by Jodi Picoult
It falls in a great, clattering heap.
Monica looks so sad that for just the slightest moment, Nathaniel feels awful. “Oh,” she sighs. “Why’d you do that?”
Satisfaction curls the corners of his mouth, blooming from a root inside. But Nathaniel doesn’t tell her what he’s thinking: Because I could.
• • •
Joseph Toro looks nervous to be in a courtroom, and I can’t blame him. The last time I saw the man he was cowering beside the bench, covered with his own client’s blood and brain matter.
“Had you met with Glen Szyszynski before you came to court that day?” Quentin asks.
“Yes,” the attorney says timidly. “In jail, pending the arraignment.”
“What did he say about the alleged crime?”
“He categorically denied it.”
“Objection,” Fisher calls out. “Relevance?”
“Sustained.”
Quentin reconsiders. “What was Father Szyszynski’s demeanor the morning of October thirtieth?”
“Objection.” Fisher stands this time. “Same grounds.”
Judge Neal looks at the witness. “I’d like to hear this.”
“He was scared to death,” Toro murmurs. “He was resigned. Praying. He read to me aloud, from the book of Matthew. The part where Christ keeps saying ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’”
“What happened when they brought your client in?” Quentin asks.
“They walked him to the defense table where I was sitting.”
“And where was Mrs. Frost at the time?”
“Sitting behind us, and to the left.”
“Had you spoken with Mrs. Frost that morning?”
“No,” Toro answers. “I’d never even met her.”
“Did you notice anything unusual about her?”
“Objection,” Fisher says. “He didn’t know her, so how could he judge what was and wasn’t customary?”
“Overruled,” the judge answers.
Toro looks at me, a bird gathering courage to dart a glance at the cat sitting a few feet away. “There was something unusual. I was waiting for her to come in . . . because she was the mother of the alleged victim, of course . . . but she was late. Her husband was there, waiting . . . but Mrs. Frost almost missed the beginning of the arraignment. I thought of all days, it seemed very strange that on this one, she wouldn’t be on time.”
I listen to his testimony, but I am watching Quentin Brown. To a prosecutor, a defendant is nothing but a victory or a loss. They are not real people; they do not have lives that interest you beyond the crime that brought them into court. As I stare at him, Brown suddenly turns. His expression is cool, dispassionate—one I have cultivated in my repertoire as well. In fact I have had all the same training as him, but there is a gulf between us. This case is only his job, after all. But it is my future.
• • •
The Alfred courthouse is old, and the bathrooms are no exception. Caleb finishes up at the long trough of the urinal just as someone comes to stand beside him. He averts his eyes as the other man unzips, then steps back to wash his hands, and realizes it is Patrick.
When Patrick turns, he does a double-take. “Caleb?”
The bathroom is empty, save the two of them. Caleb folds his arms, waits for Patrick to soap his hands and dry them with a paper towel. He is waiting, and he doesn’t know why. He just understands that at this moment, he can’t leave yet, either.
“How is she today?” Patrick asks.
Caleb finds that he cannot answer, cannot force a single word out.
“It must be hell for her, sitting in there.”
“I know.” Caleb forces himself to look directly at Patrick, to make him understand this is not a casual reply, is not even a sequitur. “I know,” he repeats.
Patrick looks away, swallows. “Did she . . . did she tell you?”
“She didn’t have to.”
The only sound is the rush of water in the long urinal. “You want to hit me?” Patrick says after a moment. He splays his arms wide. “Go ahead. Hit me.”
Slowly, Caleb shakes his head. “I want to. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything as much. But I’m not going to, because it’s too fucking sad.” He takes a step toward Patrick, pointing his finger at the other man’s chest. “You moved back here to be near Nina. You’ve lived your whole life for a woman who doesn’t live hers for you. You waited until she was skating over a weak spot, and then you made sure you were the first thing she could grab onto.” He turns away. “I don’t have to hit you, Patrick. You’re already pathetic.”
Caleb walks toward the bathroom door but is stopped by Patrick’s voice. “Nina used to write me every other day. I was overseas, in the service, and that was the only thing I looked forward to.” He smiles faintly. “She told me when she met you. Told me where you took her on dates. But the time she told me that she’d climbed some mountain with you . . . that was when I knew I’d lost her.”
“Mount Katahdin? Nothing happened that day.”
“No. You just climbed it, and came down,” Patrick says. “Thing is, Nina’s terrified of heights. She gets so sick, sometimes, that she faints. But she loved you so much, she was willing to follow you anywhere. Even three thousand feet up.” He pushes away from the wall, approaching Caleb. “You know what’s pathetic? That you get to live with this . . . this goddess. That out of all the guys in the world, she picked you. You were handed this incredible gift, and you don’t even know it’s in front of you.”
Then Patrick pushes past Caleb, knocking him against the wall. He needs to get out of that bathroom, before he is foolish enough to reveal the whole of his heart.
• • •
Frankie Martine is a prosecutor’s witness—that is to say, she answers questions clearly and concisely, making science accessible to even the high school dropout on a jury. Quentin spends nearly an hour walking her through the mechanics of bone marrow transplants, and she manages to keep the jury’s interest. Then she segues into the mechanics of her day job—spinning out DNA. I once spent three days at the state lab with Frankie, in fact, getting her to show me how she does it. I wanted to know, so that I’d fully grasp the results that were sent to me.
Apparently, I didn’t learn enough.
“Your DNA is the same in every cell in your body,” Frankie explains. “That means if you take a blood sample from someone, the DNA in those blood cells will match the DNA in their skin cells, tissue cells, and bodily fluids like saliva and semen. That’s why Mr. Brown asked me to take DNA from Father Szyszynski’s blood sample and use it to see if it matched the DNA found in the semen on the underpants.”
“And did you do that?” Quentin asks.
“Yes, I did.”
He hands Frankie the lab report—the original one, which was left anonymously in my mailbox. “What were your findings?”
Unlike some of the other witnesses the prosecutor’s put on the stand, Frankie meets my eye. I don’t read sympathy there, but I don’t read disgust either. Then again, this is a woman who is faced daily with the forensic proof of what people are capable of doing to others in the name of love. “I determined that the chance of randomly selecting an unrelated individual from the population other than the suspect, whose DNA matched the semen DNA at all the locations we tested, was one in six billion.”
Quentin looks at the jury. “Six billion? Isn’t that the approximate population of the whole earth?”
“I believe so.”
“Well, what does all this have to do with bone marrow?”
Frankie shifts on her seat. “After I’d issued these results, the attorney general’s office asked me to research the findings in light of Father Szyszynski’s medical records. Seven years ago, he’d had a bone marrow transplant, which means, basically, that his blood was on long-term loan . . . borrowed from a donor. It also means that the DNA we got from that blood—the DNA that was typed to match the semen in the underwear—was not Father Szyszynski’s DNA, but rather h
is donor’s.” She looks at the jury, making sure they are nodding before she continues. “If we’d taken saliva from Father Szyszynski, or semen, or even skin—anything but his blood—it would have excluded him as a donor to the semen stain in the child’s underwear.”
Quentin lets this sink in. “Wait a second. You’re telling me that if someone has a bone marrow transplant, they’ve got two different types of DNA in their body?”
“Exactly. It’s extremely rare, which is why it’s the exception and not the rule, and why DNA testing is still the most accurate kind of evidentiary proof.” Frankie takes out another lab report, an updated one. “As you can see here, it’s possible to test someone who’s had a bone marrow transplant to prove that they’ve got two different profiles of DNA. We extract tooth pulp, which contains both tissue and blood cells. If someone’s had a bone marrow transplant, those tissue cells should show one profile of DNA, and the blood cells should show another.”
“Is that what you found when you extracted tooth pulp from Father Szyszynski?”
“Yes.”
Quentin shakes his head, feigning amazement. “So I guess Father Szyszynski was the one person in six billion whose DNA might match the DNA found in the underwear . . . but who wouldn’t have been the one to leave it there?”
Frankie folds the report and slips it into her case file. “That’s right,” she says.
• • •
“You’ve worked with Nina Frost on a few cases, haven’t you?” Fisher asks moments later.
“Yes,” Frankie replies. “I have.”
“She’s pretty thorough, isn’t she?”
“Yes. She’s one of the DAs who calls all the time, checking up on the results we fax in. She’s even come to the lab. A lot of the prosecutors don’t bother, but Nina really wanted to make sure she understood. She likes to follow through from beginning to end.”
Fisher slants a look my way. Tell me about it. But he says, “It’s very important for her to make sure that she has the facts straight, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“She isn’t someone who’d jump to a conclusion, or rely on something she was told without double-checking it?”
“Not that I’ve seen,” Frankie admits.
“When you issue your lab reports, Ms. Martine, you expect them to be accurate, don’t you?”
“Of course.”
“You issued a report, in fact, that said the chances of somebody other than Father Szyszynski contributing this semen to Nathaniel Frost’s underwear were less than one in the population of the whole earth?”
“Yes.”
“You never put anything in that report qualifying your results in the case that the suspect was a bone marrow transplant recipient, did you? Because that’s such a rare event that even you, as a scientist, would never assume it?”
“Statistics are statistics . . . an estimation.”
“But when you handed that initial report to the DA’s office, you were prepared to ask the prosecutor to rely on it?”
“Yes.”
“You were prepared to ask a jury of twelve people to rely on it as evidence to convict Father Szyszynski?”
“Yes,” Frankie says.
“You were prepared to ask the judge to rely on it when he sentenced Father Szyszynski?”
“Yes.”
“And you were prepared to ask Nina Frost, the child’s mother, to rely on it for closure and peace of mind?”
“Yes.”
Fisher turns to the witness. “Then is it any wonder in your mind, Ms. Martine, that she did?”
• • •
“Of course Quentin objected,” Fisher says, his mouth full of pepperoni pizza. “That’s not the point. The point is that I didn’t withdraw the question before I dismissed the witness. The jury’s going to notice that nuance.”
“You are giving far too much credit to a jury,” I argue. “I’m not saying the cross wasn’t fantastic, Fisher, it was. But . . . watch it, you’re going to get sauce on your tie.”
He looks down, then flips the tie over his shoulder and laughs. “You’re a riot, Nina. At what point during this trial do you think you might actually start to root for the defense?”
Never, I think. Maybe it is easier for Fisher, a defense attorney, to come up with rationalizations for why people do the things they do. After all, when you have to stand up next to felons on a daily basis and fight for their freedom, you either convince yourself they had some excuse for committing a crime . . . or you tell yourself this is nothing but a job, and if you lie on their behalf it’s all in the name of billable hours. After seven years as a prosecutor, the world looks very black and white. Granted, it was easy enough to persuade myself that I was morally righteous when I believed I’d killed a child molester. But to be absolved of murdering a man who was blameless—well, even Johnnie Cochran must have nightmares every now and then.
“Fisher?” I ask quietly. “Do you think I ought to be punished?”
He wipes his hands on a napkin. “Would I be here if I did?”
“For what you’re making, you’d probably stand in the middle of a gladiator’s ring.”
Smiling, he meets my eye. “Nina, relax. I will get you acquitted.”
But I shouldn’t be. The truth lies at the base of my stomach, even though I can’t say it aloud. What good is the legal process if people can decide their motives are bigger than the law? If you remove one brick from the foundation, how long before the whole system tumbles down?
Maybe I can be pardoned for wanting to protect my child, but there are plenty of parents who shelter their children without committing felonies. I can tell myself that I was only thinking of my son that day; that I was only acting like a good mother . . . but the truth is, I wasn’t. I was acting like a prosecutor, one who didn’t trust the court process when it became personally relevant. One who knew better than to do what I did. Which is exactly why I deserve to be convicted.
“If I can’t even forgive myself,” I say finally, “how are twelve other people going to do it?”
The door opens and Caleb enters. Suddenly the atmosphere is plucked tight as a bowstring. Fisher glances at me—he knows that Caleb and I have been estranged, lately—and then balls his napkin up and tosses it into the box. “Caleb! There’s a couple slices left.” He stands up. “I’m going to go take care . . . of that thing we were talking about,” Fisher says vacuously, and he gets out of the room while he can.
Caleb sits across from me. The clock on the wall, fast by five minutes, ticks as loud as my heart. “Hungry?” I ask.
He traces the sharp corner of the pizza box. “I’m starving,” Caleb answers.
But he makes no move to take one of the slices. Instead, we both watch as his fingers creep forward, as he clasps my hand between both of his. He scoots his chair closer and bows his head until it touches our joined fists. “Let’s start over,” he murmurs.
If I have gained anything over these months, it is the knowledge there is no starting over—only living with the mistakes you’ve made. But then, Caleb taught me long ago you can’t build anything without some sort of foundation. Maybe we learn to live our lives by understanding, firsthand, how not to live them.
“Let’s just pick up where we left off,” I reply, and I rest my cheek on the crown of Caleb’s head.
• • •
How far can a person go . . . and still live with himself?
It’s something that’s been haunting Patrick. There are certain acts for which you easily make excuses—killing during wartime; stealing food if you’re starving; lying to save your own life. But narrow the circumstances, bring them closer to home—and suddenly, the faith of a man who’s dedicated his life to morality gets seriously shaken. Patrick doesn’t blame Nina for shooting Glen Szyszynski, because at that moment she truly believed it was her only option. Likewise, he doesn’t consider making love with her on Christmas Eve to be wrong. He’d waited for Nina for years; when she finally was his—even for a nig
ht—the fact of her marriage to another man was inconsequential. Who was to say that the bond between Patrick and Nina was any less strong because there was no piece of paper sanctifying it?
Justification is a remarkable thing—takes all those solid lines and blurs them, so that honor becomes as supple as a willow, and ethics burst like soap bubbles.
If Nina chose to leave Caleb, Patrick would be at her side in an instant, and he could come up with a multitude of reasons to defend his behavior. Truth be told, it’s something he’s let himself consider in the soft gray moments before sleep comes. Hope is his balm for reality; if Patrick spreads it thick enough, sometimes he can even envision a life with her.
But then, there’s Nathaniel.
And that’s the point Patrick cannot get past. He can rationalize falling in love with Nina; he can even rationalize her falling in love with him. There’s nothing he would like more than to see Caleb gone from her life. But Caleb is not just Nina’s husband . . . he is also the father of her son. And Patrick could not bear knowing that he was responsible for ruining Nathaniel’s childhood. If Patrick did that after all that has happened, well . . . how could she ever love him?
Compared to a transgression of that size, what he is about to do seems insignificant.
He watches Quentin Brown from the witness box. The prosecutor is expecting this to go easily—just as easily as it did during the practice session. After all, Patrick is a law enforcement official, used to testifying. As far as Brown knows, despite his friendship with Nina, he’s on the side of the prosecution. “Were you assigned to work the Nathaniel Frost case?” Quentin asks.
“Yes.”
“How did the defendant react to your investigation of the case?”
Patrick can’t look at Nina, not yet. He doesn’t want to give himself away. “She was an incredibly concerned parent.”
This is not the answer they have rehearsed. Patrick watches Quentin do a double-take, then feed him the response he was supposed to give. “Did you ever see her lose her temper during the case?”
“At times she’d become distraught. Her child wasn’t speaking. She didn’t know what to do.” Patrick shrugs. “Who wouldn’t get frustrated in a situation like that?”