Judgment

11

When she arrived home that evening, thumbing her temples, trying to massage away the headache, Duncan was in the kitchen, making a spaghetti sauce, which was bubbling away in a big pot. The house smelled great: sautéed onion and garlic and olive oil and tomato. He was washing a frying pan.

“Hey, hon,” he called. “I’m making Mom’s Bolognese.”

“Smells great,” she managed. Actually, it did smell wonderful.

“I’ll do that,” she said, reaching for the skillet. “You cooked.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve got it. So how was your day?”

Juliana looked away, pretended she hadn’t heard the question. She could hardly level with him, couldn’t exactly tell him about the meeting with Sam Giannopoulos, the threatening phone call she’d gotten on her cell. “Where’s Jakie?” she asked.

“Where else?” He shrugged. “His room. You okay? You look — I don’t know, tired.”

“Just a headache.”

“Take any Advil or something?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t have any.”

He put the pan in the drying rack, then opened a cabinet and pulled out a little bottle of pain pills. He opened it and handed it to her.

She took it gratefully, smiled thanks.

See it through.

She could see Sam Giannopoulos’s chalk-white face, tight with fear. I think it would be better if you made no changes to your schedule. Then that unsettling call from Matías. Your life as you know it will be over.

“Are you okay enough to talk to him tonight, or do you want to put it off till tomorrow?”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath. “No, let’s do it tonight.” She wanted to take control of something in her life, at least. But she was finding it hard to concentrate, to think about anything other than the video and its awful consequences. She felt it like a physical weight, like she was wearing a backpack full of bricks. It slowed her down and hollowed her out.

In a strange way, she was actually looking forward to talking with Jake, even about something as thorny as this. This was her family life, her home life. It was real life. Not that nightmarish other life.

“So shall we go up?”

“Sure. But — wait, though. First let’s make sure we’re on the same page, okay?” she said.

He crossed his arms. “Honey, I’m not sure we are.”

“Let’s set aside the law for a moment. Illegal or not, if smoking pot is causing him problems, I think we both agree we have to intervene.”

“Sure. But he said it’s not. He does it to calm himself down. Takes the edge off.”

She groaned.

“Careful about the Judge Judy thing,” he said.

“I know.” She laughed hollowly. It was an old gibe, sort of an inside joke between them, which normally she didn’t really mind. When she got too judgy, when she became like the famous TV judge who could be so outrageous and provocative and comically stern — all he had to do was say Judge Judy. Right away she’d get it, she’d back off some, modulate her tone.

The truth was, Judge Judy was annoying and completely unrealistic. She hated that schtick, all those courtroom zingers, the way she abused witnesses. “You’re an idiot!” Though occasionally Juliana wished she could mouth off that way.

She took his hand. “I promise I’ll do my best.”

“All I ask.”

They trudged up the stairs, side by side, and stood outside Jake’s bedroom. All the way out here she could hear the percussive notes from his headphones. Duncan thudded his fist on the door. No answer. He thumped again, yelled, “Jake?” and then opened the door.

Jacob whirled around in his chair, took off his bulky headphones. He looked at his father and then his mother. A wary look appeared in his eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“We need to talk about the vaping,” Juliana said as they both entered.

“You told her,” Jake said angrily. “Thanks a lot, Dad.”

“I told you I would,” said Duncan.

“We’re concerned,” Juliana said. She sat on the edge of his bed, and then Duncan sat next to her. She crossed her legs. “Who are you getting high with?”

Jake looked around helplessly, glanced at his father, who nodded. Then he said: “Tyler and Ryan, mostly. Sometimes other guys.”

Duncan said, “Do you get high by yourself?”

Jake hesitated. He had his father’s dark Italian looks, the brown eyes and brown hair, but with a light sprinkling of acne across his nose and cheeks. His face began to redden. “Hardly ever. Why?”

“Hardly ever?” Juliana said.

“You did it once as an experiment, right?” said Duncan.

“Just that one time,” said Jake.

“Dunc, let Jake tell me. How do you get your hands on it?”

“I mean... There’s a kid at school. I think his parents buy it for him. It’s totally legal, by the way. This is so not a big deal, Mom. What’s with all the drama?”

She ignored his attempt to make this about her. “When did you first start using it?” she asked.

Jake sighed, turned away. “I don’t know, maybe a couple of months?”

“Why?”

“Wh... why did I start?”

She tilted her head to the side. “Why do you use it?”

“I don’t know.” Another sigh. “I like it, that’s all. It relaxes me. It takes the edge off.”

Takes the edge off. Duncan’s exact phrase.

Jake’s open laptop reminded her suddenly of Matías and the video. Her memory was flooded with images, like screenshots. Of Matías’s hand on the small of her back. Of him walking into her courtroom. Sam Giannopoulos’s pale, scared face. She tried to push it all away.

After a moment, she said, “Do you get why we’re concerned?”

“Sure I get it. You’re worried about your career, ’cause you’re a judge.”

“Come on, Jake,” Duncan said. “That’s totally not true.”

It was partially true, though. She wouldn’t deny it. But only partially.

“This is not a big deal,” Jake said. “Like, eighty percent of my friends get high. Some of them get high with their parents.”

Juliana’s eyes widened. “What?”

“You heard me. With their parents.”

“Look,” she said, “we don’t know if it’s even safe for you, given... your medical history.”

“I’m fine!” Jake said.

“Right, but...” She drifted off. He hated to talk about the Hodgkin’s. He resented the way she so often asked how he was feeling, how overly solicitous she was. He wanted to be treated like a normal kid.

“Here’s the thing, Jakie,” she said. “Marijuana is a colossal ambition-buster. I want you to do well in school, because you’re smart. You have a bright future if you keep your grades up.”

But Jake wasn’t hearing it. “Sometimes if I vape a couple of puffs it makes me feel smarter and more creative.” He laughed. “Last week I got an A on an English essay, and I was totally high when I wrote it.”

“Great,” she said sourly, not laughing.

“Jake, listen,” said Duncan. “We don’t want you getting high alone. That would worry us. If you’re going to use it, use it with your friends and don’t do anything stupid.”

“I don’t do stupid stuff,” Jake said. “Dad, you know that.”

“I saw a serious medical study, an Israeli study,” Juliana said. “Cannabis has been found to cause schizophrenia in teenagers, it said.”

“Oh, please,” Jake said.

Duncan had stopped nodding. He was watching. Not objecting, but not really joining the fight.

She felt a flash of annoyance. The old division of labor in the family: she played the heavy, while Dunc got to be Cool Dad.

Maybe she was just more worried about their son than Duncan was. She worried about how he’d fare in a world where a million kids his age in metropolises on the other side of the planet were being drilled to succeed as Western-style meritocrats. She didn’t care about four-point-ohs, he didn’t have to go to an Ivy League school; she just wanted him to have the best possible chance of making the life he wanted to make, whatever that was. Not to have to settle. She’d read a statistic she couldn’t shake: for the first time in American history, kids had just a fifty-fifty chance of doing better, financially, than their parents.

Whereas Duncan considered the world a giant trampoline. You’re falling? Well, you’ll bounce back, and it’ll make for a great story. When Juliana thought about trampolines, she thought about broken necks and traumatic brain injuries, because those things happen too. You can land on the hard metal frame or on the ground. And sometimes you don’t get up.

“Don’t worry about Jake,” Duncan said later, when they were in their room, preparing for bed. “He’ll be okay.”

“But he’s so apathetic,” she said. “He just doesn’t care about anything. And it’s got to be the weed.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Then what is it? He doesn’t like school; he never talks about soccer anymore. I mean, if only he had a passion for something. But from what I can tell, he’s interested in nothing.”

“Are you afraid Jake’s going to get into some kind of trouble that might spill over onto you?”

“That’s the last thing I worry about.” If you only knew...

“Sweetie, you’ve always been the good girl. The rules girl. You always keep your nose clean.”

The huge irony of that loomed before her like a shipwreck: Matías and that night in Chicago, the one time she had thrown away caution.

“Remember when Rosa got sick, and Keith and Judy offered us Sofia?”

Their nanny, Rosa, had once been briefly hospitalized with pneumonia, which caught them shorthanded. Juliana had court and couldn’t miss it, and Duncan had classes to teach and faculty meetings to attend. Their next-door neighbors had offered their wonderful Filipina housekeeper to babysit for them, and at first it looked like a lifesaver. Until Juliana had discovered that Sofia’s papers weren’t exactly in order. She was not going to hire an undocumented nanny, even for a couple of weeks. Nanny problems had kept two women from becoming Attorney General of the United States a few years back. It could keep you off the Supreme Court. Why borrow trouble?

“You know I couldn’t hire an undocumented worker.”

“And my home office deduction on our taxes? You said ixnay to that.”

“That’s just a red flag.”

“Sometimes I think you live your life like there’s a constant goddamned Senate confirmation hearing going on.”

She looked away. The truth was, there was a spotlight on her. And if she ever wanted to move up in the judicial world — even though she tried not to think too much about that stuff — she had to stay clean. That was just the reality of it. At confirmation hearings, they went after you with all kinds of ammo.

Meanwhile, Duncan was a tenured professor. He lived in the academic equivalent of a gated community: nothing could touch him. His rebellious streak didn’t cost him anything. But things might be different for Jake. Maybe his dad’s high-wire rhetoric about smashing the system just gave Jake a rationale for screwing up.

Duncan could coast, and Juliana was pretty sure he’d already begun coasting. Whereas she had further to go.

And more to lose.