Serenity
The final weeks of this pregnancy were kicking my ass.
I was starving around the clock, my ankles were swollen to the point where I couldn’t tell where my calf ended and my foot began, I was gassy enough to clear a room, and my skin had darkened by several shades.
I no longer recognized myself in the mirror.
How was it that I looked like a ghoul when every other pregnant woman I knew glowed like a goddess?
Zainab carried twins and looked ethereal the entire time.
The last time I saw Mehar, her skin was brighter and dewy, like pregnancy was a facial she was getting from the inside.
And here I was, giving ogre. Straight up Fiona.
My nose had stretched from cheek to cheek, forehead acne galore, and my neck no longer matched the complexion of my face.
I wanted to hide. Had I not been arrested, I would’ve been doing exactly that, chilling in Rita’s attic like the Hunchback of Notre Dame until I dropped this baby and returned to normal.
But instead I was stressed the fuck out and ugly, about to walk into a courtroom full of strangers and beg a judge to let me go home.
Xander had brought me a navy-blue dress and a pair of black ballet flats.
Bless this man. He also picked me up some Nars foundation, and since I had the good sense to ask for a few different shades, I was able to mix something close to my current color.
Not exact, but close enough that I didn’t look like I was wearing a mask.
I got dressed in the small room they gave me to change in and tried to make my face as presentable as possible.
Concealer on the forehead bumps. A little blush to warm up what the jail lighting had washed out.
My hair was braided back in two French braids that one of the women on my block had done for me yesterday in exchange for my commissary honey bun, and honestly it was the best trade I’d made since I got here.
I looked in the small metal mirror bolted to the wall and wanted to cry. I still looked tired and swollen and nothing like the version of myself I wanted the world to see. But this was what I had and the hearing wasn’t going to wait for me to feel pretty.
Xander met me in the attorney conference room before they walked us to the courtroom.
He was in a charcoal suit with a white shirt, no tie.
He looked like he’d slept eight hours and had a smoothie for breakfast and did a quick workout before showing up to save my life.
Meanwhile I was over here looking like I’d been sleeping on concrete for a week, which I had.
“You look beautiful,” he said, looking up from his legal pad. “We got a big day today. I’m gonna get you out of here.”
Beautiful. He was straight up lying to my face.
And see, right there was why I was nervous.
If this man could stand in front of me with a straight face and call this beautiful, what else was he willing to say with a straight face?
What if he got in front of that judge and said something equally delusional and it cost me my freedom?
I could feel my eyes watering up. I was going to have this baby in jail.
I was going to deliver on that two-inch mattress with a guard standing outside and a PB&J as my postpartum meal because my lawyer thought lying was a viable legal strategy.
“What’s wrong?” Xander asked, stepping closer. He extended his hand toward me and as he closed the distance, the scent of his cologne settled around me. Oud Satin Mood. The warmth of it loosened something in my chest that had been tight since the handcuffs clicked.
“Nothing,” I said, blinking the tears back.
I couldn’t admit that he’d triggered me with a compliment.
That was too embarrassing and too hormonal and too much to explain to a man who had never been eight months pregnant and ugly in a courtroom dress that was working overtime to contain a belly that had its own zip code.
But even through the mess of my emotions, I could feel it.
The pull toward him that had been there since I was nineteen and had never fully gone away, just gotten buried under Julian and drugs and Mega and all the other wreckage.
Xander was standing close enough for me to see the flecks of amber in his brown eyes and I needed him to step back before I did something stupid like lean into him and ruin both of our professional boundaries.
And what would he want with my ugly ass.
“I’m fine,” I said, straightening up. “Let’s go get me out of here.”
He studied me for a second, like he was deciding whether to believe me or push it.
He didn’t push. He nodded and picked up his briefcase and held the door open for me and we walked toward the courtroom side by side, my ballet flats silent on the floor, his dress shoes clicking with a confidence I was borrowing just by being next to him.
· · ·
The courtroom was smaller than I expected.
Cold, fluorescent, and sterile with wooden benches that reminded me of church pews if church was a place where people went to get judged by a stranger in a robe instead of by God.
There were maybe fifteen people in the gallery.
A few reporters with notebooks. A couple of court regulars who apparently just showed up to hearings for entertainment, which was a hobby I didn’t understand but couldn’t judge because I was the entertainment today.
And then I saw Rita sitting there patiently.
It settled my spirit to know that she was in my corner.
Rita didn’t have to be here for me. She didn’t even have to let me stay with her.
She wasn’t my biological grandmother after all.
Alex Banks was her son and he wasn’t my father.
But because of my brothers, she accepted me as her own.
In that regard, she was such an incredible woman. She was so family oriented, especially after family disowned her for something as stupid as marrying a dark-skinned man. Rita had stories for days. Secrets galore. She’d lived through some shit and a courtroom was the least of it.
She turned her head slightly in my direction when I walked in. She could make out the outline of my full shape. Her cataract procedure was supposed to be in a few weeks, but with this going on, she would probably postpone it.
She gave me one small nod that said I’m here, baby. I’m right here.
I sat down next to Xander at the defense table and folded my hands over my belly and focused on breathing because if I didn’t focus on something mechanical I was going to fall apart.
The judge entered. Honorable Patricia Nguyen. She was petite, in her mid-fifties, with reading glasses sitting on the nose of her expressionless face. She looked like the type who had heard every excuse known to man and wasn’t moved by any of them.
The prosecutor, Toby Gallagher, went first. He was a young white guy that was eager, trying to make a name for himself off a cold case involving a famous family.
He laid it out clean. Body found in the woods.
David Jamison, former teacher at Ashford Academy.
Text messages placing the defendant as the last known contact.
Anonymous tip alleging a biological child fathered by the victim.
Flight risk given the defendant’s financial resources and family connections.
He asked for remand or high bail with conditions.
Xander stood up and buttoned his jacket and I watched him transform from the man who just called me beautiful into someone else entirely. His voice dropped into a register that filled the courtroom without raising the volume. Controlled, precise, every word chosen for impact.
“Your Honor, my client is eight months pregnant. She has no prior criminal record, not so much as a parking ticket. She is a resident of Washington, D.C. where her entire family resides, including her elderly grandmother who is present in this courtroom today. She was cooperative during her arrest and has made no attempt to flee or obstruct. The prosecution’s case is built on text messages from a phone that’s been buried in the ground for over twelve years and an anonymous tip from an unreliable source.
There is no DNA evidence linking Ms. Banks to the burial site, no murder weapon, and no witnesses.
This is a circumstantial cold case being prosecuted on the thinnest of foundations and my client should not be forced to deliver her child in a detention facility while the state attempts to build a case it does not currently have. ”
He paused, just long enough for the judge to absorb it, then continued.
“We are requesting bail with standard conditions. Ms. Banks will surrender her passport, submit to electronic monitoring, and remain within the jurisdictions of Connecticut and the District of Columbia for the duration of the proceedings. She is not a flight risk. She is a pregnant woman who wants to go home to her family and have her baby in peace.”
The courtroom was quiet. The prosecutor looked like he wanted to object but couldn’t find anything to object to because Xander hadn’t said a single thing that wasn’t true.
Judge Nguyen looked at me over her reading glasses and I looked back at her and put my hand on my belly, not for sympathy but because the baby was kicking hard and I needed to feel her move to remind myself that there was a reason to keep it together.
Judge Nguyen took about thirty seconds that felt like thirty minutes. Then she spoke.
“Bail is set at five hundred thousand dollars. The defendant will be placed on house arrest with electronic monitoring and is restricted to the state of Connecticut until further order of this court. Passport surrender. Next court date will be set within ninety days.”
It sucked to have to stay in Connecticut.
My doula, Reverie, who was also my cousin, and midwife were both based in DC.
I could always ask them to stay with me the final week of my pregnancy and I could pay them for it.
That’s if my brothers would pay for it. I ain’t the most cash fluid at the moment.
The gavel banged and my stomach sank because freedom with conditions was still freedom but being stuck in a state six hours from my family while eight months pregnant wasn’t what I needed right now.
I needed Rita’s kitchen and my bed at her house and my brothers down the street.
Instead I was getting an ankle monitor and a zip code I didn’t choose.
Five hundred thousand dollars. For most people, that number would be a death sentence.
For a Banks, it was a phone call. I looked at Xander and he gave me a nod that wasn’t quite a smile but was close enough to tell me this was exactly what he expected.
He’d already prepared for this outcome and had Justice on standby to wire the money.
The man had dismantled the prosecution’s position in under three minutes and had the bail logistics handled before the judge finished talking.
I could’ve kissed him. I didn’t. But I could’ve.
The processing took hours because the justice system moves at the speed of people who don’t care about your schedule.
Paperwork, signatures, ankle monitor fitting, conditions review, more paperwork.
By the time I walked out of that building the sun was setting and the air hit my face and I stood on the steps of the Hartford courthouse and breathed real air for the first time in over a week and almost dropped to my knees from the relief of it.
Rita was waiting at the bottom of the steps, sitting in the backseat of a black car service with the door open and her hands already reaching out before I made it down the last step. She’d hired a driver to bring her up from D.C.
I walked down those steps as fast as my swollen ankles would carry me, climbed into the backseat. She pulled me into her arms without a word. Her hands found my face and moved across it slowly, reading me through touch and intuition and a love so fierce it didn’t need eyes.
“My baby,” she whispered. “My baby. You’re okay. You’re right here. Thank you, Lord. Thank you.”
I buried my face in her shoulder and cried. I had to beat this murder charge so that I could give this baby the best life ever.
Rita rode with me to the furnished apartment Xander had set up in downtown Hartford. It was clean, stocked with groceries, had a real bed with real pillows and a bathroom with actual water pressure. Compared to where I’d been sleeping, it was the Four Seasons.
It felt good to be out of that cell. “Will you stay with me?” I asked Rita.
“Of course.”
“We need to get my father up here.”
“Yes, the fuck we do,” she said sternly.
In that moment, she meant business because she knew he was the key to undoing this.