The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Patrick knocked softly and stepped into the room. Josie stared at him blankly; the woman beside her turned around.

  Cormier, Patrick realized. As in Judge Cormier. He’d been called to testify in her courtroom a few times before she became a superior court judge; he’d gone to her for warrants as a last resort—after all, she came from a public defender’s background, which in Patrick’s mind meant that even if she now was scrupulously fair, she still had once played for the other side.

  “Your Honor,” he said. “I didn’t realize Josie was your daughter.” He approached the bed. “How are you doing?”

  Josie stared at him. “Do I know you?”

  “I’m the one who carried you out—” He stopped as the judge put her hand on his arm and drew him out of Josie’s range of hearing.

  “She doesn’t remember anything that happened,” the judge whispered. “She thinks for some reason that she was in a car accident . . . and I . . .” Her voice trailed off. “I haven’t been able to tell her the truth.”

  Patrick understood—when you loved someone, you didn’t want to be the one who brought their world crashing down. “Would you like me to do it?”

  The judge hesitated, and then nodded gratefully. Patrick faced Josie again. “You all right?”

  “My head hurts. The doctors said I have a concussion and have to stay overnight.” She looked up at him. “I guess I ought to thank you for rescuing me.” Suddenly, a flicker of intention crossed her face. “Do you know what happened to Matt? The guy who was in the car with me?”

  Patrick sat down on the edge of the hospital bed. “Josie,” he said gently, “you weren’t in a car accident. There was an incident at your school—a student came in and started shooting people.”

  Josie shook her head, trying to dislodge the words.

  “Matt was one of the victims.”

  Her eyes filled with tears. “Is he okay?”

  Patrick looked down at the soft waffle weave of the blanket between them. “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” Josie said. “No. You’re lying to me.” She struck out at Patrick, clipping him across the face and chest. The judge rushed forward, trying to hold her daughter back, but Josie was wild—shrieking, crying, clawing, drawing the attention of the nursing staff down the hall. Two of them flew into the room on white wings, shooing out Patrick and Judge Cormier, while they administered a sedative to Josie.

  In the hallway, Patrick leaned against the wall and closed his eyes. Jesus Christ. Was this what he’d have to put every one of his witnesses through? He was about to apologize to the judge for upsetting Josie when she turned on him just like her daughter had. “What the hell do you think you’re doing, telling her about Matt!”

  “You asked me to,” Patrick bristled.

  “To tell her about the school,” the judge qualified. “Not to tell her her boyfriend’s dead!”

  “You know damn well Josie would have found out sooner or—”

  “Later,” the judge interrupted. “Much later.”

  The nurses appeared in the doorway. “She’s sleeping now,” one of them whispered. “We’ll be back in to check on her.”

  They both waited until the nurses were out of hearing range. “Look,” Patrick said tightly. “Today I saw kids who’d been shot in the head, kids who will never walk again, kids who died because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Your daughter . . . she’s in shock . . . but she’s one of the lucky ones.”

  His words hit her, a solid slap. For just a moment, when Patrick looked at the judge, she no longer seemed furious. Her gray eyes were heavy with all the scenarios that, thankfully, had not come to pass; her mouth softened with relief. And then, just as suddenly, her features smoothed, impassive. “I’m sorry. I’m not usually like this. It’s just . . . been a really awful day.”

  Patrick tried, but he could see no trace left of the emotion that had, for a moment, broken her. Seamless. That’s what she was.

  “I know you were only trying to do your job,” the judge said.

  “I would like to talk to Josie . . . but that’s not why I came. I’m here because she was the first one . . . well, I just needed to know she was all right.” He offered Judge Cormier the smallest of smiles, the kind that can start a heart to breaking. “Take care of her,” Patrick said, and then he turned and walked down the hall, aware of the heat of her gaze on his back, and how much it felt like the touch of a hand.

  Twelve Years Before

  On his first day of kindergarten, Peter Houghton woke up at 4:32 a.m. He padded into his parents’ room and asked if it was time yet to take the school bus. For as long as he could remember, he’d watched his brother Joey get on the bus, and it was a mystery of dynamic proportion: the way the sun bounced off its snub yellow nose, the door that hinged like the jaw of a dragon, the dramatic sigh when it came to a stop. Peter had a Matchbox car that looked just like the bus Joey rode on twice a day—the same bus that now he was going to get to ride on, too.

  His mother told him to go back to sleep until it was morning, but he couldn’t. Instead, he got dressed in the special clothes his mother had bought for his first day of school and he lay back down in bed to wait. He was the first one downstairs for breakfast, and his mother made chocolate chip pancakes—his favorite. She kissed him on the cheek and took a picture of him sitting at the breakfast table, and then another one when he was dressed in his coat and had his empty knapsack on his back, like the shell of a turtle. “I can’t believe my baby is going to school,” his mother said.

  Joey, who was in first grade this year, told him to stop acting stupid. “It’s just school,” he said. “Big deal.”

  Peter’s mother finished buttoning his coat. “It was a big deal to you once, too,” she said. Then she told Peter she had a surprise for him. She went into the kitchen and reappeared with a Superman lunch box. Superman was reaching forward, as if he were trying to break out of the metal. His whole body stuck out from the background the tiniest bit, like the letters on books blind people read. Peter liked thinking that even if he couldn’t see, he would be able to tell that this was his lunch box. He took it from his mother and hugged her. He heard the thud of a piece of fruit rolling, the crinkle of wax paper, and he imagined the insides of his lunch, like mysterious organs.

  They waited at the end of the driveway, and just as Peter had dreamed over and over, the yellow bus rose over the crest of the hill. “One more!” his mother called, and she took a picture of Peter with the bus groaning to a stop behind him. “Joey,” she instructed, “take care of your brother.” Then she kissed Peter on the forehead. “My big boy,” she said, and her mouth pinched tight, the way it did when she was trying not to cry.

  Suddenly Peter felt his stomach turn to ice. What if kindergarten was not as great as he’d imagined? What if his teacher looked like the witch on that TV program that gave him nightmares sometimes? What if he forgot which direction the letter E went and everyone made fun of him?

  With hesitation, he climbed the steps of the school bus. The driver wore an army jacket and had two teeth missing in the front. “There’s seats in back,” he said, and Peter headed down the aisle, looking for Joey.

  His brother was sitting next to a boy Peter didn’t know. Joey glanced at him as he walked by, but didn’t say anything.

  “Peter!”

  He turned and saw Josie patting the empty seat next to her. She had her dark hair in pigtails and was wearing a skirt, even though she hated skirts. “I saved it for you,” Josie said.

  He sat down next to her, feeling better already. He was riding inside a bus. And he was sitting next to his best friend in the whole world. “Cool lunch box,” Josie said.

  He held it up, to show her the way that you could make Superman look like he was moving if you wiggled it, and just then a hand reached across the aisle. A boy with ape arms and a backward baseball cap grabbed the lunch box out of Peter’s grasp. “Hey, freak,” he said, “you want to see Superman fly?”

 
Before Peter understood what the older boy was doing, he opened a window and hurled Peter’s lunch box out of it. Peter stood up, craning his neck around to see out the rear emergency door. His lunch box burst open on the asphalt. His apple rolled across the dotted yellow line of the road and vanished beneath the tire of an oncoming car.

  “Sit down!” the bus driver yelled.

  Peter sank back into his seat. His face felt cold, but his ears were burning. He could hear the boy and his friends laughing, as loud as if it were happening in his own head. Then he felt Josie’s hand slide into his. “I’ve got peanut butter,” she whispered. “We can share.”

  * * *

  Alex sat in the conference room at the jail, across from her newest client, Linus Froom. This morning, at 4:00 a.m., he’d dressed in black, pulled a ski mask over his head, and robbed an Irving gas station convenience store at gunpoint. When the police were called in after Linus ran off, they found a cell phone on the ground. It rang while the detective was sitting at his desk. “Dude,” the caller said. “This is my cell phone. Do you have it?” The detective said yes, and asked where he’d lost it. “At the Irving station, man. I was there, like, a half hour ago.” The detective suggested that they meet at the corner of Route 10 and Route 25A; he’d bring the cell phone.

  Needless to say, Linus Froom showed up, and was arrested for robbery.

  Alex looked at her client across the scarred table. Her daughter was at this moment having juice and cookies or story time or Advanced Crayoning or whatever else the first day of kindergarten consisted of, and she was stuck in a conference room at the county jail with a criminal too stupid to even be good at his craft. “It says here,” Alex said, perusing the police report, “that there was some contention when Detective Chisholm read you your rights?”

  Linus lifted his gaze. He was a kid—only nineteen—with acne and a unibrow. “He thought I was dumb as shit.”

  “He said this to you?”

  “He asked me if I could read.”

  All cops did; they were supposed to have the perp follow along with the Miranda rights. “And your response, apparently, was, ‘Hello, fucko, do I look like a moron?’”

  Linus shrugged. “What was I supposed to say?”

  Alex pinched the bridge of her nose. Her days in the public defender’s office were an exhausting blur of moments like this: a great amount of energy and time expended on behalf of someone who—a week, a month, a year later—would wind up sitting across from her again. And yet, what else was she qualified to do? This was the world she had chosen to inhabit.

  Her beeper went off. Glancing at the number, she silenced it. “Linus, I think we’re going to have to plead this one out.”

  She left Linus in the hands of a detention officer and ducked into the office of a secretary at the jail in order to borrow her phone. “Thank God,” Alex said when the person picked up on the other end. “You saved me from jumping out a second-story window at the jail.”

  “You forgot, there are bars,” Whit Hobart said, laughing. “I used to think maybe they’d been installed not to keep the prisoners in, but to prevent their public defenders from running away when they realize how bad their cases are.”

  Whit had been Alex’s boss when she’d joined the NH public defender’s office, but he had retired nine months ago. A legend in his own right, Whit had become the father she’d never had—one who, unlike her own, had praise for her instead of criticism. She wished Whit were here, now, instead of in some golf community on the seacoast. He’d take her out to lunch and tell her stories that made her realize every public defender had clients—and cases—like Linus. And then he’d somehow leave her with the bill and a renewed drive to get up and fight all over again.

  “What are you doing up?” Alex said. “Early tee time?”

  “Nah, damn gardener woke me with the leaf blower. What am I missing?”

  “Nothing, really. Except the office isn’t the same without you. There’s a certain . . . energy missing.”

  “Energy? You’re not becoming some New Age crystal-reading hack, are you, Al?”

  Alex grinned. “No—”

  “Good. Because that’s why I’m calling: I’ve got a job for you.”

  “I already have a job. In fact, I have enough work for two jobs.”

  “Three district courts in the area are posting a vacancy in the Bar News. You really ought to put your name in, Alex.”

  “To be a judge?” She started to laugh. “Whit, what are you smoking these days?”

  “You’d be good at it, Alex. You’re a fine decision maker. You’re even-tempered. You don’t let your emotions get in the way of your work. You have the defense perspective, so you understand the litigants. And you’ve always been an excellent trial attorney.” He hesitated. “Plus, it’s not too often that New Hampshire has a Democratic female governor picking a judge.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Alex said, “but I am so not the right person for that job.”

  She knew, too, because her father had been a superior court justice. Alex could remember swinging around in his swivel chair, counting paper clips, running her thumbnail along the green felt surface of his spotless blotter to make a hatch-marked grid. She’d pick up the phone and talk to the dial tone. She’d pretend. And then inevitably her father would come in and berate her for disturbing a pencil or a file or—God forbid—himself.

  On her belt, her beeper began to vibrate again. “Listen, I have to get to court. Maybe we can do lunch next week.”

  “Judges’ hours are regular,” Whit added. “What time does Josie get home from school?”

  “Whit—”

  “Think about it,” he said, and then he hung up.

  * * *

  “Peter,” his mother sighed, “how could you possibly lose it again?” She skirted around his father, who was pouring himself a cup of coffee, and fished through the dark bowels of the pantry for a brown paper lunch sack.

  Peter hated those sacks. The banana never could quite fit in, and the sandwich always got crushed. But what else was he supposed to do?

  “What did he lose?” his father asked.

  “His lunch box. For the third time this month.” His mother began to fill the brown bag—fruit and juice pack on the bottom, sandwich floating on top. She glanced at Peter, who was not eating his breakfast, but vivisecting his paper napkin with a knife. He had, so far, made the letters H and T. “If you procrastinate, you’re going to miss the bus.”

  “You’ve got to start being responsible,” his father said.

  When his father spoke, Peter pictured the words like smoke. They clouded up the room for a moment, but before you knew it, they’d be gone.

  “For God’s sake, Lewis, he’s five.”

  “I don’t remember Joey losing his lunch box three times during the first month of school.”

  Peter sometimes watched his father playing soccer in the backyard with Joey. Their legs pumped like crazy pistons and gears—forward, backward, forward—as if they were doing a dance together with the ball caught between them. When Peter tried to join them, he got tangled up in his own frustration. The last time, he’d scored against himself by accident.

  He looked over his shoulder at his parents. “I’m not Joey,” he said, and even though nobody answered, he could hear the reply: We know.

  * * *

  “Attorney Cormier?” Alex glanced up to find a former client standing in front of her desk, beaming from ear to ear.

  It took her a moment to place him. Teddy MacDougal or MacDonald, something like that. She remembered the charge: simple assault domestic violence. He and his wife had gotten drunk and gone after each other. Alex had gotten him acquitted.

  “I got somethin’ for ya,” Teddy said.

  “I hope you didn’t buy me anything,” she answered, and she meant it—this was a man from the North Country who was so poor that the floor of his house was literally dirt and he stocked his freezer with the spoils of his own hunting. Al
ex was not a fan of hunting, but she understood that for some of her clients—like Teddy—it was not about sport, but survival. Which was exactly why a conviction for him would have been so devastating: it would have cost him his firearms.

  “I didn’t buy it. Promise.” Teddy grinned. “It’s in my truck. Come on out.”

  “Can’t you bring it in here?”

  “Oh, no. No, can’t do that.”

  Oh, excellent, Alex thought. What could he possibly have in his truck that he can’t bring in? She followed Teddy out to the parking lot and in the back of his pickup truck saw a huge, dead bear.

  “This is for your freeza’,” he said.

  “Teddy, this is enormous. You could eat it all winter.”

  “Damn right. But I thoughta you.”

  “Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. But I don’t, um, eat meat. And I wouldn’t want it to go to waste.” She touched his arm. “I really want you to have it.”

  Teddy squinted into the sun. “All right.” He nodded at Alex, climbed into the cab of his truck, and bounced out of the parking lot as the bear thumped against the walls of the pickup bed.

  “Alex!”

  She turned to find her secretary standing in the doorway.

  “A call from your daughter’s school just came in,” the secretary said. “Josie got sent to the principal’s office.”

  Josie? In trouble at school? “For what?” Alex asked.

  “She beat the crap out of a boy on the playground.”

  Alex started toward her car. “Tell them I’m on my way.”

  * * *

  On the ride home, Alex stole glances at her daughter in the rearview mirror. Josie had gone to school this morning in a white cardigan and khaki pants; now that cardigan was streaked with dirt. There were twigs in her hair, which had fallen from its ponytail. The elbow of her sweater had a hole in it; her lip was still bleeding. And—here was the amazing thing—apparently, she’d fared better than the little boy she’d gone after.

  “Come on,” Alex said, leading Josie upstairs to the bathroom. There, she peeled off her daughter’s shirt, washed her cuts, and covered them with Neosporin and Band-Aids. She sat down in front of Josie, on the bathmat that looked like it was made of Cookie Monster skin. “You want to talk about it?”