The ligaments in Larinda’s ballooning left wrist were a mess but she could still move it, so maybe it wasn’t broken.
“Stop here,” she told the cabbie. He pulled the cab to the curb. She handed him three twenties, told him to wait.
Inside the pharmacy she grabbed a cloth bandage, more gauze pads and some snacks. Back in the cab, she opened a Slim Jim and bit off a generous hunk. She slipped a package of beef jerky into the front seat through the hole in the partition, just to be nice to the swami.
He checked her out in the rearview, ignored the gift, shook his head. In disgust, disbelief, she didn’t know which, but it was not favorable.
Then she remembered. Beef was cow. Not a favorite Hindi foodstuff.
No matter. The cabbie needed to read the Bible, not the Bhagavad Gita.
She bandaged her crucified palm then wrapped the wrist and hand with the cloth bandage, which left her fingers free. The cab left the street, drove down a short, paved incline to the Key Bridge Boathouse dock shack.
“Leave me off there,” she said, pointing at the entrance to the shack. She’d rather he didn’t see her vehicle. Taking his generous tip, the cabbie hustled off. Around her, people waited for their rental kayaks and canoes. On the dock, and on a small stretch of sand next to it, returned boating equipment awaited check-in by the busy attendants.
The parking lot was where she crashed, more battered, more exhausted than she’d realized, on a patch of grass under an elm at the far end from the rental station, next to a park bench with worn, dark green enameled slats. With minimal effort she tuned out the tourists unloading and reloading themselves in the canoes and kayaks and paddleboats. A short rest here was what she needed, in the shade of a tree holding on to its leaves, the tree enjoying some Indian summer weather.
The questions rattled around inside Naomi’s head. When had they planned on exploiting this scholarship sham? Why go to all this trouble? Why her?
At her office window, she parted the sheers for an unobstructed view of an autumn afternoon in this corner of D.C. An unusually warm day for the season. Small whirlwinds churned up stray brown and green leaves around hedges needing a late summer trim, blowing them past smooth stone benches on the tree-lined plaza outlined by marble columns. From her window there was a partial view of the Capitol, which further grounded her in the seriousness of these surroundings, and yet, emotionally, she was a million miles away, this view lost in the gravity of what she’d just learned. Her shoes were off, her stockinged toes free to find comfort in the thick oriental carpets.
The pinnacle of her legal career. She’d either soar to the heights expected of this appointment, or she’d crash and burn before she rendered her first decision as a sitting associate justice. She would address this landmine when the people who had unearthed it arrived.
She removed a framed wall hanging, admired at arm’s length the off-white parchment under glass while she carried it back to her desk. A letter opener helped her remove the frame’s thin, pressed wood backing. She liberated the document, pondered it a moment more, then tucked it into a desk drawer. Her toes located her high heels inside the desk kneehole; she slipped them back on.
A knock on her chambers door. Naomi expected two separate sets of visitors, in no particular order, and she was quite sure she wouldn’t be happy seeing either set.
“Come in.”
Senator Folsom barged past her administrative clerk and the court cop. She marched up to Naomi’s desk, irate. What Naomi had expected.
“Why are you canceling on my Saturday breakfast meeting?” the senator bellowed.
“Senator. So glad you could fit this visit in with me today. Have a seat.” Trailing the senator but entering on a more reserved note was evangelist Higby Hunt.
More senatorial bluster. “I have the District’s National Museum of the American Indian booked for the entire morning on Saturday! A number of constituents and their families will be there to hear you speak. Your story is inspiring, Your Honor. You committed to this!”
“Senator, have you ever heard of a Chester Plunkett?”
“Who?”
“Chester ‘Fights Like A Badger’ Plunkett. Full-blooded Cherokee. Law professor emeritus, University of Oklahoma Law School. A close friend of mine. The Oklahoma Law School and Indian community lost him today. He was eighty years old.”
“Yes,” Reverend Hunt interjected. “I know of him. I’m sorry for your loss, Your Honor.”
“Yes, you do know him, Reverend. You and the senator both.” Naomi produced a copy of the document she’d received today from the Badger, may he rest in peace. She slid it across her desk, under Senator Folsom’s nose.
“Chester Plunkett discovered this by way of the Texas Public Information Act. It was there for the asking, except no one, least of all me or my family, would have ever thought there’d be a need to ask. One open-ended, phantom scholarship, set up for one person only, worth in excess of two hundred thousand publicly funded dollars. Some people might even view this as money laundering, Senator. It seems,” Naomi’s jaw muscles tightened, “that in one underhanded, shameless, politically-influenced maneuver expected to yield some preferred treatment to be named later. I already know of one situation where it might come in handy, you, Senator, are now in a position to tarnish my credentials and limit whatever effectiveness I might have hoped to achieve on the Supreme Court. You can have that copy. Oh, you can have this, too.”
Naomi opened her desk drawer and removed what she’d taken down from her wall. The grandiose document commemorated the occasion of her college scholarship award, done up splendidly with calligraphic letters, gold seals and a few Native American markings, and signed by the senator, a retired Texas governor, and other Texas dignitaries.
“My academic scholarship was a pretense. For what, I don’t know. You are going to tell me the significance of this sham. Now.”
Unflinching stares on both their parts, until another knock on the door broke the tension. Her admin clerk leaned in. “Your next appointment is here, Madam Justice.”
“Make them comfortable, please,” she told him. “We’re not through in here.”
Naomi sat up straighter at her desk, folded her hands in front of her. “I need information from you on this, Senator.”
Reverend Hunt shifted in his seat, but it was clear he was waiting for the senator to respond. Naomi remained patient, didn’t flinch. Senator Folsom was in full assessment mode, evaluating what she’d heard. She tilted her silver-white head, produced an intense, furrowed-brow stare at her accuser. She leaned in.
“Perhaps the state budget wouldn’t allow for funding after that first scholarship, Your Honor. Law school is expensive, remember? Don’t forget, if it weren’t for that scholarship, you might still be paying it off.”
A test salvo. A miss. “I would have been like every other law student with loans. But regardless, the state had a budget surplus for more than a decade. The money was there to keep that scholarship going. Don’t impugn my intelligence, Senator. This is influence peddling. How you intended to use it, considering at that point I was simply a mouthy student feminist, is what I want to know.”
“The committee could not have known, Your Honor,” Senator Folsom said.
“What does that mean? Could not have known what?”
“We wanted to make sure you were equipped to do well. To excel. We never dreamed…”
“Look, Senator, stop speaking in generalities. Who is this ‘we’? And why me?”
“I’ll speak however I want to, damn it. There was no intention of using this ‘phantom scholarship’ against you, Madam Justice. None. The ‘we’ was, and is, a small group of conservative Christian faithful who set about to prove a point. That an unborn baby’s life matters.”
“You’re not making any sense, Senator! You funneled money to some random Native American kid…me…to validate that Christians are pro-life?”
“Listen carefully, Naomi Coolsummer. There was nothing random about it.” The gravel in her voice intensified. “In nineteen eighty-five, when you were in high school…”
“Mildred, is this the time and the place for this?” Reverend Hunt said. “I thought Saturday…”
“Shut up, Higby. You heard her. There is no Saturday. It has to be now.”
She was referring to Naomi at age fifteen. A normally awkward high school experience for her until then, raised by a middle-income, two wage-earner family. But from sixteen forward, a world of difference for her. People suddenly knew who she was, paid more attention to her upbringing, her family.
Naomi’s interest piqued ten-fold. “Go on.”
“When you were a teenager we learned something about you. Something your adoptive parents never knew. How we learned it, you needn’t worry about, but it was information obtained with the best of intentions. For the greater good.”
“I’ll cut to the chase. Certain closed adoption records were made available to us. We learned who your birth mother is.”
The senator was keen to Naomi’s facial expression, waiting for feedback. Naomi was angrier about the senator’s arrogance than shocked at the revelation itself.
“You pompous, self-righteous windbag. I’m supposed to be thankful you ferretted out this information on me? You had no right to it, and having learned it, no right to withhold it. How dare you!”
“Naomi…”
“Madam Justice to you. You need to leave, Senator.”
“Do not mistake my civility with you,” the senator’s eyes narrowed, “or my willingness to accept your misguided derision, Madam Justice, as a sign of weakness. Few adoptees from back then can say they know the names of their birth mothers. Even I can’t say that about myself. This information, once it was in our hands, turned a life that was already special, because all life is, into a life that over time became much more significant. Yours.”
Naomi’s face tightened. “Again with the generalities. A group of people not including my adoptive parents knows who my birth mother is. Thirty years you’ve kept this information to yourself. And you rigged public scholarship money for me because of it? I’m supposed to be happy learning this now? This is sick, Senator. What’s more, it’s probably criminal. Get out.”
The reverend stood, ready to leave. The senator didn’t budge. Naomi punched a button on her chambers phone. “Send in Deputy Marshal Trenton please,” she said into the phone’s speaker, “there’s a situation in here.”
Senator Folsom tented her fingers, leaned farther back in the chair.
“I’m having you forcibly removed, Senator.”
The senator drilled a challenging, unblinking stare into Naomi’s enraged eyes.
“I’ll get to the point. Jane. Roe. Your mother is Norma McCorvey. Jane. Fucking. Roe.” She shrugged her shoulders, feigning apology. “It seemed like you weren’t going to ask.”
The heavy wooden door to her office burst open, Edward shouldering his way into the chambers. His gun drawn, he strode quickly in front of Naomi’s desk, inserting himself between her and her guests. In his wake was a court policeman.
“What’s the problem, Your Honor?” Edward faced down the reverend, seemed less interested in the elderly senator, who remained seated. In the hallway, heads poked into view through the open door, all three of them, Naomi was sure, intrigued by the excitement.
The pendulum, Naomi now realized, had swung in a different direction, and it could well decapitate her.
“You have proof of this, Senator?”
“Of course. Birth certificate, hospital, month, day, year. Parents’ names and ethnicities. I will gather it up.”
“Edward, thank you, but I’ve changed my mind. Leave us alone please.”