Jodi Picoult - House Rules

“Me?”

“Yes. Do you remember what you told me when you decided I could run an insanity defense?”

Jacob nods. “That the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination by the state or local governments, including the courts,” he says, “and that some people consider autism to be a disability, even if I don’t happen to be one of them.”

“Right. But if you do consider Asperger’s syndrome to be a developmental disability, then under the ADA you’re also entitled to provisions in court that will make the experience easier for you.” I let a slow smile loose, like a card that’s been played close to the chest. “Tomorrow, we’re going to make sure you get them.”

From Auntie Em’s column archives:

Dear Auntie Em,

Recently I have been dreaming about my ex. Should I consider this a sign from a higher power and call him to say hi?

Sleepless in Strafford

Dear Sleepless,

Yes, but I wouldn’t tell him you are calling because he’s starring in your dreams. Unless he happens to say, “Gosh, it’s so strange that you called today, because I dreamed about you last night.”

Auntie Em

I asked Henry out on our first date, because he didn’t seem to be picking up on hints that I was his for the taking. We saw the movie Ghost and went out to dinner afterward, where Henry told me that, scientifically, ghosts could simply not exist. “It’s basic physics and math,” he said. “Patrick Swayze couldn’t walk through walls and tag along behind Demi Moore. If ghosts can follow someone, that means their feet apply force to the floor. If they go through walls, though, they don’t have any substance. They could either be material or be unmaterial, but they can’t be both at the same time. It violates Newton’s rule.”

He was wearing a T-shirt that said FULL FRONTAL NERDITY, and his corn silk hair kept falling into his eyes. “But don’t you wish it could be true?” I asked him. “Don’t you wish love was so strong it could come back to haunt you?”

I told him the story of my mother, who one night had woken up at 3:14 A.M. with a mouth full of violet petals and the scent of roses so thick in the air that she could not breathe. An hour later she was roused by a phone call: her own mother, a florist by trade, had died of a heart attack at 3:14 a.m. “Science can’t answer everything,” I told Henry. “It doesn’t explain love.”

“Actually it does,” he told me. “There have been all kinds of studies done. People are more attracted to people with symmetrical features, for example. And symmetrical men smell better to women. Also, people who have similar genetic traits are attracted to each other. It probably has something to do with evolution.”

I burst out laughing. “That is awful, ” I said. “That is the most unromantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I don’t think so…”

“Oh, really. Say something that will sweep me off my feet,” I demanded.

Henry looked at me for a long moment, until I could feel my head growing lighter and dizzier. “I think you might be perfectly symmetrical,” he said.

On our second date, Henry took me to Boston. We had dinner at the Parker House, and then he hired a hansom cab to take us around the Boston Common. It was late November, and frost crouched in the bare branches of the trees; when we settled into the back of the carriage, the driver handed us a heavy wool blanket to put over our laps. The horse was spirited, stamping its feet and snorting.

Henry was telling me riddles. “The ratio of an igloo’s circumference to its diameter?”

“I give up.”

“Eskimo pi, ” he said. “How about half of a large intestine?”

“I don’t know…”

“A semicolon.”

“That’s not a math or science joke,” I said.

“I’m a Renaissance Guy.” Henry laughed. “Eight nickels?”

I shook my head.

“Two paradigms,” he said.

The puns weren’t, by definition, funny. But on Henry’s lips, they were. Lips that were curved at the ends and that always seemed a little embarrassed to smile, lips that had kissed me good night on our first date with a surprising amount of force and intensity.

I was staring at his lips when the horse dropped dead.

Technically, it wasn’t dead. It had slipped on a patch of black ice, and its front legs had buckled. I had heard one snap.

We rolled in slow motion out of the hansom cab, Henry twisting so that he would cushion my fall. “You all right?” he asked, and he helped me to my feet. He held the rough blanket around me while the police came, and then animal control. “Don’t watch,” Henry whispered, and he turned my face away when the officer pulled out a pistol.

I tried to focus on the words on Henry’s T-shirt, where his coat was gaping open: DOES THIS PROTON MAKE MY MASS LOOK FAT? But the sound was like the world cracking in half, and the last thing I remember was wondering who wore a T-shirt in the winter, and if that meant his skin was always warm, and if I would ever get to lie against it.

I woke up in an unfamiliar bed. The walls were cream-colored, and there was a dresser made of dark wood with a television on it. It was very clean and… corporate. You fainted, I told myself. “The horse,” I said out loud.

“Um,” a voice said quietly. “He’s in that big carousel in the sky?”

I rolled over to find Henry pressed against the far wall, still wearing his coat. “You don’t believe in heaven,” I murmured.

“No, but I figured you would. Are you… are you okay?”

I nodded gingerly, testing. “What’s wrong? Don’t women swoon around you all the time?”

He grinned. “It was a little Victorian of you.”

“Where are we?”

“I got a room at the Parker House. I thought you might need to lie down for a while.” His cheeks bloomed a bright red. “I, um, don’t want you to get the wrong idea, though.”

I came up on an elbow. “You don’t?”

“Well… n-not unless you want me to,” he stammered.

“Well, that’s a little Gothic,” I said. “Henry, can I ask you something?”

“Okay.”

“What are you doing all the way over there?”

I held out my hand and felt the mattress give under his weight as Henry crawled onto it. I felt his mouth come down against mine, and I realized that this relationship would not be what I’d imagined it to be: me, playing teacher to the shy young computer science geek. I should have known from watching Henry work at the office: programmers moved slowly and deliberately, and then waited to see the reaction. And if they did not succeed the first time, they would try over and over again, until they broke through that fifth dimension and got it right.

Later, when I was wearing Henry’s T-shirt and his arms were wrapped around me, when we had turned on the television and were watching a show on primates in the Congo with the volume muted, when he had fed me chicken nuggets from the kids’ room service menu, I thought how clever I’d been to see past what other people saw in Henry. The silly T-shirts, the Star Wars canteen in which he stored his coffee, the way he could barely look a woman in the eye-beneath that exterior was a man who touched me as if I were made of glass, who focused with such intensity on me that sometimes I had to remind him to breathe when we were making love. I never imagined at the time that Henry wouldn’t be able to love anything other than me-not even a baby he’d made. I never imagined that all that passion between us would pool beneath the tangled threads of Jacob’s genetic code, waiting for just the perfect storm to dig in its roots, to burst and blossom into autism.