Custody (3 page)

“I see.” The professor leaned back in his chair, steepled his fingers, and thought. “Can your family help you, perhaps?”

She flinched. “No.”

“Well. This is a difficult state of affairs, but not an impossible one. Not unique.”

“It’s unique for me.”

“I wish you’d apply, anyway, Kelly,” Professor Hammond urged. “Don’t give up.”

“I
have
given up,” she told him
.

More applause, appreciative murmurs, and the stirring of the assembly brought Kelly back to the present. Daria Wittington returned to her seat. Judge Steinberg introduced the third and final speaker: Professor George Hammond.

He made his way to the podium slowly, hampered by his age—he was in his seventies now—and by the crippling effects of Parkinson’s disease. When he began to speak, Judge Steinberg moved to the podium to adjust the microphone for him, for he had trouble projecting his words. Yet when he spoke, the room went still.

“I knew Kelly MacLeod before she helped Daria Wittington with her organization. I knew Kelly before she met Bettina. I knew her when she was only a junior in college, and I would like to say that way back then I was so insightful I knew that Kelly would one day be standing here before us, about to become a judge for the Middlesex County Probate and Family Court.

“But I didn’t know that. I didn’t have that kind of foresight. What I saw, all those years
ago, was only a young woman with a mind both quick and profound. A young woman with a skill for words, a talent for judicious reasoning, and a fierce hunger for knowledge.

“I pride myself on being the person to suggest she choose law for a career. But I could not know, as no one can know, that Kelly MacLeod would have the pure, dogged persistence to make it through the yards of reviews, the miles of legal texts, the mountains of difficult casework, past the traps of vanity and pretension, the siren lure of wealth, and especially the abyss of cynicism and downright exhausted despair to this day.

“But here she is. My pride in her is boundless. My hopes for her are infinite. And this is what I want to say here to her now:

“The Massachusetts court system is the envy of the world. People come from every other country on this planet to study our courts, because in spite of all its faults, and there are many, it comes as close as humanly possible to rendering justice on this earth. What we do here effects not only the parties directly involved in each legal case. Its reverberations extend throughout the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world. The responsibilities of judges are awesome. The consequences are illimitable.

“Those who must come to court do so in the darkest hours of their lives. They cannot see their futures, and their pasts have been shattered like broken mirrors. There is light in their future, but it is the black robe of the judge which, like the expanse of night sky, makes the stars of hope visible. Take away that robe, and the light disappears. Take away that robe, and there is no way to see the dawn of the new day.”

Professor Hammond cleared his throat. He took a sip of water. Then he continued.

“I thank you all for bearing with me as I waxed poetic. I have done so in the hope that Kelly MacLeod will carry with her, into her future, the thought of the night sky, and its vastness, which is like the vastness of the responsibilities of the mantle she is about to don.”

The crowd applauded slowly, steadily, and then, one by one and in groups, they rose to give the man a standing ovation.

He was probably the most revered man in this room, Kelly thought, and he knew everything about Kelly:
everything
. If anyone could judge her now, as she stood before her peers, it would be Professor Hammond.
He
had judged her, and he approved. He understood, more than any other person alive, what she had sacrificed to her passion for the law.

Judge Steinberg was continuing. “I now am honored,” she said, “to introduce to you the Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Richard Hamilton.”

Blood drummed so loudly in Kelly’s ears that she couldn’t really hear what the Governor
was saying. Then he turned to her and smiled.

So she rose and stepped forward, suddenly and serenely triumphant, and raising her right hand, she began to take her oath of office.

Two

August 6, 2000

S
UNDAY MORNING
K
ELLY SAT CROSS
-
LEGGED
next to her mother’s grave. Because the days and nights just after her ceremony passed in a blur of celebration and a scattered attempt at organizing her desk, her calendar, and her life, Kelly appreciated even more than usual the tranquillity of the cemetery today, when the summer air lay lush and heavy against her skin and the traffic of the surrounding city was muted. Only the occasional singing bird broke the silence.

Just when she was wondering whether or not the man would come, as he had every Sunday she’d been here, she saw him walking up the paved lane, a sheaf of lilies in his hand.

Kelly had noticed the man before, and liked the look of him, although she chastised herself for having such thoughts in a cemetery—especially since she was engaged.

But she couldn’t help observing that he was there when she arrived each Sunday morning, or appeared soon after, walking up Magnolia Path, carrying fresh flowers—pale yellow roses, white lilies, and once, tulips of a breathtaking coral—in his hands. She admired him for bringing perishable flowers rather than a more durable plant—for wasn’t that why we grieve, because what had once been living and beautiful had vanished from the earth forever? She wondered if the grave was his wife’s.

In May, even in June, the man had worn a suit and tie, and Kelly had admired that, too: the respect suggested by his attire and the attitude—could you call it optimism?—implied that an invisible spirit was aware of this, the person for whom he mourned, or perhaps God. Or perhaps he dressed so formally only for his own awareness, in which case she admired him more.

He was a tall, broad-shouldered, massive man with a head of silver-blond hair. She’d never been close enough to see the color of his eyes, but she’d bet they were bright blue, Viking eyes, the color of the oceans his ancestors once sailed to fight with bronze spear and shield, conquering countries and earning names such as Fergus the Brave or Ivan the Stouthearted.

She knew she spent too much time thinking about this man.

But how could she help it? Every Sunday morning Kelly visited her mother’s grave.

She had done this since her mother’s death two months ago, and she thought she might very well continue to do this every week for the rest of her life, because the moment she passed through the Gothic gates of Forest Hills Cemetery, she felt lighter and peaceful. She could be herself here; she could think whatever she wanted to think, or not think at all and simply sit listening to the birds sing. She could catch her breath.

By nature energetic and decisive, by profession critical, Kelly lived according to more rules, standards, and goals than most people did. In addition was the irrevocable, irreducible fact of her height, a physical reality with psychological consequences. She was six feet tall, and had been the tallest in her class and tortured for it ever since kindergarten, when Donny Ramos, in a burst of creativity, invented the taunt: “Kelly makes me laugh! She’s tall as a giraffe!” A fierce kind of pride had forced her then as well as now to stand erect,
never
to stoop, to keep her head high and her shoulders back even if it did, as she grew into her teens, accentuate the shelf of bosom that the toughest sports bra could not conceal.

In the cemetery her height didn’t matter, nor did the size of her bosom, the gravity of her profession, the magnitude of her goals, the pettiness of her vanities. Here she was just herself, with many talents and good qualities, and, she supposed, as many flaws as any normal person on this earth.

This morning in the very middle of July steamed with heat. She had parked her car behind the chapel, waved hello to the groundskeeper, and headed up past the Bell Tower along Mulberry Avenue. She wore a short blue sundress and for the sake of coolness had pulled her pale hair up into a careless clump on top of her head and fastened it with a clip. As she walked, long tendrils escaped, curling down around her ears, tickling her skin. Absentmindedly she tucked them back up, and a few minutes later they fell out all over again. She didn’t notice, really, or care. Six days of the week her hair was immaculately tamed. This morning, she was free.

She had strolled along Sweet Briar Path, Magnolia Path, Cowslip Path—she loved these names—past Lake Hibiscus, up Fountain Avenue and Tulip Path, until she came to Lilac Path. Here rested not a soaring marble angel or a sober gray tombstone but a small sturdy boulder of granite glistening with pink quartz.

The stone marked Kelly’s mother’s grave. Next to it lay the modest flat plaques marking the graves of Ingrid’s first husband, Otto, and his mother and father. Interesting, Kelly thought
bitterly, that Ingrid chose to be buried here, that her second husband didn’t object. But why would he object? The plot had been bought years and years ago when Ingrid and Otto married. It had been waiting for her. It saved René Lambrousco from having to pay for a plot.

Kelly had folded her long legs and sunk cross-legged onto the grass. Closing her eyes, she urged bitterness from her heart and said a prayer. Then she merely sat, letting the worries of the past week seep out of her into the warm silence of the air around her, until she was calm. She talked then, quietly, to her mother. Sometimes she stayed there for as long as an hour.

She’d lost so much time. For years she hadn’t spoken to her mother. Hadn’t seen her mother.
For years
. She had meant to punish her mother, but now she knew she had punished herself, as well.

She hated feeling grateful to her mother’s husband, but she had to be. If René hadn’t phoned her, she’d never have known they’d moved back to Boston. Fifteen years of silence stood between Kelly and her mother, a stone wall of silence, thick with hours and days. When Kelly finally reunited with her mother, there had not been enough time left in Ingrid’s life for Kelly to lift away, word by word, stone by stone, that barricade. And Kelly had always been aware that her mother was dying. She did not,
could
not, burden her mother with her own sorrows or ask her mother for what she no longer had the strength to give.

While Ingrid was dying, Kelly had been at her bedside as often as possible, but her mother usually slept, and in the latter days Kelly had no idea how much her mother understood of what she told her. There had been a moment, in the middle of one April afternoon, after the doctors and nurses had done what they could for Ingrid MacLeod Lambrousco’s suffering body, and before Kelly’s stepfather came in from work to spend the evening with his wife, when Ingrid had suddenly opened her eyes and spoken.

“Kelly.” Her voice was a low rasp.

Kelly had been proofing an article she’d written for the
Massachusetts Law Journal
. Sun filled the room, glancing off the chrome on all the machines and the bars of the bed, and the air-conditioning hummed, so it seemed they were in the private cabin of a small, steadily traveling boat.

Kelly dropped her papers. “I’m here, Mom.”

Ingrid’s pale blue eyes shone with a light that had been missing over the past weeks. For a moment she seemed free of pain and also of the drug-induced fog that had dimmed her gaze.

Kelly took her mother’s hand in both of hers. Ingrid’s skin was dry, papery, hollow-feeling, like a petal past its prime—weightless.

“I love you, Kelly,” her mother said.

Kelly’s eyes, as pale a blue as her mother’s, had filled with tears. “I love you, too, Mommy,” she whispered.

Ingrid had smiled. “I know, darling. I’ve always known. Every single day.”

How Kelly had longed then to let it all pour out, to tell her mother everything—about all the decisions she’d made and the sacrifices she’d undertaken during those confusing, amazing, mysterious years when by law she became an adult, yet in her heart was little more than a child, when more than ever she had needed her mother’s guidance, but had been prevented from seeking it by her own anger and pride. Kelly wanted her mother to know her as she was now, tempered and forged by the kiln of experience. She wanted her mother to laugh and cry with her, to praise her, to mourn for her—she wanted her mother to say, “I understand. And what you did was right.”

But her mother’s eyelids had fluttered, and she’d made a tiny coughing noise deep in her throat that alarmed Kelly, who’d risen from her chair, wondering whether she should ring for a nurse. But Ingrid had taken a shuddering breath and said, “Darling, I must sleep.”

That was the last real exchange between the two women. Ingrid had not known that Kelly had applied for a judicial position. She had not been alive when the grand news came to Kelly that she had won the appointment. She had not been alive when Kelly took her oath of office. She had not been alive to rejoice or advise.

Kelly still had much to say. She still needed to be with her mother. Somehow she felt she really
was
with her mother in this cemetery where only life and death and love mattered, far away from the laws of man. So she came here every Sunday.

And every Sunday the man came, too.

Today she’d been sitting by the stone for almost an hour when she saw him arrive, clad, in concession to the heat, only in khakis, a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and a tie. Today he looked less like a warrior and more like someone who had once played college football. He strode up Lilac Path, a level below Kelly’s mother’s grave, and right within her line of view—she didn’t have to go out of her way to see him. She couldn’t help seeing him.

Still, when he knelt at the foot of the grave, Kelly, out of respect and the wish to give him privacy, rose and quietly moved away. She would walk. She always walked around the cemetery after visiting her mother.