by Jodi Picoult
“Hey, after lunch I want to talk to you about what’s going to happen later this week when we—”
“Shh,” Jacob says. “The commercial’s over.”
I flip the page and see an entry that doesn’t have an episode number.
I start reading, and my jaw drops. “Oh, shit,” I say out loud.
* * *
A month ago, after the suppression hearing, I’d called Helen Sharp. “I think you need to give up,” I told her. “You can’t prove the case. We’re willing to take probation for five years.”
“I can win this without his police department confession,” she said. “I’ve got all the statements that were made at the house before Jacob was in custody; I have the forensic evidence at the scene and eyewitness evidence that goes to motive. I’ve got his history of violence, and I’ve got the defendant’s journals.”
At the time, I’d shrugged it off. Jacob’s journals were formulaic, and every other piece of evidence she listed was something I could excuse away on cross.
“We’re going forward,” Helen had said, and I’d thought, Good freaking luck.
Here’s what the journal says:
At Her House. 1/12/10.
Situation: Girl missing.
Evidence:
Clothes in pile on bed
Toothbrush missing, lip gloss missing
Victim’s purse and coat remain
Cell phone missing . . . cut screen . . . boot prints outside match up with boyfriend’s footwear.
“Jesus Christ, Jacob,” I explode, so loud that Emma comes running in from the laundry room. “You wrote about Jess in your CrimeBusters journals?”
He doesn’t respond, so I stand and turn off the TV.
“What do you mean?” Emma says.
I pass her the photocopy of the notebook. “What were you thinking?” I demand.
Jacob shrugs. “It was a crime scene,” he says simply.
“Do you have any idea what Helen Sharp is going to do with this?”
“No, and I don’t care,” Emma replies. “I want to know what you’re going to do about it.” She folds her arms and moves a step closer to Jacob.
“I don’t know, to be honest. Because after all the work we did to get the police station statement thrown out, this brings it all back in.”
Jacob repeats what I said, and then repeats it again: Brings it all back. Brings it all back. The first time I heard him do it, I thought he was mimicking me. Now I know it’s echolalia; Emma explained it to me as just the repetition of sounds. Sometimes Jacob does that by reciting movie quotes, and sometimes it’s an immediate parroting of something he’s heard.
I just hope no one hears him doing it in court, or they’ll assume he’s a wiseass.
“Bring it all back,” Jacob says again. “Bring what all back?”
“Something that’s going to make the jury assume you’re guilty.”
“But it’s a crime scene,” Jacob says again. “I just wrote down the evidence like usual.”
“It’s not a fictional crime scene,” I point out.
“Why not?” he asks. “I’m the one who created it.”
“Oh my God,” Emma chokes. “They’re going to think he’s a monster.”
I want to put my hand on her arm and tell her I will be able to keep that from happening, but I cannot make that kind of promise. Even having been with Jacob for the past month, like I have, there are still things he does that strike me as utterly chilling—like now, when his mother is hysterical and he turns away without registering any remorse and cranks up the volume on his TV show. Juries, which are supposed to be about reason, are actually always about the heart. A juror who watches Jacob stare blankly through the graphic testimony about Jess Ogilvy’s death will deliberate his fate with that image etched in her mind, and it cannot help but sway her decision.
I cannot change Jacob, which means I have to change the system. This is why I’ve filed a motion, and why we’re going to court tomorrow, although I haven’t yet broken the news to Emma yet.
“I need to tell you both something,” I say, as Emma’s watch begins to beep.
“Hold on,” she says, “I’m timing Theo on a math quiz.” She faces the kitchen. “Theo? Put your pencil down. Jacob, lower that volume. Theo? Did you hear me?”
When there’s no answer, Emma walks into the kitchen. She calls out again, and then I hear her footsteps overhead, in Theo’s room. A moment later, she is back in the living room, her voice wild. “He never did his math quiz. And his coat and sneakers and backpack are missing,” she says. “Theo’s gone.”
Theo
Let me just say that I think it’s pretty insane that a kid who’s fifteen, like me, can fly across the country without a parent. The hardest part was getting the ticket, which turned out to not be very hard at all. It was no secret that my mother keeps an emergency credit card buried in her file cabinet, and honestly, didn’t this count as an emergency? All I had to do was dig it out, get the number off the front and the PIN code on the back, and book my ticket on Orbitz.com.
I had a passport, too (we’d driven up to Canada once on a vacation that lasted approximately six hours, after Jacob refused to sleep in the motel room because it had an orange carpet), which was stored one file folder away from the emergency credit card. And getting to the airport was a piece of cake; it took two hitched rides, and that was that.
I wish I could tell you I had a plan, but I didn’t. All I knew was that, directly or indirectly, this was my fault. I hadn’t killed Jess Ogilvy, but I’d seen her the day she died, and I hadn’t told the police or my mother or anyone else—and now Jacob was going to be tried for murder. In my mind, it was like a chain reaction. If I hadn’t been breaking into houses at the time, if I hadn’t been in Jess’s, if I had never locked eyes with her—maybe that missing link would have broken the string of events that happened afterward. It was no great secret that my mother was totally freaking out about where the money would be coming from for Jacob’s trial; I figured that if I was ever going to remove my karmic debt, I might as well start by finding the solution to that problem.
Hence: this visit to my father.
On the plane, I am sitting between a businessman who’s trying to sleep and a woman who looks like a grandmother—she’s got short white hair and a light purple sweatshirt with a cat on it. The businessman is shifting in his seat because he’s got a kid behind him who keeps kicking it.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he says.
I’ve always wondered why people say that. Why the H? I mean, what if his middle name was Stanley?
“I’m stuck on the last one,” the grandma says.
I pull my iPod earphone free. “Sorry?”
“No, that doesn’t fit.” She is hunched over a crossword puzzle in the back of the US Airways magazine. It had been filled out halfway. I hate that; doesn’t the jerk who is sitting in the seat on the previous flight think someone else might want to try it on his own? “The clue is Regretted. And it’s four letters.”
Theo, I think.
Suddenly the businessman comes out of his seat and twists around. “Madam,” he says to the kid’s mom, “is there any chance you could keep your brat from being so incredibly rude?”
“That’s it,” the grandma says. “Rude!”
I watch her write it in pencil. “I, uh, think it’s spelled differently,” I suggest. “R-U-E-D.”
“Right,” she says, erasing it to make the correction. “I admit to being a horrendous speller.” She smiles at me. “Now, what’s bringing you out to sunny California?”
“I’m visiting someone.”
“Me, too. Someone I’ve never met—my first grandbaby.”
“Wow,” I say. “You must be pretty stoked.”
“If that’s a good thing, then yes, I guess I am. My name’s Edith.”
“I’m Paul.”
Okay, I don’t know where the lie came from. I shouldn’t have been surprised—after all, I’d hidden my involvement in
this whole nightmare for over a month now, and I was getting really good at pretending I wasn’t the same person I was back then. But once I made up the name, the rest kept coming. I was on school break. I was an only child. My parents were divorced (Ha! Not a lie!), and I was going to see my dad. We were planning on taking a college tour of Stanford.
At home, we don’t talk about my father. In world studies class we learned about indigenous cultures who no longer speak the names of the dead—well, we no longer say the name of the person who quit when the going got tough. I don’t really know the details of my parents’ split, except that I was still a baby when it happened, and so of course there’s a piece of me that thinks I must have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. But I do know that he tries to pay off his guilt by sending my mom a child support check every month. And I also know that he has replaced Jacob and me with two little girls who look like china dolls and who probably have never broken into a house or stimmed a day in their short lives. I know this because he sends us a Christmas card every year, which I throw out if I get to the mail before my mother does.
“Do you have brothers or sisters?” Edith asks.
I take a sip of the 7-Up I bought for three bucks. “Nope,” I say. “Only child.”
“Stop it,” the businessman says, and for one awful moment I think he’s going to tell this woman who I really am. Then he turns around in his seat. “For the love of God,” he says to the little kid’s mom.
“So, Paul,” Edith says, “what do you want to study at Stanford?”
I am fifteen, I have no idea what I want to do with my life. Except fix the mess I’ve made of it.
Instead of answering, I point down at her crossword puzzle. “Quito,” I say. “That’s the answer to forty-two across.”
She gets all excited and reads aloud the next clue. I think about how happy she’ll be if we finish this crossword puzzle. She’ll get off the plane and tell her son-in-law, or whoever is picking her up, about the nice young man she met. About how helpful I was. How proud my parents must be of me.
Jacob
My brother is not as smart as I am.
I am not saying this to be mean; I’m just stating a fact. For example, he has to study all his vocabulary words if he wants to do well on a test; I can look at the page and it’s stuck in my head for easy retrieval after that first glance. He would leave the room if two adults started discussing adult things, like current events; I would just pull up a chair and join the conversation. He doesn’t care about storing information away like a squirrel would save nuts for the winter; it’s only interesting to Theo if it has current real-life applications.
However, I am not nearly as intuitive as my brother. This is why when I begin to let some of that stored information bleed free—like for example how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak released the Apple I computer on April Fool’s Day 1976—and the person I am speaking with begins to go glassy-eyed and make excuses, I will keep talking, although Theo would easily read the clues and shut up.
Being a detective is all about intuition. Being a good crime scene investigator, however, requires great thoroughness and intelligence. Which is why, while my mother is rendered immobile by her panic over Theo’s disappearance and Oliver is doing stupid things like patting her shoulder, I go to Theo’s bedroom and get on his computer.
I am very good with computers. I once took my guidance counselor’s laptop apart and put it back together, motherboard and all. I could probably configure your wireless network in my sleep. Here is the other reason I like computers: when you are talking to someone online, you don’t have to read expressions on faces or interpret tones of voice. What you see is what you get, and that means I don’t have to try so hard when I interact. There are chat rooms and message boards for Aspies like me, but I don’t frequent them. One of the house rules in the family is to not go to websites my mother has not vetted. When I asked her why, she made me sit down with her and watch a television show about sexual predators. I tried to explain that the website I wanted to chat on wasn’t quite the same thing—that it was only a bunch of people like me trying to connect without all the bullshit that’s part of face-to-face meetings—but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. You don’t know what these people are like, Jacob, she said to me. In fact, I did. It was the people in the real world I didn’t understand.
It takes only a few clicks to delve into his cache—even though he thinks he’s emptied it, nothing is ever really gone on a computer—and to see where he was last surfing the Net. Orbitz.com, flights to San Jose.
When I bring downstairs the printout of the webpage that has his ticket information on it, Oliver is trying to convince my mother to call the police. “I can’t,” she says. “They won’t want to help me.”
“They don’t get to pick and choose their cases—”
“Mom,” I interrupt.
“Jacob, not now,” Oliver says.
“But—”
My mother looks at me and starts crying. I watch one tear make an S-curve down her cheek. “I want to talk to you,” I say.
“I’m getting the phone,” Oliver says.
“I’m dialing 911.”
“I know where Theo is,” I tell them.
My mother blinks. “You what?”
“It was on his computer.” I hand her the printed page.
“Oh my God,” my mother says, holding her hand up to her mouth. “He’s going to Henry’s.”
“Who’s Henry?” Oliver asks.
“My father,” I answer. “He walked out on us.”
Oliver takes a step backward and rubs his chin.
“He’s connecting in Chicago,” I add. “His plane leaves in fifteen minutes.”
“You can’t catch him before he takes off,” Oliver says. “Does Henry know? About Jacob?”
“Of course he knows about me. He sends checks every year for my birthday and Christmas.”
“I meant does Henry know about the murder charge?”
My mother looks down at the fault line between the cushions of the couch. “I don’t know. He might have read about it in the papers, but I didn’t talk to him about it,” she admits. “I didn’t know how to tell him.”
Oliver holds out the phone. “Now’s the time to figure that out,” he says.
I don’t like to think of Theo on a plane; I don’t like planes. I understand Bernoulli’s principle, but for the love of God, no matter how physical forces are being exerted on the wings for lift, the hardware weighs a million pounds. For all intents and purposes, it should fall out of the sky.
My mother takes the phone and starts to dial a long-distance number. It sounds like the notes of a game show theme song, but I can’t remember which one.
“Christ,” Oliver says. He looks at me.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond. “We’ll always have Paris,” I say.
* * *
When Theo was eight, he became convinced that there was a monster living underneath the house. He knew this because he could hear its breath every night when the radiators in his room hissed awake. I was eleven and very into dinosaurs at the time, and as thrilling as it was for me to assume that there might be a sauropod rooting around under the foundations of our house, I knew this was not likely:
1. Our house was built in 1973.
2. To build it, there would have been an excavation.
3. The probability of the world’s sole long-lost dinosaur surviving the excavation and residing beneath my basement floor would be pretty slim.
4. Even if it had survived, what the hell would it be eating?
“Grass clippings,” Theo said, when I told him all this. “Duh.”
One of the reasons I like having Asperger’s is that I don’t have an active imagination. To many—teachers and guidance counselors and shrinks included—this is a great detriment. To me, it’s a blessing. Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets
you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.
Like running into a hadrosaur on your way to the bathroom at 3:00 A.M.
Theo spent two weeks freaking out in the middle of the night when he heard the hiss from heating registers in his room. My mother tried everything—from warm milk before bedtime to an illustrated diagram of the heating system of the house to an unnecessary dose of children’s Benadryl at night to knock Theo out—but like clockwork, he’d start screaming in the middle of the night and would run out of his room and wake both of us.
It was getting old, frankly, which is why I did what I did.
After my mother tucked me in, I stayed up with a flashlight hidden under my pillow and read until I knew she had gone to bed, too. Then I took my pillow and blankets and sleeping bag and camped outside Theo’s bedroom door. That night, when he woke up screaming and tried to run to my mother’s room to wake her up, too, he tripped over me.
He blinked for a second, trying to figure out if he was dreaming. “Go back to bed,” I said. “There’s no stupid dinosaur.”
I could tell he didn’t believe me, so I added, “And if there is, he’ll kill me first before he gets to you.”
This actually worked. Theo crawled back into bed, and we both fell asleep again. My mother was the one who found me sprawled on the floor the next morning.
She panicked. Assuming I’d had some kind of seizure, she started shaking me. “Stop, Mom,” I finally said. “I’m fine!”
“What are you doing out here?”
“I was sleeping . . .”
“In the hallway?”
“Not the hallway,” I corrected. “In front of Theo’s room.”
“Oh, Jacob. You were trying to make him feel safe, weren’t you?” She threw her arms around me and held me so tight I thought I just might have a seizure after all. “I knew it,” she babbled. “I knew it! All those books; all those idiot doctors who said kids with Asperger’s have no theory of mind and can’t empathize . . . You do love your brother. You wanted to protect him.”