Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Peter stared at the screen. People were sobbing and screaming in New York City, but you could barely see because of the dust and smoke in the air. There were fires everywhere, and the ululations of screaming fire engines and car alarms. It looked nothing like the New York Peter remembered the one time he’d vacationed there with his parents. They’d gone to the top of the Empire State Building and they were planning to have a fancy dinner at Windows on the World, but then Joey had gotten sick from eating too much popcorn and instead they’d headed back to the hotel.

Mrs. Rasmussin had left school for the day. Her brother was a bond trader in the World Trade Center.

Had been.

Josie was sitting next to Peter. Even with a few inches of space separating their chairs, he could feel her shaking. “Peter,” she whispered, horrified, “there’s people jumping.”

He couldn’t see as well as she could, even with his glasses, but when he squinted he could tell Josie was right. It made his chest hurt to watch, as if his ribs were suddenly a size too small. What kind of person would do that?

He answered his own question: The kind who doesn’t see any other way out.

“Do you think they could get us here?” Josie whispered.

Peter glanced at her. He wished he knew what to say to make her feel better, but the truth was, he didn’t feel all that great himself and he didn’t know if there were even any words in the English language to take away this kind of stunning shock, this understanding that the world isn’t the place you thought it was.

He turned back to the screen so that he didn’t have to answer Josie. More people leaped out of the windows of the north tower; then there was a massive roar as if the ground itself were opening its jaws. When the building collapsed, Peter let out the breath he’d been holding-relieved, because now he couldn’t see anything at all.

The switchboards to the schools were completely jammed, and so parents fell into two categories: the ones who didn’t want to scare their kids to death by showing up at school and shepherding them into a basement bunker, and those who wanted to ride out this tragedy with their children close at hand.

Lacy Houghton and Alex Cormier both fell into the latter category, and both arrived at the school simultaneously. They parked beside each other in the bus circle and got out of their cars, and only then recognized each other-they had not seen each other since the day Alex marched her daughter out of Lacy’s basement, where the guns were kept. “Is Peter-” Alex began.

“I don’t know. Josie?”

“I’m here to get her.”

They went into the main office together, and were directed down the hall to the media center. “I can’t believe they’re letting them watch the news,” Lacy said, running beside Alex.

“They’re old enough to understand what’s happening,” Alex said.

Lacy shook her head. “I’m not old enough to understand what’s happening.”

The media center was spread with students-on chairs, on tables, sprawled on the floor. It took Alex a moment to realize what was so unnatural about the crowd: no one was making a sound. Even the teachers stood with their hands over their mouths, as if they were afraid to let out any of the emotion, because once the floodgates opened, everything else in their path would be swept away.

In the front of the room was a single television, and every eye was on it. Alex spotted Josie because she had stolen one of Alex’s headbands-a leopard print. “Josie,” she called, and her daughter whipped around, then nearly climbed over other kids in her effort to reach Alex.

Josie hit her like a hurricane, all emotion and fury, but Alex knew that somewhere inside was the eye of that storm. And then, like any force of nature, you had to brace yourself for another onslaught before things went back to normal. “Mommy,” she sobbed. “Is it over?”

Alex didn’t know what to say. As the parent, she was supposed to have all the answers, but she didn’t. She was supposed to be able to keep her daughter safe, but she couldn’t promise that either. She had to put on a brave face and tell Josie it was going to be fine, when she really didn’t know that herself. Even driving here from court, she had been aware of the fragility of the roads beneath her wheels, of the divider of sky that could so easily be breached. She passed wells and thought about drinking-water contamination; she wondered how far away the closest nuclear power plant was.

And yet, she had spent years being the judge others expected her to be-someone cool and collected, someone who could reach conclusions without getting hysterical. She could certainly put on that demeanor for her daughter, too.

“We’re fine,” Alex said calmly. “It’s over.” She did not know that even as she spoke, a fourth plane was crashing into a field in Pennsylvania. She did not realize that her fierce grip on Josie contradicted her words.

Over Josie’s shoulder Alex nodded to Lacy Houghton, who was leaving with her two sons in tow. With some shock she realized Peter was tall now, nearly as tall as a man.

How many years had it been since she’d seen him?

You could lose track of someone when you blinked, Alex realized. She vowed not to let that happen to her and her daughter. Because when it came down to it, being a judge didn’t matter nearly as much as being a mother. When Alex’s clerk had told her the news about the World Trade Center, her first thought had not been for her constituents…only for Josie.

For a few weeks, Alex held to her promises. She rearranged her docket so that she was home when Josie got there; she left legal briefs in the office instead of bringing them home to read on weekends; every night, over dinner, they talked-not just chatter, but real conversation: about why To Kill a Mockingbird might very well be the best book ever written; about how you could tell if you’d fallen in love; even about Josie’s father. But then, one week, a particularly knotty case had her staying late at the office. And Josie started being able to sleep through the night again, instead of waking up screaming. Part of going back to normal meant erasing the boundaries of what was abnormal, and within a few months, the way Alex had felt on 9/11 was slowly forgotten, like a tide washing out a message she’d once scrawled on the sand.

Peter hated soccer, but he was on the middle school team. They had an anyone-can-play policy, so that even kids who might not normally make varsity or JV or-who was he kidding? the team, period-could join. It was this-plus his mother’s belief that part of fitting in meant being in the crowd to begin with-that led him to a season of afternoon practices where he found himself doing passing drills and running after the ball more often than he returned it; and games twice a week where he warmed middle school soccer field benches all over Grafton County.

There was only one thing Peter hated more than soccer, and that was getting dressed for it. After school, he’d purposely find something to do at his locker, or a question to ask a teacher, so that he wound up in the locker room after most of his teammates were outside stretching and warming up. Then, in a corner section, Peter would strip without having to listen to anyone make fun of the way his chest sort of caved in at the bottom, or having the elastic of his boxers twisted to give him a wedgie. They called him Peter Homo, instead of Peter Houghton, and even when he was the only one in the locker room he could still hear the slap of their high-fives and the laughter that rolled toward him like an oil slick.

After practice, he usually was able to do something that ensured he would be the last one in the locker room-picking up the practice balls, asking the coach a question about an upcoming game, even retying his cleats. If he was really lucky, by the time he reached the showers, everyone else would already have left for home. But today, just as practice had ended, a thunderstorm had rolled in. The coach herded all the kids off the field and into the locker room.