Jodi Picoult - House Rules

I don’t know how anyone could look at Jacob and think he’d be a viable witness. Sure, his mind is a steel trap. But half the time, there’s no lock to get inside it.

The detective sits at the kitchen table. I turn down the flame on the stove and then join him. Jacob is struggling to look in Matson’s direction, but his eyelids keep fluttering, as if he’s staring into the sun, and finally he gives up and lets his gaze slide away.

“You have a friend named Jess, right?” the detective asks.

“Yes.”

“What do you and Jess do together?”

“We practice social skills. Conversations. Good-byes. Things like that.” He hesitates. “She’s my best friend.”

This doesn’t surprise me. Jacob’s definition of a friend isn’t legitimate. To him, a friend might be the kid whose locker is next to his in school, who therefore has an interaction at least once a day to say, Could you move over? A friend is someone who he’s never met but who doesn’t actively taunt him in school. Jess may be paid by me to meet with Jacob, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that she honestly cares about him and connects with him.

The detective looks at Jacob, who, of course, is not looking at him. I watch people falter over that normal courtesy of communication all the time-after a while, it feels like staring, so they look away from Jacob, mirroring his behavior. Sure enough, after a moment, Matson stares down at the table as if there’s something fascinating in the wood grain. “Right now, Jacob, Jess is missing. And it’s my job to find her.”

I suck in my breath. “ That’s what you call sensitive?”

But Jacob doesn’t seem to be surprised, which makes me wonder if he’s seen the news, or read about the disappearance in the papers or online. “Jess is gone,” he repeats.

The detective leans forward. “Were you supposed to meet with her last Tuesday?”

“Yes,” Jacob says. “At two thirty-five.”

“And did you?”

“No.”

Suddenly, Jacob’s breakdown makes perfect sense. To travel to Jess’s unfamiliar new residence-which already would have set off his alarm bells-and then to never have Jess show up… Well, talk about a perfect storm for an AS kid. “Oh, Jacob. Was that why you had a meltdown?”

“Meltdown?” Matson echoes.

I glance at him briefly. “When Jacob’s routine is disrupted, he gets very agitated. This was a double whammy, and by the time he came home-” I break off, suddenly remembering something else. “You walked home from Jess’s place? Alone?”

It isn’t that he wouldn’t know the way-Jacob is a veritable human GPS; he can take one look at a map and have it memorized. But knowing geography and knowing how to follow directions are two very different things. Getting from point A to point B to point C inevitably trips him up.

“Yes,” Jacob says. “It wasn’t so bad.”

It was nearly eight miles. In the freezing cold. I suppose I should consider us lucky: on top of everything else, Jacob could have wound up with pneumonia.

“How long did you wait for her?”

Jacob looks up at the clock. He starts rubbing the tips of his fingers against his thumbs, back and forth. “I have to go now.”

I notice the detective staring at Jacob as he fidgets, and I know damn well what he’s thinking. “I bet when you see someone who doesn’t make eye contact and who can’t sit still, you immediately assume guilt,” I say. “Me, I assume he’s on the spectrum.”

“It’s four-thirty.” Jacob’s voice is louder, more urgent.

“You can go watch CrimeBusters, ” I tell him, and he bolts into the living room.

The detective stares at me, dumbfounded. “Excuse me, I was in the middle of an interrogation.”

“I thought this wasn’t an interrogation.”

“A young girl’s life might be at stake, and you think it’s more important for your son to watch a television show?”

“Yes,” I snap.

“It doesn’t strike you as odd that your son isn’t upset by his tutor’s disappearance?”

“My son didn’t even get upset when his grandfather died,” I reply. “It was a forensics adventure for him. His feelings about Jess going missing will be determined only by how it affects him-which is the way he measures everything. When he realizes that his Sunday session with Jess might not take place, then he’ll get upset.”

The detective looks at me for a long moment. I think he’s going to give me a lecture about obstruction of justice, but instead, he tilts his head to one side, thoughtful. “That must be really hard on you.”

I don’t remember the last time anyone has said those words to me. I would not trade Jacob for the world-for his tenderness, his incredible brain, his devotion to following rules-but that doesn’t mean it’s been an easy ride. An ordinary mother doesn’t worry about whether her son being shunned at a school concert hurts him as much as it hurts me. An ordinary mother doesn’t call Green Mountain Power when the electricity goes out to say that one of the residents has a disability that requires immediate intervention-because missing CrimeBusters actually qualifies, when it comes to Jacob. An ordinary mother doesn’t lie awake at night wondering if Theo will ever accept his brother enough to watch over him when I’m gone.

“It’s my life,” I say, shrugging.

“Do you work outside the home?”

“Are you interviewing me, too?”

“Just making conversation until the commercial break,” he says, smiling.

Ignoring him, I stand up and stir the blueberries I am cooking down for tonight’s pie filling.

“Your son, he took us by surprise the other night,” Matson continues. “We’re not used to minors crashing our crime scenes.”

“Technically, he’s not a minor. He’s eighteen.”

“Well, he’s got more forensic scientific knowledge than guys I know who are four times his age.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“You’ve got pretty eyes,” the detective says.

Fumbling, I drop the spoon into the pot. “What did you just say?”

“You heard me,” Matson replies, and he walks into the living room to wait for the opening credits of CrimeBusters to finish.

I have never been a big fan of I Love Lucy. That said, every time I see the episode when Lucy and Ethel are working at the candy factory and get behind on the packaging, it makes me laugh. The way they stuff the candy into their mouths and inside their uniforms-well, you know it’s going to end with Lucy wailing her famous wail.

Having Detective Matson ask me these questions makes me feel like Lucy at the candy factory. At first, I can keep up-especially after I realize that he is not angry at me for coming to the hypothermic man’s crime scene. But then it begins to get more complicated. The questions stack up like that candy, and I am still trying to wrap the last one when he sends the next one my way. All I want to do is take his words and stuff them somewhere where I don’t have to hear them anymore.

Detective Matson is standing in front of me as soon as the first commercial airs. It’s for Pedi Paws, a new incredible pet nail trimmer. That makes me think of the miniature poodle at the pizza place that we saw, and that makes me think of Jess, and that makes me feel like there’s a bird caught inside my rib cage.

What would he say if he knew that right now, in my pocket, is Jess’s pink cell phone?

“Just a couple more questions, Jacob,” he promises. “I’ll make sure I’m done in ninety seconds.”

He smiles, but it’s not because he’s happy. I had a biology teacher like that once. When I corrected Mr. Hubbard’s mistakes in class, he smiled with the left side of his mouth. I assumed that meant he was grateful. But that weird half smile apparently meant he was annoyed with me, even though if someone’s smiling it is supposed to signify that they’re cheerful. So I got sent to the principal’s office for my bad attitude when, really, it was just because the expressions on people’s faces are not always reflections of how they feel inside.