The Jodi Picoult Collection #2

by Jodi Picoult

  “Patrick,” she says quietly, “I think I’ve already ruined the lives of enough people I love.”

  When the door bursts open and Nathaniel tumbles into the kitchen on a whirl of cold air, Patrick comes to his feet. The boy smells of popcorn and is carrying a stuffed frog inside his winter coat. “Guess what,” he says. “Daddy took me to the arcade.”

  “You’re a lucky guy,” Patrick answers, and even to his own ears, his voice sounds weak. Caleb comes in, then, and closes the door behind him. He looks from Patrick to Nina, and smiles uncomfortably. “I thought you were visiting with Marcella.”

  “She had to go. She was meeting someone else. As she was leaving, Patrick stopped by.”

  “Oh.” Caleb rubs the back of his neck. “So . . . what did she say?”

  “Say?”

  “About the DNA.”

  Before Patrick’s very eyes, Nina changes. She flashes a polished smile at her husband. “It’s a match,” she lies. “A perfect match.”

  • • •

  From the moment I step outside, the world is magic. Air cold enough to make my nostrils stick together; a sun that trembles like a cold yolk; a sky so wide and blue that I cannot keep it all in my eyes. Inside smells different from outside, but you don’t notice until one of them is taken away from you.

  I am on my way to Fisher’s office, so my electronic bracelet has been deactivated. Being outside is so glorious that it almost supersedes the secret I am hiding. As I slow for a stoplight I see the Salvation Army man swinging his bell, his bucket swaying gently. This is the season of charity; surely there will be some left for me.

  Patrick’s offer swims through my mind like smoke, making it difficult to see clearly. He is the most moral, upstanding man I know—he would not have offered lightly to become my one-man posse. Of course, I cannot let him do this. But I also can’t stop hoping that maybe he will ignore me and do it anyway. And immediately, I hate myself for even thinking such a thing.

  I tell myself, too, that I don’t want Patrick to go after Gwynne for another reason, although it is one I will admit only in the darkest corners of the night: Because I want to be the one. Because this was my son, my grievance, my justice to mete out.

  When did I become this person—a woman who has the capacity to commit murder, to want to murder again, to get what she wants without caring who she destroys in the process? Was this always a part of me, buried, waiting? Maybe there is a seed of malfeasance even in the most honest of people—like Patrick—that requires a certain combination of circumstances to bloom. In most of us, then, it lies dormant forever. But for others, it blossoms. And once it does, it takes over like loosestrife, choking out rational thought, killing compassion.

  So much for Christmas spirit.

  Fisher’s office is decorated for the holidays too. Swaths of garland drape the fireplace; there is mistletoe hanging square over the secretary’s desk. Beside the coffee urn sits a jug of hot mulled cider. While I wait for my attorney to retrieve me, I run my hand over the leather cushion of the couch, simply for the novelty of touching something other than the old sage chenille sofa in my living room at home.

  What Patrick said about labs making mistakes has stayed with me. I will not tell Fisher about the bone marrow tranpslant, not until I know for sure that Marcella’s explanation is right. There is no reason to believe that Quentin Brown will dig up this obscure glitch about DNA; so there is no reason to trouble Fisher yet with information he might never need to know.

  “Nina.” Fisher strides toward me, frowning. “You’re losing weight.”

  “It’s called prisoner-of-war chic.” I fall into step beside him, measuring the dimensions of this hall and that alcove, simply because they are unfamiliar to me. In his office, I stare out the window, where the fingers of bare branches rap a tattoo against the glass.

  Fisher catches the direction of my gaze. “Would you like to go outside?” he asks quietly.

  It is freezing, nearly zero. But I am not in the habit of handing back gifts. “I would love that.”

  So we walk in the parking lot behind the law offices, the wind kicking up small tornadoes of brown leaves. Fisher holds a stack of papers in his gloved hands. “We’ve gotten the state’s psychiatric evaluation back. You didn’t quite answer his questions directly, did you?”

  “Oh, come on. Do you know the role of a judge in the courtroom? For God’s sake.”

  A small grin plays over Fisher’s mouth. “All the same, he found you competent and sane at the time of the offense.”

  I stop walking. What about now? Is it crazy to want to finish the job once you’ve found out you didn’t succeed the first time? Or is that the sanest thing in the world?

  “Don’t worry. I think we can chew this guy up and rip his report to shreds—but I also would like a forensic shrink to say you were insane then, and aren’t now. The last thing I want is a jury thinking you’re still a threat.”

  But I am. I imagine shooting Father Gwynne, getting it right this time. Then I turn to Fisher, my face perfectly blank. “Who do you want to use?”

  “How about Sidwell Mackay?”

  “We joke about him in the office,” I say. “Any prosecutor can get through him in five minutes flat.”

  “Peter Casanoff?”

  I shake my head. “Pompous windbag.”

  Together we turn our backs to the wind, trying to make a very logical decision about whom we can find to call me insane. Maybe this will not be so difficult after all. What rational woman still sees the wrong man’s blood on her hands every time she looks down, but spends an hour in the shower imagining how she might kill the right man?

  “All right,” Fisher suggests. “How about O’Brien, from Portland?”

  “I’ve called him a couple of times. He seems all right, maybe a little squirmy.”

  Fisher nods in agreement. “He’s going to come off like an academic, and I think that’s what you need, Nina.”

  I offer him my most complacent smile. “Well, Fisher. You’re the boss!”

  He gives me a guarded look, then hands over the psychiatric report. “This is the one the state sent. You need to remember what you told him before you go see O’Brien.”

  So defense attorneys do ask their clients to memorize what they said to the state psychiatrist.

  “We’ve got Judge Neal coming down, by the way.”

  I cringe. “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s supposed to be incredibly gullible.”

  “How lucky for you, then, that you’re a defendant,” Fisher says dryly. “Speaking of which . . . I don’t believe we’re going to put you on the stand.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to, after two psychiatrists testify.” But I am thinking, I cannot take the stand now, not knowing what I know.

  Fisher stops walking and faces me. “Before you start telling me how you think your defense ought to be handled, Nina, I want to remind you you’re looking at insanity from a prosecutor’s perspective, and I—”

  “You know, Fisher,” I interrupt, glancing at my watch, “I can’t really talk about this today.”

  “Is the coach turning into a pumpkin?”

  “I’m sorry. I just can’t.” My eyes slide away from his.

  “You can’t put it off forever. Your trial will start in January, and I’ll be gone over the holidays with my family.”

  “Let me get examined first,” I bargain. “Then we can sit down.”

  Fisher nods. I think of O’Brien, of whether I can convince him of my insanity. I wonder if, by then, it will be an act.

  • • •

  For the first time in a decade, Quentin takes a long lunch. No one will notice at the DA’s office; they barely tolerate his presence, and in his absence, probably dance on the top of his desk. He checks the directions he’s downloaded from the computer and swings his car into the parking lot of the high school. Teens sausaged into North Face jackets give him cursory glances as he passe
s. Quentin walks right through the middle of a hackeysack game without breaking stride, and continues around the back of the school.

  There is a shoddy football stadium, an equally shoddy track, and a basketball court. Gideon is doing an admirable job of guarding some pansy-ass center six inches shorter than him. Quentin puts his hands into the pockets of his overcoat and watches his son steal the ball and shoot an effortless three-pointer.

  The last time his son had picked up the phone to get in touch, he’d been calling from jail, busted for possession. And although it cost Quentin plenty of snide comments about nepotism, he’d gotten Gideon’s sentence transmuted to a rehab facility. That hadn’t been good enough for Gideon, though, who’d wanted to be released scot-free. “You’re no use as a father,” he’d told Quentin. “I should have known you’d be no use as a lawyer, either.”

  Now, a year later, Gideon high-fives another player and then turns around to see Quentin watching. “Shit, man,” he mutters. “Time.” The other kids fall to the sidelines, sucking on water bottles and shrugging off layers of clothes. Gideon approaches, arms crossed. “You come here to make me piss in some cup?”

  Shrugging, Quentin says, “No, I came to see you. To talk.”

  “I got nothing to say to you.”

  “That’s surprising,” Quentin responds, “since I have sixteen years’ worth.”

  “Then what’s another day?” Gideon turns back toward the game. “I’m busy.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The words make the boy pause. “Yeah, right,” he murmurs. He storms back to the basketball court, grabbing the ball and spinning it in the air—to impress Quentin, maybe? “Let’s go, let’s go!” he calls, and the others rally around him. Quentin walks off. “Who was that, man?” he hears one of the boys ask Gideon. And Gideon’s response, when he thinks Quentin is too far away to hear: “Some guy who needed directions.”

  • • •

  From the window of the doctor’s office at Dana-Farber, Patrick can see the ragtag edge of Boston. Olivia Bessette, the oncologist listed on Father Szyszynski’s medical reports, has turned out to be considerably younger than Patrick expected—not much older than Patrick himself. She sits with her hands folded, her curly hair pulled into a sensible bun, one rubber-soled white clog tapping lightly on the floor. “Leukemia only affects the blood cells,” she explains, “and chronic myeloid leukemia tends to have an onset in patients in their forties and fifties—although I’ve had some cases with patients in their twenties.”

  Patrick wonders how you sit on the edge of a hospital bed and tell someone they are not going to live. It is not that different, he imagines, from knocking on a door in the middle of the night and informing a parent that his son has been killed in a drunk driving accident. “What happens to the blood cells?” he asks.

  “Blood cells are all programmed to die, just like we are. They start out at a baby stage, then grow up to be a little more functional, and by the time they get spit out of the bone marrow they are adult cells. By then, white cells should be able to fight infection on your behalf, red blood cells should be able to carry oxygen, and platelets should be able to clot your blood. But if you have leukemia, your cells never mature . . . and they never die. So you wind up with a proliferation of white cells that don’t work, and that overrun all your other cells.”

  Patrick is not really going against Nina’s wishes, being here. All he’s doing is clarifying what they know—not taking it a step farther. He secured this appointment on a ruse, pretending that he is working on behalf of the assistant attorney general. Mr. Brown, Patrick explained, has the burden of proof. Which means they need to be a hundred percent sure that Father Szyszynski didn’t drop dead of leukemia the moment that his assailant pulled out a gun. Could Dr. Bessette, his former oncologist, offer any opinions?

  “What does a bone marrow transplant do?” Patrick asks.

  “Wonders, if it works. There are six proteins on all of our cells, human leukocyte antigens, or HLA. They help our bodies recognize you as you, and me as me. When you’re looking for a bone marrow donor, you’re hoping for all six of these proteins to match yours. In most cases, this means siblings, half-siblings, maybe a cousin—relatives seem to have the lowest instance of rejection.”

  “Rejection?” Patrick asks.

  “Yes. In essence, you’re trying to convince your body that the donor cells are actually yours, because you have the same six proteins on them. If you can’t do that, your immune system will reject the bone marrow transplant, which leads to Graft Versus Host disease.”

  “Like a heart transplant.”

  “Exactly. Except this isn’t an organ. Bone marrow is harvested from the pelvis, because it’s the big bones in your body that make blood. Basically, we put the donor to sleep and then stick needles into his hips about 150 times on each side, suctioning out the early cells.”

  He winces, and the doctor smiles a little. “It is painful. Being a bone marrow donor is a very selfless thing.”

  Yeah, this guy was a fucking altruist, Patrick thinks.

  “Meanwhile, the patient with leukemia has been taking immunosuppressants. The week before the transplant, he’s given enough chemotherapy to kill all the blood cells in his body. It’s timed this way, so that his bone marrow is empty.”

  “You can live like that?”

  “You’re at huge risk for infection. The patient still has his own living blood cells . . . he’s just not making any new ones. Then he gets the donor marrow, through a simple IV. It takes about two hours, and we don’t know how, but the cells manage to find their way to the bone marrow in his own body and start growing. After about a month, his bone marrow has been entirely replaced by his donor’s.”

  “And his blood cells would have the donor’s six proteins, that HLA stuff?” Patrick asks.

  “That’s right.”

  “How about the donor’s DNA?”

  Dr. Bessette nods. “Yes. In all respects, his blood is really someone else’s. He’s just fooling his body into believing it’s truly his.”

  Patrick leans forward. “But if it takes—if the cancer goes into remission—does the patient’s body start making his own blood again?”

  “No. If it did, we’d consider it a rejection of the graft, and the leukemia would return. We want the patient to keep producing his donor’s blood forever.” She taps the file on her desk. “In Glen Szyszynski’s case, five years after the transplant, he was given a clean bill of health. His new bone marrow was working quite well, and the chance of a recurrence of leukemia was less than ten percent.” Dr. Bessette nods. “I think the prosecution can safely say that however the priest died, it wasn’t of leukemia.”

  Patrick smiles at her. “Guess it felt good to have a success story.”

  “It always does. Father Szyszynski was lucky to have found a perfect match.”

  “A perfect match?”

  “That’s what we call it when a donor’s HLA corresponds to all six of the patient’s HLA.”

  Patrick takes a quick breath. “Especially when they’re not related.”

  “Oh,” Dr. Bessette says. “But that wasn’t the case here. Father Szyszynski and his donor were half-brothers.”

  • • •

  Francesca Martine came to the Maine State Lab by way of New Hampshire, where she’d been working as a DNA scientist until something better came along. That something turned out not to be the ballistics expert who broke her heart. She moved north, nursing her wounds, and discovered what she’d always known—safety came in gels and Petri dishes, and numbers never hurt you.

  That said, numbers also couldn’t explain the visceral reaction she has the minute she first meets Quentin Brown. On the phone, she imagined him like all the other state drones—harried and underpaid, with skin a sickly shade of gray. But from the moment he walks into her lab, she cannot take her eyes off him. He is striking, certainly, with his excessive height and his mahogany complexion, but Frankie knows that isn’t the attractio
n. She feels a pull between them, magnetism honed by the common experience of being different. She is not black, but she’s often been the only woman in the room with an IQ of 220.

  Unfortunately, if she wants Quentin Brown to study her closely, she’ll have to assume the shape of a forensic lab report. “What was it that made you look at this twice?” Frankie asks.

  He narrows his eyes. “How come you’re asking?”

  “Curiosity. It’s pretty esoteric stuff for the prosecution.”

  Quentin hesitates, as if wondering whether to confide in her. Oh, come on, Frankie thinks. Loosen up. “The defense asked to take a look at it, specifically. Immediately. And it didn’t seem to merit that kind of request. I don’t see how the DNA results here make a difference for us or for them.”

  Frankie crosses her arms. “The reason they were interested isn’t because of the lab report I issued. It’s because of what’s in the medical files.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “You know the way the DNA report says that the chances of randomly selecting an unrelated individual who matches this genetic material are one in six billion?”

  Quentin nods.

  “Well,” Frankie explains, “you just found the one.”

  • • •

  It costs approximately two thousand dollars of taxpayer money to exhume a body. “No,” Ted Poulin says flatly. As the attorney general of Maine, and Quentin’s boss, that ought to be that. But Quentin isn’t going to give up without a fight, not this time.

  He grips the receiver of the phone. “The DNA scientist at the state lab says we can do the test on tooth pulp.”

  “Quentin, it doesn’t matter for the prosecution. She killed him. Period.”

  “She killed a guy who molested her son. I have to change him from a sexual predator into a victim, Ted, and this is the way to do it.”

  There is a long silence on the other end. Quentin runs his fingertips along the grain of wood on Nina Frost’s desk. He does this over and over, as if he is rubbing an amulet.