The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Lacy nudged Alex. “I always wanted to get along with my in-laws.”

  Peter stood at a wooden stove, mixing imaginary food in a plastic pot. Josie put on an oversize lab coat. “Time to go to work. I’ll be home for dinner.”

  “Okay,” Peter said. “We’re having meatballs.”

  “What’s your job?” Alex asked Josie.

  “I’m a judge. I send people to jail all day long and then I come home and eat pisghetti.” She walked around the perimeter of the block house and reentered through the front door.

  “Sit down,” Peter said. “You’re late again.”

  Lacy closed her eyes. “Is it just me, or is this like looking into a really unflattering mirror?”

  They watched Josie and Peter put aside their plates and then move to another part of their block house, a smaller square within the square. They lay down inside it. “This is the bed,” Josie explained.

  The teacher came up behind Alex and Lacy. “They play house all the time,” she said. “Isn’t it sweet?”

  Alex watched Peter curl up on his side. Josie spooned against him, wrapping her arm around his waist. She wondered how her daughter had ever formed an image of a couple like this in her mind, given that she’d never even seen her mother go out on a date.

  She watched Lacy lean against the block cubby and write, on her small slip of paper, TENDER. That did describe Peter—he was tender, almost to the point of being raw. It took someone like Josie—curled around him like a shell—to protect him.

  Alex reached for a pencil and smoothed out the piece of paper. Adjectives tumbled through her mind—there were so many for her daughter: dynamic, loyal, bright, breathtaking—but she found herself forming different letters.

  Mine, she wrote.

  * * *

  This time when the lunch box hit the pavement, it broke wide across its hinges and the car behind the school bus ran right over his tuna fish sandwich and his bag of Doritos. The bus driver, as usual, didn’t notice. The fifth-grade boys were so good at doing this by now that the window was opened and closed before you could even yell for them to stop. Peter felt his eyes welling with tears as the boys high-fived each other. He could hear his mother’s voice in his head—this was the moment where he was supposed to stick up for himself!—but his mother did not realize that would only make it worse.

  “Oh, Peter,” Josie sighed as he sat down again beside her.

  He stared down at his mittens. “I don’t think I can go to your house on Friday.”

  “How come?”

  “Because my mom said she’ll punish me if I lose my lunch box again.”

  “That’s not fair,” Josie said.

  Peter shrugged. “Nothing is.”

  * * *

  No one was more surprised than Alex when the governor of New Hampshire officially picked her from a short list of three candidates for a district court judicial position. Although it made sense that Jeanne Shaheen—a young, Democratic female governor—would want to appoint a young, Democratic female judge, Alex was still a little light-headed over the news when she went for her interview.

  The governor was younger than Alex had expected, and prettier. Which is exactly what most people will think about me if I’m on the bench, she thought. She sat down and slipped her hands under her thighs to keep them from shaking.

  “If I nominate you,” the governor said, “is there anything I should know?”

  “You mean skeletons in my closet?”

  Shaheen nodded. What it really came down to, for a gubernatorial appointee, was whether or not that nominee would in some way reflect poorly on the governor herself. Shaheen was trying to cross her t’s and dot her i’s before making an official decision, and for that, Alex could only admire her. “Is anyone going to come to your Executive Council hearing and oppose your nomination?” the governor asked.

  “That depends. Are you giving out furloughs at the state prison?”

  Shaheen laughed. “I take it that’s where your disgruntled clients have ended up.”

  “That’s exactly why they’re disgruntled.”

  The governor stood up and shook Alex’s hand. “I think we’ll get along well,” she said.

  * * *

  Maine and New Hampshire were the only two states left in the country with an Executive Council—a group that acted as a direct check on the governor’s power. For Alex, this meant that in the month between her nomination and her confirmation hearing, she had to do whatever she could to placate five Republican men before they put her through the wringer.

  She called them weekly, asking if they had any questions they needed answered. She also had to arrange for witnesses to appear on her behalf at the confirmation hearing. After years in the public defender’s office, this should have been simple, but the Executive Council did not want to hear from lawyers. They wanted to hear from the community where Alex worked and lived—from her first-grade teacher to a state trooper who liked her in spite of her allegiance to the Dark Side. The tricky part was that Alex had to call in all her favors to get these people to prepare and testify, but she also had to make it clear that if she did get confirmed as a judge, she could give them nothing in return.

  And then, finally, it was Alex’s turn to take the hot seat. She sat in the Executive Council office in the State House, fielding questions that ranged from What was the last book you read? to Who has the burden of proof in abuse and neglect cases? Most of the questions were substantive and academic, until she was thrown a curve.

  Ms. Cormier, who has the right to judge someone else?

  “Well,” she said. “That depends on whether you’re judging in a moral sense or a legal sense. Morally, no one has the right to judge anyone else. But legally, it’s not a right—it’s a responsibility.”

  Following up on that, what is your position on firearms?

  Alex hesitated. She was not a fan of guns. She didn’t let Josie watch anything on television that showed violence. She knew what happened when you put a gun in the hand of a troubled kid, or an angry husband, or a battered wife—she’d defended those clients too many times to dismiss that kind of catalytic reaction.

  And yet.

  She was in New Hampshire, a conservative state, in front of a group of Republicans who were terrified she would turn out to be a left-wing loose cannon. She would be presiding over communities where hunting was not only revered but necessary.

  Alex took a sip of water. “Legally,” she said, “I am pro-firearms.”

  * * *

  “It’s crazy,” Alex said as she stood in Lacy’s kitchen. “You go to these robe sites online, and the models are all linebackers with breasts. The public perception of a female judge is one that looks like Bea Arthur.” She leaned into the hallway and yelled up the stairs. “Josie! I’m counting to ten and then we’re leaving!”

  “Are there choices?”

  “Yeah, black . . . or black.” Alex folded her arms. “You can get cotton and polyester or just polyester. You can get bell sleeves or gathered sleeves. They’re all hideous. What I really want is something with a waist.”

  “Guess Vera Wang doesn’t do judicial,” Lacy said.

  “Not quite.” She stuck her head into the hallway again. “Josie! Now!”

  Lacy put down the dish towel she had been using to dry a pan and followed Alex into the hall. “Peter! Josie’s mother has to get home!” When there was no response from the children, Lacy headed upstairs. “They’re probably hiding.”

  Alex followed her into Peter’s bedroom, where Lacy threw open the closet doors and checked beneath the bed. From there, they checked the bathroom, Joey’s room, and the master bedroom. It wasn’t until they went downstairs again that they heard voices coming from the basement. “It’s heavy,” Josie said.

  Then Peter: “Here. Like this.”

  Alex wound down the wooden stairway. Lacy’s basement was a one-hundred-year-old root cellar with a dirt floor and cobwebs strung like Christmas decorations. She homed in on th