The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  Jordan glanced into the living room. Selena had coaxed Josie onto the floor with her. She was pushing a toy plane toward Sam’s feet. When he burst out with the sheer belly laugh that only a baby has, Josie smiled the tiniest bit, too. Selena caught his gaze, raised her brows in a question.

  He’d gotten what he wanted: Cormier’s recusal. He could be generous enough to do this for her.

  “All right,” he told the judge. “Get me the affidavit.”

  * * *

  “When they say to scald the milk,” Josie said, scrubbing another Brillo pad against the blackened bottom of the pot, “I don’t think they mean like this.”

  Her mother picked up a dish towel. “Well, how was I supposed to know?”

  “Maybe we should start with something easier than pudding,” Josie suggested.

  “Like?”

  She smiled. “Toast?”

  Now that her mother was home during the day, she was restless. To that end, she’d taken up cooking—which was a good idea only if you happened to work for the fire department and needed job security. Even when her mother followed the recipe, it didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to, and then inevitably Josie would press her for details and find out she’d used baking powder instead of baking soda, or whole wheat flour instead of cornmeal (We didn’t have any, she complained).

  At first, Josie had suggested nightly culinary classes out of self-preservation—she really didn’t know what to say when her mother plunked a charred brick of meatloaf down with the same dramatic reverence that might have been given to the Holy Grail. As it turned out, though, it was sort of fun. When her mother wasn’t acting like she knew it all (because she so totally didn’t, when it came to cooking), she actually was pretty amusing to hang out with. It was cool, too, for Josie to feel as if she had control over a situation—any situation, even if it happened to be making chocolate pudding, or scrubbing its final remains from the bottom of a saucepan.

  Tonight, they’d made pizza—which Josie had counted as a success, until her mother had tried to slide the pizza out of the oven and it had folded, halfway, on the coils inside, which meant they had to make grilled cheese as a default dinner. They had salad out of a bag—something her mother couldn’t screw up, Josie figured, even if she worked hard at it. But now, thanks to the pudding disaster, there wasn’t any dessert.

  “How did you get to be Julia Child, anyway?” her mother asked.

  “Julia Child’s dead.”

  “Nigella Lawson, then.”

  Josie shrugged and turned off the water; stripped off the yellow plastic gloves. “I kind of got sick of soup,” she said.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to turn on the oven when I wasn’t home?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t listen to you.”

  Once, when Josie was in fifth grade, the students had had to build a bridge out of popsicle sticks. The idea was to craft a design that could withstand the most pressure. She could remember riding in the car across the Connecticut River, and studying the arches and struts and supports of the real bridges, trying her best to copy them. At the end of the unit, two engineers from the Army Corps came in with a machine specially designed to put weight and torque on each bridge, to see which child’s was the strongest.

  The parents were invited in for the testing. Josie’s mother had been in court, the only mother not present that day. Or so she’d remembered until now, when Josie realized that her mother had been there, for the last ten minutes. She might have missed Josie’s bridge test—during which the sticks splintered and groaned, and then burst apart in catastrophic failure—but she’d been there in time to help Josie pick up the pieces.

  The pot was sparkling, silver. The milk carton was half full. “We could start over,” Josie suggested.

  When there was no answer, Josie turned around. “I’d like that,” her mother answered quietly, but by that time, neither one of them was talking about cooking.

  There was a knock at the door, and that connection between them—evanescent as a butterfly that lands on your hand—broke. “Are you expecting someone?” Josie’s mother asked.

  She wasn’t, but she went to answer it anyway. When Josie opened the door, she found the detective who’d interviewed her standing there.

  Didn’t detectives show up at your door only when you were in serious trouble?

  Breathe, Josie, she told herself, and she noticed he was holding a bottle of wine just as her mother came out to see what was going on.

  “Oh,” her mother said. “Patrick.”

  Patrick?

  Josie turned and realized her mother was blushing.

  He held out the bottle of wine. “Since this seems to be a bone of contention between us . . .”

  “You know what?” Josie said, uncomfortable. “I’m just, um, going to go study.” She’d leave it to her mother to figure out how she was going to do that, since she’d finished her homework before dinner.

  She flew up the stairs, pounding extra hard with her feet so that she wouldn’t hear what her mother was saying. In her room, she turned the music on her CD player up to its loudest level, threw herself onto her bed, and stared up at the ceiling.

  Josie had a midnight curfew, not that she was using it at all now. But before, the bargain went like this: Matt would get Josie home by midnight; in return, Josie’s mother would disappear like smoke the moment they entered the house, retreating upstairs so that she and Matt could fool around in the living room. She had no idea what her mother’s rationale for this was—unless it was that it was safer for Josie to be doing this in her own living room than in a car or under the bleachers. She could remember how they’d come together in the dark, their bodies fusing and their silence measured. Realizing that at any moment her mom might come down for a drink of water or an aspirin only made it that much more exciting.

  At three or four in the morning, when her eyes were blurry and her chin rubbed raw by beard stubble, Josie would kiss Matt good night at the front door. She’d watch his taillights disappear like the glow of a dying cigarette. She’d tiptoe upstairs, past her mother’s bedroom, thinking: You don’t know me at all.

  * * *

  “If I won’t let you buy me a drink,” Alex said, “then what makes you think I’d take a bottle of wine from you?”

  Patrick grinned. “I’m not giving it to you. I’m going to open it, and you might just choose to borrow some.”

  As he said this, he was walking into the house, as if he already knew the way. He stepped into the kitchen, sniffed twice—it still smelled of the ashes of pizza crust and incinerated milk—and began to randomly open and close drawers until he found a corkscrew.

  Alex folded her arms, not because she was cold, but because she could not remember feeling this light inside, as if her body housed a second solar system. She watched Patrick remove two wineglasses from a cabinet and pour.

  “To being a civilian,” he said, toasting.

  The wine was rich and full; like velvet; like autumn. Alex closed her eyes. She would have liked to hold on to this moment, drag it wider and fuller, until it covered up so many others that had come before.

  “So, how is it?” Patrick asked. “Being unemployed?”

  She thought for a moment. “I made a grilled cheese sandwich today without burning the pan.”

  “I hope you framed it.”

  “Nah, I left that to the prosecution.” She smiled at her own little inside joke, and then felt it dissolve on the tails of her thoughts as she imagined Diana Leven’s face. “Do you ever feel guilty?” Alex asked.

  “Why?”

  “Because for a half a second, you’ve almost forgotten everything that happened.”

  Patrick put down his wineglass. “Sometimes, when I’m going through the evidence and I see a fingerprint or a photo or a shoe that belonged to one of the kids who died, I take a little more time to look at it. It’s crazy, but it seems like someone ought to, so that they’re remembered an extra minute or two.” He looked up at her.
“When someone dies, their lives aren’t the ones that stop at that moment, you know?”

  Alex lifted her glass of wine and drained it. “Tell me how you found her.”

  “Who?”

  “Josie. That day.”

  Patrick met her gaze, and Alex knew he was weighing her right to know what her daughter had experienced against his wish to save her from a truth that would cut her to the quick. “She was in the locker room,” he began quietly. “And I thought . . . I thought she was dead, too, because she was covered in blood, facedown next to Matt Royston. But then she moved and—” His voice broke. “It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

  “You know you’re a hero, don’t you?”

  Patrick shook his head. “I’m a coward. The only reason I ran into that building was because if I didn’t, I’d have nightmares for the rest of my life.”

  Alex shivered. “I have nightmares, and I wasn’t even there.”

  He took away her wineglass and studied her palm, as if he were going to read her the line of her life. “Maybe you should try not sleeping,” Patrick said.

  His skin smelled of evergreen and spearmint, this close. Alex could feel her heart pounding through the tips of her fingers. She imagined he could feel it, too.

  She didn’t know what was going to happen next—what was supposed to happen next—but it would be random, unpredictable, uncomfortable. She was getting ready to push away from him when Patrick’s hands anchored her in place. “Stop being such a judge, Alex,” he whispered, and he kissed her.

  When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst—but it wasn’t a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, a more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you’d been missing.

  The Month Before

  When you love someone, there’s a pattern to the way you come together. You might not even realize it, but your bodies are choreographed: a touch on the hip, a stroke of the hair. A staccato kiss, break away, a longer one, his hand slipping under your shirt. It’s a routine, but not in the boring sense of the word. It’s just the way you’ve learned to fit, and it’s why, when you’ve been with one guy for a long time, your teeth do not scrape together when you kiss; you do not bump noses or elbows.

  Matt and Josie had a pattern. When they started making out, he’d lean in and look at her as if he couldn’t possibly see any other part of the world. It was hypnotism, she realized, because after a while she sort of felt that way, too. Then he’d kiss her, so slowly that there was hardly pressure on her mouth, until she was the one pushing against him for more. He worked his way down her body, from mouth to neck, from neck to breasts, and then his fingers would do a search-and-rescue mission below the waistband of her jeans. The whole thing lasted about ten minutes, and then Matt would roll off her and take the condom out of his wallet so they could have sex.

  Not that Josie minded any of it. If she was going to be honest, she liked the pattern. It felt like a roller coaster—going up that hill, knowing what was coming next on track and knowing, too, that she couldn’t do anything to stop it.

  They were in her living room, in the dark, with the television on for background noise. Matt had already peeled off her clothes, and now he was leaning over her like a tidal wave, pulling down his boxers. He sprang free and settled between Josie’s legs.

  “Hey,” she said, as he tried to push into her. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “Aw, Jo. Just once, I don’t want there to be anything between us.”

  His words could melt her just as surely as his kiss or his touch; she already knew that by now. She hated that rubbery smell that permeated the air the moment he ripped open the Trojan packet and stayed on his hands until they were finished. And God, did anything feel better than having Matt inside her? Josie shifted just a little, felt her body adjust to him, and her legs trembled.

  When Josie had gotten her period at thirteen, her mother had not given her the typical heart-to-heart mother/daughter chat. Instead, she handed Josie a book on probability and statistics. “Every time you have sex, you can get pregnant or you can not get pregnant,” her mother said. “That’s fifty-fifty. So don’t fool yourself into thinking that if you only do it once without protection, the odds are in your favor.”

  Josie pushed at Matt. “I don’t think we should do this,” she whispered.

  “Have sex?”

  “Have sex without . . . you know. Anything.”

  He was disappointed, Josie could tell by the way his face froze for just a moment. But he pulled out and fished for his wallet, found a condom. Josie took it out of his hand, tore open the package, helped him put it on. “One day,” she began, and then he kissed her, and Josie forgot what she was going to say.

  * * *

  Lacy had started spreading corn on the lawn back in November to help the deer through the winter. There were plenty of locals who frowned upon artificially giving the deer a helping hand during the winter—mostly the same people whose gardens were wrecked by those surviving deer in the summer—but for Lacy, there was karma involved. As long as Lewis insisted on hunting, she was going to do what little she could to cancel out his actions.

  She put on her heavy boots—there was still enough snow on the ground to merit it, although it had gotten warm enough for the sap to start flowing, which meant that at least in theory, spring was coming. As soon as Lacy walked outside, she could smell the maple syrup refining in the neighbor’s sugar house, like candy crystals in the air. She carried the bucket of feed corn to the swing set in the backyard—a wooden structure that the boys had played on when they were small, and that Lewis had never quite gotten around to dismantling.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  Lacy turned to find Peter standing nearby, his hands dug deep into the pockets of his jeans. He was wearing a T-shirt and a down vest, and she imagined he had to be freezing. “Hi, sweetie,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  She could probably count on one hand the number of times Peter had come out of his room lately, much less outside. It was part of puberty, she knew, for adolescents to hole up in burrows and do whatever it was they did behind closed doors. In Peter’s case, it involved the computer. He was online constantly—not for web surfing as much as programming, and how could she fault that kind of passion?

  “Nothing. What are you doing?”

  “Same thing I’ve done all winter.”

  “Really?”

  She looked up at him. Against the beauty of the brisk outdoors, Peter seemed wildly out of place. His features were too delicate to match the craggy line of mountains in the backdrop behind him; his skin seemed nearly as white as the snow. He didn’t fit, and Lacy realized that most of the time when she saw Peter somewhere, she could make the same observation.

  “Here,” Lacy said, handing him the bucket. “Help.”

  Peter took the bucket and began to toss handfuls of corn on the ground. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “Is it true that you were the one who asked out Dad?”

  Lacy grinned. “Well, if I hadn’t, I would have probably had to wait around forever. Your father is many things, but perceptive isn’t one of them.”

  She had met Lewis at a pro-choice rally. Although Lacy would be the first to tell you that there was no greater gift than having a baby, she was a realist—she’d sent home enough mothers who were too young or too poor or too overburdened to know that the odds of that child having a good life were slim. She had gone with a friend to a march at the statehouse in Concord and stood on the steps with a sisterhood of women who held up signs: I’M PRO-CHOICE AND I VOTE...AGAINST ABORTION? DON’T HAVE ONE. She had looked around the crowd that day and realized that there was one lone man—well-dressed in a suit and tie,
right in the thick of the protesters. Lacy had been fascinated by him—as a protester, he was completely cast against type. Wow, Lacy had said, working her way toward him. What a day.

  Tell me about it.

  Have you ever been here before? Lacy had asked.

  My first time, Lewis said.

  Mine, too.

  They had gotten separated as a new influx of marchers came up the stone steps. A paper had blown off the stack that Lewis was carrying, but by the time Lacy could grab it, he’d been swallowed by the crowd. It was the cover page to something bigger; she knew by the staple holes at the top, and it had a title that nearly put her to sleep: “The allocation of public education resources in New Hampshire: a critical analysis.” But there was also an author’s name: Lewis Houghton, Sterling College Dept. of Economics.

  When she called to tell Lewis that she had his paper, he said that he didn’t need it. He could print out another copy. Yes, Lacy had said, but I have to bring this one back to you.

  Why?

  So you can explain it to me over dinner.

  It wasn’t until they’d gone out for sushi that Lacy learned the reason Lewis had been at the statehouse had nothing to do with attending a pro-choice rally, but only because he had a scheduled appointment with the governor.

  “But how did you tell him?” Peter asked. “That you liked him, you know, like that?”

  “As I recall, I grabbed him after our third date and kissed him. Then again, that may have been to shut him up because he was going on and on about free trade.” She glanced back over her shoulder, and suddenly the questions all made sense. “Peter,” she said, a smile breaking over her. “Is there someone you like?”

  Peter didn’t even have to answer—his face turned crimson.

  “Do I get to know her name?”

  “No,” Peter said emphatically.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter.” She looped her arm through Peter’s. “Gosh, I envy you. There’s nothing that compares to those first few months when all you can think of is each other. I mean, love in any form is pretty fabulous . . . but falling in love . . . well.”