Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

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.

She lay in bed in the dark next to Duncan for a long while that night.

She’d waited for his breathing to even out and wondered if she was keeping him awake with her periodic sighs, the way she was flopping around in the bed, trying to get the sheets around her just right. He’d buried his head in his pillow, bracketed by his bent arm.

They hadn’t made love in a while now, partly because she felt guilty about Chicago. They’d usually read in bed, kiss each other goodnight, flick off the light. Or Duncan would come in late from working in his home office, after she’d fallen asleep. She was still attracted to him — in some ways more than when they first met — and she wondered if he still felt the same way about her. She worried that maybe he didn’t — and what happened three years ago didn’t exactly reassure her.

She tried to blank out her mind, to blot out all vexing thoughts, to turn her mind into a large white screen that would allow her to slip off to sleep. Instead, she thought about Jake and his marijuana vape pen and how negative she’d been toward him and even toward Duncan. She didn’t want to be that kind of parent, constantly harping on the criticisms.

And she thought about that night with Matías, which now seemed so long ago, and she felt ill. She’d stepped right into their trap without thinking. She had jeopardized her career, was on the verge of destroying her family.

She was frozen in place. If she didn’t rule in favor of Wheelz on their protective-order motion by Monday, the world would see her having sex with a man who was not her husband. An item about her would appear in one of those judicial gossip sites, like UnderneathTheirRobes.com. Then it would spread from there. She didn’t know how, but it would. That was how things worked these days.