Judgment

74

Karney Kone was a small soft-serve ice-cream place in Newton, a boxy stand-alone building with a red-and-white-striped awning. Duncan parked in the lot, and they both got out, looking in the big plate-glass windows as they walked in. When the kids were younger, she and Duncan used to take them there after movies. Karney’s was one of Jake’s favorite places.

They found Jake in a booth at the back. Juliana was at the same time tremendously relieved and angry at the kid for just disappearing. He was sitting across the booth from a young woman wearing the tangerine Karney Kone uniform. Her name badge identified her as Megan. In the middle of the table was a small matte-black electronic device about the size of a paperback book. It was covered with nobs and buttons and looked extremely complicated. Attached to it was a funny-looking microphone.

“Hold on,” he said. “Um, Megan, these are my parents.” He touched a button on the recorder and said into it, “And that’s not getting recorded.”

“Time to get home,” Juliana said. “Time for dinner.”

The young woman, a petite brunette with piercing blue eyes, sidled out of the booth. She looked to be a few years older than Jake. “I have to get back to work now anyway,” she said.

Juliana took note of Jake’s guilty expression — the kid never had a poker face — as he got up and shrugged on his backpack. “I’m not hungry,” he said. “I had a burger here.”

“You should have told us where you were,” Duncan said. “You should have told me you were working on your podcast.”

“Why didn’t you answer your father’s calls?” Juliana asked.

“My phone died,” Jake said. “I’m sorry.”

“Let me see it,” Juliana said, holding out her palm. “Hand it over.”

“What?” Jake said, as if he didn’t understand, but at the same time he slid his phone out of his pocket and reluctantly handed it over. She glanced at it, saw it still had 16 percent.

“Why would you even lie about that?” she said. “I don’t get it.”

“I mean—” Jake said.

“And what’s this all about? What’s with the fancy recorder?”

Jake heaved an impatient sigh. “Dad?”

“Jake has a podcast,” Duncan said.

“A podcast?” Juliana said. “Sure, why not? What kind of podcast?”

“It’s a huge hit,” Duncan said proudly. “It’s insanely popular at his school. Very subversive.”

“What’s your podcast?” she asked Jake.

“It’s called Fleecing Sheep, and it’s about this whole factory we’re in, you know? It’s just— I’m trying to tell the truth about the whole deal. This whole brainwashed meritocracy, so-called. How we’re all born into captivity. How we’re supposed to be groomed and regimented and primed so that liberal-arts colleges can do more of the same to us—”

“Okay,” she said and thought: Here comes the verbal diarrhea.

“And produce a whole generation of overeducated baristas — excellent sheep primed for soul-crushing bullshit jobs, because the system is rigged, and—”

“I get it, I get it,” she said.

“I mean, whatever, you’re not exactly the target demographic, Mom.”

They dropped off Jake at his friend Link’s apartment. Link’s parents did something in tech and had a lot of money, and they lived in one of the nicest modern condo buildings in Boston, on Boylston Street. Link was a nerdy kid, a good friend of Jake’s who turned out to be the editor of his podcast. Jake would spend the night at Link’s condo. Juliana wanted him to be somewhere safe and protected, somewhere where the bad guys wouldn’t be able to find him. At least not easily.

On the way over, with Duncan driving, she said to Jake, who was sitting in the back seat: “Explain it to me slowly. What does your phone dying or not dying have to do with the fact that you didn’t tell either one of your parents what you were doing? You didn’t answer calls or texts.”

“I’m not— It’s just— I mean,” Jake sputtered. “Dad, you said it was okay.”

“Wait, how is this my fault?” Duncan said.

“You know what I’m doing.”

“I had no idea where you went,” Duncan said.

“The podcast,” Juliana said. “That looks like an expensive little digital recorder. Where’d you get it?”

“It’s Link’s,” Jake said. “A Zoom H6. He’s letting me borrow it.”

“For what?” she said.

“The overeducated fast-food worker.”

“But what I don’t get is why you didn’t tell us where you were,” Juliana said. “Or why you didn’t answer calls or texts.”

“I was recording. I had to turn off my phone.”

“Duncan,” she said.

“You should have told us where you were,” Duncan said.

“Oh, I’m sorry, Officer,” Jake said. “Is this a parole violation?”

“No,” Duncan said. “You don’t get to do this. Not to us.”

“So there’s an ‘us’ now?” Jake said.

Juliana set her jaw and turned to look out the window, trying not to smile.

“I want to hear this podcast,” she said. It had been preying on her, what was happening with Jake, and she hated like hell that she’d been so distracted. There are things in life you must never take your attention away from, she thought, and one of those is kids. Mothers don’t have to be reminded. So whatever Jake was doing wasn’t a secondary concern for her.

“Yeah, fine, whatever,” Jake said.

“How about right now? Set it up for me.”

Once Jake had connected his Samsung Galaxy to the car’s sound system, his voice came out of the speakers, speaking more clearly than he ever did in real life. “So there’s this village in Guatemala,” he was saying. He had a pleasingly raspy voice. It was very Ira Glass from This American Life.

“Every year, thousands of high school kids come down there and help build a barn for the villagers, so they can write about it on their college applications. Now, after they’ve left, the barn gets knocked down again. So a whole new crop of kids can have something to write about on their Common App. That’s right, the barn goes up, the barn comes down. It’s an industry. It’s a racket, okay? For them and for us.”

He spoke slowly and emphatically, yet conversationally, with lots of pauses, but it worked. “I mean, look, there’s a whole generation of kids who actually give a shit, you know, about social justice? But they’re told, Just go build this barn. The reality is, they don’t want you to actually give a shit. They just want you to play make-believe with this Guatemalan barn. A big charade. And you gotta ask yourself, how many things they train you to invest your time in are basically one ginormous... Guatemalan barn?”

Jake shut it off.

Tears were in her eyes. “Wow,” she said. “I’m proud of you.”

Jake was scowling down at his hands, his face red.

“That’s really smart,” she went on. “I mean, I don’t think college admissions people are going to love it.”

Jake shrugged. “They’re never going to hear it anyway.”

She was relieved. His words were dark and cynical, sure, but they weren’t the words of a troubled teenager. They were the words of a quirky, original kid. Maybe his view of the world was a bit grim — well, she wasn’t exactly in a position to tell him that everything was unicorns and rainbows out there. They both knew better.

When they arrived at Link’s parents’ condo building, Jake hopped out and grabbed his backpack. She looked at the building, at the security both inside and out, and was glad he’d be safe for a little while.

And then with a terrible pang she realized: I might not ever see him again.

When they got home, half an hour later, Duncan said, “He asked me not to tell you about the podcast.”

“But did you know he was at Karney Kone?”

“Of course not. I didn’t know where the hell he was.” Duncan was eating a cold slice of leftover pizza; she wasn’t hungry.

She shook her head. “Without telling anybody. I just about freaked out there when we found him gone, Dunc. I thought something had happened to him. So did you.”

“I know.”

“He just went to Karney’s without telling us, without leaving a note or sending a text or even asking permission. And he thinks it’s okay with Dad.”

“So?”

“How’s he ever going to develop a sense of responsibility? Or accountability? He just does whatever feels good in the moment. And you’re clearly okay with that.”

“I’m okay with letting the kid enjoy his life,” Duncan said.

“He has to learn to be responsible.”

“That’s called being an adult, and he’s not. He’s not an adult. He’s a kid. Why not let him enjoy his childhood?”

“He’s not a child either. He’s sixteen. Ashley was never like this.”

“Maybe because Ashley’s not a boy.”

“Jake’s not a boy anymore, Dunc; he’s a man.”

“No,” Duncan said.

“And it’s time for him to start acting like a man. Like a responsible adult.”

“If you had your way, every inch of that kid’s life would be planned, no spontaneity, everything scheduled.”

“That’s not fair, Dunc, and you know it. I just don’t want him looking around when he’s twenty-two, a college graduate on the job market, wishing he’d made better choices with his life.”

There was a long pause. She could see Duncan slowly turning red. “What?” she said.

“Goddamn it, Juliana, you know better!” he shouted. “You’ve read the fine print! We don’t even know if he’s going to see twenty-two!”

And Juliana was stunned. They stared at each other. There were tears in his eyes and in hers too.

“Don’t say that,” she said.

He shook his head, the words choking in his throat, for a long while before he began speaking again, in a low voice. He said, “I knew a kid in college who thought he’d beaten Hodgkin’s and died of a relapse before he graduated.”

“No, Dunc. He’s in remission.”

“Yeah, the kid’s parents paid for a commemorative bench in the college” — his voice broke — “courtyard.”

She was shaking her head. Her throat hurt. She was thinking, No. No. No.

She remembered the lines that Duncan had wanted to feature in Jake’s birth announcement. It was a passage from a nineteenth-century Russian thinker, Alexander Herzen.

We think the purpose of the child is to grow up because it does grow up. But its purpose is to play, to enjoy itself, to be a child. If we merely look to the end of the process, the purpose of life is death.

She’d objected. It was too somber, too pretentious, she said. Duncan gave in. But the words were meaningful to him, and from time to time they came back to her too. Its purpose is to play.

“We both know a recurrence is possible,” he said. “We’ve read the medical cautions, over and over. It could come back at any time.”

“It won’t.”

She was in denial, she knew it — she told herself Jake had been cured. To her it felt like a betrayal even to entertain the possibility that it might come back.

Duncan was blinking back tears, almost furiously. “These years — these years — these months — this now — these could end up being the entirety of his time on this planet,” Duncan said. “Right now. I want him to love his life, to make the most of it. To get everything out of life. You remember when Jake was in the crisis, and he was shaking and seizing and convulsing, and I held him in the hospital bed, and I told him things would be better after it was over? It’ll be behind us, I told him. And then — no more bad days, is what I said, right?”

She nodded. She remembered Duncan repeating that: No more bad days.

She could still smell the hospital room, that medicinal odor, hear the low buzz of the unwatched TV set mounted on the ceiling, its meaningless chatter flowing like hot water through a radiator. The fluorescent-hued gelatin dessert cups. Jake’s ashy lips and poisoned, jaundiced flesh.

“No more bad days,” Duncan said hoarsely.

And for an instant that memory flooded her brain again. She was looking at their sun-drenched backyard, watching ten-year-old Jake marching around the yard, imitating his father imitating Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society, chanting, “O Captain! My Captain!”

Her eyes filled with tears. Suddenly her cell phone rang, jolting her. She looked at it, glanced at the number. Didn’t recognize it.

She picked it up, said hello.

“Your Honor, my name is Alex Venkovsky. I, uh, got your name from a mutual friend.”

“Okay,” she said warily. She had no idea who it was.

“He might have mentioned I work for the government?”

“Right,” she said. This had to be the guy from Treasury, from FinCEN Special Collections. “Nice to hear from you.”

“Tomorrow seems to be a day of opportunity,” he said.

“I think so.”

“How early in the morning can I meet you? There’s some toys I wanted to show you.”

They arranged to meet in the morning. He was taking the earliest flight out of Dulles, at zero dark hundred. She didn’t have to give him her address. He already knew it. “I’ll be at your house at five o’clock,” he said.

Another call was coming in. She took it. This number she recognized: Nazarov, the mafiya guy.

She said hello.

“Your Honor,” Nazarov said, “I think we are all set. If you are really so sure this is what you want.”

“I need to find the file Hersh left for me,” Juliana told Duncan later. “I didn’t have time to look for it in my lobby this morning. And it may have something important in it.”

“No,” Duncan said. “You’re exhausted — we both are — and we have a big day ahead of us. You need to be sharp.”

“You’re right.” Juliana realized there was no use arguing with Duncan, that neither was going to budge. But she needed that file.

She waited until he’d fallen asleep. Then she scrawled a note, telling him where she’d gone, in case he got up before she was back.