The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Suddenly, Alex couldn’t follow Josie’s line of logic. “Why? Do you want to talk to him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can’t imagine why you’d want to, after—”

  “I used to be his friend,” Josie said.

  “You haven’t been Peter’s friend in years,” Alex answered, but then the tumblers clicked, and she understood why her daughter, who was seemingly terrified about Peter’s potential release from prison, might still want to communicate with him after his conviction: remorse. Maybe Josie believed that something she’d done—or hadn’t—might have brought Peter to the point where he would have gone and shot his way through Sterling High.

  If Alex didn’t understand the concept of a guilty conscience, who would?

  “Honey, there are people looking out for Peter—people whose job it is to look out for him. You don’t have to be the one to do it.” Alex smiled a little. “You just have to look out for yourself, all right?”

  Josie looked away. “I have a test next period,” she said. “Can we go back to school now?”

  Alex drove in silence, because by that time it was too late to make the correction; to tell her daughter that there was someone looking out for her, too; that Josie was not in this alone.

  * * *

  At two in the morning, when Jordan had been bouncing a wailing, sick infant in his arms for five straight hours, he turned to Selena. “Remind me why we had a child?”

  Selena was sitting at the kitchen table—well, no, actually she was sprawled across it, her head pillowed in her arms. “Because you wanted to pass along the finely tuned genetic blueprint of my bloodline.”

  “Frankly, I think all we’re passing along is some viral crud.”

  Suddenly, Selena sat up. “Hey,” she whispered. “He’s asleep.”

  “Thank God. Get him off me.”

  “Like hell I will—that’s the most comfortable he’s been all day.”

  Jordan glowered at her and sank into the chair across from her, his hands still cupped around his sleeping son. “He’s not the only one.”

  “Are we talking about your case again? Because to be honest, Jordan, I’m so damn tired that I need clues, here, if we’re going to shift topics . . .”

  “I just can’t figure out why she hasn’t recused herself. When the prosecution brought up her daughter, Cormier dismissed it . . . and more importantly, so did Leven.”

  Selena yawned and stood up. “You’re looking a gift horse in the mouth, baby. Cormier’s got to be a better judge for you than Wagner.”

  “But something’s rubbing me the wrong way about this.”

  Selena smiled at him indulgently. “Got a little diaper rash, huh?”

  “Even if her kid doesn’t remember anything now, that doesn’t mean she’s not going to. And how is Cormier going to remain impartial, knowing that her daughter’s boyfriend was blown away by my client while she stood there watching?”

  “Well, you could make a motion to get her off the case,” Selena said. “Or you could wait for Diana to do that instead.”

  Jordan glanced up at her.

  “If I were you, I’d keep my mouth shut.”

  He reached out, snagging the sash of her robe so that it unraveled. “When do I ever keep my mouth shut?”

  Selena laughed. “There’s always a first time,” she said.

  * * *

  Each tier in maximum security had four cells, six feet by eight feet. Inside the cell was a bunk bed and a toilet. It had taken Peter three days to be able to take a dump while the correctional officers were walking past, without his bowels seizing up, but—and this was how he knew he was getting used to being here—now he could probably crap on command.

  At one end of the maximum-security catwalk was a small television. Because there was only room for one chair in front of the TV, the guy who’d been in the longest got to sit down. Everyone else stood behind him, like hoboes in a soup line, to watch. There were not a lot of programs the inmates could agree upon. Mostly it was MTV, although they always turned on Jerry Springer. Peter figured that was because no matter how much you’d screwed up in your life, you liked knowing that there were people out there even more stupid than you.

  If anyone on the tier did something wrong—not even Peter, but for example an asshole like Satan Jones (Satan not being his real name; that was Gaylord, but if you mentioned it even in a whisper he’d go for your jugular), who had drawn a caricature of two of the COs doing the horizontal hora on the wall of his cell—everyone lost the television privilege for the week. Which left the other end of the catwalk to mosey on down toward: a shower with a plastic curtain, and the phone, where you could call collect for a dollar a minute, and every few seconds you’d hear This call has originated at the Grafton County Department of Corrections, just in case you had been lucky enough to forget.

  Peter was doing sit-ups, which he hated. He hated all exercise, really. But the alternative was sitting around and getting soft enough for everyone to think they could pick on you, or going outside during his exercise hour. He went, a couple of times—not to shoot hoops or to jog or even make secret deals near the fence for the drugs or cigarettes that got smuggled into jail, but just to be outside and breathing in air that hadn’t already been breathed by the other inmates in this place. Unfortunately, from the exercise yard you could see the river. You’d think that was a bonus, but in fact, it was the most awful tease. Sometimes the wind blew so that Peter could even smell it—the soil along the edge, the frigid water—and it nearly broke him to know that he couldn’t just walk down there and take off his shoes and socks and wade in, swim, fucking drown himself if he wanted to. After that, he stopped going outdoors at all.

  Peter finished his hundredth sit-up—the irony was that after a month, he was so much stronger that he could probably have kicked Matt Royston’s and Drew Girard’s asses simultaneously—and sat down on his bunk with the commissary form. Once a week, you got to go shopping for things like mouthwash and paper, with the prices jacked up ridiculously high. Peter remembered going to St. John one year with his family; in the grocery store, cornflakes cost, like, ten dollars, because they were such a rare commodity. It wasn’t like shampoo was a rare commodity, but in jail, you were at the mercy of the administration, which meant they could charge $3.25 for a bottle of Pert, or $16 for a box fan. Your other alternative was to hope that an inmate who left for the state prison would will you his belongings, but to Peter, that felt a little like being a vulture.

  “Houghton,” a correctional officer said, his heavy boots ringing down the metal catwalk, “you’ve got mail.”

  Two envelopes zoomed into the cell and slid underneath Peter’s bunk. He reached for them, scraping his fingernails against the cement floor. The first letter was from his mother, which he was almost expecting. Peter got mail from his mother at least three or four times a week. The letters were usually about stupid things like editorials in the local paper or how well her spider plants were doing. He’d thought, for a while, that she was writing in code—something he needed to know, something transcendent and inspirational—but then he started to realize that she was just writing to fill up space. That’s when he stopped opening mail from his mother. He didn’t feel bad about this, really. The reason his mother wrote to him, Peter knew, wasn’t so that he’d read the letters. It was so that she could tell herself she’d written them.

  He didn’t really blame his parents for being clueless. First of all, he’d had plenty of practice with that particular condition. Second, the only people who understood him, really, were the ones who had been at the high school that day, and they weren’t exactly jamming his mailbox with missives.

  Peter tossed his mother’s letter onto the floor again and stared at the address on the second envelope. He didn’t recognize it; it wasn’t from Sterling, or even New Hampshire, for that matter. Elena Battista, he read. Elena from Ridgewood, New Jersey.

  He ripped open the envelope and scanned her note.