The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Jordan glanced into the living room. Selena had coaxed Josie onto the floor with her. She was pushing a toy plane toward Sam’s feet. When he burst out with the sheer belly laugh that only a baby has, Josie smiled the tiniest bit, too. Selena caught his gaze, raised her brows in a question.

  He’d gotten what he wanted: Cormier’s recusal. He could be generous enough to do this for her.

  “All right,” he told the judge. “Get me the affidavit.”

  * * *

  “When they say to scald the milk,” Josie said, scrubbing another Brillo pad against the blackened bottom of the pot, “I don’t think they mean like this.”

  Her mother picked up a dish towel. “Well, how was I supposed to know?”

  “Maybe we should start with something easier than pudding,” Josie suggested.

  “Like?”

  She smiled. “Toast?”

  Now that her mother was home during the day, she was restless. To that end, she’d taken up cooking—which was a good idea only if you happened to work for the fire department and needed job security. Even when her mother followed the recipe, it didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to, and then inevitably Josie would press her for details and find out she’d used baking powder instead of baking soda, or whole wheat flour instead of cornmeal (We didn’t have any, she complained).

  At first, Josie had suggested nightly culinary classes out of self-preservation—she really didn’t know what to say when her mother plunked a charred brick of meatloaf down with the same dramatic reverence that might have been given to the Holy Grail. As it turned out, though, it was sort of fun. When her mother wasn’t acting like she knew it all (because she so totally didn’t, when it came to cooking), she actually was pretty amusing to hang out with. It was cool, too, for Josie to feel as if she had control over a situation—any situation, even if it happened to be making chocolate pudding, or scrubbing its final remains from the bottom of a saucepan.

  Tonight, they’d made pizza—which Josie had counted as a success, until her mother had tried to slide the pizza out of the oven and it had folded, halfway, on the coils inside, which meant they had to make grilled cheese as a default dinner. They had salad out of a bag—something her mother couldn’t screw up, Josie figured, even if she worked hard at it. But now, thanks to the pudding disaster, there wasn’t any dessert.

  “How did you get to be Julia Child, anyway?” her mother asked.

  “Julia Child’s dead.”

  “Nigella Lawson, then.”

  Josie shrugged and turned off the water; stripped off the yellow plastic gloves. “I kind of got sick of soup,” she said.

  “Didn’t I tell you not to turn on the oven when I wasn’t home?”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t listen to you.”

  Once, when Josie was in fifth grade, the students had had to build a bridge out of popsicle sticks. The idea was to craft a design that could withstand the most pressure. She could remember riding in the car across the Connecticut River, and studying the arches and struts and supports of the real bridges, trying her best to copy them. At the end of the unit, two engineers from the Army Corps came in with a machine specially designed to put weight and torque on each bridge, to see which child’s was the strongest.

  The parents were invited in for the testing. Josie’s mother had been in court, the only mother not present that day. Or so she’d remembered until now, when Josie realized that her mother had been there, for the last ten minutes. She might have missed Josie’s bridge test—during which the sticks splintered and groaned, and then burst apart in catastrophic failure—but she’d been there in time to help Josie pick up the pieces.

  The pot was sparkling, silver. The milk carton was half full. “We could start over,” Josie suggested.

  When there was no answer, Josie turned around. “I’d like that,” her mother answered quietly, but by that time, neither one of them was talking about cooking.

  There was a knock at the door, and that connection between them—evanescent as a butterfly that lands on your hand—broke. “Are you expecting someone?” Josie’s mother asked.

  She wasn’t, but she went to answer it anyway. When Josie opened the door, she found the detective who’d interviewed her standing there.

  Didn’t detectives show up at your door only when you were in serious trouble?

  Breathe, Josie, she told herself, and she noticed he was holding a bottle of wine just as her mother came out to see what was going on.

  “Oh,” her mother said. “Patrick.”

  Patrick?

  Josie turned and realized her mother was blushing.

  He held out the bottle of wine. “Since this seems to be a bone of contention between us . . .”

  “You know what?” Josie said, uncomfortable. “I’m just, um, going to go study.” She’d leave it to her mother to figure out how she was going to do that, since she’d finished her homework before dinner.

  She flew up the stairs, pounding extra hard with her feet so that she wouldn’t hear what her mother was saying. In her room, she turned the music on her CD player up to its loudest level, threw herself onto her bed, and stared up at the ceiling.

  Josie had a midnight curfew, not that she was using it at all now. But before, the bargain went like this: Matt would get Josie home by midnight; in return, Josie’s mother would disappear like smoke the moment they entered the house, retreating upstairs so that she and Matt could fool around in the living room. She had no idea what her mother’s rationale for this was—unless it was that it was safer for Josie to be doing this in her own living room than in a car or under the bleachers. She could remember how they’d come together in the dark, their bodies fusing and their silence measured. Realizing that at any moment her mom might come down for a drink of water or an aspirin only made it that much more exciting.

  At three or four in the morning, when her eyes were blurry and her chin rubbed raw by beard stubble, Josie would kiss Matt good night at the front door. She’d watch his taillights disappear like the glow of a dying cigarette. She’d tiptoe upstairs, past her mother’s bedroom, thinking: You don’t know me at all.

  * * *

  “If I won’t let you buy me a drink,” Alex said, “then what makes you think I’d take a bottle of wine from you?”

  Patrick grinned. “I’m not giving it to you. I’m going to open it, and you might just choose to borrow some.”

  As he said this, he was walking into the house, as if he already knew the way. He stepped into the kitchen, sniffed twice—it still smelled of the ashes of pizza crust and incinerated milk—and began to randomly open and close drawers until he found a corkscrew.

  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.