Jodi Picoult - House Rules

It’s funny when he begs for a forensics textbook on Amazon.com and I ask him to give me a ballpark figure and he says, Second base.

And it’s funny when I move heaven and earth to give Jacob white food on the first of the month and he breezily pours himself a glass of Coke.

It’s true what they say about Asperger’s affecting the whole family. I’ve been doing this for so long, I forgot to consider what an outsider would think of our pale rice and fish, our long-standing routines-just like Jacob has no capacity to put himself in the shoes of someone else he encounters. And, as Jacob has learned one rebuff at a time, what looks pitiful from one angle looks absolutely hilarious from another.

“Life’s not fair,” I tell Oliver.

“That’s the reason there are defense attorneys,” he replies. “And Jacob’s right about the legal jargon, by the way. I’m going to file a motion to suppress because the police were on notice that they weren’t dealing with someone mentally able to truly understand his Miranda rights-”

“I know my Miranda rights!” Jacob yells from the other room. “You have the right to remain silent! Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law-”

“I’ve got it, Jacob, I’m good,” Oliver calls back. He stands up and puts his plate on the counter. “Thanks for lunch. I’ll let you know what happens with the hearing.”

I walk him to the door and watch him unlock his car. Instead of getting into it, though, he reaches into the backseat and then walks toward me again, his face sober. “There’s just one more thing,” Oliver says. He reaches for my hand and presses a miniature-size Milky Way into it. “Just in case you want to sneak it in before Brown Thursday,” he whispers, and for the second time that day, he leaves me smiling.

Ernest Brendel’s sister didn’t believe her brother’s friend, who came to tell her, one fall day in 1991, that Ernest had been kidnapped-along with his wife, Alice, and young daughter, Emily-as part of a mafia scheme. But Christopher Hightower insisted that they needed ransom money, and as proof, he took her outside to Ernest’s Toyota, the car he’d driven there. He pointed to the backseat, which was soaked through with blood. There was more blood in the trunk. Eventually, police would match that blood evidence to Ernest Brendel. But they’d also prove that Hightower-not the mafia-was to blame for Brendel’s death.

To most people, Chris Hightower was a commodities broker with ties to his Rhode Island community. He taught Sunday school and worked with at-risk kids. But one fall day in 1991, he went on a murder rampage, killing his friend Ernest Brendel and Brendel’s family. Facing financial trouble and estranged from his wife, Hightower purchased a crossbow and drove to Brendel’s house. He hid in the garage and fired an arrow into Brendel’s chest when the man arrived back home. While trying to escape, Brendel was shot twice more. He managed to crawl into the second car in the garage, a Toyota, where Hightower smashed his skull with a crowbar.

Hightower then picked Emily up from an after-school program at the YMCA by offering Brendel’s license as proof that he was a family friend who could be trusted to take the girl home. When Alice Brendel arrived home that night, she and Emily were drugged with sleeping pills. It was the last time anyone from the Brendel family was seen alive.

The next day Hightower bought a brush, a hose, some muriatic acid, and a fifty-pound bag of lime. He scrubbed the garage with muriatic acid to clean up the blood. He cleaned the car with baking soda and washed away more blood.

Six weeks later a woman walking a dog stumbled over two shallow graves. One housed the remains of Ernest Brendel. The second held Alice Brendel-found with a scarf wrapped around her neck-and Emily, who was believed to have been buried alive. In the grave was an empty bag of lime. In the Toyota that Hightower had been driving, police found the torn corner of that bag of lime, as well as the Home Depot receipt for the lime and the muriatic acid.

Hightower was convicted and is serving three life sentences. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

I’ve done the math: eventually, I’m going to be the one who has to take care of my brother.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not such a colossal ass that I’m going to totally ignore Jacob when we’re grown up and when (I can’t even imagine this) Mom isn’t around. What sort of pisses me off, though, is the silent assumption that, when Mom is unable to pick up after Jacob’s messes anymore, three guesses who’ll have to take over.

Once, I read this news story on the Internet about a woman in England whose son was retarded-big-time retarded, not disabled the way Jacob is disabled but, like, unable to brush his own teeth or remember to go to the bathroom when the urge strikes. (Let me just say here that if Jacob wakes up one day and needs an adult diaper, I don’t care if I’m the last person on earth-I’m not changing it.) Anyway, this woman, she had emphysema and she was slowly dying, and it got to a point where she could barely sit up in a wheelchair all day, much less help her son out. Then there was a photo of her with her son, and although I was expecting a kid my age, Ronnie was easily in his fifties. He had a chin full of thick stubble and a potbelly poking out from his Power Rangers T-shirt, and he was giving his mother this big, gummy smile while he hugged her in her wheelchair, where she sat with tubes running into her nose.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Ronnie. It was like I suddenly realized that one day, when I was married with a houseful of rug rats and doing the corporate thing, Jacob might still be watching his stupid CrimeBusters episodes and eating yellow foods on Wednesdays. My mom and Dr. Moon, Jacob’s shrink, always talked about this abstractly, as evidence of why they thought vaccines had something to do with autism, and why autism was a relatively new phenomenon ( “If it’s really been around forever, where are all the autistic kids who’ve grown up and become adults? Because believe me, even if they’d been diagnosed as something else we’d know who they are.” ) But until that very second I hadn’t made the connection that, one day, Jacob would be one of those adults with autism. Sure, he might be lucky enough to hold down a job like all those Aspies in Silicon Valley, but when he had a meltdown and started destroying his cubicle at said job, we all know who they’d call first.

Ronnie clearly never had grown up and never would, and that was why his mother was being featured in this newspaper, the Guardian : she had placed an ad asking for a family that would take in Ronnie and treat him like their own when she was dead. He was a sweet boy, she said, even if he still wet the bed.

Good freaking luck, I had thought. Who takes on someone else’s crap willingly? I wondered what kind of people would respond to Ronnie’s mom. Mother Teresa types, maybe. Or those families that you always see in the back pages of People magazine who foster-parent twenty special needs kids and somehow manage to shape them into a family. Or, worse, maybe some lonely old perv who figured a fellow like Ronnie wouldn’t realize if he was copping a feel every now and then. Ronnie’s mom said a group home wasn’t an option, since he’d never been in one and couldn’t adapt to one at this point. All she wanted was someone who might love him the way she did.

Anyway, the article got me thinking about Jacob. He could handle a group home, maybe, if he were still allowed to shower first in the morning. But if I tossed him into one (and don’t ask me how you even go about getting a spot), what would that say about me? That I was too selfish to be my brother’s keeper, that I didn’t love him.