The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  I have been moving in slow motion, waiting for an inevitable ax to fall, listening to testimony as if these witnesses are discussing the destiny of a stranger. But now, I feel myself waking. The future may unfold in indelible strokes, but it doesn’t mean we have to read the same line over and over. That’s exactly the fate I didn’t want for Nathaniel . . . so why should I want it for me?

  Snow starts to fall, like a blessing.

  I want my life back.

  The bird looked like a tiny dinosaur, too small to have feathers or know how to open its eyes. It was on the ground next to a stick shaped like a V, and a yellow-hatted acorn. Its mouth folded back, a hinge, and one stub of a wing flopped. I could see the outline of its heart.

  “It’s okay.” I got down on the ground so I wouldn’t be so scary. But it just lay there on its side, its belly swelled like a balloon.

  When I looked up, I could see its brothers and sisters in the nest.

  With one finger I pushed it onto my hand. “Mom!”

  “What’s the matter? Oh, Nathaniel!” She made that click with her tongue and grabbed my wrist, pushing it back to the ground. “Don’t pick it up!”

  “But . . . but . . .” Anyone could see how sick it was. You were supposed to help people who were too sick or sad to take care of themselves; Father Glen said so all the time. So why not birds, too?

  “Once a human touches the baby, its mother doesn’t want it anymore.” And just like she said, the big robin came out of the sky and hopped right past the baby. “Now you know better,” she said.

  I kept staring at the bird. I wondered if it would stay there next to the V stick and the acorn until it died. I covered it with a big leaf, so that it would stay warm. “If I was a bird and someone touched me, would I die?”

  “If you were a bird,” she said, “I never would have let you fall out of the nest.”

  EIGHT

  These are the things he takes: his Yomega Brain yo-yo; the starfish arm he found on a beach. His Bravest Boy ribbon, a flashlight, a Batman trading card. Seventy-six pennies, two dimes, and a Canadian quarter. A granola bar and a bag of jellybeans left over from Easter. They are treasures he brought with him when he moved to the motel with his father; he cannot leave them behind now. Everything fits in the white pillowcase and thumps lightly against Nathaniel’s stomach when he zips it up inside his coat.

  “You all set?” his father asks, the words lobbed like a stick into a field and forgotten. Nathaniel wonders why he’s even bothered to try to keep this a secret, when his dad is too busy to notice him anyway. He climbs into the passenger seat of the truck and fastens the seat belt—then on second thought, unlatches it.

  If he’s going to be really bad, he might as well start now.

  • • •

  Once, the man at the cleaner’s offered to take Nathaniel to see where the big moving millipede of pressed clothes began. His dad had lifted him over the counter and he’d followed Mr. Sarni into the way back, where the clothes were being cleaned. The air was so heavy and wet that Nathaniel wheezed as he pushed the big red button; started the conveyor of hangers chugging in its loop again. The air in the courthouse, it reminds Nathaniel of that. Maybe it’s not as hot here, or as sticky, but it is hard to breathe all the same.

  When his dad brings him to the playroom downstairs with Monica, they speak in marshmallow bites of words that they think Nathaniel cannot hear. He does not know what a hostile witness is, or juror bias. But when his father talks the lines on his face appear on Monica’s, like it is a mirror.

  “Nathaniel,” she says, fake-bright, as soon as his dad goes upstairs. “Let’s take off that coat.”

  “I’m cold,” he lies, and he hugs his pack against his middle.

  She is careful to never touch Nathaniel, and he wonders if that’s because Monica has the X-ray vision to see how dirty he is on the inside. She looks at him when she thinks he doesn’t see, and her eyes are as deep as a pond. His mom stares at him with the same expression. It is all because of Father Gwynne; Nathaniel wishes just once someone would come up to him and think of him as some kid, instead of The One This Happened To.

  What Father Gwynne did was wrong—Nathaniel knew it then, from the way his skin shivered; and he knows it now, from talking to Dr. Robichaud and Monica. They have said over and over that it isn’t Nathaniel’s fault. But that doesn’t keep him from turning around sometimes, really fast, sure that he’s felt someone’s breath on his neck. And it doesn’t keep him from wondering if he cut himself open at the belly, like his father does when he catches a trout, would he find that black knot that hurts all the time?

  • • •

  “So, how are we doing this morning?” Fisher asks, as soon as I sit down beside him.

  “Shouldn’t you know that?” I watch the clerk set a stack of files on the judge’s bench. The jury box, without its members, looks cavernous.

  Fisher pats my shoulder. “It’s our turn,” he assures me. “I’m going to spend the whole day making the jurors forget what Brown told them.”

  I turn to him. “The witnesses—”

  “—will do a good job. Trust me, Nina. By lunchtime, everyone in this court is going to think you were crazy.”

  As the side door opens and the jury files in, I look away and wonder how to tell Fisher that’s not what I want, after all.

  • • •

  “I have to pee,” Nathaniel announces.

  “Okay.” Monica puts down the book she has been reading to him and stands up, waiting for Nathaniel to follow her to the door. They walk down the hall together to the restrooms. Nathaniel’s mother doesn’t let him in the boy’s room by himself, but it’s okay here, because there’s only one potty and Monica can check before he goes inside. “Wash your hands,” she reminds him, and she pushes open the door so Nathaniel can go inside.

  Nathaniel sits on the cold seat of the toilet to muddle it all out. He let Father Gwynne do all those things—and it was bad. He was bad; but he didn’t get punished. In fact, ever since he was so bad, everyone’s been paying extra attention to Nathaniel, and being extra nice.

  His mother did something really bad, too—because, she said, it was the best way to fix what happened.

  Nathaniel tries to make sense of all this, but the truths are too tangled in his head. All he knows is that for whatever reason, the world is upside-down. People are breaking rules like crazy—and instead of getting into trouble, it’s the only way to make things right again.

  He pulls up his pants, cinches the bottom of his jacket, and flushes. Then he closes the lid and climbs from the tank to the toilet tissue holder to the little ledge up high. The window there is tiny, only for fancy, because this is a basement floor. But Nathaniel can open it and he’s small enough to slip through.

  He finds himself behind the courthouse, in one of the window wells. Nobody notices a kid his size. Nathaniel skirts the trucks and vans in the parking lot, crosses the frozen lawn. He starts walking aimlessly down the highway, not holding an adult’s hand, intent on running away. Three bad things, he thinks, all at once.

  • • •

  “Dr. O’Brien,” Fisher asks, “when did Mrs. Frost first come to your office?”

  “On December twelfth.” At ease on the stand—as he should be, for all the testimony he’s given in his career—the psychiatrist relaxes in the witness chair. With the silver hair at his temples and his casual pose, he looks like he could be Fisher’s brother.

  “What materials had you received before you met with her?”

  “An introductory letter from you, a copy of the police report, the videotape taken by WCSH-TV, and the psychiatric report prepared by Dr. Storrow, the state’s psychiatrist, who had examined her two weeks earlier.”

  “How long did you meet with Mrs. Frost that first day?”

  “An hour.”

  “What was her state of mind when you met?”

  “The focus of the conversation was on her son. She was very concerned about his saf