The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Josie felt her throat closing. She tried to remember Matt saying that he liked her; she wondered if anyone would ever say it again. “My mother’s a big girl. She can make her own decisions about who she f—”

  “Don’t,” Patrick interrupted.

  “Don’t what.”

  “Don’t say something you’re going to wish you hadn’t.”

  Josie stepped back, her eyes glittering. “If you think that buddying up to me is going to win her over, you’re wrong. You’re better off with flowers and chocolate. She couldn’t care less about me.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “You haven’t exactly been around long enough to know, have you?”

  “Josie,” Patrick said, “she’s crazy about you.”

  Josie felt herself choke on the truth, even harder to speak than it was to swallow. “But not as crazy as she is about you. She’s happy. She’s happy and I . . . I know I should be happy for her . . .”

  “But you’re here,” Patrick said, gesturing at the cemetery. “And you’re alone.”

  Josie nodded and burst into tears. She turned away, embarrassed, and then felt Patrick fold his arms around her. He didn’t say anything, and for that one moment, she even liked him—any word at all, even a well-meaning one, would have taken up the space where her hurt needed to be. He just let her cry until finally it all stopped, and Josie rested for a moment against his shoulder, wondering if this was only the eye of the storm or its endpoint.

  “I’m a bitch,” she whispered. “I’m jealous.”

  “I think she’d understand.”

  Josie drew away from him and wiped her eyes. “Are you going to tell her I come here?”

  “No.”

  She glanced up at him, surprised. She would have thought that he’d take her mother’s side.

  “You’re wrong, you know,” Patrick said.

  “About what?”

  “Being alone.”

  Josie glanced up the hill. You couldn’t see Matt’s grave from the gates, but it was still there—just like everything else about That Day. “Ghosts don’t count.”

  Patrick smiled. “Mothers do.”

  * * *

  What Lewis hated the most was the sound of the metal doors slamming. It hardly mattered that, thirty minutes from now, he’d be able to leave the jail. What was important was that the inmates couldn’t. And that one of those inmates was the same boy he’d taught to ride a bike without training wheels; the same boy whose nursery school paperweight was still sitting on Lewis’s desk; the same boy he’d watched take his very first breath.

  He knew it would be a shock for Peter to see him—how many months had he told himself that this would be the week he got up the courage to see his son in jail, only to find another errand to run or paper to study? But, as a correctional officer opened up a door and led Peter into the visitation room, Lewis realized that he’d underestimated what a shock it would be for him to see Peter.

  He was bigger. Maybe not taller, but broader—his shoulders filled out his shirt; his arms had thickened with muscle. His skin was translucent, almost blue under this unnatural light. His hands didn’t stop moving—they were twitching at his sides and then, when he sat down, on the sides of the chair.

  “Well,” Peter said. “What do you know.”

  Lewis had rehearsed six or seven speeches, explanations of why he had not been able to bring himself to see his son, but when he saw Peter sitting there, only two words rose to his lips. “I’m sorry.”

  Peter’s mouth tightened. “For what? Blowing me off for six months?”

  “I was thinking,” Lewis admitted, “more like eighteen years.”

  Peter sat back in his chair, staring at Lewis. He forced himself to return the stare. Could Peter grant him absolution, even if Lewis still wasn’t entirely sure he could return the favor?

  Rubbing a hand down his face, Peter shook his head. Then he started to smile. Lewis felt his bones loosen, his muscles relax. Until this moment, he hadn’t really known what to expect from Peter. He could reason with himself all he wanted and assert that an apology would always be accepted; he could remind himself that he was the parent here, the one in charge—but all of that was extremely hard to remember when you were sitting in a visiting room at a jail, with a woman on your left who was trying to play footsie with her lover across that forbidden red line, and a man on your right who was cursing a blue streak.

  The smile on Peter’s face hardened, twisted into a sneer. “Fuck you,” he spat out. “Fuck you for coming here. You don’t give a shit about me. You don’t want to tell me you’re sorry. You just want to hear yourself say it. You’re here for yourself, not me.”

  Lewis’s head felt as if it were filled with stones. He bent forward, the stalk of his neck unable to bear the weight anymore, until he could rest his forehead in his hands. “I can’t do anything, Peter,” he whispered. “I can’t work, I can’t eat. I can’t sleep.” Then he lifted his face. “The new students, they’re coming onto the college campus right now. I look at them, out my window—they’re always pointing at the buildings or down Main Street or listening to the tour guides who take them across the courtyard—and I think of how much I was looking forward to doing those same things with you.”

  He had written a paper years ago, after Joey was born, about the exponential increases of happiness—the moments that the quotient changed by leaps and bounds after a triggering incident. What he’d concluded was that the outcome was variable, based not on the event that caused the happiness, but rather the state you were in when it happened. For example, the birth of your child was one thing when you were happily married and planning a family; it was something entirely different when you were sixteen and had gotten a girl knocked up. Cold weather was perfect if you were on a skiing vacation, but disappointing if you happened to be enjoying a week at the beach. A man who was once rich might be deliriously happy with a dollar in the middle of a depression; a gourmet chef would eat worms if stranded on a desert island. A father who’d hoped for a son that was educated and successful and independent might, under different circumstances, simply be happy to have him alive and safe, so that he could tell the boy he’d never stopped loving him.

  “But you know what they say about college,” Lewis said, sitting up a little straighter. “It’s overrated.”

  His words surprised Peter. “All those parents forking over forty thousand a year,” Peter said, smiling faintly. “And here I am, getting the most out of your tax dollar.”

  “What more could an economist ask for?” Lewis joked, although this wasn’t funny; never would be funny. And he realized that this was a sort of happiness, too: you would say anything—do anything—to keep your son smiling like that, as if there was something to still smile about, even if every word felt like you were swallowing glass.

  * * *

  Patrick’s feet were crossed on the prosecutor’s desk, as Diana Leven scanned the reports that had come from ballistics days after the shooting, in preparation for his testimony at the trial. “There were two shotguns, which were never used,” Patrick explained, “and two matching handguns—Glock 17s—that were registered to a neighbor across the street. A retired cop.”

  Diana glanced up over the papers. “Lovely.”

  “Yeah. Well, you know cops. What’s the point of putting the gun in a locked cabinet when you have to get at it quickly? Anyway, Gun A is the one that was fired around most of the school—the striations on the bullets we recovered match it. Gun B was fired—ballistics told us that—but there hasn’t been a bullet recovered that matches its barrel. That gun was found jammed, on the floor of the locker room. Houghton was still holding Gun A when he was apprehended.”

  Diana leaned back in her chair, her fingers steepled in front of her chest. “McAfee’s going to ask you why Houghton would have pulled out Gun B at all in the locker room, if Gun A had worked so splendidly up till that point.”

  Patrick shrugged. “He might have used it to shoot