Rosa was already in the holding cell, pacing back and forth across the cement floor. Esther sank onto the metal bench and let her face fall into her hands.
“I can’t believe this. What’s going to happen?”
“They’ll arraign us,” Rosa said. “Probably tomorrow morning, Allen thinks. Then we’ll post bail and go home.” Rosa sat down, tucked one foot under her bottom and swiveled to face Esther. She put her hands on Esther’s shoulders and looked into her face. “Don’t worry. We’ve got some good ideas about our defense.”
“Not that,” Esther said. “I mean what will happen to us? Will we go to prison? I have Molly, remember?”
“Lots of women with children go to prison.” Rosa waved her hand at the five other female prisoners, dressed in tight miniskirts and low-cut blouses. “I bet some of these women have kids.” She frowned. “I wonder why they segregated us from the other demonstrators.”
Esther didn’t care about the other demonstrators or the other women. She slipped her hand under her T-shirt and touched the tight ache in her right breast, hard with milk. “I feel so damned lopsided. If I try to stand up, I’ll tip over sideways.”
“What?”
“The cops only let Molly nurse on one side. They said she was taking too long.”
Rosa finger-combed the snarls in Esther’s hair. “Calm down. Our job now is to develop a strategy. To contrast this one injured cop with thousands of mangled and murdered Vietnamese people.”
“But what if Jake hadn’t been home? What if he was on call tonight? What would have happened to Molly?” Esther sniffed the stale urine scent and her eyes filled. The cell was no place for a baby.
Rosa drummed her fists against her thighs in a rapid beat. “I wish Allen would get here so we can start working. He promised to bring one of the senior attorneys in on this. Someone really political, I told him. And not a white male.”
“I talked to Pop.” Esther stroked Rosa’s arm, feeling the small bumps of gooseflesh. Rosa couldn’t be chilly in this steam bath, and how on earth could she be excited? But skin didn’t lie. Esther pulled back, rubbed her hand on her jeans. “Pop will find a lawyer, someone who can get us out quick.”
“Allen’s got this. You know his father was in prison for a few years when he was a kid and Allen survived, didn’t he? The important thing now is to bring the war home, make people pay attention.” Rosa pressed her lips into a determined line.
Whenever Rosa made that face, Esther and her parents would exchange looks, half-warning and half-amused. Esther had no patience now for Rosa’s disappearing lips. She crossed her arms over her chest, pushed against the sore breast. “You don’t understand. I have a baby.”
“Listen.” Rosa stroked Esther’s cheek. “I want to go home too. I feel like I’m going to barf any second. I promise you we’ll get out of here and you’ll get back to Molly and the four of us will work together, just like we always have.”
They had been a good team. Esther was the youngest, the last of the four to get to Ann Arbor, but she fit right into the daily routine of handing out flyers to students crossing the Diag between classes, of planning rallies and organizing teach-ins. She loved the intense atmosphere of the Fishbowl, the glassed-in lobby of the social sciences building where competing political factions set up literature tables and argued vigorously. Her art classes were fine, but the real education was the politics, learning to analyze what was happening in the world, talking to students about how to end the war and fight racism. It was Rosa and Esther, always together, and Jake and Allen, right there with them. It would be wonderful to feel that certain again, about how to make things right in the world.
The sisters dozed on and off all night in the cell, leaning against each other to minimize touching the slimy damp of the cement wall. Esther’s full breast alternately throbbed and dripped.
In the morning, two cops escorted Rosa and Esther to conference with their lawyers before their arraignment. Allen and Jake met them at the door, Molly in Jake’s arms.
A guard shook his head at Jake. “No kids.”
The other guard pursed his lips into a fish-face for Molly. “I’ve got a six-month-old at home,” he told Esther, then turned to his partner. “Ease up. It can’t hurt.”
“Tell that to Steele. I bet he knows about hurt.” But he turned away and didn’t stop Esther, Molly, and Jake from joining Rosa and Allen at the table with the two lawyers.
Esther winced at the initial sharp pain of Molly’s suck, followed by waves of relief as her milk let down. She nodded to Dwayne, the lawyer from Allen’s firm. Allen said Dwayne was smart, but he didn’t look impressive. Under his rumpled jacket, his white shirt was coming untucked. At least Joel, the downtown lawyer Pop hired, looked the part in his crisp three-piece suit. Joel was a distant relative, the son of Uncle Max’s cousin. When Esther moved back home to Detroit, Mama had tried to persuade her to take a typing job at his office instead of working at the cooperative bookstore. Mama said Joel was smart, but she trusted him because he was family. Esther hoped he knew more than business law and tax loopholes.
Esther twisted one of Molly’s wispy red curls around her index finger, while the unfamiliar legal phrases tumbled senselessly in the air. She concentrated on the pull of Molly’s mouth, rhythmic as tides, and on Jake’s hand on her back, his fingers circling the hard knob of each vertebra. Across the scarred wooden table, Rosa and Allen huddled with Dwayne and Joel, arguing about coercive charges. Whatever those were.
Finally Esther held up her hand. “Slow down, guys. I’m lost.” She turned to Joel. “What happens now?”
“You’ll hear the full indictments and enter a plea of not guilty. Later, Dwayne and I will meet with the prosecution team and work out a deal.”
“No deals,” Rosa said. “Allen, tell Esther about the necessity defense.”
Allen turned to Esther and Jake. “In certain circumstances the court will accept the argument that a person may violate the law in order to prevent injury. Rosa thinks that she can convince a jury that your action was justified by the necessity of drawing attention to the genocide of the Vietnamese people.”
Dwayne shook his head. “Won’t work. The only way to win with the necessity defense is to prove that your action prevented imminent harm. Not potential damage at some unspecified time to unnamed foreigners halfway across the world. I suppose you might be able to make a case that stopping the mounted police was necessary to prevent harm to the demonstrators. But not to the Vietnamese.”
“The harm is damn imminent for the Vietnamese,” Rosa said.
“That’s not what he means.” Allen rested his index finger gently across her lips and Rosa didn’t slap him away or yell at him. Amazing how her fiery sister would accept disagreement from Allen that no one else would dare offer.
Esther reached for Jake’s hand under the table. He hadn’t spoken a word during the meeting, but she could feel his anxiety. Jake’s younger brother died of leukemia when he was five and the family never recovered. Jake rarely talked about it, but sometimes his little boy fears seemed to take over. “The world can be a monstrous place,” he had told Esther once when she called him an old worrywart. Molly wasn’t the only one who needed her at home.
This situation would make anyone into a worrywart. When they were led into the courtroom, Esther ran the palm of her hand along the curved grain of the railing, imagining all the people who had sat on these benches. The dark oak was sticky and swollen in the humid August air.
Esther and Rosa stood facing the judge, Allen between them, and flanked by the other lawyers. Esther kept sneaking glances at Jake sitting two rows back, rocking Molly against his chest, back and forth on the wooden bench. The arraignment seemed perfunctory and pale compared to the moment she could hold her daughter again.
Then the clerk started reading the charges. “Assault, with an enhanced penalty for interfering with a police officer in the performance of his duty. Reckless endangerment in the first degree, creating a grave risk of death.”
Esther felt slapped. The other times they’d been busted, there had just been one or two charges, like trespassing or criminal mischief.
“They’re throwing the book at you,” Allen whispered. “It’s all about intimidation, so you’ll plead to lesser charges.”
It’s working, Esther thought.
When the charge of conspiracy was read, the lawyers exchanged glances. But Esther couldn’t ask what that meant, because then she heard the charge of attempted murder and she had to grip the railing. Attempted murder? They didn’t try to kill anyone. The courtroom air grew heavy. What could the penalties be for those charges? Reckless endangerment couldn’t be too bad, but conspiracy? Attempted murder? She shivered in the warm room, then leaned slightly forward to see her sister. Rosa stood stalwart facing the judge, dwarfed by the tall witness boxes. Allen’s hand was steady on the tender curve at the small of her back. Rosa’s face was pale under her red hair, her eyes closed, hand covering her mouth.
“Esther, he’s asking for your plea,” Joel whispered in her ear. “Say ‘not guilty.’ You can change it later, if you want to. After we hear what they offer.”
“I’m going to expedite this case,” the judge said. “Motions due in two weeks. Trial to start the third Monday in November.”