The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Another woman’s voice: “But they’re going to have to go back sometime. My daughter’s only ten, and she’s terrified about walking into that high school, ever. She wakes up in the middle of the night screaming. She thinks there’s someone with a gun there, waiting for her.”

  “Be happy she’s able to have nightmares,” a man replied. He was standing next to Jordan, his arms folded, his eyes a livid red. “Go in there every night, when she cries, and hold her and tell her you’ll keep her safe. Lie to her, just like I did.”

  A murmur rolled through the church, like a ball of yarn being unraveled. That’s Mark Ignatio. The father of one of the dead.

  Just like that, a fault line opened up in Sterling—a ravine so deep and bleak that it would not be bridged for many years. There was already a difference in this town, between those who had lost children and those who still had them to worry about.

  “Some of you knew my daughter Courtney,” Mark said, pushing away from the wall. “Maybe she babysat for your kids. Or served you a burger at the Steak Shack in the summer. Maybe you’d recognize her by sight, because she was a beautiful, beautiful girl.” He turned to the front of the stage. “You want to tell me how I’m supposed to figure out a new kind of normal, Doc? You wouldn’t dare suggest that one day, it gets easier. That I’ll be able to move past this. That I’ll forget my daughter is lying in a grave, while some psychopath is still alive and well.” Suddenly the man turned to Jordan. “How can you live with yourself?” he accused. “How the hell can you sleep at night, knowing you’re defending that sonofabitch?”

  Every eye in the room turned to Jordan. Beside him, he could feel Selena press Sam’s face against her chest, shielding the baby. Jordan opened his mouth to speak, but couldn’t find a single word.

  The sound of boots coming up the aisle distracted him. Patrick Ducharme was headed straight for Mark Ignatio. “I can’t imagine the pain you’re feeling, Mark,” Patrick said, his gaze locked on the grieving man’s. “And I know you have every right to come here and be upset. But the way our country works, someone’s innocent until they’re proven guilty. Mr. McAfee’s just doing his job.” He clapped his hand on Mark’s shoulder and lowered his voice. “Why don’t you and I grab a cup of coffee?”

  As Patrick led Mark Ignatio toward the exit, Jordan remembered what he had wanted to say. “I live here, too,” he began.

  Mark turned around. “Not for long.”

  * * *

  Alex was not short for Alexandra, like most people assumed. Her father had simply given her the name of the son he would have preferred to have.

  After Alex’s mother had died of breast cancer when she was five, her father had raised her. He wasn’t the kind of dad who showed her how to ride a bike or to skip stones—instead, he taught her the Latin words for things like faucet and octopus and porcupine; he explained to her the Bill of Rights. She used academics to get his attention: winning spelling bees and geography contests, netting a string of straight A’s, getting into every college she applied to.

  She wanted to be just like her father: the kind of man who walked down the street and had storekeepers nod to him in awe: Good afternoon, Judge Cormier. She wanted to hear the change in tone of a receptionist’s voice when the woman heard it was Judge Cormier on the line.

  If her father never held her on his lap, never kissed her good night, never told her he loved her—well, it was all part of the persona. From her father, Alex learned that everything could be distilled into facts. Comfort, parenting, love—all of these could be boiled down and explained, rather than experienced. And the law—well, the law supported her father’s belief system. Any feelings you had in the context of a courtroom had an explanation. You were given permission to be emotional, in a logical setting. What you felt for your clients was not really what was in your own heart, or so you could pretend, so that no one ever got close enough to hurt you.

  Alex’s father had had a stroke when she was a second-year law student. She had sat on the edge of his hospital bed and told him she loved him.

  “Oh, Alex,” he’d sighed. “Let’s not bother with that.”

  She hadn’t cried at his funeral, because she knew that’s what he would have wanted.

  Had her own father wished, as she did now, that the basis of their relationship had been different? Had he eventually given up hoping, settling for teacher and student instead of parent and child? How long could you march along on a parallel track with your child before you lost any chance of intersecting her life?

  She’d read countless websites about grief and its stages; she’d studied the aftermath of other school shootings. She could do research, but when she tried to connect with Josie, her daughter looked at her as if she’d never seen her before. At other times, Josie burst into tears. Alex didn’t know how to combat either outcome. She felt incompetent—and then she’d remember that this wasn’t about her, it was about Josie—and she’d feel even more like a failure.

  The great irony hadn’t escaped Alex: she was more like her father than he ever might have guessed. She felt comfortable in her courtroom, in a way she did not feel in the confines of her own home. She knew just what to say to a defendant who’d come in with his third DUI charge, but she couldn’t sustain a five-minute conversation with her own child.

  Ten days after the shooting at Sterling High, Alex went into Josie’s bedroom. It was midafternoon and the curtains were shut tight; Josie was hidden in the cocoon she’d made of her bedcovers. Although her immediate instinct was to snap open the shades and let the sunlight in, Alex lay down on the bed instead. She wrapped her arms around the bundle that was her daughter. “When you were little,” Alex said, “sometimes I’d come in here and sleep with you.”

  There was a shifting, and the sheets fell away from Josie’s face. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her face swollen. “Why?”

  She shrugged. “I was never a big fan of thunderstorms.”

  “How come I never woke up and found you here?”

  “I always went back to my own bed. I was supposed to be the tough one . . . . I didn’t want you to think I was scared of anything.”

  “Supermom,” Josie whispered.

  “But I’m scared of losing you,” Alex said. “I’m scared it’s already happened.”

  Josie stared at her for a moment. “I’m scared of losing me, too.”

  Alex sat up and tucked Josie’s hair behind her ear. “Let’s get out of here,” she suggested.

  Josie froze. “I don’t want to go out.”

  “Sweetheart, it would be good for you. It’s like physical therapy, but for the brain. Go through the motions, the pattern of your everyday life, and eventually you remember how to do it naturally.”

  “You don’t understand . . .”

  “If you don’t try, Jo,” she said, “then that means he wins.”

  Josie’s head snapped up. Alex didn’t have to tell her who he was. “Did you guess?” Alex heard herself asking.

  “Guess what?”

  “That he might do this?”

  “Mom, I don’t want to—”

  “I keep thinking about him as a little boy,” Alex said.

  Josie shook her head. “That was a really long time ago,” she murmured. “People change.”

  “I know. But sometimes I can still see him handing you that rifle—”

  “We were little,” Josie interrupted, her eyes filling with tears. “We were stupid.” She pushed back the covers, in a sudden hurry. “I thought you wanted to go somewhere.”

  Alex looked at her. A lawyer would press the point. A mother, though, might not.

  Minutes later, Josie was sitting in the passenger seat of the car beside Alex. She buckled the seat belt, then unlatched it, then secured it again. Alex watched her tug on the belt to make sure it would lock up.

  She pointed out the obvious as they drove—that the first daffodils had pushed their brave heads through the snow on the median strip of Main Street; that the Sterling College crew tea