Nineteen Minutes Read online

  *

  "It's barbecued lasagna," Alex announced after Patrick and Josie had each taken their first bite. "What do you think?"

  "I didn't know you could barbecue lasagna," Josie said slowly. She began to peel the noodles back from the cheese, as if she were scalping it.

  "How's that work, exactly?" Patrick asked, reaching for the pitcher of water to refill his glass.

  "It was regular lasagna. But some of the insides spilled out into the oven, and there was all this smoke . . . and I was going to start over, but then I sort of realized that I was only adding an extra, charcoal sort of flavor into the mix." She beamed. "Ingenious, right? I mean, I looked in all the cookbooks, Josie, and it's never been done before, as far as I can tell."

  "Go figure," Patrick said, and he coughed into his napkin.

  "I actually like cooking," Alex said. "I like taking a recipe and, you know, going off on a tangent to see what happens."

  "Recipes are kind of like laws," Patrick replied. "You might want to try to stick to them, before you commit a felony . . ."

  "I'm not hungry," Josie said suddenly. She pushed her plate away, stood up, and ran upstairs.

  "The trial starts tomorrow," Alex said, by way of explanation. She went after Josie, not even excusing herself first, because she knew Patrick would understand. Josie had slammed the door shut and turned up her music; it would do no good to knock. Alex turned the knob and stepped inside, reaching to the stereo to turn down the volume.

  Josie lay on her bed facedown, the pillow over her head. When Alex sat down on the mattress beside her, she didn't move. "You want to talk about it?" Alex asked.

  "No," Josie said, her voice muffled.

  Alex reached out and yanked the pillow off her head. "Try."

  "It's just--God, Mom--what's wrong with me? It's like the world's started spinning again for everyone else, but I can't even get back on the carousel. Even you two--you both must be thinking like crazy about the trial, too--but here you are, laughing and smiling like you can put what happened and what's going to happen out of your head, when I can't not think about it every waking second." Josie looked up at Alex, her eyes filling with tears. "Everyone's moved on. Everyone but me."

  Alex put her hand on Josie's arm and rubbed it. She could remember delighting in the sheer physical proof of Josie after she was born--that somehow, out of nothing, she'd created this tiny, warm, squirming, flawless creature. She'd spend hours on her bed with Josie beside her, touching her baby's skin, her seed-pearl toes, the pulse of her fontanel. "Once," Alex said, "when I was working as a public defender, a guy in the office threw a Fourth of July party for all the lawyers and their families. I took you, even though you were only about three years old. There were fireworks, and I looked away for a second to see them, and when I turned back you were gone. I started to scream, and someone noticed you--lying at the bottom of the pool."

  Josie sat up, riveted by a story she had never heard before.

  "I dove in and dragged you out and gave you mouth-to-mouth, and you spit up. I couldn't even speak, I was so scared. But you came back fighting and furious at me. You told me you'd been looking for mermaids, and I interrupted you."

  Tucking her knees up under her chin, Josie smiled a little. "Really?"

  Alex nodded. "I said that next time, you had to take me with you."

  "Was there a next time?"

  "Well, you tell me," Alex said, and she hesitated. "You don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?"

  When Josie shook her head, the tears spilled over. She shifted, fitting herself into her mother's arms.

  *

  This, Patrick knew, was his downfall. For the second time in his life, he was growing so close to a woman and her child that he forgot he might not really be part of their family. He looked around the table at the detritus of Alex's awful dinner and started clearing the untouched plates.

  The barbecued lasagna had congealed in its serving dish, a blackened brick. He piled the dishes in the sink and began to run warm water, then picked up a sponge and started to scrub.

  "Oh my gosh," Alex said behind him. "You really are the perfect man."

  Patrick turned, his hands still soapy. "Far from it." He reached for a dish towel. "Is Josie--"

  "She's fine. She'll be fine. Or at least we're both going to keep saying that until it's true."

  "I'm sorry, Alex."

  "Who isn't?" She straddled a kitchen chair and rested her cheek on its spine. "I'm going to the trial tomorrow."

  "I wouldn't have expected any less."

  "Do you really think McAfee can get him acquitted?"

  Patrick folded the dish towel beside the sink and walked toward Alex. He knelt in front of her chair. "Alex," he said, "that kid walked into the school like he was executing a battle plan. He started in the parking lot and set off a bomb to cause a distraction. He went around to the front of the school and took out a kid on the steps. He went into the cafeteria, shot at a bunch of kids, murdered some of them--and then he sat down and had a bowl of fucking cereal before he continued his killing spree. I don't see how, presented with that kind of evidence, a jury could dismiss the charges."

  Alex stared at him. "Tell me something . . . why was Josie lucky?"

  "Because she's alive."

  "No, I mean, why is she alive? She was in the cafeteria and the locker room. She saw people die all around her. Why didn't Peter shoot her?"

  "I don't know. Things happen that I don't understand all the time. Some of them--well, they're like the shooting. And some of them . . ." He covered Alex's hand with his own where it gripped the chair rail. "Some of them aren't."

  Alex looked up at him, and Patrick was reminded again of how finding her--being with her--was like that first crocus you saw in the snow. Just when you assumed winter would last forever, this unexpected beauty could take you by surprise--and if you did not take your eyes off it, if you kept your focus, the rest of the snow would somehow melt.

  "If I ask you something, will you be honest with me?" Alex asked.

  Patrick nodded.

  "My lasagna wasn't very good, was it?"

  He smiled at her through the slats of the chair. "Don't give up your day job," he said.

  *

  In the middle of the night, when Josie could still not get to sleep, she slipped outside and lay down on the front lawn. She stared up at the sky, which clung so low by this time of the night that she could feel stars pricking her face. Out here, without her bedroom closing in around her, it was almost possible to believe that whatever problems she had were tiny, in the grand scheme of the universe.

  Tomorrow, Peter Houghton was going to be tried for ten murders. Even the thought of it--of that last murder--made Josie sick to her stomach. She could not go watch the trial, as much as she wanted to, because she was on a stupid witness list. Instead, she was sequestered, which was a fancy word for being kept clueless.

  Josie took a deep breath and thought about a social studies class she'd taken in middle school where they'd learned that someone--Eskimos, maybe?--believed stars were holes in the sky where people who'd died could peek through at you. It was supposed to be comforting, but Josie had always found it a little creepy, as if it meant she was being spied on.

  It also made her think of a really dumb joke about a guy walking past a mental institution with a high fence, who hears the patients chanting Ten! Ten! Ten! and goes to peek through a hole in the fence to see what's going on . . . only to get poked in the eye with a stick and hear the patients chant Eleven! Eleven! Eleven!

  Matt had told her that joke.

  Maybe she'd even laughed.

  Here's what the Eskimos don't tell you: Those people on the other side, they have to go out of their way to watch you. But you can see them any old time. All you have to do is close your eyes.

  *

  On the morning of her son's murder trial, Lacy picked a black skirt out of her closet, along with a black blouse and black stockings. She dressed lik