Losing, that's what it felt like.
No, not losing. Armando knew losing. Mapuche-Araucanian, in a Buenos Aires slum, the way he'd grown up, he remembered losing. Losing was when you twisted your ankle trying to pass the ball to your friends, flattened dirt into your nostrils, and were expected to get back up and do it again, even if what you actually wanted to do was run crying home.
In the medical office, uncurling his sticky, stained hand for Latexed fingers to clean, he was impatient. And called back yet more to that disgraceful word. Because although it didn't describe—couldn't describe—not if it was written six hundred thousand times in a row—what had happened, it reminded him of something. Of the people Mia reminded him of; girls who were kicked off the streets just because boys wanted to play there.
They'd come, carrying their younger siblings, after they'd cleaned the house, or their parents wouldn't let them go. Armando, he never had to look after his younger siblings after school, never had to clean the house before he went to chase the black-pentagon-studded dusty football with all the other boys. He never spoke up to his friends about how they chased girls off and didn't let them play. Mapuche-Araucanian, in a Buenos Aires slum, Armando knew losing.
The doctor injected morphine and picked the shards of glass from Armando's hand. It was taking a long time, and then he sucked in a breath, spreading his face in a grimace. "Mia."
The doctor looked up.
"Mia," Armando said, and fished his phone out clumsily with his left hand. If he was in shock—then Mia—
She didn't pick up. Armando's right arm twitched, but his hand was numb. No, it was the sickening end of the trial that had just surfaced in his memory, fresh and sharp. Not even comparable to broken glass.
That witch, Armando thought , sucking in a breath and wishing for the first aid to be over with faster. He'd go find Mia as soon as he could. She killed him. She planned it all...no, I can't think of it…no…
The doctor finished, and smiled at Armando. "Be more careful in court, Diego." Armando flashed a 100-watt smile and thanked him for his care, then walked out, down a staircase, and over a threshold into the defendant lobby, the lights painfully bright.
"Have you seen Mia?"
A young legal aide, shiny ID plaque around his neck, blinked up at Armando. "Ah, no—no, sir. She—she may have left."
"Left?" the smile constricted.
"Y-yes. She was—"
Don't tell me what she was. I know what she was. I was there, right next to her. She was destroyed. And now—
"—she was kind of…upset, and since she didn't have another case…I think she went home."
-now on top of that, she's abandoned.
No, no. She wouldn't think that. Armando gritted his teeth. "Thank you. How long ago?"
"A short time, sir, while you were having your wound tended."
Mia wouldn't think that I abandoned her…she wouldn't….no, I'm being irrational…Mia's just taking some time to pull herself together…
Armando had another case or two to look into. Some visits to do, jailbirds to feed hope to. Some correspondence with that ignorant fat man, Grossberg. It wasn't—he felt that sickening lurch again, like he'd seen a snake—it wasn't an earth-shaking event for him, after all.
Disgusting.
"Sir, are you leaving?"
Armando lied with a pale smile, "Just stepping out."
Armando's red Chevy waited in its usual spot in the lot. He cracked the door and sat on the plush seat, one leg out the open door, to make another call.
After the fifth call, Mia picked up. "Mr. Armando…?"
Armando started to say something charming and pithy, and then went silent. He tried again. "Mia…"
"You don't need to…" She couldn't do it, either.
"Where are you?"
"I just…"
Armando looked outside and breathed in slowly. Which of them had felt abandoned? He was the one needing to reach out to Mia right now, unable to get back to the cases in his in tray.
"It's not over," he said. "That…that killer…"
"Stop," Mia said.
"Are you blaming yourself?" Armando growled, feeling faker even than he had before. But his fist was clenched, his fingernails digging into where the bandage was. "Because…it was just your first trial. You need to…"
"If it was my thirtieth," said a cold voice on the other end of the line.
Armando blinked. The fist momentarily relaxed. "What?"
"If it was my hundredth. If it was the last trial I did before retiring…Mr. Fawles would still be dead, Mr. Armando."
"It—it doesn't—it doesn't work like that!"
"Or are you saying that yes, I failed on my first trial? That someone else could have…that someone else could have changed it?"
"No!" Armando said. "You—you were the only one who took him on! The only one who WOULD take him on. If you—if you didn't—"
"Would he be alive now?"
"That doesn't matter, kitten!" Armando was rapidly losing his cool, despite the frigid actual temperature. "You tried—"
"Trying, Mr. Armando, just isn't good enough, is it?"
Armando snorted, but his ear filled with dial tone. "Oh no, don't hang up on me," he said softly, in a mock-sassy voice, looking at the pathetically short time record of their conversation on the phone. Mia—being with Mia, even over the telephone, was an anesthetic better than a drug.
Not that she needed to know that, not just yet. It wouldn't do to have such a new attorney get arrogant. This sort of thing didn't crush Mia. "I'll cheer you up later," he muttered, shutting his car door and returning to the courthouse. Returning to hell.
"I see," Marvin Grossberg said. He sagged in his leather armchair and broke into a sweat.
Armando, leaning forward on folded arms, raised an eyebrow, but didn't say anything. He was waiting for the tick, tick, tick of the clock to free him.
"Well, it's just an odd way to end a case…it makes me feel uncomfortable. I think my hemorro—"
"No," said Armando.
"Fine!" said Marvin. He patted at his forehead with a monogrammed handkerchief. Armando leaned back and rolled his eyes.
It was just minutes to go. Armando rubbed the bandage with his left hand. It had turned into a faint stinging now. If you listened, you could hear the whistling of winter anger outside.
He bid Marvin goodnight and the men both stalked into the pale blue night, looking for their cars beneath the streetlights. Armando opened the Chevy's door, and stood motionless on the snowless sidewalk for a moment. Then he climbed in and sat in the dark car for a moment. What had he been so anxious to leave for, if he was just going to waste time?
By the time Armando picked up Mia, "outside" was a howling mess of wind chill. It had been agreed on beforehand that they would go drinking to celebrate her first trial. That was a laughable idea now, but Mia did have two favorite bars to hit, and they were miraculously open.
Mia also had two favorite beers and a range of microbrews to introduce Armando to. It was almost certain to be a regretted experience, but it's not like the day could get any worse. And it made the music at the bars easier to take.
Mia had planned to stop at Waffle House or something at around four in the morning before going home, but the way things worked out…that did not exactly work out. No, even for someone who can hold up their liquor after their client committed suicide in court fourteen hours ago, there are levels of inebriation that make crawling into a diner in the wee hours not at all wise. First of all, one needs to cross the parking lot without getting into a fistfight with passersby, and then there is the matter of getting into the double glass doors during a period when one perceives them as the devil.
"Hold—still, Mia stop wriggling!" Armando was fumbling for the right key in the cramped corridor. Mia was making inhuman noises into his lapel. "Stop falling over! You're home now!"
Mia apparently didn't recognize her apartment. She did, however, collapse satisfactorily enough in the direction of the futon. Armando rolled her onto her side, eliciting more zombie noises, and went to pull a blanket over her, but couldn't find one. He searched the room for one, then gave up and covered her with two coats, one of which was his.
"This dump…I need coffee," he said, rubbing his eyes. He cracked open one eye, then peered at the kitchenette, horrified at the sudden thought that Mia's godforsaken pineapple-under-the-sea did not contain a Keurig.
"Amblllspss," said the rookie lawyer from the couch.
"How do I allow you to live in this crack den again?" Armando flipped open the cupboard, squinting one eye, wondering if a large plastic jar was full of Nescafe, or pepper. It was hard to tell in the wintry glare the streetlight forced past Mia's cheap blinds.
"Mbpleenot a crack den," Mia muttered.
"Oh?" Armando cracked the aging yellow fridge. Everything in it was either a limp wrist of celery, or beer.
"Fuck you," said the other lawyer.
"That's what I like to hear," Armando extracted, with archeological precision, a white box of Chinese takeout from behind the Stella Artois.
The sound of it rotating in the microwave seemed to bring Mia back to earth, and she pushed herself a few inches off of the futon, blinking around, as if to ascertain that yes, this is the place I paid a deposit for. This is where I do that thing called living. This is my futon, that's my shitty broken TV set I attained through dumpster diving, and those are all my law books. That's my asshat partner at Grossberg Law Firm binge-eating my possibly week-old takeout.
"This," Armando said, holding up a blue mug filled with Nescafe pebbles, "is a travesty. How can you not even have a drip coffeemaker?"
"Wouldn't…you like that," said a slurred voice from beneath the coats.
"As a matter of fact, I would," Armando paced over and gestured with the mug at the television set. "I fail to see how you murdered a drug dealer and stole his stash hiding place—" Mia cracked up under the pile of Merino wool "—but you couldn't even busy yourself to get a secondhand coffeemaker from Craigslist."
Mia was massaging her face. Armando wondered if she was getting an accelerated hangover. He was actually surprised and impressed, as he now felt the smaller amount of alcohol he'd imbibed slowly catching up with his cortex, the pain pressing between his eyes like tight eyeglasses.
The microwave pinged, and Armando went to rescue the steaming chicken and rice. If there was anything that was easy to find at Mia's, it was chopsticks. They stuck out of every container, sat in a pile on the table.
Mia sounded tired. "I…"
"Oh, no, you're not thinking, are you? Don't do that, kitten. It will just make it worse."
"I could have…"
Armando growled, "I said stop. Now."
He sat down and flicked on a green-shaded desk lamp, and pulled the mug near as he dug into the reanimated fossil of Szechuan cuisine. Food brought the killer instinct back. But it didn't do anything for the pain.
Mia blinked. She was focusing on the chopsticks.
"Your hand…didn't you injure it in cour—"
"Oh, no, this thing? It doesn't hurt anymore."
Mia said, "Please."
"Yes, I broke my mug in court…but it's not such a big deal. I'll just steal yours, kitten."
Mia was looking at him as skeptically as a drunken lawyer can, which is still pretty skeptical compared to normal people.
"It's not so bad…" Armando shook back his sleeve. He pressed his finger to a white scar on the underside of his elbow. "No, really. I bet you can't guess how this happened."
"Someone fought back after you called them 'kitten' one hundred thousand times."
"Ha, ha. I thought the alcohol would ease the sass out of you, not multiply it."
"Obviously you've never gotten smashed with me before."
Quite the milestone in any healthy relationship. Armando said, "It was home in Argentina. I was fifteen. We were with…there were some boys, we were out late. There was a rusty fence and we all climbed over it and it cut into me. I had to get a tetanus shot."
He unrolled his sleeve again, getting cold. He grasped the coffee cup and drank it as much as inhaling its steam.
Armando felt something through the back of the bandage. Mia was grasping his hand as he held the mug.
"Mia…that's just the way it is."
Mia pulled his hand away and held it in both of her own.
"Pain is just part of life… and it's part of being a lawyer. And it's harder for us because all of those scars we get in that hellish room punctuated by the judge's banhammer smashes, they're to remain invisible and we have to pretend—" Armando sipped some coffee, "—that we never received them. We have to lie, Kitten. That it doesn't hurt. We just get back up."
"I suppose that's what you want me to do tomorrow."
"That's not what I suppose. It's what is going to happen," Armando knitted his brows together, glaring at her over the coffee. "I really…hate you when you doubt yourself. It disgusts me."
"Doubting myself?!" Mia cried. "Ah—this is—Terry Fawles is dead—I failed him, Mr. Arma—"
"Mia," Armando said, and grasped her hands with his injured one. They were like warm birds. "It's not over."
Mia spat, "He's dead."
"We're lawyers. Or maybe you forgot that, kitten?" Armando raised his hand and played with Mia's shiny hair, tresses that were finally coming undone after a lousy tiring day. It was coffee-colored, the best color…he rubbed behind her ear and leaned close to the opposite ear, murmuring from the corner of his mouth. "Being defeated is just hello. Heartbreak is your morning coffee. And losing everything you hold dear is lunch. It's not over…the only time a lawyer can drop their act is when it's over, Mia."
Mia pulled his coat up to her neck and closed her eyes. Armando thought he heard a sigh. He sipped some more coffee.