Daughter's Keeper (38 page)

“Honey,” Elaine said. “You're leaking.”

***

“She really is beautiful,” Izaya said, after Elaine had left the room. He was staring not at the baby, but at Olivia. She moved to cover her breast. She paused for a moment, her hand resting lightly across her nipple. She looked directly into his eyes, and her mouth softened, almost into a smile. He blushed, and she tugged her nightgown into place.

Olivia made a nest of blankets for the sleeping baby next to her body. She lay Luna down.

“She's so tiny,” Izaya said.

“I don't know, she felt pretty big to me when I was trying to get her out,” she said, and he laughed. “I don't think I ever really said thank you.”

“Thank you? For what?”

“For everything. For the trial.”

“How can you thank me? I screwed it up! We lost.”

“We didn't lose. I got acquitted of everything but the phone count.”

Izaya leaned back in his chair and rubbed his hands roughly across his face.

“You're going to jail,” he said. “That means I lost.”

“Well, then, thanks for the moose.”

He smiled thinly. Conscious of the faint absurdity of having to comfort her lawyer for her own misfortune, Olivia said, “Four years isn't so long. I mean, it's a lot less than ten, isn't it?”

Izaya sighed. “Man, I'm such a dick. I should be the one telling you that.”

She shrugged. “It's okay. We can tell each other.” She closed her eyes. The birth had drained her of all her energy and strength, and then the baby had woken up every ninety minutes or so during the night, nursing desperately, occasionally bursting into tears of helpless rage at the mere trickle of colostrum that was all Olivia's breasts were producing. Olivia knew that her milk would come in eventually, but she still felt a kind of distressed inadequacy at this, the first of many ways she would disappoint her little girl. She could not even allow her mind to contemplate the horrible betrayal of abandonment that was to come.

“You're tired,” Izaya said, rising.

She nodded. “I am. But thanks for coming. And for everything. Really.”

He nodded and then grabbed at the string of one of the pink balloons. “I'm going to take this one, okay?” he said. He left the room, the balloon bobbing in his wake.

She picked up the baby and unwrapped her from the swaddling blankets. She pulled her hospital gown aside and held Luna's nearly naked body to her own bared breasts and belly, and she took comfort in the warmth that spread between them.

***

Olivia and Luna were easiest with each other at night; Olivia felt none of the anxiety that sometimes overtook her during the long days of caring for the baby. When Luna cried, Olivia would nurse her without really waking, fitting a nipple between her daughter's mewling lips in a kind of somnambulant haze. The baby slept nestled in bed against Olivia, not in the ivory wicker bassinet that Olivia had found waiting in her room when she came home from the hospital. In the mornings, before she came downstairs, she would muss the lace bedding in the bassinet so that Elaine would think the baby had passed the night there, rather than in her mother's arms. Olivia did this in part because she was sure Elaine wouldn't approve of the baby sharing Olivia's bed, that she would argue that Olivia might crush the tiny girl, that it was important for Luna to learn to sleep alone, in her own bed. Olivia had no energy for the argument, which she knew with a kind of weary self-foreknowledge would devolve into a lecture by her of the sleeping patterns of indigenous people the world over. But there was another reason for the charade—Olivia didn't want to hurt her mother's feelings. Elaine had been so proud of the gift she had presented to her new granddaughter, one that was so unlike her in its fundamental frivolousness. An opulent bed for a child who would sleep in it for no more than a couple of months was so extravagant, so indulgent, that it was something Olivia had a hard time even believing her mother had purchased.

The first days home from the hospital were the worst. Olivia's milk came in almost as soon as she walked in the door of the house. Her breasts swelled to the size of bowling balls and were just as hard and unyielding. Luna, who had been so hungry, seemed horrified at the transformation of the objects she'd so clearly come to view as her own. She had screamed for hours, refusing to nurse, unable to be comforted, and her tears were soon matched by her mother's. Olivia found herself more grateful to her own mother than she had ever been before. Elaine had appeared with a head of cabbage, four icepacks, and a page of instructions she had downloaded off the Web. For some reason that neither of them could figure out, stuffing Olivia's bra with raw cabbage leaves relieved the engorgement, and Luna was soon nursing peacefully again.

Arthur, to no one's surprise, absented himself from this and all the other everyday dramas associated with the baby's arrival. When Elaine had come home from the hospital the night after Luna's birth, he'd happily informed her of his decision to begin training for an Iron Man competition. She'd greeted his invitation to join him with a dull shake of her head. He spent his days at work and his evenings training for the two-and-a-half mile swim, the one hundred-twelve–mile bike ride, and the twenty-six–mile marathon.

When Luna was a week old, Elaine went back to work. Olivia had at first been panicked at the thought of being entirely alone with the baby, but she soon found their isolation pleasurable, even blissful. She would drag the baby's three-hour cycles of sleep and nursing out until the mid-morning. Then she would fill Elaine's deep tub with warm water and a squirt of lavender soap. The two would float in a fragrant steamy haze for a while, until Olivia grew hungry enough to begin the day. At first she'd simply heat up whatever was left over from the previous night's dinner, but soon she began bundling Luna up in her Baby Björn, the infant carrier she had found at the resale store down the block from the pharmacy, and walking over to the lunch counter, where Ralph would serve her a pile of scrambled eggs, toast, and potatoes large enough to feed her twice or even three times over.

In the afternoons, she'd keep the baby attached to her chest and do her best to prepare for her sentencing hearing. Periodically, Izaya would call or email, making sure she was gathering letters to be submitted to the court on her behalf. Elaine and Arthur each wrote a letter, as did Ralph and one of Olivia's high school teachers—her favorite, with whom she had stayed in touch. A couple of the families for whom she'd been the baby-sitter of legend also wrote, although there were others who greeted her request with something akin to horror.

On Izaya's instructions, Olivia drafted a statement to the judge, which Izaya then edited heavily and returned to her. They emailed the statement back and forth for a while, pulling out and putting back various lines and sections until it satisfied both of them.

Izaya sent her a copy of the brief he wrote to the judge, asking for a downward departure from the applicable sentencing guideline range. His request was audacious, to say the least. The fact that Olivia had been convicted only of the telephone count meant that her sentence was capped at four years. However, the judge was still obliged to use the sentencing guidelines and make his calculations based on the fifty-five grams of methamphetamine at issue in the trial. When Olivia had expressed confusion at how she could possibly be sentenced for a crime of which she'd been found not guilty, Izaya had shrugged his shoulders in disgust.

“It's unbelievable; I know,” he said. “But the Supreme Court has said it's the law. You get sentenced even for conduct of which you've been acquitted. Basically, it means that all the government has to do is get a conviction for one small count. Then you go to jail as if they'd won on every count.”

“But that's not
fair!
” Olivia had howled into the telephone, waking the baby lying in her arms.

“Tell me about it,” Izaya said, over the resultant sound of Luna's wails. “You're lucky. The phone count statute limits your sentence to four years. I've had clients end up serving ten, or even twenty, for crimes for which they'd been acquitted, all because they got convicted of some minor, lesser included offense.”

In the absence of the statutory maximum for the telephone count, the sentence required by the guidelines in Olivia's case was sixty-three to seventy-eight months. Izaya was not content, however, to accept the four-year sentence prescribed by the statute. Izaya's brief asked the judge to make use of the safety valve to bring her sentence down to forty-one to fifty-one months, and to depart even lower. The sentence he requested was home detention—the ankle bracelet of Elaine's fantasies.

“Will he do it?” Olivia had asked.

“I don't know,” Izaya had replied. “I've never asked for anything like this. We'll have to wait and see.”

The morning of her sentencing, Olivia woke early and forewent her usual lazy bath. She fed Luna, then hooked herself up to the breast pump Elaine had rented for her. She sat at the kitchen table, sleepily rocking to the rhythm of the suction whooshing through the tubes of the pump. She had begun pumping breast milk as soon as she had gotten home from the hospital. Over the past five weeks, she had filled her mother's freezer with three hundred ounces of pale yellow milk packed in tiny Ziploc bags. Her nipples were cracked and sore from all the pumping, and the smell of the lanolin she used to relieve the ache made her nauseous. But she wanted Luna to have breast milk as her only nourishment for as long as possible, and she was determined to leave enough for at least a month, in case Izaya's hopes went unrealized and she had to go to prison.

The sound of Elaine's voice caught Olivia's attention.

“I just can't get used to seeing you hooked up to that machine. Are you sure it doesn't hurt?”

“It's not too bad. Well, once when I had the power amped up all the way it sucked my nipple in about three inches. That was awful. But normally it's pretty bearable.”

“Ralph will be here in a few minutes. Do you want to get dressed?”

Ralph had become Luna's greatest fan. It was all Olivia and Elaine could do to keep the man from dribbling spoonfuls of Rocky Road into the baby's mouth. He had been only too happy to watch her on the day of Olivia's sentencing hearing and had even decided to close the soda fountain for the day. It would be the first time in thirty years that milk shakes wouldn't be available on a Tuesday on College Avenue.

Olivia went upstairs to dress. In the month since Luna's birth, she'd lost some weight, but nowhere near enough to fit into her pre-pregnancy clothes. She sifted through her wardrobe, loath to wear the maternity dresses that she'd grown so sick of, but unable to find anything else. She knocked on her mother's bedroom door.

“Come in,” Arthur called. He was standing at the mirror, tying his tie. “Check this out,” he said, delightedly. “I got sick of tying my ties in the same lame way, so I went online and found directions for tying
this
. It's a new kind of knot, called a Pratt. What do you think?” He was holding a printed sheet with diagrams and instructions in his hand. He held up the picture next to his own tie. “Does it look right?”

“It looks fine,” Olivia said, without looking at either the paper or Arthur. “Are you coming today?”

“Sure. I mean, Elaine told me that she wanted me to come. That
you
wanted me to come. Right?”

Olivia nodded. “Thanks. It'll be good for Mom to have someone there.” She opened the door of Elaine's closet and began to go through the hanging clothes. She pulled out a navy dress with an empire waist and held it up to herself. Then she found a white blouse with a floppy bow at the neck. After Arthur walked out of the room, she pulled on the shirt. The top buttons strained over her pneumatic breasts, and she couldn't even close the shirt over the thick roll of her belly. Still, it was good enough; the voluminous dress would hide it all. She gazed into the mirror hanging on the back of the closet door, turning this way and that. She looked, to herself, like an overgrown schoolgirl. Perfect.

***

Olivia stood silently next to Izaya as he argued to Judge Horowitz that she deserved a downward departure. Izaya told the judge that they all knew that if he looked only at the sentencing range demanded by the charts and graphs that dictated his decision, he would have to sentence her to the full four years. However, this case, Izaya argued, mandated a different outcome. He talked at length about how tangentially involved Olivia was, about her naïveté, and about her lack of a serious criminal history. He argued that her minimal role in the offense justified a much lower sentence range.

Then he asked the judge to depart even further. “Your honor, Olivia is, as you know, a new mother. Her baby girl is five weeks old. Just five weeks. If you sentence this young mother to jail for four years, she could lose her child.”

Izaya had called up one night soon after the trial and asked Olivia what she planned to do with the baby. He quickly explained that he had begun thinking through his sentencing strategy as though he wanted to be sure she didn't assume there was some more personal reason for his concern.

“I'm sending her to Jorge's parents in Mexico.”

“Are you serious?”

She didn't feel the need to reply.

“What about your own mother?” Izaya asked.

“She can't take it.”

“Why not?”

Olivia opened her mouth to explain about Arthur and about Elaine's own unwillingness to begin again the chore of raising a child but could not bring herself to say it all. “She just can't.”

“Okay,” Izaya said, softly. “Is foster care out of the question?”

“I'm allowed only a six-month window,” Olivia said, and then described to Izaya what she had learned from the attorney at Legal Services for Prisoners with Children.