Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

“The little cartoon characters go on the front,” Lacy said. She took Alex’s hand and brought it down between her legs, to where the baby was crowning.

Alex jerked her hand away. “Is that…”

“Yeah.”

“It’s coming?”

“Ready or not.”

Another contraction started. “Oh, Alex, I can see the eyebrows…” Lacy eased the baby out of the birth canal, keeping the head flexed. “I know how much it burns…there’s her chin…beautiful…” Lacy wiped off the baby’s face, suctioned the mouth. She flipped the cord over the baby’s neck and looked up at her friend. “Alex,” she said, “let’s do this together.”

Lacy guided Alex’s shaking hands to cup the infant’s head. “Stay like that; I’m going to push down to get the shoulder…”

As the baby sluiced into Alex’s hands, Lacy let go. Sobbing, relieved, Alex brought the small, squirming body against her chest. As always, Lacy was taken by how available a newborn is-how present. She rubbed the small of the baby’s back and watched the newborn’s hazy blue eyes focus first on her mother. “Alex,” Lacy said. “She’s all yours.”

Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that’s because it’s all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone’s ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end.

But then again, maybe bad things happen because it’s the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.

Hours After

Once, at a bar, Patrick’s best friend, Nina, had asked what the worst thing he’d ever seen was. He’d answered truthfully-back when he was in Maine, and a guy had committed suicide by tying himself with wire to the train tracks; the train had literally cleaved him in two. There had been blood and body parts everywhere; seasoned officers reached the crime scene and started throwing up in the scrub brush. Patrick had walked away to gain his composure and found himself staring down at the man’s severed head, the mouth still round with a silent scream.

That was no longer the worst thing Patrick had ever seen.

There were still students streaming out of Sterling High as teams of EMTs began canvassing the building to take care of the wounded. Dozens of kids had minor cuts and bruises from the mass exodus, scores were hyperventilating or hysterical, and even more were in shock. But Patrick’s first priority was taking care of the shooting victims, who lay sprawled on the floor from the cafeteria to the gymnasium, a bloody trail that chronicled the shooter’s movements.

The fire alarms were still ringing, and the safety sprinklers had created a running river in the hallway. Beneath the spray, two EMTs bent over a girl who’d been shot in the right shoulder. “Let’s get her on a sled,” the medic said.

Patrick knew her, he realized, and a shudder went through his body. She worked at the video store in town. Last weekend, when he’d rented Dirty Harry, she’d told him that he still had a late charge of $3.40. He saw her every Friday night when he rented a DVD, but he’d never asked her name. Why the hell hadn’t he asked?

As the girl whimpered, the medic took the Sharpie marker he was holding and wrote “9” on her forehead. “We don’t have IDs on all of the wounded,” he told Patrick. “So we’ve started numbering them.” As the student was shifted onto a backboard, Patrick reached across her for a yellow plastic shock blanket-one every officer carried in the back of his cruiser. He ripped it into quarters, glanced at the number on the girl’s forehead, and wrote a matching “9” on one of the squares. “Leave this in her place,” he instructed. “That way we can figure out who she is later, and where she was found.”

An EMT stuck his head around the corner. “Hitchcock says all the beds are taken. We’ve got kids lined up on the front lawn waiting, but the ambulances have nowhere to go.”

“What about APD?”

“They’re full, too.”

“Then call Concord and tell them we’ve got buses coming in,” Patrick ordered. From the corner of his eye he saw an EMT he knew-an old-timer planning to retire in three months-walk away from a body and sink into a crouch, sobbing. Patrick grabbed the sleeve of a passing officer. “Jarvis, I need your help…”

“But you just assigned me to the gym, Captain.”

Patrick had divided up the responding officers and the major crimes unit of the state police so that each part of the high school had its own team of first responders. Now he handed Jarvis the remaining pieces of the plastic shock blanket and a black marker. “Forget the gym. I want you to do a circuit of the whole school and check in with the EMTs. Anyone who’s numbered gets a numbered blanket left in place when they’re transported.”

“I have one bleeding out in the girls’ room,” a voice called.

“I’m on it,” an EMT said, picking up a bag of supplies and hurrying away.

Make sure you haven’t forgotten anything, Patrick told himself. You only get to do this once. His head felt like it was made of glass, too heavy and too thin-walled to handle the weight of so much information. He could not be everywhere at once; he could not talk fast enough or think quickly enough to dispatch his men where they needed to be. He had no fucking idea how to process a nightmare this massive, and yet he had to pretend that he did, because everyone else was looking to him to be in charge.

The double doors of the cafeteria swung shut behind him. By now, the team working this room had assessed and transported the injured; only the bodies remained behind. The cinder-block walls were chipped where bullets had pierced or grazed them. A vending machine-glass shattered, bottles pierced-dribbled Sprite and Coke and Dasani onto the linoleum floor. One of the crime techs was photographing evidence: abandoned bookbags and purses and textbooks. He snapped each item close-up, then at a distance with a little yellow tented evidence marker to record its placement in relation to the rest of the scene. Another officer examined blood-spatter patterns. A third and a fourth were pointing to a spot in the upper right corner of the ceiling. “Captain,” one of them said, “looks like we’ve got a video.”

“Where’s the recorder?”

The officer shrugged. “Principal’s office?”

“Go find out,” Patrick said.

He walked down the main aisle of the cafeteria. It looked, at first glance, like a science fiction movie: everyone had been in the middle of eating and chatting and joking around with friends, and then in the blink of an eye, all the humans were abducted by aliens, leaving only the artifacts behind. What would an anthropologist say about the student body of Sterling High, based on the Wonder-bread sandwiches scarred by only one bite; the tub of Cherry Bomb lip gloss with a fingerprint still skimming the surface; the salt-and-pepper composition notebooks filled with study sheets on Aztec civilization and margin notes about the current one: I luv Zach S!!! Mr. Keifer is a Nazi!!!

Patrick’s knee bumped one of the tables, and a loose handful of grapes scattered like gasps. One bounced against the shoulder of a boy slumped over his binder, his blood soaking into the college-ruled paper. The boy’s hand still held tight to his eyeglasses. Had he been cleaning them when Peter Houghton arrived for his rampage? Had he taken them off because he didn’t want to see?

Patrick stepped over the bodies of two girls who lay sprawled on the floor like mirror twins, their miniskirts hiked high on their thighs and their eyes still open. Walking into the kitchen area, he surveyed the troughs of graying peas and carrots and the runny slop of chicken pot pie; the explosion of salt and pepper packets that dotted the floor like confetti. The shiny metallic helmets of the Yoplait yogurts-strawberry and mixed berry and key lime and peach-which were still miraculously aligned in four neat rows near the cash register, an unflinching, tiny army. One worn plastic tray, with a dish of Jell-O and a napkin on it, waiting to be served the rest of the meal.