“That means mine could be, too, right?”
Mandy looked at her. “That means Willie Cork needs a win.”
Beth was scared and overwhelmed. She had a hundred questions, and the answer to all of them was probably something she didn’t want to hear. She felt tears climb the ladder of her throat, and she turned on her side, closing her eyes, hoping that Mandy wouldn’t notice.
She may have fallen asleep. When she heard Willie Cork’s voice, she thought at first she was having a nightmare. “What the hell are you doing out here?” he said, and Beth looked out from beneath her lashes to see that the door was open, and he was chewing out the cop who Mandy had convinced to stand outside, so that they could have privacy. “You left them in therealone? Get out. I’m having you reassigned,” the prosecutor swore, “and I’m waiting until your replacement gets here.”
She heard his voice in a one-sided phone conversation with, she guessed, someone at the police station. Mandy got up and stood in the open doorway, waiting for him to hang up. Was it weird that her public defender had sat there the whole time Beth was asleep? Had it been to avoid leaving Beth alone in a room with some male cop she didn’t know?
“What are you doing here?” Mandy hissed at Willie Cork.
“I could ask you the same, since I’m guessing that cop didn’t wander outside by himself.” He crossed past Beth’s bed and picked up a silver pen that was sitting on top of the radiator, something she hadn’t noticed. “To answer your question, I left this behind by accident.” He turned it over in his hand. “Montblanc. My daddy gave it to me when I graduated from law school.”
Mandy rolled her eyes. “Keep your voice down. She’s sleeping. And you left it behind byaccident? Come on. You planted that so you could come back and interrogate my client without her lawyer present.”
“Now, now, Mandy. You’re soundin’ like a conspiracy theorist.”
“Says the slick son-of-a-bitch who plans to climb to the district attorney’s office by trampling on a frightened, innocent girl.”
If Beth had had any thoughts of revealing she wasn’t sleeping, they vanished. She concentrated on making her breathing even, on not rattling the handcuff against the bed rail.
“Dismiss the charges,” Mandy said quietly. “I’m doing you a favor, Willie. Don’t ruin a girl’s life because you want to get ahead in yours. You’re only going to wind up embarrassed, like you did before.”
Rennie Gibbs,Beth thought.
“You’re trying to elevate the status of a fetus to personhood,” Mandy continued, “and we don’t have that law in Mississippi.”
“Yet,” the prosecutor answered.
Beth had been too nervous to really look at him during the arraignment, but now she did, peeking through the seams of her lids. Willie Cork wasn’t much older than her public defender, but he already had threads of silver at the temples of his black hair. He probably dyed them that way, just to look the part.
“Mississippi has a long history of violence against people who’ve been silenced,” he said.
Mandy laughed. “Willie, surely evenyouaren’t dumb enough to try to play the race card on a Black woman.”
“Unborn children are already part of the fabric of legal documents. Why, my granddaddy made sure I had a trust before I was even a glimmer in my daddy’s eye.”
“You know there’s a world of difference between the legal rights of an unborn child and the constitutional rights of a living human being,” Mandy whispered, heatedly. “The Constitution may protect liberty and privacy interests, but the Supreme Court has determined that those protections don’t take effect until birth,andthat prior to birth, a fetus is not a person. States may give a fetus legal rights, but that doesn’t make it a person.”
Beth’s head was spinning. These were a lot of words, and most of them she didn’t really understand. What she didn’t get was why, if this was all about a fetus,shewas the one who was handcuffed. She stifled the hysterical laugh bubbling: after all she had gone through to not be responsible for a baby, it turned out she stillwas.
“I’m merely elaborating on a time-honored legal tradition of allowing those who don’t have a voice to have one in court. You see it every day, when a guardian ad litem is appointed to speak for children, or people with disabilities. We have laws to protect the vulnerable in this country who can’t protect themselves. Like, for example, your client’s baby.”
“My client’sfetus,” Mandy clarified, “which relied on its host to survive.”
“And if that host does something to cause harm, there should be consequences. If she had been attacked by someone when she was pregnant and lost the baby, wouldn’t you want her attacker pursued? You know if that was the case, you’d be fighting as hard as I am for justice. We’re not going to exclude the perpetrator just because her womb happens to house the child.”
“What about the mother’s rights?” asked Mandy.
“Can’t have it both ways, darlin’,” Willie Cork said. “You don’t get to call her a mother if you aren’t willing to call what’s inside her a baby.”
They were not even whispering anymore, and both lawyers had their backs turned toward Beth. It was as if they had forgotten she was the root of this argument.
It wouldn’t have been the first time.
The reason she was here, now, was that everyone else seemed to have the right to make decisions about her—except Beth herself. She was so damn tired of being a bystander in her own life.
“You don’t have a case,” Mandy challenged.
