by Jodi Picoult
Peter stared at him. “Perfectly,” he said, sullen. But Jordan was looking at his client’s hands.
They were shaking.
* * *
From the log of items removed from the bedroom of Peter Houghton:
1. Dell laptop computer.
2. Gaming CDs: Doom 3, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
3. Three posters from gun manufacturers.
4. Assorted lengths of pipe.
5. Books: The Catcher in the Rye, Salinger; On War, Clausewitz; graphic novels by Frank Miller and Neil Gaiman.
6. DVD—Bowling for Columbine.
7. Yearbook from Sterling Middle School, various faces circled in black marker. One circled face x’d out with words LET LIVE beneath picture. Girl identified in caption as Josie Cormier.
* * *
The girl spoke so softly that the microphone, hanging on a boom over her head like a piñata, had trouble picking up the unraveled threads of her voice. “Mrs. Edgar’s classroom is right next to Mr. McCabe’s, and sometimes we could hear them moving their chairs around or shouting out answers,” she said. “But this time we heard screaming. Mrs. Edgar, she took her desk and shoved it up against the door and told us all to go to the far end of the classroom, near the windows, and sit on the floor. The gunshots, they sounded like popcorn. And then . . .” She stopped and wiped her eyes. “And then there wasn’t any more screaming.”
* * *
Diana Leven hadn’t expected the gunman to look so young. Peter Houghton was shackled and chained, wearing his orange jumpsuit and bulletproof vest, but he still had the apple cheeks of a boy who hadn’t come through the far side of puberty yet, and she would have bet money he didn’t have to shave. The glasses, too, upset her. The defense would play that to the hilt, she was certain, claiming some myopia that would have made sharpshooting an impossibility.
The four cameras that the district court judge had agreed on to represent the networks—ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN—hummed to life like a barbershop quartet as soon as the defendant was led into the room. Since it had gotten so quiet in the room that you could hear the sound of your own doubts, Peter turned immediately toward them. Diana realized that his eyes were not all that different from those of the cameras: dark, blind, empty behind the lenses.
Jordan McAfee—a lawyer Diana didn’t like very much on a personal level but grudgingly admitted was damn good at his job—leaned toward his client the moment Peter reached the defense table. The bailiff stood. “All rise,” he bellowed, “the Honorable Charles Albert presiding.”
Judge Albert hustled into the courtroom, his robes whispering. “Be seated,” he said. “Peter Houghton,” he began, turning to the defendant.
Jordan McAfee stood. “Your Honor, we waive the reading of the charges. We’d like to enter not-guilty pleas for all of them, and we request that a probable cause hearing be scheduled in ten days.”
This wasn’t a surprise to Diana—why would Jordan want the whole world to hear his client being indicted on ten separate counts of first-degree murder? The judge turned to her. “Ms. Leven, the statute requires that a defendant charged with first-degree murder—multiple counts, at that—be held without bail. I assume you have no problem with this.”
Diana hid a smile. Judge Albert, God bless him, had managed to slip in the charges anyway. “That’s correct, Your Honor.”
The judge nodded. “Well then, Mr. Houghton. You’re remanded back into custody.”
The whole procedure had taken less than five minutes, and the public wouldn’t be happy. They wanted blood; they wanted revenge. Diana watched Peter Houghton stumble between the hold of two sheriff’s deputies and turn back to his lawyer one last time with a question on his lips that he didn’t utter. Then the door closed behind him, and Diana gathered her briefcase and walked out of the courtroom to the cameras.
She stood in front of a thrust of microphones. “Peter Houghton was just arraigned on ten counts of first-degree murder and nineteen counts of attempted first-degree murder, and various accompanying charges involving illegal possession of explosives and firearms in this recent tragedy. The rules of professional responsibility prevent us from commenting on the evidence at this point, but the community can rest assured that we are prosecuting this case vigorously, that we have been working around the clock with our investigators to make sure that the evidence is collected, preserved, and appropriately handled so that this unspeakable tragedy will not go unanswered.” She opened her mouth to continue but realized that there was another voice speaking, just across the hallway, and that reporters were defecting from her impromptu press conference to hear Jordan McAfee instead.
He stood sober and penitent, his hands in the pockets of his trousers, as he stared right at Diana. “I grieve with the community for its losses, and will represent my client to the fullest. Peter Houghton is a seventeen-year-old boy; he’s very scared. And I ask you to please have respect for his family and to remember that this is a matter to be determined in court.” Jordan hesitated, ever the showman, and then made eye contact with the crowd. “I ask you to remember that what you see is not always all it seems to be.”
Diana smirked. The reporters—and the people all over the world who would be listening to Jordan’s careful speech—would hear his little salvo at the end and believe that he had some fabulous truth up his sleeve—something that would prove his client was not a monster. Diana, however, knew better. She could translate legalese, because she spoke it fluently. When an attorney spun mysterious rhetoric like that, it was because he had nothing else he could use to defend his client.
* * *
At noon, the governor of New Hampshire held a press conference on the steps of the Capitol building in Concord. On his lapel he was wearing a loop of maroon and white ribbon, the school colors of Sterling High, which had sprouted up at gas station cash registers and Wal-Mart counters and were being sold for $1 each, the proceeds going to support the Sterling Victims Fund. One of his minions had driven twenty-seven miles to get one, because the governor planned to throw his hat into the Democratic primary in 2008 and knew this was a perfect media moment during which he could portray compassion at its strongest. Yes, he felt for the citizens of Sterling, and especially those poor parents of the dead, but there was also a calculated part of him that knew a man who could shepherd a state through one of the most tragic school shooting incidents in America would be seen as a strong leader. “Today, all of this country grieves with New Hampshire,” he said. “Today, all of us feel the pain that Sterling feels. They are all our children.”
He glanced up. “I’ve been up to Sterling, and I’ve spoken to the investigators who are working hard, round the clock, to understand what happened yesterday. I’ve spent time with some of the families of the victims, and at the hospital with the brave survivors. Part of our past and part of our future disappeared in this tragedy,” the governor said as he looked solemnly into the cameras. “What we all need, now, is to focus on the future.”
* * *
It took Josie less than a morning to learn the magic words: when she wanted her mother to leave her alone, when she was sick of her mother watching her like a hawk, all she had to do was say that she needed a nap. Then, her mother would back off, completely unaware of the fact that her whole face relaxed the minute Josie let her off the hook, and that only then could Josie recognize her.
Upstairs, in her room, Josie sat in the dark with her shades drawn and her hands folded in her lap. It was broad daylight, but you’d never know it. People had figured out all sorts of ways to make things seem different than they truly were. A room could be turned into an artificial night. Botox transformed people’s faces into something they weren’t. TiVo let you think you could freeze time, or at least reorder it to your own liking. An arraignment at a courthouse fit like a Band-Aid over a wound that really needed a tourniquet.
Fumbling in the dark, Josie reached underneath the frame of her bed for the plastic bag she’d stashed—her supply of sleeping pills. She was no be
tter than any of the other stupid people in this world who thought if they pretended hard enough, they could make it so. She’d thought that death could be an answer, because she was too immature to realize it was the biggest question of all.
Yesterday, she hadn’t known what patterns blood could make when it sprayed on a whitewashed wall. She hadn’t understood that life left a person’s lungs first, and their eyes last. She had pictured suicide as a final statement, a fuck you to the people who hadn’t understood how hard it was for her to be the Josie they wanted her to be. She’d somehow thought that if she killed herself, she’d be able to watch everyone else’s reaction; that she’d get the last laugh. Until yesterday, she hadn’t really understood. Dead was dead. When you died, you did not get to come back and see what you were missing. You didn’t get to apologize. You didn’t get a second chance.
Death wasn’t something you could control. In fact, it would always have the upper hand.
She ripped the plastic bag open into her palm and stuffed five of the pills into her mouth. She walked into the bathroom and ran the tap, stuck her head close to the faucet until the pills were swimming in the fishbowl of her bulging cheeks.
Swallow, she told herself.
But instead, Josie fell in front of the toilet and spit the pills out. She emptied the rest of the pills, still clutched in her fist. She flushed before she could think twice.
Her mother came upstairs because she heard the sobbing. It had seeped through the grout of the tile and the soffits and the plaster that made up the ceiling downstairs. It would, in fact, become as much of this household as the bricks and the mortar, although neither of the women realized it yet. Josie’s mother burst into the bedroom and sank down beside her daughter in the attached bathroom. “What can I do, baby?” she whispered, running her hands up and down Josie’s shoulders and back, as if the answer were a visible tattoo instead of a scar on the heart.
* * *
Yvette Harvey sat on a couch holding her daughter’s eighth-grade graduation photo, taken two years, six months, and four days before she died. Kaitlyn’s hair had grown out, but you could still see the easy lopsided smile, the moon face that was part and parcel of Down syndrome.
What would have happened if she hadn’t chosen to mainstream Kaitlyn in middle school? If she’d sent her to a school for kids who had disabilities? Were those kids any less angry, less likely to have bred a killer?
The producer from The Oprah Winfrey Show handed back the stack of photographs that Yvette had given her. She hadn’t known, before today, that there were levels of tragedy, that even if the Oprah show called you to ask you to tell your sad story, they would want to make sure it was sad enough before they let you speak on camera. Yvette hadn’t planned to show her pain on television—in fact, her husband was so dead set against it he refused to be here when the producer came to call—but she was determined. She had been listening to the news. And now, she had something to say.
“Kaitlyn had a beautiful smile,” the producer said gently.
“She does,” Yvette replied, then shook her head. “Did.”
“Did she know Peter Houghton?”
“No. They weren’t in the same grade; they wouldn’t have had classes together. Kaitlyn’s were in the learning center.” She pushed her thumb into the edge of the silver portrait frame until it hurt. “All of these people who are going around saying that Peter Houghton had no friends—that Peter Houghton was teased . . . that’s not true,” she said. “My daughter had no friends. My daughter was teased every single day. My daughter was the one who felt like she was on the fringe, because she was. Peter Houghton wasn’t a misfit, like everyone wants to make him out to be. Peter Houghton was just evil.”
Yvette looked down at the glass covering Kaitlyn’s portrait. “The grief counselor from the police department told me Kaitlyn died first,” she said. “She wanted me to know that Kaitie didn’t know what was going on—that she didn’t suffer.”
“That must have been some consolation,” the producer offered.
“It was. Until we all started talking to each other and realized that the grief counselor had told the same thing to every one of us with a dead child.” Yvette glanced up, tears in her eyes. “The thing is, they couldn’t all have been first.”
* *
In the days after the shooting, the families of the victims were showered with donations: money, casseroles, babysitting services, sympathy. Kaitlyn Harvey’s father woke up one morning after a light, last springtime snow to find that his driveway had already been shoveled by a Samaritan. Courtney Ignatio’s family became the beneficiaries of their local church, whose members signed up to provide food or cleaning services on a different day of the week, a rotating schedule that would take them through June. John Eberhard’s mother was presented with a handicapped-accessible van, courtesy of Sterling Ford, to help her son adapt to life as a paraplegic. Everyone wounded at Sterling High received a letter from the president of the United States, crisp White House stationery commending them on their bravery.
The media—at first a wave as unwelcome as a tsunami—became something ordinary on the streets of Sterling. After days of watching their high-heeled black boots sink into the soft mud of a New England March, they visited the local Farm-Way and bought Merrell clogs and muck boots. They stopped asking the front desk at the Sterling Inn why their cell phones didn’t work and instead congregated in the parking lot of the Mobil station, the point of highest elevation in town, where they could get a minimal signal. They hovered in front of the police station and the courthouse and the local coffee shop, waiting for any crumb of information they could call their own.
Every day in Sterling, there was a different funeral.
* * *
Matthew Royston’s memorial service was held in a church that wasn’t large enough to hold the grief of its mourners. Classmates and parents and family friends packed into the pews, stood along the walls, spilled out the doors. A contingent of kids from Sterling High had come dressed in green T-shirts with the number 19 on the front—the same one that had graced Matt’s hockey jersey.
Josie and her mother were sitting somewhere in the back, but that didn’t keep Josie from feeling that everyone was staring at her. She wasn’t sure if that was because they all knew she was Matt’s girlfriend or because they could see right through her.
“Blessed are those who mourn,” the pastor read, “for they will be comforted.”
Josie shivered. Was she mourning? Did mourning feel like a hole in the middle of you that got wider and wider every time you tried to plug it up? Or was she incapable of mourning, because that meant remembering, which she couldn’t do?
Her mother leaned closer. “We can leave. You just say the word.”
It was hard enough not having a clue who she was, but here in the Afterward, she couldn’t seem to recognize anyone else, either. People who had ignored her for her whole life suddenly knew her by name. Everyone’s eyes got soft at the edges when they looked at her. And her mother was the most foreign of all—like one of those corporate addicts who has a near-death experience and becomes a tree-hugger. Josie had expected to have to fight her mother in order to attend Matt’s funeral, but to Josie’s surprise, her mother had suggested it. The stupid shrink Josie had to see now—probably for the rest of her life—kept talking about closure. Closure, apparently, meant that she was supposed to realize that losing normal was something you got over, like losing a soccer game or a favorite T-shirt. Closure also meant that her mother had morphed into a crazy, overcompensating emotive machine, one who kept asking her if she needed anything (how many cups of herbal tea could a person drink without liquefying?) and trying to act like an ordinary mother, or at least what she imagined an ordinary mother to be. If you really want me to feel better, Josie felt like saying, go back to work. Then they could pretend it was business as usual, and after all, her mother was the one who’d taught Josie how to pretend in the first place.
In the front of th
e church was a coffin. Josie knew it wasn’t open; rumors had flown about that. It was hard to imagine that Matt was inside that lacquered black box. That he wasn’t breathing; that his blood had been drained out and his veins were pumped full of chemicals instead.
“Friends, as we gather here to remember Matthew Carlton Royston, we are beneath the protective shelter of God’s healing love,” the pastor said. “We are free to pour out our grief, release our anger, face our emptiness, and know that God cares.”
Last year, in ancient world history, they had learned about how the Egyptians prepared their dead. Matt—who studied only when Josie forced him to do it—had been truly fascinated. The way the brain was sucked out through the nose. The possessions that went into a tomb with a pharaoh. The pets that were buried beside him. Josie had been reading the chapter in the textbook out loud, her head cradled on Matt’s lap. He’d stopped her by putting his hand on her forehead. “When I go,” he said, “I’m going to take you with me.”
The pastor looked out over the congregation. “The death of a loved one can shake us to our very foundations. When the person is so young and so full of potential and skill, the feelings of grief and loss can be even more overwhelming. At times such as this we turn to our friends and family for support, for a shoulder to cry on and for someone to walk that road of pain and anguish with us. We cannot have Matt back, but we can rest easy knowing that he’s found the peace in death he was denied here on earth.”
Matt didn’t go to church. His parents did, and they tried to make him go, but Josie knew he hated it. He thought it was a waste of a Sunday, and that if God was at all worthy of hanging around with, he’d probably be out riding around with the top down on his Jeep or playing pickup pond hockey instead of sitting in a stuffy building doing responsive reading.
The pastor moved aside, and Matt’s father stood up. Josie knew him, of course—he cracked the worst jokes, silly puns that were never funny. He’d played hockey at UVM until he blew out his knee, and he’d had high hopes for Matt. But overnight, he’d turned hunch-shouldered and sullen, like a husk that used to contain the whole of him. He stood up and talked about the first time he’d taken Matt out to skate, how he’d started out pulling him along on the end of a hockey stick and realized, not much later, that Matt wasn’t holding on. In the front row, Matt’s mother began crying. Loud, noisy sobs—the kind that splattered against the walls of the church like paint.
