The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Jordan forced a smile. “I don’t lay odds on bets I can’t collect on.”

  “Father Moreno, he’s the priest who leads the church services here? He says that if you accept Jesus and repent, you get excused . . . like religion is just some giant freebie hall pass that gets you out of anything and everything. But see, that can’t be right . . . because Father Moreno also says that every life is worth something . . . and what about the ten kids who died?”

  Jordan knew better, but he still heard himself asking Peter a question. “Why did you phrase it that way?”

  “What way?”

  “The ten kids who died. As if it was a natural progression.”

  Peter’s brow wrinkled. “Because it was.”

  “How?”

  “It’s like those explosives, I guess. Once you light the fuse, either you destroy the bomb before it goes off . . . or the bomb destroys everything else.”

  Jordan stood up and took a step toward his client. “Who struck the match, Peter?”

  Peter lifted his face. “Who didn’t?”

  * * *

  Josie now thought of her friends as the ones who had been left behind. Haley Weaver had been sent to Boston for plastic surgery; John Eberhard was in some rehab place reading Hop on Pop and learning how to drink from a straw; Matt and Courtney and Maddie were gone forever. That left Josie and Drew and Emma and Brady: a posse that had dwindled to such a degree that you could barely call them a posse at all anymore.

  They were in Emma’s basement, watching a DVD. That was about the extent of their social life these days, because Drew and Brady were still in bandages and casts and besides, even if none of them wanted to say it out loud, going anywhere they used to go reminded them of who was missing.

  Brady had brought the movie—Josie couldn’t even remember the name, but it was one of those movies that had come out after American Pie, hoping to make the same killing at the box office by taking naked girls and daredevil guys and what Hollywood imagined teenage life to be like, and tossing them together like some sort of cosmic salad. Right now, a car chase filled the screen. The main character was screaming across a drawbridge that was slowly opening.

  Josie knew he was going to make it across. First off, this was a comedy. Second, nobody had the guts to kill off the main character before the story was over. Third, her physics teacher had used this very movie to prove, scientifically, that given the speed of the car and the trajectory of the vectors, the actor could indeed jump the bridge—but only if the wind wasn’t blowing.

  Josie also knew that the person in the car wasn’t real, wasn’t even the actor playing the role, but a stuntman who had done this a thousand times. And yet, even as she watched the action unrolling on the television screen, she saw something entirely different: the car’s fender, striking the far side of the open bridge. The twist of metal turning in midair, slapping against the water, sinking.

  Grown-ups were always saying that teenagers drove too fast or got high or didn’t use condoms because they thought they were invincible. But the truth was that at any moment, you could die. Brady could have a stroke on the football field, like those young college athletes who suddenly dropped dead. Emma could be hit by lightning. Drew might walk into an ordinary high school on an extraordinary day.

  Josie stood up. “I need some air,” she murmured, and she hurried up the basement stairs and out the front door of Emma’s house. She sat down on the porch and looked at the sky, at two stars that were hitched at the elbows. You weren’t invincible when you were a teenager. You were just stupid.

  She heard the door open and close with a gasp. “Hey,” Drew said, coming to sit beside her. “You okay?”

  “I’m great.” Josie pasted on a smile. It felt gummy, like wallpaper that hadn’t been smoothed right. But she had gotten so good at this—faking it—that it was second nature. Who would have thought that she’d inherited something from her mother after all?

  Drew reached down for a blade of grass and began splitting it into hairs with his thumb. “I say the same thing when that bonehead school shrink calls me down to ask me how I’m doing.”

  “I didn’t know he calls you down, too.”

  “I think he calls all of us who were, you know, close . . .”

  He didn’t finish his sentence: Close to the ones who didn’t make it? Close to dying that day? Close to finishing ourselves off?

  “Do you think anyone ever tells the shrink anything worthwhile?” Josie asked.

  “Doubt it. He wasn’t there that day. It’s not like he really gets it.”

  “Does anyone?”

  “You. Me. Those guys downstairs,” Drew said. “Welcome to the club no one wants to join. You’re a member for life.”

  Josie didn’t mean to, but Drew’s words and the stupid guy in the movie trying to jump the bridge and the way the stars were pricking at her skin, like inoculations for a terminal disease, suddenly made her start to cry. Drew reached around her, wrapping his one good arm around her, and she leaned into him. She closed her eyes and pressed her face into the flannel of his shirt. It felt so familiar, as if she’d come home to her own bed after years of circumnavigating the globe, to find that the mattress still somehow melted around the curve and weight of her. And yet—the fabric of the shirt didn’t smell like it used to. The boy holding her wasn’t quite the same size, the same shape, the same boy.

  “I don’t think I can do this,” Josie whispered.

  Immediately, Drew pulled away from her. His face was flushed, and he could not look Josie in the eye. “I didn’t mean it like that. You and Matt . . .” His voice went flat. “Well, I know you’re still his.”

  Josie looked up at the sky. She nodded at him, as if that was what she had meant in the first place.

  * * *

  It all began when the service station left a message on the answering machine. Peter had missed his car inspection appointment. Did he want to reschedule?

  Lewis had been alone in the house, retrieving that message. He had dialed the number before he even realized what he was doing, and thus it was no surprise to find himself actually keeping the rescheduled appointment. He got out of the car, handed his keys to the gas station attendant. “You can wait right inside,” the man said. “There’s coffee.”

  Lewis poured himself a cup, putting in three sugars and lots of milk, the way Peter would have fixed it. He sat down and instead of picking up a worn copy of Newsweek, he thumbed through PC Gamer.

  One, he thought. Two, three.

  On cue, the gas station attendant came into the waiting room. “Mr. Houghton,” he said, “the car out there—it’s not due for a state inspection until July.”

  “I know.”

  “But you . . . you made this appointment.”

  Lewis nodded. “I don’t have that particular car with me right now.”

  It was impounded somewhere. Along with Peter’s books and computer and journals and God only knew what else.

  The attendant stared at him, the way you do when you realize the conversation you’re having has veered from the rational. “Sir,” he said, “we can’t inspect a car that’s not here.”

  “No,” Lewis said. “Of course not.” He put the magazine back down on the coffee table, smoothed its wrinkled cover. Then he rubbed a hand over his forehead. “It’s just . . . my son made this appointment,” he said. “I wanted to keep it on his behalf.”

  The attendant nodded, slowly backing away. “Right . . . so, how about I just leave the car parked outside?”

  “Just so you know,” Lewis said softly, “he would have passed inspection.”

  * * *

  Once, when Peter was young, Lacy had sent him to the same sleepaway camp that Joey had gone to and adored. It was somewhere across the river in Vermont, and campers water-skied on Lake Fairlee and took sailing lessons and did overnight canoe trips. Peter had called the first night, begging to be brought home. Although Lacy had been ready to start the car and drive to get him, Lewis had talk
ed her out of it. If he doesn’t stick this out, Lewis had said, how will he ever know if he can?

  At the end of two weeks, when Lacy saw Peter again, there were changes in him. He was taller, and he’d put on weight. But there was also something different about his eyes—a light that had been burned to ash, somehow. When Peter looked at her, he seemed guarded, as if he understood that she was no longer an ally.

  Now he was looking at her the same way even as she smiled at him, pretending that there was no glare from the fluorescent light over his head; that she could reach out and touch him instead of staring at him from the other side of the red line that had been drawn on the jail floor. “Do you know what I found in the attic yesterday? That dinosaur you used to love, the one that roared when you pulled its tail. I used to think you’d be carrying it down the aisle at your wedding . . .” Lacy broke off, realizing that there might never be a wedding for Peter, or any aisle outside of a prison walkway, for that matter. “Well,” she said, turning up the wattage on her smile. “I put it on your bed.”

  Peter stared at her. “Okay.”

  “I think my favorite birthday party of yours was the dinosaur one, when we buried those plastic bones in the sandbox and you had to dig for them,” Lacy said. “Remember?”

  “I remember nobody showed up.”

  “Of course they did—”

  “Five kids, maybe, whose moms had forced them to be there,” Peter said. “God. I was six years old. Why are we even talking about this?”

  Because I don’t know what else to say, Lacy thought. She looked around the visitation room—there were only a handful of inmates, and the devoted few who still believed in them, caught on opposite sides of that red stripe. In reality, Lacy realized, this dividing line between her and Peter had been there for years. If you kept your chin up, you might even be able to convince yourself there was nothing separating you. It was only when you tried to cross it, like now, that you understood how real a barrier it could be. “Peter,” Lacy blurted out, “I’m sorry I didn’t pick you up at sleepaway camp, that time.”

  He looked at her as if she was crazy. “Um, thanks for that, but I got over it about a hundred years ago.”

  “I know. But I can still be sorry.” She was sorry about a thousand things, suddenly: that she didn’t pay more attention when Peter showed her some new programming skill; that she hadn’t bought him another dog after Dozer died; that they did not go back to the Caribbean last winter vacation, because Lacy had wrongly assumed they had all the time in the world.

  “Sorry doesn’t change anything.”

  “It does for the person who’s apologizing.”

  Peter groaned. “What the fuck is this? Chicken Soup for the Kid Without a Soul?”

  Lacy flinched. “You don’t have to swear in order to—”

  “Fuck,” Peter sang. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

  “I’m not going to sit here and take this—”

  “Yes you are,” Peter said. “You know why? Because if you walk out on me, it’s just one more thing you’ve got to be sorry about.”

  Lacy was halfway out of her chair, but the truth in Peter’s words weighted her back down into the seat. He knew her, it seemed, far better than she had ever known him.

  “Ma,” he said softly, his voice edging over that red line. “I didn’t mean that.”

  She looked up at him, her throat thickening with tears. “I know, Peter.”

  “I’m glad you come here.” He swallowed. “I mean, you’re the only one.”

  “Your father—”

  Peter snorted. “I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but I haven’t seen him since that first time he came.”

  Lewis wasn’t coming to see Peter? That was news to Lacy. Where did he go when he left the house, telling her that he was headed to the jail?

  She imagined Peter, sitting in his cell every other week, waiting for a visit that did not come. Lacy forced a smile—she would get upset on her own time, not Peter’s—and immediately changed the topic. “For the arraignment . . . I brought you a nice jacket to wear.”

  “Jordan says I don’t need it. For the arraignment I just wear these clothes. I won’t need the jacket until the trial.” Peter smiled a little. “I hope you didn’t cut the tags off yet.”

  “I didn’t buy it. It’s Joey’s interview blazer.”

  Their eyes met. “Oh,” Peter murmured. “So that’s what you were doing in the attic.”

  There was silence as they both remembered Joey coming downstairs in the Brooks Brothers blazer Lacy had gotten him at Filene’s Basement in Boston at deep discount. It had been purchased for college interviews; Joey had been setting them up at the time of the accident.

  “Do you ever wish it was me who died,” Peter asked, “instead of Joey?”

  Lacy’s heart fell like a stone. “Of course not.”

  “But then you’d still have Joey,” Peter said. “And none of this would have happened.”

  She thought of Janet Isinghoff, the woman who had not wanted her as a midwife. Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest—learning when it was better to lie, rather than hurt someone with the truth. It was why Lacy came to these visits with a smile stretched like a Halloween mask over her face, when in reality, she wanted to break down sobbing every time she saw Peter being led into the visitation room by a correctional officer. It was why she was talking about camp and stuffed animals—the hallmarks of the son she remembered—instead of discovering who he had become. But Peter had never learned how to say one thing when he meant another. It was one of the reasons he’d been hurt so many times.

  “It would be a happy ending,” Peter said.

  Lacy drew in a breath. “Not if you weren’t here.”

  Peter looked at her for a long moment. “You’re lying,” he said—not angry, not accusing. Just as if he was stating the facts, in a way that she wasn’t.

  “I am not—”

  “You can say it a million times, but that doesn’t make it any more true.” Peter smiled then, so guileless that Lacy felt it smart like a stripe from a whip. “You might be able to fool Dad, and the cops, and anyone else who’ll listen,” he said. “You just can’t fool another liar.”

  * * *

  By the time Diana reached the docket board to check which judge was sitting on the Houghton arraignment, Jordan McAfee was already standing there. Diana hated him on principle, because he hadn’t ripped two pairs of stockings trying to get them on, because he wasn’t having a bad hair day, because he didn’t seem to be the least bit ruffled about the fact that half the town of Sterling was on the front steps of the courthouse, demanding blood. “Morning,” he said, not even glancing at her.

  Diana didn’t answer. Instead, her mouth dropped open as she read the name of the judge sitting on the case. “I think there’s a mistake,” she said to the clerk.

  The clerk glanced over her shoulder at the docket board. “Judge Cormier’s sitting this morning.”

  “On the Houghton case? Are you kidding me?”

  The clerk shook her head. “Nope.”

  “But her daughter—” Diana snapped her mouth shut, her thoughts reeling. “We need to have a chambers conference with the judge before the arraignment.”

  The moment the clerk was gone, Diana faced Jordan. “What the hell is Cormier thinking?”

  * * *

  It wasn’t often that Jordan got to see Diana Leven sweat, and frankly, it was entertaining. To be honest, Jordan had been just as shocked to see Cormier’s name on the docket board as the prosecutor had been, but he wasn’t about to tell Diana. Not tipping his hand was the only advantage he had right now, because frankly, his case wasn’t worth anything.

  Diana frowned. “Didn’t you expect her to—”

  The clerk reappeared. Jordan got a kick out of Eleanor; she cut him slack in the superior courthouse and even laughed at the dumb-blonde jokes he saved for her, whereas most clerks had a terminal case of self-importance. “Her Honor wi
ll see you now,” Eleanor said.

  As Jordan followed the clerk into chambers, he leaned down and whispered the punch line he’d been getting at, before Leven so rudely interrupted his joke with her arrival. “So her husband looks at the box and says, ‘Honey, it’s not a puzzle . . . it’s some Frosted Flakes!’”

  Eleanor snickered, and Diana scowled. “What’s that, some kind of code?”

  “Yeah, Diana. It’s secret defense attorney language for: Whatever you do, don’t tell the prosecutor what I’m saying.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Diana murmured, and then they were in chambers.

  Judge Cormier was already in her robe, ready to start the arraignment. Her arms were folded; she was leaning against her desk. “All right, Counselors, we have a lot of people in the courtroom waiting. What’s the problem?”

  Diana glanced at Jordan, but he just raised his eyebrows. If she wanted to poke at the hornet’s nest, that was just fine, but he’d be standing far away when it happened. Let Cormier hold a grudge against the prosecution, not the defense.

  “Judge,” Diana said hesitantly, “it’s my understanding that your daughter was in the school at the time of the shooting. In fact, we’ve interviewed her.”

  Jordan had to give Cormier credit—she somehow managed to stare Diana down as if the prosecutor hadn’t just presented a valid and disturbing fact, but had said something absolutely ludicrous instead. Like the punch line of a dumb-blonde joke, for example. “I’m quite aware of that,” the judge said. “There were a thousand children in the school at the time of the shooting.”

  “Of course, Your Honor. I just . . . I wanted to ask before we got out there in front of everyone whether the court was planning to just handle the arraignment, or if you’re planning to sit during the whole case?”

  Jordan looked at Diana, wondering why she was so dead sure that Cormier shouldn’t be sitting on this case. What did she know about Josie Cormier that he didn’t?

  “As I said, there were thousands of kids in that school. Some of their parents are police officers, some work here at the superior court. One even works in your office, Ms. Leven.”