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  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!”

  “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

  SUNDAY MORNING KELLY 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.