chest tightens at the beginnings of an argument, so I break in with the white flag.
“Okay, Dad,” I say. “I think she heard you.”
A couple of minutes later my sister emerges on her way to the bathroom. Her short hair is smashed along the side of her head where she’s been sleeping, her face cracked in places with dried Calamine. From her skeletal shoulders, her nightgown hangs as if being held up by a wire hanger. She doesn’t look herself and hasn’t for some time. The pills her L.A. shrink prescribed aren’t working.
Before she shuts the bathroom door, she faces our father dead on, calling up energy from down deep.
“Mom told me what you did to her.”
Whatever Rhea claims he’s done to our mother, it must be true because my father backs off. He snaps at me to get in the goddamn car and as we leave, it’s anyone’s guess if she’ll make it to school or simply head back to bed.
Although my father is over forty and a good fifty pounds overweight, I have trouble keeping up with him in the courthouse halls. My Van slip-ons squeak at every turn on the shiny floors, grabbing the attention of a few men in suits who look a little puzzled at seeing me, a seventh grader, tagging along with her father to court. It’s impossible to tell which of the men are attorneys and which are cleaned up drug dealers, murderers and thieves.
Inside the gallery, my father seats me in the last row. The Drakkar Noir he sprayed can’t mask the smell of our brisk walk because he’s all worked up now.
“Don’t you move,” he orders in a hardened whisper. “And don’t talk 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