The Jodi Picoult Collection #4

by Jodi Picoult

  I slip the iPod into my pocket and pour the water from the whistling kettle, and that’s when I realize that I can hear a shower running above me.

  Forgetting my tea, I creep into the living room, past the monster entertainment system, and up the stairs.

  The water sound is coming from the master bathroom suite.

  The bed’s unmade. It’s a quilt with roses embroidered all over it, and there is a pile of clothes on a chair. I pick up a lacy bra and run my hand over the straps.

  That’s when I realize that the bathroom door’s ajar, and that I can sort of see the shower reflected in the mirror.

  My day has gotten considerably better in the past thirty seconds.

  There’s steam, so I can only make out the curves when she turns and the fact that her hair reaches her shoulders. She’s humming, and she’s wicked off-key. Turn, I silently beg. Full frontal.

  “Oh, crap,” the woman says, and suddenly she opens the door of the shower. I see her arm emerge as she blindly feels around for her towel, which is hanging on a rack beside the shower door, and wipes her eyes. I hold my breath, staring at her shoulder. Her boob.

  Still blinking, she lets go of the towel and turns.

  In that second, our eyes meet.

  Jacob

  People say things all the time they don’t mean, and neurotypical folks manage to figure out the message all the same. Take, for example, Mimi Scheck in school. She said she’d die if Paul McGrath didn’t ask her to the Winter Formal, but in reality, she would not have died—she would just have been really sad. Or the way Theo sometimes smacks another kid’s shoulder and says “Get out!” when that really means he wants his friend to keep talking. Or that time my mom muttered “Oh, that’s just great” when we got a flat tire on the highway although it clearly was not great; it was a colossal hassle.

  So maybe when Jess told me to get lost on Sunday, she really meant something else.

  * * *

  I think I might be dying of spinal meningitis. Headaches, dementia, stiffness of the neck, high fever. I have two out of the four. I don’t know if I should ask my mother to take me for a lumbar puncture or just ride it out until I die. I have already prepared a note explaining how I’d like to be dressed at my funeral, just in case.

  It is equally possible, I suppose, that the reason I have a severe headache and stiff neck is I have gotten no sleep since Sunday, when I last saw Jess.

  She didn’t send me pictures of her new house in advance, like she promised. I sent her forty-eight emails yesterday to remind her, and she didn’t respond to any of them. I can’t call to remind her to send the pictures because I still have her cell phone.

  Last night at about four in the morning, I asked myself what Dr. Henry Lee would do, if confronted with the evidence that:

  1. No photos ever arrived by email.

  2. None of my forty-eight messages were acknowledged.

  Hypothesis One would be that Jess’s email account is not functional, which seems unlikely because it is connected with the entirety of UVM. Hypothesis Two would be that she is actively choosing to not communicate with me, which would indicate anger or frustration (see above: Just get lost). But that doesn’t make sense, since she specifically told me at our last meeting that I should tell her what I’d learned . . . which implies another meeting.

  Incidentally, I have made a list of what I learned at our last meeting:

  1. Gluten-free pizza tastes disgusting.

  2. Jess is not available to go to a movie this Friday night.

  3. Her cell phone sounds like a bird chirping when you power it down.

  4. Mark is a dim-witted moron. (Although, in fairness, this is (a) redundant and (b) something I already knew.)

  The only reason I went to school today, feeling as awful as I do, is that if I stayed home I know my mother would insist I miss my lesson with Jess, and I can’t do that. I have to give her back her phone, after all. And if I see her face-to-face, I can ask her why she didn’t answer my emails.

  Usually it is Theo’s job to walk me to the UVM campus, which is only a half mile from school. He drops me off at Jess’s dorm room, which she has always left unlocked for me, so that I can wait for her until she gets out of her anthropology class. Sometimes I do my homework while I’m waiting, and sometimes I look through the papers on her desk. Once I sprayed her perfume on my clothes and went around smelling like her for the rest of the day. Then Jess shows up and we go to the library to work, or sometimes to the student union or a café on Church Street.

  I could probably get to Jess’s dorm while comatose, but today—when I really do need Theo’s help to find my way to a new location—he leaves school because he’s sick. He searches me out after sixth period and tells me he feels like crap and is going home to die.

  Don’t, I tell him. That would really upset Mom.

  My immediate first instinct is to ask him how I am supposed to get to Jess’s if he goes home sick, but then I remember Jess telling me that not everything is about me, and that putting yourself in someone else’s shoes is part of social interactions. (Not literally. I would not fit in Theo’s shoes. He wears a ten and a half, while I wear a twelve.) So I tell Theo to feel better and then I go to the guidance counselor, Mrs. Grenville. We examine the map Jess has given me and decide that I should take Bus H-5 and get off at the third stop. She even draws a route in highlighter pen from the bus stop to the house.

  As it turns out, the map is a very good one, even if it’s not drawn to scale. After I get off the bus, I turn right at the fire hydrant and then count six houses on the left. Jess’s new temporary home is an old brick house with ivy growing up the sides. I wonder if she knows that the tendrils of ivy can break apart mortar and brick. I wonder if I should tell her. If someone told me, I would lie in bed at night wondering if the whole house was going to crumble around me.

  I am still very nervous when I ring the front doorbell, because I have never seen the inside of this house before and that makes me feel like my bones have gone to jelly.

  No one answers, so I go around the back.

  I glance down at the snow and make a mental note of what I see, but it isn’t really important because The Door Is Unlocked, and that must mean Jess is expecting me. I feel myself relaxing already: it’s just like her dorm room; I will go in and wait, and when she returns, everything will be back to normal.

  * * *

  There are only two times that Jess has gotten angry with me, and both occurred while I was waiting for her to show up. The first was when I took all her clothes out of her closet and arranged them according to the electromagnetic color spectrum, like mine. The second time was when I sat down at her desk and noticed the calculus problem set she was working on. She’d done half the problems wrong, so I fixed them for her.

  * * *

  Theo is the person who made me understand that the rules of violence are based on threat. If there is an actual problem, there are only two options:

  1. Retaliation

  2. Confrontation

  It’s gotten me into trouble.

  I have been sent to the principal’s office for smacking a boy who threw a paper airplane at me during English class. When Theo ruined one of my forensic experiments-in-progress, I went into his bedroom with a pair of scissors and systematically hacked his comic book collection to bits. Once in eighth grade, I found out that a group of kids were making fun of me, and as if someone had flipped an electrical switch inside me, I went into a frantic rage. I huddled in a cubicle in the school library, crafting a hit list of the people I hated and how I would like their lives to end: knife wound in the locker room at gym, bomb in their locker, cyanide in their Diet Coke. As is the Aspergian nature, I’m fanatically organized about some things and disorganized about others, and as luck would have it I lost that piece of paper. I figured someone (maybe me) had thrown it out, but my history teacher found it and gave it to the principal, who called my mother.

  She yelled at me for seventy-nine
straight minutes, mostly about how violated she felt by my actions, and then she got even more angry because I couldn’t really understand why something I did had upset her. So she took ten of my CrimeBusters notebooks and ran them through her bill shredder page by page, and suddenly, her point was crystal clear. I was so furious that, that night, I dumped the bin of shredded paper over her head while she was asleep.

  Luckily, I didn’t get suspended—most of the administration of the school knew me well enough to know I was not a threat to public safety—but my mother’s lesson was enough to make me see why I could never do anything like that again.

  I say all this by way of explanation: Impulsiveness is part of what it means to have Asperger’s.

  And it never ends well.

  Emma

  I am allowed to work at home on my column, but every Tuesday afternoon I have to trot downtown to meet with my editor. Mostly it’s a therapy session—she tells me what’s wrong with her life and expects me to dole her out advice, the way I do for the masses in the paper.

  I don’t mind, because I think that one hour a week of counseling is a pretty fair trade for a paycheck and health insurance. But it also means that on Tuesdays, when Jacob meets with Jess, she is responsible for getting him back to our house.

  Tonight, as soon as I walk through the door, I find Theo in the kitchen. “How do you feel?” I ask, pressing my palm against his forehead. “Do you have a fever?”

  I’d called home from Burlington, like I usually do before I leave the office, only to find out that Theo was sick and frantic because he’d left school without remembering that today is the day he walks Jacob to his appointment with Jess. A second call to the guidance department kept me from panicking: Mrs. Grenville had talked to Jacob about taking a bus to Jess’s new house and said he felt confident about doing it on his own.

  “It’s just a cold,” Theo says, ducking away. “But Jacob’s not home yet and it’s past four-thirty.”

  He doesn’t really need to say any more: Jacob would rather saw off his arm with a butter knife than miss an episode of CrimeBusters. But Jacob’s only fifteen minutes later than normal. “Well, he was meeting Jess somewhere new today. Maybe it’s a little farther away than her dorm was.”

  “But what if he never got there?” Theo says, visibly upset. “I should have just stayed in school and walked him there like usual—”

  “Honey, you were sick. Besides, Mrs. Grenville thought this might be a good opportunity for Jacob to be independent. And I think I’ve got Jess’s new phone number on my email; I can call if it makes you feel better.” I wrap my arms around Theo. It’s been too long since I hugged him; at fifteen, he ducks away from physical affection. But it’s sweet to see him worried about Jacob. There might be friction between them, but at heart, Theo loves his brother. “I’m sure Jacob’s fine, but I’m glad he’s got you looking out for him,” I say, and in that instant, I make a snap decision to capitalize on the goodwill Theo’s feeling for Jacob. “Let’s go out for Chinese tonight,” I suggest, even though eating out is a luxury we can’t afford; plus, it’s harder to find food Jacob can eat if I don’t make it myself.

  An unreadable expression crosses Theo’s face, but then he nods. “That would be cool,” he says gruffly, and he slides away from my grasp.

  The door to the mudroom opens. “Jacob?” I call, and I go to meet him.

  For a moment, I can’t speak. His eyes are wild and his nose is running. His hands flap at his sides as he shoves me into the wall and runs up to his room. “Jacob!”

  He has no lock on his bedroom door; I removed it years ago. Now, I push the door open and find Jacob inside his closet, underneath the tendrils of shirt cuffs and sweatpants, rocking back and forth and emitting a high, reedy note from his throat.

  “What’s the matter, baby?” I say, getting down on my hands and knees and crawling into the closet, too. I wrap my arms tight around him and start singing:

  “I shot the sheriff . . . but I didn’t shoot the deputy.”

  Jacob’s hands are flapping so hard that he is bruising me. “Talk to me,” I say. “Did something happen with Jess?”

  At the sound of her name, he arches backward, as if he’s been pierced by a bullet. He starts smacking his head against the wall so hard that it dents the plaster.

  “Don’t,” I beg, using every bit of strength I have to drag him forward, so that he cannot hurt himself.

  Dealing with an autistic meltdown is like dealing with a tornado. Once you are close enough to see it coming, there’s nothing to do but weather the storm. Unlike a child having a temper tantrum, Jacob doesn’t care if his behavior is making me react. He doesn’t make sure he’s not hurting himself. He isn’t doing it in order to get something. In fact, he’s not in control of himself at all. And unlike when he was four or five, I am not big enough to control him anymore.

  I get up and turn off all the lights in the room and pull down the blackout shades so that it is dark. I put on his Marley CD. Then I start pulling clothes off the hangers in his closet and pile them on his body—which at first makes him scream harder and then, as the weight builds, calms him down. By the time he falls asleep in my arms, I have ripped my blouse and my stockings. The CD has repeated four times in its entirety. The LED display on his alarm clock reads 8:35 P.M.

  “What set you off?” I whisper. It could have been anything—an argument with Jess, or the fact that he didn’t like the layout of the kitchen in her new accommodations, or the realization too late that he was missing his favorite TV show. I kiss Jacob on the forehead. Then, gently, I disengage myself from the knot of his arms and leave him curled on the floor with a pillow under his head. I cover him with the rainbow postage-stamp summertime quilt that’s been folded up for the season in his closet.

  Muscles stiff, I walk downstairs again. The lights have all been turned off, except for one in the kitchen.

  Let’s go out for Chinese tonight.

  But that was before I knew that I would be sucked into the black hole that Jacob can become at any given moment.

  There is a cereal bowl on the counter, with a puddle of soy milk still in the bottom. The Rice Chex box stands beside it like an accusation.

  Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I’m wearing will never really fit.

  I carry the bowl to the sink and swallow the tears that spring to the back of my throat. Oh, Theo. I’m so sorry.

  Again.

  CASE 3: BRAGGED, TAUNTED, “KAUGHT”

  Dennis Rader was a married man with two grown children, a former Cub Scout leader, and president of his Lutheran church. He also—after a thirty-one-year investigation—was revealed to be the serial killer known as BTK, short for Bind, Torture, and Kill—his method for murdering ten people in the Wichita, Kansas, area between 1974 and 1991. After the killings, letters were sent to the police bragging of the killings and offering grisly details. Following a twenty-five-year silence, those letters and packages resumed in 2004, claiming responsibility for a murder for which he had not been suspected. DNA was taken from beneath the fingernails of a victim, and authorities gathered eleven hundred DNA samples, attempting to find the serial killer.

  In one of BTK’s communications—a computer disk mailed to KSAS-TV—metadata from the Microsoft Word document revealed that the author was someone named Dennis, as well as a link to the Lutheran Church. Searching on the Internet, police were able to find a suspect: Dennis Rader. By obtaining his daughter’s DNA and comparing it with DNA samples found on the victims, the police were able to make a familial match—giving them enough probable cause for arrest. He has been sentenced to 175 years to life.

  So to all of you who surf for Internet porn or spend your free time writing anarchist manifestos: Beware. You can’t ever really get rid of something on your computer.

  3

  Rich

  I’ve faced down a lot of harrowing situations in my twenty years
on the job: suicides in progress, felons on the run after an armed robbery, rape victims too traumatized to tell me their story. None of these, however, compare to having to work an audience made up of seven-year-olds.

  “Can you show us your gun again?” one kid asks.

  “Not a great idea,” I say, glancing at the teacher, who already asked me to remove my holster and weapon before coming into the class for Job Day—a request I had to refuse, since technically, I was still on the clock.

  “Do you get to shoot it?”

  I look over the ammo-obsessed boy’s head at the rest of the class. “Any other questions?”

  A little girl raises her hand. I recognize her; she might have come to one of Sasha’s birthday parties. “Do you always get the bad guys?” she asks.

  There’s no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn’t nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would lead you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren’t proud of.

  I look her in the eye. “We sure try,” I say.

  On my hip, my cell phone starts to vibrate. I flip it open, see the number of the station, and stand up. “I’m going to have to cut this short. . . So one more time—what’s the number one rule of crime scenes?”

  The class sings the answer back to me: “Don’t touch something wet if it’s not from you!”

  As the teacher asks them all to thank me with a round of applause, I crouch down near Sasha’s desk. “What do you think? Did I embarrass you beyond repair?”

  “You did okay,” she says.

  “I can’t stay to have lunch with you,” I apologize. “I have to go down to the station.”