16

JUDGE C. J. MABER

I remembered the case, although it never went to trial. It didn’t hurt that I’d had Barfoot in my courtroom before on two separate assault charges. He left an impression. A giant of a man with a vicious temper, who still managed to look sheepish in court. I didn’t bother to pull the file before I declined to rescind the no contact order.

When the letters started coming, I looked at the file to refresh my memory. I still wasn’t inclined to meet with Miss Quinn, but I knew from long experience that some people cannot be put off. Some of them will persist until I agree to meet with them.

Miss Quinn arrived at my chambers right on time, and I was glad to see she was a serious young woman. I had no patience with the weepers and the screamers. That kind of woman makes me ashamed of my own sex. Miss Quinn was poised and well-dressed, but I couldn’t have guessed her age if I hadn’t already known it. Because Barfoot pled out, I’d never laid eyes on the girl, never seen how small and delicate she was. Honestly, if I had, I would have sentenced Barfoot to more than ten years.

She took the chair I pointed her to and set down a briefcase, which invariably held a photo album, containing pictures meant to tug at my heartstrings.

“Miss Quinn, may I call you Wavonna?”

“Wavy,” she said.

“Wavy, then. May I ask you some questions?” I liked to get at the things it didn’t occur to them to tell me. Most of all, I liked to let them know that they were important to me. To let them know they had value that wasn’t connected to the man they loved. Some of them got impatient, wanting to get to the real matter, but for many of them, I was possibly the first person in authority who had ever really expressed interest in them. Wavy was neither impatient nor starved for attention. I asked her about whether she was in school or employed. Both.

“Astrophysics,” she said, when I asked what she was studying. A smart girl, then.

“I know you’ve come here today to try to convince me to rescind the no contact order I put in place at Mr. Barfoot’s sentencing, but your presence here is proof to me that it was the right thing then and is still the right thing.”

“It isn’t fair.” She didn’t quite interrupt me, but she snuck in those three words while I was taking a breath. “Keeping him away from me was supposed to protect me, but I don’t want to be protected. I love him and I’m being punished even though I didn’t do anything wrong.”

I was struck silent for a moment, not by her words, which I’d heard hundreds of times from hundreds of other women, but by the quality of her voice. Husky and incredibly quiet, but not shy. I could have cut her off at any moment, because that little speech took her half a dozen breaths.

She was quiet for a moment, uncrossing her legs and reaching for her briefcase. As I’d known she would, she sprang her heartbreaking photo album on me. Or at any rate, her heartbreaking photo. It was a picture of Mr. Barfoot, Wavy, and a little blond boy of five or six years. All three were smiling. Mr. Barfoot had taken the picture, holding the camera out in front of them. They looked happy, of course. Familial. That was the point of those pictures.

“This is my family. My little brother, Donal. Kellen. Not Barfoot. My real family. You can help put it back together,” Wavy said.

“I somehow expected more from a girl as bright as you obviously are.”

Her eyes narrowed, so that I could see I hadn’t rattled her so much as I had angered her.

“I cannot even begin to tell you how many women I see like you, Wavy. Women who have fallen in love and think that gives a man the right to do anything to them. Most of them are victims of domestic violence, which I realize was not the case for you. What Mr. Barfoot did to you, however, was equally as harmful, if not more so. These women come to me, sometimes after waiting for years for their husbands, boyfriends, fiancés, the fathers of their children, to get out of prison.

“They come to me and beg me to reunite them with this man they love. This man who has slapped them and punched them and kicked them and sometimes raped them. They blame his terrible childhood, or the drugs, or the alcohol, or another woman, or the war. They come to me with a photo album, just as you have, to show me pictures of happier times, and they ask me to make their family whole again. I am telling you this, because I want you to understand how many times I see this, because I think you’re smart enough to see the rationale behind my decision. To see that I did the right thing by protecting you. And not just when you were a child, but by protecting you from making a mistake now.”

“Were you there when my father did this?” She laid her finger to her bottom lip, where she had an old white scar.

“Of course, no, I wasn’t there to protect you from any injuries your father might have inflicted on you. That doesn’t negate—”

“Kellen protected me,” she said. They always had a story about some kind or generous thing he’d done for them.

“Look at you. You’re in your senior year of college, with the opportunity for a good, successful life ahead of you. If you return to Mr. Barfoot, who not only was willing to exploit you as a child, but who is a high school dropout with a criminal record full of assaults, what do you think will become of that opportunity?”

“He took me to school. For six years. Paid my school fees. Dropped me off. Picked me up. Six years. No one else cared. His money pays my tuition now. He gave me this opportunity,” she said.

“Miss Quinn, I need to get ready for court. I truly wish you the best. Even for Mr. Barfoot. But you would both be better served by focusing on your respective futures, rather than dwelling on the past.” Getting them to leave was always the hardest part. They didn’t want to give up. They wanted to fight. Maybe they thought that was what I wanted to see: proof of how much they loved this man who had hurt them. Wavy, however, stood and picked up her briefcase. As she was about to retrieve the photo she’d laid on my desk, she hesitated.