Law of Attraction (4 page)

The phone rang. “I got it,” Laprea called as she picked up the cordless. A computerized voice asked if she’d accept a phone call from D.C. Jail. Laprea hesitated a moment before quietly saying yes. Then she walked into the bathroom, locked the door, and turned on the faucet.

D’marco’s voice greeted her warmly. “Hey, baby. It’s me.”

“D.” Wary, Laprea kept her voice neutral. It had been two weeks since the assault. “Why you calling?”

“I just miss you, shorty. I been thinking about you and the kids. How’s D’montrae? He ask for me?”

“Every day.” Not that he deserved to know.

“What about Dameka?”

“She doing real good in school. Got an award for spelling.”

“She take after her mother.” D’marco gave a low chuckle. “I miss you all so much. I’m so sorry about what happened, baby. I don’t want us to fight like that.”

“Me neither.” She allowed a tinge of bitterness to her tone.

“Pree, I met this guy in jail, a pastor. We been talking ’bout families and the man’s role. Kids need their father. I want to be that. I don’t want them growing up without a father, like I did. I’m gonna change, I promise you. I’m not gonna drink. I’m getting job training. I wanna support you and the kids.”

Laprea considered his words, wondering whether this time would be different. D’marco sounded sincere. She knew he wanted to be a better man. And she wanted so badly to believe that he could be—wanted the twins to have their father in their lives, wanted this man, the man she fell in love with, to cherish her.

Then she noticed her reflection in the mirror. The bruises around her eyes had faded into a sickly purplish green. The scrapes on her cheek were still pink.

“You hurt me, D. I don’t think I can keep going through this.”

“Please, Pree, gimme another chance. Every night I lie on the cot thinkin’ how beautiful you look when you holdin’ Dameka in your lap. How much I want to see that again and hold you.” His voice cracked.
“I love you, baby.”

Laprea started to tear up. But before she could decide how to respond, Rose’s voice bellowed through the phone. “D’marco Davis, how dare you call here!”

Great. How long had her mother been listening in? Laprea didn’t need the receiver against her ear to hear Rose screaming from the kitchen.

“Don’t you
ever
call this house again! If you try talking to my daughter again, I swear to God, I’ll whup your sorry hide till you ain’t got nothing left to feel pain with! Laprea, you hang up that phone right now!”

Laprea pressed End and threw the phone on the counter. A moment later Rose was banging on the bathroom door, yelling for her to come out. The twins started shouting, too, their little voices full of excitement and fear. Laprea sat on the toilet, put her head in her hands, and cried.

•  •  •

The phone’s insistent ringing tore Anna’s attention from the brief she was writing. She looked at the clock: 8:30 p.m. Grace had gone home hours ago. Anna picked up, wondering who’d be calling now.

It was Rose Johnson, and she was furious.

“D’marco called Laprea from jail tonight, Ms. Curtis! I thought you got a stay-away order. What kind of system you running, where a man with a restraining order can call the woman he beat up?”

Anna tried to calm her enough to get the details. As Rose told the story, Anna heard the fear in her voice—the real emotion under her fury. She assured Rose that she would contact the jail and have D’marco’s phone privileges revoked. She’d also get a recording of the call. Maybe they could use it against him at trial. In the meantime, D’marco would be stuck in jail with no way to contact Laprea.

“Thank God.” Rose sighed in relief. “If he gets through to her, she gonna let him off, just like before.”

As she hung up, Anna considered calling Nick and demanding that he instruct his client not to contact Laprea anymore. Would she do that with another defense attorney, or was she just looking for an excuse to call him? She hadn’t spoken to him since their dinner two weeks ago. Although he’d called and left her a couple of friendly business-related voice messages, she’d responded with short e-mails addressing
business and nothing more. She cringed remembering that she’d almost kissed him outside her apartment. She was a professional, not some tart. Professionally, she didn’t need to call him now.

Instead, Anna spent the next hour sending e-mails and faxes to the D.C. Jail, working through the bureaucracy to cut D’marco off from the world. By tomorrow morning, he wouldn’t be allowed to use the jail’s phones or Internet services any longer. Would Nick be annoyed? Too bad.

When she finally left the office, Anna tried to push her work out of her mind. Grace was always telling her to take a few minutes a day to think about normal, fun, girl things, so Anna read the celebrity section of the
Express
during her subway ride home and tried to concentrate on which actresses had recently adopted children from abroad. When she emerged from the Metro, she made herself window-shop, skimming the fiction titles propped in the window of Kramerbooks and admiring the low riders displayed in the darkened Lucky Brand Jeans store.

But she couldn’t stop thinking about D’marco’s phone call to Laprea that night. Prosecuting this case, Anna wasn’t just up against D’marco, or his lawyer, or the challenges in the legal system. She was in a very real way trying to protect Laprea from herself. Laprea had a history of taking D’marco back and refusing to press charges against him. If she did it again, a conviction would be nearly impossible.

As Anna pushed her apartment door open, her cat ran over and threw himself against her legs, meowing and purring ecstatically. She scooped up the orange tabby and buried her face in his soft fur. The creature purred even louder. Raffles had been a neighborhood stray that Anna occasionally fed. He’d started meowing outside her door every night until she eventually relented, took him for a thorough deworming, and let him move in. Now she was glad for the company at night.

Most of the time, Anna loved having her own little place, but tonight she felt a wave of loneliness as she turned on the lights. She’d cheered up the basement apartment as much as possible. The small living room was decorated with a bright red couch, colorful Kandinsky prints, and a row of bookshelves sagging under the weight of her books. All the furniture was IKEA; Anna was proud of the fact that she’d put the pieces together herself. A few plants struggled to live in the stingy sunlight of the high half windows. On one of the bookshelves, a framed photo showed Anna, her sister, Jody, and their mother smiling in front of the carousel at the Michigan State Fair. That day was one of Anna’s best
childhood memories. Anna was twelve in the photo; her sister was ten. Anna held an enormous stick of cotton candy, its pink puff bigger than her head. Jody was in profile—for a decade, she turned her face just enough to hide her scarred cheek.

Anna remembered the bloody crosshatch of scrapes on Laprea’s cheek where D’marco had mashed it into a brick wall. Would Laprea turn her face away the next time someone took a picture of her?

Anna looked at the clock, wondering if it was too late to call her sister: 9:55—just under the wire. She set the cat down, grabbed her cell phone, and padded to the galley kitchen at the back of the apartment. As the line rang, Anna rummaged through her pantry until she found a can of chicken noodle soup. She dumped it into a bowl and stuck it in the microwave.

“Hey, it’s my long-lost sister!” Jody greeted her. They hadn’t spoken all week.

“Sorry, I’ve been slammed at work. How are you?”

Jody told her Michigan had been hit with a snowstorm, but the GM plant stayed open so she’d made crazy overtime when others couldn’t make it in through the snow. While they spoke, Anna ate spoonfuls of soup. They lived such different lives. Jody had cheered Anna through college and law school, and encouraged her to take her dream job in D.C. But Jody seemed content to stay in Flint, working on the General Motors assembly line, like many of their friends. Jody had always been the stronger one. She had nothing to prove to anyone.

Anna knew that much of her own drive was fueled by a need to atone for the unforgivable thing she’d done sixteen years ago in the kitchen of their trailer home. Jody had never berated her for it—in fact, they never spoke about it. Anna suspected they both avoided the topic for the same reason: their friendship might not withstand close scrutiny of what happened. Their relationship felt like the nuclear reactor built on the San Andreas fault line: a good and positive source of energy, always at risk of blowing up if the ground shifted.

“How ’bout you?” Jody asked. “Are you running Washington yet?”

“Hardly.” Anna swallowed a mouthful of broth. “In fact, it’s a constant struggle just to keep my cases from falling apart.” Anna told her about Laprea and how D’marco was trying to win his way back into her heart.

“Sounds familiar,” Jody said somberly. “But is there anything you can do about it?”

“I’ll call her tomorrow and give her the ‘go team’ speech. There’s an advocate—she’s like a social worker, she helps the victims get resources and support—I’ll make sure she keeps in touch. And I’m getting the guy’s phone privileges suspended. This won’t be like the other times. He’ll be totally cut off from her.”

“Sounds like you’ve got it covered.” Jody’s voice held a smile. “Of course.”

As they said good-bye, Anna felt reassured she’d done everything she could. She changed into soft cotton shorts and a tank top, washed up, and climbed wearily into bed. But sleep eluded her. The case kept running through her mind. She knew that however hard she worked, D’marco Davis’s defense attorney was working equally hard on the other side.

•  •  •

The next Sunday, Laprea peered out the small window at the top of her front door and watched the MPD cruiser pull off. Rose had taken the children to Sunday school, so Laprea had a few hours to herself, the sort of alone time that was so unusual for a single mother like her. She brushed away a twinge of guilt and allowed a smile to creep onto her face as she replayed the afternoon she’d just spent.

Ten minutes later, as Laprea straightened up the kids’ play area, there was a knock at the door. She peered out the window and narrowed her eyes when she saw who was standing there: Nick Wagner.

Laprea no longer felt like yelling at the man who’d so often let D’marco crawl out from under his mistakes without a scratch. Her anger had faded, like her bruises, to a dim memory. And D’marco’s recent phone call had softened her. Curious to find out why he was there, she opened the door. The lawyer wore khakis and a light spring jacket instead of the usual suit and tie. He sure didn’t want this visit to seem official.

“Hello, Ms. Johnson,” Nick said pleasantly, cautiously. “How are you?”

“Okay.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry to bother you here in your home, but— Can I come in?”

“Mmm.” Laprea led him into the living room and offered him a seat on the couch. She sat down in the La-Z-Boy and waited to hear what he had to say.

“I really appreciate you letting me in, and I’ll try not to take up too much of your time. But I had to stop by because, well, D’marco misses you. And the kids. He’s upset that he can’t talk to you anymore.”

Laprea nodded and kept her mouth shut.

“D’marco really cares about you,” he continued. “And D’montrae and Dameka. You know I do, too. I’ve been involved with your family for a long time; I’ve seen you stand by D’marco through some pretty rough situations. But if he gets convicted of this assault, he’s going to serve all his backup time, all five years. Plus up to a year for the charges in this case.”

“So . . . D’montrae and Dameka would be, like, ten when he got out?”

“Right.” Nick nodded. “That’s a long time for your kids to go without a father in their lives.”

“Hm.” She hadn’t realized that.

“It may be hard to believe, but I really think he’s a changed man this time. He’s working very seriously at his anger management classes. If he had your support, I don’t believe he would do anything like this again. He loves you. He loves D’montrae and Dameka. He wants to be a good father to them. I think counseling, rather than jail, is the answer here.”

Laprea wondered if Nick Wagner really believed his words or if he was just trying to chalk up another
W
in his win/loss column. But D’marco had said similar things on the phone. She wanted to believe he’d been sincere, that she could still work things out with the father of her children. Nick’s words gave her hope that might happen. Against her better judgment, she let that hope creep into her heart, settle in, and start to grow.

Nick kept talking softly, telling her what made this time different, how their lives were going to be better if D’marco got out of jail this time. She was momentarily lulled by the words she wanted to hear. Then she shook herself out of the reverie.

“Ain’t my fault he’s in trouble.
He
hit
me.
”

“Of course,” Nick soothed. “But . . . you know that they can’t even
have
a trial if you don’t come to court.”

She noticed that he didn’t come right out and tell her not to show up for trial. Laprea had enough experience with the system to know lawyers could get in big trouble for doing that.

“Well, it ain’t up to me,” Laprea said flatly. “They sent a policeman
with papers saying I gotta show up.”

“A subpoena. So they may make you testify, whether you want to or not.”

Laprea expected him to ask her side of the story then—but he didn’t. Instead, he launched into the defense theory. “If it happened this way . . .” he started, and then he outlined different facts that would make a good defense for D’marco. None of them were true. She noted how deliberately the lawyer phrased things—never asking her to lie, but just telling her what might help D’marco, hypothetically, if that was what happened on the day of the assault. He was covering his own hide, she saw that—but she listened all the same.

Laprea wasn’t making any decisions now. She just listened carefully, storing it all away for consideration at a later time. There were still weeks left before the trial.