by Jodi Picoult
“Why don’t we go up to your closet and find something?” Emma suggests, and we all trudge upstairs again, this time to Jacob’s room. I studiously avoid looking into the bathroom as we pass.
Although the police still have his fuming chamber as evidence, Jacob has configured a new one, an overturned planter. It’s not transparent, like his fish tank, but it must be getting the job done, because I can smell the glue. Emma throws open the closet door.
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. Chromatically ordered, Jacob’s clothes hang side by side, not quite touching. There are jeans and chinos in the blue area; and a rainbow of long- and short-sleeved tees. And yes, in its correct sequence, the lucky green sweatshirt. It looks like a Gay Pride shrine in there.
There is a fine line between looking insane in court and looking disrespectful. I take a deep breath, wondering how to explain this to a client who cannot think beyond the feeling of a placket of buttons on his skin. “Jacob,” I say, “you have to wear a shirt with a collar. And you have to wear a tie. I’m sorry, but none of this will work.”
“What does the way I look have to do with you telling the jury the truth?”
“Because they still see you,” I answer. “So you need to make a good first impression.”
He turns away. “They’re not going to like me anyway. Nobody ever does.”
He doesn’t say this in a way that suggests he feels sorry for himself. More like he’s just telling me a fact, relating the way the world works.
After Jacob leaves to clean up his mess, I remember that Emma’s in the room with me. “The bathroom. I . . . I don’t know what to say.” She sinks down onto Jacob’s bed. “He does this all the time—sets up scenes for me to solve. It’s what makes him happy.”
“Well, there’s a big difference between using a bottle of corn syrup to get your jollies and using a human being. I don’t need the jury to be wondering how far a leap there is from one to the other.”
“Are you nervous?” she asks, turning to face me.
I nod. I probably shouldn’t be admitting this to her, but I can’t help it.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I say. “Anything.”
“Do you believe he killed Jess?”
“I already told you that doesn’t matter to a jury—we’re utilizing the defense most likely to—”
“I’m not asking you as Jacob’s lawyer,” Emma interrupts. “I’m asking you as my friend.”
I draw in my breath. “I don’t know. If he did, I don’t believe it was intentional.”
She folds her arms. “I just keep thinking that if we could get the police to reopen the case, to look harder at Jess’s boyfriend—”
“The police,” I say, “think they’ve found their murderer, based on the evidence. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be going to court on Wednesday. The prosecutor thinks she’s got enough proof to make a jury see things her way. But Emma, I’m going to do everything I can to keep that from happening.”
“I have a confession to make,” Emma says. “When we saw Dr. Newcomb? I was supposed to meet with her for a half hour. I told Jacob that I’d be thirty minutes. And then I very intentionally kept talking for another fifteen. I wanted Jacob to get rattled, because I was late. I wanted him stimming by the time he met with her, so that she’d be able to write about all that behavior in the court report.” Emma’s eyes are dark and hollow. “What kind of mother does that?”
I look at her. “One who’s trying to save her son from going to prison.”
Emma shivers. She walks to the window, rubbing her arms, even though it is downright hot in the room. “I’ll find him a collared shirt,” she promises. “But you’ll have to get it on him.”
CASE 9: PAJAMA GAME
Early in the morning on February 17, 1970, the officers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, responded to a call from Army Doctor Jeffrey MacDonald. They arrived to find his pregnant wife, Colette, and two young daughters dead from multiple stab wounds. Colette had been stabbed thirty-seven times with a knife and an ice pick, and MacDonald’s torn pajama top was draped on top of her. On the headboard of the bed, in blood, was the word PIG. MacDonald himself was found with minor wounds, beside his wife. He said he’d been hurt by three males and a woman in a white hat who chanted, “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” When the men attacked him, MacDonald said that he pulled his pajama top over his head and used it to block the jabs of the ice pick. Eventually, he said, he was knocked unconscious.
The Army didn’t believe MacDonald. The living room, for example, didn’t show signs of a struggle, except for an overturned table and plant. Fibers from the torn pajama top were not found in the room where it was torn but rather in the bedrooms of his daughters. They theorized that MacDonald killed his wife and daughters and tried to cover up the murders by using articles about the Manson Family in a magazine that was found in the living room. The Army dropped the case because of the poor quality of the investigative techniques, and MacDonald was honorably discharged.
In 1979 MacDonald was tried in a civilian court. A forensic scientist testified that the doctor’s pajama top, which he said had been used to block his attackers, had forty-eight clean, cylindrical holes that were too tidy for a violent attack—to make a hole that shape, the top would have had to be immobile, something that was very unlikely if MacDonald was defending himself from someone trying to stab him. The scientist also showed how, by folding the top a certain way, those forty-eight holes could have been created by twenty-one jabs—the exact number of times Colette MacDonald had been stabbed with an ice pick. The holes lined up with the pattern of her wounds, indicating that the pajama top had been placed on her before she was stabbed and not used in self-defense by MacDonald. He was sentenced to life in prison for three murders and still maintains that he is innocent.
9
Theo
It isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled my brother into a coat and tie. “Jesus, Jacob, cut it out before you give me a black eye,” I mutter, holding his hands pinned over his head and straddling his body, which twists like a fish that’s suddenly found itself on a dock. My mother is working her hardest to make a knot in his tie, but Jacob’s thrashing so much that it’s practically a noose.
“Do you really need to button it?” I yell, but I doubt she can hear me. Jacob’s got us beat in sheer decibels. I bet the neighbors can hear him, and I wonder what they think. Probably that we’re sticking pins in his eyeballs.
My mother manages to fasten one of the tiny buttons on the oxford shirt collar before Jacob bites her hand. She makes a little squeak and jerks her fingers away from his neck, leaving one of the buttons still unfastened. “That’s good enough,” she says, just as Oliver arrives to pick us all up for the first day of the trial.
“I knocked,” he says, but obviously we wouldn’t have heard him downstairs.
“You’re early,” my mother answers. She is still wearing a bathrobe.
“Well, let’s see the finished product,” Oliver says, and my mom and I both step away from Jacob.
Oliver looks at him for one long moment. “What the hell is this?” he asks.
Okay, I’ll admit, Jacob’s not going to win any fashion awards, but he’s in a coat and tie, which were the criteria. He is wearing a polyester suit the color of an egg yolk that my mother found at a thrift store. A pale yellow shirt, with a stretchy golden knit tie.
“He looks like a pimp,” Oliver says.
My mother presses her lips together. “It’s Yellow Wednesday.”
“I don’t care if it’s polka-dot Sunday,” Oliver says. “And neither does anyone on that jury. That’s the kind of suit Elton John wears to a gig, Emma, not what a defendant wears to trial.”
“It was a compromise,” my mother insists.
Oliver runs a hand down his face. “Didn’t we talk about a blue blazer?”
“Fridays are blue days,” Jacob says. “I’m wearing one then.”
/> “And coincidentally you are also wearing it today,” Oliver replies. He glances at me. “I want you to help me, while your mother goes and gets dressed.”
“But—”
“Emma, I don’t have time to fight with you right now,” Oliver tells her.
My mother is planning to wear a very simple dark gray skirt with a blue sweater. I was here when Oliver went through her entire closet channeling his inner Heidi Klum and picked out what he said would be “dark and conservative.”
Angry, my mother huffs out of Jacob’s room. I fold my arms. “I just got him into those clothes. No way I’m getting him out of them.”
Oliver shrugs. “Jacob, take that off.”
“Gladly,” Jacob explodes, and he rips the clothes off his own body in seconds flat.
Oliver tackles him. “Get the pin-striped shirt and the blazer and the red tie,” he orders, squinting into Jacob’s open closet. The second I do, Jacob takes one look at the clothing—styles he hates, plus they’re the wrong color—and lets out a bloodcurdling scream.
“Holy shit,” Oliver murmurs.
I reach for Jacob’s hands and pin them over his head again. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I say.
* * *
The last time I had to dress my brother in a coat and tie we were headed to my grandfather’s funeral. My mother was not herself that day, which is maybe why Jacob didn’t put up as big a fight about the clothes as he did today. Neither of us owned a coat and tie, so my mother had borrowed them from a neighbor’s husband. We were younger then, and a man’s jacket fit neither of us. We sat on the side of the viewing room where the coffin was with our clothes swimming on us, as if we’d been bigger before our grief hit.
In reality, I didn’t know my grandfather very well. He’d been in a nursing home since my grandmother died, and my mom dragged us to visit him twice a year. It smelled like pee, and I used to get totally creeped out by the old people in their wheelchairs, whose skin seemed stretched too shiny and tight over bony knuckles and knees. The one good memory I had of my grandfather involved sitting on his lap when I was really little and having him pull a quarter out of my ear. His breath smelled like whiskey, and his white hair, when I touched it, was stiff as a Brillo pad.
But still, he was dead, and I thought I should feel something . . . because if I didn’t, that meant I was no better than Jacob.
My mother had, for the most part, left us to our own devices while she accepted the condolences of people whose names she didn’t even know. I sat next to Jacob, who was staring straight ahead at the casket. It was black and propped up on fancy sawhorses that were covered with red velvet drapes. “Jacob,” I whispered. “What do you think happens after?”
“After what?”
“After, you know. You die. Do you think you still get to go to heaven even if you never went to church?” I thought about this for a moment. “Do you think that you recognize people in heaven, or is it like moving to a new school and starting over?”
Jacob looked at me. “After you die, you decompose. Calliphoridae arrive on a body within minutes of death. The blowflies lay eggs in open wounds or natural orifices even before death, and their larvae hatch out in twenty-four hours. So even though maggots can’t live underground, the pupal cases might be buried alive with the corpse and do their work from inside the coffin.”
My jaw dropped.
“What?” Jacob challenged. “Did you really think embalming lasted forever?”
After that, I didn’t ask him any more questions.
* * *
Once Jacob has been forced into his new formal wear, I leave Oliver to deal with the fallout and go to my mother’s bedroom. She doesn’t answer when I knock, so I push the door open a little bit and peek inside. “In here,” she calls from her closet.
“Mom,” I say, and I sit down on her bed.
“Is Jacob dressed?” She pokes her head around the doorframe.
“Pretty much.” I pick at a thread on her quilt.
In all the years we have lived here, my mother has slept on the left side of the bed. You’d think by now she would have branched out and taken over the whole damn thing, but no. It’s like she’s still waiting for someone to crawl into the other side.
“Mom,” I repeat. “I have to talk to you.”
“Sure, baby. Shoot,” she says. And then, “Where the hell are my black heels?”
“It’s kind of important. It’s about Jacob.”
She steps out of the closet and sits down beside me on the bed. “Oh, Theo,” she sighs. “I’m scared, too.”
“It’s not that—”
“We’re going to do this the way we’ve done everything when it comes to Jacob,” she promises. “Together.”
She gives me a tight squeeze, which only makes me feel more miserable, because I know I’m not going to say what I want to say to her, what I need to say.
“How do I look?” she asks, drawing away from me.
For the first time, I notice what she’s wearing. Not the conservative skirt and blue sweater and pearls that Oliver picked out for her but instead, a totally out-of-season bright yellow sundress. She grins at me. “It’s Yellow Wednesday,” she says.
Jacob
The first job from which I was fired was a pet store. I will not give the name of the chain, because I’m not sure if that’s printable, and I have enough legal trouble to last me a lifetime right now. However, I will say—objectively—that I was the best employee they had and that, in spite of this, they still dismissed me.
Even though when someone bought a corgi puppy, I offered facts along with Puppy Chow. (It’s related to the dachshund! Its name is Welsh and means dwarf dog!)
Even though I didn’t steal from the cash register, like one of my coworkers.
Even though I didn’t tell on that coworker.
Even though I wasn’t rude to customers and never bitched when it was my turn to clean the public restrooms.
What my boss (Alan, who was nineteen and an extremely viable candidate for Proactiv) told me was that customers had complained because of my appearance.
No, I did not have snot running down my face. I wasn’t drooling. I didn’t wear my pants halfway to my knees, like the coworker I referenced above. All I did, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was refuse to wear the store uniform. It was a blue button-down shirt. I wore it on Fridays, but honestly, it was bad enough I had to deal with buttons—was I supposed to put up with wearing colors on their off days, too?
No one had complained, by the way. And it was easy to spot me as an employee because, even when I wasn’t wearing the uniform, I still wore a tag as big as a newborn’s head that read, HELLO MY NAME IS JACOB, CAN I HELP YOU?
The real reason I was fired was that, after several weeks of making excuses to Alan about why my uniform did not appear on my body unless I happened to be scheduled to work on a Friday, I finally told him that I was autistic and that I had a thing about clothing colors, not to mention buttons. So in spite of the fact that the puppies genuinely loved me, and that I sold more of them than any other person working here; in spite of the fact that even at the moment I was fired one of the employees was texting her boyfriend instead of ringing up a customer and another one was flirting with Steve in Amphibians—in spite of all these things, I was made a scapegoat because of my disability.
Yeah, I’m playing the Asperger’s card.
All I know is that before I told Alan I had AS he was willing to make excuses along with me, and afterward, he just wanted me gone.
This is the story of my life.
* * *
We ride to the courthouse in Oliver’s car. My mother is in the front seat, and Theo and I are in the back. I spend most of the trip looking at the things I took for granted, sights I hadn’t seen while I was cooped up under house arrest: the Colony diner, with its busted neon sign, advertising EAT AT THE COLON. The picture window of the pet store where I used to work, with a Gordian knot of puppies on view. The movie theat
er where I lost my first tooth and the cross on the side of the road where a teenager once died en route to school during an ice storm. The Restwood Bible Church billboard that reads, FREE COFFEE! ETERNAL LIFE! MEMBERSHIP HAS ITS PRIVILEGES!
“Okay,” Oliver says, after he pulls into a parking spot and turns off the ignition. “Here we go.”
I open my door and step out of the car, and suddenly there are a thousand sounds hitting me like arrows and so much light that everything goes white. I can’t hold my hands up to my eyes and my ears at the same time, and somewhere in between the screaming I can hear my name and my mother’s voice and Oliver’s. They multiply before my eyes, microphones like cancer cells, and they are coming closer.
Oliver: Shit—I should have thought of this . . .
Mom: Jacob, close your eyes, baby. Can you hear me? Theo? Have you got ahold of him?
And then there is a hand on my arm, but who can say if it belongs to my brother or to one of the strangers, the ones who want to cut my veins lengthwise and bleed me dry, the ones with headlight eyes and cavern mouths who want a piece of me to stick into their pockets and take away, until there’s nothing left.
I do what any ordinary person would do when faced with a horde of wild animals gnashing their teeth and wielding microphones: I run.
It feels fantastic.
Keep in mind I have been in a cage that’s twenty by forty feet, two stories high. I may not be as fast as I’d like to be, because I am wearing dress shoes and also I am a natural klutz, but I manage to get far enough away to not hear their voices anymore. I can’t hear anything, really, but the wind whistling in my ears and my breathing.
And then suddenly I’m knocked off my feet.
“Fuck it,” Oliver wheezes. “I’m getting too old for this.”
I can barely speak because he’s lying flat on my back. “You’re . . . twenty-eight . . .,” I grunt.
He rolls off me, and for a moment we are both sprawled on the pavement underneath a sign at a gas station. UNLEADED $2.69.