Nineteen Minutes Read online

  He lifted his face to hers. "Do you know what chaos theory is?"

  "I don't give a fuck about chaos theory, Lewis. I care about Peter. Which is more than I can say for--"

  "There's this belief," he interrupted, "that you can explain only the last moment in time, linearly . . . but that everything leading up to it might have come from any series of events. So, you know, a kid skips a stone at the beach, and somewhere across the planet, a tsunami happens." Lewis stood up, his hands in his pockets. "I took him hunting, Lacy. I told him to stick with the sport, even if he didn't like it. I said a thousand things. What if one of them was what made Peter do this?"

  He doubled over, sobbing. As Lacy reached for him, the rain drummed over her shoulders and back.

  "We did the best we could," Lacy said.

  "It wasn't good enough." Lewis jerked his head in the direction of the graves. "Look at this. Look at this."

  Lacy did. Through the driving downpour, with her hair and clothes plastered to her, she took stock of the graveyard and saw the faces of the children who would still be alive, if her own son had never been born.

  Lacy put her hand over her abdomen. The pain cut her in half, like a magician's trick, except she knew she would never really be put back together.

  One of her sons had been doing drugs. The other was a murderer. Had she and Lewis been the wrong parents for the boys they'd had? Or should they never have been parents at all?

  Children didn't make their own mistakes. They plunged into the pits they'd been led to by their parents. She and Lewis had truly believed they were headed the right way, but maybe they should have stopped to ask for directions. Maybe then they would never have had to watch Joey--and then Peter--take that one tragic step and free-fall.

  Lacy remembered holding Joey's grades up against Peter's; telling Peter that maybe he should try out for soccer, because Joey had enjoyed it so much. Acceptance started at home, but so did intolerance. By the time Peter had been excluded at school, Lacy realized, he was used to feeling like an outcast in his own family.

  Lacy squeezed her eyes shut. For the rest of her life, she'd be known as Peter Houghton's mother. At one point, that would have thrilled her--but you had to be careful what you wished for. Taking credit for what a child did well also meant accepting responsibility for what they did wrong. And to Lacy, that meant that instead of making reparations to these victims, she and Lewis needed to start closer to home--with Peter.

  "He needs us," Lacy said. "More than ever."

  Lewis shook his head. "I can't go to see Peter."

  She drew away. "Why?"

  "Because I still think, every day, of the drunk who crashed into Joey's car. I think of how much I wished he'd died instead of Joey; how he deserved to die. The parents of every one of these kids is thinking the same thing about Peter," Lewis said. "And Lacy . . . I don't blame a single one of them."

  Lacy stepped back, shivering. Lewis wadded up the paper cone that had held the flowers and stuffed it into his pocket. The rain fell between them like a curtain, making it impossible for them to see each other clearly.

  *

  Jordan waited at a pizza place near the jail for King Wah to arrive after his psychiatric interview with Peter. He was ten minutes late, and Jordan wasn't sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

  King blew through the door on a gust of wind, his raincoat billowing out behind him. He slid into the booth where Jordan was sitting and picked up a slice of pizza on Jordan's plate. "You can do this," he pronounced, and he took a bite. "Psychologically, there isn't a significant difference between the treatment of a victim of bullying over time and the treatment of an adult female in battered woman syndrome. The bottom line for both is post-traumatic stress disorder." He put the crust back on Jordan's plate. "You know what Peter told me?"

  Jordan thought about his client for a moment. "That it sucks being in jail?"

  "Well, they all say that. He told me that he would rather have died than spend another day thinking about what could happen to him at school. Who does that sound like?"

  "Katie Riccobono," Jordan said. "After she decided to give her husband a triple bypass with a steak knife."

  "Katie Riccobono," King corrected, "poster child for battered woman syndrome."

  "So Peter becomes the first example of bullied victim syndrome," Jordan said. "Be honest with me, King. You think a jury is going to identify with a syndrome that doesn't even really exist?"

  "A jury's not made up of battered women, but they've been known to acquit them before. On the other hand, every single member of that jury will have been through high school." He reached for Jordan's Coke and took a sip. "Did you know that a single incident of bullying in childhood can be as traumatic to a person, over time, as a single incident of sexual abuse?"

  "You gotta be kidding me."

  "Think about it. The common denominator is being humiliated. What's the strongest memory you have from high school?"

  Jordan had to think for a moment before any memory of high school even clouded its way into his mind, much less a salient one. Then he started to grin. "I was in Phys. Ed., and doing a fitness test. Part of it involved climbing a rope that was hung from the ceiling. In high school, I didn't have quite the massive physique I have now--"

  King snorted. "Naturally."

  "--so I was already worried about not making it to the top. As it turned out, that wasn't a problem. It was coming back down, because climbing up with the rope between my legs, I got a massive boner."

  "There you go," King said. "Ask ten people, and half of them won't even be able to remember something concrete from high school--they've blocked it out. The other half will recall an incredibly painful or embarrassing moment. They stick like glue."

  "That is incredibly depressing," Jordan pointed out.

  "Well, most of us grow up and realize that in the grand scheme of life, these incidents are a tiny part of the puzzle."

  "And the ones who don't?"

  King glanced at Jordan. "They turn out like Peter."

  *

  The reason Alex was in Josie's closet in the first place was because Josie had borrowed her black skirt and never returned it, and Alex needed it tonight. She was meeting someone for dinner--Whit Hobart--her former boss, who'd retired from the public defender's office. After today's hearing, where the prosecution had made its motion to have her recused, she needed some advice.

  She'd found the skirt, but she'd also found a trove of treasures. Alex sat on the floor with a box open in her lap. The fringe of Josie's old jazz costume, from lessons she'd taken when she was six or seven, fell into her palm like a whisper. The silk was cool to the touch. It was puddled on top of a faux fur tiger costume that Josie had worn one Halloween and kept for dress-up--Alex's first and last foray into sewing. Halfway through, she'd given up and soldered the fabric together with a hot glue gun. Alex had planned to take Josie trick-or-treating that year, but she'd been a public defender at the time, and one of her clients had been arrested again. Josie had gone out with the neighbor and her children; and that night, when Alex finally got home, Josie had spilled her pillowcase of candy on the bed. You can take half, Josie told her, because you missed all the fun.

  She thumbed through the atlas Josie had made in first grade, coloring every continent and then laminating the pages; she read her report cards. She found a hair elastic and looped it around her wrist. At the bottom of the box was a note, written in the loopy script of a little girl: Deer Mom I love you a lot XOXO.

  Alex let her fingers trace the letters. She wondered why Josie still had this in her possession; why it had never been given to its addressee. Had Josie been waiting, and forgotten? Had she been angry at Alex for something and decided not to give it at all?

  Alex stood, then carefully put the box back where she'd found it. She folded the black skirt over her arm and headed toward her own bedroom. Most parents, she knew, went through their child's things in search of condoms and baggies of pot, to try t