The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  He winces. “I told you—we were having a fight, and I did grab her arms. I pinned her up against the wall. I wanted . . . I wanted to teach her a lesson.”

  “And this lesson went a little too far, didn’t it?”

  “I never killed her. I swear to God.”

  “Why did you bring her body out into the woods?”

  He looks up at me. “Please. You have to believe me.”

  I rise to my feet and loom over him. “I don’t have to believe anything you say, you little prick. You already lied to me once about fighting with her on the weekend, when it turns out you fought with her on Tuesday, too. I’ve got your boots outside the window with a cut screen, your handprints on her throat, and a dead girl who was cleaned up and moved. You ask any jury in this country, and that looks a hell of a lot like a guy who killed his girlfriend and wanted to conceal it.”

  “I never cut that screen. I don’t know who did. And I didn’t beat her up. I got mad, and I shoved her . . . and I left.”

  “Right. And then you came back, and you killed her.”

  Maguire’s eyes fill with tears. I wonder if he really is sorry about Jess Ogilvy’s death, or just sorry that he’s been caught. “No,” he says, his voice thick. “No, I loved her.”

  “Did you cry this much when you were cleaning up her blood in the bathroom? How about when you had to wipe all the blood off her face?”

  “I want to see her,” Maguire begs. “Let me see Jess.”

  “You should have thought of that before you murdered her,” I say.

  As I walk away from him, intending to let him stew in his own guilt for a few minutes before I come back in to break his confession, Maguire buries his face in his hands. That’s when I realize that they are completely uninjured—no bruising, no cuts, which you’d expect if you hit someone hard enough to make her lose a tooth.

  Theo

  By the time I was five, I knew that there were differences between Jacob and me.

  I had to eat everything on my plate, but Jacob was allowed to leave behind things like peas and tomatoes because he didn’t like the way they felt inside his mouth.

  Whatever kids’ tape I was listening to in the car while we drove took a backseat to anything by Bob Marley.

  I had to pick up all my toys after I was done playing, but the six-foot line of Matchbox cars that Jacob had spent the day arranging perfectly straight was allowed to snake down the hallway for a month until he got tired of it.

  Mostly, though, I was aware of being the odd guy out. Because the minute Jacob had any kind of crisis—and that happened constantly—my mom would drop everything and run to him. And usually the thing she dropped was me.

  Once, when I was about seven, my mother had promised me she’d take us to see Spy Kids 3-D on a Saturday afternoon. I had been excited all week, because we didn’t often see movies, much less 3-D ones. We didn’t have the extra money for it, but I had gotten a free pair of glasses in our cereal box and begged and begged until my mother said yes. However—big surprise—it turned out to be a nonissue. Jacob had read all of his dinosaur books and started flapping and rocking at the thought of not having something new to read for bedtime, and my mother made an executive decision to take us to the library instead of the theater.

  Maybe I would have been okay with this, but at the library, there was a big honking display case taking advantage of the movie tie-in with reading in general. BE A SPY KID! it said, and it was full of books like Harriet the Spy and stories about the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I watched my mother take Jacob to the nonfiction section—567 in the world of Dewey decimals, which even I knew meant dinosaurs. They sat down right in the aisle, as if dragging me to the library and ruining my day didn’t matter at all. They started to read a book about ornithopods.

  Suddenly, I realized what I had to do.

  If my mother only noticed Jacob, then that’s what I would become.

  It was probably seven years of frustration that boiled over just then, because I can’t really explain why else I did what I did. I mean, I knew better.

  Libraries are places where you are supposed to be quiet.

  Library books are sacred, and don’t belong to you.

  One minute I had been sitting in the children’s room, in the comfy green chair that looked like a giant’s fist, and the next, I was screaming my head off and yanking books off the shelves and ripping out the pages, and when the librarian said Whose child is this? I kicked her in the shins.

  I was gifted at throwing a fit. I’d been watching a master, after all, my whole life.

  A crowd gathered. Other librarians ran in to see what was going on. I only hesitated once during my tantrum, and that was when I saw my mother’s face hovering at the edge of the group that was staring at me. She had gone white, like a statue.

  Obviously, she had to get me out of there. And obviously, that meant Jacob couldn’t check out the books he wanted to bring home. She grabbed him by the wrist as he started to have his own meltdown, and lifted me with her free arm. My brother and I both kicked and screamed the whole way into the parking lot.

  When we reached the car, she set me down. I did what I’d seen Jacob do a thousand times; I went boneless as spaghetti and collapsed on the pavement.

  All of a sudden, I heard something I’d never heard before. It was louder than both my yelling and Jacob’s combined, and it was coming out of my mother’s mouth.

  She screamed. She stamped her feet. Aaaaaauuuurrrrrgggh, she cried. She flopped her arms and kicked and tossed her head back and forth. People stared at her from all the way across the parking lot.

  I stopped right away. The only thing worse than having the whole world looking at me going crazy was having the whole world look at my mother going crazy. I closed my eyes, feverishly wishing that the ground would open up and just swallow me.

  Jacob, on the other hand, kept shrieking and throwing his fit.

  “Do you think I don’t want to lose it every now and then?” my mother shouted, and then she pulled herself together and buckled a squirming Jacob into his seat in the car. She dragged me up from the asphalt and did the same with me.

  But none of that is the reason I’m telling you this story. It’s because that day was the first day my mother cried in front of me, instead of bravely trying to hold it all inside.

  Emma

  From Auntie Em’s column:

  When did they stop putting toys in cereal boxes?

  When I was little, I remember wandering the cereal aisle (which surely is as American a phenomenon as fireworks on the Fourth of July) and picking my breakfast food based on what the reward was: a Frisbee with the Trix rabbit’s face emblazoned on the front. Holographic stickers with the Lucky Charms leprechaun. A mystery decoder wheel. I could suffer through raisin bran for a month if it meant I got a magic ring at the end.

  I cannot admit this out loud. In the first place, we are expected to be supermoms these days, instead of admitting that we have flaws. It is tempting to believe that all mothers wake up feeling fresh every morning, never raise their voices, only cook with organic food, and are equally at ease with the CEO and the PTA.

  Here’s a secret: Those mothers don’t exist. Most of us—even if we’d never confess—are suffering through the raisin bran in the hopes of a glimpse of that magic ring.

  I look very good on paper. I have a family, and I write a newspaper column. In real life, I have to pick superglue out of the carpet, rarely remember to defrost for dinner, and plan to have BECAUSE I SAID SO engraved on my tombstone.

  Real mothers wonder why experts who write for Parents and Good Housekeeping—and, dare I say it, the Burlington Free Press—seem to have their acts together all the time when they themselves can barely keep their heads above the stormy seas of parenthood.

  Real mothers don’t just listen with humble embarrassment to the elderly lady who offers unsolicited advice in the checkout line when a child is throwing a tantrum. We take the child, dump him in the lady’s cart,