Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Then again, you could say the same thing about me, couldn’t you?

The Day After

For Peter’s sixth Christmas, he’d been given a fish. It was one of those Japanese fighting fish, a beta with a shredded tissue-thin tail that trailed like the gown of a movie star. Peter named it Wolverine and spent hours staring at its moonbeam scales, its sequin eye. But after a few days, he started to imagine what it would be like to have only a bowl to explore. He wondered if the fish hovered over the tendril of plastic plant each time it passed because there was something new and amazing he’d discovered about its shape and size, or because it was a way to count another lap.

Peter started waking up in the middle of the night to see if his fish ever slept, but no matter what time it was, Wolverine was swimming. He thought about what the fish saw: a magnified eyeball, rising like a sun through the thick glass bowl. He’d listen to Pastor Ron at church, talking about God seeing everything, and he wondered if that was what he was to Wolverine.

As he sat in a cell at the Grafton County jail, Peter tried to remember what had happened to his fish. It died, he supposed. He’d probably watched it to death.

He stared up at the camera in the corner of the cell, which blinked at him impassively. They-whoever they were-wanted to make sure he didn’t kill himself before he was publicly crucified. To this end, his cell didn’t have a cot or a pillow or even a mat-just a hard bench, and that stupid camera.

Then again, maybe this was a good thing. As far as he could tell, he was alone in this little pod of single cells. He’d been terrified when the sheriff’s car pulled up in front of the jail. He’d watched all the TV shows; he knew what happened in places like this. The whole time he was being processed, Peter had kept his mouth shut-not because he was so tough, but because he was afraid that if he opened it he would start to cry, and not remember how to stop. There was the swordfight sound of metal being drawn across metal, and then footsteps. Peter stayed where he was, his hands locked between his knees, his shoulders hunched. He didn’t want to look too eager; he didn’t want to look pathetic. Invisibility, actually, was something he was pretty good at. He’d perfected it over the past twelve years.

A correctional officer stopped in front of his cell. “You’ve got a visitor,” he said, and he opened the door.

Peter got up slowly. He looked up at the camera, and then followed the officer down a pitted gray hallway.

How hard would it be to get out of this jail? What if, like in all the video games, he could do some fancy kung fu move and deck this guard, and another, and another, until he was able to race out the door and suck in the air whose taste he’d already started to forget?

What if he had to stay here forever?

That was when he remembered what had happened to his fish. In a sweeping moment of animal rights and humanity, Peter had taken Wolverine and flushed him down the toilet. He figured that the plumbing emptied out into some big ocean, like the one his family had gone to last summer on a beach vacation, and that maybe Wolverine could find his way back to Japan and his other beta relatives. It was after Peter confided in his brother that Joey told him about sewers, and that instead of giving his pet freedom, Peter had killed it.

The officer stopped in front of a room whose door read PRIVATE CONFERENCE. He couldn’t imagine who would visit him, except for his parents, and he didn’t want to see them yet. They would ask him questions he couldn’t answer-about how you could tuck a son into bed, and not recognize him the next morning. Maybe it would be easier to just go back to the camera in his cell, which stared but didn’t pass judgment.

“Here you go,” the officer said, and he opened the door.

Peter took a shuddering breath. He wondered what his fish had thought, expecting the cool blue of the sea, only to wind up swimming in shit.

Jordan walked into the Grafton County Jail and stopped at the check-in point. He had to sign in before he went to visit Peter Houghton and get a visitor’s badge from the correctional officer on the other side of the Plexiglas divider. Jordan reached for the clipboard and scrawled his name, then pushed it through the tiny slot at the bottom of the plastic wall-but there was no one there to receive it. The two COs inside were huddled around a small black-and-white TV that was tuned, like every other television on the planet, to a news report about the shooting.

“Excuse me,” Jordan said, but neither man turned.

“When the shooting began,” the reporter was saying, “Ed McCabe peered out the door of his ninth-grade math classroom, putting himself between the gunman and his students.”

The screen cut to a sobbing woman, identified in white block letters below her face as JOAN MCCABE, SISTER OF VICTIM. “He cared about his kids,” she wept. “He cared about them the whole seven years he’d taught at Sterling, and he cared about them during the last minute of his life.”

Jordan shifted his weight. “Hello?”

“Just a second, buddy,” one correctional officer said, waving an absent hand in his direction.

The reporter appeared again on the grainy screen, his hair blowing upward like a boat’s sail in the light wind, the monotone brick of the school a wall behind him. “Fellow teachers remember Ed McCabe as a committed teacher who was always willing to go the extra mile to help a student, and as an avid outdoorsman who talked often in the faculty room about his dreams to hike through Alaska. A dream,” the reporter said gravely, “that will never come to pass.”

Jordan took the clipboard and shoved it through the slot in the Plexiglas, so that it clattered on the floor. Both correctional officers turned at once.

“I’m here to see my client,” he said.

Lewis Houghton had never missed a lecture in the nineteen years he’d been a professor at Sterling College, until today. When Lacy had called he’d left in such a hurry that he hadn’t even thought to put a sign on the lecture hall’s door. He imagined students waiting for him to appear, waiting to take notes on the very words that came out of his mouth, as if the things he had to say were still beyond reproach.

What word, what platitude, what comment of his had led Peter to this?

What word, what platitude, what comment might have stopped him?

He and Lacy were sitting in their backyard, waiting for the police to leave the house. Well, they had left-or at least one of them-to broaden the search warrant, most likely. Lewis and Lacy had not been allowed into their own home for the duration of the search. For a while, they’d stood in the driveway, occasionally watching officers carry out bags and boxes full of things Lewis would have expected-computers, books from Peter’s room-and things he hadn’t-a tennis racket, a jumbo box of waterproof matches.

“What do we do?” Lacy murmured.

He shook his head, numb. For one of his journal articles on the value of happiness, he’d interviewed elderly folks who were suicidal. What’s left for us? they’d said, and at the time, Lewis had not been able to understand that utter lack of hope. At the time, he couldn’t imagine the world going so sour that you couldn’t see the way to set it to rights.

“There’s nothing we can do,” Lewis replied, and he meant it. He watched an officer walk out holding a stack of Peter’s old comic books.

When he’d first come home to find Lacy pacing the driveway, she’d flung herself into his arms. “Why,” she had sobbed. “Why?”

There were a thousand questions in that one, but Lewis couldn’t answer any of them. He’d held on to his wife as if she were driftwood in the middle of this flood, and then he had noticed the eyes of a neighbor across the street, peeking from a drawn curtain.