Small Great Things

by Jodi Picoult

  Yes, I hated that racist father for belittling me. Yes, I hated the hospital for sticking by his side. I don't know if that bled over into my ability to care for a patient. I can't tell you that for a moment, it didn't cross my mind. That I didn't look down at that innocent baby and think of the monster he would grow up to be.

  Does that make me the villain here? Or does that just make me human?

  And Kennedy. What I said wasn't in my mind, it was in my heart. I do not regret a syllable. Every time I think about what it felt like to be the one who walked out of that room--who had that privilege, for once--I feel dizzy, like I'm flying.

  When I hear steps outside, I fly to the door and open it, but it is not my son--just my sister. Adisa stands with her arms crossed. "Figured you'd be home," she says, pushing her way into my living room. "After that, I didn't imagine you'd be sticking around the courthouse."

  She makes herself comfortable, draping her coat over a kitchen chair, sitting down on the couch, putting her feet up on the coffee table.

  "Have you seen Edison? Is he with Tabari?" I ask.

  She shakes her head. "Tabari's home babysitting."

  "I'm worried, A."

  "About Edison?"

  "Among other things."

  Adisa pats the couch beside her. I sit down, and she reaches for my hand and squeezes it. "Edison's a smart boy. He'll wind up on his feet."

  I swallow. "Will you...watch him for me? Make sure that he doesn't just, you know, give up?"

  "If you making out your will, I always liked those black leather boots of yours." She shakes her head. "Ruth, relax."

  "I can't relax. I can't sit here and think that my son is going to throw away his whole future and it's my fault."

  She looks me in the eye. "Then you're just gonna have to make sure you're here to monitor him."

  But we both know that's not in my hands. Before I know it, I am bent at the waist, punched in the gut by a truth so raw and so frightening that I can't breathe: I have lost control of my future. And it's my own damn fault.

  I didn't play by the rules. I did what Kennedy told me not to. And now I'm paying the price for using my voice.

  Adisa's arm goes around me, pressing my face against her shoulder. It isn't until she does that that I realize I'm sobbing. "I'm scared," I gasp.

  "I know. But you always got me," Adisa vows. "I will bake you a cake with a file in it."

  That makes me hiccup on a laugh. "No you won't."

  "You're right," she says, reconsidering. "I can't bake for shit." Suddenly she pushes off the couch and reaches into the pocket of her coat. "I thought you should have this."

  I know by the smell--a hint of perfume, with the sharp scent of laundry soap--what she is giving me. Adisa tosses the coil of my mother's lucky scarf into my lap, where it unfurls like a rose. "You took this? I looked everywhere for it."

  "Yeah, because I figured you'd either take it for yourself or bury Mama in it, and she didn't need luck anymore, but God knows I do." Adisa shrugs. "And so do you."

  She sits down next to me again. This week her fingernails are bright yellow. Mine are chewed down to the flesh. She takes the scarf and wraps it around my neck, tucking in the ends the way I used to for Edison, her hands coming to rest on my shoulders. "There," she says, like I am ready to be sent into the storm.

  --

  AFTER MIDNIGHT, EDISON returns. He is wild-eyed and fidgety, his clothes damp with sweat. "Where have you been?" I demand.

  "Running." But who runs carrying a knapsack?

  "We have to talk..."

  "I have nothing to say to you," he tells me, and he slams the door to his bedroom.

  I know he must be disgusted by what he saw in me today: my anger, my admission that I am a liar. I walk up to the door, press my palms to the particleboard, ball my hand into a fist to knock, to force this conversation, but I can't. There is nothing left in me.

  I don't make up my bed; instead I fall asleep fitfully on the couch. I dream about Mama's funeral, again. This time, she is sitting beside me in the church, and we are the only people present. There is a coffin on the altar. It's a shame, isn't it? Mama says.

  I look at her, and then I look at the coffin. I cannot see over the lip. So I get to my feet heavily, only to realize that they are rooted to the church floor. Vines have grown up around the ankles, and through the wooden boards on the ground. I try to move, but I am bound.

  Straining in my shoes, I manage to peer over the edge of the open coffin so that I can see the deceased.

  From the neck down, it's a skeleton, flesh melted from the bones.

  From the neck up, it has my face.

  I wake up, my heart hammering, only to realize that the pounding is coming from somewhere else. Deja vu, I think, as I swivel toward the door, shaking from the force of the knocks. I leap up and reach the knob, and the moment I do, the door flies back on its hinges, nearly throwing me down in the process. But the police that flood my home push me out of the way. They dump out drawers, they knock over chairs. "Edison Jefferson?" one of them yells, and my son steps out, sleepy and tousled.

  He is immediately grabbed, handcuffed, dragged toward the door. "You're under arrest for a Class C felony hate crime," the officer says.

  What?

  "Edison," I cry. "Wait! This is a mistake!"

  Another cop comes out of Edison's bedroom carrying his knapsack, unzipped, in one hand, and a can of red spray paint in the other. "Bingo," he says.

  Edison turns toward me as best he can. "I'm sorry, Mama, I had to," he says, and then he is yanked out the door.

  "You have the right to remain silent..." I hear, and just as quickly as the police entered, they are gone.

  The stillness paralyzes me, presses in on my temples, my throat. I am suffocating, I am being crushed. I manage to scrabble my hands over the coffee table to find my cellphone, which is charging. Yanking it out of the wall, I dial, even though it is the middle of the night. "I need your help."

  Kennedy's voice is sure and strong, as if she's been expecting me. "What's wrong?" she asks.

  IT'S JUST AFTER 2:00 A.M. when my cellphone rings, and I see Ruth's name flash. Immediately I'm awake. Micah sits up, alert the way doctors always are, and I shake my head at him. I've got this.

  Fifteen minutes later, I pull up to the East End police department.

  I walk up to the desk sergeant as if I have every right to be there. "You brought in a kid named Edison Jefferson?" I ask. "What's the charge?"

  "Who are you?"

  "The family lawyer."

  Who was fired hours ago, I think silently. The officer narrows his eyes. "Kid didn't say anything about a lawyer."

  "He's seventeen," I point out. "He's probably too terrified to remember his own name. Look, let's not make this any harder than it has to be, okay?"

  "We got him on security cameras at the hospital, spray-painting the walls."

  Edison? Vandalizing? "You sure you have the right kid? He's an honor student. College-bound."

  "Security guards ID'd him. And we tagged him driving a car with out-of-date plates registered to Ruth Jefferson. To his front door."

  Oh. Crap.

  "He was painting swastikas, and wrote 'Die Nigger.' "

  "What?" I say, stunned.

  That means it's not just vandalism. It's a hate crime. But it doesn't make any sense. I open my purse, look at how much cash I have. "Okay, listen. Can you get him a special arraignment? I'll pay for the magistrate to come, so he can get out of here tonight."

  I am taken back to the holding cell, where Edison is sitting on the floor, his back to the wall, his knees hunched up to his chin. Tears lattice his cheeks. The minute he sees me he stands up and walks toward the bars. "What were you thinking?" I demand.

  He wipes his nose on his sleeve. "I wanted to help my mama."

  "What about getting your ass thrown in jail helps your mother right now?"

  "I wanted to get Turk Bauer in trouble. If it wasn't for him, none of thi
s ever would have happened. And after today, everyone was blaming her, and they should have been blaming him..." He looks up at me, his eyes red. "She's the victim here. How come nobody sees that?"

  "I will help you," I tell him. "But what you and I talk about is privileged information, which means you shouldn't tell your mother anything about it." What I'm thinking, though, is that Ruth will find out soon enough. Probably when she reads the front page of the damn paper. It's just too good: SON OF KILLER NURSE ARRESTED FOR HATE CRIME. "And for the love of God, don't say a word in front of the magistrate."

  Fifteen minutes later, the magistrate comes to the holding cell. Special arraignments are like magic tricks; all sorts of rules can be bent when you are willing to pay extra. There's an officer acting as prosecutor, and me, and Edison, and the judge-for-hire. Edison's charge is read, and his Miranda rights. "What's going on here?" the magistrate asks.

  I jump in. "Your Honor, this is a very unique circumstance, an isolated incident. Edison is a varsity athlete and an honor student who's never been in trouble before; his mother is on trial right now for negligent homicide, and he's frustrated. Emotions are running very high right now, and this was a hugely misguided attempt to support his mother."

  The magistrate looks at Edison. "Is that true, young man?"

  Edison looks at me, unsure if he should answer. I nod. "Yes, sir," he says quietly.

  "Edison Jefferson," the magistrate says, "you have been charged with a racially motived hate crime. This is a felony, and you'll be arraigned in court on Monday. You will not have to answer any questions, and you have the right to an attorney. If you can't afford an attorney, one will be appointed to you. I see that you have Ms. McQuarrie here on your behalf, and the case will be referred to the public defender's office formally in superior court. You cannot leave the state of Connecticut, and I have the obligation to advise you that if you are arrested for any other offense while this case is pending, you can be held at the state prison." He stares down Edison. "Stay out of trouble, boy."

  The whole thing takes an hour. We are both wide awake when we get into my car so that I can drive Edison home. The glow of the rearview mirror brackets my eyes as I steal glances at him in the passenger seat. He's holding one of Violet's toys--a little fairy with pink wings. It is impossibly tiny in his large hands. "What the fuck, Edison?" I say quietly. "People like Turk Bauer are horrible. Why are you stooping to that level?"

  "Why are you?" he asks, turning toward me. "You're pretending that what they do doesn't even matter. I sat through that whole trial; it barely even came up."

  "What barely came up?"

  "Racism," he says.

  I suck in my breath. "It may never have been explicitly discussed during the trial, but Turk Bauer was on full display--a museum-quality exhibit."

  He looks at me, one eyebrow cocked. "You really think Turk Bauer is the only person in that courtroom who's a racist?"

  We pull into a spot in front of Ruth's home. The light is on inside, buttery and warm. She throws open the front door and comes out onto the steps, pulling her cardigan more tightly around her body. "Thank the Lord," she murmurs, and she folds Edison into her embrace. "What happened?"

  Edison glances at me. "She told me not to tell you."

  Ruth snorts. "Yeah, she's good at that."

  "I spray-painted a swastika on the hospital. And...some other stuff."

  She holds him at arm's length, waiting.

  "I wrote 'Die Nigger,' " Edison murmurs.

  Ruth slaps him across the face. He reels back, holding his cheek. "You fool, why would you do that?"

  "I thought Turk Bauer would get blamed. I wanted people to stop saying awful things about you."

  Ruth closes her eyes for a moment, like she is fighting for control. "What happens now?"

  "He'll be arraigned in court on Monday. The press will probably be there," I say.

  "What am I going to do?" she asks.

  "You," I tell her, "are going to do nothing. I'll handle this."

  I see her fighting, struggling to accept this gift. "Okay," Ruth says.

  I notice that this whole time, she keeps contact with her son. Even after swatting him, her hand is on his arm, his shoulder, his back. When I drive away, they are still standing together on the porch, tangled in each other's regret.

  --

  BY THE TIME I get home, it is four in the morning. It seems stupid to crawl into bed, and anyway, I'm wired. I decide to clean up a little, and then to have a pancake breakfast waiting when Violet and Micah wake.

  It's inevitable that over the course of a trial, my home office becomes more and more cluttered. But Ruth's case, it's a done deal. So I tiptoe into the extra bedroom I use and begin to pack up the discovery into its boxes. I stack files and folders and notes I made on the evidence. I try to find Ground Zero.

  I accidentally bump a pile on the desk and knock it onto the floor. Picking up the pages, I scan the deposition from Brittany Bauer, which of course never came into play, and the photocopied results from the state laboratory that flagged Davis Bauer's metabolic disorder. It's a long, aggregate list of disorders. Most read normal, except of course the line for MCADD.

  I glance over the rest of the list, which I never really focused on before, because I'd grabbed the brass ring and run with it. Davis Bauer seemed to be a normal infant in all other regards, his testing standard.

  Then I turn the page over, and realize there's print on the back, too.

  There, in a sea of ordinary, is the word abnormal again. This one is much farther down the list of aggregated results--less important maybe, less threatening? I cross-reference the result with the lab tests that were included in the subpoena, a mess of lists of proteins I can't pronounce, and scraggly graphs of spectrometry I do not know how to read.

  I pause at a page that looks like a runny tie-dye. Electrophoresis, I read. Hemoglobinopathy. And at the bottom of the page, the results: HbAS/heterozygous.

  I sit down at my computer and plug the result into Google. If this is something else that was medically wrong with Davis Bauer, I can introduce it, even now. I can call for a new trial, because of new evidence.

  I can start over with a fresh jury.

  Generally benign carrier state, I read, my hopes falling. So much for another potential cause of natural death.

  Family to be tested/counseled.

  The hemoglobins are listed in the order of hemoglobin present (F>A>S). FA = normal. FAS = carrier, sickle-cell trait. FSA = sickle beta-plus thalassemia.

  Then I remember something Ivan said.

  I sink to the floor, reaching for the stack of deposition transcripts, and begin to read.

  Then, although it is only 4:30 A.M., I grab my phone and scroll through the history of incoming calls until I find the one I am looking for. "This is Kennedy McQuarrie," I say, when Wallace Mercy picks up, his voice thick with dreams. "And I need you."

  --

  ON MONDAY MORNING, the steps are crowded with cameras and reporters, many now from out of state, who have picked up the story of the black kid who wrote a racial slur against his own kind, the son of a nurse on trial just down the hall for killing a white supremacist's baby. Although I have prepared a song and dance for Howard in case my stay isn't granted, Judge Thunder shocks me once again by agreeing to delay closing arguments until 10:00 A.M. so I can act as Edison's attorney before I pick up again as Ruth's--even if only to be formally fired.

  The cameras follow us down the hallway, even though I tuck Ruth under one arm and instruct Howard to shield Edison. The entire arraignment takes less than five minutes. Edison is released on personal recognizance and a pretrial conference date is set. Then we dodge the press the whole way back.

  I have never been so delighted to return to Judge Thunder's courtroom, in which no cameras or press are allowed.

  We step inside and walk to the defense table, Edison slipping quietly into the row behind. But no sooner have we reached our spot than Ruth looks at me, frowning. "Wh
at are you doing?"

  I blink. "What?"

  "Just because you're representing Edison doesn't mean anything has changed," she replies.

  Before I can respond, the judge takes the bench. He looks from me--clearly in the middle of a charged conversation with my client--to Odette, across the room. "Are the parties ready to proceed?" he asks.

  "Your Honor?" Ruth says. "I would like to get rid of my lawyer."

  I am pretty sure Judge Thunder thought nothing else in this trial could surprise him, until this moment. "Ms. Jefferson? Why on earth would you want to discharge your lawyer when the defense has rested? All that's left is a closing argument."

  Ruth's jaw works. "It's personal, Your Honor."

  "I would strongly recommend otherwise, Ms. Jefferson. She knows the case, and contrary to all expectation, she has been very prepared. She has your best interests in mind. It is my job to run this trial, and to make sure it's no longer delayed. We have a jury sitting in the box that has heard all the evidence; we don't have time for you to go find another attorney, and you are not equipped to represent yourself." He faces me. "Unbelievably, I am granting you another half-hour recess, Ms. McQuarrie, so you and your client can make nice."

  I deputize Howard to stay with Edison so that the press can't get near him. Getting to our usual conference room will require running past the press, too, so instead I take Ruth out a back entrance and into the ladies' room. "Sorry," I say to a woman following us, and I lock the door behind us. Ruth leans against the bank of sinks and folds her arms.

  "I know you think nothing's changed, and maybe it hasn't for you. But for me, it has," I say. "I hear you, loud and clear. I may not deserve it, but I'm begging you to give me one last chance."

  "Why should I?" Ruth asks, a challenge.

  "Because I told you once I don't see color...and now, it's all I see."

  She starts for the door. "I don't need your pity."

  "You're right." I nod. "You need equity."

  Ruth stops walking, still facing away from me. "You mean equality," she corrects.

  "No, I mean equity. Equality is treating everyone the same. But equity is taking differences into account, so everyone has a chance to succeed." I look at her. "The first one sounds fair. The second one is fair. It's equal to give a printed test to two kids. But if one's blind and one's sighted, that's not true. You ought to give one a Braille test and one a printed test, which both cover the same material. All this time, I've been giving the jury a print test, because I didn't realize that they're blind. That I was blind. Please, Ruth. I think you'll like hearing what I have to say."