by Jodi Picoult
He raises his head and pushes his glasses up on his nose. “And so I reject the defendant’s insanity defense.”
A shuffling to my left, from Quentin Brown.
“However—”
Quentin stills.
“—in this state there is another reason to justify the act of murder—namely, if a defendant was under the influence of a reasonable fear or anger brought about by reasonable provocation. As a prosecutor, Nina Frost didn’t have reason to be fearful or angry the morning of October thirtieth . . . yet as Nathaniel’s mother, she did. Her son’s attempt to identify the victim, the wild card of the DNA evidence, and the defendant’s intimate knowledge of the treatment of a witness in the criminal justice system all add up, in this court’s opinion, to reasonable provocation under the law.”
I have stopped breathing. This cannot be true.
“Will the defendant please rise?”
It is not until Fisher grabs my arm and hauls me to my feet that I remember the judge means me. “Nina Frost, I find you Not Guilty of Murder. I do find you Guilty of Manslaughter pursuant to 17-A M.R.S.A. Section 203 (1)(B). Does the defendant wish to waive a presentence report and be sentenced today?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” Fisher murmurs.
The judge looks at me for the first time this morning. “I sentence you to twenty years in the Maine State Prison, with credit for the time you have already served.” He pauses. “The remainder of the twenty years will be suspended, and you’ll be on probation for that time. You need to check in with your probation officer before you leave court today, and then, Mrs. Frost, you are free to go.”
The courtroom erupts in a frenzy of flashbulbs and confusion. Fisher embraces me as I burst into tears, and Caleb leaps over the bar. “Nina?” he demands. “In English?”
“It’s . . . good.” I laugh up at him. “It’s great, Caleb.” The judge, in essence, has absolved me. I will never have to serve out my prison term, as long as I manage not to kill anyone again. Caleb grabs me and swings me around; over his shoulder I see Adrienne pump her fist in the air. Behind her is Patrick. He sits with his eyes closed, smiling. Even as I watch, they blink open to focus on me. Only you, Patrick mouths silently; words I will wonder about for years.
When the reporters run off to call their affiliates with the verdict and the crowd in the gallery thins, I notice one other man. Quentin Brown has gathered his files and his briefcase. He walks to the gate between our tables, stops, and turns to me. He inclines his head, and I nod back. Suddenly my arm is wrenched behind me, and I instinctively pull away, certain that someone who has not understood the judge’s verdict is about to put handcuffs on me again. “No,” I say, turning. “You don’t understand . . .” But then the bailiff unlocks the electronic bracelet on my wrist. It falls to the floor, ringing out my release.
When I look up again, Quentin is gone.
• • •
After a few weeks, the interviews stop. The eagle eye of the news refocuses on some other sordid story. A caravan of media vehicles snakes its way south, and we go back to what we used to be.
Well, most of us do.
Nathaniel is stronger every day; and Caleb has picked up a few new jobs. Patrick called me from Chicago, his halfway point to the West Coast. So far, he is the only one who has been brave enough to ask me how I will fill my days now that I am not a prosecutor.
It has been such a big part of me for so long that there’s no easy answer. Maybe I’ll write the book everyone seems to want me to write. Maybe I’ll give free legal advice to senior citizens at the town recreation hall. Maybe I will just stay at home and watch my son grow up.
I tap the envelope in my hand. It is from the Bar Disciplinary Committee, and it has been on the kitchen counter, unopened, for nearly two months. There’s no point in opening it now, either. I know what it will say.
Sitting down at the computer, I type a very concise note. I am voluntarily turning in my license; I no longer wish to practice law. Sincerely, Nina Frost.
I print it, and an envelope to match. Fold, lick, seal, stamp. Then I put on my boots and walk down the driveway to the mailbox.
“Okay,” I say out loud, after I put it inside and raise the red flag. “Okay,” I repeat, when what I really mean is, What do I do now?
• • •
There’s always one week in January that’s a thaw. Without warning, the temperature climbs to fifty degrees; the snow melts in puddles wide as a lake; people take to sitting on Adirondack chairs in their shorts, watching it all happen.
This year, however, the thaw’s gone on for a record number of days. It started the day of Nina’s release. That very afternoon, the town skating pond was closed due to spotty ice; by the end of the week teenagers were skateboarding down sidewalks; there was even word of a few crocuses pushing their way up through the inevitable mud. It has been good for business, that’s for sure—construction that couldn’t get done in the dead of winter has suddenly been given a reprieve. And it has also, for the first time Caleb can recall, made the sap run in the maple trees this early in the year.
Yesterday Caleb set up his taps and buckets; today, he is walking the perimeter of his property, collecting the sap. The sky seems crisp as a lancet, and Caleb has his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. The mud is a succubus, grabbing for his boots, but even that can’t slow him. Days like this, they just don’t come around often enough.
He pours the sap into huge vats. Forty gallons of this sweet juice will boil down to a single gallon of maple syrup. Caleb makes it right on the kitchen stove, in a spaghetti pot, straining each batch through a sieve before it thickens. For Nina and Nathaniel, it’s all about the end product—pouring it on pancakes and waffles. But to Caleb, the beauty is in the way you get there. The blood of a tree, a spout, and a bucket. Steam rising, the scent filling every corner of the house. There is nothing quite like it: knowing every breath you take is bound to be sweet.
• • •
Nathaniel is building a bridge, although it might turn out to be a tunnel. The cool thing about Legos is that you can change them right in the middle. Sometimes when he builds he pretends he is his father, and he does it with the same careful planning. And sometimes when he builds he pretends he is his mother, and takes a tower as high as it can go before it falls to the ground.
He has to work around the dog’s tail, because Mason happens to be sleeping right on the middle of his bedroom floor, but that’s all right too, because this could be a village with a monstrous beast. In fact, he might be creating the wicked awesome getaway boat.
But where will they all go? Nathaniel thinks for a minute, then lays down four greens and four reds, begins to build. He makes sturdy walls and wide windows. A level of a house, his father has told him, is called a story.
Nathaniel likes that. It makes him feel like maybe he is living between the covers of a book himself. Like maybe everyone in every home is sure to get a happy ending.
• • •
Laundry is always a good, mindless start. Ours seems to reproduce at the dank bottom of its bin, so that regardless of how careful we are with our clothes, there is always a full basket every other day. I fold the clean wash and carry it upstairs, putting Nathaniel’s items away before I tackle my own.
It is when I go to fold a pair of my jeans over a hanger that I see the duffel bag. Has it really been sitting here, shoved into the back of the closet, for two weeks? Caleb probably never even noticed; he has enough clothes in his drawers to have overlooked unpacking the bag he took with him to the motel. But seeing it is an eyesore; it reminds me of the moment he moved out.
I pull out a few long-sleeved shirts, some boxers. It is not until I toss them into the laundry bin that I realize my hand is sticky. I rub my fingers together, frown, pick up one shirt again and shake it out.
There is a big, green stain on one corner.
There are stains on some socks too. It looks as if something has spilled all over, but when I look in the bag, there’s no open bo
ttle of shampoo.
Then, it doesn’t smell like shampoo either. It is a scent I cannot place, exactly. Something industrial.
The last item in the bag is a pair of jeans. Out of habit, I reach into the pockets to make sure Caleb hasn’t left money or receipts inside.
In the left rear pocket is a five-dollar bill. And in the right rear pocket are boarding passes for two US Air flights: one from Boston to New Orleans, one from New Orleans to Boston, both dated January 3, 2002. The day after Nathaniel’s competency hearing.
Caleb’s voice comes from a few feet behind me. “I did what I had to do.”
Caleb is yelling at Nathaniel to stop playing with the antifreeze. “How many times do I have to tell you . . . It’s poison.” Mason, lapping at the puddle because it tastes so sweet; he does not know any better.
“The cat,” I whisper, turning to him. “The cat died too.”
“I know. I figure it got at the rest of the cocoa. Ethylene glycol is toxic . . . but it’s sweet enough.” He reaches for me, but I back away. “You told me his name. You said it wasn’t over yet. All I did,” Caleb says softly, “is finish what you started.”
“Don’t.” I hold up my hand. “Caleb, don’t tell me this.”
“You’re the only one I can tell.”
He is right, of course. As his wife, I am not obligated to testify against him. Not even if Gwynne is autopsied, and there are traces of poison in the tissues. Not even if evidence leads right to Caleb.
But then, I have spent three months learning the repercussions of taking the law into one’s own hands. I have watched my husband walk out the door—not because he was judging me, it turns out, but because he was trying himself. I have come so close to losing everything I ever wanted—a life I was too foolish to value until it was nearly taken away.
I stare at Caleb, waiting for an explanation.
Yet there are some feelings so far-flung and wide that words cannot cover them. As language fails Caleb, his eyes lock onto mine, and he spells out what he cannot speak. His hands come up to clasp each other tightly. To someone who does not know how to listen in a different way, it looks like he is praying for the best. But me, I know the sign for marriage.
It is all he needs to say to make me understand.
Suddenly Nathaniel bursts into our bedroom. “Mom, Dad!” he yells. “I made the coolest castle in the world. You have to see it.” He spins before he has even come to a complete stop, and runs back, expecting us to follow.
Caleb watches me. He cannot take the first step. After all, the only way to communicate is to find someone who can comprehend; the only way to be forgiven is to find someone who is willing to forgive. So I start for the door, turning back at the threshold. “Come on,” I say to Caleb. “He needs us.”
It happens when I am trying to come down the stairs superfast, my feet ahead of the rest of me. One of the steps just isn’t where it is supposed to be, and I fall really hard onto the railing where hands go. I hit the part of my arm that makes a corner, the part with the name that sounds just like what it is. L-bow.
The hurt feels like a shot, a needle going in right there and spreading out like fire under the rest of my arm. I can’t feel my fingers, and my hand goes wide. It hurts more than when I fell on the ice last year and my ankle got as fat as the rest of my leg. It hurts more than when I went over the handlebars of my bike and scraped up the whole front of my face and needed two stitches. It hurts so much that I have to get past the ouch of it before I can remember to cry.
“Mooooooooooom!”
When I yell like that, she can come quick as a ghost, the air empty one minute and full of her the next. “What hurts?” she cries. She touches all the places I am holding close to myself.
“I think I broke my funny bone,” I say.
“Hmm.” She moves that arm up and down. Again. Then she puts her hands on my shoulders and looks up at me. “Tell a joke.”
“Mom!”
“How else are we going to know for sure if it’s broken?”
I shake my head. “It doesn’t work that way.”
She picks me up and carries me into the kitchen. “Says who?” She laughs, and before I know it I am laughing back, which must mean I’m going to be okay after all.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Jodi Picoult
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Picoult, Jodi, 1966–
Perfect match / Jodi Picoult.
p. cm.
ISBN: 0-7434-1872-7
ISBN-13: 978-0-74342-280-2 (ebook)
1. Sexually abused children—Fiction. 2. Public prosecutors—Fiction. 3. Mothers and sons—Fiction. 4. Women murderers—Fiction. 5. Married women—Fiction. 6. Women lawyers—Fiction. 7. Maine—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3566.I372 P47 2002
813'54—dc21
2002016950
First Atria Books hardcover printing May 2002
ATRIA BOOKS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
CONTENTS
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Part Two
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Three
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Acknowledgments
Author’s Note
Bibliography
For Sammy, who is both a reader and a writer. I love you to the moon and back. XOXO, Mom
What if you slept?
And what if in your sleep, you dreamed?
And what if in your dream, you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful flower?
And what if, when you woke, you had the flower in your hand?
Ah! What then?
—SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE
PART ONE
2001
True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
—FRANÇOIS, DUC DE LA ROCHEFOUCAULD, MAXIM 76
ONE
Ross Wakeman succeeded the first time he killed himself, but not the second or the third.
He fell asleep at the wheel and drove his car off a bridge into a lake—that was the second time—and was found on the shore by rescuers. When his half-sunken Honda was recovered, the doors were all locked, and the tempered glass windows were shattered like spiderwebs, but still intact. No one could figure out how he’d gotten out of the car in the first place, much less survived a crash without even a scratch.
The third time, Ross was mugged in New York City. The thief took his wallet and beat him up, and then shot him in the back and left him for dead. The bullet—fired close enough to have shattered his scapula and punctured a lung—didn’t. Instead it miraculously stopped at the bone, a small nugget of lead that Ross now used as a keychain.
The first time was years ago, when Ross had found himself in the middle of an electrical storm. The lightning, a beautiful blue charge, had staggered out of the sky and gone straight for his heart. The doctors told him that he had been legally dead for seven minutes. They reasoned that the current could not have struck Ross directly, because 50,000 amperes of current in his chest cavity would have boiled the moisture in his cells and quite literally made him explode. Instead, the lightning had hit nearby and created an induced current in his own body, one still strong enough to disturb his cardiac rhythm. The doctors said he was one hell
of a lucky man.
They were wrong.
Now, as Ross walked up the pitched wet roof of the O’Donnells’ Oswego home in the dark, he did not even bother with caution. The wind coming off Lake Ontario was cold even in August, and whipped his long hair into his eyes as he maneuvered around the gabled window. The rain bit at the back of his neck as he worked the clamps onto the flashing and positioned the waterproof video camera so that it was pointing into the attic.
His boots slipped, dislodging some of the old shingles. On the ground, beneath an umbrella, O’Donnell squinted up at him. “Be careful,” the man called out. Ross also heard the words he did not say: We’ve got enough ghosts.
But nothing would happen to him. He would not trip; he wouldn’t fall. It was why he volunteered for the riskiest tasks; why he put himself into danger again and again. It was why he’d tried bungee jumping and rock climbing and crack cocaine. He waved down to Mr. O’Donnell, indicating that he’d heard. But just as Ross knew that in eight hours, the sun would come up—just as he knew that he’d have to go through the motions for another day—he also knew he couldn’t die, in spite of the fact that it was what he wanted, more than anything.
The baby woke Spencer Pike, and he struggled to a sitting position. In spite of the nightlights kept in every room at the Shady Pines Nursing Home—nearly enough combined wattage, he imagined, to illuminate all of Burlington, Vermont—Spencer couldn’t see past the foot of his bed. He couldn’t see anything these days, thanks to the cataracts; although sometimes he’d get up to take a leak, and in the mirror, as he passed by, he would catch a glimpse of someone watching him—someone whose brow was not spotted and yellow; someone whose skin was not sighing off his bones. But then the young man Spencer had once been would disappear, leaving him to stare at the crumbs that were left of his life.
His ears, though, were sharp. Unlike the other sorry old morons in this place, Spencer had never needed a hearing aid. Hell, he heard things that he didn’t even care to.