Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

“Yes, that wish to be granted. Of course. I swore this on my babushka’s grave. Anything that’s within my power.” He placed a palm on his chest. “Is a burden to carry a debt. A relief, always, to pay it off. Tell me, Your Honor, what can I do?” He was beaming, like a child who’d just been given a puppy.

When she told him, his smile became a rictus of horror. He looked, Juliana thought, like a child whose puppy had just been run over.

She turned her Lexus left onto Granite Street and looped around to 93 North, the artery that went straight through Boston, thirteen miles of highway. Four lanes of traffic headed north. Traffic was light. Rush hour hadn’t yet begun.

She glanced up in the rearview mirror to see if she noticed anyone, any vehicle that seemed to be following. She saw a white car behind her, a Dodge, that she thought she’d seen in the Braintree office park. She saw the car’s snout, its aggressive grille.

It was traveling a little close.

Then the white Dodge changed lanes and came up on her left, far too close. She accelerated, and the white Dodge accelerated, and then she felt a heavy thud, heard a sickening metallic crunch.

The Dodge had crashed into her.

In panic mode now, she swerved away, to the right, setting off car horns, nearly colliding with a blue Toyota. But the Dodge had moved lanes and was immediately on her left, again, and moving in closer.

She accelerated even faster, and now the Dodge had pulled up even with her, on her left, and far too close. She swerved her SUV one more lane, into the rightmost lane, but the white Dodge followed her over.

The car was trying to force her off the road.

Another loud crunch. The Dodge had driven right into her again. She swung the wheel hard right, away, into the breakdown lane, and the Dodge was on her again, and she spun harder to the right. With a shrieking of steel, she’d smashed into the steel guardrails, sparks flying, and she slammed on the brakes. A loud squeal and car horns blaring all around, and she came to an abrupt stop.

The white Dodge sped away.

She keyed off the ignition, sat there, breathing hard, trying to steady her heart rate.

Then a beat-up red pickup truck pulled up ahead of her and also came to a stop, its emergency lights flashing. A large guy with long blond hair and a big potbelly, in his thirties or early forties, got out, wearing an old Carhartt work jacket and a “Make America Great Again” hat. He came over to her.

“Hey, lady, you okay?”

“I’m fine, thank you.” She was out of breath.

“Looked like that guy cut you off. I saw that! I mean, what the hell?”

“Unbelievable.” She was jittery with adrenaline, which had now flooded her system. Her heart juddered, and her face felt hot.

“You want me to call the cops? Call you an ambulance?”

Shaking her head, she said, “Don’t bother. No need.” The last thing she wanted was to be entangled with the police. She knew there was damage to the vehicle, but from where she sat she couldn’t really get a sense of how bad it was. Not without getting out of the car. Which she didn’t want to do, not in the middle of traffic where there was no shoulder and cars passing by all the time now.

“But thank you so much,” she said.

After another minute or so she’d calmed down enough to start the car back up, and she was on her way home.

She was driving on Beacon Street, a mile or so from home, when she pulled up to a traffic light and stopped. Glancing at the sidewalk, she saw a man sitting on a bench waiting for the bus. Something about the man — she looked more closely. If Calvin were still alive, that’s what he would have looked like.

In her frayed, sleep-deprived state, she remembered their last argument, couldn’t turn her mind away. He’d been hitting her up for money, something he did more and more often. She was finishing law school, living at home with her parents. He was living with his girlfriend, freeloading. She said something about what a mess he was making of his life.

He lashed back, talked about what phonies Mom and Dad were. At least they weren’t home to hear his rant. She said something about how he wasn’t too proud to take the checks Mom was always writing him. He’d even wheedled her into taking out a second mortgage, and when Dad found out, he practically exploded. And yet he couldn’t be bothered to visit her when she was in the hospital with the mastectomy. “Not once,” she said. “Not once. You take her money, and yet you couldn’t be bothered to visit.”

“So what? I was touring . And she’s fine. She’s fine . I don’t hear Mom complaining.”

“Oh, playing at Miller’s Ale House in Scituate is touring ? You’re unbelievable. You damage people, Calvin. You damage the people who love you, and you don’t even know it.”

He was wearing a filthy pair of jeans and his crappy leather motorcycle jacket that gave off that skunky pot smell. She looked with sadness at his bitten-down fingernails, one with a death’s head on it that his girlfriend had painted with black and white enamel.

If she squinted she could see him as the bouncing eighth grader who led the lacrosse team to victory in the all-district tournament, hoisted up by his teammates to ride their shoulders as they whooped their elation. Neither Mom nor Dad could make it, but Juliana watched it all with a wide smile that seemed to own her face.

But if she squinted again at his once-handsome face, now bloated, she could almost see him as the middle-aged barfly he was on track to be.

The argument grew more and more heated. She said he didn’t appreciate the way she was practically a mom to him, all she did for him. “Yeah, and how’d that work out, sis?” he snapped. He called her “ Der Führer ” because she was such a control freak. It got ugly. By the end he was bellowing at her, red-faced. It was terrifying.

“You’re nothing!” she yelled at him. “You’re nothing. You’re a goddamned waste of space.”

He stormed out of the house and jumped into his beat-up Toyota. He raced off, leaving skid marks on the driveway.

Her memory of what happened after that grew a little vague and disjointed. She remembered watching TV and the phone ringing. The call from the hospital in the middle of the night. They couldn’t save him.

She remembered being brought in to see the body, which she wished to this day she hadn’t agreed to. Neither of her parents did.

Later, in that hallucinatory night-into-day, she remembered the police telling her about how Calvin had driven his Toyota through a red light and right into the path of an oncoming tractor trailer.

The truck driver was fine but shaken. He wasn’t at fault, no question about it. Calvin was drunk, but most of all he was drunk with rage.

And — this was the most horrible thing of all — she had provoked him into doing it. Why the hell had she gotten it into her head to tear into him that way? She’d told herself she was staging a kind of “intervention.” But if it hadn’t been for her anger that night, Calvin might still be alive. It was her judgmental nature that had directly resulted in Calvin’s death.

She was always bringing up Calvin with Jake, as if Calvin was some parable of all the reckless decisions he made. But now she realized there was more to it than that. It was really about a fateful decision of her own. About hurting those you love.

Sitting in judgment upon herself, she found herself guilty.

The tears were streaming down her face when she was startled out of her thoughts by the loud honk of the car behind her. The light had turned green.

She took her foot off the brake and drove away.