Nineteen Minutes

by Jodie Picoult

  Nothing, Jordan had said. We were fishing.

  This had made no sense to Selena; they’d been gone for six hours. How could you sit beside someone in a small boat for that long and not have a heart-to-heart about how he was doing; if he was holding up in the wake of this crisis; if he worried about the rest of his life.

  She looked at Sam, who now had the dump truck in his hand and was rolling it across his former pizza. Change could come that quickly, Selena knew. She thought of how Sam would wrap his tiny arms around her and kiss her; how he’d come running to her if she held out her arms. But sooner or later he’d realize that his friends didn’t hold their mothers’ hands when they crossed the street; that they didn’t bake pizzas and cakes in the sandbox, instead they built cities and dug caverns. One day-in middle school, or even earlier-Sam would start to hole himself up in his room. He would shy away from her touch. He would grunt his responses, act tough, be a man.

  Maybe it was our own damn fault that men turned out the way they did, Selena thought. Maybe empathy, like any unused muscle, simply atrophied.

  Josie told her mother that she had gotten a summer job volunteering with the school system to tutor middle and elementary school kids in math. She talked about Angie, whose parents had split up during the school year and who had failed algebra as an indirect consequence. She described Joseph, a leukemia patient who’d missed school for treatment and had the hardest time understanding fractions. Every day at dinner, her mother would ask her about work, and Josie would have a story. The problem was, it was just that-a fiction. Joseph and Angie didn’t exist; and for that matter, neither did Josie’s tutoring job.

  This morning, like every morning, Josie left the house. She got on the Advance Transit bus and said hello to Rita, the driver who’d been on this route all summer. When the other passengers got off at the stop that was closest to the school, Josie stayed in her seat. She didn’t get up, in fact, until the very last stop-the one that was a mile south of the Whispering Pines Cemetery.

  She liked it there. At the cemetery, she didn’t run into anyone she didn’t feel like talking to. She didn’t have to speak at all if she wasn’t in the mood. Josie walked up the winding trail, which was so familiar to her by now that she could tell, with her eyes closed, when the pavement was going to make a dip and when it would veer left. She knew that the violently blue hydrangea bush was halfway to Matt’s grave; that you could smell honeysuckle when you were only steps away from it.

  By now, there was a headstone, a pristine block of white marble with Matt’s name carefully carved. Grass had started to grow. Josie sat down on the raised hummock of dirt, which was warm, as if the sun had been seeping into the earth and holding that heat in wait for her. She reached into her backpack and took out a bottle of water, a peanut butter sandwich, a bag of saltines.

  “Can you believe school’s starting in a week?” she said to Matt, because sometimes she did that. It wasn’t like she expected him to answer; it just felt better talking to him after so many months of not talking. “They’re not opening the real school yet, though. They said maybe by Thanksgiving, when the construction’s done.”

  What they were actually doing to the school was a mystery-Josie had driven by enough to know that the gymnasium and library had been torn down, as had the cafeteria. She wondered if the administration was naïve enough to think that if they got rid of the scene of the crime, the students could be fooled into thinking it had never happened.

  She’d read somewhere that ghosts didn’t just hang around physical locations-that sometimes, a person could be haunted. Josie hadn’t really considered herself big on the paranormal, but this she believed. There were some memories, she knew, you could run from forever and never shake.

  Josie lay down, her hair spread over the newborn grass. “Do you like having me here?” she whispered. “Or would you tell me to get lost, if you were the one who could talk?”

  She didn’t want to hear the answer. She didn’t even really want to think about it. So she opened her eyes as wide as she could and stared into the sky, until the brilliant blue burned the backs of her eyes.

  Lacy stood in the men’s department at Filene’s, touching her hands to the bristled tweeds and hallowed blue and puckered seersucker fabrics of the sports jackets. She’d driven two hours to Boston so that she would have the best choices to outfit Peter for his trial. Brooks Brothers, Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, Ermenegildo Zegna. They had been made in Italy, France, Britain, California. She peeked at a price tag, sucked in her breath, and then realized she did not care. This would most likely be the last time she would ever buy clothes for her son.

  Lacy moved systematically through the department. She picked up boxer shorts made of the finest Egyptian cotton, a packet of Ralph Lauren white tees, cashmere socks. She found khaki trousers-30 x 30. She plucked a button-down oxford shirt off a rack, because Peter had always hated having his collar peek out from a crewneck sweater. She chose a blue blazer, as Jordan had instructed. We want him dressed as if you’re sending him to Phillips Exeter, he had said.

  She remembered how, when Peter was around eleven, he’d developed an aversion to buttons. You’d think it would be easy to get around something like that, but it eliminated most pants. Lacy could remember driving to the ends of the earth to find elastic-waist flannel plaid pajama pants that might double for daily wear. She remembered seeing kids wearing pajama bottoms to school as recently as last year and wondering if Peter had started the trend, or simply been slightly out of sync.

  Even after Lacy had gathered what she needed, she continued to walk through the men’s department. She touched a rainbow of silk handkerchiefs that melted over her fingers, choosing one that was the color of Peter’s eyes. She rifled through leather belts-black, brown, stippled, alligator-and neckties printed with dots, with fleurs-de-lis, with stripes. She picked up a bathrobe that was so soft it nearly brought her to tears, shearling slippers, a cherry-red bathing suit. She shopped until the weight in her arms was as heavy as a child.

  “Oh, let me help you with those,” a saleswoman said, taking some of the items from her arms and carrying them to the counter. She began to fold them, one by one. “I know how it feels,” she said, smiling sympathetically. “When my son went away, I thought I was going to die.”

  Lacy stared at her. Was it possible that she wasn’t the only woman who had gone through something as awful as this? Once you had, like this salesperson, would you be able to pick others out of a crowd, as if there were a secret society of those mothers whose children cut them to the quick?

  “You think it’s forever,” the woman said, “but believe me, once they come home for Christmas break or summer vacation and start eating you out of house and home again, you’ll be wishing college was year-round.”

  Lacy’s face froze. “Right,” she said. “College.”

  “I’ve got a girl at the University of New Hampshire, and my son’s at Rochester,” the saleswoman said.

  “Harvard. That’s where my son’s going.”

  They had talked about it once-Peter liked the computer science department at Stanford better, and Lacy had joked around, saying she’d throw away any brochures from colleges west of the Mississippi, because they were so far away.

  The state prison was sixty miles south, in Concord.

  “Harvard,” the saleswoman said. “He must be a smart one.”

  “He is,” Lacy said, and she continued to tell this woman about Peter’s fictional transition to college, until the lie did not taste like licorice on her tongue; until she could nearly believe it herself.

  Just after three o’clock, Josie rolled over onto her belly, spread her arms wide, and pressed her face into the grass. It looked like she was trying to hold on to the ground, which, she supposed, wasn’t all that far from the truth. She breathed in deeply-usually, she smelled nothing but weeds and soil, but every now and then when it had just rained, she got the barest scent of ice and Pert shampoo, as if Matt were still himself jus
t under that surface.

  She gathered the wrapper from her sandwich and her empty water bottle and put them into her backpack, then headed down the winding path to the cemetery gates. There was a car blocking the entrance-only twice this summer had Josie been present when a funeral procession came, and it had made her a little sick to her stomach. She started to walk faster, in the hope that she would be long gone and sitting on her Advance Transit bus before the service began-and then she realized that the car blocking the gates was not a hearse, not even black for that matter. It was the same car that had been parked in their driveway this morning, and Patrick was leaning against it with his arms crossed.

  “What are you doing here?” Josie asked.

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  She shrugged. “It’s a free country.”

  Josie didn’t really have anything against Patrick Ducharme himself. He just made her nervous, on so many counts. She couldn’t look at him without thinking of That Day. But now she had to, because he also was her mother’s lover (how weird was it to say that?) and in a way, that was even more upsetting. Her mother was on cloud nine, falling in love, while Josie had to sneak off to a graveyard to visit her boyfriend.

  Patrick pushed himself off the car and took a step toward her. “Your mother thinks you’re teaching long division right now.”

  “Did she tell you to stalk me?” Josie said.

  “I prefer surveillance,” Patrick corrected.

  Josie snorted. She didn’t want to sound like such a snot, but she couldn’t help it. Sarcasm was like a force field; once she turned it off, he might be able to see that she was this close to falling to pieces.

  “Your mother doesn’t know I’m here,” Patrick said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I’m going to miss my bus.”

  “Then I’ll drive you wherever you want to go,” he said, exasperated. “You know, when I’m doing my job, I spend a lot of time wishing I could turn back the clock-get to the rape victim before it happened, stake out the house before the thief comes by. I know what it’s like to feel like nothing you do or say is ever going to make things better. And I know what it’s like to wake up in the middle of the night replaying one moment over and over so vividly that you might as well be living it again. In fact, I bet you and I replay the same moment.”

  Josie swallowed. In all these months, out of all the well-meaning conversations she’d had with doctors and psychiatrists and even other kids from the school, no one had captured, so succinctly, what it felt like to be her. But she couldn’t let Patrick know that-couldn’t admit to her weakness, even though she had the feeling that he could spot it all the same. “Don’t pretend we have anything in common,” Josie said.

  “But we do,” Patrick replied. “Your mother.” He looked Josie in the eye. “I like her. A lot. And I’d like to know that you’re okay with that.”

  Josie felt her throat closing. She tried to remember Matt saying that he liked her; she wondered if anyone would ever say it again. “My mother’s a big girl. She can make her own decisions about who she f-”

  “Don’t,” Patrick interrupted.

  “Don’t what.”

  “Don’t say something you’re going to wish you hadn’t.”

  Josie stepped back, her eyes glittering. “If you think that buddying up to me is going to win her over, you’re wrong. You’re better off with flowers and chocolate. She couldn’t care less about me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You haven’t exactly been around long enough to know, have you?”

  “Josie,” Patrick said, “she’s crazy about you.”

  Josie felt herself choke on the truth, even harder to speak than it was to swallow. “But not as crazy as she is about you. She’s happy. She’s happy and I…I know I should be happy for her…”

  “But you’re here,” Patrick said, gesturing at the cemetery. “And you’re alone.”

  Josie nodded and burst into tears. She turned away, embarrassed, and then felt Patrick fold his arms around her. He didn’t say anything, and for that one moment, she even liked him-any word at all, even a well-meaning one, would have taken up the space where her hurt needed to be. He just let her cry until finally it all stopped, and Josie rested for a moment against his shoulder, wondering if this was only the eye of the storm or its endpoint.

  “I’m a bitch,” she whispered. “I’m jealous.”

  “I think she’d understand.”

  Josie drew away from him and wiped her eyes. “Are you going to tell her I come here?”

  “No.”

  She glanced up at him, surprised. She would have thought that he’d take her mother’s side.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” Patrick said.

  “About what?”

  “Being alone.”

  Josie glanced up the hill. You couldn’t see Matt’s grave from the gates, but it was still there-just like everything else about That Day. “Ghosts don’t count.”

  Patrick smiled. “Mothers do.”

  What Lewis hated the most was the sound of the metal doors slamming. It hardly mattered that, thirty minutes from now, he’d be able to leave the jail. What was important was that the inmates couldn’t. And that one of those inmates was the same boy he’d taught to ride a bike without training wheels; the same boy whose nursery school paperweight was still sitting on Lewis’s desk; the same boy he’d watched take his very first breath.

  He knew it would be a shock for Peter to see him-how many months had he told himself that this would be the week he got up the courage to see his son in jail, only to find another errand to run or paper to study? But, as a correctional officer opened up a door and led Peter into the visitation room, Lewis realized that he’d underestimated what a shock it would be for him to see Peter.

  He was bigger. Maybe not taller, but broader-his shoulders filled out his shirt; his arms had thickened with muscle. His skin was translucent, almost blue under this unnatural light. His hands didn’t stop moving-they were twitching at his sides and then, when he sat down, on the sides of the chair.

  “Well,” Peter said. “What do you know.”

  Lewis had rehearsed six or seven speeches, explanations of why he had not been able to bring himself to see his son, but when he saw Peter sitting there, only two words rose to his lips. “I’m sorry.”

  Peter’s mouth tightened. “For what? Blowing me off for six months?”

  “I was thinking,” Lewis admitted, “more like eighteen years.”

  Peter sat back in his chair, staring at Lewis. He forced himself to return the stare. Could Peter grant him absolution, even if Lewis still wasn’t entirely sure he could return the favor?

  Rubbing a hand down his face, Peter shook his head. Then he started to smile. Lewis felt his bones loosen, his muscles relax. Until this moment, he hadn’t really known what to expect from Peter. He could reason with himself all he wanted and assert that an apology would always be accepted; he could remind himself that he was the parent here, the one in charge-but all of that was extremely hard to remember when you were sitting in a visiting room at a jail, with a woman on your left who was trying to play footsie with her lover across that forbidden red line, and a man on your right who was cursing a blue streak.

  The smile on Peter’s face hardened, twisted into a sneer. “Fuck you,” he spat out. “Fuck you for coming here. You don’t give a shit about me. You don’t want to tell me you’re sorry. You just want to hear yourself say it. You’re here for yourself, not me.”

  Lewis’s head felt as if it were filled with stones. He bent forward, the stalk of his neck unable to bear the weight anymore, until he could rest his forehead in his hands. “I can’t do anything, Peter,” he whispered. “I can’t work, I can’t eat. I can’t sleep.” Then he lifted his face. “The new students, they’re coming onto the college campus right now. I look at them, out my window-they’re always pointing at the buildings or down Main Street or listening to the tour guides who take t
hem across the courtyard-and I think of how much I was looking forward to doing those same things with you.”

  He had written a paper years ago, after Joey was born, about the exponential increases of happiness-the moments that the quotient changed by leaps and bounds after a triggering incident. What he’d concluded was that the outcome was variable, based not on the event that caused the happiness, but rather the state you were in when it happened. For example, the birth of your child was one thing when you were happily married and planning a family; it was something entirely different when you were sixteen and had gotten a girl knocked up. Cold weather was perfect if you were on a skiing vacation, but disappointing if you happened to be enjoying a week at the beach. A man who was once rich might be deliriously happy with a dollar in the middle of a depression; a gourmet chef would eat worms if stranded on a desert island. A father who’d hoped for a son that was educated and successful and independent might, under different circumstances, simply be happy to have him alive and safe, so that he could tell the boy he’d never stopped loving him.

  “But you know what they say about college,” Lewis said, sitting up a little straighter. “It’s overrated.”

  His words surprised Peter. “All those parents forking over forty thousand a year,” Peter said, smiling faintly. “And here I am, getting the most out of your tax dollar.”

  “What more could an economist ask for?” Lewis joked, although this wasn’t funny; never would be funny. And he realized that this was a sort of happiness, too: you would say anything-do anything-to keep your son smiling like that, as if there was something to still smile about, even if every word felt like you were swallowing glass.

  Patrick’s feet were crossed on the prosecutor’s desk, as Diana Leven scanned the reports that had come from ballistics days after the shooting, in preparation for his testimony at the trial. “There were two shotguns, which were never used,” Patrick explained, “and two matching handguns-Glock 17s-that were registered to a neighbor across the street. A retired cop.”