Chapter Forty

All those boys. Each one of them looked like they would cut her given the chance, but when she spied them out of the corner of her eye, they seemed to settle. They sat with family, friends, lawyers at their designated round metal tables and their shoulders slumped with the weight of reality outside of their bunks. They were just kids.

And so was her grandson. He didn’t look deflated like the rest of them though. He looked good enough, a little skinnier, but there was a light yellowish bruise near one eye that he insisted was nothing. Marge didn’t believe him, but every time she started in about it, she felt Walt’s gentle but firm hand on her knee.

Leave it alone, Marge.

He said nobody bothered him (especially when they found out why he was there, which made Marge sadder than having to be pat down by that plain-faced woman a fraction her age in the lobby) and that his bunk mate wasn’t too awful. Marge’s eyes pleaded “why?” with him because time was short, and that lawyer woman would be there any second. It was a question that couldn’t be quickly answered, and even if it were, Marge wasn’t sure she wanted to hear it.

The lawyer woman did finally show up. She was a tired sort of pretty and made short excuses about the traffic and parking. She smelled lightly floral, assumingly trusting this scent to cover her overall sense of rawness.

It didn’t work.

“I’m honored to meet you all. I’m Denise McGovern. I used to go to school with your parents,” she told Travis who seemed a little blindsided by this information. Denise had trusted Travis’s grandmother to deliver the news, but getting up close and personal with the woman, Denise wasn’t sure trust was the way to go.

“What were they like?” Travis asked. Everyone stopped breathing except for Denise who slowly streamed her panic through her nostrils like Pastor Luke had taught her. She looked at their boy, at Whitney and Jamal’s. He was so much like her best friend, her former best friend, she reasoned in her head because Jamal wasn’t there to defend himself against her. But we loved each other once, she said to God in her head.

I know.

And I’m sorry, she thought.

I know that too.

“Your dad was a brilliant artist. He drew a lot, in school too. And your mom...was strong. Is strong.” Denise talked to Travis’s case file until his grandfather, Walt, softly cleared his throat.

“So, like I said over the phone to Marge—"

“Mrs. Brightman.” Marge said. Denise stared a little harder into the files until she felt her cheeks calm down.

“Yes, Mrs. Brightman.” Denise paused again, her sweat glands flaring. “As I was saying before to your grandmother, I work at Jennings and Jacobs, and I received your case from a colleague of mine, your current lawyer, who happens to be your mother’s lawyer too. He thought I would do a better job of representing you given my ties to the family.” Denise had practiced this part in the car against Journey’s softly piped vocals. It wasn’t the entire truth. The entire truth was that there was a vacant sadness in George Jennings that Denise found she wanted to wade in, becoming that ultimate cliché of the young protégé in love with her boss. And that maybe on some level, that edged out even her purer motives to help Jamal’s son. But Denise didn’t say any of this. She instead sat and suffered in the dampness beneath her blouse.

“I’d be lying if I didn’t say I was happy about a switch up. George tried his best for Whitney, but that wasn’t good enough, and I doubt he could do much for Travis either. But he’s Walt’s friend.” Denise caught Marge’s emphasis on the last word as well as the slightly pained look on Walt’s face. She couldn’t imagine what this soft-spoken man saw in a woman who made a freight train look tame.

“Well, I’ll certainly do my best. We don’t have much time today, so this is just a formal meeting, but I’ll need to meet with Travis one-on-one to further discuss his involvement in Mr. Garrity’s murder.

“He had no involvement,” Marge spat while air quoting. “He was framed!”

“Mrs. Brightman, I understand how something like this can stir up passion—”

“Passion? You haven’t begun to see passion. You’re telling me you want to spend alone time with my boy, to what? Confuse him? Make him think he had something to do with all this and take a plea bargain? I know how you people work.”

“I’m not confused.” Again, breath stopped, and all eyes were on Travis. He had been watching the adults make sense of his situation, which troubled him even more. The spectacle reminded him of Aunt Dolores’s telenovelas that she watched when she wasn’t watching TBN. Never mind that she didn’t know a lick of Spanish.

“I’m not confused,” Travis repeated. He didn’t see the old man’s face when he closed his eyes. He felt him, like he had never stopped sitting next to Travis. What everyone at the table didn’t even think to consider was how Travis felt knowing he would have to look this same man’s family in the eyes. “I was there. I was with Douglas. I didn’t kill the man, but I didn’t stop it either.”

Marge sounded like air quickly vacating a balloon. She looked at her grandson. “He’s just a boy,” she said, not to the table but to a cruel God who had taken Lenny, and let her be raped, and sent her daughter to prison and now her grandson. How could He do this? How?

“We have a good case,” Denise said. She knew she could make sure the jury saw Douglas as the culprit and that Travis was the innocent victim caught in the crosshairs of gang violence, male bravado. She could make the fact that Travis was just a boy work for him.

But Travis sat, knowing he was no victim.