Jodie Picoult - Nineteen Minutes

Alex folded her arms, not because she was cold, but because she could not remember feeling this light inside, as if her body housed a second solar system. She watched Patrick remove two wineglasses from a cabinet and pour.

“To being a civilian,” he said, toasting.

The wine was rich and full; like velvet; like autumn. Alex closed her eyes. She would have liked to hold on to this moment, drag it wider and fuller, until it covered up so many others that had come before.

“So, how is it?” Patrick asked. “Being unemployed?”

She thought for a moment. “I made a grilled cheese sandwich today without burning the pan.”

“I hope you framed it.”

“Nah, I left that to the prosecution.” She smiled at her own little inside joke, and then felt it dissolve on the tails of her thoughts as she imagined Diana Leven’s face. “Do you ever feel guilty?” Alex asked.

“Why?”

“Because for a half a second, you’ve almost forgotten everything that happened.”

Patrick put down his wineglass. “Sometimes, when I’m going through the evidence and I see a fingerprint or a photo or a shoe that belonged to one of the kids who died, I take a little more time to look at it. It’s crazy, but it seems like someone ought to, so that they’re remembered an extra minute or two.” He looked up at her. “When someone dies, their lives aren’t the ones that stop at that moment, you know?”

Alex lifted her glass of wine and drained it. “Tell me how you found her.”

“Who?”

“Josie. That day.”

Patrick met her gaze, and Alex knew he was weighing her right to know what her daughter had experienced against his wish to save her from a truth that would cut her to the quick. “She was in the locker room,” he began quietly. “And I thought…I thought she was dead, too, because she was covered in blood, facedown next to Matt Royston. But then she moved and-” His voice broke. “It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.”

“You know you’re a hero, don’t you?”

Patrick shook his head. “I’m a coward. The only reason I ran into that building was because if I didn’t, I’d have nightmares for the rest of my life.”

Alex shivered. “I have nightmares, and I wasn’t even there.”

He took away her wineglass and studied her palm, as if he were going to read her the line of her life. “Maybe you should try not sleeping,” Patrick said.

His skin smelled of evergreen and spearmint, this close. Alex could feel her heart pounding through the tips of her fingers. She imagined he could feel it, too.

She didn’t know what was going to happen next-what was supposed to happen next-but it would be random, unpredictable, uncomfortable. She was getting ready to push away from him when Patrick’s hands anchored her in place. “Stop being such a judge, Alex,” he whispered, and he kissed her.

When feeling came back, in a storm of color and force and sensation, the most you could do was hold on to the person beside you and hope you could weather it. Alex closed her eyes and expected the worst-but it wasn’t a bad thing; it was just a different thing. A messier one, a more complicated one. She hesitated, and then she kissed Patrick back, willing to concede that you might have to lose control before you could find what you’d been missing.

The Month Before

When you love someone, there’s a pattern to the way you come together. You might not even realize it, but your bodies are choreographed: a touch on the hip, a stroke of the hair. A staccato kiss, break away, a longer one, his hand slipping under your shirt. It’s a routine, but not in the boring sense of the word. It’s just the way you’ve learned to fit, and it’s why, when you’ve been with one guy for a long time, your teeth do not scrape together when you kiss; you do not bump noses or elbows.

Matt and Josie had a pattern. When they started making out, he’d lean in and look at her as if he couldn’t possibly see any other part of the world. It was hypnotism, she realized, because after a while she sort of felt that way, too. Then he’d kiss her, so slowly that there was hardly pressure on her mouth, until she was the one pushing against him for more. He worked his way down her body, from mouth to neck, from neck to breasts, and then his fingers would do a search-and-rescue mission below the waistband of her jeans. The whole thing lasted about ten minutes, and then Matt would roll off her and take the condom out of his wallet so they could have sex.

Not that Josie minded any of it. If she was going to be honest, she liked the pattern. It felt like a roller coaster-going up that hill, knowing what was coming next on track and knowing, too, that she couldn’t do anything to stop it.

They were in her living room, in the dark, with the television on for background noise. Matt had already peeled off her clothes, and now he was leaning over her like a tidal wave, pulling down his boxers. He sprang free and settled between Josie’s legs.

“Hey,” she said, as he tried to push into her. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“Aw, Jo. Just once, I don’t want there to be anything between us.”

His words could melt her just as surely as his kiss or his touch; she already knew that by now. She hated that rubbery smell that permeated the air the moment he ripped open the Trojan packet and stayed on his hands until they were finished. And God, did anything feel better than having Matt inside her? Josie shifted just a little, felt her body adjust to him, and her legs trembled.

When Josie had gotten her period at thirteen, her mother had not given her the typical heart-to-heart mother/daughter chat. Instead, she handed Josie a book on probability and statistics. “Every time you have sex, you can get pregnant or you can not get pregnant,” her mother said. “That’s fifty-fifty. So don’t fool yourself into thinking that if you only do it once without protection, the odds are in your favor.”

Josie pushed at Matt. “I don’t think we should do this,” she whispered.

“Have sex?”

“Have sex without…you know. Anything.”

He was disappointed, Josie could tell by the way his face froze for just a moment. But he pulled out and fished for his wallet, found a condom. Josie took it out of his hand, tore open the package, helped him put it on. “One day,” she began, and then he kissed her, and Josie forgot what she was going to say.

Lacy had started spreading corn on the lawn back in November to help the deer through the winter. There were plenty of locals who frowned upon artificially giving the deer a helping hand during the winter-mostly the same people whose gardens were wrecked by those surviving deer in the summer-but for Lacy, there was karma involved. As long as Lewis insisted on hunting, she was going to do what little she could to cancel out his actions.

She put on her heavy boots-there was still enough snow on the ground to merit it, although it had gotten warm enough for the sap to start flowing, which meant that at least in theory, spring was coming. As soon as Lacy walked outside, she could smell the maple syrup refining in the neighbor’s sugar house, like candy crystals in the air. She carried the bucket of feed corn to the swing set in the backyard-a wooden structure that the boys had played on when they were small, and that Lewis had never quite gotten around to dismantling.

“Hey, Mom.”

Lacy turned to find Peter standing nearby, his hands dug deep into the pockets of his jeans. He was wearing a T-shirt and a down vest, and she imagined he had to be freezing. “Hi, sweetie,” she said. “What’s going on?”

She could probably count on one hand the number of times Peter had come out of his room lately, much less outside. It was part of puberty, she knew, for adolescents to hole up in burrows and do whatever it was they did behind closed doors. In Peter’s case, it involved the computer. He was online constantly-not for web surfing as much as programming, and how could she fault that kind of passion?