Judgment

81

Six weeks later

Juliana had put together a feast for Ashley to welcome her back from Namibia: steamer clams, corn, and lobster. The dining table was a mess of lobster shells and clamshells and cleanly shorn corncobs.

Ashley was looking thinner and a little drawn, but at the same time even more vibrantly pretty. She said she’d broken up with Jens, in Namibia, and she was okay with that. Jake seemed genuinely happy to have his sister back. Finally the band was back together. The family was reunited and safe.

They were at the ramshackle old Wellfleet house they rented every summer, just up the dunes off White Crest Beach. The house needed a lot of work, but it was cozy, it was right on the beach, it had an amazing location, and they all loved it. They’d been renting the house for ten years already.

They were sitting around the table finishing off the last of their lobsters. Juliana was feeling relaxed, finally, and not just because of the sauvignon blanc Duncan kept pouring. The Wheelz case had been nicely squared away. The government had seized all of Yuri Protasov’s assets, including the complex network of companies he owned through offshore shell companies like Wheelz and including, yes, the ten million dollars he wired to the offshore account that FinCEN had set up.

The government hired a law firm to manage the company, which had immediately fired Devin Allerdyce and replaced him with a well-known female CEO, Cheryl Whitley, who’d run a big tech company.

Her first order of business was to settle the Rachel Meyers lawsuit. She issued a statement: After a thorough investigation and some soul-searching, the board of the Wheelz Corporation has concluded that mistakes were made and that Rachel Meyers was not treated fairly or appropriately during her time at Wheelz. She deserves to be compensated, and we have made a generous offer to do that. We are looking forward to putting this matter behind us and continuing our efforts to improve the atmosphere in our workplace.

So Rachel Meyers had gotten what she wanted: acknowledgment of what had happened to her. In addition, she received a five-million-dollar cash settlement.

Juliana found herself thinking, too, about Philip Hersh, about the memorial service she and Martie had organized, how amazing the size of the turnout. People came from all walks of life: taxi drivers, car mechanics, politicians, city bureaucrats, cops, high-priced lawyers, bookies. The guy had touched a lot of people, in his mordant way.

Juliana looked around at her family. Ashley, digging some lobster meat out of a claw, said, “I just saw on Twitter that Kent Yarnell got Me Too’d.”

“Yep,” Juliana said. The Boston Globe had an article that morning on its front page reporting that three women in the Attorney General’s office had filed complaints against Yarnell for inappropriate sexual conduct. So he was stepping down. She wasn’t surprised.

“Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” Duncan said.

Jake rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on,” he said. “It’s all theater. Am I the only one who sees this—?”

Ashley always ignored Jake when he was in verbal diarrhea mode. She cut him off, talking over him: “You always said he was a creep, Mom.”

Juliana tried not to smile. “I don’t judge. Ash, are you going to help Jake with his college essays?” She worried about how Jake would deal with a process he had so effectively mocked. Probably not so well. Maybe Ashley would be a good influence on him. “What do you think, Jakie — an essay on building a Guatemalan barn?”

Ashley and Jake exchanged a meaningful glance. She got up and located a piece of paper in a pile of mail in front of the TV. Then she handed Juliana a white business envelope. Its return address was Hampshire College, Amherst, Mass.

“What is it?”

“Check out who listens to his blog,” Ashley said.

Juliana took out a crisply folded white letter and looked at it. She said, “An old-fashioned letter and everything.”

Hope you’re considering Hampshire, it read, where we really value the kind of initiative, creativity, and sparky irreverence you’ve brought to your podcast. They were inviting him to visit the town of Amherst.

“They love your podcast!” she marveled. “How did they even hear it?”

“Right?”

“‘Sparky irreverence’?”

Jake groaned, though he looked secretly pleased. “I can’t even,” he said.

Her phone rang on the table next to her. She picked it up.

“Is this Judge Brody?” a woman said.

“It is.”

“I have the governor.”

“Excuse me,” she said to the table as she got up. “I have to take this.”

Duncan threw her a who is it? look, and she got up to take the call in the little bedroom off the kitchen.

Duncan and Juliana walked along the beach very early the next morning, so early that it was still dark. She’d spent most of the night tossing and turning and getting up, and finally Duncan took her by the elbow and out of the house. They walked barefoot along the sand and down to the water’s edge. The waves were lapping gently and the moonlight shimmered on the water, and she was momentarily overcome by how beautiful the world could sometimes be.

They walked a mile down the deserted beach. As they set off, Duncan said, “Why are you struggling with this?”

“Because — I mean, who am I to dispense justice, after all I’ve done?”

The governor had put her on the short list to be named acting Attorney General, with the understanding that whoever he chose would have the party’s support in the next election. Juliana just had to tell him whether she was up for it.

“All you’ve done? I’ll tell you what you’ve done. You refused to be a victim. You saved the lives of your family.”

They walked in silence for almost a minute before she said, “Yes, but I walked right into their trap. It all started with a decision I made.”

“What does that have to do with anything? You need to forgive yourself, Jules.” He stopped and picked up an oyster shell. The first pale glimmerings of the morning had begun to appear, blood-orange at the horizon. “Don’t be such a hanging judge with yourself. Look, you’re a great mom. You take care of people. You make us better than we are.”

“Tell that to Calvin.”

“Dammit, Juliana. That wasn’t your fault. Calvin shouldn’t have been driving drunk. And that tractor-trailer shouldn’t have been going seventy in a fifty-mile-per-hour zone. Yeah, that’s a detail you never remember, because charges were never filed, not when the victim was DWI. You shouldn’t ever have blamed yourself. Time to dismiss the goddamned case, Your Honor. And let the defendant go free. God knows she deserves it.”

“But what I did in Chicago—”

“What you did in Chicago — it’s not like in court, when you can strike something from the record. We can’t forget what happened. But you move on, right? You live your life forward. You have to.”

They walked on some more, and then Duncan said, “Head back?” They turned around and started back the way they had come.

“Anyway,” he went on, “it’s like Martie says, there’s sand in every oyster’s shell, but only some of them make pearls. And you, babe, make pearls.”

“Oh, please. You’ve been talking to Martie?”

“Guilty as charged.”

“I’m sure she was behind this offer.”

“Maybe so, but you’re the one they want.”

“You really think?”

“Of course. This is your path. You wanted to resign from the bench, here’s your chance. You should take it. Martie thinks this is just the first step toward — well, she just thinks you have an amazing future ahead of you.”

She nodded.

“Listen, we have a decision to make.”

“I know.”

“Not what I mean. Another decision.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mrs. Barnet is finally willing to sell.”

“She is?” Mrs. Barnet was the elderly widow who owned the house they rented every summer in Wellfleet, except for the summer Jake spent in the hospital. They’d given up asking about buying it from her; the answer was always no.

“And she only wants to sell to us. She likes us, loves our connection to the house, the way we take care of it.”

“Can we afford it?”

“It’ll be a stretch.”

“It does need a lot of work, you know.”

“I know. But it’s got good bones. And the best thing about it is how it’s all on one level.”

“So?”

“So in, you know, forty years from now, when we can’t deal with stairs any longer, we can live here. We can enjoy it here.”

“Forty years, huh?”

“Hey, ‘Grow old along with me,’ right?” At their wedding, Duncan had read the Robert Browning poem, the one that begins, “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be.”

Her face felt warm.

The house came into view. The kids were asleep, she knew, and would be for hours. In the distance, a pair of seagulls jousted noisily over some scrap of something.

They walked along the edge of the water. She’d fallen silent. “Yes,” she said.

“Yes to the house? Yes to the job? Yes to the growing-old part?”

She took his hand and rested her head on his shoulder. She could hear the gulls cawing. She said, simply, “Yes.”