Judgment

3

One of the things Juliana liked most about being a judge was the routine, the predictability. Everything happened on schedule. She had something like 250 pending cases on her docket, but only one trial at a time. Every morning she arrived at her office before eight thirty, went through whatever writing she had to do — discovery disputes, motions, jury instructions — and then began presiding over a trial at 9:00 A.M. sharp. (These days she had a med-mal case — medical malpractice, a wrongful death.) The trial ended at 1:00 P.M. Then came lunch from 1:00 P.M. to 2:00 P.M., usually spent at her computer catching up on paperwork. In the afternoon, from 2:00 P.M. to 4:00 P.M., were often motion sessions. Which basically meant a bunch of arguments, made orally and on paper, on which she had to make decisions. These were cases that might go to trial but usually didn’t. For the last few months she’d been dealing with Rachel Meyers v. Wheelz, a sex-discrimination case that seemed as though it would never end.

True, there were little things that popped up fairly often. People walked in with requests for ex parte relief, motions to attach property, and so on. Appeals from sex offenders. Condo disputes. A motion ordering a hospital to release a guy’s medical records. Loads of paperwork. The Superior Court didn’t yet do electronic filing, so her office was heaped with piles of paper, with more coming in every day. The workload could be punishing. It was unyielding, an unending cascade. There was always a load of homework. Reading and writing. It was like being back in school. It truly never stopped. And — in fact — she loved it.

No one said judging was easy. You had to be really committed to it. You didn’t do it for the money. You didn’t make any friends in this job. In a courtroom, Juliana once realized, half the room thinks you’re just barely smart enough to get it. The other half just thinks you’re stupid. Lawyers liked to tell a joke: What do you call a lawyer with an IQ of eighty? “Your Honor.”

But the psychic income was high. You were making a difference in people’s lives. That was worth something. Unfortunately, judges were also susceptible to the dreaded Black Robe disease, in which they come to believe the black robe lets them walk on water and that all their jokes are funny.

For almost a week after Chicago, she’d been able to lose herself in the routine. Which was not to say she didn’t think about what she’d done at the hotel. She thought about it constantly, and the feeling that seemed to have settled over her was guilt. She was susceptible to feelings of guilt anyway. There’d been moments in her life she couldn’t forget, moments when she’d let herself down, moments she still didn’t like to think about. That time in tenth grade, when she was on the high school yearbook staff and she’d quietly removed an unflattering photo of herself, at the expense of another girl in the picture, glamorously captured spiking the ball. Or that time at the end of junior year in college, just back from France, when she’d promised her friend Sandy they could room together senior year — until Alyssa, to her surprise, asked her to join the quad she was creating, and Juliana had quickly accepted. Sandy had been crushed. I’m not a good person, Juliana had thought at the time.

That was how she felt about Chicago: it had been a rare error in judgment.

Fortunately, work was there to distract her. There was always another decision to write, another dispute to decide. She found herself conveniently distracted. She had piles of work to lose herself in.

She had her run too. Every morning she got up at six and did three miles. Running was important to her. It gave her calm for the entire day, reduced stress, helped maintain her sanity. She had her earbuds in, listened to some Sara Evans or Chris Stapleton. She thought a lot about cortisol, the hormone naturally released in your body by stress. It could make you superproductive. In some ways she was attracted to stress, to danger. But cortisol was bad for women’s hearts. If you lived in a constant state of high stress, your levels of cortisol elevated and you were far more likely to have a heart attack.

After her run, she allowed herself precisely forty-five minutes to shower, dress, and do her hair and makeup. She had all her makeup ready to go, like an assembly line. Perfectly choreographed. She didn’t have to worry too much about what she wore, since she covered it all in a black sack anyway.

Once, a defendant’s girlfriend had erupted in the courtroom, yelling at Juliana. “You’ve destroyed my family — I’m going to destroy yours!” the young woman screamed. “And you need a makeover!”

That was truly the dagger in her heart, that bit about a makeover. Also not true, she thought.

On this morning’s run, she admired, as she always did, the beautiful houses on her street in Newton, graceful houses of stone and wood on ample lots, some of them designed by famous nineteenth-century architects. Their house was by far the most modest on the block, a brick-and-stone Tudor, built in the 1920s, on a quiet dead-end street. She’d loved it on sight, which was why, when they first went to look for a house, she’d immediately urged Duncan to go for it — even though it was more house than they could afford at the time. She’d been an assistant US Attorney and he was a law school professor, neither making much money. Eventually she went into private practice and the money got better. When she became a judge, her pay dropped again. No one ever became a judge for the money. But they were getting by. They could even afford to rent a beach house in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, for a month each summer.

When she came downstairs after her postrun shower, she could smell the bacon. Duncan was making breakfast, which was a nice surprise. Then she remembered: Jake had a big math test this morning, and Duncan’s ritual was to make a serious breakfast on Jake’s test days. Bacon, eggs, toasted English muffins. The menu never varied.

“Mm,” she said, giving Duncan a kiss. “Smells great.”

“Hey,” he said. “Coffee?”

“Thanks.” He turned from the stove to the coffeemaker, poured her a mug.

“Where’s Jake?” she asked.

“Can you yell up to him?”

“Sure.”

She felt a pang of guilt. Duncan was a wonderful father and a good person. I don’t even deserve the guy, she thought.

Her first serious boyfriend, in college, had been Richard, the lock-jawed Hotchkiss grad with the Nantucket red pants and the Bean boots, the vexing early bald spot and the perfect table manners. They were totally compatible, both prudent, rules-following, list-checking people. Whereas Duncan was a scruffy, bearded kid, an idealist, a pleasure-seeker, who for too long a time didn’t want to get married.

He was a good-looking man. He still had a great head of curly hair, though it was more gray than brown now. A closely trimmed beard, killer smile. Maybe twenty pounds overweight, but he wore it well.

He was still, in fundamental ways, her polar opposite. That was what had really attracted her to him. He was impulsive and risk-taking, a terrible planner, but really smart. He loved adventure. He was a devoted scuba diver and skier and surfer. He didn’t do extreme stuff like bull riding or motorcycle racing or bungee jumping, but he liked to have fun. His ideal vacation might be trekking on foot through the Cardamom Mountains in Cambodia. Hers might involve breakfast at the Brasserie Lipp in Paris. He once dragged her to some eco-resort in Costa Rica, where the howler monkeys lived up to their name. Her revenge involved dragging him to Paris, and a fancy part of it too.

As she walked over to the foot of the stairs, she thought: I’m home. This is home. The coffee, the sizzling bacon, Duncan, even the recalcitrant teenager upstairs. This is something valuable and meaningful, something I don’t want to break. This is good. She felt a deep sense of gratitude.

She called out, “Jacob, come on.” She didn’t hear the shower running. So he was still in his bedroom. The kid was sixteen but acted like a child sometimes. He regularly slept through his alarms. She started up the stairs to get him and then heard his door open.

“I heard you,” Jake said.

“I want us to call Ashley.”

“I don’t have time.”

“Well, we’re Skyping in five minutes, so let’s get moving.”

Ashley, who was eighteen, was spending a gap year, between high school and college, in Namibia, volunteering at a village outside Windhoek that took care of women with AIDS. Internet service there was intermittent. Juliana imagined a shack made from corrugated steel, with a 1998-model modem and a long extension cord.

Jake came into the kitchen, in jeans and a black T-shirt with a couple of cartoon characters with bulging eyes on it and the words RICK AND MORTY. Some TV show he liked. He had his father’s brown eyes and curly brown hair, in need of a haircut. He was a good-looking kid, in a gawky, awkward teenage way, and she was pretty sure he’d grow up to be a handsome man like his father. But his eyes were bloodshot and glassy. He looked feverish.

“Hey, sweetie, you okay?”

“I’m fine, what do you mean?”

“Were you up really late last night?”

“No,” Jake said too quickly. Which meant yes. She had no idea what he did in his room so late at night. Video games? Lights were supposed to be out by ten, but neither she nor Duncan regularly enforced that. She spent the day being a judge, being the arbiter, making sure the rules were followed. She didn’t want to do it at home too.

“All set for the big math test?” she asked.

“What? Oh, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I don’t particularly care.”

“Dude,” said Duncan, turning around.

“You’d better care,” Juliana said. She worried about the kid. He didn’t seem to give a damn about anything. There was something self-protective about that, she figured. If you lower your ambitions, you won’t get disappointed. You won’t get slapped down by the Splintered Ruler of Life. But the way he was going, he could end up circling the drain, like her screw-up brother, Calvin.

“You look like you could use some coffee,” Duncan said.

“What about Mom’s rule?” Jake said.

“That’s your parents’ rule, Jake,” she said. Jake wasn’t allowed to have coffee until he was a senior in high school. A totally arbitrary policy, she had to admit. But it had been her father’s. Then she added, “But you know what? Rules are meant to be broken. Go ahead and have coffee.”

“Why not?” Duncan said, after throwing a surprised glance at Juliana. He took a mug out from the cabinet and poured some coffee. “You’ll probably want a lot of cream and sugar.”

“I’ll take it black,” Jake said.

“Really?” Duncan said.

Jake took a sip and grimaced. “Yeah, I like it black now,” he said.

“Jake, can you sign me into Skype?” Juliana said. “I think you changed the password.”

“No, I didn’t,” Jake said.

“Sign me in, okay?”

“Anyway, I don’t have time to talk to her. I’ll miss the bus.”

“Talk to your sister,” Duncan said. “I’ll drive you to school. And sign your mom into Skype.”

Duncan, a professor at New England Law, had an easier schedule than hers. His first class didn’t start until ten. She had to be at the courthouse no later than eight thirty.

Duncan put The Boston Globe down on the table in front of her, folded to a story about Wheelz in the Boston market, about all the competition in ride-hailing apps and how the ordinary cabdriver was getting screwed big time. She saw a big picture of the extremely rich founder of Wheelz, Devin Allerdyce, a pointy-faced man of thirty-five with scraggly brown hair and a pinched face that reminded her of a mouse.

“That rat-faced scumbag,” Duncan said. “Hope you drop an anvil on his ass.”

She smiled, shook her head. “Dispassionate judgment. Procedure. Rule of law. You know, all the stuff you tell your impressionable law-student groupies is just a mask for the workings of power and hegemony? Call me old-fashioned, but that’s still how I roll. We are not having this conversation.”

He smiled, and then she admitted, “He does kinda look like a rodent.”

This morning she found herself looking around the kitchen, watching Duncan slide a couple of sunny-side-up eggs onto Jake’s plate, and suddenly her throat got tight and tears came to her eyes. This happened to her, every once in a while: her heart would swell. She never knew when it would come on.

“You okay?” Duncan said, putting two crisp pieces of bacon on her plate.

“An eyelash,” she said. “I’m fine.”

The Skype ringtone sounded, and she pulled the laptop close to answer. “Ash, baby,” she said. “I miss you.”