Chapter 2: The Judge Who Couldn’t Help Me

Grant’s fingers opened.

I felt it happen in my elbow before I saw it, the way you feel a tooth come loose. One second his hand was there and the next it was just warm air, and my arm was my own, and I didn’t know what to do with it.

His arm was still up. He’d forgotten about it. He stood on the courthouse steps with one hand out to the crowd like a man in a painting, and his mouth was open a little, and for the first time in three years I watched my husband look for something to say and not find it.

The small woman waited.

She didn’t fill the silence for him. She didn’t move. She stood there with her glasses on the end of her nose and the sun on the scuffed toe of her shoe and let him have the whole thing.

“Your Honor,” he said finally.

And there it was. The smile came back up his face like water filling a glass. He brought the arm down and put the hand out, open, friendly, the hand he gave to mayors.

“Grant Whitlock. I’m so sorry, I didn’t—we haven’t met, I think, but I believe we were both at the hospital foundation dinner in—”

“We weren’t,” she said.

She didn’t take the hand. She didn’t look at it. She looked past him, up the steps, to the glass doors.

“Deputy Okoro.”

The doors sighed. The man with the pen in his pocket came out, except he wasn’t a man with a pen in his pocket, he was a deputy in a short-sleeved uniform shirt with a radio on his shoulder, and I understood that I had been three steps from him when Grant’s hand had closed on my folder. Three steps. He had a soft face and he was not looking at Grant at all. He was looking at me.

“Judge,” he said.

“You saw that.”

“Yes, ma’am. From the desk. Whole thing.”

“Write it down. All of it, in order, before you talk to anyone. Then write down what you didn’t see, so nobody can put words in your mouth later.” She tipped her head back toward the portico, toward the little black dome above the doors. “That camera on?”

“Always on, Judge.”

“Good.”

Grant laughed.

It was a good laugh. Easy, surprised, a little rueful, the laugh of a reasonable man caught in a misunderstanding. He put both hands up, palms out.

“Okay. Okay, I can see how this looks. My wife is seven months pregnant and she hasn’t been sleeping, and she got herself worked up about something this morning and I came to bring her home, and I—” He looked down at his own right hand like it belonged to a stranger. “I was trying to get her attention. She was going to fall. I’m not proud of how it looked.”

“Mr. Whitlock.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“I’m going to say this once, so listen.” She reached down and picked her coffee cup up off the ledge. Carefully. Like it mattered. “Everything you say to me from this point forward, you are saying to a witness. Not a judge. A witness. Do you understand the difference?”

He did. I watched him understand it. The smile stayed exactly where it was and everything behind it went very still, the way a pond goes still when something big moves under it.

“I’d like to call my attorney,” he said.

“I’d like you to.” She turned to me. Up close her eyes were a plain light brown, and tired, and there was nothing soft in them at all, and I have never in my life been so glad to be looked at. “Can you walk?”

“Yes.”

“Is anything hurt? You went down on that knee.”

“No. I’m—no.”

“Then walk up these steps and through those doors and don’t stop in the lobby. Deputy Okoro is going to walk in the same direction you’re walking. He’s not escorting you. He’s going to work.” She looked at Grant. “You’re going to stay out here until your attorney arrives, and then the two of you are going to come in through the side entrance on Pine Street, because I’d like you nowhere near her, and I can’t order that, so I’m asking.”

“Of course,” Grant said. “Of course. Whatever’s easiest.”

He ran two fingers down his tie.

I went up the steps.

I didn’t look back. I know that’s what you’re supposed to do in the story, look back and see his face, but I didn’t. I had thirteen steps to climb and a page folded in my fist and a knee that was starting to tell me about the stone, and I counted the steps, and the doors sighed open, and the air inside was cold enough to make my teeth hurt.

* * *

Room 2B was on the second floor at the end of a hallway that smelled like floor wax and photocopies.

It was small. I don’t know what I’d expected. Television, probably. Wood and brass and a flag. It had the flag. It also had drop ceilings and a water stain shaped like Florida and six rows of chairs that had been bolted to the floor at some point and then unbolted and never put back straight.

I sat in the second row with my hands under my belly and watched the clock over the door go from 9:04 to 9:21.

Nobody else came in. A phone rang somewhere down the hall and rang and rang and stopped. The air conditioning cycled on and off with a shudder that came up through the chair, and every time it came on I felt the sweat on my back go cold, and every time it went off I started counting again from where I’d left off.

I was counting because the baby hadn’t moved.

She moved most in the mornings. She had a schedule, this one; she woke up when I ate toast and she went quiet when I drove and she kicked, hard, under my right ribs, whenever Grant raised his voice in another room. I’d started to think of it as her opinion. And she had not moved since the steps, not when I went down on my knee, not when his shoe came down on my hand, not on the thirteen stairs, and I sat in that cold room with both hands pressed flat against myself like I was holding a door shut and I made bargains with nobody.

At 9:11 Deputy Okoro came in with my pages.

He’d collected them. All of them, off the steps, down to the one that had blown halfway to the planter, and he’d put them in a clear plastic sleeve in the right order with the cover sheet on top. He didn’t say anything. He put the sleeve on the chair beside me, and nodded at my belly in a way that was somehow not rude, and went back out.

Page four was still missing. I checked. I knew it would be and I checked anyway.

At 9:15 I got up and went to the window, because I couldn’t sit, and I looked down through the venetian blinds at the street, and there he was. On the sidewalk by the silver car, in the sun, with his phone to his ear. He was laughing. Whoever he was talking to, he was laughing with them, head back, free hand in his trouser pocket, a man having a perfectly ordinary Tuesday.

Then he lowered the phone and looked up.

Not at the window. He couldn’t have seen the window. He looked up at the building, the whole face of it, the way you’d look at a thing you were planning to buy, and I stepped back from the blinds so fast I hit the chair behind me.

That was when she kicked. Right under the ribs. Twice.

I stood there in the middle of a courtroom with my hand pressed over the place and my eyes shut and let it be the only thing in the world for as long as it lasted.

At 9:21 the door at the front opened and she came in without her robe. Just the grey suit, and the glasses back up in her hair, and a thin folder. A woman at a desk below the bench, who I hadn’t noticed, sat up straighter.

“We’re on the record in Whitlock,” the judge said, before she’d fully sat down. “Petitioner is present. Respondent—”

The side door opened.

Grant came in with a man I knew. Parrish. He’d been at our wedding. He’d been at Thanksgiving. He had a face like a well-fed cat and a voice that went up at the end of everything, and he had, apparently, been somewhere inside this building at nine in the morning on a Tuesday, because it had taken him eleven minutes to appear.

I did the arithmetic. I couldn’t help it. It’s what I do.

Parrish didn’t drive here. Parrish was already here.

“Respondent is present with counsel,” the judge said. She hadn’t looked up. “Mr. Parrish.”

“Your Honor.”

“At approximately eight fifty this morning, on the front steps of this courthouse, I personally observed an incident between the parties to this petition. I am a fact witness to that incident. I’m recusing myself from this matter effective immediately.”

The room did something. Not a sound. A pressure change.

I didn’t understand, at first. I heard the words and they went into me and sat there like something swallowed wrong. Recusing. I knew the word the way you know words from television. It took me the length of one breath to get from the word to what it meant, and what it meant was: she can’t help me.

She’d stood on the steps and said I will, and she had meant it, and now she was sitting ten feet away telling a room full of bolted chairs that she couldn’t.

I looked at Grant.

He was looking at his watch.

He wasn’t smiling. That was how I knew he was pleased. The smile was for people. When he was actually, privately happy, his face went smooth and blank, like a plate.

“Your Honor,” Parrish said, in his rising voice, “given the—given what Your Honor has just described, my client would ask that this matter be continued for a reasonable period so that—”

“No.”

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re asking me to continue it. I can’t continue it. I just told you I’m not on it.” She finally looked up, and she looked at Parrish, and Parrish’s voice stopped going up. “What I can do, and what I am doing, is referring the petition to Judge Alder’s emergency docket. He’s in the building. He’ll hear it at one o’clock today, in his courtroom, which is 3A. Ms. Whitlock, that’s the third floor, the room on the left.”

“Your Honor—”

“I’m not finished, Mr. Parrish.” She didn’t raise her voice. I was starting to understand that she never did. “Deputy Okoro’s statement is being typed as we speak and will be in Judge Alder’s hands before lunch. The portico camera footage has been requested. I’ve asked the clerk to note on the file that the petitioner appeared at the courthouse this morning in a timely manner for her nine o’clock hearing and was prevented from entering the building.”

“Prevented,” Grant said, pleasantly, from his chair.

The judge looked at him.

She looked at him for long enough that Parrish put a hand on his client’s sleeve.

“Mr. Whitlock, I’m going to say something to you now, and you should let your lawyer explain it to you afterward, because he looks like he’d like to.” She closed her folder. “I recused myself because I saw what you did. That is the worst possible reason for a judge to come off your case, and the only person in this room who doesn’t know that yet is you.”

She stood up.

“Ms. Whitlock. Legal aid has an office on this floor. Room 214. There’s usually someone in it at this hour.” She picked up her folder and her coffee cup, which she had carried onto the bench with her, lipstick on the lid and all. “I can’t walk you there. I can’t advise you. I can tell you that it exists and that it’s on the way to the stairs.”

“Thank you,” I said.

It came out wrong. Too small. She’d already turned to go, and she stopped, and for just a second she looked at me the way she’d looked at me on the steps, plain and tired and completely steady.

“Don’t thank me,” she said. “I didn’t do anything. That’s the point.”

The side door closed behind Grant and Parrish before I’d gotten out of my chair. I heard Parrish’s voice going up on the other side of it, and then Grant’s, low and even, and then nothing. I sat for a minute more with the plastic sleeve in my lap and the folded page on top of it, because my legs weren’t ready, and because I wanted them to be somewhere else in the building before I was in the hallway.

The hallway was long and empty and very bright. The knee that had gone down on the stone had started to stiffen, so that I walked a little lopsided, one hand under my belly and one on the wall, past a drinking fountain and a bulletin board of flyers about jury duty and a bench where a boy in a tie was sleeping with his mouth open. Room 210. Room 212. The numbers were brass and some of them had been polished by hands and some hadn’t. I thought, absurdly, about my mother, who used to say that you could tell everything about a place by which doorknobs were shiny.

Room 214’s wasn’t.

* * *

Room 214 had a door that stuck.

I know because I stood outside it for a long time with my hand on the knob, and when I finally turned it, it didn’t open, and I thought, well, that’s that then, and then it opened all at once and I nearly went through it onto the floor.

“Whoa. Whoa, hey. Okay. You’re okay.”

The woman who caught my arm had a red raincoat hanging on the back of her chair even though it hadn’t rained in a month, and she was chewing something, hard, with the side of her jaw. She was maybe forty-five. She had reading glasses on a cord around her neck and a second pair on her head and she looked at my belly first and my face second and the page in my fist third.

“Teddy Ruiz,” she said. “Sit. No. Sit there, that one doesn’t rock. You’re the one from the steps.”

“How did—”

“Sam Okoro texts me when something happens on the steps. We’ve got an arrangement. He texts me and I pretend I don’t know anything when they walk in.” She sat down across from me and pulled her chair in until her knees nearly touched mine. “Okay. I’m going to ask you a lot of questions very fast and some of them are going to be rude. That’s not because I don’t believe you. That’s because at one o’clock a man named Parrish is going to ask you the same questions, slowly, and I want you to have heard them already. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“What’s in your hand?”

I gave her the page. She unfolded it and read it in about as long as it had taken the judge, which told me something about both of them.

“He stood on this?”

“Yes.”

“And then he read it, and then he put the rest of this in his jacket.”

“One page. The fourth page.”

“Do you know which page that was?”

I did. I’d read that folder every night for three weeks.

“It was the exhibit list,” I said. “The things I was asking the court to order him to produce.”

Teddy stopped chewing.

“Say the list.”

“Bank statements for the joint account. Since the wedding. The title and registration on the car he sold, mine, the one I came into the marriage with. The—” I had to stop and breathe. “My phone records. His copies of my mother’s estate paperwork. He handled all of it, when she died. He said it was simpler.”

“Simpler,” Teddy said.

“He said I was in no state.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

I hadn’t been. I’d been thirty-one years old and I’d buried my mother on a Saturday and on Monday I’d asked to see the paperwork and Grant had put his hand on the back of my neck, gently, the way he did, and said that the lawyers had it handled and that he didn’t want me to have to think about any of it, and that I should rest. And I’d rested. I’d rested for two years. I’d rested so well that I had never once seen a single piece of paper with my mother’s name on it after the funeral program.

She looked at me for a second, and then she turned to the laptop on the desk beside her and started typing with two fingers, fast, the way people type who learned on something else.

“What was your mother’s name?”

“Ruth Cole.”

“Address?”

“Fourteen Juniper Lane. The yellow one. It’s—it was left to me. The will was very simple. She did it herself, at the kitchen table, with two neighbors as witnesses, because she didn’t trust lawyers.” I almost laughed. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. She was right about most of us.” The typing stopped. Teddy leaned in toward the screen until her second pair of glasses nearly touched it, and she pulled them down, and she read something, and then she scrolled, and read it again.

“What,” I said.

“Hang on.”

“Teddy. What.”

“I’m on the county recorder’s index. It’s public. Anybody can look. Fourteen Juniper Lane.” She turned the laptop around so I could see it. I couldn’t read it. The letters wouldn’t hold still. “There are two instruments recorded against that parcel in the last three years. The first one is a deed from the estate of Ruth Cole to Lena Cole Whitlock. That’s yours. That’s fine. That’s your mother’s will doing what it was supposed to do.”

“And the second one?”

“The second one is a quitclaim deed.” She tapped the screen with a short unpainted nail. “Grantor, Lena Cole Whitlock. Grantee, Whitlock Development LLC. Consideration, ten dollars and other good and valuable consideration. Notarized. Recorded in March.”

I didn’t say anything.

The clock on her wall said 9:52. Somewhere below us, down two flights of stairs and across the street, a silver car was idling with the air conditioning on, and I thought about how Grant had checked his watch on the steps with my arm in his hand. He hadn’t been deciding whether to be late. He’d been deciding whether he still had time to go upstairs.

“Lena,” Teddy said. “Look at me. Not the screen. Me.”

I looked at her.

“Did you sign a quitclaim deed on March ninth?”

I didn’t have to think about the date. Nobody who’s been through that night has to think about the date.

March ninth was ten weeks. March ninth was blood on the bathroom tile at two in the morning and Grant driving with one hand on my knee saying it’s fine, it’s fine, you’re fine, and the lights of Ashford General coming up through the windshield. He’d been wonderful. Everyone said so. The nurses said so. He’d carried my bag in and held my hand through the scan and when the doctor said the words subchorionic and common and watch and wait, he’d put his forehead down on the rail of the bed like a man praying.

Then he’d gone home to get my things. He’d been gone two hours. He’d come back with the wrong nightgown and my purse, which I hadn’t asked for, and he’d set the purse on the chair and kissed my forehead and said he’d handled a few things while he was out so I wouldn’t have to worry.

“I was in the hospital on March ninth.”

The gum stopped moving. The whole room stopped, the way the steps had stopped, the way everything stopped around that man eventually, except that this time it wasn’t for him.

“Then somebody signed it for you,” she said.