House Rules

by Jodi Picoult

  I took Gracie's journal back to the station, and I Xeroxed it twice. It was covered with blood, because while she was writing, she was cutting herself. One copy I gave to the medical examiner. The second I brought to the chief. Someone in this family needs to know what was going on, I told him.

  After Gracie was buried, I called her mother and asked to meet with her. We sat down in the living room, in front of a blazing fire. At that appointment, I gave her a copy of the journal and told her I'd marked the pages that she really needed to read. She stared at me with glassy eyes and told me the family was starting fresh. She thanked me, and then, while I was watching, she threw the journal into the flames.

  I am thinking of Gracie Cheever now as I move gingerly around the culvert where Jess Ogilvy's body has been located. She is wrapped in a quilt, and fully dressed. There's a fine sheen of frost on her clothes and her skin. Wayne Nussbaum snaps off the latex gloves he's been using to examine the body and instructs his assistants to wait for the CSIs to finish their photographs of the scene before moving the victim back to the hospital for an autopsy.

  --First impression?|| I ask.

  --She's been dead awhile. Days, I'm thinking, although it's hard to say. The cold weather made a nice makeshift morgue.|| He tucked his bare hands under his armpits. --I doubt she was killed here. The scrapes on her back look like they were caused by being dragged postmortem.|| As an afterthought, he asks, --Did any of your guys find a tooth?||

  --Why?||

  --Because she's missing one.||

  I make a mental note to tell my investigators to search for that. --Knocked out with a punch? Or taken as a trophy after death?||

  He shakes his head. --Rich, you know I'm not playing a guessing game with you at four in the morning. I'll call you with my report.||

  As he walks off, the flash of a CSI photographer illuminates the night.

  In that instant, we all look like ghosts.

  Mark Maguire swallows when he sees the backpack that has been returned from the lab.

  --That's the one her aunt gave her,|| he murmurs.

  He is shell-shocked. Not only has he been told his girlfriend is dead but, seconds afterward, he was arrested for her murder. It was 7:00 A.M. when the officers went to his apartment to pick him up. Now, during the interrogation, he is still wearing the clothes he wore to bed last night: sweatpants and a faded UVM tee. From time to time he's shivered in the drafty conference room, but that only makes me think of Jess Ogilvy's blue-cast skin.

  My time line is shaping up. The way I see it, Maguire was fighting with Jess, punched her--knocking out her tooth and inadvertently killing her. Panicking, he cleaned up the evidence and then tried to cover his tracks by making it look like a kidnapping: the cut screen, the overturned CD rack and kitchen stools, the mailbox note, the backpack full of Jess's clothes.

  I take the clothes out of the backpack--mostly plus-sizes far too big for Jess's tiny frame. --A smarter criminal who was leaving a red herring would have picked clothes that actually still fit her,|| I muse. --But then again, Mark, you aren't very smart, are you?||

  --I already told you, I had nothing to do with--||

  --Did you knock out her tooth when you were fighting with her?|| I ask. --Is that the way a guy like you gets off? By beating up his girlfriend?||

  --I didn't beat her up--||

  --Mark, you can't win here. We've got her body, and there are bruises clear as day on her arms and her neck. How long do you think it's going to take us to tie them to you?||

  He winces. --I told you--we were having a fight, and I did grab her arms. I pinned her up against the wall. I wanted ... I wanted to teach her a lesson.||

  --And this lesson went a little too far, didn't it?||

  --I never killed her. I swear to God.||

  --Why did you bring her body out into the woods?||

  He looks up at me. --Please. You have to believe me.||

  I rise to my feet and loom over him. --I don't have to believe anything you say, you little prick. You already lied to me once about fighting with her on the weekend, when it turns out you fought with her on Tuesday, too. I've got your boots outside the window with a cut screen, your handprints on her throat, and a dead girl who was cleaned up and moved.

  You ask any jury in this country, and that looks a hell of a lot like a guy who killed his girlfriend and wanted to conceal it.||

  --I never cut that screen. I don't know who did. And I didn't beat her up. I got mad, and I shoved her ... and I left.||

  --Right. And then you came back, and you killed her.||

  Maguire's eyes fill with tears. I wonder if he really is sorry about Jess Ogilvy's death, or just sorry that he's been caught. --No,|| he says, his voice thick. --No, I loved her.||

  --Did you cry this much when you were cleaning up her blood in the bathroom?

  How about when you had to wipe all the blood off her face?||

  --I want to see her,|| Maguire begs. --Let me see Jess.||

  --You should have thought of that before you murdered her,|| I say.

  As I walk away from him, intending to let him stew in his own guilt for a few minutes before I come back in to break his confession, Maguire buries his face in his hands.

  That's when I realize that they are completely uninjured--no bruising, no cuts, which you'd expect if you hit someone hard enough to make her lose a tooth.

  Theo

  By the time I was five, I knew that there were differences between Jacob and me.

  I had to eat everything on my plate, but Jacob was allowed to leave behind things like peas and tomatoes because he didn't like the way they felt inside his mouth.

  Whatever kids' tape I was listening to in the car while we drove took a backseat to anything by Bob Marley.

  I had to pick up all my toys after I was done playing, but the six-foot line of Matchbox cars that Jacob had spent the day arranging perfectly straight was allowed to snake down the hallway for a month until he got tired of it.

  Mostly, though, I was aware of being the odd guy out. Because the minute Jacob had any kind of crisis--and that happened constantly--my mom would drop everything and run to him. And usually the thing she dropped was me.

  Once, when I was about seven, my mother had promised me she'd take us to see Spy Kids 3-D on a Saturday afternoon. I had been excited all week, because we didn't often see movies, much less 3-D ones. We didn't have the extra money for it, but I had gotten a free pair of glasses in our cereal box and begged and begged until my mother said yes.

  However--big surprise--it turned out to be a nonissue. Jacob had read all of his dinosaur books and started flapping and rocking at the thought of not having something new to read for bedtime, and my mother made an executive decision to take us to the library instead of the theater.

  Maybe I would have been okay with this, but at the library, there was a big honking display case taking advantage of the movie tie-in with reading in general. BE A SPY KID! it said, and it was full of books like Harriet the Spy and stories about the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I watched my mother take Jacob to the nonfiction section--567 in the world of Dewey decimals, which even I knew meant dinosaurs. They sat down right in the aisle, as if dragging me to the library and ruining my day didn't matter at all. They started to read a book about ornithopods.

  Suddenly, I realized what I had to do.

  If my mother only noticed Jacob, then that's what I would become.

  It was probably seven years of frustration that boiled over just then, because I can't really explain why else I did what I did. I mean, I knew better.

  Libraries are places where you are supposed to be quiet.

  Library books are sacred, and don't belong to you.

  One minute I had been sitting in the children's room, in the comfy green chair that looked like a giant's fist, and the next, I was screaming my head off and yanking books off the shelves and ripping out the pages, and when the librarian said Whose child is this? I kicked her in the shins.

>   I was gifted at throwing a fit. I'd been watching a master, after all, my whole life.

  A crowd gathered. Other librarians ran in to see what was going on. I only hesitated once during my tantrum, and that was when I saw my mother's face hovering at the edge of the group that was staring at me. She had gone white, like a statue.

  Obviously, she had to get me out of there. And obviously, that meant Jacob couldn't check out the books he wanted to bring home. She grabbed him by the wrist as he started to have his own meltdown, and lifted me with her free arm. My brother and I both kicked and screamed the whole way into the parking lot.

  When we reached the car, she set me down. I did what I'd seen Jacob do a thousand times; I went boneless as spaghetti and collapsed on the pavement.

  All of a sudden, I heard something I'd never heard before. It was louder than both my yelling and Jacob's combined, and it was coming out of my mother's mouth.

  She screamed. She stamped her feet. Aaaaaauuuurrrrrgggh, she cried. She flopped her arms and kicked and tossed her head back and forth. People stared at her from all the way across the parking lot.

  I stopped right away. The only thing worse than having the whole world looking at me going crazy was having the whole world look at my mother going crazy. I closed my eyes, feverishly wishing that the ground would open up and just swallow me.

  Jacob, on the other hand, kept shrieking and throwing his fit.

  --Do you think I don't want to lose it every now and then?|| my mother shouted, and then she pulled herself together and buckled a squirming Jacob into his seat in the car. She dragged me up from the asphalt and did the same with me.

  But none of that is the reason I'm telling you this story. It's because that day was the first day my mother cried in front of me, instead of bravely trying to hold it all inside.

  Emma

  From Auntie Em's column:

  When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes?

  When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit's face emblazoned on the front.

  Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end.

  I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA.

  Here's a secret: Those mothers don't exist. Most of us--even if we'd never confess--are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring.

  I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone.

  Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping--and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press--seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood.

  Real mothers don't just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady's cart, and say, --Great. Maybe you can do a better job.||

  Real mothers know that it's okay to eat cold pizza for breakfast.

  Real mothers admit it is easier to fail at this job than to succeed.

  If parenting is the box of raisin bran, then real mothers know the ratio of flakes to fun is severely imbalanced. For every moment that your child confides in you, or tells you he loves you, or does something unprompted to protect his brother that you happen to witness, there are many more moments of chaos, error, and self-doubt.

  Real mothers may not speak the heresy, but they sometimes secretly wish they'd chosen something for breakfast other than this endless cereal.

  Real mothers worry that other mothers will find that magic ring, whereas they'll be looking and looking for ages.

  Rest easy, real mothers. The very fact that you worry about being a good mom means that you already are one.

  During a short fit of writer's block, I make myself a tuna sandwich and listen to the midday news. The local station is so awful that I like to watch it for the entertainment value. If I were still in college, I'd play a drinking game and take a swig of beer every time the anchors mispronounced a word or dropped their notes. My favorite recent mistake was when the anchor reported on a Vermont senator's proposed overhaul of Medicaid. Instead of cutting to the video of his speech, they showed a clip of a polar bear plunge by a bunch of local octogenarians.

  Today's top story, however, is not funny at all.

  --Early Monday morning,|| the anchor reads, --the body of Jessica Ogilvy was found in the woods behind her residence. The twenty-three-year-old UVM student had gone missing last Tuesday.||

  The plate on my lap falls to the floor as I stand up, tears in my eyes. Although I'd known this was a possibility--a probability, really, as days went by and she wasn't found--that doesn't make her death any easier.

  I had often wondered what the world would have looked like if there were more people like Jess around, young men and women who could see someone like Jacob and not laugh at his quirks and flaws but instead celebrate the ways they made him interesting and worthy. I imagined the boys who would one day be in a class Jess taught and who would not have to struggle with the self-esteem and bullying issues that Jacob had struggled with in grade school. And now, none of that would happen.

  The story cuts to a reporter, whose segment has been filmed close to the spot where Jess's body was found. --In this very sad turn of events,|| she says soberly, --investigators responded to a 911 call placed from Ogilvy's cell phone and traced the call here, to a culvert behind Ogilvy's home.||

  This was taped near dawn; the sky is striped with pink. In the background are the crime scene investigators, setting up markers and taking measurements and photos.

  --Shortly afterward,|| the reporter continues, --authorities took Ogilvy's boyfriend, twenty-four-year-old Mark Maguire, into custody. An autopsy report is still pending ...||

  If I had blinked, I probably would never have seen it. If the reporter had not shifted her feet, I would never have seen it. The image was that quick--the tiniest flash on the side of the screen before it was gone.

  A quilt with rainbow patchwork, ROYGBIV over and over.

  I freeze the frame--a newfangled feature of the satellite system we use--and run the clip backward before letting it play again. This time maybe I will see that it was only a trick of the eye, a flutter of the reporter's scarf that I mistook for something else.

  It is still there, so I run the tape backward a second time.

  I once saw madness defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. My heart is pounding so fiercely now that I can feel it beating at the base of my throat. I race upstairs to Jacob's closet, where I'd found Jess's backpack a few days earlier, wrapped in the rainbow quilt.

  Which is missing.

  I sink down on his bed and smooth my hand over his pillow. Right now, at 12:45, Jacob is in physics class. He told me this morning that they are doing a lab on Archimedes'

  principle, trying to determine the density of two unknown materials. What mass, when inserted into a medium, causes it to displace? What floats, and what sinks?

  I will go to the school and pick the boys up, making up an excuse--a dentist's visit, a haircut appointment. But instead of coming home we will drive and drive until we cross the border into Canada. I will pack suitcases for them, and we will never come back here.

  Even as I am thinking this, I know it could never happen. Jacob would not und
erstand the concept of never coming back home. And somewhere, in a police station, Jess's boyfriend is being blamed when he might be innocent.

  Downstairs, with numb fingers, I pick through the stack of bills that I haven't sorted. I know it's in here somewhere ... and then I find it, beneath the second notice from the phone company. Rich Matson's business card, with his cell phone number scrawled on the back.

  Just in case, he had said.

  Just in case you happen to think that your son might be involved in a murder. Just in case you are confronted with the glaring evidence that you have failed as a mother. Just in case you are caught between what you want and what you should do.

  Detective Matson has been honest with me; I will be honest with him.

  His voice mail picks up immediately after I dial the number. The first time, I hang up, because all of my intended words have become jammed together like putty. The second time, I clear my throat. --This is Emma Hunt,|| I say. --I ... I really need to speak with you.||

  Still holding the phone like an amulet, I wander into the living room again. The news program is over; now there is a soap opera on. I rewind the action until the segment about Jess Ogilvy plays again. I deliberately keep my eyes trained to the other side of the screen, but it's still there: a flag on the field, a nanosecond of truth in all the shades of the color spectrum.

  No matter how hard I try, I can't unsee that damn quilt.

  Jacob

  Jess is dead.

  My mother tells me after school. She stares at me when she says it, as if she's trying to find clues in my expression, the same way I scrutinize the tilt of someone's eyebrows and the position of their mouth and the size of their pupils and try to connect them with an emotion.

  For a moment I think, Does she have Asperger's, too? But then, just when it seems that she is analyzing my features, hers change, and I can't tell what she's feeling. Her eyes look tight at the edges, and her mouth is pinched. Is she mad at me, or is she just upset about Jess being dead? Does she want me to react to news I already know? I could act like I'm shocked (jaw dropped, eyes round), but that would also mean I'm lying, and then my lying face (eyes looking up at ceiling, teeth biting down on bottom lip) would do a hostile takeover of my shocked face. Besides, lying is right up there on the House Rules list. To recap: