"Oh my God." Jess looked toward the door as though Renee might be standing behind it. "Oh my God, Nora. Why would she—"
"Because she knew," Nora said. "She's always known."
* * *
It had started, like most things in Nora's life, with a debate resolution.
Last October the national topic had been criminal justice reform, and her partner had wanted to run a case on mandatory minimums, and Nora, who did not like to argue anything she had not read the primary sources on, had spent three weekends in the Astoria library and on the Oregon Judicial Department website reading about Measure 11. Oregon voters had passed it in 1994: a list of violent crimes, each with a fixed sentence the judge could not reduce, no matter who you were or what you'd been through or how sorry you were. Assault in the second degree, seventy months. Robbery in the first degree, ninety months. No good time. No early release. She'd built a whole case around it. She'd had charts.
She had been looking for examples. That was the thing she kept coming back to afterward, how innocent it had been. She'd been looking for a real Oregon case to humanize the statistics, the way Coach Okafor always told them to: judges vote on numbers, but they remember people. And it had occurred to her, sitting in the library's back carrel with rain sheeting down the window, that she had never once in her life typed her mother's name into anything.
She had typed it into the state's case lookup at four-forty in the afternoon on October 19th. By five she had read everything there was.
State of Oregon v. Dana Marie Lindqvist. Clatsop County Circuit Court. Arrested November 21, 2015. Driving under the influence of intoxicants. Assault in the second degree. Plea entered. Sentenced to seventy months in the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections.
Seventy months. Nora had done the math on the back of her hand in ballpoint because she couldn't trust herself to do it in her head. Five years and ten months. From the winter she was seven to the fall she was thirteen.
Her mother had not left her.
Her mother had been sixty miles away in a concrete building in Wilsonville, Oregon, the entire time Nora was learning long division and losing her baby teeth and being told, at the kitchen table, by her father, with his big hands folded in front of him like a man saying grace, that Mom had made a choice.