Jodi Picoult - House Rules

“I don’t know,” Oliver admits. “We’ll get Ava Newcomb and Dr. Murano to put together an outpatient treatment plan, but it depends on Judge Cuttings. He could weigh the fact that Jacob committed murder and decide that he can’t ignore that, and isolate him from the rest of the community.”

He has told me this before, but it never seems to sink in. “In a state mental hospital,” I finish. As we reach my driveway again, I stop walking, and Oliver stops, too, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “I fought my whole life to have Jacob treated like ordinary kids in regular school, with regular programming,” I say, “and now his only chance of staying out of jail means playing the Asperger’s card.”

“I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen,” Oliver says. “But it’s better to be prepared.”

“I haven’t told Jacob yet.”

He looks down at his shoes. “Maybe you should.”

As if we have conjured him, the door opens and Jacob stands in silhouette in his pajamas. “I’m waiting for you to say good night,” he tells me.

“I’ll be right there.”

Jacob looks at Oliver, impatient. “Well?”

“Well what?”

“Will you just kiss her good-bye already?”

My jaw drops with surprise. Since my fight with Jacob, Oliver and I have been careful to steer clear of each other in his company. But now Oliver takes me into his arms. “I don’t have to be asked twice,” he says, and he presses his lips against mine.

When Jacob was little, I used to sneak into his bedroom after midnight and sit on a rocking chair next to his bed so that I could watch him sleep. There was a wonderful magic brush that painted him when he was unconscious. In his bed, I could not tell that the hand curled under the covers was the same one that had stimmed fiercely that afternoon when a girl at the park came into the sandbox where he was happily playing alone. I couldn’t tell that those eyes, closed, winced when I asked him to look right at me. I couldn’t watch him, easy and relaxed in his dreams, and think this was the same boy who could not remember the sequence of words to ask the lunch lady for apple juice instead of milk.

When Jacob slept, the slate was wiped clean, and he could have been any child. Any ordinary child.

Instead, during his waking hours, he was extraordinary. And that truly was the definition for him-outside the perimeter of the norm. At some point in the English language, that word had acquired positive connotations. Why hadn’t Asperger’s?

You could say I was different. I had willingly traded my own future for Jacob’s, giving up whatever fame or fortune I might have achieved in order to make sure his life was a better one. I had let every relationship slide, with the exception of the one I’d built with Jacob. I had made choices that other women would not have made. At best that made me a fierce, fighting mother; at worst, it made me single-minded. And yet, if I walked into a crowded room, people did not mystically part from me as if there was an invisible magnetic field, a polarizing reaction between my body and theirs. People did not turn to their friends and groan, Oh, God, save me-she’s heading this way. People didn’t roll their eyes behind my back when I was talking. Jacob might have acted strangely, but he’d never been cruel.

He simply didn’t have the self-awareness for it.

Now, I sink down on that same chair I used to sit on years ago, and I watch Jacob sleep again. He isn’t a child anymore. His face has the planes of that of an adult; his hands are strong and his shoulders sculpted. I reach out and brush his hair back from where it has fallen over his forehead. In his sleep, Jacob stirs.

I do not know what kind of life I’d have had without Jacob, but I don’t want to know. If he hadn’t been autistic, I could not love him any more than I already do. And even if he is convicted, I could not love him any less.

I lean down, just like I used to, and I kiss him on the forehead. It is the age-old, time-honored way for mothers to test for fever, to give a blessing, to say good night.

So why does it feel like I’m saying good-bye?

My sixteenth birthday is today, but I’m not expecting much. We’re still waiting, six days later, for the jury to reach a verdict. I’m guessing, actually, that my mother won’t even remember-which is why I am struck speechless when she yells “Breakfast” and I come downstairs with my hair still wet from my shower and there’s a chocolate cake with a candle in it.

Granted, it’s Brown Thursday and it’s no doubt gluten-free, but beggars can’t be choosers.

“Happy birthday, Theo,” my mother says, and she starts the round of singing. My dad, my brother, and Oliver all join in. I have a big, fat smile on my face. As far as I know, my father has never been to one of my birthday parties, unless you count the minute I was delivered in the hospital, and that wasn’t really a party, I imagine.

Was it worth it? A little voice inside me curls like the smoke from the candle. Was it worth all this to get a family like the ones you used to spy on?

My mother puts her arm around my shoulders. “Make a wish, Theo,” she says.

A year ago, this is exactly what I would have wished for. What I did wish for, with or without the cake. But there’s something in her voice, like a string made of steel, that suggests there’s a right answer here, one collective heart’s desire for all of us.

Which just happens to rest in the hands of twelve jurors.

I close my eyes and blow out the candle, and everyone claps. My mother starts to cut slices from the cake and gives me the first one. “Thanks,” I say.

“I hope you like it,” my mother replies. “And I hope you like this.”

She hands me an envelope. Inside is a note, handwritten:

Your debt is paid.

I think of my crazy trip to California to find my father, of how much money those tickets had cost, and for a second I can’t talk.

“But,” she says, “if you do that again, I’ll kill you.”

I laugh, and she wraps her arms around me from behind and kisses the top of my head.

“Hey, there’s more.” My father hands me an envelope, which has a cheesy “To My Son” Hallmark card inside, and forty bucks.

“You can start saving for a faster router,” he says.

“That’s awesome!”

Then Oliver hands me a package wrapped in Bounty paper towels. “It was this or a pizza box,” he explains.

I shake it. “Is it a calzone?”

“Give me a little credit here,” Oliver says.

I rip it open and find the Vermont Driver’s Manual.

“After this trial’s over, I thought you and I could make an appointment at the DMV and finally get that learner’s permit.”

I have to look down at the table, because if I don’t, everyone’s going to realize I’m totally about to cry. I remember how, when I was little, my mother would read us these ridiculous fairy tales where frogs turned into princes and girls woke up from comas with a single kiss. I never bought into any of that crap. But who knows? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe a person’s life can change in an instant after all.

“Wait,” Jacob says. Until now, he’s been watching, his face bisected by a smile-and this is an improvement. At all my birthday parties growing up, the unwritten rule was that Jacob had to help me blow out the candles. It was easier to share my moment than to have him ruin the festivities with a meltdown. “I’ve got a present for you, too, Theo.”

I don’t think, in all the years that I’ve been alive, Jacob’s ever gotten me a present. I don’t think he’s ever gotten anyone a present, unless you count the perfume I pick out at CVS for Christmas and give to my mother, after putting both my name and Jacob’s on the tag. Giving gifts just isn’t on my brother’s radar.