Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

“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.”

Jake would be in class for the next two hours, which meant that Juliana had a choice: she could find a Starbucks nearby and work while she waited for him, or she could drive home and then come back to pick him up.

She decided to drive back to the courthouse and pick up a stack of documents to read at home. As she drove, she replayed her conversation with Jake and regretted how she’d somehow gotten sucked into an argument. He didn’t like talking about school or schoolwork anymore. She remembered when he would chatter excitedly about his day when she picked him up, about his teachers and what he was learning and what happened in recess. But that was long ago; he must have been no older than ten. Now, everything was grist for a potential fight. He didn’t argue nearly as much with his father. Jake was hyperarticulate, unusually so for a kid his age, and scary smart.

Unfortunately, he’d started coasting, it seemed, at just the wrong time. He just stopped caring. Was it weed? Was it something else? His grades had dropped this year. He was screwing things up for himself. She couldn’t shake the feeling that he was doing a Calvin. How could you motivate someone like that? He was so different from Ashley.

Jake was also so different from the way she’d been when she was his age. She’d been the real grown-up in the house, not her alcoholic mother or her recessive father. She made sure Calvin got to bed on time and did his homework.

And Calvin, of course, came to resent it.

Everyone always thought she was so together, so on top of everything, so in control. When the truth was, she always feared she was one stumble away from becoming Calvin. Or Rosalind. She knew it was a lot easier to judge them than to acknowledge how easily she could have been them.

How baffled poor Chae-won Kim had looked when Juliana had stormed up to her. And she still couldn’t stop looking in the rearview mirror from time to time to check whether she was being followed. Even if she were being followed — what would they find? That she went from home to courthouse and back, with occasional jaunts to Jake’s school. That was about it.

She lucked into a space on Cambridge Street and entered the courthouse.

“Judge, isn’t it kind of late for you?” said one of the security guards, waving her through.

“No rest for the wicked,” she said, an old line they batted back and forth. If you only knew .

“I hear you.”

She took the elevator to the ninth floor and walked to her office. The hallway, normally bustling with people going to court, was empty and still.

She unlocked the door, and before she switched on the light, she noticed light seeping in from the adjoining courtroom. Strange, she thought. Who could be in the courtroom at this time of day? She switched on her office light and then strode across to the courtroom door, which she opened.

A janitor was vacuuming the floor of the courtroom. A light-skinned black man with a shaved head, wearing steel-framed glasses. She knew the maintenance and custodial staff, always greeted them by name. But this one she’d never seen before.

Her nerves were really frayed, her suspicions out of control. The janitor looked up at her; she nodded, and he went back to vacuuming. She closed her office door.

She located the place in the pile of printouts where she’d stopped reading — she’d marked it with a sticky note — and grabbed about an inch-thick pile of documents, looking around for a file folder.

She heard a key turn in the door lock and, surprised, looked up. The janitor was opening the door.

She smiled. “I’ll be out of your way in five or ten minutes,” she said.

He entered her office anyway, holding a broom.

“Excuse me,” she said a little louder. “I should be out of here in five or ten minutes.”

But the janitor kept walking toward her. “This will only take a minute, Judge Brody,” he said. She was surprised he knew her name. She felt a pulse of fear.

He leaned the broom handle against her desk, then picked up a delicate glass object, blindfolded Lady Justice holding up her scales.

“Judge of the Year,” he said. He had a pronounced, jutting jaw and was staring at her intently.

She felt the breath catch in her throat. He was a tall, powerfully built man wearing a tight, tan T-shirt. She could see the ropy muscles along his shoulders and his arms.

“I’m sure you were worthy of the prize.”

She didn’t trust herself to speak.

“It’s fragile,” he said. “Like everything we most love in life.”

He looked as though he could crush the glass statuette in his giant bare hands. Then abruptly he let go, and it smashed on the floor, shattering.

She gasped and stepped back, terrified, as he picked up something else from her desk, a silver picture frame. Her favorite picture, of her and Duncan and the kids in the middle of a pumpkin patch in autumn. He admired it for a few seconds.

“Excuse me,” she said, “what the hell do you think you’re doing? Put that back!”

“A precious thing, a family,” he said.

“Please,” she said quietly. Her heart hammered. “Put it down.”

“A lot of things are more fragile than you realize, Judge. It’s so much easier to break things than to put them back together.”

“What the hell do you want?” she said desperately.

“I know people like you; you think you can just turn the page, not be haunted by the past. What happens in Chicago stays in Chicago, right? But maybe that’s not how it really works.”

“What do you want? ”

“Some people say who we are is the sum of everything we’ve ever done. In other words, no backsies. No hitting the Delete key in life, right? All you have is what you’ve done and what you’re gonna do. When you make one rash decision, the only way out is to make a smart one. You ready to make the smart choice?”

He tossed the frame toward her, casually. She surprised herself by snatching it out of the air, a perfect catch.

“Is there a problem?” he said in a soft voice.

Her heart was pounding wildly. She set down the frame carefully on her desk.

“I’d like to know if we have a problem.”

She just looked at him. He pointed at the broken glass strewn on the floor. He began to sweep it up. “Don’t worry about that,” he said. “That’ll all be gone in a minute.” He swept the jagged pieces into one neat pile. “You have a decision to make,” he said. “You don’t want to make the wrong one.”

For a long while after the man left, she sat at her desk, heart racing, adrenaline pulsing through her body, as the sound of the janitor’s bucket thumped along the hallway, one squeaky wheel, faded away. She felt light-headed. She wondered whether the man had intended to go through her office, her files, after hours, when she was usually gone. Had they sent someone to go through her files and notes at home too? Or had he come here just to threaten her? Because if that’s all it was, it had worked perfectly. The guy hadn’t needed to pick up the picture frame; she’d gotten the message. They could go after her family. No longer was the threat just her public shaming, discrediting, through the release of a video. Now her family was in the crosshairs too.