Chapter 14
I sit in my car, watching the rain slam against the windshield. It’s a hard rain—torrential comes to mind. Surely it can’t last. Rain like this never lasts for more than a few minutes.
Then I glance at the clock on the dashboard of my car, and I realize I don’t have a few minutes.
In only ten, my hearing is scheduled to begin, and I still have to unload my evidence bag from my car, walk down the ramp to the courthouse, go through security, and ride the elevator up to the third floor. My choices are get drenched or be late.
I’m appearing before Judge Palmieri, so it’s an easy decision. A tardy lawyer is worse than a wet one.
I was certain I had an umbrella on the floor in front of the passenger seat, but it’s not there.
I searched for it without getting out of my car, as thoroughly as my skirt suit allowed, sliding the seats backward, then forward, checking beneath them, then crawling into the back seat to check the floor.
But I didn’t find an umbrella.
You were with me this morning. We woke together in the same bed for the eighth day in a row.
I wanted to look professional today. I used a curling iron to form loose waves in my hair, then pulled half of it back with a tortoiseshell clip and doused my head with spray. Every hair in place, nothing to tug loose, to distract me.
You twirled a gentle finger through one of my manufactured waves.
“You look beautiful,” you said.
I moved toward the door, expecting you to follow me.
“I’m going to leave a little later. I have an early call I was planning to take before going into the office,” you said. Then you faltered, uncertain. “Is that okay? If you want me to leave, I will.”
“Don’t be silly,” I told you. “Just lock the door behind you.”
We blinked at each other for several seconds.
It wasn’t moving in together, which we were both still considering, but it was, perhaps, the preceding step.
I opened the middle drawer of the console table in the entryway and removed my spare key.
After I handed it to you, you stared at it with wonder before slipping it onto your key ring. Then you took my face in your hands and kissed me. It felt like you never wanted it to end, as if we might melt together, into one, at any moment.
I left you there, alone in my condo, and I went to work.
It feels like enough of a step for now.
I went to the office feeling buoyant, a balloon bobbing above a toddler’s head.
The sky was only clouded over then, no rain yet.
I reviewed my notes, packed my bag for my afternoon court appearance.
During my drive to the courthouse, the rain began suddenly, but still I was unconcerned. Because I knew I had an umbrella.
I was wrong.
I peer out the passenger-side window at the sky, hoping for a break, a beam of sunlight, a brightening. But there’s only grayness and more rain.
To say that my hair will be ruined is an understatement.
“Just go,” I tell myself.
I move as quickly as I can. I fling my door open, then retrieve my evidence bag from the back seat. I parked as close to the front door as I could, but I still have about fifty yards to go.
My flats splash through puddles, soaking my feet. I run shamelessly, as quickly as I can—which isn’t very quickly in this restrictive pencil skirt—to the front door of the courthouse.
When I push inside to the security station, the deputy sheriffs smile at me with sympathy. I heave my evidence bag and purse onto the conveyor belt, then step through the metal detector.
Although I prefer the stairs over the courthouse’s creaky, old elevator, my bag is too heavy, so I ride it up to the third floor.
I know I’m in courtroom 4, and I know exactly where it is.
This courthouse is like my second office, but its familiarity brings little comfort.
There remains too much unknown every time I walk through the doors, adrenaline pumping.
Did I prepare enough? Was there something my client hid from me that will come out before the judge and make me look like a fool?
Will opposing counsel be an asshole? Will I lose or forget my umbrella and enter the building looking like a drowned rat?
I find my client outside the courtroom. Sheila Fritz spins around, then stares at me. “What happened to you?” she asks.
“I forgot my umbrella.” I push my wet hair away from my face. “How are you?”
“Better than you.” She sniffs disdainfully.
Sheila has never seemed to like me, has always regarded me dubiously.
She speaks to me as though I’m a little girl, perhaps a friend of her preteen daughter whom she doesn’t particularly like.
Showing up with drenched hair and, I’m certain, running makeup has done nothing to assure her of my competence and intelligence, never mind that I have always represented her competently and intelligently.
I take off my coat—a hoodless trench, because of course I didn’t even have enough luck to have worn a coat with a hood—shake the water from it, and drape it over the back of a chair in the hallway.
Opposing counsel sidles up to me then. Jason Sargent has been nothing but professional and pleasant to work with thus far, and I hope he isn’t about to do anything to make me reconsider that assessment.
But he merely gives me a sympathetic smile. “Forgot your umbrella?”
I nod as I gather my hair and spin it into a twist, wringing out the water, which falls onto my blazer.
“I just checked in with the law clerk, and Judge Palmieri is finishing up a pendente lite hearing. He won’t be ready for us for another thirty minutes or so.”
“Oh,” I reply. “Thanks.”
Jason smiles tightly and turns, wandering back to his client.
There is nothing further for us to discuss.
This is a discovery motion—a hearing about a motion for a protective order that I filed on Sheila’s behalf.
There are no settlement discussions to be had.
Jason wants Sheila’s medical records—specifically, her psychiatric-treatment records, to be released and admitted into evidence—and I do not.
We will make our arguments, and the court will decide whether to quash Jason’s subpoena or give him access to the records he seeks.
Often, when I arrive for a court appearance, there are last-minute settlement discussions, and sometimes they’re fruitful. This is not such a situation.
I turn back to Sheila. “We won’t get started for about thirty minutes,” I tell her. “The judge’s prior hearing is running late. I’m going to the restroom.”
“Good idea,” Sheila replies. Immediately, her eyes flick away from mine, as if she can’t stand to look at me.
In the bathroom, I’m appalled to discover that my appearance is even worse than I’d expected.
My hair hangs limply; mascara pools beneath my lower lashes.
I search my purse for a hairbrush or comb, but of course I don’t have one.
That would be far too convenient. All I have is a plastic fork, so I run the tines through my hair.
I crouch beneath the hand-dryer and turn it on, again and again, cycle after cycle, until my hair is merely damp.
When I check the mirror once more, it’s an improvement but is by no means a tidy or professional look.
When I return to the hallway, I remove my outline from my evidence bag and review my notes.
Although I practiced my argument several times, I feel ill-prepared and oddly, dizzyingly off-balance.
I feel like a child dressed in a lawyer costume.
I’m waiting for someone to chuckle at my cuteness and lead me away, back to my mother, away from this courthouse, where I so clearly don’t belong.
It’s an unusual thought because I am thirty-five years old.
I don’t belong with my mother, either. I never did, and she always made certain that I knew it.
Fittingly, I lose the hearing. Judge Palmieri looks at me with skepticism over the rims of his thick-lensed glasses.
When our arguments have been made, he rules from the bench, telling us that the records Jason’s client seeks are to be received by him within two weeks.
He will issue a written order today. He sweeps from the bench.
“What the fuck?” Sheila murmurs as we return to the ground floor. “Why did we lose?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her. It’s the truth, but it’s also a wholly inadequate thing to say to someone who is now going to have her private psychiatric records released to the insurance company of the driver who rear-ended her with his car last May. I genuinely hadn’t expected to lose the motion.
“It’s frustrating,” I say, still dizzy and stunned. “The ruling doesn’t make sense.”
She merely shakes her head. She has no use for my platitudes.
I want to tell her that it’s not the first surprising or nonsensical ruling, one seemingly not grounded in law, that I’ve received in my career—every lawyer has his or her list of them.
In my experience, those lists are longer for relatively young, relatively inexperienced female lawyers.
There’s a bias—I’ve felt it countless times.
It may be subconscious, but may not be. When a male attorney several decades my senior opposes me in the courtroom, certain judges have automatically awarded him a head start, an extra hundred points, before he even opens his mouth.
Perhaps my rain-washed face and unkempt hair caused a waver in my voice.
Perhaps a lack of confidence in my unprofessional appearance seeped into my legal argument, at least into the way it was delivered.
Perhaps Judge Palmieri simply decided that a lawyer who couldn’t remember to keep an umbrella in her car deserved to be further shamed.
Such is the prerogative of a judge. Wrong, unfair, but it happens.
That’s litigation. That’s why I prefer to settle whenever I can.
I suspect voicing these thoughts to Sheila would only make her more likely to fire me.
I stand beneath the covered area outside the courthouse, watching Sheila open her umbrella and step into the deluge. She doesn’t suggest that I walk with her. Perhaps she thinks I deserve to get soaked again.
Suddenly, I think of you. I ache for you. It’s been an awful day, and you’re the one I want to share it with.
And, unbelievably, inexplicably, there you are. You’re holding a black umbrella over your head and walking toward me quickly, purposefully. You lower the umbrella once you’re beneath the awning and pull me against you. I melt. Although I feel like crying, I don’t let myself.
“What’s wrong?” you ask, your lips pressed into my hair. “What’s wrong, Klara?”
“I forgot my umbrella,” I say. “And my client hates me and I lost my hearing.” I sound like a brat, I think. These are minor issues in the realm of all that I could be facing. But they matter to me. I care about them, and you do, too.
“It’s okay,” you tell me, stroking my hair, combing it with your fingertips. “Everything will be okay. I’ll walk you to your car.”
I nod gratefully. “What are you doing here?” I ask.
“I was dropping off some materials for Magistrate Clancy. She’s running the business section bar association meeting next week.
Then I had just returned to my car and I looked up, and there you were, leaving the building.
I knew your hearing was here today, but I didn’t realize you would still be here. ”
“It started late,” I say as you hold the umbrella over both of our heads with your right arm, your left wrapped around me.
I let this go, but your explanation seems off. Delivering physical materials to the magistrate? Why not just email electronic copies?
But I don’t press further. I let you walk me to my car and tuck me inside. I let you bend down to kiss me. “Should I come over?” you ask, and I smile weakly and nod. You slam my car door and walk away. I watch you disappear.
And I find myself doing what I promised you I’d do. I consider how badly I had needed to see you and how much better you made me feel. And I think about what it would be like if your parting statement had not been Should I come over? but rather I’ll see you at home.
It’s not until later, when we’re lying in bed and you’re on your side, tracing the whisper-soft pads of your fingers along my clavicle, that it occurs to me that the umbrella you, on your white horse, brought to the courthouse was the exact same one as mine that was missing.
And something unsettled blooms within me, like a drop of ink in a glass of water.
It swirls and expands until it has turned everything dark.