Custody (2 page)

“You’ll do fine,” he said. He planted a kiss on her hair, right next to her cheek.

Had he mussed her hair? She’d worked fiendishly to subdue it in a French twist.

Judge Colburn, Kelly’s role model and mentor for the past few years, appeared at her side. She had gray hair, solemn black eyes, a wise and wrinkled face, and an ability to read minds.

“Your hair is perfect. Everything’s perfect, Kelly. This is your day. We’re all so proud of you.”

Judge Linda Steinberg approached her, slowly, limping slightly. “It’s time,” she said.

Kelly nodded. Here it was, the moment for which she’d been striving all her adult life, and she was on the verge of blacking out.

“Deep breaths,” Judge Colburn said. “Look at me, Kelly. Deep breaths.” She demonstrated, putting her hand on her diaphragm and breathing in slowly.

“Deep breaths,” the nurse had coached Kelly. “Look at me, Kelly. Deep breaths.…”

Looking into Judge Colburn’s eyes, Kelly put her hand on her own diaphragm. She pulled sweet air into her lungs.

The sergeant-at-arms, complete with top hat and staff, approached. “Ready?”

Judge Steinberg looked at Kelly. “Ready?”

Kelly smiled. “Ready.”

Judge Steinberg turned to the others in the room.

“All right, everyone,” she said. “Show time.”

They fell into line: the Governor, the judges, the attorneys, and Kelly. They walked down the majestic marble halls.

When they came to the wide center doors, the deputy clerk pounded the gavel three times. The sound reverberated through the air, hushing the crowd.

“Oyez. Oyez. Oyez. All rise,” the deputy clerk called out. “The Honorable Governor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, accompanied by Judge Designate Kelly MacLeod. Please rise.”

Kelly broke out in goose bumps from head to toe.

Eight hundred people stood to watch the group filing in.

The sergeant-at-arms led them in stately ceremonial step into the magnificent House Chamber. They entered through the center doors and walked single file down the aisle, over the bright blue rug with its gold fleurs-de-lis to the front of the room.

Three massive chairs of black leather and ornately carved wood waited at the dais between the flag of the United States and the flag of the Commonwealth. Governor Hamilton took a chair, the Chief Justice of the Probate and Family Court Department, Judge Steinberg, took a chair, and Kelly took one. The other judges sat in the first row, where family members would ordinarily sit.

Kelly smoothed her cream silk pants and suit jacket, aware that hundreds of people were smiling at her: friends, colleagues, former clients. It had taken her long hours into the night to compile her list and address the invitations she’d had printed. Now she was glad she’d made the effort. It was wonderful that so many people had come.

It almost made up for the fact that no one she could call family was here.

Ironic, really, since she was about to become a family court judge.

“Good afternoon,” Judge Steinberg greeted the assembly.

The hum of voices quieted. People settled in their seats. The room was still.

“We are gathered here today to witness our good friend Kelly MacLeod receive the oath of office as Associate Justice of the Middlesex County Probate and Family Court,” Judge Steinberg announced. “This is an honor and a charge of great magnitude. In all of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts there are only forty-nine justices in the Probate and Family Court, and they are appointed to serve until the age of seventy. We put our trust for today and for the future into the hands of our justices, and we give our trust to Kelly MacLeod with great elation.”

Kelly looked out at the audience. She spotted Professor Hammond, one of her first law professors, in his sagging tweed and bow tie. In a dress of flowered silk, Sally Beale, the woman who as a register of the probate court had taught her so much of the real work of justice. Donna Krebs, her best friend and colleague, buttoned up tight in a navy blue suit, trying to look solemn, but grinning like an idiot while tears sparkled in her eyes. Stout Fred Dunlap and lean Wallace Reed, senior partners in the firm where for seven years Kelly had had her professional home. Scattered throughout the crowd, other lawyers and clerks and secretaries. Some policemen. Some members of the Probation Department and the Family Service Clinic. She saw her fiancé, Jason, his face flushed with pride, and his mother, Eloise, sitting next to him, turning the diamonds on her fingers, looking completely bored.

There had been only one time in all her life when she had missed—when she had needed—her own mother more.

Judge Steinberg was saying, “Everyone here today knows Kelly MacLeod. We have studied with her, worked with her, built cases with her, heard her argue cases before us. We have fought with her. In many cases we have fought against her. And always, we have admired her. Perhaps we think we know her. Today we have invited three different people to tell us about the Kelly MacLeod they know.”

“First, we would like to introduce Bettina Florez.”

A plump young woman approached the podium. No one would ever have called her pretty, because all the lines of her face were too extreme: her jaw protruded in a triangular wedge, her enormous nose featured nostrils that were larger than her small black eyes, and her tight bush of black hair could not conceal her elephantine ears. But she carried her head high, and though her hands trembled as she lifted the pages of her speech, her eyes burned with pride as she looked out at the crowd—and as she looked at Kelly, they softened with love.

“My name is Bettina Florez,” the woman said. “I first met Kelly MacLeod twelve years ago through the Big Sister program. She was just beginning her first year of law school, she was living in a two-bedroom apartment in Somerville with three other women, and she drove a fifteen-year-old Chevy with one hundred and sixty-five thousand miles on it. I do believe that car was in the shop more than it was on the road.”

Bettina smiled then, and the audience smiled with her, for her smile was a lovely sight.

“Kelly was working weekends and nights as well as attending law school, but she always found a way to spend time with me at least two days a week, and she never once canceled a date. I was fifteen years old then, living in Roxbury with my mother and my three brothers and sisters. I was smart, but I was starting to do drugs, mostly just to have a crowd to hang with. I was never a very popular girl, and I was very lonely. I think it’s fair to say that I also wasn’t the most charming of children.”

Kelly smiled to herself, thinking,
That’s an understatement
. For their first few months together, Bettina either refused to talk or muttered profanities.

“Kelly had hardly any money herself, but she took me to museums and lectures and concerts. She brought me to her apartment and showed me how someone with very little money could still have a decent life and, more important, have hope. Kelly loves to read and she started a reading program with me, introducing me to the works of Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou and Julia Alvarez. She couldn’t afford a bicycle, so she taught me to jog. I had become accustomed to despising myself because I’m so big, but Kelly MacLeod, who is, you might have noticed, six feet tall, taught me to carry myself with pride and dignity.

“I will tell you honestly that my mother gave up on me. My teachers gave up on me. But Kelly MacLeod never gave up on me, not even when I gave her cause—and a great deal of it—to do so. Because of Kelly MacLeod’s belief in me and the help she gave me, I not only finished high school, I also attended Bunker Hill Community College. Even when I turned twenty-one and was no longer eligible for the Big Sister program, Kelly continued seeing me at least once a month, even though she was then also working with another Little Sister. She saw me on
Christmas Day, and she took me out on my birthday.” Bettina smiled at Kelly. “I hope she always will.

“As my life changed, so did hers. She got her law degree, passed the bar exam, and began working for a law firm. She was able to get rid of that old Chevy—which by that time had a rejected sticker on it—and to buy a newer used car. She was able to move into an apartment all her own.

“She was able to loan me money to buy my schoolbooks.

“When all others, including my own mother, saw only a fat, ugly, impoverished, and worthless individual, Kelly MacLeod saw a human being with potential. With her help, I graduated last year from the University of Massachusetts and I have been admitted to the Suffolk Law School, where I will begin my studies this fall with the aim of becoming a paralegal.

“As I look out at this audience, I see the faces of four other women who have been Kelly MacLeod’s Little Sisters, and who have become admirable women because of her help. Kelly MacLeod honored me through so many years with her respect and her belief in my potential. I cannot tell you how proud I am to be here today when we honor her.

“One last thing. I know that Kelly asked me to speak today not to praise her, but to tell you all about the Big Sister program, and so I ask a few more moments of your time.”

Of course, I believe in reaching out to those who are not connected by family, Kelly thought. If Professor Hammond had not reached out to her, who knows where she might be now? Certainly not here. At a time when she was lost, he had pointed her toward her future. He had made all the difference in her life
.

In her junior year at U. Mass, Kelly took Professor Hammond’s course on law and society. One day he called her into his office to tell her how impressed he was by her papers and her class participation. She had a quick and incisive mind. Had she considered a career in law?

It was when he asked the question that Kelly knew, in a flash as powerful as true love, what she wanted to do with her life
.

Professor Hammond became her mentor. He helped her change her major from political science to pre-law. He suggested books she should read. He told her he’d write such a brilliant recommendation for her that no law school would turn her down
.

And when her grandparents died and everything changed, he hadn’t given up on her. The assistance he offered her was so extraordinary that no one but a handful of people knew about it
.

As was fitting, it had been perfectly legal
.

“Sometimes,” Bettina Florez was saying, “sometimes your own family, no matter how much they love you, just can’t help you, no matter how much they might want to. Sometimes we all need the insight, good will, and sheer hard work of strangers to take us by the hand,
by the hand
, to touch us, to help us see that there is a good path open to us, and to help us onto that good path. To stop us from being the worst person we ever could be, to guide us toward becoming the very best person we could possibly be. To help us dream, and to help us make those dreams come true. That’s what Big Sisters can do for their Little Sisters. That’s what Kelly MacLeod did for me.” She looked right at Kelly. “Kelly, I love you.”

“I love you, too,” Kelly mouthed back. Today was Bettina’s triumph as much as Kelly’s.

After the applause died down, Judge Steinberg returned to the podium. “Our next speaker,” she announced, “is a woman many of us know and have had the pleasure of working with, Daria Wittington.”

The next speaker could not have looked more different from Bettina if she tried. Petite, blond, a symphony of caramel from her frosted pale hair to her tennis-tanned skin clad in fawn silk, Daria radiated wealth and privilege.

“Good afternoon,” she said, in the perfectly modulated tones of one quite accustomed to public speaking. “I want to thank Kelly MacLeod for asking me to speak here today because in doing so she allows me the opportunity to tell you about my work, the work for which Kelly has for eight years now volunteered innumerable hours and inestimable expertise. I am the head of MASCC, the Massachusetts Adoption of Special Children Center. We specialize in the placement of children eight years and older who have received, through the misfortunes of fate, extreme mental or physical challenges. Many of these children were born to mothers who were permanent drug users or who were HIV-positive. To be blunt, these are the children no one wants. No one even wants to see them. We don’t like to know that they exist. But they
do
exist, and they are human beings just like the rest of us, with the deep, human need to be loved, treasured, nurtured, taught, and valued.

“All of these children have been raised in foster homes under less than optimal conditions. There is never enough money to help these children. We have a small committee of generous patrons who financially support us so that we’re able to have an office with a paid secretary. Everyone else who works for MASCC is a volunteer. For eight years now, Kelly MacLeod has spent at least two nights a week helping with the legalities of running a nonprofit organization and preparing the necessary adoption papers.”

Adoption
.

In November of her senior year, Kelly had been summoned to Professor Hammond’s office
.

He had actually growled. “You haven’t applied to law school!”

“No.”

“Would you be kind enough to tell me why?”

“I can’t afford it.”

“So apply for a fellowship. Get a loan.”

“Professor Hammond, I wish I could, but I’m already deeply in debt. There have been some
 … 
changes
 … 
in my situation.” How, Kelly wondered, could the white-haired gentleman sitting before her in his beautiful, ancient tweeds, behind the magnificent desk he’d inherited from his father, comprehend her situation?

She needed to be clear. “I’ve had to get a loan to finish my senior year. I’m working every night as a waitress at Michael’s. I clean houses on weekends. And I can still barely pay the rent on my apartment and buy food and car insurance and gas and health insurance. Oh, yes, and I owe an oral surgeon over a thousand dollars for removing my wisdom teeth!”