Campbell doesn't look up from whatever he's writing with great fury. His
shirtsleeves are rolled up to the elbow. He needs a haircut. “Kerri,”
he says, "see if you can find some Jenny Jones transcript about identical
twins who don't know that they—
“Hello, Campbell.”
First, he stops writing. Then he lifts his head. “Julia.” He gets
to his feet, a schoolboy caught in an indecent act.
I step inside and close the door behind me. “I'm the guardian ad litem
assigned to Anna Fitzgerald's case.”
A dog that I haven't noticed till now takes its place by Campbell's side.
“I'd heard that you went to law school.”
Harvard. On full scholarship.
“Providence is a pretty tight place… I kept expecting…” His voice
trails off, and he shakes his head. “Well, I thought for sure we'd run
into each other before now.”
He smiles at me, and I suddenly am seventeen again—the year I realized love
doesn't follow the rules, the year I understood that nothing is worth having so
much as something unattainable. “It's not all that hard to avoid someone,
when you want to,” I answer coolly. “You of all people should
know.”
CAMPBELL
I'M REMARKABLY CALM, really, until the principal of Ponaganset High School
starts to give me a telephone lecture on political correctness. “For God's
sake,” he sputters. “What kind of message does it send when a group
of Native American students names their intramural basketball league The
Whiteys?”
“I imagine it sends the same message that you did when you picked the
Chieftains as your school mascot.”
“We've been the Ponaganset Chieftains since 1970,” the principal
argues.
“Yes, and they've been members of the Narragansett tribe since they
were born.”
“It's derogatory. And politically incorrect.”
“Unfortunately,” I point out, “you can't sue a person for
political incorrectness, or clearly you would have been handed a summons years
ago. However, on the flip side, the Constitution does protect various
individual rights to Americans, including Native Americans—one for assembly,
and one for free speech, which suggest that the Whiteys would be granted
permission to convene even if your ridiculous threat of a lawsuit managed to
make its way to court. For that matter, you may want to consider a class action
against humanity in general, since surely you'd also like to stifle the
inherent racism implicit in the White House, the White Mountains, and the White
Pages.” There is dead silence on the other end of the phone. “Shall I
assume, then, that I can tell my client you don't plan to litigate
afterall'”
After he hangs up on me, I push the intercom button. “Kerri, call Ernie
Fishkiller, and tell him he's got nothing to worry about.”
As I settle down to the mountain of work on my desk, Judge lets out a sigh.
He's asleep, curled like a braided rug to the left of my desk. His paw
twitches.
That's the life, she said to me, as we watched a puppy chase its own
tail. That's what I want to be next.
I had laughed. You would wind up as a cat, I told her. They don't need anyone else.
I need you, she replied.
Well, I said. Maybe I'll come back as catnip.
I press my thumbs into the balls of my eyes. Clearly I am not getting enough
sleep; first there was that moment at the coffee shop, now this. I scowl at
Judge, as if it is his fault, and then focus my attention on some notes I've
made on a legal pad. New client—a drug dealer caught by the prosecution on
videotape. There's no way out of a conviction on this one, unless the guy has
an identical twin his mother kept secret.
Which, come to think of it…
The door opens, and without glancing up I fire a directive at Kerri.
“See if you can find some Jenny Jones transcript about identical twins who
don't know that they—”Hello, Campbell."
I am going crazy; I am definitely going crazy. Because not five feet away
from me is Julia Romano, whom I have not seen in fifteen years. Her hair is
longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of
words I was not around to hear. “Julia,” I manage.
She closes the door, and at the sound, Judge jumps to his feet. “I'm
the guardian ad litem assigned to Anna Fitzgerald's case,” she says.
“Providence is a pretty tight place … I kept expecting… Well, I thought
for sure we'd run into each other before now.”
“It's not all that hard to avoid someone, when you want to,” she
answers. “You of all people should know.” Then, all of a sudden, the
anger seems to steam out of her. “I'm sorry. That was totally uncalled
for.”
“It's been a long time,” I reply, when what I really want to do is
ask her what she's been doing for the past fifteen years. If she still drinks
tea with milk and lemon. If she's happy. “Your hair isn't pink
anymore,” I say, because I am an idiot.
“No, it's not,” she replies. “Is that a problem?”
I shrug. “It's just. Well…” Where are words, when you need them?
“I liked the pink,” I confess.
“It tends to take away from my authority in a courtroom,” Julia
admits.
This makes me smile. “Since when do you care what people think of
you?”
She doesn't respond, but something changes. The temperature of the room, or
maybe the wall that comes up in her eyes. “Maybe instead of dragging up
the past, we should talk about Anna,” she suggests diplomatically.
I nod. But it feels like we are sitting on the tight bench of a bus with a
stranger between us, one that neither of us is willing to admit to or mention,
and so we find ourselves talking around him and through him and sneaking
glances when the other one isn't looking. How am I supposed to think about Anna
Fitzgerald when I'm wondering whether Julia has ever woken up in someone's arms
and for just a moment, before the sleep cleared from her mind, thought maybe it
was me?
Sensing tension, Judge gets up and stands beside me. Julia seems to notice
for the first time that we are not alone in the room. “Your partner?”
“Only an associate,” I say. “But he made Law
Review.” Her fingers scratch Judge behind the ear—goddamn lucky
bastard—and grimacing, I ask her to stop. “He's a service dog. He isn't
supposed to be petted.”
Julia looks up, surprised. But before she can ask, I turn the conversation.
“So. Anna.” Judge pushes his nose into my palm.
She folds her arms. “I went to see her.”
“And?”
“Thirteen-year-olds are heavily influenced by their parents. And Anna's
mother seems convinced that this trial isn't going to happen. I have a feeling
she might be trying to convince Anna of that, too.”
“I can take care of that,” I say.
She looks up, suspicious. “How?”
“I'll get Sara Fitzgerald removed from the house.”
Her jaw drops. “You're kidding, right?”
By now, Judge has started pulling my clothes in earnest. When I don't
respond, he barks twice. “Well, I certainly don't think my client ought to
be the one to move out. She hasn't violated the judge's orders. I'll
get a temporary restraining order keeping Sara Fitzgerald from having any
contact with her.”
“Campbell, that's her mother!”
“This week, she's opposing counsel, and if she's prejudicing my client
in any way she needs to be ordered not to do so.”
“Your client has a name, and an age, and a world that's
falling apart—the last thing she needs is more instability in her life. Have
you even bothered to get to know her?”
“Of course I have,” I lie, as Judge begins to whine at my feet.
Julia glances down at him. “Is something wrong with your dog?”
“He's fine. Look. My job is to protect Anna's legal rights and win the
case, and that's exactly what I'm going to do.”
“Of course you are. Not necessarily because it's in Anna's
best interests… but because it's in yours. How ironic is it that a kid
who wants to stop being used for another person's benefit winds up picking your
name out of the Yellow Pages?”
“You don't know anything about me,” I say, my jaw tightening.
“Well, whose fault is that?”
So much for not bringing up the past. A shudder runs the length of me, and I
grab Judge by the collar. “Excuse me,” I say, and I walk out the
office door, leaving Julia for the second time in my life.
When you get right down to it, The Wheeler School was a factory, pumping
out debutantes and future investment bankers. We all looked alike and talked
alike. To us, summer was a verb.
There were students, of course, who broke that mold. Like the
scholarship kids, who wore their collars up and learned to row, never realizing
that all along we were well aware they weren't one of us. There were the stars,
like Tommy Boudreaux, who was drafted by the Detroit Redwings in his junior
year. Or the head cases, who tried to slit their wrists or mix booze and Valium
and then left campus just as silently as they had once wandered around it.
I was a sixth-former the year that Julia Romano came to Wheeler. She
wore army boots and a Cheap Trick T-shirt under her school blazer; she was able
to memorize entire sonnets without breaking a sweat. During free periods, while
the rest of us were copping smokes behind the headmaster's back, she climbed
the stairs to the ceiling of the gymnasium and sat with her back against a
heating duct, reading books by Henry Miller and Nietzsche. Unlike the other
girls in school, with their smooth waterfalls of yellow hair caught up in a
headband like ribbon candy, hers was an absolute tornado of black curls, and
she never wore makeup—just those sharp features, take it or leave it.
She had the thinnest hoop I'd ever seen, a silver filament, through her left
eyebrow. She smelled like fresh dough rising.
There were rumors about her. that she'd been booted out of a girl's
reform school; that she was some whiz kid with a perfect PS AT score; that she
was two years younger than everyone else in our grade; that she had a tattoo.
Nobody quite knew what to make of her. They called her Freak, because she
wasn't one of us.
One day Julia Romano arrived at school with short pink hair. We all
assumed she'd be suspended, but it turned out that in the litany of rules about
what one had to wear at Wheeler, coiffure was conspicuously absent. It made me
wonder why there wasn't a single guy in the school with dreadlocks, and I
realized it wasn't because we couldn't stand out; it's because we didn't want
to. At lunch that day she passed the table where I was sitting with a bunch of
guys on the sailing team and some of their girlfriends. “Hey,” one
girl said, “did it hurt?”
Julia slowed down. “Did what hurt?”
“Falling into the cotton candy machine?”
She didn't even blink. “Sorry, I can't afford to get my hair done
at Wash, Cut and Blow Jobs 'R' Us.” Then she walked off to the corner of
the cafeteria where she always ate by herself, playing solitaire with a deck of
cards that had pictures of patron saints on the backs.
“Shit,” one of my friends said, “that's one girl I
wouldn't mess with.” I laughed, because everyone else did. But I also
watched her sit down, push the tray of food away from her, and begin to lay out
her cards. I wondered what it would be like to not give a damn about what people
thought of you.
One afternoon, / went AWQL from the sailing team where I was
captain, and followed her. I made sure to stay far enough behind that she
wouldn't realize I was there. She headed down Blackstone Boulevard, turned into
Swan Point Cemetery, and climbed to the highest point. She opened her knapsack,
took out her textbooks and binder, and spread herself in front of a grave.
“You might as well come out,” she said then, and I nearly swallowed
my tongue, expecting a ghost, until I realized she was talking to me. “If
you pay an extra quarter, you can even stare up close.”
I stepped out from behind a big oak, my hands dug into my pockets. Now
. that I was there, I had no idea why I'd come. I nodded toward the grave.
“That a relative?”
She looked over her shoulder. “Yeah. My grandma had the seat right
next to him on the Mayflower.” She stared at me, all right angles and
edges. “Don't you have some cricket match to go to?”
“Polo,” I said, breaking a smile. “I'm just waiting for
my horse to get here.”
She didn't get the joke… or maybe she didn't find it funny. “What
do you want?”
I couldn't admit that I was following her. “Help,” I said.
“Homework.”
In truth I had not looked over our English assignment. I grabbed a paper
on top of her binder and read aloud: You come across a horrible four-car
accident. There are people moaning in pain, and bodies strewn all over the
place. Do you have an obligation to stop?
“Why should I help?” she said.
“Well, legally, you shouldn't. If you pull someone out and hurt them
more, you could get sued.”
“I meant why should I help you.”
The paper floated to the ground. “You don't think very much of me,
do you?”
“I don't think about any of you, period. You're a bunch of
superficial idiots who wouldn't be caught dead with someone who's different
from you.”
“Isn't that what you're doing, too?”
She stared at me for a long second. Then she started stuffing her
backpack. “You've got a trust fund, right? If you need help, go pay a
tutor.”
I put my foot down on top of a textbook. “Would you do it?”
“Tutor you? No way.”
“Stop. At the car accident.”
Her hands quieted. “Yeah. Because even if the law says that no one
is responsible for anyone else, helping someone who needs it is the right thing
to do.”
I sat down beside her, close enough that the skin of her arm hummed
right next to mine. “You really believe that?”
She looked down at her lap. “Yeah.”
“Then how,” I asked, “can you walk away from me?”
Afterward, I wipe my face with paper towels from the dispenser and fix my
tie. Judge pads in tight circles beside me, the way he always does. “You
did good,” I tell him, patting the thick ruff of his neck.