Judgment

20

Right after the afternoon session, Juliana left the courthouse, got her car from the garage across the street, and picked up Jake in front of his high school. He had to get to his SAT prep class in the farthest reaches of Newton. The sun was still out and bright; it hung in the air, burnt orange and enormous. Jake got into the car, shrugging off his backpack, looking sullen.

“How was school?”

He didn’t answer.

“That bad, eh?”

“Where’s Dad?”

“Faculty meeting. You’re stuck with me.” She pulled away from the curb. She glanced in her rearview.

Are you being followed? Hersh had asked.

“How was the history exam?”

“Fine.” His tone invited no follow-up.

“How do you like Mr. Bertone?”

No reply. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him shrug.

“He’s got to be better than Ms. Thomas.” Ms. Thomas was his seventh-grade history teacher with whom he had repeatedly clashed.

She signaled left and merged into heavy traffic on Route 9. From time to time she checked her rearview mirror. Jake was looking at his phone.

“Whoa,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re famous.”

“Me?”

“Well, not you, but the Wheelz case. Wow, there’s this whole subreddit about the trial.”

“A what?”

“It’s on Reddit — anyway, what’s her name, Rachel Meyers? Wheelz employees are really sliming her.”

“How so?”

He read from his phone. “‘That skanknasty bitch should be on her knees saying thank you to Devin for putting her in a big job she wasn’t ready for.’”

“Lovely.”

“‘Skeevy ho wants millions for every bj she gave.’”

“Jake.”

“Sorry. I didn’t write it.”

“It’s a swamp of trolls out there.”

“It says Wheelz offered her millions of dollars for a settlement and she turned it down. That she’s just some greedy pig, and it’s all ’cause Devin Allerdyce asked her out on a date.”

“It went a lot further than asking her out on a date, Jake. She was subjected to all kinds of abuse. Sexual harassment. So she reported it to the head of HR, who’s a woman. She figured, you know—”

“The sisterhood.”

“Instead, the head of HR turned right around and told the CEO. Who fired her on a totally bogus pretext. Performance issues. Bad advice. Like that.”

“You don’t sound very neutral.”

“In the courtroom I am. Totally. You know that. But I’m also a human being, and I have opinions. Can’t help it.”

In her rearview mirror she noticed a black Suburban with a tinted windshield, the same one that had been behind her since leaving the high school.

There was a long silence, and then she said, “Was Tyler back in school?” Tyler was one of his best friends and had been out sick for a while.

“Yeah.”

“I’m glad he’s better. His mom was worried. Speaking of which, you don’t still have a sore throat, do you?”

“That was one day, and it wasn’t even really sore.”

“You’d tell me if it was getting sore, wouldn’t you?”

“Jesus!” He hated questions about his health.

She knew she tended to be alarmist and think the worst, fear a return of the Hodgkin’s, but what could she do? When he went through that ordeal, she did too. She’d seen the fragility of life. She’d seen her son go partly bald during chemo; he had the rest of his hair shaved off. She remembered how skeletal he looked, his skin fish-pale. She’d seen her son hooked up to an IV for more than two months because his intestines had stopped working and he could no longer eat. No longer would a fever or a lump ever be routine.

Yet her overprotectiveness invariably incited his anger, as if she were pointing out some kind of weakness.

“All right, all right,” she said. She glanced in the rearview again and saw the same black Suburban, a couple of cars behind. Opaque windows, a Massachusetts plate.

She felt her insides twist. That had to be them, following her for some reason. Some reason she didn’t want to know.

“Why do I have to go to this stupid class anyway?”

“Because it’s important.” She could barely concentrate on the argument, she was so anxious.

“It’s pointless.”

“If you... If you do well on the SAT you won’t have to take it again, think of it that way.”

“Lots of colleges are SAT-optional now. It’s not like when you were in high school.”

“Okay,” she said. She didn’t want to argue. Her mind was stuck on that black Suburban a couple of cars back. What the hell was it doing, were they doing — just intimidating her? Reminding her that she couldn’t make a move unobserved?

“If I don’t get my homework done, you’re just gonna be pissed off.”

“If you...” She wanted to say, If you don’t waste your time on Instagram or whatever, but she caught herself in time. Don’t be Judge Judy. “You’ll get your homework done,” she said.

“It’s tedious.”

“What is?”

“This pointless SAT prep class. It’s a waste of my time.”

“And we know how valuable your time is,” she said. She changed lanes, and so did the black Suburban. Anxiety sent ants crawling up the back of her neck. What the hell? If they were trying to intimidate her, it was working.

“Dad says this whole ridiculous system is just designed to turn us all into sheep. Excellent sheep.”

She sighed. Duncan had a well-thumbed copy of a book called Excellent Sheep on his bedside table.

He went on, “Bionic hamsters. The whole thing is a factory that turns out conformists who get perfect grades and are good at taking tests. Dad says it’s all bullshit.”

She didn’t want to argue about this either. The grim fact was that Jake’s grades had been dropping, and he didn’t seem to care. His father’s attitude had infected him, she was fairly sure. She wasn’t a tiger mom, but she knew how the world worked, and she wanted Jake to have every opportunity.

“My brother, Calvin—”

“Not Calvin again!” Jake protested.

Her younger brother, Calvin, had been a loser whose life had been a series of failures, until the day he died in a collision with a tractor-trailer that probably wasn’t an accident. He was a Bukowski-reading romantic who prided himself on being edgy and interesting. He’d dropped out of college after his freshman year.

He smoked a lot of dope — another reason she wanted Jake to stop. The friends he made were the kind who encouraged him in the worst way, brought out the worst in him. One of them turned him onto something stronger. He started a garage band that wasn’t very good. Once she’d even helped him get a booking at a local club in Allston, and then his band showed up totally stoned and barely able to play.

Calvin’s life, and death, haunted her. Her parents never recovered. Calvin was like an object lesson to her: what could happen, how your life could be derailed, when you made reckless choices.

She hated using Calvin as a parable, a metaphor for bad judgment, but she did it anyway and always felt guilty when she did.

“You need to have a plan, that’s all. When people don’t plan, life makes plans for them.”

“Dad says, ‘Man plans, God laughs.’”

She smiled. “But you can’t just coast, honey. Look, I see the real world. I have people coming into my courtroom who come from good families and end up in trouble, make bad decisions. I see it all the time.”

“Oh, God.”

“You’re at a really crucial point in your life, Jake. It’s not the time to slack off.”

They had arrived at the modern red-brick office building where the prep course was held. She pulled up to the curb, and Jake opened the door and hopped out.

As he entered the building, she glanced in the rearview mirror and saw the black Suburban again, idling at the curb, and something in her finally snapped. She was more angry than scared. How dare they follow her. How dare they intrude on her family. She shut off the car and got out. She felt a tightening in her chest. They would never do anything to her here, not out in the open, not with people around.

She strode up to the Suburban, feeling hot, prickly with anticipation.

She rapped her knuckles on the tinted driver-side window, her heart pounding in her ears.

The window powered down, and an Asian woman in a business suit was looking at her, puzzlement in her eyes. “Juliana? Everything okay?”

The mother of Soo Jung Kim, a kid in Jake’s class.

“I’m sorry, Chae-won,” she said. “Wrong car.”