by Jodi Picoult
“You know, it’s wise to keep a spare tank . . .” Mr. Weatherhall’s voice floated from the bottom of the basement stairs, accompanied by the percussion of his footsteps. Peter let go of the gun, snapped his hands back to his sides.
He was sweating by the time Mr. Weatherhall walked into the kitchen. “You all right?” he asked, peering at Peter. “You look a little white around the gills.”
“I stayed up late doing homework. Thanks for the gas. Again.”
“You tell your dad I’m not bailing him out next time,” Mr. Weatherhall said, and he waved Peter off from the porch.
Peter waited until Mr. Weatherhall had closed the door, and then he started to run, kicking up snow in his wake. He left the gas can next to the snow blower and burst into his house. He locked his bedroom door, took the gun from his pants, and sat down.
It was black and heavy crafted out of alloyed steel. What was really surprising was how fake the Glock looked—like a kid’s toy gun—although Peter supposed he ought to be marveling instead at how realistic the toy guns actually were. He racked the slide and released it. He ejected the magazine.
He closed his eyes and held the gun up to his head. “Bang,” he whispered.
Then he set the gun on his bed and pulled off one of his pillowcases. He wrapped the Glock inside it, rolling it up like a bandage. He slipped the gun between his mattress and his box spring and lay down.
It would be like that fairy tale, the one with the princess who could feel a bean or a pea or whatever. Except Peter wasn’t a prince, and the lump wouldn’t keep him up at night.
In fact, it might make him sleep better.
* * *
In Josie’s dream, she was standing in the most beautiful tepee. The walls were made of buttery deerskin, sewed tight with golden thread. Stories had been painted all around her in shades of red, ochre, violet, and blue—tales of hunts and loves and losses. Rich buffalo skins were piled high for cushions; coals glowed like rubies in the firepit. When she looked up, she could see stars falling through the smoke hole.
Suddenly Josie realized that her feet were sliding; worse, that there was no way to stop this. She glanced down and saw only sky; wondered whether she’d been silly enough to believe she could walk among the clouds, or if the ground beneath her feet had disappeared when she looked away.
She started to fall. She could feel herself tumbling head over heels; felt the skirt she was wearing balloon and the wind rush between her legs. She didn’t want to open her eyes, but she couldn’t help peeking: the ground was rushing up at an alarming pace, postage-stamp squares of green and brown and blue that grew larger, more detailed, more realistic.
There was her school. Her house. The roof over her bedroom. Josie felt herself hurtle toward it and she steeled herself for the inevitable crash. But you never hit the ground in your dreams; you never get to see yourself die. Instead, Josie felt herself splash, her clothes billowing like the sails of a jellyfish as she treaded warm water.
She woke up, breathless, and realized that she still felt wet. She sat up, lifted up the covers, and saw the pool of blood beneath her.
After three positive pregnancy tests, after her period was three weeks late—she was miscarrying.
Thankgodthankgodthankgod. Josie buried her face in the sheets and started to cry.
* * *
Lewis was sitting at the kitchen table on Saturday morning, reading the latest issue of The Economist and methodically working his way through a whole-wheat waffle, when the phone rang. He glanced at Lacy, who—beside the sink—was technically closer to it, but she held up her hands, dripping with water and soap. “Could you . . . ?”
He stood up and answered it. “Hello?”
“Mr. Houghton?”
“Speaking,” Lewis said.
“This is Tony, from Burnside’s. Your hollow-point bullets are in.”
Burnside’s was a gun shop; Lewis went there in the fall for his Hoppe’s solvent and his ammunition; once or twice he’d been lucky enough to bring a deer in to be weighed. But it was February; deer season was over now. “I didn’t order those,” Lewis said. “There must be some mistake.”
He hung up the phone and sat down again in front of his waffle. Lacy lifted a large frying pan out of the sink and set it on the drainer to dry. “Who was that?”
Lewis turned the page in his magazine. “Wrong number,” he said.
* * *
Matt had a hockey game in Exeter. Josie went to his home games, but rarely the ones where the team traveled. Today, though, she had asked her mother to borrow the car and drove to the seacoast, leaving early enough to be able to catch him in the locker room beforehand. She poked her head inside the visiting team’s locker room and was immediately hit with the reek of all the equipment. Matt stood with his back to her, wearing his chest protector and his padded pants and his skates. He hadn’t yet pulled on his jersey.
Some of the other guys noticed her first. “Hey, Royston,” a senior said. “I think your fan club president’s arrived.”
Matt didn’t like it when she showed up before a game. Afterward: well, that was mandatory—he needed someone to celebrate his win. But he’d made it very clear that he didn’t have time for Josie when he was getting ready; that he’d only get shit from the guys if she clung that closely; that Coach wanted the team to be alone to focus on their game. Still, she thought that this might be an exception.
A shadow passed over his face as his team started catcalls.
Matt, you need help putting on your jock?
Hey, quick, get the guy a bigger stick . . .
“Yeah,” Matt shot back as he walked across the rubber mats toward Josie. “You just wish you had someone who could suck the chrome off a hood ornament.”
Josie felt her cheeks flame as the entire locker room burst into laughter at her expense, and the rude comments shifted focus from Matt to her. Grasping her by the arm, Matt pulled Josie outside.
“I told you not to interrupt me before a game,” he said.
“I know. But it was important . . .”
“This is important,” Matt corrected, gesturing around the rink.
“I’m fine,” Josie blurted out.
“Good.”
She stared at him. “No, Matt. I mean . . . I’m fine. You were right.”
As he realized what Josie was really trying to tell him, he put his arms around her waist and lifted her off the ground. His gear caught like armor between them as he kissed her. It made Josie think of knights heading off to battle; of the girls they left behind. “Don’t you forget it,” Matt said, and he grinned.
PART TWO
When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.
—CHINESE PROVERB
Sterling isn’t the inner city. You don’t find crack dealers on Main Street, or households below the poverty level. The crime rate is virtually nonexistent.
That’s why people are still so shell-shocked.
They ask, How could this happen here?
Well. How could it not happen here?
All it takes is a troubled kid with access to guns.
You don’t have to go to an inner city to find someone who meets those criteria. You only have to open your eyes. The next likely candidate might be upstairs, or sprawled in front of your TV right now. But hey, you just go right on pretending it won’t happen here. Tell yourself that you’re immune because of where you live or who you are.
It’s easier that way, isn’t it?
Five Months After
You can tell a lot about people by their habits. For example, Jordan had come across potential jurors who religiously took their cups of coffee to their computers and read the entire New York Times online. There were others whose welcome screen on AOL didn’t even include news updates, because they found it too depressing. There were rural people who owned televisions but only got a grainy public broadcasting station because they couldn’t afford the money it
would take to bring cable lines up their dirt road; and there were others who had bought elaborate satellite systems so that they could catch Japanese soaps or Sister Mary Margaret’s Prayer Hour at three in the morning. There were those who watched CNN, and those who watched FOX News.
It was the sixth hour of individual voir dire, the process by which the jury for Peter’s trial would be selected. This involved long days in the courtroom with Diana Leven and Judge Wagner, as the pool of jurors dribbled one by one into the witness seat to be asked a variety of questions by the defense and the prosecution. The goal was to find twelve folks, plus an alternate, who weren’t personally affected by the shooting; a jury that could commit to a long trial if necessary, instead of worrying about their home business or who was taking care of their toddlers. A group of people who had not been living and breathing the news about this trial for the past five months—or, as Jordan was affectionately starting to think of them: the blessed few that had been living under a rock.
It was August, and for the past week the temperatures had climbed to nearly a hundred degrees during the day. To make matters worse, the air-conditioning in the courtroom was on the fritz, and Judge Wagner smelled like mothballs and feet when he sweated.
Jordan had already taken off his jacket and loosened the top button of his shirt beneath his tie. Even Diana—who he secretly believed had to be some kind of Stepford robot—had twisted her hair up and jammed a pencil into the bun to secure it. “What are we up to?” Judge Wagner asked.
“Juror number six million seven hundred and thirty thousand,” Jordan murmured.
“Juror number eighty-eight,” the clerk announced.
It was a man this time, wearing khaki pants and a short-sleeved shirt. He had thinning hair, boat shoes, and a wedding band. Jordan noted all of this on his pad.
Diana stood up and introduced herself, then began asking her litany of questions. The answers would determine if a potential juror could be dismissed for cause—if they had a kid, for example, who’d been killed at Sterling High and couldn’t be impartial. If not, Diana could choose to use one of her peremptory strikes. Both she and Jordan had fifteen opportunities to dismiss a potential juror out of gut instinct. So far, Diana had used one of hers against a short, bald, quiet software developer. Jordan had dismissed a former Navy SEAL.
“What do you do for work, Mr. Alstrop?” Diana asked.
“I’m an architect.”
“You’re married?”
“For twenty years, this October.”
“Do you have any children?”
“Two, a fourteen-year-old boy and a nineteen-year-old girl.”
“Do they go to public high school?”
“Well, my son does. My daughter’s in college. Princeton,” he said proudly.
“Do you know anything about this case?”
Saying he did, Jordan knew, wouldn’t exclude him. It was what he believed or didn’t believe, in spite of what the media had said.
“Well, only what I read in the papers,” Alstrop said, and Jordan closed his eyes.
“Do you read a certain newspaper daily?”
“I used to get the Union Leader,” he said, “but the editorials drove me crazy. I try to read the main section of The New York Times now, at least.”
Jordan considered this. The Union Leader was a notoriously conservative paper, The New York Times a liberal one.
“What about television?” Diana asked. “Any shows you particularly like?”
You probably didn’t want a juror who watched ten hours of Court TV per day. You also didn’t want the guy who savored Pee-wee Herman marathons.
“60 Minutes,” Alstrop replied. “And The Simpsons.”
Now that, Jordan thought, was a normal guy. He got to his feet as Diana turned the questioning over to him. “What do you remember reading about this case?” he asked.
Alstrop shrugged. “There was a shooting at the high school and one of the students was charged.”
“Did you know any of the students?”
“No.”
“Do you know anyone who works at Sterling High?”
Alstrop shook his head. “No.”
“Have you talked to anyone involved in this case?”
“No.”
Jordan walked up to the witness stand. “There’s a rule in this state that says you can take a right on red, if you stop first at the red light. You familiar with it?”
“Sure,” Alstrop said.
“What if the judge told you that you can’t turn right on red—that you must stay stopped until the light goes green again, even if there’s a sign in front of you that specifically says RIGHT TURN ON RED. What would you do?”
Alstrop looked at Judge Wagner. “I guess I’d do what he said.”
Jordan smiled to himself. He didn’t give a damn about Alstrop’s driving habits—that setup and question was a way to weed out the people who couldn’t see past convention. There would be information in this trial that wasn’t necessarily intuitive, and he needed people on a jury who were open-minded enough to understand that rules weren’t always what you thought they were, who could listen to the new regulations and follow them accordingly.
When he finished his questioning, he and Diana walked toward the bench. “Is there any reason to dismiss this juror for cause?” Judge Wagner asked.
“No, Your Honor,” Diana said, and Jordan shook his head.
“So?”
Diana nodded. Jordan glanced at the man, still sitting on the witness stand. “This one works for me,” he said.
* * *
When Alex woke up, she pretended not to. Instead, she kept her eyes nearly closed so that she could stare at the man sprawled on the other side of her bed. This relationship—four months old now—was still a mystery to her, as much as the constellation of freckles on Patrick’s shoulders, the valley of his spine, the startling contrast of his black hair against a white sheet. It seemed that he had invaded her life by osmosis: she’d find his shirt mixed in with her laundry; she’d smell his shampoo on her pillowcase; she would pick up the phone, thinking to call him, and he’d already be on the line. Alex had been single for so long; she was practical, resolute, and set in her ways (oh, who was she kidding . . . those were all just euphemisms for what she really was: stubborn)—she would have guessed that this sudden attack on her privacy would be unnerving. Instead, though, she found herself feeling disoriented when Patrick wasn’t around, like the sailor who’s just landed after months at sea and who still feels the ocean rolling beneath him even when it isn’t there.
“I can feel you staring, you know,” Patrick murmured. A lazy smile heated his face, but his eyes were still shut.
Alex leaned over, slipping her hand under the covers. “What can you feel?”
“What can’t I?” Striking quick as lightning, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her underneath him. His eyes, still softened by sleep, were a crisp blue that made Alex think of glaciers and northern seas. He kissed her, and she vined around him.
Then suddenly her eyes snapped open. “Oh, shit,” she said.
“That wasn’t really what I was going for . . .”
“Do you know what time it is?”
They had drawn the shades in her bedroom because of a full moon last night. But by now, the sun was streaming through the thinnest crack at the bottom of the windowsill. Alex could hear Josie banging pots and pans downstairs in the kitchen.
Patrick reached over Alex for the wristwatch he’d left on her nightstand. “Oh, shit,” he repeated, and he threw back the covers. “I’m an hour late for work already.”
He grabbed his boxers as Alex jumped out of bed and reached for her robe. “What about Josie?”
It wasn’t that they had been hiding their relationship from Josie—Patrick often dropped by after work or for dinner or to hang out in the evenings. A few times, Alex had tried to talk to Josie about him, to see what she thought of the whole miracle of her mother dating again, but Josie did whatever it
took to avoid having that conversation. Alex wasn’t sure herself where this was all going, but she did know that she and Josie had been a unit for so long that adding Patrick to the mix meant Josie became the loner—and right now, Alex was determined to keep that from happening. She was making up for lost time, really, thinking of Josie before she thought of anything else. To that end, if Patrick spent the night, she made sure he left before Josie could wake up to find him there.
Except today, when it was a lazy summer Thursday and nearly ten o’clock.
“Maybe this is a good time to tell her,” Patrick suggested.
“Tell her what?”
“That we’re . . .” He looked at her.
Alex stared at him. She couldn’t finish his sentence; she didn’t really know the answer herself. She never expected that this was the way she and Patrick would have this conversation. Was she with Patrick because he was good at that—rescuing the underdog who needed it? When this trial was over, would he move on? Would she?
“We’re together,” Patrick said decisively.
Alex turned her back to him and yanked shut the tie of her robe. That wasn’t, to paraphrase Patrick earlier, what she had been going for. But then again, how would he know that? If he asked her right now what she wanted out of this relationship . . . well, she knew: she wanted love. She wanted to have someone to come home to. She wanted to dream about a vacation they’d take when they were sixty and know he’d be there the day she stepped onto the plane. But she’d never admit any of this to him. What if she did, and he just looked at her blankly? What if it was too soon to think about things like this?
If he asked her right now, she wouldn’t answer, because answering was the surest way to get your heart handed back to you.
Alex rummaged underneath the bed, searching for her slippers. Instead, she located Patrick’s belt and tossed it to him. Maybe the reason she hadn’t openly told Josie she was sleeping with Patrick had nothing to do with protecting Josie, and everything to do with protecting herself.
