Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Now he was looking at her the same way even as she smiled at him, pretending that there was no glare from the fluorescent light over his head; that she could reach out and touch him instead of staring at him from the other side of the red line that had been drawn on the jail floor. “Do you know what I found in the attic yesterday? That dinosaur you used to love, the one that roared when you pulled its tail. I used to think you’d be carrying it down the aisle at your wedding…” Lacy broke off, realizing that there might never be a wedding for Peter, or any aisle outside of a prison walkway, for that matter. “Well,” she said, turning up the wattage on her smile. “I put it on your bed.”

Peter stared at her. “Okay.”

“I think my favorite birthday party of yours was the dinosaur one, when we buried those plastic bones in the sandbox and you had to dig for them,” Lacy said. “Remember?”

“I remember nobody showed up.”

“Of course they did-”

“Five kids, maybe, whose moms had forced them to be there,” Peter said. “God. I was six years old. Why are we even talking about this?”

Because I don’t know what else to say, Lacy thought. She looked around the visitation room-there were only a handful of inmates, and the devoted few who still believed in them, caught on opposite sides of that red stripe. In reality, Lacy realized, this dividing line between her and Peter had been there for years. If you kept your chin up, you might even be able to convince yourself there was nothing separating you. It was only when you tried to cross it, like now, that you understood how real a barrier it could be. “Peter,” Lacy blurted out, “I’m sorry I didn’t pick you up at sleepaway camp, that time.”

He looked at her as if she was crazy. “Um, thanks for that, but I got over it about a hundred years ago.”

“I know. But I can still be sorry.” She was sorry about a thousand things, suddenly: that she didn’t pay more attention when Peter showed her some new programming skill; that she hadn’t bought him another dog after Dozer died; that they did not go back to the Caribbean last winter vacation, because Lacy had wrongly assumed they had all the time in the world.

“Sorry doesn’t change anything.”

“It does for the person who’s apologizing.”

Peter groaned. “What the fuck is this? Chicken Soup for the Kid Without a Soul?”

Lacy flinched. “You don’t have to swear in order to-”

“Fuck,” Peter sang. “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.”

“I’m not going to sit here and take this-”

“Yes you are,” Peter said. “You know why? Because if you walk out on me, it’s just one more thing you’ve got to be sorry about.”

Lacy was halfway out of her chair, but the truth in Peter’s words weighted her back down into the seat. He knew her, it seemed, far better than she had ever known him.

“Ma,” he said softly, his voice edging over that red line. “I didn’t mean that.”

She looked up at him, her throat thickening with tears. “I know, Peter.”

“I’m glad you come here.” He swallowed. “I mean, you’re the only one.”

“Your father-”

Peter snorted. “I don’t know what he’s been telling you, but I haven’t seen him since that first time he came.”

Lewis wasn’t coming to see Peter? That was news to Lacy. Where did he go when he left the house, telling her that he was headed to the jail?

She imagined Peter, sitting in his cell every other week, waiting for a visit that did not come. Lacy forced a smile-she would get upset on her own time, not Peter’s-and immediately changed the topic. “For the arraignment…I brought you a nice jacket to wear.”

“Jordan says I don’t need it. For the arraignment I just wear these clothes. I won’t need the jacket until the trial.” Peter smiled a little. “I hope you didn’t cut the tags off yet.”

“I didn’t buy it. It’s Joey’s interview blazer.”

Their eyes met. “Oh,” Peter murmured. “So that’s what you were doing in the attic.”

There was silence as they both remembered Joey coming downstairs in the Brooks Brothers blazer Lacy had gotten him at Filene’s Basement in Boston at deep discount. It had been purchased for college interviews; Joey had been setting them up at the time of the accident.

“Do you ever wish it was me who died,” Peter asked, “instead of Joey?”

Lacy’s heart fell like a stone. “Of course not.”

“But then you’d still have Joey,” Peter said. “And none of this would have happened.”

She thought of Janet Isinghoff, the woman who had not wanted her as a midwife. Part of growing up was learning not to be quite that honest-learning when it was better to lie, rather than hurt someone with the truth. It was why Lacy came to these visits with a smile stretched like a Halloween mask over her face, when in reality, she wanted to break down sobbing every time she saw Peter being led into the visitation room by a correctional officer. It was why she was talking about camp and stuffed animals-the hallmarks of the son she remembered-instead of discovering who he had become. But Peter had never learned how to say one thing when he meant another. It was one of the reasons he’d been hurt so many times.

“It would be a happy ending,” Peter said.

Lacy drew in a breath. “Not if you weren’t here.”

Peter looked at her for a long moment. “You’re lying,” he said-not angry, not accusing. Just as if he was stating the facts, in a way that she wasn’t.

“I am not-”

“You can say it a million times, but that doesn’t make it any more true.” Peter smiled then, so guileless that Lacy felt it smart like a stripe from a whip. “You might be able to fool Dad, and the cops, and anyone else who’ll listen,” he said. “You just can’t fool another liar.”

By the time Diana reached the docket board to check which judge was sitting on the Houghton arraignment, Jordan McAfee was already standing there. Diana hated him on principle, because he hadn’t ripped two pairs of stockings trying to get them on, because he wasn’t having a bad hair day, because he didn’t seem to be the least bit ruffled about the fact that half the town of Sterling was on the front steps of the courthouse, demanding blood. “Morning,” he said, not even glancing at her.

Diana didn’t answer. Instead, her mouth dropped open as she read the name of the judge sitting on the case. “I think there’s a mistake,” she said to the clerk.

The clerk glanced over her shoulder at the docket board. “Judge Cormier’s sitting this morning.”

“On the Houghton case? Are you kidding me?”

The clerk shook her head. “Nope.”

“But her daughter-” Diana snapped her mouth shut, her thoughts reeling. “We need to have a chambers conference with the judge before the arraignment.”

The moment the clerk was gone, Diana faced Jordan. “What the hell is Cormier thinking?”

It wasn’t often that Jordan got to see Diana Leven sweat, and frankly, it was entertaining. To be honest, Jordan had been just as shocked to see Cormier’s name on the docket board as the prosecutor had been, but he wasn’t about to tell Diana. Not tipping his hand was the only advantage he had right now, because frankly, his case wasn’t worth anything.

Diana frowned. “Didn’t you expect her to-”

The clerk reappeared. Jordan got a kick out of Eleanor; she cut him slack in the superior courthouse and even laughed at the dumb-blonde jokes he saved for her, whereas most clerks had a terminal case of self-importance. “Her Honor will see you now,” Eleanor said.

As Jordan followed the clerk into chambers, he leaned down and whispered the punch line he’d been getting at, before Leven so rudely interrupted his joke with her arrival. “So her husband looks at the box and says, ‘Honey, it’s not a puzzle…it’s some Frosted Flakes!’”