Jodie Picoult: Nineteen Minutes

Beside her, Matt leaned against the windshield, his face tipped up to the sun. “Let’s ditch school,” he said. “It’s too nice out to be stuck inside all day.”

“If you ditch, you’ll be benched.”

The state championship tournament in hockey began this afternoon, and Matt played right wing. Sterling had won last year, and they had every expectation of doing it again. “You’re coming to the game,” Matt said, and it wasn’t a question, but a statement.

“Are you going to score?”

Matt smiled wickedly and tugged her on top of him. “Don’t I always?” he said, but he wasn’t talking about hockey anymore, and she felt a blush rise over the collar of her scarf.

Suddenly Josie felt a rain of hail on her back. They both sat up to find Brady Pryce, a football player, walking by hand-in-hand with Haley Weaver, the homecoming queen. Haley tossed a second shower of pennies-Sterling High’s way of wishing an athlete good luck. “Kick ass today, Royston,” Brady called.

Their math teacher was crossing the parking lot, too, with a worn black leather briefcase and a thermos of coffee. “Hey, Mr. McCabe,” Matt called out. “How’d I do on last Friday’s test?”

“Luckily, you’ve got other talents to fall back on, Mr. Royston,” the teacher said as he reached into his pocket. He winked at Josie as he pitched the coins, pennies that fell from the sky onto her shoulders like confetti, like stars coming loose.

It figures, Alex thought as she stuffed the contents of her purse back inside. She had switched handbags and left her pass key at home, which allowed her into the employee entrance at the rear of the superior court. Although she’d pushed the buzzer a million times, no one seemed to be around to let her in.

“Goddamn,” she muttered under her breath, hiking around the slush puddles so that her alligator heels wouldn’t get ruined-one of the perks of parking in the back was not having to do this. She could cut through the clerk’s office to her chambers, and if the planets were aligned, maybe even onto the bench without causing a delay in the docket.

Although the public entrance of the court had a line twenty people long, the court officers recognized Alex because, unlike the district court circuit, where you bounced from courthouse to courthouse, she would be ensconced here for six months. The officers waved her to the front of the line, but since she was carrying keys and a stainless steel travel thermos and God only knew what else in her purse, she set off the metal detectors.

The alarm was a spotlight; every eye in the lobby turned to see who’d gotten caught. Ducking her head, Alex hurried across the polished tile floor and nearly lost her footing. As she pitched forward, a squat man reached forward to steady her. “Hey, baby,” he said, leering. “I like your shoes.”

Without responding, Alex yanked herself out of his grasp and headed toward the clerk’s office. None of the other superior court judges had to deal with this. Judge Wagner was a nice guy, but with a face that looked like a pumpkin left to rot after Halloween. Judge Gerhardt-a fellow female-had blouses that were older than Alex. When Alex had first come to the bench, she’d thought that being a relatively young, moderately attractive woman was a good thing-a vote against typecasting-but on mornings like this, she wasn’t so sure.

She dumped her purse in chambers, shrugged into her robe, and took five minutes to drink her coffee and review the docket. Each case got its own file, but cases for repeat offenders were rubber-banded together, and sometimes judges wrote Post-it notes to each other inside about the case. Alex opened one and saw a picture of a stick-figure man with bars in front of his face-a signal from Judge Gerhardt that this was the offender’s last chance, and that next time, he should go to jail.

She rang the buzzer to signify to the court officer that she was ready to start, and waited to hear her cue: “All rise, the Honorable Alexandra Cormier presiding.” Walking into a courtroom, to Alex, always felt as if she were stepping onto a stage for the first time at a Broadway opening. You knew there would be people there, you knew their gazes would all be focused on you, but that didn’t prevent you from having a moment when you could not breathe, could not believe you were the one they had come to see.

Alex moved briskly behind the bench and sat down. There were seventy arraignments scheduled for that morning, and the courtroom was packed. The first defendant was called, and he shuffled past the bar with his eyes averted.

“Mr. O’Reilly,” Alex said, and as the man met her gaze she recognized him as the guy from the lobby. He was clearly uncomfortable, now that he realized whom he’d been flirting with. “You’re the gentleman who assisted me earlier, aren’t you?”

He swallowed. “Yes, Your Honor.”

“If you’d known I was the judge, Mr. O’Reilly, would you have said, ‘Hey, baby, I like your shoes’?”

The defendant glanced down, weighing impropriety against honesty. “I guess so, Your Honor,” he said after a moment. “Those are great shoes.”

The entire courtroom went still, anticipating her reaction. Alex smiled broadly. “Mr. O’Reilly,” she said, “I couldn’t agree more.”

Lacy Houghton leaned over the bed railing and put her face right in front of her sobbing patient’s. “You can do this,” she said firmly. “You can do this, and you will.”

After sixteen hours of labor, they were all exhausted-Lacy, the patient, and the father-to-be, who was facing zero-hour with the dawning realization that he was superfluous, that right now, his wife wanted her midwife much more than she wanted him. “I want you to get behind Janine,” Lacy told him, “and brace her back. Janine, I want you to look at me and give me another good push…”

The woman gritted her teeth and bore down, losing all sense of herself in the effort to create someone else. Lacy reached down to feel the baby’s head, to guide it past the seal of skin and quickly loop the cord over its head without ever losing eye contact with her patient. “For the next twenty seconds, your baby is going to be the newest person on this planet,” Lacy said. “Would you like to meet her?”

The answer was a pressured push. A crest of intention, a roar of purpose, a sluice of slick, purpled body that Lacy quickly lifted into the mother’s arms, so that when the infant cried for the first time in this life, she would already be in a position to be comforted.

Her patient started weeping again-tears had a whole different melody, didn’t they, without the pain threaded through them? The new parents bent over their baby, a closed circle. Lacy stepped back and watched. There was plenty of work left for a midwife to do even after the moment of birth, but for right now, she wanted to make eye contact with this little being. Where parents would notice a chin that looked like Aunt Marge’s or a nose that resembled Grandpa’s, Lacy would see instead a gaze wide with wisdom and peace-eight pounds of unadulterated possibility. Newborns reminded her of tiny Buddhas, faces full of divinity. It didn’t last long, though. When Lacy saw these same infants a week later at their regular checkups, they had turned into ordinary-albeit tiny-people. That holiness, somehow, disappeared, and Lacy was always left wondering where in this world it might go.

While his mother was across town delivering the newest resident of Sterling, New Hampshire, Peter Houghton was waking up. His father knocked on the door on his way out to work-Peter’s alarm clock. Downstairs, a bowl and a box of cereal would be waiting for him-his mother remembered to do that even when she got paged at two in the morning. There would be a note from her, too, telling him to have a good day at school, as if it were that simple.