House Rules

by Jodi Picoult

  He glances down at the page. --It says SOLVED: ME.||

  --Anything else notable about that line?||

  Matson looks at the jury. --It's underlined. Ten times.||

  Theo

  At dinner, I'm the one who sees my brother stealing the knife.

  I don't say anything at first. But it's perfectly clear to me, the way he pauses in the middle of his yellow rice and scrambled eggs to carve the kernels off an ear of corn--and then pushes the knife with his thumbs to the edge of the table, so that it falls into his lap.

  My mother yammers on about the trial--about the coffee machine at the courthouse which only dispenses cold coffee; about what Jacob is going to wear tomorrow; about the defense, which will present its case in the morning. I don't think either of us is listening, because Jacob is trying to not move his shoulders while he wraps the knife in a napkin and I am trying to study his every move.

  When he starts to get up from the table and my mother cuts him off with a sharp, forced cough, I am sure she's going to call him on his stolen cutlery. But instead, she says, --Aren't you forgetting something?||

  --May I be excused?|| Jacob mutters, and a minute later he's scraped his plate and heads upstairs.

  --I wonder what's the matter,|| my mother says. --He hardly ate.||

  I shovel the rest of my food into my mouth and then mumble a request to be excused. I hurry upstairs, but Jacob's not in his room. The bathroom door is wide open, too.

  It's like he's just vanished.

  I walk into my own bedroom, and all of a sudden I'm grabbed and pulled against the wall, and there's a knife at my throat.

  Okay, I'm just going to say it's pretty depressing that this is not the first time I've found myself in this scenario with my brother. I do what I know works: I bite his wrist.

  You'd think he'd see it coming, but he doesn't; the knife clatters to the floor, and I elbow him in his soft gut. He doubles over, grunting. --What the fuck are you doing?|| I yell.

  --Practicing.||

  I reach for the knife and stick it inside my desk drawer, the one I keep locked, where I've learned to keep the things I don't want Jacob to get. --Practicing murder?|| I say.

  --You crazy motherfucker. This is why you're going to get convicted.||

  --I wasn't going to actually hurt you.|| Jacob sits down heavily on my bed. --There was someone looking at me funny today.||

  --I'd think a lot of people in that courtroom were looking at you funny.||

  --But this one guy followed me to the bathroom. I have to be able to protect myself.||

  --Right. And what do you think is going to happen tomorrow morning when you walk into the courthouse and the metal detectors start beeping? And the stupid reporters all watch you pull a steak knife out of your sock?||

  He frowns. This is one of those harebrained Aspie schemes of his, the ones he never thinks through. Like when he called the cops on my mom two months ago. To Jacob, I'm sure it seemed perfectly logical. To the rest of the free world, not so much.

  --What if there's nothing wrong with me?|| Jacob says. --What if the reason I act like I do and think like I do is that I'm left out all the time? If I had friends, you know, maybe I wouldn't do things that look strange to everyone else. It's like bacteria that only grows in a vacuum. Maybe there's no such thing as Asperger's. Maybe all there is is what happens to you when you don't fit in.||

  --Don't go telling your lawyer that. He needs Asperger's to exist big-time right now.|| I look at Jacob's hands. His cuticles are bitten down to the skin; often he draws blood. My mother used to have to wrap Band-Aids around all his fingers before she sent him to school. Once, in the hallways, I heard two girls calling him the Mummy. --Hey, Jacob,|| I say quietly. --I'll tell you something no one else knows.||

  His hand flutters on his thigh. --A secret?||

  --Yeah. But you can't tell Mom.||

  I want to tell him. I've wanted to tell someone for so long now. But maybe Jacob is right: in the absence of having space in the world, the thing that's left behind just gets bigger and more unrecognizable. It swells in my throat; it steals all the air in the room. And suddenly, I'm blubbering like a baby; I'm wiping my eyes with my sleeves and trying to pretend that my brother isn't in court; my brother isn't going to jail; that this isn't karmic payment for all the bad things I've done and all the bad thoughts I've had.

  --I was there,|| I blurt out. --I was there the day Jess died.||

  Jacob doesn't look at me, and maybe that's easier. He flutters his hand a little faster and then brings it up to his throat. --I know,|| he says.

  My eyes widen. --You do?||

  --Of course I do. I saw your footprints.|| He stares just over my shoulder. --That's why I had to do it.||

  Oh my God. She told Jacob that I'd been spying on her naked and that she was going to go to the cops, and he shut her up. Now I'm sobbing; I can barely catch my breath.

  --I'm sorry.||

  He doesn't touch me or hug me or comfort me, the way my mom would. The way any other human would. Jacob just keeps fanning his fingers, and then he says I'm sorry I'm sorry like I did, an echo that's been stripped of its music, like rain on tin.

  It's prosody. It's part of Asperger's. When Jacob was little, he would repeat questions I asked and throw them back at me like a baseball pitch instead of answering. My mother told me this was like his movie quotes, a verbal stim. It was Jacob's way of feeling the words in his mouth when he had nothing to say in return.

  But all the same, I let myself pretend it's his robotic, monotone way of asking for my forgiveness, too.

  Jacob

  That day when we come home from court, instead of watching CrimeBusters, I choose a different video instead. It is a home movie of me when I was a baby, only one year old. It must be my birthday because there is a cake, and I am clapping and smiling and saying things like Mama and Dada and milk. Every time someone says my name I look up, right into the camera.

  I look normal.

  My parents are happy. My dad's there, and he's not even in any videos we have of Theo. My mother doesn't have the line between her eyes that she has now. Most people take home movies, after all, to capture something they want to remember, not a moment they'd rather forget.

  That's not the case later on in the video. All of a sudden, instead of sticking my fingers in a cake and offering up a big gummy smile, I'm rocking in front of the washing machine, watching the clothes turn in circles. I'm lying in front of the television, but instead of watching the programming, I'm lining up Lego pieces end to end. My father isn't in the film anymore; instead there are people I don't know--a woman with frizzy yellow hair and a sweatshirt with a cat on it who gets down on the floor with me and moves my head so that I focus on a puzzle she's set down. A lady with bright blue eyes is having a conversation with me, if you can call it that: Lady: Jacob, are you excited about going to the circus?

  Me: Yes.

  Lady: What do you want to see at the circus?

  Me: (No answer)

  Lady: Say, At the circus, I want to see ...

  Me: I want to see clowns.

  Lady (gives me an M&M): I love clowns. Are you excited about the circus?

  Me: Yeah, I want to see clowns.

  Lady (gives me three M&M's): Jacob, that's great!

  Me: (I stuff the M&M's into my mouth)

  These are the movies my mother took as evidence, as proof that I was now a different child than the one she'd started with. I don't know what she was thinking when she recorded them. Surely she didn't want to sit and watch all this over and over, the visual equivalent of a slap in the face. Maybe she was keeping them in the hope that one day a pharmaceutical executive might arrive unexpectedly for dinner, watch the tapes, and cut her a check for damages.

  As I'm watching, there's a sudden streak of silver static that makes me cover my ears, and then there's another segment of video. It's been accidentally taped over my Oscar-worthy autistic toddler film, and in it I am much older. It is only a y
ear ago, and I am getting ready for my junior prom.

  Jess took the video. She came over that afternoon while I was getting ready so that she could see the final result of our preparations. I can hear her voice. Jacob, she says, for God's sake, get closer to her. She's not going to bite you. The video swings like an amusement park ride, and I hear Jess's voice again. Oops, I suck at this.

  My mother has a camera and is taking a picture of me with my date. The girl's name is Amanda, and she goes to my school. She's wearing an orange dress, which is probably the reason I refuse to get closer to her, even though I usually do what Jess wants.

  On television, it's like I'm watching a make-believe show and Jacob isn't me, he's a character. It's not really me who closes his eyes when my mother tries to take a picture on the front lawn. It's not really me who walks to Amanda's car and sits in the back like I always do. Oh no, my mother's voice says, and Jess starts laughing. We totally forgot about that, she says.

  Suddenly the camera turns around fast, and Jess's face is fishbowl-close. Hello, world! she says, and she pretends to swallow the camera. She's smiling.

  Then there's a line of red that moves down the television screen like a curtain, and suddenly I am only three years old again and I am stacking a green block on top of a blue block on top of a yellow block, just like the therapist has shown me. Jacob! Good work! she says, and she pushes a toy truck toward me as a reward. I flip it over and spin its wheels.

  I want Jess to be on the screen again.

  --I wish I knew how to quit you,|| I whisper.

  Suddenly, my chest feels like it's shrinking, the way it sometimes does when I am standing with a group of kids in school and I realize I'm the only one who did not get the punch line of the joke. Or that I am the punch line of the joke.

  I start to think maybe I've done something wrong. Really wrong.

  Because I do not know how to fix it, I pick up the remote control and rewind the tape almost back to the beginning, to the time when I was no different from anyone else.

  Emma

  From Auntie Em's archives:

  Dear Auntie Em,

  How do I get a boy's attention? I am hopeless at flirting, and there are so many other girls out there who are prettier and smarter than I am. But I'm sick of never being noticed; maybe I can reinvent myself. What can I do?

  Baffled in Bennington

  Dear Baffled,

  You don't have to be anyone except who you already are. You just have to get a guy to take a second look. For this, there are two approaches:

  1. Stop waiting: take the initiative and go talk to him. Ask him if he got the answer to number 7 on your math homework. Tell him he did a great job in the school talent show.

  2. Start walking around naked.

  But it's your choice.

  Love,

  Auntie Em

  When I can't sleep, I pull a cardigan over my pajamas and sit outside on the porch steps and try to imagine the life I might have had.

  Henry and I would be waiting, with Jacob, for college acceptance letters. We might pop out a bottle of champagne and let him have a glass to celebrate once he made his choice. Theo would not hole himself up in his room doing his absolute best to pretend he doesn't belong to this family. Instead, he would sit at the kitchen table, doing crosswords in the daily paper. --Three letters,|| he'd say, and he'd read the clue. --Hope was often found here.|| And we'd all guess at the answer--God? Sky? Arkansas?--but Jacob would be the one to get it right: USO.

  Our boys would be listed on the honor roll quarterly. And people would stare at me when I went shopping for groceries, not because I was the mother of that autistic boy, or worse, the murderer, but because they wished they were as lucky as me.

  I don't believe in self-pity. I think it's for people who have too much time on their hands. Instead of dreaming of a miracle, you learn to make your own. But the universe has a way of punishing you for your deepest, darkest secrets; and as much as I love my son--as much as Jacob has been the star around which I've orbited--I've had my share of moments when I silently imagined the person I was supposed to be, the one who got lost, somehow, in the daily business of raising an autistic child.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Picture your life without Jacob, and it just may come true.

  I listened to the testimony today. And yes, as Oliver has said, it's not our turn yet.

  But I watched the faces of the jury as they stared at Jacob, and I saw the same expression I've seen a thousand times before. That mental distancing, that subtle acknowledgment that there is something wrong with that boy.

  Because he doesn't interact the way they do.

  Because he doesn't grieve the way they do.

  Because he doesn't move or speak the way they do.

  I fought so hard to have Jacob mainstreamed at school--not just so that he could see the way other kids behaved but because other kids needed to see him, and to learn that different isn't synonymous with bad. But I cannot say, honestly, that his classmates ever learned that lesson. They gave Jacob enough rope to hang himself in social situations, and then set the blame squarely on his shoulders.

  And now, after all that work to shoehorn him into an ordinary school setting, he is in a courtroom peppered with accommodations for his special needs. His only chance at acquittal hinges on his diagnosis on the spectrum. To insist that he is just like anyone else, at this moment, would be a sure prison sentence.

  After years of refusing to make excuses for Jacob's Asperger's, this is the only chance he has.

  And suddenly, I am running, as if my life depends on it.

  It's after 2:00 A.M. and the pizza parlor is dark, the Closed sign flipped on the door, but in the tiny window above, a light is burning. I open the door to the narrow staircase that leads to the law office, climb the steps, knock.

  Oliver answers, dressed in sweats and a T-shirt that has an old, faded picture of a man with furry, ursine arms. SUPPORT THE SECOND AMENDMENT, it reads. His eyes are bloodshot, and he has ink stains on his hands. --Emma,|| he says. --Is everything okay?||

  --No,|| I say, pushing past him. There are take-out containers on the floor, and an empty two-liter jug of Mountain Dew lies on its side. Thor, the dog, is asleep with his chin notched over the green plastic bottle. --No, everything's not okay.|| I face him again, my voice catching. --It's two in the morning. I'm in my pajamas. I just ran here--||

  --You ran here?||

  ----and my son's going to prison. So no, Oliver, everything is not okay.||

  --Jacob's going to get acquitted--||

  --Oliver,|| I say. --Tell me the truth.||

  He moves a stack of papers off the couch and sits down heavily. --You know why I'm awake at two in the morning? I'm trying to write my opening statement. Want to hear what I've got so far?|| He lifts up the paper he's holding. --Ladies and gentlemen, Jacob Hunt is ...|| He stops.

  --Is what?||

  --I don't know,|| Oliver says. He crumples it into a ball, and I know he's thinking of Jacob's meltdown, just like I am. --I don't fucking know. Jacob Hunt is saddled with an attorney who should have stayed a farrier, that's what. I shouldn't have said yes to you. I shouldn't have gone to the police station. I should have given you the name of some guy who can do criminal law in his sleep, instead of pretending a novice like me might have half a chance of pulling this off.||

  --If this is your way of trying to make me feel better, you're doing a really lousy job,|| I tell him.

  --I told you I suck at this.||

  --Well. At least now you're being honest.|| I sit down beside him on the couch.

  --You want honest?|| Oliver says. --I have no idea if that jury is going to buy the defense. I'm scared. Of losing, of the judge laughing me out of court as a total sham.||

  --I'm scared all the time,|| I admit. --Everyone thinks I'm the mother who never gives up; that I'd drag Jacob back from the edge of hell a hundred times if I had to. But some mornings I just want to pull the covers over my
head and stay in bed.||

  -- Most mornings I want to do that,|| Oliver says, and I swallow a smile.

  We are leaning against the back of the couch. The blue light from the streetlamps outside turns us both into ghosts. We aren't in this world anymore, just haunting its edges.

  --You want to hear something really sad?|| I whisper. --You're my best friend.||

  --You're right. That is really sad.|| Oliver grins.

  --That's not what I meant.||

  --Are we still playing True Confessions?|| he asks.

  --Is that what we're doing?||

  He reaches toward me and rubs a strand of my hair between his fingers. --I think you're beautiful,|| Oliver says. --Inside and out.||

  He leans forward the tiniest bit and breathes in, closing his eyes, before he lets the hair fall back against my cheek. I feel it inside me, as if I've been shocked.

  I don't pull away.

  I don't want to pull away.

  --I ... I don't know what to say,|| I stammer.

  Oliver's eyes light up. --Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,|| he quotes. He moves slowly, so that I know what's coming, and kisses me.

  I should be with Jacob, by court order. I am already breaking rules. What's one more?

  His teeth catch my lip. He tastes like sugar. --Jelly beans,|| he murmurs against my ear. --My biggest vice. After this.||

  I tangle my hands in his hair. It's thick and golden, wild. --Oliver,|| I gasp, as he slides his hands under my camisole. His fingers span my ribs. --I'm pretty sure you're not supposed to sleep with your clients.||

  --You're not my client,|| he says. --And I'm not nearly as attracted to Jacob.|| He peels back the cardigan I'm wearing; my skin burns. I cannot remember the last time someone treated me as if I were the hallowed museum piece that he had received permission to touch.

  Somehow we have inched ourselves down onto the couch. My head falls to the side, along with my best intentions, when his mouth closes over my breast. I find myself staring directly into Thor's eyes. --The dog ...||

  Oliver lifts his head. --Jesus,|| he says, and he stands up, grabbing Thor like a football in one arm. --You've got lousy timing.|| He opens a closet and tosses a handful of Milk-Bones on a pillow inside, then sets Thor down and closes the door.