by Jodi Picoult
She is babbling, and I have no idea what the hell she is talking about. Although I did hear the word single. “I’m sorry, Ms. Hunt—”
“Emma.”
“Emma, then. I … have no idea what you’re talking about. I came because your son is tutored by Jess Ogilvy—”
“Oh,” she says, sobering. “I heard about Jess on the news. Her poor parents must be frantic. Are there any leads yet?”
“That’s why I’m here to speak to your son.”
Those eyes of hers darken. “You can’t possibly think Jacob had anything to do with her disappearance?”
“No, but he was the last appointment in her date book before she disappeared.”
She folds her arms. “Detective Matson, my son has Asperger’s syndrome.”
“Okay.” And I’m red-green color-blind. Whatever.
“It’s high-functioning autism. He doesn’t even know Jess is missing yet. He’s had a hard time lately, and the news could be devastating to him.”
“I can be sensitive about the subject.”
She measures me for a moment with her gaze. Then, turning, she heads into the house, expecting me to follow. “Jacob,” she calls as we reach the kitchen.
I stand in the entryway, waiting for a child to appear. After all, Jess Ogilvy is a teacher and Professor Gorgona referred to a boy she worked with. Instead, a behemoth teenager who’s taller than I am, and probably stronger, shuffles into the room. This is who Jess Ogilvy tutored? I stare at him for a second, trying to place the reason he looks so familiar out of context, and suddenly it comes to me: hypothermic man. This kid identified the cause of death before the medical examiner did.
“You?” I say. “You’re Jacob Hunt?”
Now his mother’s rushed apologies make sense. She probably thought I’d come to slap a fine on the kid, or arrest him for interfering with a crime scene.
“Jacob,” she says drily, “I think you’re already acquainted with Detective Matson.”
“Hi, Jacob.” I hold out a hand. “Nice to officially meet you.”
He doesn’t shake it. He doesn’t even look me in the eye. “I saw the article in the paper,” he says, his voice flat and robotic. “It was buried in the back. If you ask me, someone dying of hypothermia is worthy of at least page two.” He takes a step forward. “Did the full autopsy results come back? It would be interesting to know if the alcohol lowered the freezing point for the body, or if there’s not a significant change.”
“So, Jake,” I say.
“Jacob. My name is Jacob, not Jake.”
“Right, Jacob. I was hoping to ask you a few questions?”
“If they’re about forensics,” he says, growing animated, “then I am more than happy to help. Have you heard about the research coming out of Purdue, on desorption electrospray ionization? They found that the sweat from finger pores slightly corrodes metal surfaces—anything from a bullet to a piece of a bomb. If you spray the fingerprints with positively charged water, the droplets dissolve chemicals in the fingerprints and transfer minute amounts that can be analyzed by mass spectrometer. Can you imagine how handy it would be to not only get fingerprint images but also identify the chemicals in them? You could not only place a suspect at a crime scene but also get proof that he handled explosives.”
I look at Emma Hunt, begging for help. “Jacob, Detective Matson needs to talk to you about something else. You want to sit down for a minute?”
“A minute. Because it’s almost four-thirty.”
And what, I wonder, happens at 4:30? His mother doesn’t react at all to his comment. I feel a little like Alice in Wonderland, in the Disney video that Sasha likes to watch on her weekends with me, and everyone is in on the Unbirthday routine but me. Last time we’d watched it, I realized that being a parent wasn’t all that different. We’re always bluffing, pretending we know best, when most of the time we’re just praying we won’t screw up too badly.
“Well, then,” I say to Jacob. “I guess I’d better start.”
Emma
The only reason I let Rich Matson into my house is because I’m still not entirely sure that he doesn’t want to punish Jacob for showing up at his crime scene last weekend, and I will do whatever I have to do to make that whole nightmare go away.
“Jacob,” I say, “Detective Matson needs to talk to you about something else. You want to sit down for a minute?”
We are racing against a clock, not that Matson would understand. “A minute. Because it’s almost four-thirty,” Jacob tells me.
I don’t know how anyone could look at Jacob and think he’d be a viable witness. Sure, his mind is a steel trap. But half the time, there’s no lock to get inside it.
The detective sits at the kitchen table. I turn down the flame on the stove and then join him. Jacob is struggling to look in Matson’s direction, but his eyelids keep fluttering, as if he’s staring into the sun, and finally he gives up and lets his gaze slide away.
“You have a friend named Jess, right?” the detective asks.
“Yes.”
“What do you and Jess do together?”
“We practice social skills. Conversations. Good-byes. Things like that.” He hesitates. “She’s my best friend.”
This doesn’t surprise me. Jacob’s definition of a friend isn’t legitimate. To him, a friend might be the kid whose locker is next to his in school, who therefore has an interaction at least once a day to say, Could you move over? A friend is someone who he’s never met but who doesn’t actively taunt him in school. Jess may be paid by me to meet with Jacob, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that she honestly cares about him and connects with him.
The detective looks at Jacob, who, of course, is not looking at him. I watch people falter over that normal courtesy of communication all the time—after a while, it feels like staring, so they look away from Jacob, mirroring his behavior. Sure enough, after a moment, Matson stares down at the table as if there’s something fascinating in the wood grain. “Right now, Jacob, Jess is missing. And it’s my job to find her.”
I suck in my breath. “That’s what you call sensitive?”
But Jacob doesn’t seem to be surprised, which makes me wonder if he’s seen the news, or read about the disappearance in the papers or online. “Jess is gone,” he repeats.
The detective leans forward. “Were you supposed to meet with her last Tuesday?”
“Yes,” Jacob says. “At two thirty-five.”
“And did you?”
“No.”
Suddenly, Jacob’s breakdown makes perfect sense. To travel to Jess’s unfamiliar new residence—which already would have set off his alarm bells—and then to never have Jess show up … Well, talk about a perfect storm for an AS kid. “Oh, Jacob. Was that why you had a meltdown?”
“Meltdown?” Matson echoes.
I glance at him briefly. “When Jacob’s routine is disrupted, he gets very agitated. This was a double whammy, and by the time he came home—” I break off, suddenly remembering something else. “You walked home from Jess’s place? Alone?”
It isn’t that he wouldn’t know the way—Jacob is a veritable human GPS; he can take one look at a map and have it memorized. But knowing geography and knowing how to follow directions are two very different things. Getting from point A to point B to point C inevitably trips him up.
“Yes,” Jacob says. “It wasn’t so bad.”
It was nearly eight miles. In the freezing cold. I suppose I should consider us lucky: on top of everything else, Jacob could have wound up with pneumonia.
“How long did you wait for her?”
Jacob looks up at the clock. He starts rubbing the tips of his fingers against his thumbs, back and forth. “I have to go now.”
I notice the detective staring at Jacob as he fidgets, and I know damn well what he’s thinking. “I bet when you see someone who doesn’t make eye contact and who can’t sit still, you immediately assume guilt,” I say. “Me, I assume he’s on the spectr
um.”
“It’s four-thirty.” Jacob’s voice is louder, more urgent.
“You can go watch CrimeBusters,” I tell him, and he bolts into the living room.
The detective stares at me, dumbfounded. “Excuse me, I was in the middle of an interrogation.”
“I thought this wasn’t an interrogation.”
“A young girl’s life might be at stake, and you think it’s more important for your son to watch a television show?”
“Yes,” I snap.
“It doesn’t strike you as odd that your son isn’t upset by his tutor’s disappearance?”
“My son didn’t even get upset when his grandfather died,” I reply. “It was a forensics adventure for him. His feelings about Jess going missing will be determined only by how it affects him—which is the way he measures everything. When he realizes that his Sunday session with Jess might not take place, then he’ll get upset.”
The detective looks at me for a long moment. I think he’s going to give me a lecture about obstruction of justice, but instead, he tilts his head to one side, thoughtful. “That must be really hard on you.”
I don’t remember the last time anyone has said those words to me. I would not trade Jacob for the world—for his tenderness, his incredible brain, his devotion to following rules—but that doesn’t mean it’s been an easy ride. An ordinary mother doesn’t worry about whether her son being shunned at a school concert hurts him as much as it hurts me. An ordinary mother doesn’t call Green Mountain Power when the electricity goes out to say that one of the residents has a disability that requires immediate intervention—because missing CrimeBusters actually qualifies, when it comes to Jacob. An ordinary mother doesn’t lie awake at night wondering if Theo will ever accept his brother enough to watch over him when I’m gone.
“It’s my life,” I say, shrugging.
“Do you work outside the home?”
“Are you interviewing me, too?”
“Just making conversation until the commercial break,” he says, smiling.
Ignoring him, I stand up and stir the blueberries I am cooking down for tonight’s pie filling.
“Your son, he took us by surprise the other night,” Matson continues. “We’re not used to minors crashing our crime scenes.”
“Technically, he’s not a minor. He’s eighteen.”
“Well, he’s got more forensic scientific knowledge than guys I know who are four times his age.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“You’ve got pretty eyes,” the detective says.
Fumbling, I drop the spoon into the pot. “What did you just say?”
“You heard me,” Matson replies, and he walks into the living room to wait for the opening credits of CrimeBusters to finish.
Jacob
I have never been a big fan of I Love Lucy. That said, every time I see the episode when Lucy and Ethel are working at the candy factory and get behind on the packaging, it makes me laugh. The way they stuff the candy into their mouths and inside their uniforms—well, you know it’s going to end with Lucy wailing her famous wail.
Having Detective Matson ask me these questions makes me feel like Lucy at the candy factory. At first, I can keep up—especially after I realize that he is not angry at me for coming to the hypothermic man’s crime scene. But then it begins to get more complicated. The questions stack up like that candy, and I am still trying to wrap the last one when he sends the next one my way. All I want to do is take his words and stuff them somewhere where I don’t have to hear them anymore.
Detective Matson is standing in front of me as soon as the first commercial airs. It’s for Pedi Paws, a new incredible pet nail trimmer. That makes me think of the miniature poodle at the pizza place that we saw, and that makes me think of Jess, and that makes me feel like there’s a bird caught inside my rib cage.
What would he say if he knew that right now, in my pocket, is Jess’s pink cell phone?
“Just a couple more questions, Jacob,” he promises. “I’ll make sure I’m done in ninety seconds.”
He smiles, but it’s not because he’s happy. I had a biology teacher like that once. When I corrected Mr. Hubbard’s mistakes in class, he smiled with the left side of his mouth. I assumed that meant he was grateful. But that weird half smile apparently meant he was annoyed with me, even though if someone’s smiling it is supposed to signify that they’re cheerful. So I got sent to the principal’s office for my bad attitude when, really, it was just because the expressions on people’s faces are not always reflections of how they feel inside.
He glances at my notebook. “What’s that for?”
“I take notes on the episodes,” I tell him. “I have over a hundred.”
“Episodes?”
“Notebooks.”
He nods. “Was Mark at Jess’s place when you got there?”
“No.” Now, the commercial on television is for denture cream. Secretly I am very scared of losing all my teeth. Sometimes I dream about waking up and finding them rolling around on my tongue like marbles. I close my eyes so I don’t have to watch. “You know Mark?”
“We’ve met,” the detective says. “Did you and Jess ever talk about him?”
My eyes are still closed, so maybe that’s why I see what I do: Mark with his hand sliding up Jessica’s shirt at the pizza place. His hideous orange sweatshirt. The earring in his left ear. The bruises I saw once on Jessica’s side when she reached for a book on a high shelf, two uneven purple ovals like quality stamps on a cut of beef. She told me she’d fallen off a stepladder, but she looked away when she said it. And unlike me, who looks away out of comfort, she does it in moments of discomfort.
I see Mark smiling with only half his mouth, too.
Now the commercial is for Law & Order: SVU, a promo, which means that the next image on the screen will be CrimeBusters again. I pick up my pen and turn the page in my notebook.
“Did Jess and Mark fight?” the detective asks again.
On the TV, Rhianna is in the woods with Kurt, and they’re investigating a dead dog with a human finger found undigested in its stomach.
“Jacob?”
“Hasta la vista, baby,” I murmur, and I make up my mind that, no matter what this detective says to me, I’m not speaking again until my show is over.
Theo
So I’m headed downstairs to get something to eat when I hear a voice in the kitchen I do not recognize. This is pretty extraordinary—I’m not the only one who doesn’t have friends as a result of Jacob’s Asperger’s; I can probably count on one hand the number of people my mother has ever trusted enough to invite over. The fact that the voice is male is even more bizarre. And then I hear my mom refer to him as Detective Matson.
Holy crap.
I run back upstairs and lock myself in my room. He’s here because of Jess Ogilvy, and I’m officially freaked out.
And, for the record, still hungry.
Here’s what I know for sure: Jess was alive and well at about 1:00 P.M. on Tuesday. I know this because I saw her—all of her. Her tits, let me just say, rank right up there as masterworks of art.
I’d say we were equally surprised when she reached for her towel, wiped her eyes, and looked in the mirror. She certainly didn’t expect to find some random guy in her house, watching her naked. And I sure as hell didn’t expect the object of my momentary lust to be my brother’s tutor.
“Hey!” she yelled, and in one smooth move she grabbed the towel and wrapped it around herself. Me, meanwhile, I was totally paralyzed. I stood there like an idiot until I realized she was pissed and she was coming after me.
The only reason I got away is that the floor of the bathroom was wet. When she stumbled, I flew out of the master bedroom, where I’d been standing, down the stairs. In my hurry, I crashed into some of the furniture and knocked a whole mess of papers off the kitchen counter, but I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of that house and join a monastery or hop on a
plane to Micronesia—anything that would put me far away by the time Jess Ogilvy asked my brother and my mom whether they were aware that Theo Hunt was a Peeping Tom, a total perv.
But sometime between now and then, Jess Ogilvy got dressed, left her house, and vanished. Is she wandering around with amnesia? Or hiding out and plotting some kind of revenge scheme against me?
I don’t know.
I can’t tell the cops, though, without incriminating myself.
It’s just past five-thirty when I get the nerve to leave my bedroom. I can smell blueberry pie cooking (the only good thing about Blue Food Fridays, if you ask me) and know it will be ready at six—like everything else, we eat on a schedule to keep Jacob calm.
The door to his room is open, and he’s standing on his desk chair, slipping one of his CrimeBusters journals back into its predetermined spot on a shelf.
“Hey,” I say to him.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he sits down on the bed with his back to the wall and picks up a book on his nightstand.
“I saw that the cops were here.”
“Cop,” Jacob murmurs. “Singular.”
“What did he want to talk to you about?”
“Jess.”
“What did you tell him?”
Jacob draws his knees up to his chest. “If you build it, he will come.”
My brother may not communicate the way the rest of us do, but after all this time, I’ve learned to read him loud and clear. When he doesn’t feel like talking, he hides behind someone else’s words.
I sit beside him, just staring at the wall while he reads. I want to tell him that I saw Jess alive on Tuesday. I want to ask him if he did as well, and if that’s part of the reason he doesn’t want to talk to the police, either.
I wonder if he’s got something to hide, too.
For the first time in my life, Jacob and I just might have something in common.