Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

I’ve always sort of wondered, though: If everyone else’s opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

One Month After

Although the investigative report from Patrick Ducharme had been sitting on Diana’s desk since ten days post-shooting, the prosecutor hadn’t given it a glance. First she’d had a probable cause hearing to pull together, then, she’d been in front of the grand jury, getting them to hand down an indictment. Only now was she beginning to sift through the analyses of fingerprints, ballistics, and bloodstains, as well as all the original police reports.

She’d spent the morning poring over the logistics of the shooting and mentally organizing her opening statement along the same path of destruction Peter Houghton had followed, tracking his movements from victim to victim. The first to be shot was Zoe Patterson, on the school steps. Alyssa Carr, Angela Phlug, Maddie Shaw. Courtney Ignatio. Haley Weaver and Brady Pryce. Lucia Ritolli, Grace Murtaugh.

Drew Girard.

Matt Royston.

More.

Diana took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes. A book of the dead, a map of the wounded. And those were only the ones whose injuries had been serious enough to involve a hospital stay-there were scores of kids who had been treated and released, hundreds whose scars were buried too deep to see.

Diana did not have children-hell, in her position, the men she met were either felons, which was awful, or defense attorneys, which was worse. She did, however, have a three-year-old nephew, who’d been reprimanded in his nursery school for pointing his finger at a classmate and saying, “Bang, you’re dead.” When her sister called up indignant and spouting about the Bill of Rights, had Diana thought that her nephew was going to grow up to become a psychopath? Not for a moment. He was just a kid, playing around.

Had the Houghtons thought that, too?

Diana looked down at the list of names in front of her. Her job was to connect these dots, but what truly needed to be done was to draw a line long before this: the tipping point where Peter Houghton’s mind had shifted, subtly, from what if to when.

Her eye fell on another list-one from the hospital. Cormier, Josie. According to the medical records, the girl-seventeen-had been admitted overnight for observation after a fainting spell, and had a laceration on the scalp. Her mother’s signature was at the bottom of the consent form for blood tests-Alex Cormier.

It couldn’t be.

Diana sat back in her chair. You’d never want to be the one to ask a judge to recuse herself. You might as well announce that you doubted her ability to be impartial, and since Diana would be in her court numerous times in the future, it just wasn’t a smart career move. But Judge Cormier surely knew that she couldn’t address this case fairly, not with a daughter who was a witness. Granted, Josie hadn’t been shot, but she’d been hurt during the shooting. Judge Cormier would recuse herself, certainly. Which meant there was nothing to worry about.

Diana turned her attention back to the discovery spread across her desk, reading until the letters blurred on the page, until Josie Cormier was just another name.

On her way home from the courthouse, Alex passed the makeshift memorial that had been erected for the victims of Sterling High. There were ten white wooden crosses, even though one of the dead children-Justin Friedman-had been Jewish. The crosses were nowhere near the school, but instead on a stretch of Route 10 where there was only floodplain for the Connecticut River. In the days after the shooting, there might be any number of mourners standing by the crosses, adding to the individual piles of photos and Beanie Babies and bouquets.

Alex felt herself pulling her car off the road, onto the shoulder. She didn’t know why she was stopping now, why she hadn’t stopped before. Her heels sank into the spongy grass. She crossed her arms and stepped up to the markers.

They were in no particular order, and the name of each dead student was carved into the crosspiece of the wood. Most of the students Alex did not know, but Courtney Ignatio and Maddie Shaw had crosses beside each other. The flowers that had been left behind at the markers had wilted, their green tissue wrappers rotting into the ground. Alex knelt down, fingering a faded poem that was tacked to Courtney’s memorial.

Courtney and Maddie had come for a sleepover several times. Alex remembered finding the girls in the kitchen, eating raw cookie dough instead of baking it, their bodies fluid as waves as they moved around each other. She could remember being jealous of them-to be so young, to know you hadn’t yet made a mistake that would change your life. Now Alex flushed with chagrin: at least she had a life to be changed.

It was at Matt Royston’s cross, however, that Alex started to cry. Propped against the white wooden base was a framed photograph, one that had been enclosed in a plastic bag to keep the elements from ruining it. There was Matt, his eyes bright, his arm hooked around Josie’s neck.

Josie wasn’t looking at the camera. She was staring at Matt, as if she couldn’t see anything else.

Somehow, it seemed safer to fall apart here in front of a makeshift memorial than at home, where Josie might hear her crying. No matter how cool and collected she had been-for Josie’s sake-the one person she could not fool was herself. She might pick up her daily routine like a missed stitch, she might tell herself that Josie was one of the lucky ones, but when she was alone in the shower, or caught in the interstitial space between waking and sleep, Alex would find herself shaking uncontrollably, the way you do when you’ve swerved to avoid an accident and have to pull to the side of the road to make sure you are really, truly all in one piece.

Life was what happened when all the what-if ’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or-in this case-feared might come to pass passed by instead. Alex had spent enough nights thinking of good fortune, of how it was thin as a veil, how seamlessly you might stream from one side to the other. This could easily have been Josie’s cross she was kneeling before, Josie’s memorial that hosted this photo. A twitch of the shooter’s hand, a fallen footstep, a bullet’s ricochet-and everything might have been different.

Alex got to her feet and took a fortifying breath. As she headed back to her car, she saw the narrow hole where an eleventh cross had been. After the ten had been erected, someone had added one with Peter Houghton’s name on it. Night after night that extra cross had been taken down or vandalized. There had been editorials in the paper over it: Did Peter Houghton deserve a cross, when he was still very much alive? Was putting up a memorial for him a tragedy or a travesty? Eventually, whoever had carved Peter’s cross decided to leave well enough alone and stopped replacing it every day.

As Alex slipped inside her car again, she wondered how-until she’d come here for herself-she had managed to forget that someone, at some point, considered Peter Houghton to be a victim, too.

Since That Day, as Lacy had taken to calling it, she’d delivered three babies. Each time, although the birth was uneventful and the delivery easy, something had gone wrong. Not for the mother, but for the midwife. When Lacy stepped into a delivery room, she felt poisonous, too negative to be the one to welcome another human being to this world. She had smiled her way through the births and had offered the new mothers the support and the medical care that they needed, but the moment she’d sent them on their way, cutting that last umbilical cord between hospital and home, Lacy knew she was giving them the wrong advice. Instead of easy platitudes like Let them eat when they want to eat and You can’t hold a baby too much, she should have been telling them the truth: This child you’ve been waiting for is not who you imagine him to be. You’re strangers now; you’ll be strangers years from now.