House Rules: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  The aide who staffs the room, Ms. Agworth, is also the Quiz Bowl teacher. Every day at 11:45 she leaves to make photocopies of whatever it is she’s using in Quiz Bowl later that day. For this very reason, I’ve made it a point to use my COP pass at 11:30 for the past two days. It gets me out of English, which is a blessing in disguise, since we are reading Flowers for Algernon and just last week a girl asked (not in a mean way but truly curious) whether there were any experiments under way that might cure people like me.

  Today, I enter the sensory break room and make a beeline for the Koosh balls. Holding one in each hand, I wrestle my way into the swing and pull the material closed around me. “Morning, Jacob,” Ms. Agworth says. “You need anything?”

  “Not right now,” I murmur.

  I don’t know why people with AS are so sensitive to things like texture and color and sound and light. When I don’t look someone in the eye, and when other people very pointedly look away from me so they don’t appear to be staring, I sometimes wonder if I even really exist. The items in this room are the sensory equivalent of the game Battleship. Instead of calling out coordinates—B-4, D-7—I call for another physical sensation. Each time I feel the weight of a blanket on my arm, or the pop of Bubble Wrap under my body when I roll on it, it’s a direct hit. And at the end of my sensory break, instead of sinking my battleship, I’ve just found a way to locate myself in the grid of this world.

  I close my eyes and slowly spin inside this dark, close ball. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” I murmur.

  “What’s that, Jacob?” Ms. Agworth says.

  “Nothing,” I shout. I wait until I’ve swung in three more slow pivots, and then I emerge.

  “How are you doing today?” she asks.

  It seems like a pretty gratuitous question, given the fact that I wouldn’t be in this room if I were able to tolerate sitting in class like neurotypical people. But when I don’t answer, she doesn’t pry. She just keeps reading her trivia books and jotting down notes.

  The largest fish in the world is a whale shark, at fifty feet.

  Four million marshmallow Peeps are made each day.

  (That sort of makes me wonder who on earth is buying them when it’s not Easter.)

  It takes the average adult man thirteen minutes to eat his dinner.

  “I’ve got one for you, Ms. Agworth,” I say. “The word ass is in the Bible 170 times.”

  “Thanks for that, Jacob, but it’s not really appropriate.” She shuffles her papers and looks down at her watch. “You think you’d be okay for a few minutes, if I ran down to the office to make some copies?”

  Technically, she is not supposed to leave me alone. And I know there are certain other autistic kids who use the sensory room that she’d never stop watching like a hawk—Mathilda, for example, would probably fashion a noose out of the rope on the swing; Charlie would start tearing the shelves off the walls. But me, I’m a pretty safe bet. “No problem, Ms. A,” I say.

  In fact, I am counting on it. And the moment the door closes behind her again, I pull the cell phone out of my pocket. As soon as I flip it open and press the power button, it lights up: little blue squares around each number, and a picture of Jess and Mark on the screen saver.

  I cover Mark’s face with my thumb.

  It’s Thursday, and today I’m allowed to call her. I already broke the rules and called her twice before from this phone—dialing her own cell number, even though I knew I would be automatically dumped into voice mail. Hey, so, this is Jess, and you know what to do.

  I am already starting to forget the notes in the song of her voice.

  Today, though, instead of hearing her message, I heard a tinny voice telling me that this wireless customer’s mailbox is full.

  I’m prepared for this. I have memorized the phone number she gave me a week ago, the one that belongs to the new house. I dial it, even though I have to do it twice because it’s unfamiliar and the numbers get tangled in my head.

  A machine picks up. Hey, this is Jess at the Robertsons’ house. They’re out of town, but you can leave a message for me!

  I hang up and dial it again.

  Hey, this is Jess at the Robertsons’ house.

  I wait till the beep, and then I hang up. I turn off the power button on the cell phone, too. Then I speak my message, the same words I say to her every Thursday: See you in three days.

  Emma

  By Thursday, Jacob looks like the old Jacob, but he still isn’t back to normal. I can tell by the way he’s distracted—I’ll set a full dinner plate down in front of him and he won’t eat until I remind him that it’s time to pick up his fork and dig in—and by the moments I catch him rocking or bouncing on the balls of his feet. His meds don’t seem to be helping. And I’ve heard from teachers at his school that he’s been spending nearly half the day in the sensory break room.

  I’ve called Jess Ogilvy twice, but her voice-mail box is full. I’m afraid to bring her name up to Jacob, but I don’t know what else to do. So after dinner on Thursday, I knock on the door of his bedroom and let myself inside. “Hi,” I say.

  He looks up from a book he is reading. “Hey.”

  It took me two years to realize that Jacob had not learned to read along with the rest of his kindergarten class. His teacher said he was among the most gifted language arts students, and sure enough, every night, he would pick out a book from a big basket in his room and read it aloud. But one day I realized that what everyone assumed was reading was actually just Jacob’s photographic memory. If he’d heard the book once, he could spit it back. Read this, I had said, handing him a Dr. Seuss book, and he’d opened it up and started the story. I’d stopped him, pointing to a letter.

  What’s that?

  A B.

  And what sound does a B make?

  He hesitated. Buzz, he said.

  Now, I sink down beside him on the bed. “How are you feeling?”

  “Interrupted,” Jacob says.

  I take the book out of his hands. “Can we talk?” He nods. “Did you and Jess have a fight on Tuesday?”

  “No.”

  “When you went to her house, she didn’t say anything to upset you?”

  He shakes his head. “No, she didn’t say anything.”

  “Well, I’m a little lost here, Jacob, since you came home from your tutoring session very upset … and I think there’s still something bothering you.”

  Here is the thing about Asperger’s syndrome: Jacob won’t lie. So when he says he didn’t have an argument with Jess, I believe him. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t traumatized by something else that relates to her. Maybe he walked in on her having sex with her boyfriend. Maybe he got freaked out by her new residence.

  Or maybe it has nothing to do with Jess, and he ran across an orange construction zone sign on the way home that required him to take a detour.

  I sigh. “You know that I’m here when you’re ready to talk about it. And Jess, too. She’s there if you need her.”

  “I’m going to see her again on Sunday.”

  “Same bat-time,” I say. “Same bat-channel.”

  I hand him back his book and realize that tucked beneath his arm is the old Jemima Puddle-Duck toy he used to carry as a child. Jacob carried her so fiercely that I had to sew a leopard cape onto her back because her fur kept rubbing bald. It was a ritual piece, according to Dr. Murano—something Jacob could hold to calm himself down. She described it as a way to reboot, to remind him that he’s all right. Over the years, Jemima was retired to make room for more discreet objects that could be tucked in his pockets: a photo-booth strip of the two of us, so folded and faded you could barely see our faces; a small green pebble a teacher brought him back from Montana; a piece of sea glass Theo gave him for Christmas one year. In fact, I haven’t seen this stuffed animal in ages; she’s been buried in his closet.

  It is hard to see your eighteen-year-old son clutching a stuffed toy. But that’s what autism is, a slippery slope.
One minute, you convince yourself that you are so far up that hill you can’t see the bottom anymore, and the next, it’s covered with black ice, and you are falling fast.

  * * *

  Auntie Em’s column, Thursday, January 14, Teen Edition:

  The best parenting advice I ever got was from a labor nurse who told me the following:

  1. After your baby gets here, the dog will just be a dog.

  2. The terrible twos last through age three.

  3. Never ask your child an open-ended question, such as “Do you want to go to bed now?” You won’t want to hear the answer, believe me. “Do you want me to carry you upstairs, or do you want to walk upstairs to go to bed?” That way, you get the outcome you want and they feel empowered.

  Now that my children are older, not much has changed.

  Except we do not have a dog.

  The terrible twos last through age eighteen.

  And questions still shouldn’t be open-ended, because you won’t get an answer to “Where were you last night till two A.M.?” or “How did you get a D on your math test?”

  There are two deductions you can glean from this. That parenting isn’t a noun but a verb—an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.

  I leave Jacob’s room, intending to watch the evening news. But when I reach the living room, Theo is tuned to some god-awful MTV show about spoiled girls who are shipped off to third-world countries by their parents to learn humility. “Don’t you have homework to do?” I ask.

  “Done.”

  “I want to watch the news.”

  “I was here first.”

  I stare as a girl shovels elephant dung into a large plastic bag in Burma. “Eeew,” she squeals, and I glance at Theo. “Please tell me you’d rather open your mind to current affairs than watch this.”

  “But I’m supposed to tell the truth,” Theo says, grinning. “House rules.”

  “Okay, let’s try this: if I watch this program with you, I might be suitably moved to send you to Burma to broaden your horizons by cleaning up elephant dung.”

  He tosses me the remote control. “That is such blackmail.”

  “And yet it worked,” I say, flipping the channel to a local broadcast. A man is shouting into a microphone. “All I know,” he cries, “is that it’s a crime for a local police department to sit on the disappearance of a young girl, instead of actively pursuing an investigation.”

  A white banner flashes beneath the face: STATE SENATOR CLAUDE OGILVY.

  “Hey,” Theo says. “Isn’t that the name—”

  “Ssh …”

  The reporter’s face fills the screen. “Townsend Police Chief Fred Huckins says that the disappearance of Jess Ogilvy is a priority and urges anyone with information to contact the department at 802-555-4490.”

  Then a picture of Jacob’s social skills tutor appears, with the phone number below it.

  Theo

  “Live from Townsend,” the reporter wraps up, “I’m Lucy McNeil.”

  I look at my mother. “That’s Jess,” I say, the obvious.

  “Oh my God,” she murmurs. “That poor girl.”

  I don’t understand. I totally don’t understand.

  My mother grabs my arm. “This information doesn’t leave this room,” she says.

  “You think Jacob isn’t going to find out? He reads the papers. He’s online.”

  She pinches the bridge of her nose. “He’s so fragile right now, Theo. I can’t throw this at him yet. Just give me a little while so I can figure out how.”

  I take the remote out of her hand and turn the TV off. Then, muttering some excuse about an essay, I run upstairs to my room and lock the door.

  I walk in circles, my arms braced behind my head, like I’m cooling off after running a marathon. I run through everything I heard that senator say, and the reporter. The police chief, for God’s sake, who said the disappearance is a priority.

  Whatever the fuck that means.

  I wonder if it will turn out to be a big hoax, like that college girl who vanished and later said she was abducted and it turned out that she was making the whole story up to get attention. I kind of hope that’s what happens, because the alternative is something I don’t want to think about.

  Here’s all I really need to know:

  Jess Ogilvy is missing, and I was one of the last people to see her.

  Rich

  On the answering machine at the Robertsons’ house, there are six messages. One is from Mark Maguire, asking Jess to call him when she gets back. One is from a dry cleaner, letting her know that her skirt is ready. One is identified by caller ID as E. Hunt. The message says, “Hi, Jess, this is Jacob’s mom. Can you give me a call?” The other three messages are hang-ups, and all three came from the number registered to Jess Ogilvy’s mobile phone.

  That tells me either she’s a battered woman in hiding, trying to get the nerve to call her boyfriend and failing, or her boyfriend is covering his ass after accidentally killing her.

  I spend Friday crossing off the names in Jess Ogilvy’s Day-Timer. My first call is to the two girls whose names pop up the most often in the history of months past. Alicia and Cara are grad students, like Jess. Alicia has cornrowed hair that hangs to her waist, and Cara is a tiny blonde wearing camouflage cargo pants and black work boots. Over coffee at the student center, they admit they haven’t seen Jess since Tuesday.

  “She missed an exam with the Gorgon,” Cara says. “Nobody misses an exam with the Gorgon.”

  “The Gorgon?”

  “Professor Gorgona,” she explains. “It’s a seminar course on special education.”

  GORGONA, I write in my notes. “Has Jess ever gone away for a few days before?”

  “Yeah—once,” Alicia says. “She went to Cape Cod for a long weekend and didn’t tell us beforehand.”

  “She went with Mark, though,” Cara adds, and she wrinkles her nose.

  “I take it you aren’t a fan of Mark Maguire?”

  “Is anyone?” Alicia says. “He doesn’t treat her right.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “If he says jump, she doesn’t even ask ‘How high?’ She goes out and buys a pogo stick.”

  “We haven’t seen a lot of her since they started hooking up,” Cara says. “Mark likes to keep her all to himself.”

  So do most abusive partners, I think.

  “Detective Matson?” Alicia asks. “She’s going to be okay, right?”

  A week ago, Jess Ogilvy was probably sitting here where I am, drinking coffee with her friends and freaking out about the Gorgon’s upcoming exam.

  “I hope so,” I say.

  People don’t just disappear. There’s always a reason, or an enemy with a grudge. There’s always a loose thread that starts to unravel.

  The problem is that Jess Ogilvy is, apparently, a saint.

  “I was surprised when she missed the exam,” Professor Gorgona says. A slight woman with a white bun and a trace of a foreign accent, she doesn’t seem nearly as threatening as Alicia and Cara made her out to be. “She’s my star student, really. She’s getting her master’s and writing an honors thesis at the same time. Graduated with a 4.0 from Bates and worked with Teach for America for two years before she decided to make a career out of it.”

  “Is there anyone who might be jealous of the fact that she does so well in class?” I ask.

  “Not that I’ve noticed,” the professor says.

  “Did she confide in you about any personal problems?”

  “I’m not exactly the warm and fuzzy type,” the professor says wryly. “Our communication was strictly adviser-advisee in an academic sense. The only extracurricular activities I even know she participated in are education-related: she organizes the Special Olympics here in town, and she tutors an autistic boy.” Suddenly the professor frowns. “Has anyone contacted him? He’ll have a hard time coping if Jess
doesn’t show up for her scheduled appointment. Changes in routine are very traumatic for kids like Jacob.”

  “Jacob?” I repeat, and I open the Day-Timer.

  This is the boy whose mother left a message on the answering machine at the professor’s house. The boy whose name is entered into Jess’s schedule on the day she disappeared.

  “Professor,” I say, “you wouldn’t happen to know where he lives?”

  Jacob Hunt and his family reside in a part of Townsend that’s a little more run-down than the rest of it—the part you have to work harder to find behind the picture-postcard town green and the stately New England antique homes. Their house is just beyond the condos that are filled with the recently separated and newly divorced, past the train tracks for an Amtrak route that’s long defunct.

  The woman who opens the door has a blue stain on her shirt and dark hair wound into a messy knot and the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They’re pale, like a lioness’s, nearly golden, but they also look like they’ve done their share of crying, and we all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn’t have any. I’d place her in her early forties. She’s holding a spoon, which is dribbling its contents onto the floor. “I don’t want any,” she says, starting to close the door.

  “I’m not selling anything,” I say. “You’re, um, dripping.”

  She glances down, and then sticks the spoon into her mouth.

  That’s when I remember why I’m here. I hold up my badge. “I’m Detective Rich Matson. Are you Jacob’s mother?”

  “Oh, God,” she says. “I thought he’d already called you to apologize.”

  “Apologize?”

  “It’s really not his fault,” she interjects. “Granted, I should have known that he was sneaking out, but with him, this hobby is almost a pathology. And if there’s any way I can convince you to keep this quiet—not a bribe, of course, just maybe a handshake agreement … You see, if it becomes public knowledge, then my career could really take a hit, and I’m a single mom who’s barely scraping by as is …”