by Jodi Picoult
Before Josie realized what she was doing, she’d gotten to her feet. “Josie!” her mother whispered, fierce, beside her—in that instant a flicker of the mother she was accustomed to, the one who would never make a spectacle of herself. Josie was shaking so hard that her feet did not seem to touch the ground, not as she stepped into the aisle in the black dress she had borrowed from her mother, not as she moved toward Matt’s coffin, magnetically drawn to a pole.
She could feel Matt’s father’s eyes on her, could hear the whispers of the congregation. She reached the casket, polished to such a gleam that she could see her own face reflected back at her, an imposter.
“Josie,” Mr. Royston said, coming down from the podium to embrace her. “You all right?”
Josie’s throat closed like a rosebud. How could this man, whose son was dead, be asking her that? She felt herself dissolving, and wondered if you could turn into a ghost without dying; if that part of it was only a technicality.
“Did you want to say something?” Mr. Royston offered. “About Matt?”
Before she knew what was happening, Matt’s father had led her up to the podium. She was vaguely aware of her mother, who’d gotten out of her seat in the pew and was edging her way down toward the front of the church—to do what? Spirit her away? Stop her from making another mistake?
Josie stared out at a landscape of faces she recognized and did not really know at all. She loved him, they were all thinking. She was with him when he died. Her breath caught like a moth in the cage of her lungs.
But what would she say? The truth?
Josie felt her lips twist, her face crumple. She started to sob, so hard that the wooden floorboards of the church bowed and creaked; so hard that even in that sealed casket, Josie was sure Matt could hear her. “I’m sorry,” she choked out—to him, to Mr. Royston, to anyone who would listen. “Oh, God. I’m so sorry.”
She did not notice her mother climbing the steps to the podium, wrapping an arm around Josie, leading her behind the altar to a little vestibule used by the organist. She didn’t protest when her mother handed her Kleenex and rubbed her back. She didn’t even mind when her mother tucked her hair back behind her ears, the way she used to when Josie was so small, she could barely remember the gesture. “Everyone must think I’m an idiot,” Josie said.
“No, they think you miss Matt.” Her mother hesitated. “I know you believe this was your fault.”
Josie’s heart was pounding so hard, it moved the thin chiffon fabric of the dress.
“Sweetheart,” her mother said, “you couldn’t have saved him.”
Josie reached for another tissue, and pretended that her mother understood.
* * *
Maximum security meant Peter did not have a roommate. He did not get recreation time. His food was brought to him three times a day in his cell. His reading material was restricted by the correctional officers. And because the staff still believed he might be suicidal, his room consisted of a toilet and a bench—no sheets, no mattress, nothing that might be fashioned into a means of checking out of this world.
There were four hundred and fifteen cinder blocks on the back wall of his cell; he’d counted. Twice. Since then, he’d taken the time to stare right at the camera that was watching him. Peter wondered who was at the other end of that camera. He pictured a bunch of COs clustered around a crummy TV monitor, poking each other and cracking up when Peter had to go to the bathroom. Or, in other words, yet another group of people who’d find a way to make fun of him.
The camera had a red light on it, a power indicator, and a single lens that shimmered like a rainbow. There was a rubber bumper around the lens that looked like an eyelid. It struck Peter that even if he wasn’t suicidal, a few weeks of this and he would be.
It did not get dark in jail, just dim. That hardly mattered, since there was nothing to do but sleep anyway. Peter lay on the bench, wondering if you lost your hearing if you never had to use it; if the power of speech worked the same way. He remembered learning in one of his social studies classes that in the Old West, when Native Americans were thrown into jail, they sometimes dropped dead. The theory was that someone so used to the freedom of space couldn’t handle the confinement, but Peter had another interpretation. When the only company you had was yourself, and when you didn’t want to socialize, there was only one way to leave the room.
One of the COs had just come through, doing his security sweep—a heavy-booted run past the cells—when Peter heard it:
I know what you did.
Holy shit, Peter thought. I’ve already started to go crazy.
Everyone knows.
Peter swung his feet to the cement floor and stared at the camera, but it wasn’t giving up any secrets.
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 wa
y 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.”
