The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Nine months later, there had been Gideon. They were married, a mistake, six days before he was born. They stayed married for less than a year. Since then Quentin had supported his son financially, if not emotionally.

  “I must hate it, if I’ve stuck with it that long,” Tanya says, and it takes Quentin a moment to realize that she is only answering his question. Something must have crossed his face, because she touches her hand to his. “I’m sorry, that was rude. And here you were just being polite.”

  Her coffee arrives. She blows on it before taking a sip. “Saw your name in the paper,” Tanya says. “They got you down here for that priest’s murder.”

  Quentin shrugs. “Pretty simple case, actually.”

  “Well, sure, if you look at the news.” But Tanya shakes her head, all the same.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That the world isn’t black and white, but you never did learn that.”

  He raises his brows. “I didn’t learn it? Who threw whom out?”

  “Who found whom screwing that girl who looked like a mouse?”

  “There were mitigating circumstances,” Quentin says. “I was drunk.” He hesitates, then adds, “And she looked more like a rabbit, really.”

  Tanya rolls her eyes. “Quentin, it’s been sixteen and a half years and you’re still being a lawyer about it.”

  “Well, what do you expect?”

  “For you to be a man,” Tanya replies simply. “For you to admit that even the Great and Powerful Brown is capable of making a mistake once or twice a century.” She pushes away her mug, although she isn’t even half-finished. “I’ve always wondered if you’re so good at what you do because it takes the heat off you. You know, if making everyone else walk the straight and narrow makes you righteous by association.” She fishes in her purse and slaps five dollars on the counter. “Think about that when you’re prosecuting that poor woman.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Can you even imagine what she was feeling, Quentin?” Tanya asks, her head tipped to the side. “Or is that kind of connection to a child beyond you?”

  He stands when she does. “Gideon wants nothing to do with me.”

  Tanya buttons her coat, already halfway to the door. “I always said he got your intelligence,” she says, and then, once again, she slips right through his grasp.

  • • •

  By Thursday, Caleb has established a routine. He gets Nathaniel up, feeds him breakfast, and takes him for a walk with the dog. They drive to whatever site Caleb might be working at that morning, and while he builds walls Nathaniel sits in the bed of the truck and plays with a shoebox full of Legos. They eat lunch together, peanut butter and banana sandwiches or Thermoses of chicken soup, and soda that he’s packed in the cooler. And then they go to Dr. Robichaud’s office, where the psychiatrist tries, unsuccessfully, to get Nathaniel to speak again.

  It is a ballet, really—a story they are crafting without words, but comprehensible to anyone who sees Caleb and his silent son moving slowly through their days. To his surprise, this is even beginning to feel like normal. He likes the quiet, because when there are no words to be had, you can’t tangle yourself up in the wrong ones. And if Nathaniel isn’t talking, at least he isn’t crying anymore.

  Caleb keeps blinders on, moving from one task to the next, getting Nathaniel fed and clothed and tucked in, and therefore only has a few moments each day to let his mind wander. Usually, this is when he is lying in bed, with the space beside him where Nina used to be. And even when he tries to keep himself from thinking it, the truth fills his mouth, bitter as a lemon: Life is easier, without her here.

  • • •

  On Thursday, Fisher brings me the discovery to read. This consists of 124 eyewitness accounts that describe my murder of Father Szyszynski, Patrick’s report on the molestation, my own incoherent statement to Evan Chao, and the autopsy report.

  I read Patrick’s file first, feeling like a beauty queen poring over her scrapbook. Here is the explanation for everything else that sits in a stack at my side. Next, I read the statements of all the people who were in the courtroom the day of the murder. Of course, I save the best for last—the autopsy report, which I hold as reverently as if it were the Dead Sea Scrolls.

  First I look at the pictures. I stare at them so hard that when I close my eyes I can still see the ragged edge where the priest’s face was simply gone now. I can envision the creamy color of his brain. His heart weighed 350 grams, or so says Dr. Vern Potter, coroner.

  “Dissection of the coronary arteries,” I read aloud, “reveals narrowing of the lumen by atherosclerotic plaque. The most significant narrowing is in the left anterior descending coronary, where the lumen is narrowed by about 80 percent of the cross-sectional area.”

  Lumen. I repeat this word, and the others that are all that are left of this monster: no evidence of thrombus; the gallbladder serosa is smooth and glistening; the bladder is slightly trabeculated.

  The stomach contains partly digested bacon and a cinnamon roll.

  Powder burns from the gun form a corona around the small hole in the rear of his head, where the bullet entered. There is a zone of necrosis around the bullet tract. Only 816 grams of his brain were left intact. There were contusions of the cerebellar tonsils bilaterally. Cause of death: Gunshot wound to head. Manner of death: Homicide.

  This language is foreign, and I am suddenly, miraculously fluent. I touch my fingers to the autopsy report. Then I remember the twisted face of his mother, at the funeral.

  Attached to this file is another one, with the name of a local physician’s office stamped on its side. This must be Father Szyszynski’s medical history. It is a thick file, far more than fifty years of routine checkups, but I don’t bother to crack it open. Why should I? I have done what all those ordinary flus and hacking coughs and aches and cramps could not.

  I killed him.

  • • •

  “This is for you,” the paralegal says, handing Quentin a fax. He looks up, takes the pages, and then stares down at them, confused. The lab report has Szyszynski’s name on it; but has nothing to do with his case. Then he realizes: It is from the previous case, the closed case—the one involving the defendant’s son. He glances at it, shrugging at the results, which are no great surprise. “It’s not mine,” Quentin says.

  The paralegal blinks at him. “So what am I supposed to do with it?”

  He starts to hand it back to the woman, then puts it on the edge of his desk instead. “I’ll take care of it,” he answers, and buries himself in his work again until she leaves his office.

  • • •

  There are a thousand places Caleb would rather be—in a prisoner-of-war’s hovel, for example; or standing in an open field during a tornado. But he had to be present today, the subpoena said so. He stands in the courtroom cafeteria in his one jacket and threadbare tie, holding a cup of coffee so hot it is burning his palm, and tries to pretend that his hands aren’t shaking with nerves.

  Fisher Carrington is not such a bad guy, he thinks. At least, he’s not nearly the demon that Nina has made him out to be. “Relax, Caleb,” the attorney says. “This will be over before you know it.” They make their way to the exit. Court will convene in five minutes; even now, they might be bringing Nina in.

  “All you have to do is answer the questions we’ve already gone over, and then Mr. Brown will ask a few of his own. No one’s expecting you to do anything but tell the truth. Okay?”

  Caleb nods, tries to take a sip of the fire that is his coffee. He doesn’t even like coffee. He wonders what Nathaniel is doing with Monica, downstairs in the playroom. He tries to distract himself by picturing an intricate brick pattern he created for a former insurance CEO’s patio. But reality crouches like a tiger in the corner of his mind: In minutes, he is going to be a witness. In minutes, dozens of reporters and curious citizens and a judge will be hanging on the words of a man who much prefers silence