Nineteen Minutes Read online

  Lewis had a bigwig economist from London coming to dinner, and in preparation, Lacy had taken the day off work to clean. Although she had no doubts about her prowess as a midwife, the nature of her work meant that toilets didn't get cleaned on a regular basis; that dust bunnies bloomed beneath the furniture. Usually, she didn't care--she thought a house that was lived in was preferential to one that was sterile--unless company was coming over; then pride kicked in. So that morning, she'd gotten up, made breakfast, and had already dusted the living room by the time Peter--a sophomore, then--threw himself angrily into a chair at the kitchen table. "I have no clean underwear," he fumed, although the rule in the house was that when his laundry bin filled, he had to do his own wash--there was so little that Lacy ever asked him to do, she didn't think this one task was unreasonable. Lacy had suggested that he borrow some from his father, but Peter was disgusted by that, and she decided to let him figure it out on his own. She had enough on her plate.

  She usually let Peter's room stand in utter pigsty disarray, but as she passed by that morning, she noticed his laundry bin. Well, she was already home working, and he was at school. She could do this one thing for him. By the time Peter got home that day, Lacy had not only vacuumed and scrubbed the floors, cooked a four-course meal, and cleaned the kitchen--she had also washed, dried, and folded three loads of Peter's laundry. They were piled on the bed, clean clothing that covered the entire six-foot span of the mattress, segregated into pants, shirts, undershorts. All he had to do was set them into his closet, his drawers.

  Peter arrived, sullen and moody, and immediately hurried upstairs to his room and his computer--the place he spent most of his time. Lacy--arm deep in the toilet, at that point, scouring--waited for him to notice what she'd done for him. But instead, she heard him groan. "God! I'm supposed to put all this away?" Then he slammed his bedroom door so loud that the house shook around her.

  Suddenly, Lacy couldn't see straight. She had--of her own volition--done something nice for her son--her ridiculously spoiled son--and this was how he acted in return? She rinsed off the scrubbing gloves and left them in the sink. Then she stomped upstairs to Peter's room and threw open the door. "What is your problem?"

  Peter glared at her. "What's your problem? Look at this mess."

  Something inside Lacy had snapped like a filament, igniting her. "Mess?" she repeated. "I cleaned up the mess. You want to see a mess?" She reached past Peter, knocking over a pile of neatly folded T-shirts. She grabbed his boxer shorts and threw them on the floor. She shoved his pants off the bed, hurled them at his computer, so that his tower of CD-ROMs fell over and the silver disks scattered. "I hate you!" Peter yelled, and without missing a beat, Lacy yelled back, "I hate you, too!" Only then did she realize that she and Peter were now the same height; that she was arguing with a child who stood eye-level with her.

  She backed out of Peter's room, and he slammed the door behind her. Almost immediately, Lacy burst into tears. She hadn't meant it--of course she hadn't. She loved Peter. She just, at that moment, hated what he'd said; what he'd done. When she knocked, he wouldn't answer. "Peter," she said. "Peter, I'm sorry I said that."

  She held her ear to the door, but there was no sound coming from the inside. Lacy had gone back downstairs and finished cleaning the bathroom. She had moved like a zombie through dinner, making conversation with the economist without really knowing what she was saying. Peter had not joined them. She did not see him, in fact, until the next morning, when Lacy went to wake him up and found his room already empty--and spotless. The clothes had been refolded and placed in their drawers. The bed was made. The CDs organized again, in their tower.

  Peter was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of cereal, when Lacy went downstairs. He did not meet her eyes, and she did not meet his--the ground between them was still too tender for that. But she poured him a glass of juice and set it on the table. He said thank you.

  They never spoke of what they'd said to each other, and Lacy had vowed to herself that no matter how frustrating it got, being the parent of a teenage boy, no matter how selfish and self-centered Peter became, she would never again let herself reach a point where she truly, viscerally hated her own son.

  But as the victims of Sterling High told their stories in a courtroom just down the hall from where Lacy sat, she hoped that she wasn't too late.

  *

  At first, Peter didn't recognize her. The girl who was being led up the ramp by a nurse--the girl whose hair had been cropped to fit underneath bandages and whose face was twisted with scar tissue and bone that had been broken and carved away--settled herself inside the witness box in a way that reminded him of fish being introduced to a new tank. They'd swim around the perimeter gingerly, as if they knew they had to assess the dangers of this new place before they could even begin to function.

  "Can you state your name for the record?" the prosecutor asked.

  "Haley," the girl said softly. "Haley Weaver."

  "Last year, you were a senior at Sterling High?"

  Her mouth rounded, flattened. The pink scar that curved like the seam on a baseball over her temple grew darker, an angry red. "Yes," she said. She closed her eyes, and a tear slid down her hollow cheek. "I was the homecoming queen." She bent forward, rocking slightly as she cried.

  Peter's chest hurt, as if it were going to explode. He thought maybe he would just die on the spot and save everyone the trouble of going through this. He was afraid to look up, because if he did he would have to see Haley Weaver again.

  Once, when he was little, he'd been playing with a Nerf football in his parents' bedroom and he knocked over an antique perfume bottle that had belonged to his great-grandmother. It was made out of glass and it broke into pieces. His mother told him she knew it was an accident, and she'd glued it back together. She kept it on her dresser, and every time he passed by he saw the lines. For years, he'd thought that might have been worse than being punished in the first place.

  "Let's take a short recess," Judge Wagner said, and Peter let his head sink down to the defense table, a weight too heavy to bear.

  *

  The witnesses were sequestered by side, prosecution in one room and defense in another. The policemen had their own room, too. Witnesses were not supposed to see each other, but nobody really noticed if you left to go to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee or a donut, and Josie had taken to leaving for hours at a time. It was there that she'd run into Haley, who'd been drinking orange juice through a straw. Brady was with her, holding the cup so she could reach it.

  They'd been happy to see Josie, but she was glad when they left. It hurt, physically, to have to smile at Haley and pretend that you weren't staring at the pits and gullies of her face. She'd told Josie that she had already had three operations with a plastic surgeon in New York City who had donated his services.

  Brady never let go of her hand; sometimes he ran his fingers through her hair. It made Josie want to cry, because she knew that when he looked at Haley, he was still able to see her in a way that no one else would again.

  There were others there, too, that Josie hadn't seen since the shooting. Teachers, like Ms. Ritolli and Coach Spears, who came over to say hello. The DJ who ran the radio station at the school, the honors student with the really bad acne. They all cycled through the cafeteria while she sat and nursed a cup of coffee.

  She glanced up when Drew flung himself into a chair across from her. "How come you're not in the room with the rest of us?"

  "I'm on the defense's list." Or, as she was sure everyone in the other room thought of it, the traitors' side.

  "Oh," Drew said, as if he understood, although Josie was sure he didn't. "You ready for this?"

  "I don't have to be ready. They're not actually going to call me."

  "Then why are you here?"

  Before she could answer, Drew waved, and then she realized John Eberhard had arrived. "Dude," Drew said, and John headed toward them. He walked with a limp, she noticed, bu