Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Josie looked up, pained. “Can’t you just stay?”

For a moment, Patrick saw something light in the judge’s eyes-want? regret?-but it vanished before he could put a name to it. “You know I can’t,” she said gently.

Patrick didn’t have any kids of his own, but he was pretty damn sure that if one of his had come this close to dying, he’d have a hard time letting her out of his sight. He did not know exactly what was going on between the mother and daughter, but he knew better than to get in the middle of it.

“I’m sure Detective Ducharme will make this utterly painless,” the judge said.

It was part wish, part warning. Patrick nodded at her. A good cop did whatever he could to protect and serve, but when it was someone you knew who was robbed or threatened or hurt, the stakes changed. You’d make a few more phone calls; you’d shuffle your responsibilities so that one took priority. Patrick had experienced that, to a greater degree, years ago with his friend Nina and her son. He didn’t know Josie Cormier personally, but her mother was in the field of law enforcement-Christ, she was at its top level-and for this, her daughter deserved to be treated with kid gloves.

He watched Alex walk up the stairs, and then he took a pad and pencil out of his coat pocket. “So,” he said. “How are you doing?”

“Look, you don’t have to pretend you care.”

“I’m not pretending,” Patrick said.

“I don’t even get why you’re here. It’s not like anything anyone says to you is going to make those kids less dead.”

“That’s true,” Patrick agreed, “but before we can try Peter Houghton we need to know exactly what happened. And unfortunately, I wasn’t there.”

“Unfortunately?”

He looked down at the table. “I sometimes think it’s easier to be the one who’s been hurt than the one who couldn’t stop it from happening.”

“I was there,” Josie said, shaken. “I couldn’t stop it.”

“Hey,” Patrick said, “it’s not your fault.”

She looked up at him then, as if she so badly wished she could believe that, but knew he was wrong. And who was Patrick to tell her otherwise? Every time he envisioned his mad dash to Sterling High, he imagined what would have happened if he’d been at the school when the shooter first arrived. If he’d disarmed the kid before anyone was hurt.

“I don’t remember anything about the shooting,” Josie said.

“Do you remember being in the gym?”

Josie shook her head.

“How about running there with Matt?”

“No. I don’t even remember getting up and going to school in the first place. It’s like a blank spot in my head that I just skip over.”

Patrick knew, from talking to the shrinks who’d been assigned to work with the victims, that this was perfectly normal. Amnesia was one way for the mind to protect itself from reliving something that would otherwise break you apart. In a way, he wished he could be as lucky as Josie, that he could make what he’d seen vanish.

“What about Peter Houghton? Did you know him?”

“Everyone knew who he was.”

“What do you mean?”

Josie shrugged. “He got noticed.”

“Because he was different from everyone else?”

Josie thought about this for a moment. “Because he didn’t try to fit in.”

“You were dating Matthew Royston?”

Immediately, tears welled in Josie’s eyes. “He liked to be called Matt.”

Patrick reached for a paper napkin and passed it to Josie. “I’m sorry about what happened to him, Josie.”

She ducked her head. “Me too.”

He waited for her to wipe her eyes, blow her nose. “Do you know why Peter might have disliked Matt?”

“People used to make fun of him,” Josie said. “It wasn’t just Matt.”

Did you? Patrick thought. He’d looked at the yearbook confiscated from Peter’s room-the circles around certain kids who became victims, and others who did not. There were many reasons for this-from the fact that Peter ran out of time to the truth that hunting down thirty people in a school of a thousand was more difficult than he’d imagined. But of all the targets Peter had marked in the yearbook, only Josie’s photo had been crossed out, as if he’d changed his mind. Only her face had words printed beneath it, in block letters: LET LIVE.

“Did you know him personally? Have any classes or anything with him?”

She looked up. “I used to work with him.”

“Where?”

“The copy store downtown.”

“Did you two get along?”

“Sometimes,” Josie said. “Not always.”

“Why not?”

“He lit a fire there once and I ratted him out. He lost his job after that.”

Patrick marked a note down on his pad. Why had Peter made the decision to spare her when he had every reason to hold a grudge?

“Before that,” Patrick asked, “would you say you were friends?”

Josie pleated the napkin she’d used to dry her tears into a triangle, a smaller one, a smaller one still. “No,” she said. “We weren’t.”

The woman next to Lacy was wearing a checkered flannel shirt, reeked of cigarettes, and was missing most of her teeth. She took one look at Lacy’s skirt and blouse. “Your first time here?” she asked.

Lacy nodded. They were waiting in a long room, side by side in a row of chairs. In front of their feet ran a red dividing line, and then a second set of chairs. Inmates and visitors sat like mirror images, speaking in shorthand. The woman beside Lacy smiled at her. “You get used to it,” she said.

One parent was allowed to visit Peter every two weeks, for one hour. Lacy had come with a basket full of home-baked muffins and cakes, magazines, books-anything she could think of to help Peter. But the correctional officer who’d signed her in for visitation had confiscated the items. No baked goods. And no reading material, not until it was vetted by the jail staff.

A man with a shaved head and sleeves of tattoos up and down his arms headed toward Lacy. She shivered-was that a swastika inked onto his forehead? “Hi, Mom,” he murmured, and Lacy watched the woman’s eyes strip away the tattoos and the bare scalp and the orange jumpsuit to see a little boy catching tadpoles in a mudhole behind their house. Everyone, Lacy thought, is somebody’s son.

She glanced away from their reunion and saw Peter being led into the visitation room. For a moment her heart caught-he looked too thin, and behind his glasses, his eyes were so empty-but then she tamped down whatever she was feeling and offered him a brilliant smile. She would pretend that it didn’t bother her to see her son in a prison jumpsuit; that she hadn’t had to sit in the car and fight a panic attack after pulling into the jail lot; that it was perfectly normal to be surrounded by drug dealers and rapists while you asked your son if he was getting enough to eat.

“Peter,” she said, folding him into her arms. It took a moment, but he hugged her back. She pressed her face to his neck, the way she used to when he was a baby, and she thought she would devour him-but he did not smell like her son. For a moment she let herself entertain the pipe dream that this was all a mistake-Peter’s not in jail! This is someone else’s unfortunate child!-but then she realized what was different. The shampoo and deodorant he had to use here were not what he’d used at home; this Peter smelled sharper, coarser.

Suddenly there was a tap on her shoulder. “Ma’am,” the correctional officer said, “you’ll have to let go now.”

If only it was that easy, Lacy thought.

They sat down on opposite sides of the red line.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“I’m still here.”

The way he said it-as if he’d totally expected otherwise by now-made Lacy shudder. She had a feeling he wasn’t talking about being let out on bail, and the alternative-the idea of Peter killing himself-was something she could not hold in her head. She felt her throat funnel tight, and she found herself doing the one thing she’d promised herself she would not do: she started to cry. “Peter,” she whispered. “Why?”