by Jodi Picoult
Allie leaned forward in her seat. "You knew that Maggie was going to ask him?"
Pauline nodded, as if the conversation she'd had with Maggie had been as mundane as a discussion of the weather, or brands of cereal. Allies mind began to spin with the implications of putting Pauline on a witness stand for Jamie. Would her story uphold the confession Jamie had signed for Cam? Or would it only be dismissed as hearsay?
"Jamie MacDonald is a blessing and a curse."
Allies head snapped up. "What do you mean by that?"
"Maggie says it to me all the time--" she said, and then corrected herself. "Said it to me." In the low light of the afternoon Allie could see the film of tears over Pauline's eyes. "I'm sorry. I thought I was ready for this. I mean, I knew that it was coming, and Maggie and I had talked about it, but when you get right down to it, preparing doesn't make it hurt any less." She took a deep breath and faced Allie again. "Tell me again why you're here. I'll help Maggie any way I can."
"You said that Jamie was a blessing and a curse," Allie prompted.
"Oh, yes. Maggie loved him to death." She stopped abruptly, realizing the implications of the idiom she'd used. "Maggie loved him to death," she repeated softly. "She knew that Jamie would have done anything for her, so she figured that if she pushed him hard enough, he'd make it easier when the time came." She looked up at Allie. "Did you know her? Maggie?"
Allie shook her head. "I wish I had. I wish I could."
Pauline walked over to the playpen and retrieved her youngest child, a little girl who began to chew on the long rope of her mother's braid. "It's impossible to tell you what Maggie was like unless you figure Jamie into the situation. They were inseparable, I swear. But not through any doing of Maggie's. I used to tell her I'd swap lives with her in a second--trade her all the dirty diapers and the school lunches and the carpooling for a man who was hanging on my every word, and Maggie said it wasn't the bliss that I thought it was. I think she felt bad because Jamie couldn't let go and she couldn't hold on as tight as he did."
She bounced the baby in her arms. "She told me that if it was the other way around--if Jamie had the cancer--she wouldn't be able to . . . you know. Said she'd worry too much about what was going to happen to her, after. She said it wasn't like that for Jamie, since he wouldn't imagine a future that didn't have Maggie in it too." Pauline glanced up. "What Maggie said to me--about the dying--was that she didn't have a choice anymore. She knew she'd be using Jamie horribly, but she didn't even care, if that was what it took to stop the pain."
Allie watched Pauline press a kiss to her daughter's tangled hair, and swallowed thickly. "How's Jamie doing?"
Allie took a deep breath. "He's angry. And frustrated. Lonely. I think he's starting to feel guilty."
Pauline nodded. "Just like Maggie." She waved her free arm around the room, encompassing the clutter and the discord that made up a family. "She was jealous of me. Me! She used to say that whatever else my marriage was, at least it was still equal between Frank and me. But with Jamie, well, no matter how hard he tried--no matter how much he gave--it would only make Maggie feel worse, more guilty for what she couldn't give." Pauline shook her head. "I told her she was crazy."
Allie thought of Jamie clutching Maggie's limp body in the cab of his truck, unwilling to let anyone else close enough to touch her. She thought of the way her heart lodged at the back of her throat every time she opened the door to the police station to visit Cam unannounced, hoping that he would say or do something to make her believe he had wanted her there in the first place. "Crazy," Allie repeated. "I don't think so."
Cam drove out of Wheelock with the windows rolled down, his car speeding down side roads in an effort to outrace his guilt. With the wind blinding him and the cold numbing his fingers and his cheeks, it was easier to forget about Mia. It was easier to concentrate on Allie.
The leaves were starting to fall--crimson and orange, they spi-raled like tiny, stiff ballerinas across the windshield of the car. It was nearly time for fall colors, that three-week stretch of October when everyone and his brother decided to visit the Berkshires for the scenery. It was the only month of the year when the Wheelock Inn was filled to capacity; when the coffee shop in town had a line out the front door. Wheelock did not have the grandeur of Great Barrington or the charm of Lenox, but it was one of those towns off Route 8 that still seemed quaint and untouched. The reputation led to problems--tourists seemed to think it was a reconstructed village, like the Shaker town down in Pittsfield, a place too cute for people to really live in. He remembered once, as a child, someone had knocked on the door of the house. His mother had smiled politely at the man in his sleek Italian suit and wing-tip shoes, at the woman on his arm with a feathered cap and a muff made of rabbit fur. "We were wondering," the man had said in a tight Long Island lockjaw, "have you any antiques you'd be willing to sell?"
Cam pulled over to the side of the road and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. It was impossible to think of the influx of hundreds of strangers into a town that no longer seemed big enough for Mia, Allie, and himself. And with this damned murder trial in the local papers, Wheelock was guaranteed to become a circus.
Cam stepped out of the car and slammed the door shut, realizing as he stretched to his full height that he was still wearing a tie and a jacket, the trappings of a morning at Mass. He hooked his finger into the knot at his neck and pulled, loosening his tie. He unbuttoned the top of his shirt. Then he took off his shoes and socks and set them on the hood of the car.
He went barefoot all the time in the house, in spite of Allies warnings about drafts and colds, but the last time he'd run free outdoors had been seven years before. It was early October, just as it was now, and Allie had shown up at the station with a picnic. "Come on," she'd said. "No one's going to commit a crime on a day as beautiful as this."
They had been dating for a few months. Cam liked her enough and had become accustomed to spending Sunday afternoons at Allies apartment, reading the newspaper. He knew that when she looked at him, she was seeing him at the altar of the church, holding out a gold band, but this did not bother him. If he wanted to get married, he would do so in his own time. He had been forced into coming back to Wheelock, forced into succeeding his father as police chief, but no one was going to make him sign the rest of his life away.
Allie had wanted to eat behind the football field at the high school--some misguided sense of nostalgia for their roots, he supposed--but Cam insisted that he'd only take time off for lunch if he got to pick the picnic site. Allie agreed, as he had known she would, and he had driven her in one of the cruisers toward Wee Loch at the northern end of town.
He remembered looking across at her when they came to a stoplight. He had wanted her to look up at him and smile--he'd silently willed this to happen--but Allie had been fixated on the dashboard of the car. Without glancing at Cam, she'd pointed to a button. "Are those the lights?" She gently traced the button with her finger.
Cam laughed and covered her hand with his own. "Go ahead," he said. "Now's your big chance."
Allie pushed the button for the flashing lights, and they sped toward the lake without the siren. When Cam pulled into the shade of the trees at the edge of the water, he put the cruiser into park and sat back, arms crossed, watching Allie. "Well?"
"I feel very privileged. Of course, I couldn't really see them from in here."
Cam grinned. "You'd rather be an observer than a part of the action?"
"Well," Allie said, "that depends on what's being observed."
Cam insisted they leave their shoes in the car--what was a picnic with shoes? He helped her carry the Playmate slowly across the stretch of grass, giving time for Allie's feet to feel out acorns and stones he did not notice. Allie had brought huge submarine sandwiches--pastrami on French bread, Italian salami and provolone, roast beef and boursin. She'd packed a thermos of peach iced tea and a small container of red potato salad. There were, for dessert, individual apple ta
rts. Allie told him that she'd just thrown this together on the spur of the moment, but Cam knew from the bruised skin beneath her eyes that she had been planning this for days and had stayed up late to cook for him.
To his surprise, he liked the idea of that very much.
He watched her kneel on the ground to open the Playmate cooler.
She unpacked half of the contents in an array to her left before she turned to Cam. "I forgot a blanket," she said, as if this was the worst thing in the world. "I cannot believe I forgot the stupid blanket."
She looked like she was going to cry, and that was just about the last thing Cam thought he'd be able to handle, so he jumped to his feet. "I ought to have something in the car," he said, and he ran back to the road, but only found emergency flares and a spare jack. When he walked back toward the lake, Allie was waiting, her hands in her lap and still filled with the apple tarts. He started to tell her they'd have to make do, but the trust in her eye stopped him. Cam had seen it before on the face of nearly every townsper-son who'd attended his father's funeral and had, afterward, put himself blindly into Cam's care. Cam knew the expression, and the burden of responsibility that slogged in his chest whenever he faced it. But on Allie, trust looked different. Cam saw himself as Allie did, and for the first time he began to believe it was possible to be someone's everyday hero.
He did not remember what he said to her, or how he came to stick his knee into one of the tarts as he caught Allie up in his arms and fell with her onto a blanket nature loaned them, made of the brilliant gold of fallen maple leaves. It was not lust that overwhelmed Cam. It was the sense that this feeling of invincibility would fade unless he could somehow ensure its permanence. And the surest way was to take the person who made him feel like this, and make her a part of himself.
Cam had pulled at her clothes, frustrated by something as simple as buttons, until Allie gently pushed him back and freed them herself. As if it were perfectly natural to be lying half-naked in the middle of the day, she held out her arms to Cam, and he fell to her, tugging at her hair, pressing her back on the crinkling leaves, bruising her throat with his kisses. Even now, years later, when he closed his eyes and pictured Allie, it was with her eyes heavy and her face turned to the side, those vivid yellow leaves tangled in her hair as if she were backed by the sun itself.
When he came inside her he was so focused on how warm she was and how well they fit that he did not notice the leaves which fell from overhead to prick at his shoulders, or the quick rigidity of Allie beneath him, or the quiet cry she muffled against his neck.
There was a pressure, and a yielding, but Cam believed this was some internal barrier he'd constructed giving way as he accepted what he had always been meant to do.
He did not realize that Allie Gordon had been, at twenty-five, a virgin, until he rolled to his side and saw against the gold leaves the smear of red, bright as a sugar maple, between her thighs.
Cam jumped to his feet and began to pull on his clothes. He did not speak until he was fully dressed, and by this time Allie had curled up into a small ball, her arms around her knees, her clothes draped protectively about her. "Why didn't you tell me?" he demanded, standing over her.
"You didn't ask," Allie said.
With a curse, Cam stalked off toward the lake, kicking at the leaves. He stood there for several minutes, until he realized that Allie, now dressed, was standing behind him. "You're mad at me."
"Hell, yes," Cam said.
Allie shivered a little. "It doesn't change anything. It's the eighties. I wasn't trying to trap you into a relationship. And it probably would have happened eventually anyway."
"That isn't the point," Cam muttered. "The first time should have been different. In a bed, for God's sake. Slower."
Allie beamed. "Then you're not mad at me. You're mad at yourself."
She put her arms around him from behind and rested her cheek against his back. They stood that way for a while, watching the leaves chase each other across the lake like pixies. Finally, Cam disentangled Allies hands from his waist and walked her to the car. "I'll get the cooler," he said, not wanting her to go back there.
He crossed the road again, barefoot. Before picking up the Playmate he kicked the leaves at the spot where they had been, covering up the evidence of Allies pain. When he turned, he saw Allie standing in front of the police cruiser, her hands on her hips. She'd turned on the ignition and the flashing lights, and the circling blue beam caught her every few seconds, freezing her into something pale and still and lovely, like an angel.
Shelley Pass, the first town off Route 8 once you left Wheelock,
suffered from the same fate as its neighbor: it too was a proto-
typical New England town set in the beauty of the Berkshires and overwhelmed by visitors when the leaves turned. But it had the added attraction of being the birthplace of the poet who'd penned the verse about Little Boy Blue, and in the town center, across from the church, was a bronze statue of the lazy pint-sized shepherd, clutching his horn and asleep beside a haystack. For reasons Cam could not fathom, people actually traveled to see this statue, to take photos beside it.
Cam drove through the little town, his shoes tucked into the passenger seat, his toes curled over the brake pedal at the rusted stop signs.
He did not know what he was looking for, exactly, but he did know that he was looking. He passed the landmarks of any small New England town: barber, fire station, post office. Cam leaned closer to the windshield, as if this might make some boutique appear. He would give it five more minutes, and then he'd just drive to the nearest flower shop that did not have Mia Townsend working in it and buy Allie a dozen roses.
He turned down a side road purely on a whim, and at the end of a dirty cul-de-sac was a prettily painted sign. MEENA AND HEDDY'S, it said, in purple script. FINE ART AND OTHERWISE. Cam smiled at that. What was unfine art? Hooked rugs and paint-by-numbers ?
When he entered the shop, he had to duck his head to accommodate the low ceilings. There was no one in the shop but a small woman wearing a caftan that covered her from her neck to her ankles. "Hello. Can I help you?"
Cam grinned at her. She came up, maybe, to his ribs. "I'm looking for a gift for my wife," he said. "I think I'll just poke around."
The woman shrugged. "Suit yourself."
Cam walked around the clutter, remembering Allie telling him to shoot her with his Smith and Wesson if she ever let her shop get, as she called it, cute and kitschy. He fingered heart-shaped cut stones and hand-potted mugs with clay lizards as handles. There was a small collection of pet rocks and lampshades encrusted with seashells. He glanced at watercolor paintings of different spaniel breeds, sterling silver hanging earrings, embroidered vests. "Is this for a birthday?" the woman asked.
Cam spun around. No, he thought, it's to soothe my conscience. "She's a florist. Anything along that line?"
She led him to wreaths made of dried primroses, and raffia baskets spilling with ivy, but these were things that Allie had in her own shop. Resigned, he shook his head. "Thanks for your time," he began.
"Wait." For a tiny woman, her voice held the power of a drill sergeant. Cam stopped in his tracks. "My sister's out back working on something. Maybe we can come to an arrangement."
She was bent over a table, painstakingly cutting a sliver of blue. It was the last jigsaw piece in a stunning pane of stained-glass that depicted three graceful daffodils against a sapphire background. Their thin stems were a light gem green, their centers as red as fire. The daffodils themselves were the shade of the silver maple leaves that Cam would always associate with Allie. And the blue background was the color of Mia's eyes.
He realized that having this panel hang in his living room for the rest of his life would be penance enough.
"I'll take it," he said, knowing that price would not be a factor. He waited for the woman to wrap it in layers of gauze and tissue, and lay it with a last caress across the back seat of his car. There was a certain irony i
n buying something that was, by name, already considered stained. The whole way home Cam thought of blueberries and blood and other indelible things, and he wondered how long it took for a soul to come clean.
Graham MacPhee had lost the rhythm of sleep. He hadn't made it through a night since he'd accepted the police chief's offer to take on Jamie MacDonald as a client. And now that he'd officially entered a defense of temporary insanity at the hearing, he couldn't bed down for more than five minutes before waking in a cold sweat and wondering why he hadn't decided to try the case on the principles of euthanasia.
He stood in a pair of silk boxer shorts, staring out at the stars from the balcony of his apartment. The problem with a euthanasia defense was that he only wanted to win. He didn't want to set a precedent. And if he created a huge media circus with an unorthodox defense strategy, who the hell knew how it would affect a jury?
Not to mention the fact that for the rest of time, whenever someone killed someone else without eyewitnesses, he was going to try to claim the other person asked him to do it.
There were too many folds in a mercy killing defense; folds you could get trapped in at a trial and never make your way out of. Who would have to give consent, for example? Jamie had Maggie's permission to kill her, but what if she had been comatose, unable to speak her mind?
And who said Maggie's consent was all that was needed? What about her best friend? Her aunt Lou in Chicago? Her old college roommate? Anyone else who knew her, who was a part of her life, who wanted her around a little longer?
And if you had consent, did someone have to give approval? A doctor, who said the cause was past hope? What illnesses were past hope, anyway? Everyone knew the story of someone who'd come out of a fifteen-year coma. Did an illness have to be protracted? Painful? Fatal? Did a person have to be sick at all?
Then there were the mechanics of death. Smothering was okay, for example, but a gunshot to the head was out of the question.
Graham sat down in a cold metal deck chair and propped his feet on the railing of his balcony. There were a million stars out there, and just as many facets to a euthanasia defense. You couldn't possibly make a law or set a precedent, because the very next case would break it with hairline circumstances.