Jodi Picoult - House Rules

If my mother were here, she’d start singing “I Shot the Sheriff.” I stick my fingers in my ears so I cannot hear him and I close my eyes so I cannot see him and I start to repeat the chorus without any breaks between the words, just a ribbon of sound that I can imagine circling me like a force field.

Suddenly he grabs my shoulder. “Hey,” he says, and I start to scream.

His hat has fallen off so that I can see he is a redhead, and everyone knows that people with red hair don’t really have red hair, they have orange hair. And worse, his hair is long. It falls all around his face and his shoulders, and if he leans any closer it might land on me.

The sounds that I make are high and piercing, louder than the voices of everyone who is telling me to shut the fuck up, louder than the officer who tells me he’ll write me up if I do not stop. But I can’t, because by now, the sound is oozing out of all my pores and even when I press my lips together my body is screaming. I grab the bars of the cell door- contusions are caused by blood vessels that are broken as the result of the blow -and smack my head against them- cerebral contusion associated with subdural hematoma in the front lobe is associated with mortality -and again- each red blood cell is one-third hemoglobin -and then just as I predicted my skin cannot contain what’s happening inside me and it splits and the blood runs down my face and into my eyes and mouth.

I hear:

Get this fucking nutcase out of my house.

And

If he’s got AIDS I’m gonna sue this state for everything it’s got.

My blood tastes like pennies, like copper, like iron- Blood makes up seven percent of the total body weight-

“On the count of three,” I hear. Two people grab my arms and I am moving, but my feet don’t feel like they belong to me and it’s too yellow under the lights and there is metal in my mouth and metal on my wrists and then I don’t see or hear or taste anything at all.

I think I might be dead.

I make this deduction from the following facts:

1. The room that I am in is monochromatic-floor, walls, ceiling all the color of pale flesh.

2. The room is soft. When I walk, it feels like walking on a tongue. When I lean against the walls, they lean against me, too. I cannot reach the ceiling, but it stands to reason it is the same. There’s one door, without any windows, or a knob.

3. There is no noise except for my breathing.

4. There is no furniture. Just a mat, which is flesh-colored, too, and soft.

5. There is a grate in the middle of the floor, but when I look down inside it, I cannot see anything. Maybe that’s the tunnel that leads back to earth.

Then again, there are other factors that lead me to believe that I might not actually be dead after all.

1. If I were dead, why would I be breathing?

2. Shouldn’t there be other dead people around?

3. Dead people don’t have fierce headaches, do they?

4. Heaven probably does not have a door, knob notwithstanding.

I touch my hand to my scalp and find a bandage shaped like a butterfly. There is blood on my shirt that has dried brown and stiff. My eyes are swollen, and there are tiny cuts on my hands.

I walk around the grate, giving it a wide berth. Then I lie down on the mat with my arms crossed over my chest.

This is what my grandfather looked like, in his coffin.

This is not how Jess looked.

Maybe she’s what is inside that grate. Maybe she is on the other side of that door. Would she be happy to see me? Or angry? Would I look at her and be able to tell the difference?

I wish I could cry, like other humans do.

Jacob’s medicines and supplements fill two full gallon-size Ziploc bags. Some are prescription-antianxiety meds given by Dr. Murano, for example-and others, like the glutathione, I get online for him. I am waiting outside the visitors’ entrance of the jail, holding these, when the door is unlocked.

My mother used to tell me how, when she was a little girl, her appendix burst. That was back in the day before parents were allowed to stay with their children during hospitalizations, and so my grandmother would arrive four hours before visiting hours began and would stand at the front of a roped-off queue that my mother could see from her hospital bed. My grandmother would just stand there, smiling and waving, until they let her in.

If Jacob knows I’m waiting for him, if he knows that I will see him every day at nine o’clock-well, that’s a routine he can cling to.

I would have expected there to be more people waiting with me for the front door to open, but maybe for the rest of the mothers who have come to jail to visit their sons, this is old hat. Maybe they are used to the routine. There is only one other person waiting with me, a man dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase. He must be a lawyer. He stamps his feet. “Cold out,” he says, smiling tightly.

I smile back. “It is.” He must be a defense attorney, coming in here to see his client. “Do you, um, know how this works?”

“Oh, first time?” he says. “It’s a piece of cake. You go in, give up your license, and go through the metal detectors. Kind of like checking in for a flight.”

“Except you don’t go anywhere,” I muse.

He glances at me and laughs. “That’s for damn sure.”

A correctional officer appears on the other side of the glass door and turns the lock. “Hey, Joe,” the lawyer says, and the officer grunts a greeting. “You see the Bruins last night?”

“Yeah. Answer me this. How come the Patriots and the Sox can win championships but the Bs are still skating like crap?”

I follow them to a control booth, where the officer steps inside and the lawyer hands over his driver’s license. The lawyer scribbles something on a clipboard and hands his keys to the officer. Then he walks through a metal detector, heading down a hall where I lose sight of him.

“Can I help you, ma’am?” the officer asks.

“Yes. I’m here to visit my son. Jacob Hunt.”

“Hunt.” He scans a list. “Oh, Hunt. Right. He just came in last night.”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’re not approved yet.”

“For what?”

“Visitation. You’ll probably be clear by Saturday-that’s when visiting hours are, anyway.”

“Saturday?” I repeat. “You expect me to wait till Saturday ?”

“Sorry, ma’am. Until you’re cleared, I can’t help you.”

“My son is autistic. He needs to see me. When his routine gets changed, he can get incredibly upset. Even violent.”

“Guess it’s a good thing he’s behind bars, then,” the officer says.

“But he needs his medication…” I lift the two Ziploc bags and set them on the lip of the counter.

“Our medical staff can administer prescription meds,” the officer says. “I can get you a form to fill out for that.”

“There are dietary supplements, too. And he can’t eat glutens, or caseins-”

“Have his doctor contact the warden’s office.”

Jacob’s diet and supplements, however, weren’t mandated by a doctor-they were just tips, like a hundred others, that mothers of autistic kids had learned over the years and had passed down to others in the same boat, as something that might work. “When Jacob breaks the diet, his behavior gets much worse…”

“Maybe we should put all our inmates on it, then,” the officer says. “Look, I’m sorry, but if we don’t get a doctor’s note, we don’t pass it along to the inmate.”

Was it my fault that the medical community couldn’t endorse treatments that autistic parents swore by? That money for autism research was spread so thin that even though many physicians would agree these supplements helped Jacob to focus or to take the edge off his hypersensitivity, they couldn’t scientifically tell you why? If I’d waited for doctors and scientists to tell me conclusively how to help my son, he would still be locked in his own little world like he was when he was three, unresponsive and isolated.