The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  He hesitates. “This morning, as you were driving to court, at least one of you came upon a four-way intersection with a traffic light that was turning yellow. You needed to make a decision about whether or not to take your foot off the gas and stop . . . or whether you should speed through it. I don’t know what choice you made; I don’t need to. All I need to know—all you need to know—is that the split second when you made the decision to stop or to go was premeditation. That’s all it takes. And when Mrs. Frost told you yesterday that at the moment she held the gun to Father Szyszynski’s head, she was thinking that she needed to keep him from leaving the courtroom alive in order to protect her son—that, too, was premeditation.”

  Quentin walks back toward the defense table and points at Nina. “This is not a case about emotions; this is a case about facts. And the facts in this case are that an innocent man is dead, that this woman killed him, and that she believed her son deserved special treatment that only she could give.” He turns toward the jury one last time. “Don’t give her any special treatment for breaking the law.”

  • • •

  “I have two daughters,” Fisher says, standing up beside me. “One’s a high school junior; the other goes to Dartmouth.” He smiles at the jury. “I’m crazy about them. I’m sure many of you feel the same about your kids. And that’s the way Nina Frost feels about her son, Nathaniel.” He puts his hand on my shoulder. “However, one completely ordinary morning, Nina found herself facing a horrible truth no parent ever wants to face: Someone had anally raped her little boy. And Nina had to face a second horrible truth—she knew what a molestation trial would do to her son’s fragile emotional balance.”

  He walks toward the jury. “How did she know? Because she’d made other parents’ children go through it. Because she had witnessed, time after time, children coming to court and dissolving into tears on the witness stand. Because she had seen abusers walk free even as these children were trying to fathom why they had to relive this nightmare all over again in front of a room full of strangers.” Fisher shakes his head. “This was a tragedy. Adding to it is the fact that Father Szyszynski was not the man who had hurt this little boy, after all. But on October thirtieth, the police believed that he was the abuser. The prosecutor’s office believed it. Nina Frost believed it. And on that morning, she also believed that she had run out of options. What happened in court that morning was not a premeditated, malicious act but a desperate one. The woman you saw shooting that man might have looked like Nina Frost, might have moved like Nina Frost—but ladies and gentlemen, that woman on the videotape was someone different. Someone not mentally capable of stopping herself at that moment.”

  As Fisher takes another breath to launch into the definition of not guilty by reason of insanity, I get to my feet. “Excuse me, but I’d like to finish.”

  He turns around, the wind gone from his sails. “You what?”

  I wait until he is close enough for me to speak privately. “Fisher, I think I can handle a closing argument.”

  “You are not representing yourself!”

  “Well, I’m not misrepresenting myself either.” I glance at the judge, and at Quentin Brown, who is absolutely gaping. “May I approach, Your Honor?”

  “Oh, by all means, go right ahead,” Judge Neal says.

  We all go up to the bench, Fisher and Quentin sandwiching me. “Your Honor, I don’t believe this is the wisest course of action for my client,” Fisher says.

  “Seems to me that’s an issue she needs to work on,” Quentin murmurs.

  The judge rubs his brow. “I think Mrs. Frost knows the risks here better than other defendants. You may proceed.”

  Fisher and I do-si-do for an awkward moment. “It’s your funeral,” he mutters, and then he steps around me and sits down. I walk up to the jury, finding my footing again, like a long-ago sailor stepping back on the deck of a clipper. “Hello,” I begin softly. “I think you all know who I am by now. You’ve certainly heard a lot of explanations for what brought me here. But what you haven’t heard, straight out, is the truth.”

  I gesture toward Quentin. “I know this, because like Mr. Brown, I was a prosecutor. And truth isn’t something that makes its way into a trial very often. You’ve got the state, tossing facts at you. And the defense, lobbing feelings. Nobody likes the truth because it’s subject to personal interpretation, and both Mr. Brown and Mr. Carrington are afraid you might read it the wrong way. But today, I want to tell it to you.

  “The truth is, I made a horrible mistake. The truth is, on that morning, I was not the vigilante Mr. Brown wants you to believe I was, and I wasn’t a woman having a nervous breakdown, like Mr. Carrington wants you to believe. The truth is I was Nathaniel’s mother, and that took precedence over everything else.”

  I walk up to one juror, a young kid wearing a backward baseball cap. “What if your best friend was being held at gunpoint, and you had a revolver in your own hand? What would you do?” Turning to an older gentleman, I ask, “What if you came home and found your wife being raped?” I step back. “Where is the line? We’re taught to stand up for ourselves; we’re taught to stand up for others we care about. But all of a sudden, there’s a new line drawn by the law. You sit back, it says, and let us deal with this. And you know that the law won’t even do a very good job—it will traumatize your child, it will set free a convict in only a few years. In the eyes of this law that’s dealing with your problem, what’s morally right is considered wrong . . . and what’s morally wrong, you can get away with.”

  I level my gaze at the jury. “Maybe I knew that the judicial system would not work for my son. Maybe I even knew, on some level, that I could convince a jury I looked crazy even though I wasn’t. I wish I could tell you for sure—but if I’ve learned anything, it’s that we don’t know half of what we think we do. And we know ourselves least of all.”

  I turn toward the gallery and look, in turn, at Caleb and Patrick. “For each of you sitting there, condemning me for my actions: How can you know that you wouldn’t have done the same thing, if put to the test? Every day, we do little things to keep the people we love from being hurt—tell a white lie, buckle a seat belt, take away car keys from a buddy who’s had one drink too many. But I’ve also heard of mothers who find the strength to lift cars off trapped toddlers; I’ve read of men who jump in front of bullets to save women they can’t live without. Does that make them insane . . . or is that the moment when they are painfully, 100 percent lucid?” I raise my brows. “It’s not for me to say. But in that courtroom, the morning I shot Father Szyszynski, I knew exactly what I was doing. And at the same time, I was crazy.” I spread my hands, a supplicant. “Love will do that to you.”

  • • •

  Quentin stands up to rebut. “Unfortunately for Mrs. Frost, there are not two systems of justice in this country—one for people who think they know everything, and one for everyone else.” He glances at the jury. “You heard her—she’s not sorry that she killed a man . . . she’s sorry she killed the wrong man.

  “Enough mistakes have been made lately,” the prosecutor says wearily. “Please don’t make another one.”

  • • •

  When the doorbell rings, I think it might be Fisher. He hasn’t spoken to me since we left court, and the three hours the jury deliberated after closing arguments does tend to support his belief that I shouldn’t have gotten up to speak my mind. But when I open it, ready to defend myself—again—Nathaniel pitches into me. “Mom!” he yells, squeezing me so tightly I stumble back. “Mom, we checkered out!”

  “Did you?” I say, and then repeat it over his head to Caleb. “Did you?”

  He sets down his small duffel bag, and Nathaniel’s. “I thought it might be a good time to come home,” he says quietly. “If that’s okay?”

  By now Nathaniel has his arms around the barrel of our golden retriever’s stomach; while Mason, wriggling, licks every spare inch of skin he can find. His thick tail thumps on the tile, a joyous