Motion to Suppress (3 page)

His body so close to hers seemed larger, surrounding her with an aura of wild threat and protection she found herself unable to categorize or resist. Caught in the dangerous spell, she didn’t do the proper thing. She didn’t move away. "You have beautiful hair," he said, his hand reaching out to stroke it. "Brown like milk chocolate. Silky."

His hand slid under her head, lifting it, and then suddenly, he kissed her, wrapping his arms around her in a hug as warm as bear fur. His fingers touched her hair so softly, she felt soothed and thrilled at the same time. She found herself touching his earring with the tip of her finger, discarding the cool knowledge that she should not be doing this, tracing the curve of his ear instead. Somehow he had kicked off his shoes and he was on the couch with her, murmuring how nice she was, how beautiful, how smooth her skin felt. He moved around her with an easy familiarity, as though he had known her forever.

Dizzy with her own desire, she moved her hands down his back and heard him sigh. Then he stopped, moving only to turn his head to one side, then froze. Above the roaring in her blood she heard somebody saying, loudly, coldly, precisely, "So this is how it is. This is how it is." The boy jumped up and she tried to sit up, looking at her husband. For a long instant Jack stared at them with a look on his face she did not recognize. Then he turned away. The front door slammed.

"Sorry," the boy said. "This really sucks. Your old man?"

Nina had no reply.

He tied his high-tops and came over, rubbing her head lightly. "You going to be all right?"

"I’ll be all right."

"Your husband looked pretty pissed off. There’s no chance he’d ... hit you or something?"

"He’s a lawyer." Now, didn’t that say it all?

"Uh-oh. Worse." He started for the door and then turned back toward her, clearly reluctant, his face a question mark.

"Oh," said Nina. "I’ll leave the check under the mat, okay? You can pick it up later."

"Great," he said, ducking out of there. "And thank you for calling Jiffy Plumb."

Not funny. But she appreciated the gesture. She really did.

Ms. Cherry, a brisk-sounding woman who identified herself as Jack’s attorney, called her at home the next day.

"No, he’d prefer you don’t try to contact him at the hotel," she said.

"He has to talk to me sometime. He can’t just call it quits after five years without talking to me." Nina tried to sound businesslike and failed. "Jack loves to talk.... We can work this out, if he’ll just call me." She couldn’t believe she was pleading, groveling to this stranger. So that was how her divorce clients’ spouses felt when she called to notify them the locks were being changed and they’d be getting some papers.

"I’m afraid his decision is final," said Ms. Cherry, her tone neutral. "He has instructed me to file the petition for dissolution as soon as possible. I will be sending you a marital settlement agreement for your review. We’ll need to sell the condo."

The words impaled her. Just like that, she was going to lose her husband and her home. Correction. Not just her. Bobby. "I understand that Mr. McIntyre is not the boy’s biological father, and never formally adopted your son," the lawyer went on, reading her mind. "He wishes to maintain contact with him, and we would like to work out informal visitation."

"Well, you tell Mr. McIntyre that he can kiss my ass," Nina said.

"I’m sorry you feel that way," Ms. Cherry said. Nina used that line, too, when people had tantrums over the phone at work.

"He has to talk to me," Nina said. She hung up the phone and stood for a long time, her hand on it as though to pick it up again. She couldn’t think of anyone to call except Jack. Since she couldn’t do that, she wanted to run away to work, using it like exercise to relax her, but that option no longer existed. She walked out on the balcony. Pine needles from a tall tree on the hill behind their house twisted through the mist to speckle Jack’s blue canvas chair. An ambulance led by two police cars screamed along the street, bearing its unfortunate cargo to the hospital up the hill.

The week before, she had been a married, respectable San Francisco attorney with a well-settled future. Now all she had was Bobby and her law degree.

If only she had agreed to work with Ralph Teeter. If only Jack hadn’t come home early.

If only she had done the grocery shopping instead of the laundry.

Strange days, indeed.

2

WHEN BAD THINGS happen, people often leave town. Also, they turn to their families. Nina’s brother, Matt, lived at Lake Tahoe, and he had a spare room. They drove there the next day.

She was pretending, for Bobby’s sake, that she was her usual self.

They ate lunch just north of Sacramento, at a big barn called Schulz’s, one of those self-consciously old-fashioned stores where you could buy candy straight from bins filled with licorice, saltwater taffy, and caramel corn. They ordered huge hamburgers. Bobby left most of his, cadged a pocketful of change, and dove into the noisy adjacent room with its kiddie rides and video games.

Nina sat at a nearby table, reading the news while she ate french fries. The governor wanted to cut welfare again and siphon off still more money earmarked for public schools— not bad enough for California to be next to last in spending on schools out of the fifty states. The deficit was worse than the legislative analysts had ever dreamed, at least before the election. Car-jackings were up; Apple Computer stock was way down. Still reeling from a series of earthquakes, fires, and coastal mudslides, California wasn’t recovering from the recession.

The second section told the horror stories, the ones about stalkers and molesters and new carcinogens found in the diet. Money and the environment and the pervasive aura of violence. Same old shit, Jack would say. You couldn’t take these things personally; they occurred on too vast a scale. Was the Golden State named for the Gold Rush or its dry, golden hillsides, she thought, zipping to the comic section, purposely redirecting her thoughts.

Her eyes fell upon Madame Zelda with her crystal ball, sitting in a dusty trance in her glass cabinet a few feet away. She got up and dropped in a quarter. Zelda’s face lit up under the ragged scarf. The machine hiccuped and a yellowed card dropped into the slot.

Love’s little dove has flown away, leaving you filled with
sad dismay.
Fear not! Great happiness lies ahead.
You have a tendency to be obstinate.

Obstinate: grim, logical, and conscientious. The brain of a cyborg, the heart of the Grinch. In short, a standard member of the legal profession. She thought again of the alacrity with which she had succumbed to her friendly plumber. Obviously, something else was inside her, too, something suppressed and raring to receive some attention.

By three o’clock they had driven another seventy miles and seven thousand feet up to Echo Summit. This high up it was still winter, and the road wound between dirty walls of snow. Just past the ski lifts at the top they followed the last sharp curve into the immense Tahoe basin.

From their vantage a thousand feet above the Tahoe valley, the whole oval of the lake, seventy-two miles around, twenty-six miles across, more than sixteen hundred feet deep, radiated intense turquoise into a baby-blue sky. The lake was already more than a mile high, but the snowy mountains that ringed it passed the two-mile mark. Between the mountains and the lake, the landmarks were close enough or tall enough to materialize like mirages above the dense forests: on the south shore, the tiny town of Meyers and nearby the landing strips of the Tahoe airport, then the high-rise casinos glamorizing the lakeside town of South Lake Tahoe. On the north shore the small towns of Incline and King’s Beach disappeared in the distance; but Tahoe’s highest mountain, Mount Rose, pointed the way to Reno.

The Bronco wound down from the granite summit into the town. The temperature had dropped thirty degrees from Sacramento, but Matt Reilly, Nina’s younger brother, was chopping wood in the front yard in his Giants baseball cap and an old T-shirt. He gave Bobby a hug and said, "Troy and Brianna are out back," then put an arm around Nina. "I thought you’d be all bandaged up, on crutches maybe, like a Crusader fresh from the wars," he said.

Matt had moved to Tahoe five years before, when their mother died, and married Andrea later the same year. They had two children, Troy, Andrea’s eight-year-old son from a previous marriage, and Brianna, who was four. In winter Matt drove a tow truck and in summer he ran a parasailing business at the foot of Ski Run Boulevard. He looked slim and sunburned. Nina had always tried to protect him when they were children. This time she needed his support. "I hope you’ll stick around," he said. He helped her unload her suitcases to the spare bedroom, and let her try her hand splitting kindling when she asked for something to do.

Andrea came home from her Sunday shift at the Women’s Shelter at five, a tart redhead with the fast moves of a working mother, handed Nina a bag of groceries, and took charge of the household. She looked pleased to see her sister-in-law; her work in the field of domestic violence had involved her in several legal hassles, and she would now have her own in-house counsel for a while.

By nine the three kids were asleep and Matt had washed the dishes. The adults collapsed by the fire, talking about the day, the chores, the fresh prespring air. Nina told them her story, giving them credit for not laughing when she came to the part about the plumber. Especially Matt.

"Do you want to keep trying with Jack?" Andrea said. She lay entwined with Matt on the couch, while Nina adjusted herself on the floor by the fire, settling for an oversize pillow.

"When we got married, he still loved someone else," Nina said. "I needed him so much then, I shotgunned him to the preacher. All he wanted then was to handle a few cases and the rest of the time lay low in his cabin at Big Sur and listen to music and read poetry out loud. So naturally I got my first big job in the brightest lights I could find and moved us out of Carmel to San Francisco. Bobby went to day care and our home life consisted of hi’s and good-bye’s and Sunday afternoons. Now Jack’s caught me squeezing another man’s butt. So mortifying. So banal. I wouldn’t want me back."

"Well, screw him then," Matt said. "He cheats at Monopoly, anyway. "

"Oh, yeah, I want to get hostile and trash him, Matt. That’s how my divorce clients get through their first few months. The former love-of-her-life turns into a monster. But I can’t do that. I’m the one who turned into Mr. Hyde and precipitated this whole thing." Yes, that was it, a low and shambling fragment of id had been cavorting around in her mind, making trouble.

Andrea said, "Now you mention it, you could use a haircut and a shave." Nina threw Matt’s slipper at her. Andrea went on, "Can’t you always find another job in the City?"

A vision of Ms. Cherry’s life rose unbidden in Nina’s mind. She didn’t know Jack’s Ms. Cherry, but she knew the Ms. Cherrys of San Francisco: the empty home life; the long hours; the demanding partners; the continual rushing around; the relentless, grinding pressures of their caseloads. ... She ought to know. It was her own recent existence she was describing to herself. There had to be another way to practice law.

"I’d rather be staked to a sandhill and eaten by fire ants," she heard herself say. Matt and Andrea laughed. "But for Bobby’s sake, I better decide something soon. He’s going to miss Jack. Jack’s the only father he’s ever known. And the condo where he’s lived all this time ... it’ll be sold."

"Stay here and think things over as long as you want," Andrea said. "And try not to worry. Bobby’s adaptable. He’ll survive this."

"And Tahoe’s excellent in the spring. It’s fab and gear and all those other pimply hyperboles." Matt failed to hide a huge yawn. "Age is a terrible thing. As soon as I hit thirty I couldn’t stay up past eleven anymore."

Andrea got up too.

"Think I’ll stare into the fire for a few minutes," Nina said. She didn’t want to go to bed and sleep alone. She fell asleep there, woke up at two, found the fire down to embers, and finally climbed under the yellow covers. She dreamed she was back in high school, on the first day, and she’d forgotten her locker combination, and her books were in there. She was late. The bell was ringing. She had blown high school, and she couldn’t think of a thing she could do about it.

On Wednesday, while out shopping for chocolate Easter eggs, Nina passed a small office building. A cardboard FOR RENT sign on a post, dangling crookedly from one nail, caught her eye. The building fronted on Highway 50, the main drag in town. There was plenty of parking in back. She returned the same way, and this time she turned into the lot and entered through the double doors on the side. Inside, she walked along a carpeted hall with ten office suites, five on each side.

The property manager, evidently glad to see her, showed her a small corner suite with a reception area where a secretary and a couple of client chairs might fit. There were two inner doors, one of which led to a long room that would make a nice combined law library and conference room. A big closet with several electric sockets could stow a fax, copy machine, and supplies, even a small refrigerator.

When she raised the blinds on the side wall in the main office, she could hardly believe her eyes. Lake Tahoe, tufted with whitecaps in the wind, less than a mile away, dominated an unobstructed view of marsh and trees. Other than a dirt road, there was no evidence of human activity in that direction.

The manager followed her eyes. "Great view of Tallac," he said, pointing to a jagged peak across the southern portion of the lake. "I climbed it last summer. It’s a long day, but worth it." In his sixties, skinny in his beat-up jeans, he wore what Nina had already come to recognize as Tahoe’s trademark, a plaid wool shirt. He pulled the other set of blinds on the wall next to the highway to show the busy street, sidewalk, traffic lights, gas station on the corner across the street, and Mexican restaurant on the other side. "Parallel universes," he said. "You choose when you pull the blinds."

"How much?" she said.

"Seven-fifty a month."

Insanely cheap by City standards. She made an instant decision, took out her checkbook and wrote him a deposit. He told her he’d get a sign made. By the time the installer hung the sign three days later, she had bought two desks, a long table, lamps, office supplies, and several chairs at the local office supply store. They were delivered the same day, set on an old Oriental rug Andrea loaned her that she’d owned since college. She hung the two Ansel Adams prints she found in boxes of papers from her San Francisco office, and considered them with satisfaction, stark and elegant on her new reception area wall.

NINA F. REILLY, ATTORNEY-AT-LAW the sign on the building read in large, raised block letters. She called Andrea and Matt and they opened up a bottle of champagne while the man outside struggled to attach the sign to the stucco. Several of her new office neighbors came out, an elderly accountant named Frank and two ladies from the real estate brokerage at the other end of the hall, happy to break up the day and drink Korbel out of a paper cup.

On Sunday and Monday of the three-day Easter weekend, leaving Bobby and a huge Easter basket with Andrea, Nina drove hastily back to Bernal Heights and packed up the place. She also left recordings on the respective answering devices of Ms. Cherry, Bobby’s school, Francine Chu, and Mel Akers. By Monday at midnight she was back in Tahoe, dead beat, packing a lunch for Bobby. She would enroll him at the John Muir Elementary School, where Troy attended school and Brianna had preschool, the next day. On Tuesday afternoon Matt helped her unload the small trailer with its computer and printer and boxes of books and toys into the garage.

April sixteenth.

Fourteen days since she lost her job: ten days since Jiffy Plumb sent its representative over to wreak havoc.

"Historical change," she said to Matt as they puffed their way into the garage with her box of pots and pans.

"Historical? Or hysterical?" Matt said. "Really, you move ahead like a tidal wave over all obstacles. I’m in awe."

"It’s all very logical, everything I’m doing," Nina said.

"Sure, Nina! Like moving to Tahoe. Very logical!"

"What do you mean by that? Here, set it on top of the TV."

They set the box down and straightened up. "In case you haven’t noticed," Matt said, taking off his cap and wiping his brow and exhibiting a prime case of hat hair in the process, "there are ways besides using logic to make decisions."

"Like what?"

"Like using experience and intuition."

"I guess. So what do you think, Matt? Is life a tragedy or a comedy?"

Matt placed his cap carefully on his head. "You’ve asked the right person that question. And my answer is, let’s go inside and put our feet up and have ourselves a beer."