Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

As Patrick led Mark Ignatio toward the exit, Jordan remembered what he had wanted to say. “I live here, too,” he began.

Mark turned around. “Not for long.”

Alex was not short for Alexandra, like most people assumed. Her father had simply given her the name of the son he would have preferred to have.

After Alex’s mother had died of breast cancer when she was five, her father had raised her. He wasn’t the kind of dad who showed her how to ride a bike or to skip stones-instead, he taught her the Latin words for things like faucet and octopus and porcupine; he explained to her the Bill of Rights. She used academics to get his attention: winning spelling bees and geography contests, netting a string of straight A’s, getting into every college she applied to.

She wanted to be just like her father: the kind of man who walked down the street and had storekeepers nod to him in awe: Good afternoon, Judge Cormier. She wanted to hear the change in tone of a receptionist’s voice when the woman heard it was Judge Cormier on the line.

If her father never held her on his lap, never kissed her good night, never told her he loved her-well, it was all part of the persona. From her father, Alex learned that everything could be distilled into facts. Comfort, parenting, love-all of these could be boiled down and explained, rather than experienced. And the law-well, the law supported her father’s belief system. Any feelings you had in the context of a courtroom had an explanation. You were given permission to be emotional, in a logical setting. What you felt for your clients was not really what was in your own heart, or so you could pretend, so that no one ever got close enough to hurt you.

Alex’s father had had a stroke when she was a second-year law student. She had sat on the edge of his hospital bed and told him she loved him.

“Oh, Alex,” he’d sighed. “Let’s not bother with that.”

She hadn’t cried at his funeral, because she knew that’s what he would have wanted.

Had her own father wished, as she did now, that the basis of their relationship had been different? Had he eventually given up hoping, settling for teacher and student instead of parent and child? How long could you march along on a parallel track with your child before you lost any chance of intersecting her life?

She’d read countless websites about grief and its stages; she’d studied the aftermath of other school shootings. She could do research, but when she tried to connect with Josie, her daughter looked at her as if she’d never seen her before. At other times, Josie burst into tears. Alex didn’t know how to combat either outcome. She felt incompetent-and then she’d remember that this wasn’t about her, it was about Josie-and she’d feel even more like a failure.

The great irony hadn’t escaped Alex: she was more like her father than he ever might have guessed. She felt comfortable in her courtroom, in a way she did not feel in the confines of her own home. She knew just what to say to a defendant who’d come in with his third DUI charge, but she couldn’t sustain a five-minute conversation with her own child.

Ten days after the shooting at Sterling High, Alex went into Josie’s bedroom. It was midafternoon and the curtains were shut tight; Josie was hidden in the cocoon she’d made of her bedcovers. Although her immediate instinct was to snap open the shades and let the sunlight in, Alex lay down on the bed instead. She wrapped her arms around the bundle that was her daughter. “When you were little,” Alex said, “sometimes I’d come in here and sleep with you.”

There was a shifting, and the sheets fell away from Josie’s face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face swollen. “Why?”

She shrugged. “I was never a big fan of thunderstorms.”

“How come I never woke up and found you here?”

“I always went back to my own bed. I was supposed to be the tough one…. I didn’t want you to think I was scared of anything.”

“Supermom,” Josie whispered.

“But I’m scared of losing you,” Alex said. “I’m scared it’s already happened.”

Josie stared at her for a moment. “I’m scared of losing me, too.”

Alex sat up and tucked Josie’s hair behind her ear. “Let’s get out of here,” she suggested.

Josie froze. “I don’t want to go out.”

“Sweetheart, it would be good for you. It’s like physical therapy, but for the brain. Go through the motions, the pattern of your everyday life, and eventually you remember how to do it naturally.”

“You don’t understand…”

“If you don’t try, Jo,” she said, “then that means he wins.”

Josie’s head snapped up. Alex didn’t have to tell her who he was. “Did you guess?” Alex heard herself asking.

“Guess what?”

“That he might do this?”

“Mom, I don’t want to-”

“I keep thinking about him as a little boy,” Alex said.

Josie shook her head. “That was a really long time ago,” she murmured. “People change.”

“I know. But sometimes I can still see him handing you that rifle-”

“We were little,” Josie interrupted, her eyes filling with tears. “We were stupid.” She pushed back the covers, in a sudden hurry. “I thought you wanted to go somewhere.”

Alex looked at her. A lawyer would press the point. A mother, though, might not.

Minutes later, Josie was sitting in the passenger seat of the car beside Alex. She buckled the seat belt, then unlatched it, then secured it again. Alex watched her tug on the belt to make sure it would lock up.

She pointed out the obvious as they drove-that the first daffodils had pushed their brave heads through the snow on the median strip of Main Street; that the Sterling College crew team was training on the Connecticut River, the bows of their boats breaking through the residual ice. That the temperature gauge in the car said it was more than fifty degrees. Alex intentionally took the long route-the one that did not go past the school. Only once did Josie’s head turn to look at the scenery, and that was when they passed the police station.

Alex pulled into a parking spot in front of the diner. The street was filled with lunchtime shoppers and busy pedestrians, carrying boxes to be mailed and talking on cell phones and glancing into store windows. To anyone who didn’t know better, it was business as usual in Sterling. “So,” Alex said, turning to Josie. “How are we doing?”

Josie looked down at her hands in her lap. “Okay.”

“It’s not as bad as you thought, is it?”

“Not yet.”

“My daughter the optimist.” Alex smiled at her. “You want to split a BLT and a salad?”

“You haven’t even looked at a menu yet,” Josie said, and they both got out of the car.

Suddenly a rusted Dodge Dart ran the light at the head of Main Street, backfiring as it sped away. “Idiot,” Alex muttered, “I should get his plate number…” She broke off when she realized that Josie had vanished. “Josie!”

Then Alex saw her daughter, pressed against the sidewalk, where she’d flattened herself. Her face was white, her body trembling.

Alex knelt beside her. “It was a car. Just a car.” She helped Josie to her knees. All around them, people were watching and pretending not to.

Alex shielded Josie from their view. She had failed again. For someone renowned for her good judgment, she suddenly seemed to be lacking any. She thought of something she’d read on the Internet-how sometimes, when it came to grief, you could take one step forward and then three steps back. She wondered why the Internet did not add that when someone you loved was hurting, it cut you right to the bone, too. “All right,” Alex said, her arm anchored tight around Josie’s shoulders. “Let’s get you back home.”