Nineteen Minutes

by Jodie Picoult

  “You’re such a fake with them.”

  “I’m just not the way I am with you,” Josie said.

  “Like I said: fake.”

  “There’s different kinds of real.”

  Peter scoffed. “If that’s what those jerks are teaching you, it’s bullshit.”

  “They’re not teaching me anything,” Josie argued. “I’m there because I like them. They’re fun and funny and when I’m with them-” She broke off abruptly.

  “What?” Peter prompted.

  Josie looked him in the eye. “When I’m with them,” she said, “people like me.”

  Peter guessed change could be that dramatic: in an instant, you could go from wanting to kill someone to wanting to kill yourself.

  “I won’t let them make fun of you anymore,” Josie promised. “That’s a silver lining, right?”

  Peter didn’t respond. This wasn’t about him.

  “I just…I just can’t really hang out with you right now,” Josie explained.

  He lifted his face. “Can’t?”

  Josie stood up, backing away from him. “I’ll see you around, Peter,” she said, and she walked out of his life.

  You can feel people staring; it’s like heat that rises from the pavement during summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don’t have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it’s about you.

  I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn’t tell. I mean, I was just me.

  Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did.

  That was the day I started to believe they might be right.

  Ten Days After

  Josie waited until she could no longer hear the television in her mother’s bedroom-Leno, not Letterman-and then rolled onto her side to watch the LED acrobatics of the digital clock. When it was 2:00 a.m., she decided it was safe, and she pulled back her covers and got out of bed.

  She knew how to sneak downstairs. She’d done it a couple of times before, meeting Matt outside in the backyard. One night, he’d texted her on her cell-1/2 2 C U now. She had gone out to him in her pajamas, and for a moment when he touched her she actually thought she would slip through his fingers.

  There was only one landing where the floorboards creaked, and Josie knew enough to step over it. Downstairs, she rummaged through the stack of DVDs for the one she wanted-the one she didn’t want to be caught viewing. Then she turned on the television, muting the sound so low she had to sit right on top of the screen and its built-in speakers to hear.

  The first person shown was Courtney. She held up her hand, blocking whoever had been videotaping. She was laughing, though; her long hair falling over her features like a screen of silk. Offscreen, Brady Pryce’s voice: Give us something for Girls Gone Wild, Court. The camera fuzzed out for a moment, and then there was a close-up of a birthday cake. HAPPY SWEET SIX-TEEN, JOSIE. A run of faces, including Haley Weaver’s, singing to her.

  Josie paused the DVD. There was Courtney, and Haley, and Maddie, and John, and Drew. She touched her finger to each of their foreheads, getting a tiny electric shock each time.

  At her birthday party, they’d had a barbecue at Storrs Pond. There were hot dogs and hamburgers and sweet corn. They had forgotten the ketchup and someone had to drive back into town to buy some at a mini-mart. Courtney’s card had been signed BFF, best friends forever, even though Josie knew she’d written the same thing on Maddie’s card a month earlier.

  By the time the screen fuzzed out again and her own face came on, Josie was crying. She knew what was coming; she remembered this part. The camera panned back and there was Matt, his arms around her as she sat on his lap on the sand. He had taken off his shirt, and Josie remembered that his skin had been warm where it pressed up against hers.

  How could you be so alive one moment, and then have everything stop-not just your heart and your lungs, but the way you smiled slowly, the left side of your mouth curling before the right; and the pitch of your voice; and the habit you had of tugging at your hair when you were doing your math homework?

  I can’t live without you, Matt used to say, and now Josie realized he wouldn’t have to.

  She couldn’t stop sobbing, so Josie pushed her fist into her mouth to keep herself from making noise. She watched Matt on the screen the way you might study an animal you had never seen before, if you had to memorize it and tell the world later what you’d found. Matt’s hand splayed across her bare stomach, grazed the edge of her bikini top. She watched herself push him away, blush. “Not here,” her voice said, a funny voice, a voice that didn’t sound like Josie to her own ears. You never did, when you heard yourself on tape.

  “Then let’s go somewhere else,” Matt said.

  Josie ruched up the edge of her pajama top, until she could reach underneath. She spread her own hand across her belly. She edged her thumb up, like Matt had, to the curve of her breast. She tried to pretend it was him.

  He had given her a gold locket for that birthday, one she hadn’t taken off since that day nearly six months ago. Josie was wearing it on the DVD. She remembered that when she’d looked at it in the mirror, Matt’s thumbprint had been on the back, left behind after he clasped it around her neck. That had seemed so intimate, and for a few days, she had done everything she could to keep it from rubbing off.

  On the night that Josie had met Matt out in her own backyard, beneath the moon, he’d laughed at her pajamas, printed all over with pictures of Nancy Drew. What were you doing when I texted you? he asked.

  Sleeping. Why did you have to see me in the middle of the night?

  To make sure you were dreaming about me, he said.

  On the DVD, someone called out Matt’s name. He turned, grinning. His teeth were wolf’s teeth, Josie thought. Sharp, impossibly white. He stamped a kiss on Josie’s mouth. “Be right back,” he said.

  Be right back.

  She pressed Pause again, just as Matt stood up. Then she reached around her neck and ripped the locket off its thin gold chain. She unzipped one of the couch cushions and pushed the necklace deep inside the stuffing.

  She turned off the television. She pretended that Matt would be suspended like that forever, inches away from Josie so that she could still reach out and grab him, even though she knew that the DVD would reset itself even before she left the room.

  Lacy had known they were out of milk; that morning, as she and Lewis sat like zombies at the kitchen table, she had brought it up:

  I hear it’s going to rain again.

  We’re out of milk.

  Have you heard from Peter’s lawyer?

  It devastated Lacy to know that she could not visit Peter again for another week-jail rules. It killed her to know Lewis hadn’t been there to see him at all yet. How was she supposed to go through the motions of an ordinary day, knowing that her son was sitting in a cell less than twenty miles away?

  There was a point where the events of your life became a tsunami; Lacy knew, because she’d been washed away once before by grief. When that happened, you would find yourself days later on unfamiliar ground, rootless. The only other choice you had was to move to higher ground while you still could.

  Which is why Lacy found herself at a gas station buying a carton of milk, although all gut instinct told her to crawl under the covers and sleep. This was not as easy as it seemed: to get the milk, she had to first back out of her garage with reporters slapping the car windows and blocking her path. She had to elude the news van that followed her to the highway. As a result, she found herself paying for the milk at a service station in Purmort, New Hampshire-one she rarely frequented.

  “That’s $2.59,” the cashier said.

  Lacy opened her wallet and extracted three dollar bills. Then she noticed the small, hand-lettered display at the register.
Memorial Fund for the Victims of Sterling High, the sign read, and there was a coffee can to hold the donations.

  She started shaking.

  “I know,” the cashier sympathized. “It’s just tragic, isn’t it?”

  Lacy’s heart was pounding so fiercely she was certain the clerk would hear it.

  “You’ve got to wonder about the parents, don’t you? I mean, how could they not have known?”

  Lacy nodded, afraid that even the sound of her voice would ruin her anonymity. It was almost too easy to agree: Had there ever been a more awful child? A worse mother?

  It was simple to say that behind every terrible child stood a terrible parent, but what about the ones who had done the best they could? What about the ones, like Lacy, who had loved unconditionally, protected ferociously, cherished mightily-and still had raised a murderer?

  I didn’t know, Lacy wanted to say. It’s not my fault.

  But she stayed silent because-truth be told-she wasn’t quite sure she believed that.

  Lacy emptied the contents of her wallet into the coffee can, bills and coins. Numb, she walked out of the gas station, leaving the carton of milk on the counter.

  She had nothing left inside. She’d given it all to her son. And that was the greatest heartbreak of all-no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.

  Ervin Peabody, the professor of psychiatry at the college, offered to run a grief session for the entire town of Sterling at the white clapboard church in its center. There was a tiny line item in the daily paper and purple flyers posted at the coffee shop and bank, but that was enough to spread the word. By the time the meeting convened at 7:00 p.m., cars were parked as far as a half mile away; people spilled through the open doors of the church onto the street. The press, which had come en masse to cover the meeting, was turned away by a battalion of Sterling policemen.

  Selena pressed the baby closer against her chest as another wave of townspeople pushed past her. “Did you know it was going to be like this?” she whispered to Jordan.

  He shook his head, eyes roaming over the crowd. He recognized some of the same people who’d come to the arraignment, but also a host of other faces that were new, and that wouldn’t have been intimately connected to the high school: the elderly, the college kids, the couples with young babies. They had come because of the ripple effect, because one person’s trauma is another’s loss of innocence.

  Ervin Peabody sat in the front of the room, beside the police chief and the principal of Sterling High. “Hello,” he said, standing up. “We’ve called this session tonight because we’re all still reeling. Nearly overnight, the landscape’s changed around us. We may not have all the answers, but we thought it might be beneficial for us to start to talk about what’s happened. And maybe more importantly, to listen to each other.”

  A man stood up in the second row, holding his jacket in his hands. “I moved here five years ago, because my wife and I wanted to get away from the craziness of New York City. We were starting a family, and were looking for a place that was…well, just a little bit kinder and gentler. I mean, when you drive down the street in Sterling you get honked at by people who know you. You go to the bank and the teller remembers your name. There aren’t places like that in America anymore, and now…” He broke off.

  “And now Sterling’s not one either,” Ervin finished. “I know how difficult it can be when the image you’ve had of something doesn’t match its reality; when the friend beside you turns into a monster.”

  “Monster?” Jordan whispered to Selena.

  “Well, what is he supposed to say? That Peter was a time bomb? That’ll make them all feel safe.”

  The psychiatrist looked out over the crowd. “I think that the very fact that you’re all here tonight shows that Sterling hasn’t changed. It may not ever be normal again, as we know it…. We’re going to have to figure out a new kind of normal.”

  A woman raised her hand. “What about the high school? Are our kids going to have to go back inside there?”

  Ervin glanced at the police chief, the principal. “It’s still the site of an active investigation,” the chief said.

  “We’re hoping to finish out the year in a different location,” the principal added. “We’re in talks with the superintendent’s office in Lebanon, to see if we can use one of their empty schools.”

  Another woman’s voice: “But they’re going to have to go back sometime. My daughter’s only ten, and she’s terrified about walking into that high school, ever. She wakes up in the middle of the night screaming. She thinks there’s someone with a gun there, waiting for her.”

  “Be happy she’s able to have nightmares,” a man replied. He was standing next to Jordan, his arms folded, his eyes a livid red. “Go in there every night, when she cries, and hold her and tell her you’ll keep her safe. Lie to her, just like I did.”

  A murmur rolled through the church, like a ball of yarn being unraveled. That’s Mark Ignatio. The father of one of the dead.

  Just like that, a fault line opened up in Sterling-a ravine so deep and bleak that it would not be bridged for many years. There was already a difference in this town, between those who had lost children and those who still had them to worry about.

  “Some of you knew my daughter Courtney,” Mark said, pushing away from the wall. “Maybe she babysat for your kids. Or served you a burger at the Steak Shack in the summer. Maybe you’d recognize her by sight, because she was a beautiful, beautiful girl.” He turned to the front of the stage. “You want to tell me how I’m supposed to figure out a new kind of normal, Doc? You wouldn’t dare suggest that one day, it gets easier. That I’ll be able to move past this. That I’ll forget my daughter is lying in a grave, while some psychopath is still alive and well.” Suddenly the man turned to Jordan. “How can you live with yourself?” he accused. “How the hell can you sleep at night, knowing you’re defending that sonofabitch?”

  Every eye in the room turned to Jordan. Beside him, he could feel Selena press Sam’s face against her chest, shielding the baby. Jordan opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t find a single word.

  The sound of boots coming up the aisle distracted him. Patrick Ducharme was headed straight for Mark Ignatio. “I can’t imagine the pain you’re feeling, Mark,” Patrick said, his gaze locked on the grieving man’s. “And I know you have every right to come here and be upset. But the way our country works, someone’s innocent until they’re proven guilty. Mr. McAfee’s just doing his job.” He clapped his hand on Mark’s shoulder and lowered his voice. “Why don’t you and I grab a cup of coffee?”

  As Patrick led Mark Ignatio toward the exit, Jordan remembered what he had wanted to say. “I live here, too,” he began.

  Mark turned around. “Not for long.”

  Alex was not short for Alexandra, like most people assumed. Her father had simply given her the name of the son he would have preferred to have.

  After Alex’s mother had died of breast cancer when she was five, her father had raised her. He wasn’t the kind of dad who showed her how to ride a bike or to skip stones-instead, he taught her the Latin words for things like faucet and octopus and porcupine; he explained to her the Bill of Rights. She used academics to get his attention: winning spelling bees and geography contests, netting a string of straight A’s, getting into every college she applied to.

  She wanted to be just like her father: the kind of man who walked down the street and had storekeepers nod to him in awe: Good afternoon, Judge Cormier. She wanted to hear the change in tone of a receptionist’s voice when the woman heard it was Judge Cormier on the line.

  If her father never held her on his lap, never kissed her good night, never told her he loved her-well, it was all part of the persona. From her father, Alex learned that everything could be distilled into facts. Comfort, parenting, love-all of these cou
ld be boiled down and explained, rather than experienced. And the law-well, the law supported her father’s belief system. Any feelings you had in the context of a courtroom had an explanation. You were given permission to be emotional, in a logical setting. What you felt for your clients was not really what was in your own heart, or so you could pretend, so that no one ever got close enough to hurt you.

  Alex’s father had had a stroke when she was a second-year law student. She had sat on the edge of his hospital bed and told him she loved him.

  “Oh, Alex,” he’d sighed. “Let’s not bother with that.”

  She hadn’t cried at his funeral, because she knew that’s what he would have wanted.

  Had her own father wished, as she did now, that the basis of their relationship had been different? Had he eventually given up hoping, settling for teacher and student instead of parent and child? How long could you march along on a parallel track with your child before you lost any chance of intersecting her life?

  She’d read countless websites about grief and its stages; she’d studied the aftermath of other school shootings. She could do research, but when she tried to connect with Josie, her daughter looked at her as if she’d never seen her before. At other times, Josie burst into tears. Alex didn’t know how to combat either outcome. She felt incompetent-and then she’d remember that this wasn’t about her, it was about Josie-and she’d feel even more like a failure.

  The great irony hadn’t escaped Alex: she was more like her father than he ever might have guessed. She felt comfortable in her courtroom, in a way she did not feel in the confines of her own home. She knew just what to say to a defendant who’d come in with his third DUI charge, but she couldn’t sustain a five-minute conversation with her own child.

  Ten days after the shooting at Sterling High, Alex went into Josie’s bedroom. It was midafternoon and the curtains were shut tight; Josie was hidden in the cocoon she’d made of her bedcovers. Although her immediate instinct was to snap open the shades and let the sunlight in, Alex lay down on the bed instead. She wrapped her arms around the bundle that was her daughter. “When you were little,” Alex said, “sometimes I’d come in here and sleep with you.”