Jodi Picoult - House Rules

On the spot where he’s been bouncing, the snow has melted, revealing a patch of briars. I kick at the ground beneath my boots and shake my head. That poor, drunk, dead bastard had the misfortune to fall down in a field of brambles.

Before I can say anything else, the regional medical examiner arrives. Wayne Nussbaum went to clown college before getting his medical degree, although I haven’t seen the guy crack a smile in the fifteen years I’ve been on the job. “Greetings, all,” he says, coming into the clearing of artificial light. “I hear you have a murder mystery on your hands?”

“You think it could be hypothermia?” I ask.

He considers this, carefully rolling the victim forward and examining the back of his head. “I’ve never seen it firsthand… but I’ve read about it. It certainly would fit the bill.” Wayne glances up at me. “Nice work-but you didn’t need to pull me away from the Bruins in overtime for death by natural causes.”

I glance to the spot where Jacob was standing moments before, but he’s disappeared.

I pedal home as fast as I can. I can’t wait to transcribe my notes from the crime scene into a fresh notebook. I plan to draw pictures, using colored pencils and scaled maps. I slip into the house through the garage, and I am just taking off my sneakers when the door opens behind me again.

Immediately, I freeze.

It’s Theo.

What if he asks me what I’ve been doing?

I have never been a very good liar. If he asks, I’m going to have to tell him about the scanner and the dead body and the hypothermia. And that makes me angry because right now I want to keep it all to myself instead of sharing it. I tuck my notebook into the back of my pants and pull my sweater down over it and then cross my hands behind my back to hide it.

“What, now you’re going to spy on me?” Theo says, kicking off his boots. “Why don’t you get your own life?”

It isn’t until he’s halfway up the stairs that I look at him and see how red his cheeks are, how his hair is windblown. I wonder where he’s been, and if Mom knows, and then the thought is gone, replaced by the vision of the dead man’s bare skin, blue underneath the floodlights, and the pink, stained snow all around him. I will have to remember all that, the next time I set up a crime scene. I could use food coloring in water, and spray it on the snow outside. And I’ll draw with red Sharpie on my knuckles and my knees. Although I am not too keen on lying in the snow in my underwear, I am willing to make the sacrifice for a scenario that will totally stump my mother.

I am still humming under my breath when I get to my room. I take off my clothes and put on my pajamas. Then I sit down at my desk and carefully cut the page out of the old, used notebook so that I don’t have to hear the sound of paper being crumpled or torn. I take out a fresh spiral notebook and begin to sketch the crime scene.

Go figure. On a scale of one to ten, this day’s turned out to be an eleven.

Imette St. Guillen was an honors student pursuing a degree in criminal justice in New York. One winter night in 2006, she went out drinking with her friends, eventually splitting from them and heading to SoHo, where she called a friend to say she was at a bar. She never returned home. Instead, her naked body was found fourteen miles away, in a deserted area off the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, wrapped in a flowered bedspread. Her hair had been cut off on one side, her hands and feet were secured with plastic ties, she’d been gagged with a sock, and her face was wrapped in packaging tape. She had been raped, sodomized, and suffocated.

Blood was found on one of those plastic ties, but DNA evidence revealed that it didn’t belong to the victim. Instead, it was matched to Darryl Littlejohn, a bouncer who had been asked to remove the drunk young woman from the bar at around 4:00 A.M. Witnesses said they argued before leaving the bar.

Fibers were also found in Littlejohn’s residence that matched those on the packing tape on the victim’s body.

Littlejohn was also arraigned for a second kidnapping and assault of another college student who managed to get away from him after he impersonated a police officer, handcuffed her, and threw her into his van.

And Imette St. Guillen, tragically, went from being a student of criminal justice to being the lesson taught by professors of forensic DNA analysis.

I used to have friends. Back before I had children, when I was working at a textbook publishing company outside of Boston, I’d hang out with some of the other editors after hours. We’d go for sushi, or to see a movie. When I met Henry-he was a technical consultant on a computer programming textbook-my friends were the ones who encouraged me to ask him on a date, since he seemed too shy to ask me. They leaned over my cubicle, laughing, asking if he had a Superman side underneath all that Clark Kent. And when Henry and I got married, they were bridesmaids.

Then I got pregnant, and suddenly the people I could relate to were enrolled in my birthing class, practicing their breathing and talking about the best deals on Diaper Genies. After we had our babies, three of the other mothers and I formed a casual playgroup. We rotated hosting duties. The adults would sit on the couch and gossip while the babies rolled around on the floor with a collection of toys.

Our children got older and started to play with each other instead of beside each other. All of them, that is, except Jacob. My friends’ boys zoomed Matchbox cars all over the carpet, but Jacob lined them up with military precision, bumper to bumper. While the other kids colored outside the lines, Jacob drew neat little blocks in a perfect rainbow spectrum.

I didn’t notice, at first, when my friends forgot to mention at whose house the next playgroup was taking place. I didn’t read between the lines when I hosted and two of the mothers begged off because of previous engagements. But that afternoon, Jacob got frustrated when my friend’s daughter reached for the truck whose wheels he was spinning, and he hit her so hard that she fell against the edge of the coffee table. “I can’t do this anymore,” my friend said, gathering up her shrieking child. “I’m sorry, Emma.”

“But it was an accident! Jacob didn’t understand what he was doing!”

She stared at me. “Do you ?”

After that, I didn’t really have friends anymore. Who had time, with all the early intervention specialists that were occupying every minute of Jacob’s life? I spent the entire day on the carpet with him, forcing him to interact, and at night I stayed up reading the latest books about autism research-as if I might find a solution that even the experts couldn’t. Eventually, I met families at Theo’s preschool-who were welcoming at first but distanced themselves when they met Theo’s older brother; when they invited us for dinner and all I could talk about was how a cream of transdermal glutathione had helped some autistic kids, who couldn’t produce enough of the substance themselves to bind to and remove toxins from the body.

Isolation. A fixation on one particular subject. An inability to connect socially.

Jacob was the one diagnosed, but I might as well have Asperger’s, too.

When I come downstairs at seven in the morning, Jacob is already sitting at the kitchen table, showered and dressed. An ordinary teenager would sleep in till noon on a Sunday-Theo will, certainly-but then again, Jacob isn’t ordinary. His routine of getting up for school trumps the fact that it’s a weekend and there’s no urgency to leave the house. Even when it is a snow day and school is canceled, Jacob will get dressed instead of going back to bed.