by Jodi Picoult
“Why?” she asked.
She could make out the silver edge of Josie’s profile. “Because you told me to tell the truth.”
“What is the truth?”
“I loved Matt. And I hated him. I hated myself for loving him, but if I wasn’t with him, I wasn’t anyone anymore.”
“I don’t understand . . .”
“How could you? You’re perfect.” Josie shook her head. “The rest of us, we’re all like Peter. Some of us just do a better job of hiding it. What’s the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you’re faking.”
Alex thought of all the parties she’d ever gone to where the first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wound one day and heal the next.
I’m not perfect, Alex thought, and maybe that was the first step toward becoming that way.
“What’s going to happen to me?” Josie asked, the same question she’d asked a day ago, when Alex thought herself qualified to give answers.
“What’s going to happen to us,” Alex corrected.
A smile chased over Josie’s face, gone almost as quickly as it had come. “I asked you first.”
The door to the conference room opened, spilling light from the corridor, silhouetting whatever came next. Alex reached for her daughter’s hand and took a deep breath. “Let’s go see,” she said.
* * *
Peter was convicted of eight first-degree murders and two second-degree murders. The jury decided that in the case of Matt Royston and Courtney Ignatio, he had not been acting with premeditation and deliberation. He’d been provoked.
After the verdict was handed down, Jordan met with Peter in the holding cell. He’d be brought back to the jail only until the sentencing hearing; then he would be transferred to the state prison in Concord. Serving out eight consecutive murder sentences, he would not leave it alive.
“You okay?” Jordan asked, putting his hand on Peter’s shoulder.
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “I sort of knew it was going to happen.”
“But they heard you. That’s why they came back with manslaughter for two of the counts.”
“I guess I should say thanks for trying.” He smiled crookedly at Jordan. “Have a good life.”
“I’ll come see you, if I get down to Concord,” Jordan said.
He looked at Peter. In the six months since this case had fallen into his lap, his client had grown up. Peter was as tall as Jordan now. He probably weighed a little more. He had a deeper voice, a shadow of beard on his jaw. Jordan marveled that he hadn’t noticed these things until now.
“Well,” Jordan said. “I’m sorry it didn’t work out the way I’d hoped.”
“Me, too.”
Peter held out his hand, and Jordan embraced him instead. “Take care.”
He started out of the cell, and then Peter called him back. He was holding out the eyeglasses Jordan had brought him for the trial. “These are yours,” Peter said.
“Hang on to them. You have more use for them.”
Peter tucked the glasses into the front pocket of Jordan’s jacket. “I kind of like knowing you’re taking care of them,” he said. “And there isn’t all that much I really want to see.”
Jordan nodded. He walked out of the holding cell and said good-bye to the deputies. Then he headed toward the lobby, where Selena was waiting.
As he approached her, he put on Peter’s glasses. “What’s up with those?” she asked.
“I kind of like them.”
“You have perfect vision,” Selena pointed out.
Jordan considered the way the lenses made the world curve in at the ends, so that he had to move more gingerly through it. “Not always,” he said.
* * *
In the weeks after the trial, Lewis began fooling around with numbers. He’d done some preliminary research and entered it into STATA to see what kinds of patterns emerged. And—here was the interesting thing—it had absolutely nothing to do with happiness. Instead, he’d started looking at the communities where school shootings had occurred in the past and spinning them out to the present, to see how a single act of violence might affect economic stability. Or in other words—once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?
He was teaching again at Sterling College—basic microeconomics. Classes had only just begun in late September, and Lewis found himself slipping easily into the lecture circuit. When he was talking about Keynesian models and widgets and competition, it was routine—so effortless that he could almost make himself believe this was any other freshman survey course he’d taught in the past, before Peter had been convicted.
Lewis taught by walking up and down the aisles—a necessary evil, now that the campus had gone WiFi and students would play online poker or IM each other while he lectured—which was how he happened to come across the kids in the back. Two football players were taking turns squeezing a sports-top water bottle so that the stream arced upward and sprayed onto the back of another kid’s neck. The boy, two rows forward, kept turning around to see who was squirting water at him, but by then, the jocks were looking up at the graphs on the screen in the front of the hall, their faces as smooth as choirboys’.
“Now,” Lewis said, not missing a beat, “who can tell me what happens if you set the price above point A on the graph?” He plucked the water bottle out of the hands of one of the jocks. “Thank you, Mr. Graves. I was getting thirsty.”
The boy two rows ahead raised his hand like an arrow, and Lewis nodded at him. “No one would want to buy the widget for that much money,” he said. “So demand would fall, and that means the price would have to drop, or they’d wind up with a whole boatload of extras in the warehouse.”
“Excellent,” Lewis said, and he glanced up at the clock. “All right, guys, on Monday we’ll be covering the next chapter in Mankiw. And don’t be surprised if there’s a surprise quiz.”
“If you told us, it’s not a surprise,” a girl pointed out.
Lewis smiled. “Oops.”
He stood by the chair of the boy who’d given the right answer. He was stuffing his notebook into his backpack, which was already so crammed with papers that the zipper wouldn’t close. His hair was too long, and his T-shirt had a picture of Einstein’s face on it. “Nice work today.”
“Thanks.” The boy shifted from one foot to the other; Lewis could tell that he wasn’t quite sure what to say next. He thrust out his hand. “Um, nice to meet you. I mean, you’ve already met us all, but not, like, personally.”
“Right. What’s your name again?”
“Peter. Peter Granford.”
Lewis opened up his mouth to speak, but then just shook his head.
“What?” The boy ducked his head. “You just, uh, looked like you were going to say something important.”
Lewis looked at this namesake, at the way he stood with his shoulders rounded, as if he did not deserve so much space in this world. He felt that familiar pain that fell like a hammer on his breastbone whenever he thought of Peter, of a life that would be lost to prison. He wished he’d taken more time to look at Peter when Peter was right in front of his eyes, because now he would be forced to compensate with imperfect memories or—even worse—to find his son in the faces of strangers.
Lewis reached deep inside and unraveled the smile that he saved for moments like this, when there was absolutely nothing to be happy about. “It was important,” he said. “You remind me of someone I used to know.”
* * *
It took Lacy three weeks to gather the courage to enter Peter’s bedroom. Now that the verdict had been handed down—n
ow that they knew Peter would never be coming home again—there was no reason to keep it as she had for the past five months: a shrine, a haven for optimism.
She sat down on Peter’s bed and brought his pillow to her face. It still smelled like him, and she wondered how long it would take for that to dissipate. She glanced around at the scattered books on his shelves—the ones that the police had not taken. She opened his nightstand drawer and fingered the silky tassel of a bookmark, the metal teeth of a lockjawed stapler. The empty belly of a television remote control, missing its batteries. A magnifying glass. An old pack of Pokémon cards, a magic trick, a portable hard drive on a keychain.
Lacy took the box she’d brought up from the basement and placed each item inside. Here was the crime scene: look at what was left behind and try to re-create the boy.
She folded his quilt, and then his sheets, and then pulled the pillowcase free. She suddenly recalled a dinner conversation where Lewis had told her that for $10,000, you could flatten a house with a wrecking ball. Imagine how much less it took to destroy something than it did to build it in the first place: in less than an hour, this room would look as if Peter had never lived here at all.
When it was all a neat pile, Lacy sat back down on the bed and looked around at the stark walls, the paint a little brighter in the spots where posters had been. She touched the piped seam of Peter’s mattress and wondered how long she would continue to think of it as Peter’s.
Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details. It couldn’t save a single child—not the ones who’d gone to Sterling High that day, expecting the normal; not Josie Cormier; certainly not Peter. So what was the recipe? Was it love, mixed with something else for good measure? Luck? Hope? Forgiveness?
She remembered, suddenly, what Alex Cormier had said to her during the trial: Something still exists as long as there’s someone around to remember it.
Everyone would remember Peter for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy would have to be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive. For every recollection of him that involved a bullet or a scream, she would have a hundred others: of a little boy splashing in a pond, or riding a bicycle for the first time, or waving from the top of a jungle gym. Of a kiss good night, or a crayoned Mother’s Day card, or a voice off-key in the shower. She would string them together—the moments when her child had been just like other people’s. She would wear them, precious pearls, every day of her life; because if she lost them, then the boy she had loved and raised and known would really be gone.
Lacy began to stretch the sheets over the bed again. She settled the quilt, tucked the corners, fluffed the pillow. She set the books back on the shelves and the toys and tools and knickknacks back in the nightstand. Last, she unrolled the long tongues of the posters and put them back up on the walls. She was careful to place the thumbtacks in the same original holes. That way, she wouldn’t be doing any more damage.
* * *
Exactly one month after he was convicted, when the lights were dimmed and the detention officers made a final sweep of the catwalk, Peter reached down and tugged off his right sock. He turned on his side in the lower bunk, so that he was facing the wall. He fed the sock into his mouth, stuffing it as far back as it would go.
When it got hard to breathe, he fell into a dream. He was still eighteen, but it was the first day of kindergarten. He was carrying his backpack and his Superman lunch box. The orange school bus pulled up and, with a sigh, split open its gaping jaws. Peter climbed the steps and faced the back of the bus, but this time, he was the only student on it. He walked down the aisle to the very end, near the emergency exit. He put his lunch box down beside him and glanced out the rear window. It was so bright he thought the sun itself must be chasing them down the highway.
“Almost there,” a voice said, and Peter turned around to look at the driver. But just as there had been no passengers, there was no one at the wheel.
Here was the amazing thing: in his dream, Peter wasn’t scared. He knew, somehow, that he was headed exactly where he’d wanted to go.
March 6, 2008
You might not have recognized Sterling High. There was a new green metal roof, fresh grass growing out front, and a glass atrium that rose two stories at the rear of the school. A plaque on the bricks by the front door read: A SAFE HARBOR.
Later today, there would be a ceremony to honor the memories of those who’d died here a year ago, but because Patrick had been involved in the new security protocols for the school, he’d been able to sneak Alex in for an advance viewing.
Inside, there were no lockers—just open cubbies, so that nothing was hidden from view. Students were in class; only a few teachers moved through the lobby. They wore IDs around their necks, as did the kids. Alex had not really understood this—the threat was always from the inside, not the outside—but Patrick said that it made people feel secure, and that was half the battle.
Her cell phone rang. Patrick sighed. “I thought you told them—”
“I did,” Alex said. She flipped it open, and the secretary for the Grafton County public defender’s office began reeling off a litany of crises. “Stop,” she said, interrupting. “Remember? I’m missing in action for the day.”
She had resigned her judicial appointment. Josie had been charged as an accessory to second-degree murder and accepted a plea of manslaughter, with five years served. After that, every time Alex had a child in her courtroom charged with a felony, she couldn’t be impartial. As a judge, weighing the evidence had taken precedence; but as a mother, it was not the facts that mattered—only the feelings. Going back to her roots as a public defender seemed not only natural but comfortable. She understood, firsthand, what her clients were feeling. She visited them when she went to visit her daughter at the women’s penitentiary. Defendants liked her because she wasn’t condescending and because she told them the truth about their chances: what you saw of Alex Cormier was what you got.
Patrick led her to the spot that had once housed the back staircase at Sterling High. Instead, now, there was an enormous glass atrium that covered the spot where the gymnasium and locker room had been. Outside, you could see the playing fields, where a gym class was now in the thick of a soccer game, taking advantage of the early spring and the melted snow. Inside, there were wooden tables set up, with stools where students could meet or have a snack or read. A few kids were there now, studying for a geometry test. Their whispers rose like smoke to the ceiling: complementary . . . supplementary . . . intersection . . . endpoint.
To one side of the atrium, in front of the glass wall, were ten chairs. Unlike the rest of the seats in the atrium, these had backs and were painted white. You had to look closely to see that they had been bolted to the floor, instead of having been dragged over by students and left behind. They were not lined up in a row; they were not evenly spaced. They did not have names or placards on them, but everyone knew why they were there.
She felt Patrick come up behind her and slide his arm around her waist. “It’s almost time,” he said, and she nodded.
As she reached for one of the empty stools and started to drag it closer to the glass wall, Patrick took it from her. “For God’s sake, Patrick,” she muttered. “I’m pregnant, not terminal.”
That had been a surprise, too. The baby was due at the end of May. Alex tried not to think about it as a replacement for the daughter who would still be in jail for the next four years; she imagined instead that maybe this would be the one who rescued them all.
Patrick sank down beside her on a stool as Alex looked at her watch: 10:02 a.m.
She took a deep breath. “It doesn’t look the same anymore.”
“I know,” Patrick said.
“Do you think that’s a good thing?”
He thought for a moment. “I think it’s a necessary thing,” he said.
She not
iced that the maple tree, the one that had grown outside the window of the second-story locker room, had not been cut down during the construction of the atrium. From where she was sitting, you couldn’t see the hole that had been carved out of it to retrieve a bullet. The tree was enormous, with a thick gnarled trunk and twisted limbs. It had probably been here long before the high school ever was, maybe even before Sterling was settled.
10:09.
She felt Patrick’s hand slip into her lap as she watched the soccer game. The teams seemed grossly mismatched, the kids who had already hit puberty playing against those who were still slight and small. Alex watched a striker charge a defenseman for the other team, leaving the smaller boy trampled as the ball hurtled high into the net.
All that, Alex thought, and nothing’s changed. She glanced at her watch again: 10:13.
The last few minutes, of course, were the hardest. Alex found herself standing, her hands pressed flat against the glass. She felt the baby kick inside her, answering back to the darker hook of her heart. 10:16. 10:17.
The striker returned to the spot where the defenseman had fallen and reached out his hand to help the slighter boy stand. They walked back to center field, talking about something Alex couldn’t hear.
It was 10:19.
She happened to glance at the maple tree again. The sap was still running. A few weeks from now, there would be a reddish hue on the branches. Then buds. A burst of first leaves.
Alex took Patrick’s hand. They walked out of the atrium in silence, down the corridors, past the rows of cubbies. They crossed the lobby and threshold of the front door, retracing the steps they’d taken.
Nineteen Minutes
Jodi Picoult
A Readers Club Guide
INTRODUCTION
In this emotionally charged novel, Jodi Picoult delves beneath the surface of a small town to explore what it means to be different in our society.
