Jodi Picoult - House Rules

Emma shakes her head. “Listen to him,” she says quietly. “Right now, Oliver’s the boss.”

“I’m going to give you a stack of Post-its every time we walk into that courtroom,” I tell him. “If you need a break, you hand me a note.”

“What kind of note?” Jacob says.

“Any note. But you only do it if you need a break. I’m also going to give you a pad and a pen, and I want you to write stuff down-just like you would if you were watching CrimeBusters. ”

“But there’s nothing interesting going on in that courtroom-”

“Jacob,” I tell him flatly, “your life is being decided in there. Rule number three: you can’t talk to anyone. Not even your mother. And you,” I say, turning to Emma, “cannot tell him how he’s supposed to feel, or react, or what he should look like or how he should act. Everything you two pass back and forth is going to be read by the prosecution and the judge. I don’t even want you two discussing the weather, because they’re going to interpret it, and if you do anything suspicious, you’re going to be kicked off that counsel table. You want to write Breathe, that’s fine. Or It’s okay, don’t worry. But that’s as specific as I want you to get.”

Emma touches Jacob’s arm. “You understand?”

“Yes,” he says. “Can I go now? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get corn syrup off a wall once it dries?”

I completely ignore him. “Rule number four: you will wear a button-down shirt and a tie, and I don’t want to hear that you haven’t got the money for it because this isn’t negotiable, Emma-”

“No buttons,” Jacob announces, in a tone that brooks no argument.

“Why not?”

“Because they feel weird on my chest.”

“All right,” I say. “How about a turtleneck?”

“Can’t I wear my lucky green sweatshirt?” Jacob asks. “I wore it when I took my SATs, and I got 800 on the math section.”

“Why don’t we go up to your closet and find something?” Emma suggests, and we all trudge upstairs again, this time to Jacob’s room. I studiously avoid looking into the bathroom as we pass.

Although the police still have his fuming chamber as evidence, Jacob has configured a new one, an overturned planter. It’s not transparent, like his fish tank, but it must be getting the job done, because I can smell the glue. Emma throws open the closet door.

If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. Chromatically ordered, Jacob’s clothes hang side by side, not quite touching. There are jeans and chinos in the blue area; and a rainbow of long- and short-sleeved tees. And yes, in its correct sequence, the lucky green sweatshirt. It looks like a Gay Pride shrine in there.

There is a fine line between looking insane in court and looking disrespectful. I take a deep breath, wondering how to explain this to a client who cannot think beyond the feeling of a placket of buttons on his skin. “Jacob,” I say, “you have to wear a shirt with a collar. And you have to wear a tie. I’m sorry, but none of this will work.”

“What does the way I look have to do with you telling the jury the truth?”

“Because they still see you,” I answer. “So you need to make a good first impression.”

He turns away. “They’re not going to like me anyway. Nobody ever does.”

He doesn’t say this in a way that suggests he feels sorry for himself. More like he’s just telling me a fact, relating the way the world works.

After Jacob leaves to clean up his mess, I remember that Emma’s in the room with me. “The bathroom. I… I don’t know what to say.” She sinks down onto Jacob’s bed. “He does this all the time-sets up scenes for me to solve. It’s what makes him happy.”

“Well, there’s a big difference between using a bottle of corn syrup to get your jollies and using a human being. I don’t need the jury to be wondering how far a leap there is from one to the other.”

“Are you nervous?” she asks, turning to face me.

I nod. I probably shouldn’t be admitting this to her, but I can’t help it.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I say. “Anything.”

“Do you believe he killed Jess?”

“I already told you that doesn’t matter to a jury-we’re utilizing the defense most likely to-”

“I’m not asking you as Jacob’s lawyer,” Emma interrupts. “I’m asking you as my friend.”

I draw in my breath. “I don’t know. If he did, I don’t believe it was intentional.”

She folds her arms. “I just keep thinking that if we could get the police to reopen the case, to look harder at Jess’s boyfriend-”

“The police,” I say, “think they’ve found their murderer, based on the evidence. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be going to court on Wednesday. The prosecutor thinks she’s got enough proof to make a jury see things her way. But Emma, I’m going to do everything I can to keep that from happening.”

“I have a confession to make,” Emma says. “When we saw Dr. Newcomb? I was supposed to meet with her for a half hour. I told Jacob that I’d be thirty minutes. And then I very intentionally kept talking for another fifteen. I wanted Jacob to get rattled, because I was late. I wanted him stimming by the time he met with her, so that she’d be able to write about all that behavior in the court report.” Emma’s eyes are dark and hollow. “What kind of mother does that?”

I look at her. “One who’s trying to save her son from going to prison.”

Emma shivers. She walks to the window, rubbing her arms, even though it is downright hot in the room. “I’ll find him a collared shirt,” she promises. “But you’ll have to get it on him.”

Early in the morning on February 17, 1970, the officers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, responded to a call from Army Doctor Jeffrey MacDonald. They arrived to find his pregnant wife, Colette, and two young daughters dead from multiple stab wounds. Colette had been stabbed thirty-seven times with a knife and an ice pick, and MacDonald’s torn pajama top was draped on top of her. On the headboard of the bed, in blood, was the word PIG. MacDonald himself was found with minor wounds, beside his wife. He said he’d been hurt by three males and a woman in a white hat who chanted, “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” When the men attacked him, MacDonald said that he pulled his pajama top over his head and used it to block the jabs of the ice pick. Eventually, he said, he was knocked unconscious.

The Army didn’t believe MacDonald. The living room, for example, didn’t show signs of a struggle, except for an overturned table and plant. Fibers from the torn pajama top were not found in the room where it was torn but rather in the bedrooms of his daughters. They theorized that MacDonald killed his wife and daughters and tried to cover up the murders by using articles about the Manson Family in a magazine that was found in the living room. The Army dropped the case because of the poor quality of the investigative techniques, and MacDonald was honorably discharged.

In 1979 MacDonald was tried in a civilian court. A forensic scientist testified that the doctor’s pajama top, which he said had been used to block his attackers, had forty-eight clean, cylindrical holes that were too tidy for a violent attack-to make a hole that shape, the top would have had to be immobile, something that was very unlikely if MacDonald was defending himself from someone trying to stab him. The scientist also showed how, by folding the top a certain way, those forty-eight holes could have been created by twenty-one jabs-the exact number of times Colette MacDonald had been stabbed with an ice pick. The holes lined up with the pattern of her wounds, indicating that the pajama top had been placed on her before she was stabbed and not used in self-defense by MacDonald. He was sentenced to life in prison for three murders and still maintains that he is innocent.