Chapter 19: The Guardianship Hearing
Family court is not like Judge Voss's courtroom. It is smaller, for one thing — a room built for twelve people and one grief at a time, with fluorescent lights that hum at a pitch just below hearing and chairs bolted in rows like a bus station to somewhere better. I have sat this year in rooms designed to end my life as I knew it. This one was designed to give it back. I took my seat at the little table with my folder on my knees and thought: this is the most beautiful room I have ever been in.
Hannah Doyle went first. She read her report the way she does everything — plain, thorough, and immune to decoration. Home study: completed and satisfactory. Employment: verified, thirty-eight hours a week at the thrift store, eighteen months under the same supervisor, who had written me a letter with the word reliable in it twice. Housing: a two-bedroom lease, eleven months remaining, rent current to the day. Support network: she named Rita and Hammer Kovich by name, and described the club, for the record, as "an established community organization providing material and supervisory support," which is the most elegant description of forty bikers the State of Montana has ever produced.
Then the exhibits. My lease. My pay stubs, six months of them, kept in a coffee can the way my father kept receipts — because my father kept receipts, and some inheritances are just habits with better handwriting. The judge turned every page like she intended to remember it. And the dismissal order, entered as an exhibit, one page long, Judge Voss's signature at the bottom and the words with prejudice sitting in the middle of it like a fence post. Kate had driven it over herself that morning. She is not my lawyer in this court. She came anyway, and sat behind me where I could feel her not worrying, which is a thing she does at a professional level.
The judge asked me her questions directly, the way Voss does, like weather arriving. Who takes Micah to school when my shift runs long. Rita, or the bus, which stops at the corner. What happens if the store cuts my hours. Then I pick up more, and the club's lawyer — there is one, a tired man in Missoula who does the club's paperwork — has already written the contingency into a letter, because Hammer thinks of everything except his own knee. What happens, she asked last, if it gets hard. "It gets hard at the Beemans' too," I said. "He just won't have to watch me pretend it isn't, from somebody else's house."
The Beemans testified after Hannah. Carol said they had loved having Micah in their home and intended to go on loving him at Sunday dinner, which was different, and better, and what the boy himself wanted. Tom Beeman is a man of about eleven words a day. He used six of them. "He asks for his sister," he said. "Daily."
Micah spoke to the judge in chambers, with Hannah in the room and a court reporter at her machine, the way it is properly done. I waited in the hallway and counted ceiling tiles. Sixty-four tiles, and one water stain shaped almost exactly like the state of Wyoming. I took it as a good sign and a poor geography education. When the door opened, Micah came out walking the way he walks when he has decided something: chin first, shoulders after. "I told her the truth," he reported, in the tone of a boy marking off a chore. "All of it. Even the part about the bike."
The family-court judge was younger than Voss and listened with her whole face. She did not make us wait. Emergency guardianship: granted, to me, effective Friday, with full review in ninety days. The conditions were read aloud and written down where I could keep them. Micah stays in his school. Counseling continues. The lease and my employment stay as represented. Hannah visits monthly, announced or not. "Any time," I said, out loud, on the record. "The door sticks a little. Knock twice." The judge smiled, and wrote it down, and I choose to believe she wrote it exactly as said.
On the courthouse steps, Micah hugged the Beemans first — hard, around the middle, the way a boy closes a door gently and means it — and Carol cried in the efficient way of a woman who has fostered nine children and knows that crying, too, runs on a schedule. Then he took my hand for the walk to the truck, which he had not done since he was seven years old, and he did not let go until the truck door. I drove us home at exactly the speed limit, with one page of paper on the seat between us that said, in the formal language of the State of Montana, that my brother was coming home to me.