Page 72 of Justice

Fifteen years I’d bled for that place. I built my name in those halls. They walked me out past my own associates with a cardboard box and a security escort. Not one person I’d mentored said a word. A woman with a sex tape and a lost case is radioactive. Everybody knew better than to catch it.

I held my head up as I walked to the car. I didn’t cry until I hit a red light three blocks away. Then I cried so hard I missed the green light.

But losing that job was survivable. I could rebuild a career. I’d built one from nothing before, I could do it again. I almost had myself believing it.

Then I turned onto my street.

My babies were out front in the last of the daylight, my sister watching them from the porch steps. And my son was running with the neighborhood boys, and they were playing with guns. Those guns looked so real. They weren’t the plastic water pistols that I still cringed at him using.

Fingers out, thumbs cocked. Pow. Pow. Got you. You dead. Diving behind the recycling bins, popping up to fire. It should have been nothing. It was nothing, on every other street in America that evening.

But I stopped the car in the middle of the road and watched my boy, and everything in me went cold.

The other boys were sloppy with it, laughing, falling all over themselves. My son wasn’t laughing. He took his time. He aimed. He held that small hand up steady, one eye closed, like somebody had taught him how. He waited for the shot. And when he took it there was a stillness in his little face I had never put there, a focus that did not belong on a seven-year-old, and I knew exactly whose it was.

“Baby. Come here.”

He trotted over, sweaty and grinning, my heart in a pair of dirty sneakers.

“I don’t want you playing guns,” I said. “Not like that. Guns aren’t toys. You hear me?”

He looked at me, confused, a little down. And then my beautiful boy said the thing I have carried every single day since.

“But Daddy says shooting is what men do.”

I stopped breathing.

Because that wasn’t my son talking. That was something poured into him, slow and careful, by a man who’d been reaching into my child’s chest on the weekends and rearranging what he found there. Building him. Word by word. Turning my sweet boy into a loaded thing and calling it raising a man.

And I couldn’t stop it. That’s what took the air out of me right there on that sidewalk. I had a law degree, a sharp mouth, a career built on winning fights. None of it mattered. The court gave that man my son half the week, and there was no motion in the world I could file against a father teaching his boy to love a gun. I could say no on my days. He’d say yes on his. And a child believes the parent who lets him hold the dangerous thing.

I got down on my knees on that concrete and took his face in both my hands.

“Listen to me,” I said, and I made my voice as sure as his father’s must have been, because certainty was the only weapon I had that matched. “That is not what men do. A real man protects people. A real man would rather die than hurt somebody smaller than him. You hear me? That is what a man does.”

He nodded. Because he loved me. Because underneath everything being done to him, he was still a good boy.

But I saw it in his eyes. He believed his daddy more than he believed me. His daddy was big and certain and let him hold the dangerous thing. I was the tired mama who cried in the car and took the fun away. Even then, even that small, the scale had already tipped. I was already losing him. And years later I sat on the floor of a dark bedroom in Justice Banks’s house and had to press both hands over my mouth to keep the sound in.

Because I knew now exactly how far I’d lost him.

And I knew what it cost.

I opened my eyes in the dark of my room in Justice’s house. My face was wet and it was three in the morning.

Down the hall a house full of other people’s children slept behind their doors. One of them grieving her mother. One of them shut in a room at the end of the hall with something wrong in her I could see even when nobody else would name it.

And I lay there in the dark and thought about how you can love a child with everything you have and still watch the poison win. How I knew that better than anybody in this house full of people who thought Storie was just sad.

I knew exactly what a child looked like when something got its hooks in early.

I’d raised the beginning of one.

37

JUSTICE

The last time I was in cell I was about 21. I had gotten in a fight and had to spend a couple nights in county. No biggie. And this wouldn’t be either. I knew how to hold my own.