Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Josie lay on her bed facedown, the pillow over her head. When Alex sat down on the mattress beside her, she didn’t move. “You want to talk about it?” Alex asked.

“No,” Josie said, her voice muffled.

Alex reached out and yanked the pillow off her head. “Try.”

“It’s just-God, Mom-what’s wrong with me? It’s like the world’s started spinning again for everyone else, but I can’t even get back on the carousel. Even you two-you both must be thinking like crazy about the trial, too-but here you are, laughing and smiling like you can put what happened and what’s going to happen out of your head, when I can’t not think about it every waking second.” Josie looked up at Alex, her eyes filling with tears. “Everyone’s moved on. Everyone but me.”

Alex put her hand on Josie’s arm and rubbed it. She could remember delighting in the sheer physical proof of Josie after she was born-that somehow, out of nothing, she’d created this tiny, warm, squirming, flawless creature. She’d spend hours on her bed with Josie beside her, touching her baby’s skin, her seed-pearl toes, the pulse of her fontanel. “Once,” Alex said, “when I was working as a public defender, a guy in the office threw a Fourth of July party for all the lawyers and their families. I took you, even though you were only about three years old. There were fireworks, and I looked away for a second to see them, and when I turned back you were gone. I started to scream, and someone noticed you-lying at the bottom of the pool.”

Josie sat up, riveted by a story she had never heard before.

“I dove in and dragged you out and gave you mouth-to-mouth, and you spit up. I couldn’t even speak, I was so scared. But you came back fighting and furious at me. You told me you’d been looking for mermaids, and I interrupted you.”

Tucking her knees up under her chin, Josie smiled a little. “Really?”

Alex nodded. “I said that next time, you had to take me with you.”

“Was there a next time?”

“Well, you tell me,” Alex said, and she hesitated. “You don’t need water to feel like you’re drowning, do you?”

When Josie shook her head, the tears spilled over. She shifted, fitting herself into her mother’s arms.

This, Patrick knew, was his downfall. For the second time in his life, he was growing so close to a woman and her child that he forgot he might not really be part of their family. He looked around the table at the detritus of Alex’s awful dinner and started clearing the untouched plates.

The barbecued lasagna had congealed in its serving dish, a blackened brick. He piled the dishes in the sink and began to run warm water, then picked up a sponge and started to scrub.

“Oh my gosh,” Alex said behind him. “You really are the perfect man.”

Patrick turned, his hands still soapy. “Far from it.” He reached for a dish towel. “Is Josie-”

“She’s fine. She’ll be fine. Or at least we’re both going to keep saying that until it’s true.”

“I’m sorry, Alex.”

“Who isn’t?” She straddled a kitchen chair and rested her cheek on its spine. “I’m going to the trial tomorrow.”

“I wouldn’t have expected any less.”

“Do you really think McAfee can get him acquitted?”

Patrick folded the dish towel beside the sink and walked toward Alex. He knelt in front of her chair. “Alex,” he said, “that kid walked into the school like he was executing a battle plan. He started in the parking lot and set off a bomb to cause a distraction. He went around to the front of the school and took out a kid on the steps. He went into the cafeteria, shot at a bunch of kids, murdered some of them-and then he sat down and had a bowl of fucking cereal before he continued his killing spree. I don’t see how, presented with that kind of evidence, a jury could dismiss the charges.”

Alex stared at him. “Tell me something…why was Josie lucky?”

“Because she’s alive.”

“No, I mean, why is she alive? She was in the cafeteria and the locker room. She saw people die all around her. Why didn’t Peter shoot her?”

“I don’t know. Things happen that I don’t understand all the time. Some of them-well, they’re like the shooting. And some of them…” He covered Alex’s hand with his own where it gripped the chair rail. “Some of them aren’t.”

Alex looked up at him, and Patrick was reminded again of how finding her-being with her-was like that first crocus you saw in the snow. Just when you assumed winter would last forever, this unexpected beauty could take you by surprise-and if you did not take your eyes off it, if you kept your focus, the rest of the snow would somehow melt.

“If I ask you something, will you be honest with me?” Alex asked.

Patrick nodded.

“My lasagna wasn’t very good, was it?”

He smiled at her through the slats of the chair. “Don’t give up your day job,” he said.

In the middle of the night, when Josie could still not get to sleep, she slipped outside and lay down on the front lawn. She stared up at the sky, which clung so low by this time of the night that she could feel stars pricking her face. Out here, without her bedroom closing in around her, it was almost possible to believe that whatever problems she had were tiny, in the grand scheme of the universe.

Tomorrow, Peter Houghton was going to be tried for ten murders. Even the thought of it-of that last murder-made Josie sick to her stomach. She could not go watch the trial, as much as she wanted to, because she was on a stupid witness list. Instead, she was sequestered, which was a fancy word for being kept clueless.

Josie took a deep breath and thought about a social studies class she’d taken in middle school where they’d learned that someone-Eskimos, maybe?-believed stars were holes in the sky where people who’d died could peek through at you. It was supposed to be comforting, but Josie had always found it a little creepy, as if it meant she was being spied on.

It also made her think of a really dumb joke about a guy walking past a mental institution with a high fence, who hears the patients chanting Ten! Ten! Ten! and goes to peek through a hole in the fence to see what’s going on…only to get poked in the eye with a stick and hear the patients chant Eleven! Eleven! Eleven!

Matt had told her that joke.

Maybe she’d even laughed.

Here’s what the Eskimos don’t tell you: Those people on the other side, they have to go out of their way to watch you. But you can see them any old time. All you have to do is close your eyes.

On the morning of her son’s murder trial, Lacy picked a black skirt out of her closet, along with a black blouse and black stockings. She dressed like she was headed to a funeral, but maybe that wasn’t so far off the mark. She ripped three pairs of hose because her hands were shaking, and finally decided to go without. By the end of the day her shoes would rub blisters on her feet, and Lacy thought maybe this was a good thing; maybe she could concentrate instead on a pain that made perfect sense.

She did not know where Lewis was; if he was even going to the trial today. They hadn’t really spoken since the day she had tracked him to the graveyard, and he had taken to sleeping in Joey’s bedroom. Neither one of them went into Peter’s.

But this morning, she forced herself to turn left instead of right at the landing, and she opened the door of Peter’s bedroom. After the police had come, she had put it back in some semblance of order, telling herself that she didn’t want Peter to come home to a place that had been ransacked. There were still gaping holes-the desk looked naked without its computer, the bookshelves half empty. She walked up to one and pulled down a paperback. The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde. Peter had been reading it for English class when he was arrested. She wondered if he’d had the time to finish.