The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  “This is fine,” Alex said, but as she reached for the cup, her bell sleeve caught the edge of the Styrofoam, and the coffee spilled.

  Smooth, Alex, she thought.

  “Oh, gosh,” the lawyer said. “I’m sorry!”

  Why are you sorry, Alex wondered, when it was my fault? The girl was already setting out napkins to clean up the mess, so Alex stripped off her gown to clean it. For one giddy moment she thought about not stopping there—disrobing completely, down to her bra and panties, and parading through the courthouse like the Emperor in the fairy tale. Isn’t my gown beautiful? she’d say, and she would listen to everyone answer: Oh, yes, Your Honor.

  She rinsed the sleeve off in the sink and wrung it dry. Then, still carrying her robe, she started back to chambers. But the thought of sitting there for another half hour, alone, was too depressing, so instead Alex began to wander the halls of the Keene courthouse. She took turns she’d never taken before and wound up at a basement door that led to a loading zone.

  Outside, she found a woman dressed in the green jumpsuit of a groundskeeper, smoking a cigarette. The air was full of winter, and frost glittered on the asphalt like broken glass. Alex wrapped her arms around herself—it was quite possibly even colder out here than in chambers—and nodded at the stranger. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hey.” The woman exhaled a stream of smoke. “I haven’t seen you around here before. What’s your name?”

  “Alex.”

  “I’m Liz. I’m the whole property maintenance department.” She grinned. “So where do you work in the courthouse?”

  Alex fumbled in her pocket for a box of Tic Tacs—not that she wanted or needed a mint, but because she wanted to buy some time before this conversation came to a screeching halt. “Um,” she said, “I’m the judge.”

  Immediately, Liz’s face fell, and she stepped back, uncomfortable.

  “You know, I hate telling you that, because it was so nice the way you just struck up a conversation with me. No one else around here will do that and it’s . . . well, it’s a little lonely.” Alex hesitated. “Could you maybe forget that I’m the judge?”

  Liz ground out the cigarette beneath her boot. “Depends.”

  Alex nodded. She turned the small plastic box of mints over in her palm; they rattled like music. “You want a Tic Tac?”

  After a moment, Liz held out her hand. “Sure, Alex,” she said, and she smiled.

  * * *

  Peter had taken to wandering his own home like a ghost. He was grounded, which had something to do with the fact that Josie didn’t come over anymore, even though they used to see each other after school three or four times a week. Joey didn’t want to play with him—he was always off at soccer practice or playing a computer game where you had to drive really fast around a racetrack that was bent like a paper clip—which meant that Peter, officially, had nothing to do.

  One evening after dinner, he heard rustling in the basement. He hadn’t been down there since his mother had found him with Josie and the gun, but now he was drawn like a moth to the light over his father’s workbench. His father sat on a stool in front of it, holding the very gun that had gotten Peter into so much trouble.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be getting ready for bed?” his father asked.

  “I’m not tired.” He watched his father’s hands run down the swan neck of the rifle.

  “Pretty, isn’t it? It’s a Remington 721. A thirty-ought-six.” Peter’s father turned to him. “Want to help me clean it?”

  Peter instinctively glanced toward the stairs, where his mother was washing dishes from dinner.

  “The way I figure it, Peter, if you’re so interested in guns, you need to learn how to respect them. Better safe than sorry, right? Even your mom can’t argue with that.” He cradled the gun in his lap. “A gun is a very, very dangerous thing, but what makes it so dangerous is that most people don’t really understand how it works. And once you do, it’s just a tool, like a hammer or a screwdriver, and it doesn’t do anything unless you know how to pick it up and use it correctly. You understand?”

  Peter didn’t, but he wasn’t about to tell his father. He was about to learn how to use a real rifle! None of those idiot kids in his class, the ones who were such jerks, could say that.

  “First thing we have to do is open the bolt, like this, to make sure there aren’t any bullets in it. Look in the magazine, right down there. See any?” Peter shook his head. “Now check again. You can never check too many times. Now, there’s a little button under the receiver—just in front of the trigger guard—push that and you can remove the bolt completely.”

  Peter watched his father take off the big silver ratchet that attached the butt of the rifle to the barrel, just like that. He reached onto his workbench for a bottle of solvent—Hoppes #9, Peter read—and spilled a little bit on a rag. “There’s nothing like hunting, Peter,” his father said. “To be out in the woods when the rest of the world is still sleeping . . . to see that deer raise its head and stare right at you . . .” He held the rag away from him—the smell made Peter’s head swim—and started to rub the bolt with it. “Here,” Peter’s father said. “Why don’t you do this?”

  Peter’s jaw dropped—he was being told to hold the rifle, after what had happened with Josie? Maybe it was because his father was here to supervise, or maybe this was a trick and he was going to get punished for wanting to hold it again. Tentative, he reached for it—surprised, as he had been before, at how incredibly heavy it was. On Joey’s computer game, Big Buck Hunter, the characters swung their rifles around as if they were feather-light.

  It wasn’t a trick. His father wanted him to help, for real. Peter watched him reach for another tin—gun oil—and dribble some onto a clean rag. “We wipe down the bolt and put a drop on the firing pin. . . . You want to know how a gun works, Peter? Come over here.” He pointed out the firing pin, a teensy circle inside the circle of the bolt. “Inside the bolt, where you can’t see it, there’s a big spring. When you pull the trigger, it releases the spring, which hits this firing pin and pushes it out just the tiniest bit—” He held his thumb and forefinger apart just a fraction of an inch, for illustration. “That firing pin hits the center of a brass bullet . . . and dents a little silver button called the primer. The dent sets off the charge, which is gunpowder inside the brass casing. You’ve seen a bullet—how it gets thinner and thinner at the end? That skinny part holds the actual bullet, and when the gunpowder goes off, it creates pressure behind the bullet and pushes it from behind.”

  Peter’s father took the bolt out of his hands, wiped it with oil, and set it aside. “Now look into the barrel.” He pointed the gun as if he were going to shoot at a lightbulb on the ceiling. “What do you see?”

  Peter peeked into the open barrel from behind. “It’s like the noodles Mom makes for lunch.”

  “Yeah, I guess it is. Rotini? Is that what they’re called? The twists in the barrel are like a screw. As the bullet gets pushed out, these grooves make the bullet turn. Kind of like when you throw a football and put some spin on it.”

  Peter had tried to do that in the backyard with his father and Joey, but his hand was too small or the football was too big and when he tried to make a pass, mostly it just crashed at his own feet.

  “If the bullet comes out spinning, it can fly straight without wobbling.” His father began to fiddle with a long rod that had a loop of wire on the end. Sticking a patch into the loop, he dipped it in solvent. “The gunpowder leaves gunk inside the barrel, though,” he said. “And that’s what we have to clean off.”

  Peter watched his father jam the rod into the barrel, up and down, like he was churning butter. He put on a clean patch and ran it through the barrel again, and then another, until they didn’t come out streaked black anymore. “When I was your age, my father showed me how to do this, too.” He threw the patch out in the trash. “One day, you and I will go hunting.”

  Peter couldn’t contain himself at the very tho
ught of this. He—who couldn’t throw a football or dribble a soccer ball or even swim very well—was going to go hunting with his father? He loved the thought of leaving Joey at home. He wondered how long he’d have to wait for this outing—how it would feel to be doing something with his father that was just theirs.

  “Ah,” his father said. “Now, look down the barrel again.”

  Peter grabbed the gun backward, looking down through the muzzle, the barrel of the gun pressed up against his face near his eye. “Jesus, Peter!” his father said, taking it out of his hands. “Not like that! You’ve got it backward!” He turned the gun so that the barrel was facing away from Peter. “Even though the bolt’s way over there—and it’s safe—you don’t ever look down the muzzle of a rifle. You don’t point a gun at something you don’t want to kill.”

  Peter squinted, looking into the barrel the right way. It was blinding, silver, shiny. Perfect.

  His father rubbed down the outside of the barrel with oil. “Now, pull the trigger.”

  Peter stared at him. Even he knew you didn’t do that.

  “It’s safe,” his father repeated. “It’s what we need to do to reassemble the gun.”

  Peter hesitantly curled his finger around the half-moon of metal and pulled. It released a catch so that the bolt his father was holding slid into place.

  He watched his father take the rifle back to the gun cabinet. “People who get upset about guns don’t know them,” his father said. “If you know them, you can handle them safely.”

  Peter watched his father lock up the gun case. He understood what his father was trying to say: The mystery of the rifle—the very thing that had sparked him to steal the key to the cabinet from his father’s underwear drawer and show Josie—was no longer quite as compelling. Now that he’d seen it taken apart and put back together, he saw the firearm for what it was: a collection of fitted metal, the sum of its parts.

  A gun was nothing, really, without a person behind it.

  Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it’s your fault—that if you’d tried better, or worked harder, it wouldn’t have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?

  I know people who’ll hear about the people who died, and will say it was God’s will. I know people who’ll say it was bad luck. And then there’s my personal favorite: They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Then again, you could say the same thing about me, couldn’t you?

  The Day After

  For Peter’s sixth Christmas, he’d been given a fish. It was one of those Japanese fighting fish, a beta with a shredded tissue-thin tail that trailed like the gown of a movie star. Peter named it Wolverine and spent hours staring at its moonbeam scales, its sequin eye. But after a few days, he started to imagine what it would be like to have only a bowl to explore. He wondered if the fish hovered over the tendril of plastic plant each time it passed because there was something new and amazing he’d discovered about its shape and size, or because it was a way to count another lap.

  Peter started waking up in the middle of the night to see if his fish ever slept, but no matter what time it was, Wolverine was swimming. He thought about what the fish saw: a magnified eyeball, rising like a sun through the thick glass bowl. He’d listen to Pastor Ron at church, talking about God seeing everything, and he wondered if that was what he was to Wolverine.

  As he sat in a cell at the Grafton County jail, Peter tried to remember what had happened to his fish. It died, he supposed. He’d probably watched it to death.

  He stared up at the camera in the corner of the cell, which blinked at him impassively. They—whoever they were—wanted to make sure he didn’t kill himself before he was publicly crucified. To this end, his cell didn’t have a cot or a pillow or even a mat—just a hard bench, and that stupid camera.

  Then again, maybe this was a good thing. As far as he could tell, he was alone in this little pod of single cells. He’d been terrified when the sheriff’s car pulled up in front of the jail. He’d watched all the TV shows; he knew what happened in places like this. The whole time he was being processed, Peter had kept his mouth shut—not because he was so tough, but because he was afraid that if he opened it he would start to cry, and not remember how to stop.

  There was the swordfight sound of metal being drawn across metal, and then footsteps. Peter stayed where he was, his hands locked between his knees, his shoulders hunched. He didn’t want to look too eager; he didn’t want to look pathetic. Invisibility, actually, was something he was pretty good at. He’d perfected it over the past twelve years.

  A correctional officer stopped in front of his cell. “You’ve got a visitor,” he said, and he opened the door.

  Peter got up slowly. He looked up at the camera, and then followed the officer down a pitted gray hallway.

  How hard would it be to get out of this jail? What if, like in all the video games, he could do some fancy kung fu move and deck this guard, and another, and another, until he was able to race out the door and suck in the air whose taste he’d already started to forget?

  What if he had to stay here forever?

  That was when he remembered what had happened to his fish. In a sweeping moment of animal rights and humanity, Peter had taken Wolverine and flushed him down the toilet. He figured that the plumbing emptied out into some big ocean, like the one his family had gone to last summer on a beach vacation, and that maybe Wolverine could find his way back to Japan and his other beta relatives. It was after Peter confided in his brother that Joey told him about sewers, and that instead of giving his pet freedom, Peter had killed it.

  The officer stopped in front of a room whose door read PRIVATE CONFERENCE. He couldn’t imagine who would visit him, except for his parents, and he didn’t want to see them yet. They would ask him questions he couldn’t answer—about how you could tuck a son into bed, and not recognize him the next morning. Maybe it would be easier to just go back to the camera in his cell, which stared but didn’t pass judgment.

  “Here you go,” the officer said, and he opened the door.

  Peter took a shuddering breath. He wondered what his fish had thought, expecting the cool blue of the sea, only to wind up swimming in shit.

  * * *

  Jordan walked into the Grafton County Jail and stopped at the check-in point. He had to sign in before he went to visit Peter Houghton and get a visitor’s badge from the correctional officer on the other side of the Plexiglas divider. Jordan reached for the clipboard and scrawled his name, then pushed it through the tiny slot at the bottom of the plastic wall—but there was no one there to receive it. The two COs inside were huddled around a small black-and-white TV that was tuned, like every other television on the planet, to a news report about the shooting.

  “Excuse me,” Jordan said, but neither man turned.

  “When the shooting began,” the reporter was saying, “Ed McCabe peered out the door of his ninth-grade math classroom, putting himself between the gunman and his students.”

  The screen cut to a sobbing woman, identified in white block letters below her face as JOAN MCCABE, SISTER OF VICTIM. “He cared about his kids,” she wept. “He cared about them the whole seven years he’d taught at Sterling, and he cared about them during the last minute of his life.”

  Jordan shifted his weight. “Hello?”

  “Just a second, buddy,” one correctional officer said, waving an absent hand in his direction.

  The reporter appeared again on the grainy screen, his hair blowing upward like a boat’s sail in the light wind, the monotone brick of the school a wall behind him. “Fellow teachers remember Ed McCabe as a committed teacher who was always willing to go the extra mile to help a student, and as an avid outdoorsman who talked often in the faculty room about his dreams to hike through Alaska. A dream,” the reporter said gravely, “that will never come to pass.”

  Jordan took the clipboard and shoved it thro
ugh the slot in the Plexiglas, so that it clattered on the floor. Both correctional officers turned at once.

  “I’m here to see my client,” he said.

  * * *

  Lewis Houghton had never missed a lecture in the nineteen years he’d been a professor at Sterling College, until today. When Lacy had called he’d left in such a hurry that he hadn’t even thought to put a sign on the lecture hall’s door. He imagined students waiting for him to appear, waiting to take notes on the very words that came out of his mouth, as if the things he had to say were still beyond reproach.

  What word, what platitude, what comment of his had led Peter to this?

  What word, what platitude, what comment might have stopped him?

  He and Lacy were sitting in their backyard, waiting for the police to leave the house. Well, they had left—or at least one of them—to broaden the search warrant, most likely. Lewis and Lacy had not been allowed into their own home for the duration of the search. For a while, they’d stood in the driveway, occasionally watching officers carry out bags and boxes full of things Lewis would have expected—computers, books from Peter’s room—and things he hadn’t—a tennis racket, a jumbo box of waterproof matches.

  “What do we do?” Lacy murmured.

  He shook his head, numb. For one of his journal articles on the value of happiness, he’d interviewed elderly folks who were suicidal. What’s left for us? they’d said, and at the time, Lewis had not been able to understand that utter lack of hope. At the time, he couldn’t imagine the world going so sour that you couldn’t see the way to set it to rights.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” Lewis replied, and he meant it. He watched an officer walk out holding a stack of Peter’s old comic books.

  When he’d first come home to find Lacy pacing the driveway, she’d flung herself into his arms. “Why,” she had sobbed. “Why?”

  There were a thousand questions in that one, but Lewis couldn’t answer any of them. He’d held on to his wife as if she were driftwood in the middle of this flood, and then he had noticed the eyes of a neighbor across the street, peeking from a drawn curtain.