by Jodi Picoult
That’s when they had moved to the backyard. They sat on the porch swing, surrounded by a thicket of bare branches and melting snow. Lewis sat perfectly still, his fingers and lips numb from cold, from shock.
“Do you think,” Lacy whispered, “it’s our fault?”
He stared at her, amazed at her bravery: she’d put into words what he hadn’t allowed himself to even think. But what else was left to say between them? The shootings had happened; their son was involved. You couldn’t argue the facts; you could only change the lens through which you looked at them.
Lewis bent his head. “I don’t know.” Where did you even begin to look at those statistics? Had it happened because Lacy had picked Peter up too much as a baby? Or because Lewis had pretended to laugh when Peter took a tumble, hoping that the toddler wouldn’t cry if he didn’t think there was anything to cry about? Should they have monitored more closely what he read, watched, listened to . . . or would smothering him have led to the same outcome? Or maybe it was the combination of Lacy and Lewis together. If a couple’s children counted as a track record, then they had failed miserably.
Twice.
Lacy stared down at the intricate brickwork between her shoes. Lewis remembered laying this patio; he’d leveled the sand and set the brick himself. Peter had wanted to help, but Lewis hadn’t let him. The bricks were too heavy. You could get hurt, he’d said.
If Lewis had been less protective—if Peter had felt true pain, might he have been less likely to inflict it?
“What was the name of Hitler’s mother?” Lacy asked.
Lewis blinked at her. “What?”
“Was she awful?”
He put his arm around Lacy. “Don’t do this to yourself,” he murmured.
She buried her face in his shoulder. “Everyone else will.”
For just a moment, Lewis let himself believe that everyone was mistaken—that Peter couldn’t have been the shooter today. In a way, this was true—although there had been hundreds of witnesses, the boy they’d seen was not the same one Lewis had talked to last night before he went to bed. They’d had a conversation about Peter’s car.
You know you have to get it inspected by the end of the month, Lewis had said.
Yeah, Peter had replied. I already made an appointment.
Had he been lying about that, too?
“The lawyer—”
“He said he’ll call us,” Lewis answered.
“Did you tell him Peter’s allergic to shellfish? If they feed him any—”
“I told him,” Lewis said, although he hadn’t. He pictured Peter, sitting alone in a cell at a jail he’d driven by every summer, en route to the Haverhill Fairgrounds. He thought of Peter, calling home on the second night of sleepaway camp, begging to be picked up. He thought of his son, who was still his son, even if he had done something so horrible that Lewis could not close his eyes without imagining the worst; and then his ribs felt too tight and he couldn’t draw in enough air.
“Lewis?” Lacy said, pulling away as he gasped. “Are you all right?”
He nodded, smiled, but he was choking on the truth.
“Mr. Houghton?”
They both glanced up to find a police officer standing in front of them.
“Sir, could you come with me for a second?”
Lacy stood up beside him, but he held her off with one hand. He didn’t know where this cop was taking him, what he was about to be shown. He didn’t want Lacy to see it if she didn’t have to.
He followed the policeman into his own house, arrested for a moment by the white-gloved officers combing through his kitchen, his closet. As soon as they reached the basement door, he started to sweat. He knew where they were headed; it was something he had studiously avoided thinking about since he’d first gotten Lacy’s call.
Another officer was standing in the basement, blocking Lewis’s view. It was ten degrees colder down here, and yet Lewis was sweating. He mopped his forehead with his sleeve. “These rifles,” the officer said. “They belong to you?”
Lewis swallowed. “Yes. I hunt.”
“Can you tell us, Mr. Houghton, if all your firearms are here?” The officer stepped aside to reveal the glass-fronted gun cabinet.
Lewis felt his knees buckle. Three of his five hunting rifles were nestled inside the gun cabinet, like wallflowers at a dance. Two were missing.
Until this moment, he had not allowed himself to believe this horrible thing about Peter. Until this moment, it had been a devastating accident.
Now, Lewis started blaming himself.
He faced the officer, looking the man in the eye without giving any of his feelings away. An expression, Lewis realized, he’d learned from his own son. “No,” he said. “They’re not.”
* * *
The first unwritten rule of defense law was to act like you knew everything, when in fact you knew absolutely nothing at all. You were facing an unknown client who may or may not have had a chance in hell of acquittal; the trick, however, was to remain simultaneously impassive and impressive. You had to immediately set the parameters of the relationship: I am boss; you tell me only what I need to hear.
Jordan had been in this situation a hundred times before—waiting, in a private conference room at this very jail, for his next meal ticket to arrive—and he truly believed he had seen it all, which is why he was stunned to find that Peter Houghton had the ability to surprise him. Given the magnitude of the shooting and the damage wrought, the terror on the faces Jordan had seen on the television screen—well, this skinny, freckled, four-eyed kid hardly seemed capable of such an act.
This was his first thought. His second was: That’ll work to my advantage.
“Peter,” he said. “I’m Jordan McAfee, and I’m a lawyer. I’ve been retained by your parents to represent you.”
He waited for a response. “Have a seat,” he said, but the boy remained standing. “Or don’t,” Jordan added. He put on his business mask and looked up at Peter. “You’ll be arraigned tomorrow. You’re not going to get bail. We’ll have a chance to go over the charges in the morning, before you go into court.” He gave Peter a moment to digest this information. “From here on in, you’re not going through this alone. You’ve got me.”
Was it Jordan’s imagination, or had something flashed in Peter’s eyes when he’d said those words? As quickly as it might have happened, it was gone; Peter stared down at the ground, expressionless.
“Well,” Jordan said, getting to his feet. “Any questions?”
As he expected, there wasn’t any response. Hell, for all of Peter’s involvement in this little discussion, Jordan might as well have been chatting up one of the less fortunate victims of the shooting.
Maybe you are, he thought, and the voice in his head sounded too damn much like his wife’s.
“All right, then. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He knocked on the door, summoning the correctional officer who would take Peter back to his cell, when suddenly the boy spoke.
“How many did I get?”
Jordan hesitated, his hand on the knob. He did not turn to face his client. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he repeated.
* * *
Dr. Ervin Peabody lived across the river in Norwich, Vermont, and worked part-time at Sterling College’s psychology program. Six years ago he had been one of seven coauthors of a published paper about school violence—an academic exercise he barely remembered. And yet, he’d been called by the NBC affiliate out of Burlington—a morning news show he sometimes watched over a bowl of cereal for the sheer glee of seeing how often the inept newscasters screwed up. We’re looking for someone who can talk about the shooting from a psychological standpoint, the producer had said, and Ervin had replied, I’m your man.
“Warning signals,” he said in response to the anchor’s question. “Well, these young men pull away from others. They tend to be loners. They talk about hurting themselves, or others. They can’t function in school, or are subjected to discipline there. They
lack a connection with someone—anyone—who might make them feel important.”
Ervin knew the network hadn’t come to him for his expertise—only for solace. The rest of Sterling—the rest of the world—wanted to know that kids like Peter Houghton were recognizable, as if the potential to turn into a murderer overnight were a visible birthmark. “So there’s a general profile of a school shooter,” the anchor prodded.
Ervin Peabody looked into the camera. He knew the truth—that if you said these kids wore black or listened to odd music or were angry, you were discussing most of the male teenage population at some point during their adolescent years. He knew that if a deeply disturbed individual was intent on doing damage, he’d probably succeed. But he also knew that every eye in the Connecticut Valley was on him—maybe even in the whole Northeast—and that he was up for tenure at Sterling. A little prestige—a label of expert—couldn’t hurt. “You could make that argument,” he said.
* * *
Lewis was the one who settled the Houghton household for the night. He’d start in the kitchen and load the dishwasher. He’d lock the front door and turn off the lights. Then he’d head upstairs, where Lacy was usually already in bed, reading—if not out assisting at a birth—and he’d stop in his son’s room. Tell him to shut off the computer and go to bed.
Tonight he found himself standing in front of Peter’s room, looking at the mess wrought by the police during their search. He thought about righting the remaining books on the shelves, putting away the contents of the desk drawers that had been dumped onto the carpet. On second thought, he gently closed the door.
Lacy was not in the bedroom, or brushing her teeth. He hesitated, an ear cocked. There was chatter—it sounded like a furtive conversation—coming from the room directly below him.
He retraced his steps, drawing closer to the voices. Who would Lacy be talking to at nearly midnight?
The screen of the television glowed green and unearthly in the dark study. Lewis had forgotten there even was a television in that room, it was so infrequently used. He saw the CNN logo and familiar ticker tape of breaking news along the bottom. A thought occurred to him: that ticker tape hadn’t existed until 9/11—until people were so scared that they needed to know, without any delay, the facts of the world they inhabited.
Lacy was kneeling on the carpet, her face turned up to the anchor’s. “There is little word yet about how the man who was the shooter secured his weapons, or exactly what those weapons are . . .”
“Lacy,” he said, swallowing. “Lacy, come to bed.”
Lacy did not move, did not give any indication she’d heard him. Lewis passed her, trailing his hand over her shoulder as he went to shut off the television. “Preliminary reports are focusing on two pistols,” the anchor confided, just before his image disappeared.
Lacy turned to him. Her eyes reminded him of the sky you see from airplanes: a boundless gray that could be anywhere, and nowhere, all at once. “They keep calling him a man,” she said, “but he’s only a boy.”
“Lacy,” he repeated, and she stood and moved into his arms, as if this were her invitation to the dance.
* * *
If you listen carefully in a hospital, you can hear the truth. Nurses whisper to one another over your still body when you are pretending to sleep; policemen trade secrets in the hallway; doctors enter your room with another patient’s condition on their lips.
Josie had been making a mental list of the wounded. It seemed she could play six degrees of separation with any of the injured—when she had seen them last; when they had crossed her path; where they had been in proximity to her when they had been shot. There was Drew Girard, who’d grabbed Matt and Josie to tell them that Peter Houghton was shooting up the school. Emma, who’d been sitting three chairs away from Josie in the cafeteria. And Trey MacKenzie, a football player known for his house parties. John Eberhard, who had been eating Josie’s French fries that morning. Min Horuka, an exchange student from Tokyo who’d gotten drunk last year out on the ropes course behind the track and then peed into the open window of the principal’s car. Natalie Zlenko, who’d been in front of Josie in the cafeteria line. Coach Spears and Miss Ritolli, two former teachers of Josie’s. Brady Pryce and Haley Weaver, the golden senior couple.
There were others that Josie knew only by name—Michael Beach, Steve Babourias, Natalie Phlug, Austin Prokiov, Alyssa Carr, Jared Weiner, Richard Hicks, Jada Knight, Zoe Patterson—strangers with whom, now, she’d be linked forever.
It was harder to find out the names of the dead. They were whispered about even more quietly, as if their condition were contagious to the rest of the unfortunate souls just taking up space in the hospital beds. Josie had heard rumors: that Mr. McCabe had been killed, and Topher McPhee—the school pot dealer. To hoard crumbs of information, Josie tried to watch television, which was running twenty-four-hour Sterling High Shooting coverage, but inevitably her mother would come into the room and turn it off. All she had gleaned from her forbidden media forays was that there had been ten fatalities.
Matt was one.
Every time Josie thought about it, something happened to her body. She stopped breathing. All the words she knew congealed at the bottom of her throat, a boulder blocking the exit from a cave.
Thanks to the sedatives, so much of this seemed unreal—as if she were walking on the spongy floor of a dream—but the moment she thought of Matt, it became authentic and raw.
She would never kiss Matt again.
She would never hear him laugh.
She would never feel the print of his hand on her waist, or read a note he’d slipped through the furrows of her locker, or feel her heart beat into his hand when he unbuttoned her shirt.
She was only remembering the half of it, that she knew—as if the shooting had not only split her life into before and after, but also robbed her of certain skills: the ability to last an hour without puddling into tears; the ability to see the color red without feeling queasy; the ability to form a skeleton of the truth from the bare bones of memory. To remember the rest of it, given what had happened, would be nearly obscene.
So instead, Josie found herself veering drunkenly from the soft-focus moments with Matt to the macabre. She kept thinking of a line from Romeo and Juliet that had freaked her out when they’d studied the play in ninth grade: With worms that are thy chambermaids. Romeo had said it to Juliet’s looks-like-dead body in the Capulet crypt. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. But there were a whole bunch of steps in between that no one ever talked about, and when the nurses were gone in the middle of the night, Josie found herself wondering how long it took for flesh to peel from a skull; what happened to the jelly of eyes; whether Matt had already stopped looking like Matt. And then she’d wake up and find herself screaming, with a dozen doctors and nurses holding her down.
If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?
The door to her room opened and her mother stepped inside. “So,” she said, with a fake smile so wide it divided her entire head like an equator. “You ready?”
It was only 7:00 a.m., but Josie had already been discharged. She nodded at her mother. Josie sort of hated her right now. She was acting all concerned and worried, but it was too much too late, as if it had taken this shooting for her to wake up to the fact that she had absolutely no relationship with Josie. She kept telling Josie she was here if Josie needed to talk, which was ridiculous. Even if Josie wanted to—which she didn’t—her mother was the last person on earth she’d want to confide in. She wouldn’t understand—no one would, except for the other kids lying in different rooms in this hospital. This hadn’t been just some murder on the street somewhere, which would have been bad enough. This was the worst that could happen, in a place where Josie would have to return, whether she wanted to or not.
Josie was wearing different clothes than the ones she’d been brought here with, whi
ch had mysteriously disappeared. No one was admitting to anything, but Josie assumed they were covered with Matt’s blood. In this, they had been right to throw them away: no matter how much bleach was used and how many washings were done, Josie knew she’d be able to see the stains.
Her head still ached from where she’d struck the floor when she fainted. She’d cut her forehead and narrowly avoided needing stitches, although the doctors had wanted to watch her overnight. (For what? Josie had wondered. A stroke? A blood clot? Suicide?) When Josie stood up, her mother was at her side immediately, an arm anchored around her for support. It reminded Josie of the way that she and Matt sometimes walked down the street in the summer, their hands filed into the back pockets of each other’s jeans.
“Oh, Josie,” her mother said, and that was how she realized she’d started to cry again. It happened so often, now, that Josie had lost the capacity to tell when it stopped and started. Her mother offered her a tissue. “You know what? You’ll start feeling better when you get home. I promise.”
Well, duh. Josie couldn’t start feeling any worse.
But she managed a grimace, which might have been a smile if you weren’t looking too closely, because she knew that’s what her mother needed right now. She walked the fifteen steps to the door of her hospital room.
“You take care, sweetheart,” one of the nurses said as Josie passed their pod of desks.
Another one—the one Josie had liked the best, who fed her ice chips—smiled. “Don’t come back and see us, you hear?”
Josie moved slowly toward the elevator, which seemed to get farther and farther away each time she glanced up. As she passed by one of the patient rooms she noticed a familiar name on the clipboard outside: HALEY WEAVER.
Haley was a senior, homecoming queen for the past two years. She and her boyfriend, Brady, were the Brangelina of Sterling High—roles Josie actually had believed she and Matt stood a good chance to inherit after Haley and Brady graduated. Even the wishful thinkers who pined after Brady for his smoky smile and sculpted body had to admit that there was a poetic justice to his dating Haley, the most beautiful girl in the school. With her waterfall of white-blond hair and her clear blue eyes, she had always reminded Josie of a magical fairy—the serene, heavenly creature that floats down to grant someone’s wishes.
