Nineteen Minutes

by Jodie Picoult

  The voice sounded like wind passing over snow-bleak, a whisper. “To your right,” it said, and Peter slowly got to his feet and walked to a corner of the cell.

  “Who…who’s there?” he said.

  “It’s about fucking time. I thought you were never going to stop wailing.”

  Peter tried to see through the bars, but couldn’t. “You heard me crying?”

  “Fucking baby,” the voice said. “Grow the fuck up.”

  “Who are you?”

  “You can call me Carnivore, like everyone else.”

  Peter swallowed. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing they said I did,” Carnivore answered. “How long?”

  “How long what?”

  “How long till your trial?”

  Peter didn’t know. It was the one question he had forgotten to ask Jordan McAfee, probably because he was afraid to hear the answer.

  “Mine’s next week,” Carnivore said before Peter could reply.

  The metal door of the cell felt like ice against his temple. “How long have you been here?” Peter asked.

  “Ten months,” Carnivore answered.

  Peter imagined sitting in this cell for ten straight months. He thought about all the times he’d count those stupid cinder blocks, all the pisses that the guards would get to watch on their little television set.

  “You killed kids, right? You know what happens in this jail to guys who kill kids?”

  Peter didn’t respond. He was roughly the same age as everyone at Sterling High; it wasn’t like he’d gone into a nursery school. And it wasn’t like he hadn’t had a good reason.

  He didn’t want to talk about this anymore. “How come you didn’t get bail?”

  Carnivore scoffed. “Because they say I raped some waitress, and then stabbed her.”

  Did everyone in this jail think they were innocent? All this time Peter had spent lying on that bench, convincing himself that he was nothing like anyone else in the Grafton County Jail-and as it turned out, that was a lie.

  Did he sound like this to Jordan?

  “You still there?” Carnivore asked.

  Peter lay back down on his bench without saying another word. He turned his face to the wall, and he pretended not to hear as the man next to him tried over and over to make a connection.

  The first thing that struck Patrick, again, was how much younger Judge Cormier looked when she wasn’t on the bench. She answered the door in jeans and a ponytail, wiping her hands on a dish towel. Josie stood just behind her, her face washed by the same vacant stare he’d seen a dozen times over, now, in other victims he’d interviewed. Josie was a vital piece in the puzzle, the only one who had seen Peter kill Matthew Royston. But unlike those victims, Josie had a mother who knew the intricacies of the legal system.

  “Judge Cormier,” he said. “Josie. Thanks for letting me come over.”

  The judge stared at him. “This is a waste of time. Josie doesn’t remember anything.”

  “With all due respect, Judge, it’s my job to hear that from Josie herself.”

  He steeled himself for an argument, but she stepped back to let him inside. Patrick let his eyes roam the foyer-the antique table with a spider plant spilling over its surface, the tasteful landscapes that hung on the walls. So this was how a judge lived. His own place was a pit stop, a haven of laundry and old newspapers and food long past its expiration date, where he’d go for a few hours between his stints at the office.

  He turned to Josie. “How’s the head?”

  “It still hurts,” she said, so softly that Patrick had to strain to hear her.

  He turned to the judge again. “Is there a room where we could go talk for a few minutes?”

  She led them into the kitchen, which looked like just the kind of kitchen Patrick sometimes thought about when he imagined where he should have been by now. There were cherry cabinets and lots of sun streaming through the bay window and a bowl of bananas on the counter. He sat down across from Josie, expecting the judge to pull up a chair beside her daughter, but to his surprise she remained standing. “If you need me,” she said, “I’ll be upstairs.”

  Josie looked up, pained. “Can’t you just stay?”

  For a moment, Patrick saw something light in the judge’s eyes-want? regret?-but it vanished before he could put a name to it. “You know I can’t,” she said gently.

  Patrick didn’t have any kids of his own, but he was pretty damn sure that if one of his had come this close to dying, he’d have a hard time letting her out of his sight. He did not know exactly what was going on between the mother and daughter, but he knew better than to get in the middle of it.

  “I’m sure Detective Ducharme will make this utterly painless,” the judge said.

  It was part wish, part warning. Patrick nodded at her. A good cop did whatever he could to protect and serve, but when it was someone you knew who was robbed or threatened or hurt, the stakes changed. You’d make a few more phone calls; you’d shuffle your responsibilities so that one took priority. Patrick had experienced that, to a greater degree, years ago with his friend Nina and her son. He didn’t know Josie Cormier personally, but her mother was in the field of law enforcement-Christ, she was at its top level-and for this, her daughter deserved to be treated with kid gloves.

  He watched Alex walk up the stairs, and then he took a pad and pencil out of his coat pocket. “So,” he said. “How are you doing?”

  “Look, you don’t have to pretend you care.”

  “I’m not pretending,” Patrick said.

  “I don’t even get why you’re here. It’s not like anything anyone says to you is going to make those kids less dead.”

  “That’s true,” Patrick agreed, “but before we can try Peter Houghton we need to know exactly what happened. And unfortunately, I wasn’t there.”

  “Unfortunately?”

  He looked down at the table. “I sometimes think it’s easier to be the one who’s been hurt than the one who couldn’t stop it from happening.”

  “I was there,” Josie said, shaken. “I couldn’t stop it.”

  “Hey,” Patrick said, “it’s not your fault.”

  She looked up at him then, as if she so badly wished she could believe that, but knew he was wrong. And who was Patrick to tell her otherwise? Every time he envisioned his mad dash to Sterling High, he imagined what would have happened if he’d been at the school when the shooter first arrived. If he’d disarmed the kid before anyone was hurt.

  “I don’t remember anything about the shooting,” Josie said.

  “Do you remember being in the gym?”

  Josie shook her head.

  “How about running there with Matt?”

  “No. I don’t even remember getting up and going to school in the first place. It’s like a blank spot in my head that I just skip over.”

  Patrick knew, from talking to the shrinks who’d been assigned to work with the victims, that this was perfectly normal. Amnesia was one way for the mind to protect itself from reliving something that would otherwise break you apart. In a way, he wished he could be as lucky as Josie, that he could make what he’d seen vanish.

  “What about Peter Houghton? Did you know him?”

  “Everyone knew who he was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Josie shrugged. “He got noticed.”

  “Because he was different from everyone else?”

  Josie thought about this for a moment. “Because he didn’t try to fit in.”

  “You were dating Matthew Royston?”

  Immediately, tears welled in Josie’s eyes. “He liked to be called Matt.”

  Patrick reached for a paper napkin and passed it to Josie. “I’m sorry about what happened to him, Josie.”

  She ducked her head. “Me too.”

  He waited for her to wipe her eyes, blow her nose. “Do you know why Peter might have disliked Matt?”

  “People used to make fun of him,” Josie said. “It wasn’t
just Matt.”

  Did you? Patrick thought. He’d looked at the yearbook confiscated from Peter’s room-the circles around certain kids who became victims, and others who did not. There were many reasons for this-from the fact that Peter ran out of time to the truth that hunting down thirty people in a school of a thousand was more difficult than he’d imagined. But of all the targets Peter had marked in the yearbook, only Josie’s photo had been crossed out, as if he’d changed his mind. Only her face had words printed beneath it, in block letters: LET LIVE.

  “Did you know him personally? Have any classes or anything with him?”

  She looked up. “I used to work with him.”

  “Where?”

  “The copy store downtown.”

  “Did you two get along?”

  “Sometimes,” Josie said. “Not always.”

  “Why not?”

  “He lit a fire there once and I ratted him out. He lost his job after that.”

  Patrick marked a note down on his pad. Why had Peter made the decision to spare her when he had every reason to hold a grudge?

  “Before that,” Patrick asked, “would you say you were friends?”

  Josie pleated the napkin she’d used to dry her tears into a triangle, a smaller one, a smaller one still. “No,” she said. “We weren’t.”

  The woman next to Lacy was wearing a checkered flannel shirt, reeked of cigarettes, and was missing most of her teeth. She took one look at Lacy’s skirt and blouse. “Your first time here?” she asked.

  Lacy nodded. They were waiting in a long room, side by side in a row of chairs. In front of their feet ran a red dividing line, and then a second set of chairs. Inmates and visitors sat like mirror images, speaking in shorthand. The woman beside Lacy smiled at her. “You get used to it,” she said.

  One parent was allowed to visit Peter every two weeks, for one hour. Lacy had come with a basket full of home-baked muffins and cakes, magazines, books-anything she could think of to help Peter. But the correctional officer who’d signed her in for visitation had confiscated the items. No baked goods. And no reading material, not until it was vetted by the jail staff.

  A man with a shaved head and sleeves of tattoos up and down his arms headed toward Lacy. She shivered-was that a swastika inked onto his forehead? “Hi, Mom,” he murmured, and Lacy watched the woman’s eyes strip away the tattoos and the bare scalp and the orange jumpsuit to see a little boy catching tadpoles in a mudhole behind their house. Everyone, Lacy thought, is somebody’s son.

  She glanced away from their reunion and saw Peter being led into the visitation room. For a moment her heart caught-he looked too thin, and behind his glasses, his eyes were so empty-but then she tamped down whatever she was feeling and offered him a brilliant smile. She would pretend that it didn’t bother her to see her son in a prison jumpsuit; that she hadn’t had to sit in the car and fight a panic attack after pulling into the jail lot; that it was perfectly normal to be surrounded by drug dealers and rapists while you asked your son if he was getting enough to eat.

  “Peter,” she said, folding him into her arms. It took a moment, but he hugged her back. She pressed her face to his neck, the way she used to when he was a baby, and she thought she would devour him-but he did not smell like her son. For a moment she let herself entertain the pipe dream that this was all a mistake-Peter’s not in jail! This is someone else’s unfortunate child!-but then she realized what was different. The shampoo and deodorant he had to use here were not what he’d used at home; this Peter smelled sharper, coarser.

  Suddenly there was a tap on her shoulder. “Ma’am,” the correctional officer said, “you’ll have to let go now.”

  If only it was that easy, Lacy thought.

  They sat down on opposite sides of the red line.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  “I’m still here.”

  The way he said it-as if he’d totally expected otherwise by now-made Lacy shudder. She had a feeling he wasn’t talking about being let out on bail, and the alternative-the idea of Peter killing himself-was something she could not hold in her head. She felt her throat funnel tight, and she found herself doing the one thing she’d promised herself she would not do: she started to cry. “Peter,” she whispered. “Why?”

  “Did the police come to the house?” Peter asked.

  Lacy nodded-it seemed as if it had happened so long ago.

  “Did they go to my room?”

  “They had a warrant-”

  “They took my things?” Peter exclaimed, the first emotion she’d seen from him. “You let them take my things?”

  “What were you doing with those things?” she whispered. “Those bombs. The guns…?”

  “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Then make me, Peter,” she said, broken. “Make me understand.”

  “I haven’t been able to make you understand in seventeen years, Mom. Why should it be any different now?” His face twisted. “I don’t even know why you bothered to come.”

  “To see you-”

  “Then look at me,” Peter cried. “Why won’t you fucking look at me?”

  He put his head in his hands, his narrow shoulders rounding with the sound of a sob.

  It came down to this, Lacy realized: You stared at the stranger in front of you and decided, categorically, that this was no longer your son. Or you made the decision to find whatever scraps of your child you still could in what he had become.

  Was that even really a choice, if you were a mother?

  People could argue that monsters weren’t born, they were made. People could criticize her parenting skills, point to moments when Lacy had let Peter down by being too lax or too firm, too removed or too smothering. The town of Sterling would analyze to death what she had done to her son-but what about what she would do for him? It was easy to be proud of the kid who got straight A’s and who made the winning basket-a kid the world already adored. But true character showed when you could find something to love in a child everyone else hated. What if the things she had or hadn’t done for Peter were the wrong criteria for measurement? Wasn’t it just as telling a mark of motherhood to see how, from this awful moment on, she behaved?

  She reached across the red line until she could embrace Peter. She didn’t care if it was allowed or not. The guards could come and pull her off him, but until that happened, Lacy was not planning to let her son go.

  On the surveillance video taken from the cafeteria, students were carrying trays and doing homework and chatting when Peter entered the room holding a handgun. There was a discharge of bullets and a cacophony of screaming. A smoke alarm went off. When everyone started to run, he shot again, and this time two girls fell down. Other students ran right over them in an effort to get away.

  When the only people left in the cafeteria were Peter and the victims, he walked through the rows of tables, surveying his handiwork. He passed by the boy he’d shot who lay in a puddle of blood on top of a book, but he stopped to pick up an iPod that had been left on the table and put the earphones in his ears before turning it off and setting it down again. He turned the page in an open notebook. And then he sat down at one untouched tray and placed the gun on it. He opened a box of Rice Krispies and poured them into a Styrofoam bowl. He added the contents of a milk container and ate all the cereal before standing up again, retrieving his pistol, and exiting the cafeteria.

  It was the most chilling, deliberate thing Patrick had ever seen in his life.

  He looked down at the bowl of ramen noodles he had cooked himself for dinner, and realized he’d lost his appetite. Setting it aside on a stack of old newspapers, he rewound the video and forced himself to watch it again.

  When the phone rang, he picked it up, still distracted by the sight of Peter on his television screen. “Yeah.”

  “Well, hello to you, too,” Nina Frost said.

  He melted when he heard her voice; old habits died hard. “Sorry. I’m just in the middle of something.”
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  “I can imagine. It’s all over the news. How are you holding up?”

  “Oh, you know,” he said, when what he really meant was that he was not sleeping at night; that he saw the faces of the dead whenever he closed his eyes; that his mouth was full of the questions he was certain he’d forgotten to ask.

  “Patrick,” she said, because she was his oldest friend and because she knew him better than anyone, including himself, “don’t blame yourself.”

  He bent his head. “It happened in my town. How can’t I?”

  “If you had a videophone, I’d be able to tell if you’re wearing your hair shirt or your cape and boots,” Nina said.

  “It’s not funny.”

  “No, it’s not,” she agreed. “But you must know it’s a slam dunk at trial. You have, what? A thousand witnesses?”

  “Something like that.”

  Nina grew quiet. Patrick did not have to explain to her-a woman who’d lived with regret as a constant companion-that convicting Peter Houghton was not enough. For Patrick to lay this to rest, he’d have to understand why Peter had done this in the first place.

  So that he could keep it from happening again.

  From an FBI investigatory report, published by special agents in charge of examining school shootings around the globe:

  Among school shooters, we have seen a similarity of family dynamics. Often the shooter will have a turbulent relationship with his parents, or will have parents who accept pathological behavior. There is a lack of intimacy within the family. There are no limits for television or computer use imposed on the shooter, and sometimes there is access to weapons.

  Within the school environment, wefound a tendency toward detachment from the learning process on the part of the shooter. The school itself tended to tolerate disrespectful behavior, exhibited inequitable discipline and an inflexible culture-with certain students enjoying prestige given to them by teachers and staff.

  Shooters are more likely to have access to violent movies, television, and video games; to use drugs and alcohol; to have a peer group that exists outside of school and supports their behavior.

  In addition, prior to a violent act, there is evidence of leakage-aclue that something is coming. These hints might take the form of poems, writings, drawings, Internet posts, or threats made in person or in absentia.