more important, to the defense attorney, Ms. Cruz. The D.A. started out at such an advantage that Les worked hard to even the playing field. She'd been an assistant D.A. herself for a short year, but she was known not to play favorites. Ms. Cruz leaned down to speak to her client and put a hand on his shoulder before the jury looked away. Les relaxed. Ms. Cruz knew what she was doing. She didn't need Les's help to wrest respect from the jury. Between the two of them, by the end of tomorrow, number six would be paying attention.

In chambers, Les quickly packed her briefcase and slipped out the door. She had already told her clerk and her bailiff that she'd be leaving at four o'clock. She didn't bother to offer an explanation. She was the boss. They loved working for Judge Kong and protected her fiercely from rivals and reporters. Once, her bailiff, Tony, six feet three and stout, had tackled a man who'd come charging across the courtroom screaming, “I'll kill you!” at the judge. Tony's arm was slashed; the man had gotten a screwdriver past security downstairs. A family law matter. Those were the most dangerous.

Now she was in trials and happier for it, especially in felony cases. The stakes were high and the lawyering was good. She yearned for a spot on the federal bench, where the law was often more complex and the lawyers were sometimes dazzling. There she could match wits with the best the bar had to offer, and she wouldn't have to put up with sharing the turf with her sister. They worked in different courthouses—Charlie didn't often come down to the hall—but both being in state court meant they sometimes intersected. How tiresome it was: “the King Kong Sisters,” she'd heard people snigger. A swipe at Asians taking their seats at the table, or maybe it was because they were women, though surely, Les believed, the bar was beyond that now. She didn't consider herself a trailblazer. Those were the women in their sixties and seventies who had mentored Les, her law school professors and the law firm partners who'd opened their tight circle to let Les in. No, the jabs came because Les was a judge and Charlie a public defender, when one should have been a doctor and the other an engineer. People didn't like their expectations unmet; it made them uncomfortable or resentful. Sometimes idiots got Les and Charlie mixed up if Les wasn't wearing her robes. Woe to the lawyer who made that mistake. The next time he appeared in her courtroom, Les would lean down and pin him. “Judge
Lesley
Kong, presiding.”

She drove home fast, because Burrell was waiting.

B
urrell Johnson made himself a drink and lounged on Les's sofa. From her living room window, he could see rooftops and the bay. A sickly bonsai tree in a dark green dish languished on the sill. The room was cold; it was late November, and the sun was shining, but there'd been early-winter frost on the lawn that morning. His wife, Nancy, had mentioned it when she brought in the papers. Their sons lived in Chicago and Detroit and laughed at their parents whenever they said it was cold in San Francisco. He sipped his drink, enjoying the quiet. He liked the sparseness of Lesley's home, a welcome refuge after the clamor of the day. His life was noisy. Three times the law firm had merged until it had become an international behemoth. He hated the result, the constant conflicts and endless management meetings, but they'd had no choice—it was a matter of survival. He'd made his money, but the young guys had to have theirs, too, and they weren't content with making a damn good living. Greed had made them crazy. They wanted what their clients in Silicon Valley had, never mind that the profession they'd chosen was to counsel companies and stand up for them in court, not create new markets, new ways for the world to think. The lawyers didn't take the risks, why should they reap the rewards? But his kind of lawyering was just about dead. Nobody cared about service or justice. Lesley was smart to have gotten out of private practice. Her old firm, like his, had cut off its own nuts, morphing from a partnership of some of the best lawyers in town into a bloated business with offices around the country, no more exclusive than H&R Block. They'd regret it, all of them, giving up so much control. At least he could say he'd been master of his own fate, and the master of others', too, with a line to the governor's and senators' offices. How many men, white or black, could say that about their lives? His blood warmed from the pride and the drink and the thought of what they'd do when Lesley walked through the door. He rose to turn on a floor lamp. There was wood in the grate; he could light a fire, but on days like today, when he had a dinner to get to, they always went straight to the bedroom.

Les arrived, and they grabbed for each other.

A
fterward, they sat in her breakfast nook, dressed and drinking coffee. They looked like an unlikely pair: Burrell a stocky, bullet-headed black man gone gray at the temples, and Les, wide-hipped, long-limbed, almost fifteen years younger. They didn't indulge in a lovers' interlude, sharing their feelings on damp and tangled sheets. They had very different habits, imbued with their own romance. Their intimacies flourished when they felt most at ease—across the table, both upright, with hair brushed and shoes on their feet. They had found over the years in their long-running saga—broken off twice, and resumed in urgent surrender—that transitions were difficult, and so they always took the time for quiet conversation. It made it easier for them to reenter their separate lives if they had talked themselves onto a higher plane, like scuba divers rising slowly so they wouldn't get the bends. The lying they didn't discuss. They both knew they had to, once and for all, end it.

“This time next year,” Les said, “we won't have any more of this nonsense.” She wrapped her fingers around his thick wrist. In bed, she liked holding on to him in little ways: a wrist, a thumb, the lobe of his ear, as soft and black as the tip of a tulip stamen. She had piano fingers, Burrell liked to say, though he was the one who more often wandered into the living room to fool around on the baby grand. Sometimes they sat side by side on the narrow bench, Les playing bass to Burrell's treble riffing. Burrell had said they made a pretty picture, the big, black cowboy and his Chinese sweetheart, like something you'd find in a Wild West whorehouse. There weren't any
women
Chinese back then, Les had objected. It was only men, laboring on the railroads. Well, that's too bad, he'd said. They didn't know what they were missing.

“It's absurd,” Les said. “We're far too old for this.”

Burrell shook his head. “We're not going to talk about that today.” He took a swallow and savored the bitter coffee. After the first fuck, he'd slept briefly, and then turned her over and licked her clean, Lesley gasping. He didn't need a young thing to flatter or cajole him. Les, in her fifties, was as eager to be ravished as the day they'd first gone to bed. He knew himself, had lived for years listening in his head to the skillful arguments of his heart, mind, and needs. Les was the woman he wanted.

“Mon amour
,
”
Les said. It was a joke between them. The first time they had met, Les a young attorney and Burrell a lawyer's lawyer, Les had mispronounced his name. “Bur-relle,” she had said in the glass-walled conference room that was their combat cage. She was deposing his client in a contract dispute. The depo was easy work, but Les had overprepared, which made her slip up and say his name wrong.

“Are you French?” Burrell had erupted in his loudest baritone voice.

Les had fumbled, off her pace for a moment.

“If you're not French, then try to get the name right.
Burrrl
,” he'd growled, “as in
burly, burnish, beurre blanc, Burton
.” He winked at the court reporter, who knew all his tricks.

Les had doused him with a look. This was 1984, and grim-faced women were clawing their way to the top.

“As in
burial
,” she'd said, “as in,
We're going to bury you in a burlap burqa
.”

He'd had no idea what a burqa was. He had shot her a grin and let her ask her questions.

“I
had a young woman in the jury box today who reminded me of my niece, Ari,” Les said. The sun had retreated. They didn't look at the clock; they were used to billing their time in six-minute intervals, and so the passing of an hour ticked in their very organs.

“She hasn't come home?” Burrell asked.

“No, and says she won't. They talk on the phone—Ari yells, Charlie cries, they hang up, they get nowhere. If I were Charlie, I'd get on a plane this minute.”

“Why doesn't she?”

“Ari said if she does, she'll disappear for good, and Charlie's convinced she means it.”

“That's tough,” Burrell said.

“I'm furious with Charlie. How could she have let Ari sneak off like that? I'm not saying she's a bad mother. God knows she's managed pretty well. But now's not the time for Charlie to dither. She ought to show a firmer hand.”

“Maybe,” Burrell said mildly. In his experience, people who hadn't raised children of their own put vast, unwarranted faith in the exercise of parental discipline.
It sounds like a legal theory
, he thought.
The Firmer Hand Doctrine.
One of many doctrines that fell apart in the application.

“You could hire somebody to investigate,” he said. “I can get you a couple of names. They'd be discreet; the daughter won't find out, and you don't have to tell your sister.”

Les shook her head. “We had a huge argument. She wants me to stay out of it. She says she believes that Ari will come home by herself. Whatever's fundamentally troubling Ari, only Ari can fix. I don't understand it. If I were her, I'd be raging.”

“She's legally an adult,” Burrell said, “and she has money. You've said she's smart. I don't see her living under a freeway, turning tricks for food.”

“This isn't a case we're talking about! Not some messed-up kid in my courtroom, or a client of Charlie's.” Les got up to go to the sink for a drink of water.

“Does she have friends?” Burrell asked. “Anyone she could talk to?”

“She has friends,” Les said, her back still to Burrell. She glanced up and saw herself in the kitchen window looking so wifely she might have been wearing an apron. Instead of the water, she reached for a bottle of wine. “Good friends, and she liked her teachers, too. But something changed, once she got to high school. She turned really sour and moody.” She fetched two glasses and brought the wine to the table.

“Typical teenage stuff,” Burrell said.

“It was more than that,” Les said, sitting back down. “There was a kind of anger there, mixed with sadness.”

“That's not unusual, I suppose. For a kid who's been adopted.”

What do you know about it?
Les wanted to retort, for she didn't like anyone slapping labels on Ari. But there was truth in what he said. The kinds of questions Ari had asked when she was younger—
Why didn't my parents want me? What if they want me back?
—reappeared in telling ways. She'd been “dumped,” not “placed”; her birth parents, Ari cracked, “threw me out with the bathwater.” Les overheard her tell a boy that Charlie had purchased her at a pawnshop. Whenever Charlie tried to lighten what Ari had said by making a joke or giving her a hug, Ari's mood turned darker.