The minute after I arrest Jacob Hunt, all hell breaks loose. His mother cries out and starts shouting at the same moment that I put my hand on Jacob’s shoulder to lead him back to the room where we do our fingerprints and mug shots-but from his reaction, you would have thought I’d just run him through with a sword. He takes a swing at me, which sets off his lawyer, who-being a lawyer-is no doubt already wondering how to keep his client from being charged for assault on an officer as well. “Jacob!” his mother shrieks, and then she grabs my arm. “Don’t touch him. He doesn’t like to be touched.”
I gingerly test my jaw where he’s decked me. “Yeah, well, I don’t like to be punched,” I mutter, and I twist Jacob’s arms behind his back and handcuff him. “I need to type up some paperwork for your son. Then we’ll drive him down to the courthouse for his arraignment.”
“He can’t handle all this,” Emma argues. “At least let me stay with him, so that he knows it’s going to be all right-”
“You can’t,” I say flatly.
“You wouldn’t interrogate someone deaf without an interpreter!”
“With all due respect, ma’am, your son isn’t deaf.” I meet her gaze. “If you don’t leave, I’m going to arrest you as well.”
“Emma,” the lawyer murmurs, taking her arm.
“Let go of me,” she says, shaking him off. She takes a step toward her flailing son, but one of the other officers stops her.
“Get them out of here,” I order as I start to drag Jacob down the hall to the processing room.
It’s like trying to wrestle a bull into the backseat of a car. “Look,” I say, “you just have to relax.” But he is still struggling against my hold when I finally shove him into the small space. There’s a fingerprinting machine in there, plus the camera we use for mug shots, expensive equipment that in my mind’s eye I’m seeing shattered by Jacob’s tantrum. “Stand here,” I say, pointing to a white line on the floor. “Look at the camera.”
Jacob lifts up his face and closes his eyes.
“Open them,” I say.
He does-and rolls them toward the ceiling. After a minute, I take the damn picture anyway, and then his profile shots.
It’s when he’s turned to his right that he notices the fingerprint machine and goes very still. “Is that a LiveScan?” Jacob murmurs, the first coherent words he’s said since I placed him under arrest.
“Yup.” I stand at the keypad and suddenly realize that there is a much easier way to go about processing Jacob. “You want to see how it works?”
It’s like a switch has been flipped; the crazed tornado has morphed into a curious kid. He takes a step closer. “They’re digital files, right?”
“Yeah.” I type Jacob’s name onto the keypad. “What’s your middle initial?”
“B.”
“Date of birth?”
“December twenty-first, 1991,” he says.
“You wouldn’t happen to know your social security-”
He rattles off a string of numbers, looking over my shoulder at the next entry. “Weight: 185 pounds,” Jacob says, growing more animated. “Occupation: Student. Place of Birth: Burlington, Vermont.”
I reach for a bottle of Corn Huskers lotion that we use to make sure the ridges are slightly damp and all friction skin is captured and realize Jacob’s hands are still cuffed behind him. “I’d like to show you how this machine operates,” I say slowly, “but I can’t do it if you’re in handcuffs.”
“Right. I understand,” Jacob says, but he’s staring at the screen on the LiveScan machine, and I think if I’d told him that he’d have to give up one of his limbs in return for seeing the scan in action, he would have eagerly agreed. I unlock the cuffs and wipe his fingertips down with the lotion before taking his right hand in mine.
“First we do the thumb flats,” I say, pressing Jacob’s down one at a time. “Then we do flats of the fingers.” It’s a simultaneous impression, the four fingers of each hand pressed on the glass surface at once. “Once the computer’s got these loaded, the other images are matched up against them. You roll side to side, thumbs inward, fingers outward,” I say, illustrating with the first of his fingers and following through with the rest.
When the machine rejects one of the rolled fingers, Jacob’s eyebrows shoot up. “That is remarkable,” he says. “It won’t enter a shoddy print?”
“Nope. It lets me know when I’ve lifted the finger too soon or if the print is too dark, so I can redo the scan.” When I finish with his fingers, I press his palm flat on the surface-it’s the type of print we find most often on windows, if a criminal’s been peeking inside-and then I scan a writer’s palm print, the curved edge of the hand along the pinkie finger down to the wrist. By the time I switch to Jacob’s left hand, he’s practically doing it himself. “It’s that easy,” I say, as the images line up on the screen.
“So you’ll send out searches to AFIS right from here?” Jacob asks.
“That’s the plan.” Having a digital LiveScan that connects to the Automated Fingerprint Identification System is a godsend; I am old enough to remember when it was far more complicated than it is now. The prints are sent to the state central depository, which documents the arrest and sends it along to the FBI. After I lock Jacob up, I will come back to see if there are any other crimes in his past for which he has a record.
I’m guessing there will not be any other hits, but that doesn’t mean this is the first time Jacob’s acted out. It only means it’s the first time he’s been caught.
The printer spits out a card that I’ll put in his arrest folder, along with his mug shots. At the top, all of Jacob’s biographical information is listed. Below are ten small squares, each with a rolled print. Under those are the ten fingertip digits, lined up like an army of soldiers.
In that instant, I happen to notice Jacob’s face. His eyes are shining; his mouth is bent into a smile. He’s been arrested for murder, yet he’s on cloud nine, because he’s gotten to see a LiveScan system up close and personal.
I hit a button, and a second card is printed. “Here.” I hand it to him.
He starts to bounce on the balls of his feet. “You mean… I can keep it?”
“Why the hell not,” I say. While he’s entranced by the printout, I grasp his elbow to lead him to the lockup. This time, he doesn’t go ballistic when I touch him. He doesn’t even notice.
Once, I was called in to a suicide. The guy had OD’d on sleeping pills when he was supposed to be babysitting for his sister’s twins. The kids were ten-year-old boys, holy terrors. When they couldn’t wake up their uncle, they decided to horse around with him. They covered his face with whipped cream and put a cherry on his nose, which is the first thing I saw when I took a look at the body stretched out on the living room couch.
Those kids never realized the guy was dead.
Eventually, of course, they would have been told. And even though my work was done at that point, I thought about the twins a lot. You just know that after they found out, they were never quite the same. I was probably one of the last people to see those boys when they were still just two kids, when death was the farthest thing from their minds.
That’s what haunts me at night. Not the dead bodies I find, but the live ones I leave in my wake.
When I lock Jacob inside our holding cell, he doesn’t react-and that scares me more than his earlier outburst. “I’m coming back for you,” I say. “I just have to finish doing a little paperwork, and then we’ll go to the courthouse. Okay?”
He doesn’t answer. In his right hand, he clutches the fingerprint card. His left hand is flapping against his thigh.
“Why don’t you sit down?” I say.
Instead of taking a seat on the bunk, Jacob immediately sinks down onto the concrete floor.
We have a video camera pointed into the cell, so that someone is always watching over a perp. I should be going through the paperwork, which takes forever, but instead, I swing into dispatch to stare at the monitor. For ten whole minutes, Jacob Hunt doesn’t move, unless you count the way his hand is fluttering. Then, very slowly, he scoots backward until he is leaning against the wall, pressed against the corner of the cell. His mouth is moving.
“What the hell is he saying?” I ask the dispatcher.
“Beats me.”
I walk out of dispatch and crack the door that leads to the holding cell. Jacob’s voice is faint:
All around in my hometown,
They’re trying to track me down.
They say they want to bring me in guilty
For the killing of a deputy.
I swing open the door and walk up to the cell. Jacob is still singing, his voice rising and falling. My footsteps echo on the concrete, but he doesn’t stop, not even when I am standing on the other side of the bars, directly in front of him, with my arms crossed.
He sings through the chorus two more times before he stops. He doesn’t look at me, but I can tell from the way his shoulders square that he knows I’m here.
With a sigh, I realize that I’m not going to leave this kid alone again. And I’m not going to get my paperwork done unless I can convince him it’s another lesson in police procedure. “So,” I say, unlocking the cell door, “have you ever filled out an intake form?”
As soon as I hear the detective say that he’ll arrest Emma Hunt if she doesn’t shut up, I snap out of the panic I am in, a panic induced by the sentence he spoke just slightly before that: Then we’ll drive him down to the courthouse for his arraignment.
What the hell do I know about arraignments?
I have won a couple of civil suits. But a criminal arraignment is a whole different animal.
We are in Emma’s car, driving to the courthouse, but that was a struggle. She didn’t want to leave the police station without Jacob; the only way I managed to convince her to leave was by pointing her in the direction of where her son would be heading. “I ought to be with him,” she says, running a red light. “I’m his mother, for God’s sake.” As if that triggers something else in her mind, she grimaces. “Theo. Oh my God, Theo… He doesn’t even know we’re here…”
I don’t know who Theo is, and to be honest, I don’t have time to care. I am busy wondering where I am supposed to stand in the courtroom.
What do I say?
Do I speak first, or does the prosecutor?
“This is a total misunderstanding,” Emma insists. “Jacob’s never hurt anyone. This couldn’t be his fault.”
Actually, I don’t even know which courtroom to go to.
“Are you even listening?” Emma asks, and I realize at that moment she must have asked me a question.
“Yes,” I say, figuring I have a 50 percent chance of being right.
She narrows her eyes. “Left or right,” she repeats.
We are sitting at a stop sign. “Left,” I murmur.
“What happens at the arraignment?” she asks. “Jacob won’t have to talk, will he?”
“No. The lawyer does. I mean, I do. The whole point of an arraignment is just to read the charges and set bail.” This much I remember from law school, anyway.
But it’s not the right thing to say to Emma. “Bail?” she repeats. “They’re going to lock Jacob up?”
“I don’t know,” I say, totally honest. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Emma parks in the courthouse lot. “When will he get here?”
I don’t know the answer to that. What I do know is that it’s nearly the end of the business day, and if Detective Matson doesn’t get his ass in gear, Jacob’s going to be spending the night at the county jail-but there’s no way I’m going to tell Emma that.
It’s quiet inside the courthouse; most of the cases are through for the day. However, mine is just beginning, and I need a crash course in criminal law before my client figures out I’m a total fraud. “Why don’t you wait here?” I suggest, pointing to a chair in the lobby.
“Where are you going?”
“To do, um, some paperwork that needs to be filed before Jacob arrives,” I say, trying to look as confident as possible, and then I make a beeline for the office of the clerk.
It’s just like nurses in a hospital tend to know more than the doctors most of the time; if you really want to get the answer to a question about court, you should spend more time buttering up the clerks than the judges. “Hello,” I say to the small, dark-haired woman peering into a computer screen. “I’m here for a criminal arraignment.”
She flicks a glance upward. “How nice for you,” she says flatly.
My gaze falls on a nameplate on her desk. “I wonder, Dorothy, if you could tell me in which courtroom that might take place?”
“The criminal courtroom would be a safe bet…”
“Right.” I smile, as if I knew this all along. “And the judge…?”
“If it’s Monday, it’s Judge Cuttings,” she says.
“Thanks. Thanks very much,” I reply. “Really nice to meet you.”
“The highlight of my day,” Dorothy intones.
I am about to walk out the door when I turn back at the last moment. “One more thing…”
“Yes?”
“Am I, um, supposed to say anything?”
She looks up from her computer. “The judge will ask you whether your client pleads guilty or not guilty,” Dorothy answers.
“Great,” I say. “I really appreciate that.”
In the lobby, I find Emma hanging up her cell phone. “So?” she asks.
I sink into the empty seat beside her. “Piece of cake,” I tell her, and I hope I can convince myself.
Emma and I sit through three drug possession charges, one B and E, and an indecent exposure charge before Jacob is brought into the courtroom. From my vantage point in the gallery, I can tell the moment Emma notices he’s here: she sits up a little straighter, and her breath catches in her throat.
If you have spent any time in a courtroom, you’ll know that high school football players-the mean ones with no necks-grow up and become bailiffs. Two of these behemoths are manhandling Jacob, who’s doing his damnedest to get the hell away from them. He keeps craning his neck, looking at the people in the courtroom, and as soon as he spots Emma, his entire body sags with relief.
I stand up, heading down from the gallery, because it’s showtime, and realize too late that Emma’s following me. “You have to stay here,” I whisper over my shoulder as I take my place at the defendant’s table beside my client.
“Hi,” I say to Jacob under my breath. “My name’s Oliver. Your mom hired me to be your lawyer, and I’ve got it all under control. Don’t say anything to the judge. Just let me do the talking.”
The whole time I’m speaking, Jacob is looking at his lap. The minute I finish, he twists in his seat. “Mom,” he calls out, “what’s going on?”
“Counselor,” the bigger bailiff says, “either shut your client up or he’s going back in the holding cell.”
“I just told you not to talk to anybody,” I tell Jacob.
“You told me not to say anything to the judge.”
“You can’t talk to anybody,” I clarify. “Do you understand?”
Jacob glances down at the table.
“Jacob? Hello?”
“You told me not to talk to anybody,” he mutters. “Will you make up your mind already?”
Judge Cuttings is a hard-boiled New Englander who, in his time off, runs a llama farm and who, in my opinion, looks a little like a llama himself. He has just announced Jacob’s name when Dorothy the clerk enters through a side door and passes him a note. Looking down his long nose at it, he sighs. “I have two arraignments for Mr. Robichaud that need to be done in another courtroom. Since he’s currently here with his clients, I’ll do those first, and then we’ll take the prisoner’s case.”
The minute he says the word prisoner, Jacob jumps to his feet. “I need a sensory break,” he announces.
“Shut up,” I murmur.
“I need a sensory break!”
Dozens of thoughts are running through my mind: How do I get the kid to stop talking? How do I get the judge to forget everything that’s unfolding before his eyes? How would a seasoned lawyer handle a situation like this, when a client becomes a loose cannon? How long before I am seasoned enough to stop second-guessing myself?
The minute Jacob takes a step, the two bailiffs are on top of him. He starts screaming, a high, keening sound. “Let go of him!” Emma shrieks behind me. “He doesn’t understand! He’s allowed to get up in school when things are overwhelming-”
“This isn’t school,” the judge thunders. “This is my courtroom, and you, madam, will be leaving it.”
The second bailiff releases Jacob and steps into the gallery to pull Emma outside. “I can explain,” she cries, but her voice gets fainter as she’s forced down the aisle.
I look from her to my client, who has gone boneless and is being dragged out a different door. “Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty ape!” Jacob yells.
The judge narrows his eyes at me.
“It’s from Planet of the Apes,” I mutter.
“I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore,” he replies. “That’s from Network. I highly recommend you watch the movie after you get your client under control.”
I duck my head and hurry down the aisle. Emma stands outside the courtroom door, flushed and angry, her eyes shooting daggers at the bailiff. “Your kid can wait till the courtroom’s empty,” he says to me. “That’s when we’ll arraign him. And the mother can’t come back inside until then.”
He enters the courtroom again; the door opens with a gasp. That leaves me standing alone in the hallway with Emma, who grabs my hand and pulls me toward the staircase. “What… what are you doing?”
“He’s down there, isn’t he? Come on.”
“Hold it.” I dig in my heels and fold my arms. “What was that all about?”
“I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. That’s Asperger’s. Sometimes Jacob seems totally normal-brilliant, even-and sometimes the tiniest thing can set him off into a full-fledged fit.”
“Well, he can’t behave like that in a courtroom. I thought he knew all about crime scenes and cops and the law. He has to be respectful and quiet or this will be disastrous.”
“He’s trying,” Emma insists. “That’s why he asked for a sensory break.”
“A what?”
“A place he can go to away from all the noise and confusion, so that he can calm himself down. At school, that’s one of the special accommodations he gets… Look, can we talk about this later and just go see him?”
Jacob was getting his sensory break… in a holding cell. “You aren’t allowed down there.”
She flinches, as if I’ve struck her. “Well,” Emma says, “are you?”
To be honest, I am not sure. I poke my head inside the courtroom. The bailiff stands just inside the door, arms folded. “Can I go talk to my client?” I whisper.
“Yeah,” he says. “Go ahead.”
I wait for him to take me to Jacob, but he doesn’t budge. “Thanks,” I say, and I duck out the door again and head past Emma, down the stairs.
I hope that’s where the holding cells are.
After five minutes of detours through the custodial closet and the boiler room, I find what I’m looking for. Jacob is sitting in the corner of this cell, one hand flapping like a bird, his shoulders hunched, his voice thready and singing Bob Marley.
“How come you sing that song?” I ask, coming to stand in front of the bars.
He pauses in the middle of the chorus. “It makes me feel better.”
I consider this. “You know any Dylan?” When he doesn’t answer, I step forward. “Look, Jacob. I know you don’t know what’s going on. And to be honest, neither do I. I’ve never done this before. But we’re going to figure it out together. All you have to do is promise me one thing: Let me do the talking.” I wait for Jacob to nod, to acknowledge me, but it doesn’t happen. “Do you trust me?”
“No,” he says. “I don’t.” Then he gets to his feet. “Will you give a message to my mom?”
“Sure.”
He curls his hands around the bars. His fingers are long, elegant. “Life is like a box of chocolates,” he whispers. “You never know what you’re gonna get.”
I laugh, thinking the boy can’t be all that bad off if he’s able to joke around. But then I realize that he’s not kidding. “I’ll tell her,” I say.
When I return, Emma is pacing. “Is he okay?” she asks, the minute I turn the corner. “Was he responsive?”
“Yes and yes,” I assure her. “Maybe Jacob’s stronger than you think he is.”
“You’re basing this insight on the five minutes you’ve spent with him?” She rolls her eyes. “He has to eat by six. If he doesn’t-”
“I’ll get him a snack from the vending machines.”
“It can’t have caseins or glutens-”
I have no freaking idea what that means. “Emma, you have to relax.”
She rounds on me. “My older son, who’s autistic, has just been arrested for murder. He’s stuck in a jail cell somewhere in the basement, for God’s sake. Don’t you dare tell me to relax.”
“Well, it won’t do Jacob any good if you lose it in the courtroom again.” When she doesn’t respond, I sit down on a bench across the hall. “He wanted me to tell you something.”
The hope on her face is so naked that I have to look away.
“Life is like a box of chocolates,” I quote.
With a sigh, Emma sinks down beside me. “Forrest Gump. That’s one of his favorites.”
“Movie buff?”
“An intense one. It’s almost like he’s studying for a test he’ll have to take later.” She glances at me. “When he feels something overwhelming, he doesn’t always have the words for it, so he quotes someone else’s.”
I think about Jacob spouting Charlton Heston when the bailiff grabbed him and smile broadly.
“He sets up crime scenes for me,” Emma says softly. “So that I can look at the forensic evidence and work backward. But I should have been working forward. We never really talked about what happens after. What happens now.”
“I know you’re upset, but we have a lot of time to figure it out. Today’s arraignment is just a rubber stamp.”
She stares at me. When I was in college, the girls that I always found myself drooling over were the ones who had dabs of toothpaste on their chins, or who stuck pencils through their messy hair to keep it away from their faces. The ones who slayed me were so far removed from caring how they looked that they circled back to a natural, artless beauty. Emma Hunt might be a decade older than me, but she’s still a knockout. “How old are you?” she asks after a moment.
“I don’t really think that chronological age is a decent measure of-”
“Twenty-four,” she guesses.
“Twenty-eight.”
She closes her eyes and shakes her head. “I was twenty-eight a thousand years ago.”
“Then you look great for your age,” I say.
Blinking, she focuses fiercely on me. “Promise,” she demands. “Promise me that you’re going to get my son out of here.”
I nod at her, and for a moment I want to be a white knight; I want to be able to tell her I know law as well as I know how to shoe a skittish mare, and I don’t want it to be a lie. Just then the bailiff peers around the corner. “We’re ready,” he says.
I only wish I could say the same.
The courtroom is different when it’s empty. Dust motes hang in the air, and my footsteps sound like gunshots on the parquet flooring. Emma and I walk to the front of the gallery, where I leave her sitting just behind the bar as I cross through to sit at the defense table.
It’s déjà vu.
Jacob is led out by the bailiffs. He’s handcuffed, and I hear Emma suck in her breath behind me when she notices. But then again, he left the courtroom violent; there’s no reason to assume he wouldn’t pull the same trick twice. When he sits down beside me, the handcuffs jingle in his lap. He presses his lips together in a flat line, as if he’s trying to show me he remembers my instructions.
“All rise,” the bailiff says, and when I stand up, I grab Jacob’s sleeve so he will, too.
Judge Cuttings enters and sits down heavily in his chair, his robes billowing around him like a storm. “I trust you’ve talked to your client about his behavior in the courtroom, Counselor?”
“Yes, Your Honor,” I answer. “I’m sorry about the outburst. Jacob’s autistic.”
The judge frowns. “Are you concerned about competency?”
“Yes,” I reply.
“All right. Mr. Bond, your client is here to be arraigned on a charge of first-degree murder pursuant to 13 VSA, section 2301. Do you waive the reading of the rights on his behalf at this time?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
He nods. “I’m going to enter a not guilty plea on his behalf, because of the competency issue.”
For a moment, I hesitate. If the judge enters the plea, does that mean I don’t have to?
“Are there any other issues with the charge as it stands today, Counselor?”
“I don’t think so, Your Honor…”
“Excellent. This is bound over for a competency hearing fourteen days from today at nine A.M. I’ll see you then, Mr. Bond.”
The larger bailiff approaches the defense table and hauls Jacob to his feet. He lets loose a squeak, and then, remembering the rules of the courtroom, squelches it. “Hang on a minute,” I interrupt. “Judge, didn’t you just say we could go?”
“I said you could go, Counselor. Your client, on the other hand, is charged with murder and being held pending his competency hearing at your own request.”
As he leaves the bench to return to chambers, as Jacob is pulled out of the courtroom again-silent, this time-headed to a two-week stay in jail, I gather the courage to turn around and confess to Emma Hunt that I’ve just done everything I told her I wouldn’t.
My mother doesn’t cry very often. The first time, like I said, was at the library when I had a tantrum instead of Jacob. The second time was when I was ten years old and Jacob was thirteen and he had homework for his life skills class-an extracurricular he hated because he was one of only two autistic kids, and the other boy didn’t have AS but was lower on the spectrum and spent most of the class lining up crayons end to end. The other three kids in the class had Down syndrome or developmental disabilities. Because of this, a lot of time was spent on things like hygiene-stuff Jacob already knew how to do-with a little bit of social skills tossed in. And one day, his teacher assigned the class to make a friend before the next time they all met.
“You don’t make a friend,” Jacob said with a scowl. “It’s not like they come with directions like you’d find on a box of macaroni and cheese.”
“All you have to do is remember the steps that Mrs. LaFoye gave you,” my mother said. “Look someone in the eye, tell them your name, ask them if they’d like to play.”
Even at ten, I knew that this protocol would surely lead to getting your ass kicked, but I wasn’t going to tell Jacob that.
So the three of us trekked to the local playground, and I sat down next to my mother on a bench while Jacob set out to make a friend. The problem was, there was no one his age there. The oldest kid I could see was about my age, and he was hanging upside down from the monkey bars. Jacob walked up to him and twisted sideways so that he could look the kid in the eye. “My name is Jacob,” he said in his voice, which I’m used to but which is weird to everyone else-flat as a sheet of aluminum, even in places where there should be exclamation points. “Do you want to play?”
The kid did a neat flip onto the ground. “Are you, like, some kind of retard?”
Jacob considered this. “No.”
“News flash,” the boy said. “You are.”
The kid ran off, leaving Jacob standing alone under the monkey bars. I almost got up to rescue him, but then he started to turn in a slow circle. I couldn’t figure out what he was doing, and then I realized he liked the sound his sneaker made when it crunched a dry leaf underneath the sole.
He walked on his tiptoes, very precisely crushing the leaves, until he reached the sandbox. A pair of tiny kids-one blond and one with red pigtails-were busy making pizzas out of sand. “Here’s another one,” the first girl said, and she slapped a glob of sand onto the wooden railing so that the other girl could decorate it with pepperoni rocks and mozzarella grass.
“Hi, I’m Jacob,” my brother said.
“I’m Annika, and I’m going to be a unicorn when I grow up,” the blonde said.
Pigtails didn’t look up from the pizza assembly line. “My little brother threw up in the bathroom and slipped in it and landed on his butt.”
“Do you want to play?” Jacob asked. “We could dig for dinosaurs.”
“There aren’t any dinosaurs in the sandbox, just pizza,” Annika said. “Maggie’s the one who gets to put on the cheese and stuff, but you can be the waiter.”
Jacob looked like a giant in the sandbox beside those two girls. A woman was staring daggers at him, and I would have bet fifty bucks it was either Annika’s or Maggie’s mom, wondering if the thirteen-year-old playing with her precious little daughter was a perv. Jacob picked up a stick and began to outline a skeleton in the sand. “The allosaurus had a wishbone, like other meat-eating dinosaurs,” he said. “Just like you’d find on a chicken.”
“Here’s another one,” Annika said, and she dumped a pile of sand in front of Maggie. You could practically draw a line between the little girls and Jacob. They weren’t playing together as much as they were playing next to each other.
Jacob looked up at that moment and grinned at me. He tipped his head toward the girls as if to say, Hey, check it out, I made two friends.
I glanced at my mother, and that’s when I saw her crying. Tears were rolling down her cheeks and she wasn’t doing anything to try to wipe them away. It was almost as if she didn’t know it was happening.
There were plenty of other times in my life that it would have made more sense for my mother to cry: when she had to go to the school to talk to the principal about something Jacob had done to get himself into trouble, for example. Or when he had one of his tantrums in the middle of a crowded space-like last year, in front of the Santa Claus pavilion at the mall while a bazillion kids and parents watched the nuclear meltdown ensue. But then, my mother had been dry-eyed, her face wiped clean of expression. In fact, during those moments, my mother looked a little like Jacob did.
I don’t know why seeing my brother with two little girls in a sandbox was a straw that broke the so-called camel’s back, for her. I just know that, at that moment, I remember feeling like the world had turned itself inside out. It’s the child who’s supposed to cry, and the mom who makes it all better, not the other way around, which is why mothers will move heaven and earth to hold it together in front of their own kids.
Even then I knew that if Jacob was the one who made her cry, I was the one who had to stop it.
Of course I know where they are; my mother has called me from the courthouse. But that doesn’t keep me from being unable to concentrate on Civitas or Geo until they come home.
I wonder if my teachers will accept that as an excuse: Sorry I didn’t get my homework done: my brother was being arraigned.
Sure, my geometry teacher will say. Like I haven’t heard that one a thousand times.
The minute I hear the door open, I run into the mudroom to find out what happened. My mother walks in, alone, and sits down on the bench where we usually dump our school backpacks.
“Where’s Jacob?” I ask, and very slowly she looks up at me.
“In jail,” she whispers. “Oh, my God, he’s in jail.” She bends at the waist until she is doubled over.
“Mom?” I touch her shoulder, but she doesn’t move. It scares me to death, and it’s eerily familiar.
It takes me a second to place it-the way she’s staring off into space, the way she won’t respond: this is how Jacob looked last week, when we couldn’t get him to come back to us.
“Come on, Mom.” I slip an arm around her waist and lift her. She feels like a bag of bones. I guide her upstairs, wondering why the hell Jacob is in jail. Aren’t you supposed to be guaranteed the right to a speedy trial? Could it have been that speedy? If only I’d done my Civitas homework, maybe I’d understand what had happened, but this much I know: I am not about to ask my mother.
I sit her down on the bed and then I kneel and take off her shoes. “Just lie down,” I suggest, which seems like something she’d say if the tables were turned. “I’ll get you a cup of tea, okay?”
In the kitchen I set the kettle to boil and have a tsunami of déjà vu: the last time I did this-boil a kettle, take out a tea bag, and hook its paper tag over the edge of a mug-I was in Jess Ogilvy’s house. It’s really just a matter of luck that Jacob’s the one sitting in jail right now, and I’m here. It could easily have been the other way around.
Part of me is relieved about that, which makes me feel like total crap.
I wonder what the detective said to Jacob. Why my mother brought him down there in the first place. Maybe that’s why she’s so messed up now: not grief but guilt. That much, I understand. If I’d gone to the cops and told them I had seen Jess alive and naked earlier that day, would it have made matters worse for Jacob, or better?
I don’t really know how my mother takes her tea, so I put in milk and sugar and carry it upstairs. She is sitting up now, the pillows piled behind her. When she sees me, she tears up. “My boy,” she says, as I sit down beside her. She cups her hand around my cheek. “My beautiful boy.”
She might be talking about me, and she might be talking about Jacob. I decide it doesn’t really matter.
“Mom,” I ask. “What’s going on?”
“Jacob has to stay in jail… for two weeks. Then they’ll take him to court again to see if he’s competent to stand trial.”
Okay, I may not be a rocket scientist, but sticking someone who may not be able to handle a trial in jail doesn’t seem like the best way to see if they’re able to handle a trial. I mean, if you can’t handle a trial, how the hell could you handle jail?
“But… he hasn’t done anything wrong,” I say, and I look carefully at my mother, to see if she knows more than I do.
If she does, she’s not showing it. “That doesn’t seem to matter.”
Today in Civitas we talked about the cornerstone of our country’s legal system: that you’re innocent until proven guilty. Locking someone up in jail while you try to figure out what to do next doesn’t seem like you’re giving him the benefit of the doubt. It sounds like you’re already assuming he’s screwed, so he might as well get comfortable in his future living quarters.
My mother tells me how Jacob got suckered into talking to the detective. How she ran to find him a lawyer. How Jacob was arrested in front of her. How he decked the bailiffs when they tried to grab his arms.
I don’t understand why this lawyer wasn’t able to get Jacob released and back home. I read enough Grisham novels to know that happens all the time, especially for people who don’t have a previous record.
“So what happens now?” I ask.
I don’t just mean for Jacob, either. I mean for us. All those years I wished Jacob didn’t exist, and now that he’s not in the house, it’s like there’s an elephant in the room. How am I supposed to make a can of soup for dinner, knowing that my brother is in a cell somewhere? How am I supposed to get up in the morning, go to school, pretend that this is life as usual?
“Oliver-that’s the lawyer-says that people get unarrested all the time. The police get some new evidence, and they let the original suspect go.”
She is holding on to this like it’s a lucky charm, a rabbit’s foot, an amulet. Jacob will be unarrested, and we can all go back to the way we were. Never mind that the way we were wasn’t that terrific, or that unarrested doesn’t mean the slate is wiped entirely clear so you forget what happened. Imagine spending twenty years in prison for a crime you never committed before you’re acquitted thanks to DNA evidence. Sure, you’re free now, but you don’t get back those twenty years. You don’t ever stop being “that guy who used to be in prison.”
Because I don’t know how to say this to her-and I’m sure she wouldn’t want to hear it, anyway-I reach for the remote control on her nightstand and turn on the TV that’s sitting on the dresser across the room. The news is on, the weatherman predicting a storm sometime next week. “Thanks, Norm,” the anchorwoman says. “Breaking news in the case of the murder of Jessica Ogilvy… Police have arrested eighteen-year-old Jacob Hunt of Townsend, Vermont, in connection with the crime.”
Beside me, my mother freezes. Jacob’s school photo fills the screen. In it, he is wearing a striped blue shirt and, as usual, not staring at the camera. “Jacob is a senior at Townsend Regional High School and was tutored by the victim.”
Holy shit.
“We’ll have more on this story as it develops,” the anchor promises.
My mother lifts the remote control. I figure she is going to turn off the television, but instead, she hurls it at the screen. The remote breaks apart, and the TV screen cracks. She rolls onto her side.
“I’ll get the broom,” I say.
In the middle of the night, I hear noises in the kitchen. I creep downstairs to find my mother, rummaging through a drawer to find the phone book. Her hair is loose, her feet are bare, and there’s a toothpaste stain on her shirt. “Why isn’t it listed under ‘Government,’” she mutters.
“What are you doing?”
“I have to call the jail,” she says. “He doesn’t like it when it’s dark. I could bring him a night-light. I want them to know that I can bring him a night-light, if that helps.”
“Mom,” I say.
She picks up the telephone.
“Mom… you need to go to bed.”
“No,” she corrects. “I need to call the jail-”
“It’s three in the morning. They’re asleep.” I look at her. “Jacob’s asleep.”
She turns her face to mine. “Do you really think so?”
“Yeah,” I say, but the word has to squeeze itself out around the knot in my throat. “Yeah, I do.”
Here are the things I am afraid of:
That the subject Jacob loves the most has stopped being an interest and has started to become an obsession.
That this is why he’s in jail in the first place.
That when he was last with Jess, something made him feel scared, or cornered, which is what makes him snap.
That you can love someone and hate him at the same time.
That age has nothing to do with who is the older brother.
If you think having a brother who’s got Asperger’s makes me a pariah, imagine having one who’s in jail. The next day I am in school-yes, more on that later-and everywhere I go, I hear the whispers.
I heard he cut off her finger with a knife and kept it.
I heard he hit her with a baseball bat.
I always thought he was creepy.
The reason I’m taking up space in my classes today-and believe me, that’s all I’m doing, since my brain is too busy blocking the gossip I overhear-is that my mother thought it was the best plan. “I have to go to the jail,” she said, which I had figured would happen. “You can’t stay home for two weeks. You have to go back sometime.”
I knew she was right, but didn’t she also realize that people were going to ask about Jacob? Make assumptions? And not just the kids. Teachers would come up to me full of fake sympathy when what they really wanted was some dirt they could take back to the teachers’ lounge. The whole thing made me feel sick to my stomach.
“What am I supposed to say if someone asks?”
My mother hesitated. “Tell them your brother’s attorney said you can’t talk about it.”
“Is that true?”
“I have no idea.”
I took a deep breath. I was going to come clean, to tell her about breaking into Jess’s house. “Mom, I have to talk to you about something…”
“Can I take a rain check?” she said. “I want to be there when the doors open at nine. There’s plenty of cereal for breakfast, and you can take the bus.”
Now, I’m sitting in biology next to Elise Howath, who is a pretty good lab partner even if she’s a girl, when she slips a note to me.
I’m really sorry to hear about your brother.
I want to thank her, for being nice. For being the first person to give a shit about Jacob instead of crucifying him like the media and the stupid court already have for what he’s done.
What he’s done.
I grab my backpack and run out of class, even though Mr. Jennison is still yammering away, and he doesn’t even comment (which tells me, more than anything, that this is not my life but a parallel universe). I keep walking down the hall without a hall pass, and no one stops me. Not when I cruise past the principal’s office and the guidance department. Not when I bust through the double doors near the gym into the blinding light of afternoon and start walking.
Apparently in the public schools, if you have a relative arrested for murder, the administration and teachers pretend you are invisible.
Which, to be honest, isn’t really all that different from the way I was treated before.
I wish I had my skateboard with me. Then I could move faster, maybe outdistance the facts that keep circling in my head:
I saw Jess Ogilvy alive and well. Shortly after that, Jacob went to her house.
Now she’s dead.
I’ve seen my brother put a chair through a wall and smash a window with his hand. I’ve been in his way, sometimes, when he has a meltdown. I’ve got the scars to prove it.
You do the math.
My brother is a murderer. I test the words under my breath and immediately feel a pain in my chest. You can’t say it the way you’d say My brother is six feet tall or My brother likes scrambled eggs, even if they are all accurate facts. But the Jacob I knew a week ago is no different than the Jacob I saw this morning. So does that mean I was too stupid to notice some major flaw in my brother? Or that anyone-even Jacob-might suddenly turn into a person you never imagined?
I sure as hell qualify.
All my life I’ve thought I have nothing in common with my brother-and it turns out we are both criminals.
But you didn’t kill anyone.
The voice echoes in my head, an excuse. For all I know, Jacob’s got his reasons, too.
That makes me run faster. But I could be a goddamned bullet and still not manage to outstrip the sad fact that I’m no better than those assholes at school: I have already assumed my brother is guilty.
Behind the school, if you go far enough, you hit a pond. It’s a community hot spot in the winter-on weekends someone lights a bonfire and brings marshmallows to roast; and a few enterprising hockey dads sweep the ice with wide shovels so that pickup games can break out all across its surface. I step onto the ice, even though I don’t have skates with me.
It’s not crowded on a weekday. A few moms with toddlers, pushing milk crates as they learn to skate. An old man in those black figure skates that always make me think of Holland, or the Olympics. He’s doing figure eights. I dump my backpack on the edge of the snow and shuffle my feet little by little, until I am standing dead center.
Every year there’s a competition in Townsend to see when the ice will fully melt. They stick a pole in the ice that’s attached to some kind of digital clock, and when the ice melts enough for the pole to tilt, it trips a switch and records that moment in time. People put money down on which day and hour the ice will melt, and the person with the closest guess gets the jackpot. Last year, I think it was about $4,500.
What if the moment the ice melted was right now?
What if I went under?
Would those kids skating around hear the splash? Would the old man come to my rescue?
My English teacher says a rhetorical question is one that’s asked even though an answer isn’t expected: Is the Pope Catholic? Or Does a bear crap in the woods?
I think it’s a question that has an answer you don’t really want to hear.
Does this dress make me look fat?
Are you really that stupid?
If the ice melts and no one sees me go under, did I ever really exist?
If I were the one in jail, would Jacob believe the worst of me?
Just like that, I sit down in the middle of the pond, on the ice. It’s cold through my jeans. I picture myself freezing from the inside out. They will find me and I’ll be a sculpture, a statue.
“Hey, kid, you okay?” The old man has skated over to me. “You need some help?”
Like I said: an answer you don’t really want to hear.
I didn’t sleep much last night, but when I did, I dreamed. I dreamed that I was breaking Jacob out of jail. I did it by reading through all his CrimeBusters notebooks and copying the behavior of cat burglars. As soon as I rounded the corner of the prison where Jacob was being kept in a cell, he was ready. Jacob, I said, you have to do exactly what I tell you to do, and he did, which is how I knew it was a dream. He was quiet, and he followed my lead, and he didn’t ask any questions. We tiptoed past the guard booth, and we both hopped into a giant trash bin, covering ourselves with paper and garbage. The custodian finally came and wheeled us right through the buzzers and the locked gate, and just as he was about to dump the giant trash bin into the Dumpster outside, I yelled, Now! and Jacob and I jumped out and started running. We ran for hours, until the only things following us were falling stars, and then we finally stopped in a field of tall grass and laid down on our backs on the ground.
I didn’t do it, Jacob told me.
I believe you, I said, and it was really true.
On that day when Jacob was supposed to make a friend for homework, those two little girls he met in the sandbox had to leave. They ran off without saying good-bye, leaving my thirteen-year-old brother alone and digging in the sand.
I was afraid to look at my mother again. So instead, I walked to the sandbox and sat down on the edge. My knees came up to my chin; I was too big for the space-it was crazy to see my brother squeezed into it. I picked up a rock and started to paw through the sand with it. “What are we looking for?” I asked.
“Allosaurus,” Jacob replied.
“How are we going to know when we find it?”
Jacob’s face lit up. “Well, its vertebrae and skull won’t be as heavy as those of other dinosaurs. That’s what the name means, translated: different lizard.”
I imagined any kid Jacob’s age watching him play paleontologist in a sandbox and wondered if he’d ever have a friend.
“Theo,” he suddenly whispered, “you know we’re not really going to find allosaurus in here.”
“Um, yeah.” I laughed. “But if we did, that would be some story, wouldn’t it?”
“The news vans would come,” Jacob said.
“Screw the news, we’d be on Oprah,” I told him. “Two kids who find a dinosaur skeleton in a sandbox. We might even wind up on the Wheaties box.”
“The fabulous Hunt brothers.” Jacob grinned. “That’s what they’d call us.”
“The fabulous Hunt brothers,” I repeated, and I watched Jacob dig to the bottom with his shovel. I wondered how long it would be before I outgrew him.
I don’t really understand what’s happening.
At first I thought maybe this was protocol, like the way that my mother was wheeled out of the hospital after she gave birth to Theo, even though she could easily have walked and carried him in her arms. Maybe it was a liability issue, which is why the bailiffs had to get me out of the courtroom (this time they were a little more hesitant to touch me). I assumed they would lead me to the front of the building, or maybe to a loading dock where defendants could be picked up and taken home.
Instead, I was stuffed into the back of a police car and driven two hours and thirty-eight minutes to jail.
I do not want to be in jail.
The officers who drop me off are not the same ones who take me into the jail. This new one wears a different colored uniform and asks me the same questions that Detective Matson asked me at the police station. There are fluorescent lights on the ceiling, like they have at Walmart. I don’t enjoy going to Walmart for this very reason-the lights spit and hiss sometimes due to their transformers, and I worry that the ceiling will collapse on me. Even now, I cannot speak without glancing up at the ceiling every few moments. “I’d like to call my mother now,” I say to the officer.
“Well, I’d like a winning lottery ticket, but something tells me neither of us is going to get what we want.”
“I can’t stay here,” I tell him.
He’s still typing on his computer. “I don’t remember asking for your opinion.”
Is this man particularly thickheaded? Or is he trying to annoy me? “I’m a student,” I explain, the same way I might explain mass spectrometry to someone who doesn’t have a clue about trace evidence analysis. “I have to be at school by seven forty-seven in the morning, or else I won’t have time to get to my locker before class.”
“Consider yourself on winter break,” the officer says.
“Winter break isn’t until February fifteenth.”
He punches a button on the keyboard. “All right. Stand up,” he says, so I do. “What’s in your pockets?”
I glance down at my jacket. “My hands.”
“So you’re a wiseass,” the officer says. “Empty them, come on.”
Confused, I hold my palms up in front of me. There’s nothing in them.
“Your pockets.”
I pull out a stick of gum, a green pebble, a piece of sea glass, a strip of photographs of my mother and me, and my wallet. He takes them all. “Hey-”
“The money will be logged in to your account,” he says. I watch him write notes on a piece of paper, and then he opens my wallet and takes out my money and my picture of Dr. Henry Lee. He starts to count the money, and by accident, he drops the pile. When he gathers it back up, it’s out of order.
Sweat breaks out on my forehead. “The money,” I say.
“I didn’t take any, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I see a twenty rubbing up against a dollar bill, and the five-dollar bill is backward, with President Lincoln facedown.
In my wallet, I make sure that everything is in order from the smallest denomination to the biggest, and everything faces up. I have never taken cash out of my mother’s wallet without her permission, but sometimes when she is unaware I sneak into her purse and organize her money for her. I just don’t like the thought of all that chaos; the coin pocket is already haphazard enough.
“You okay?” the officer says, and I realize he is staring at me.
“Could you…” I can barely speak, my throat has gotten so tight. “Could you just put the bills in order?”
“What the hell?”
With my hand curled to my chest, I point a single finger at the stack of bills. “Please,” I whisper. “The ones go on top.”
If at least the money looks the way it is supposed to, that’s something that hasn’t changed.
“I don’t believe this,” the officer mutters, but he does it, and once that twenty is resting safely at the bottom of the pile, I let out the breath I’ve been holding.
“Thanks,” I say, even though I noticed at least two of the bills are still upside down.
Jacob, I tell myself, you can do this. It doesn’t matter if you are in another bed tonight instead of your own. It doesn’t matter if they do not let you brush your teeth. In the grand scheme of things, the world will not stop spinning. (That is a sentence my mother likes to use when I get nervous about a change in routine.)
Meanwhile the officer leads me to another room, one not much bigger than a closet. “Strip,” he says, and he folds his arms.
“Strip what?” I answer.
“All of it. Underwear, too.” When I realize he wants me to take off my clothes, I am so surprised that my jaw drops.
“I’m not changing in front of you,” I say, incredulous. I won’t even change for gym class in the locker room. I have a doctor’s note from Dr. Moon saying that I do not have to, that I can participate in class while wearing my normal clothes.
“Again,” the officer says, “I didn’t ask you.”
On television I’ve seen inmates wearing jumpsuits, although I never really gave much thought to what happened to their clothes. But what I am remembering now is bad. Very Bad, with capital letters. On television, the jumpsuits are always orange. Sometimes it is enough to make me change the channel.
I can feel my pulse accelerate at the thought of all that orange, touching my skin. Of the other inmates, wearing the same color. We would be like an ocean of hazard warnings, a sea of danger.
“If you don’t take off your clothes,” the officer says, “I will do it for you.”
I turn my back to him and peel off my coat. I pull my shirt over my head. My skin is white, like a fish belly, and I don’t have rippling stomach muscles like the Abercrombie & Fitch guys; this embarrasses me. I unzip my jeans and pull down my underwear and then remember my socks. Then I crouch into a ball and carefully organize my clothes so that the olive khaki pants are on the bottom, then the green shirt, finally the green boxers and socks.
The officer takes the clothes and starts shaking them out. “Hands out at your sides,” he says, and I close my eyes and do what he says, even when he makes me turn around and bend down and I can feel his fingers moving me apart. A soft cloth sack hits my chest. “Get dressed again.”
Inside it is clothing but not my own. Instead, there are three pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear, three T-shirts, thermal pants, a thermal top, three pairs of dark blue pants and matching shirts, rubber flip-flops, a jacket, a hat, gloves, a towel.
This is a huge relief. I won’t be wearing orange after all.
I have been to one sleepover in my life. It was at the home of a boy named Marshall, who has since moved to San Francisco. Marshall had a lazy eye and was, like me, often the butt of classmates’ jokes in second grade. Our mothers were the ones who organized the sleepover, after mine learned that Marshall could spell the names of most dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period as well.
My mother and I talked for two whole weeks about what would happen if I woke up in the middle of the night and wanted to come home (I’d call). What would happen if Marshall’s mother served something for breakfast that I didn’t like (I would say No thank you). We talked about how Marshall might not have his clothes organized in his closet the way I do and how he had a dog and dogs sometimes drop hair on the floor without intending to.
The night of the sleepover my mother dropped me off after dinner. Marshall asked if I wanted to watch Jurassic Park, and I said yes. But when I started telling him during the video what was anachronistic and what was downright fictionalized, he got angry and told me to shut up and I went to play with his dog instead.
The dog was a Yorkshire terrier with a pink bow in its hair even though it happened to be male. It had a very small pink tongue, and it licked my hand, which I thought I would like but which I wanted to wash off immediately.
That night when we went to sleep Marshall’s mother put a rolled blanket between us to divide up his full-size bed. She kissed him on the forehead and then she kissed me, which was strange because she was not my mother. Marshall told me that in the morning if we got up early we could watch TV before his mother got up and caught us. Then he fell asleep, but I didn’t. I was awake when the dog came into the room and burrowed underneath the covers, scratching me with its tiny black toenails. And I was still awake when Marshall wet the bed in his sleep, too.
I got up and called my mother. It was 4:24 A.M.
When she arrived, she knocked on the door, and Marshall’s mother answered it in her bathrobe. My mother thanked her on my behalf. “I guess Jacob’s an early riser,” she said. “Very early.” She tried to laugh a little, but it sounded like a brick falling.
When we got into the car, she said, “I’m sorry.”
Even though I didn’t meet her gaze, I could feel her looking at me. “Don’t ever do that to me again,” I answered.
I have to fill out a form for visitors. I can’t imagine who might want to come, so I write down my mother’s name and my brother’s name and our address, and their birth dates. I add Jess’s name, too, although I know she can’t visit, obviously, but I bet she would have wanted to.
Then a nurse examines me, taking my temperature and checking my pulse, just like at the doctor’s office. When she asks me if I’m on any medication, I tell her yes, but she gets angry when I don’t know the names of the supplements, when I can only tell her the colors, or the fact that it comes in a syringe.
Finally, I am taken to the place where I will be staying. The officer walks me down a hallway until we reach a booth. Inside, another officer pushes a button, and the metal door in front of us slides open. I am given another laundry bag, this one with two sheets and two blankets and a pillowcase.
The cells are on the left side of a hallway that has a metal grate instead of a floor. Each cell has two beds, a sink, a toilet, and a television inside it. Each cell also has two men inside. They look like the same people you would see on the street, except of course they have all done something bad.
Well, maybe not. After all, I’m here, too.
“You’ll stay here for a week while you’re evaluated,” the officer says. “Based on your behavior, you might be moved to the minimum-security population.” He nods at one cell, which, unlike the others, has a smaller window. “That’s the shower,” the officer says.
How am I supposed to make sure I shower first when there are so many other people around?
How am I going to brush my teeth when I don’t have my toothbrush with me?
How will I take my shot in the morning, and my supplements?
As I think about these details, I feel myself starting to lose control.
It’s not like a tsunami, although I’m sure that’s what it looks like to someone on the outside. It’s more like a packet of mail that’s wrapped tight several times with a rubber band. When it snaps, the band stays in place-out of habit, or out of muscle memory, I don’t know-and then one tiny move of the packet and it begins to unravel. Before you know it, there is nothing holding that packet of letters together.
My hand starts moving a little, my fingers playing a beat on my thigh.
Jess is dead and I am in jail and I missed CrimeBusters today and my right eye has a tic now that I can’t stop.
We stop walking when we reach the cell at the end of the hallway. “Home sweet home,” the officer says. He unlocks the door to the cell and waits for me to move inside.
The minute he locks the door again, I grab the bars. I can hear the lights buzzing overhead.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid didn’t go to jail; instead they jumped off a cliff. “Kid, the next time I say ‘Let’s go someplace like Bolivia,’” I mutter, “let’s go someplace like Bolivia.”
My head hurts, and out of the corners of my eyes, I am seeing red. I shut them, but the sounds are still there and my hands feel too big for my body and my skin is getting tighter. I picture it stretching so hard that it splits.
“Don’t worry,” a voice says. “You’ll get used to it.”
I spin around and hold my hands clutched in front of my chest, the way I used to walk sometimes when I wasn’t concentrating on looking like everyone else. I’d assumed the officer had put me in a special cell for people who have to be in jail but shouldn’t really be. I had not realized that I, like everyone else, would have a roommate.
He is wearing all his blue clothes plus his jacket and hat, pulled down to his eyebrows. “What’s your name?”
I stare at his face without looking him in the eye. He has a mole on his left cheek, and I have never liked people with moles. “I am Spartacus.”
“No shit? Then I hope you’re in here for killing your parents.” He gets up from the bunk and walks behind me. “How about I call you Bitch instead?” My hands grip the bars more tightly. “Let’s get some things straight, so that you and me, we get along. I get the bottom bunk. I get to go out to the exercise yard before you do. I pick the TV channel. You don’t fuck with me, and I won’t fuck with you.”
There is a common behavior in dogs that are put together in close quarters. One will snap at the other until the beta dog knows that the alpha dog is to be obeyed.
I am not a dog. Neither is this man. He is shorter than I am. The mole on his cheek is raised, and shaped like a beehive.
If Dr. Moon were here she’d ask, What’s the number?
Sixteen. On a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest, my anxiety level is a sixteen. Which is the worst number, because it’s (a) even, (b) has an even square root, and (c) its even square root has an even square root.
If my mother were here, she’d start singing “I Shot the Sheriff.” I stick my fingers in my ears so I cannot hear him and I close my eyes so I cannot see him and I start to repeat the chorus without any breaks between the words, just a ribbon of sound that I can imagine circling me like a force field.
Suddenly he grabs my shoulder. “Hey,” he says, and I start to scream.
His hat has fallen off so that I can see he is a redhead, and everyone knows that people with red hair don’t really have red hair, they have orange hair. And worse, his hair is long. It falls all around his face and his shoulders, and if he leans any closer it might land on me.
The sounds that I make are high and piercing, louder than the voices of everyone who is telling me to shut the fuck up, louder than the officer who tells me he’ll write me up if I do not stop. But I can’t, because by now, the sound is oozing out of all my pores and even when I press my lips together my body is screaming. I grab the bars of the cell door-contusions are caused by blood vessels that are broken as the result of the blow-and smack my head against them-cerebral contusion associated with subdural hematoma in the front lobe is associated with mortality-and again-each red blood cell is one-third hemoglobin-and then just as I predicted my skin cannot contain what’s happening inside me and it splits and the blood runs down my face and into my eyes and mouth.
I hear:
Get this fucking nutcase out of my house.
And
If he’s got AIDS I’m gonna sue this state for everything it’s got.
My blood tastes like pennies, like copper, like iron-Blood makes up seven percent of the total body weight-
“On the count of three,” I hear. Two people grab my arms and I am moving, but my feet don’t feel like they belong to me and it’s too yellow under the lights and there is metal in my mouth and metal on my wrists and then I don’t see or hear or taste anything at all.
I think I might be dead.
I make this deduction from the following facts:
1. The room that I am in is monochromatic-floor, walls, ceiling all the color of pale flesh.
2. The room is soft. When I walk, it feels like walking on a tongue. When I lean against the walls, they lean against me, too. I cannot reach the ceiling, but it stands to reason it is the same. There’s one door, without any windows, or a knob.
3. There is no noise except for my breathing.
4. There is no furniture. Just a mat, which is flesh-colored, too, and soft.
5. There is a grate in the middle of the floor, but when I look down inside it, I cannot see anything. Maybe that’s the tunnel that leads back to earth.
Then again, there are other factors that lead me to believe that I might not actually be dead after all.
1. If I were dead, why would I be breathing?
2. Shouldn’t there be other dead people around?
3. Dead people don’t have fierce headaches, do they?
4. Heaven probably does not have a door, knob notwithstanding.
I touch my hand to my scalp and find a bandage shaped like a butterfly. There is blood on my shirt that has dried brown and stiff. My eyes are swollen, and there are tiny cuts on my hands.
I walk around the grate, giving it a wide berth. Then I lie down on the mat with my arms crossed over my chest.
This is what my grandfather looked like, in his coffin.
This is not how Jess looked.
Maybe she’s what is inside that grate. Maybe she is on the other side of that door. Would she be happy to see me? Or angry? Would I look at her and be able to tell the difference?
I wish I could cry, like other humans do.
Jacob’s medicines and supplements fill two full gallon-size Ziploc bags. Some are prescription-antianxiety meds given by Dr. Murano, for example-and others, like the glutathione, I get online for him. I am waiting outside the visitors’ entrance of the jail, holding these, when the door is unlocked.
My mother used to tell me how, when she was a little girl, her appendix burst. That was back in the day before parents were allowed to stay with their children during hospitalizations, and so my grandmother would arrive four hours before visiting hours began and would stand at the front of a roped-off queue that my mother could see from her hospital bed. My grandmother would just stand there, smiling and waving, until they let her in.
If Jacob knows I’m waiting for him, if he knows that I will see him every day at nine o’clock-well, that’s a routine he can cling to.
I would have expected there to be more people waiting with me for the front door to open, but maybe for the rest of the mothers who have come to jail to visit their sons, this is old hat. Maybe they are used to the routine. There is only one other person waiting with me, a man dressed in a suit and carrying a briefcase. He must be a lawyer. He stamps his feet. “Cold out,” he says, smiling tightly.
I smile back. “It is.” He must be a defense attorney, coming in here to see his client. “Do you, um, know how this works?”
“Oh, first time?” he says. “It’s a piece of cake. You go in, give up your license, and go through the metal detectors. Kind of like checking in for a flight.”
“Except you don’t go anywhere,” I muse.
He glances at me and laughs. “That’s for damn sure.”
A correctional officer appears on the other side of the glass door and turns the lock. “Hey, Joe,” the lawyer says, and the officer grunts a greeting. “You see the Bruins last night?”
“Yeah. Answer me this. How come the Patriots and the Sox can win championships but the Bs are still skating like crap?”
I follow them to a control booth, where the officer steps inside and the lawyer hands over his driver’s license. The lawyer scribbles something on a clipboard and hands his keys to the officer. Then he walks through a metal detector, heading down a hall where I lose sight of him.
“Can I help you, ma’am?” the officer asks.
“Yes. I’m here to visit my son. Jacob Hunt.”
“Hunt.” He scans a list. “Oh, Hunt. Right. He just came in last night.”
“Yes.”
“Well, you’re not approved yet.”
“For what?”
“Visitation. You’ll probably be clear by Saturday-that’s when visiting hours are, anyway.”
“Saturday?” I repeat. “You expect me to wait till Saturday?”
“Sorry, ma’am. Until you’re cleared, I can’t help you.”
“My son is autistic. He needs to see me. When his routine gets changed, he can get incredibly upset. Even violent.”
“Guess it’s a good thing he’s behind bars, then,” the officer says.
“But he needs his medication…” I lift the two Ziploc bags and set them on the lip of the counter.
“Our medical staff can administer prescription meds,” the officer says. “I can get you a form to fill out for that.”
“There are dietary supplements, too. And he can’t eat glutens, or caseins-”
“Have his doctor contact the warden’s office.”
Jacob’s diet and supplements, however, weren’t mandated by a doctor-they were just tips, like a hundred others, that mothers of autistic kids had learned over the years and had passed down to others in the same boat, as something that might work. “When Jacob breaks the diet, his behavior gets much worse…”
“Maybe we should put all our inmates on it, then,” the officer says. “Look, I’m sorry, but if we don’t get a doctor’s note, we don’t pass it along to the inmate.”
Was it my fault that the medical community couldn’t endorse treatments that autistic parents swore by? That money for autism research was spread so thin that even though many physicians would agree these supplements helped Jacob to focus or to take the edge off his hypersensitivity, they couldn’t scientifically tell you why? If I’d waited for doctors and scientists to tell me conclusively how to help my son, he would still be locked in his own little world like he was when he was three, unresponsive and isolated.
Not unlike, I realize, a jail cell.
Tears fill my eyes. “I don’t know what to do.”
I must look like I’m about to fall apart, because the officer’s voice gets softer. “Your son have a lawyer?” he asks.
I nod.
“Might be a good place to start,” he suggests.
From Auntie Em’s column:
What I Know Now That I Wish I’d Known Before I Had Kids
1. If you stick a piece of bread in a VCR, it will not come out intact.
2. Garbage bags don’t work as parachutes.
3. Childproofing is a relative term.
4. A tantrum is like a magnet: eyes cannot help but lock onto you and your child when it happens.
5. Legos are not absorbed by the digestive tract.
6. Snow is a food group.
7. Kids know when you are not listening to them.
8. A Brussels sprout covered in cheese is still a Brussels sprout.
9. The best place to cry is in a mother’s arms.
10. You’ll never be as good a mother as you want to be.
From my car, I call Oliver Bond. “They won’t let me in to see Jacob,” I say.
In the background I can hear a dog bark. “Okay.”
“Okay? I can’t see my son, and you think that’s okay?”
“I meant okay, as in tell me more. Not okay as in… Just tell me what they said.”
“I’m not on some approved visitors list,” I shout. “Do you think Jacob has any idea that he needs to tell the jail who can and cannot visit him?”
“Emma,” the lawyer says. “Take a deep breath.”
“I can’t take a deep breath. Jacob does not belong in jail.”
“I know. I’m sorry about that-”
“Don’t be sorry,” I snap. “Be effective. Get me in to visit my son.”
He is quiet for a moment. “All right,” Oliver says finally. “Let me see what I can do.”
I can’t say it’s a surprise to find Theo at home, but I am so mentally drained that I don’t have the fortitude to ask him why he is here, instead of at school. “They wouldn’t let me in to see Jacob,” I say.
“How come?”
Instead of answering, I just shake my head. In the buttery light of late morning, I can see the softest down on Theo’s cheek and jaw. It reminds me of the first time I noticed that Jacob was growing hair underneath his armpits, and I was unnerved. It was one thing to be needed so fiercely by a child; it was another thing to have to take care of a grown man.
“Mom?” Theo says, hesitant. “Do you think he did it?”
Without thinking, I slap him hard across the face.
He falls back, reeling, his hand pressed to his cheek. Then he runs out the front door.
“Theo!” I call after him. “Theo!” But he is already halfway down the block.
I should follow him; I should apologize. I should confess that the reason I hit him wasn’t what he said but because he gave voice to all the unutterable thoughts I’ve been thinking.
Do I believe Jacob is capable of murder?
No.
The easy answer, the knee-jerk reaction. This is my son we are talking about. The one who still asks me to tuck him in at night.
But I also remember Jacob knocking over Theo’s high chair when I told him he could not have another glass of chocolate soy milk. I remember the time he hugged a hamster to death.
Mothers are supposed to be their children’s biggest cheerleaders. Mothers are supposed to believe in their children, no matter what. Mothers will lie to themselves, if necessary, to do this.
I step outside and walk down the driveway, in the direction Theo ran. “Theo,” I call. My voice does not sound like my own.
I have clocked 193 miles today on my car, driving to Springfield and then back home and returning again. At five-thirty I am again in the lobby of the jail visitors’ entrance, with Oliver Bond standing beside me. He left a message on my cell phone instructing me to meet him here, explaining that he’d arranged a special visit for me while he sorted out long-term visiting plans.
I was so happy to hear this that I didn’t even dwell on the phrase long-term.
At first, I hardly recognize Oliver. He isn’t wearing a suit, like he was yesterday; instead, he’s in jeans and a flannel shirt. This makes him seem even younger. I glance down at my own clothes-which look like something I’d wear to a staff meeting at the newspaper. What made me think I had to dress up for jail?
Oliver leads me to the booth. “Name?” the officer asks.
“Emma Hunt,” I say.
He looks up. “No, the name of the person you’re here to visit.”
“Jacob Hunt,” Oliver interjects. “We’ve arranged a special visit through the superintendent’s office.”
The officer nods and hands me a clipboard to sign. He asks for my ID.
“Give him your keys,” Oliver says. “He’ll hold them while you’re inside.”
I pass them to the officer and then step toward the metal detector. “Aren’t you coming?”
Oliver shakes his head. “I’ll be waiting out here.”
A second officer arrives to lead me down the hall. Instead of turning in to a room where there are tables and chairs set up, though, he leads me around the corner to a small cubicle. At first, I think it is a closet, but then I realize it’s a visiting booth. A stool is pushed beneath a window that looks into a mirror image of this room. A handset is stuck to the wall. “I think there’s been a mistake,” I say.
“No mistake,” the officer tells me. “Noncontact visits only for inmates in protective custody.”
He leaves me in the tiny chamber. Had Oliver known I wouldn’t be able to see Jacob face-to-face? Had he not told me because he knew it would upset me, or had he not been given this information? And what is protective custody?
The door on the other side of the glass opens, and suddenly Jacob is there. The officer who’s brought him points to the telephone on the wall, but Jacob has seen me through the glass. He presses his palms flat against it.
He has blood on his shirt and in his hair. His forehead is covered with a line of purple bruises. His knuckles are scraped raw, and he is stimming like crazy-his hand twitching at his side like a small animal, his entire body bouncing on his toes. “Oh, baby,” I murmur. I point to the phone in my hand and then to the spot where he should have a receiver, too.
He doesn’t pick it up. He smacks his palms against the Plexiglas that separates us.
“Pick up the phone,” I cry, even though he cannot hear me. “Pick it up, Jacob!”
Instead, he closes his eyes. He sways forward and rests his cheek against the window, spreads his arms as wide as they can go.
I realize he is trying to embrace me.
I put the receiver down and step up to the window. I mimic his position, so that we are mirrors of each other, with a glass wall between us.
Maybe this is what it is always like for Jacob, who tries to connect with people and can’t ever quite manage it. Maybe the membrane between someone with Asperger’s and the rest of the world is not a shifting invisible seam of electrons but, instead, a see-through partition that allows only the illusion of feeling, instead of the actual thing.
Jacob steps away from the window and sits on the stool. I pick up the phone, hoping he will follow my lead, but he isn’t making eye contact. Eventually, he reaches for his receiver, and for a moment, I see some of the joy that used to spread across his face when he discovered something startling and came to share it with me. He turns the receiver over in his hands and then holds it to his ear. “I saw these on CrimeBusters. On the episode where the suspect turned out to be a cannibal.”
“Hey, baby,” I say, and I force myself to smile.
He is rocking as he sits. His free hand, the one not holding the receiver, flutters, as if he is playing an invisible piano.
“Who hurt you?”
He touches his fingers gingerly to his forehead. “Mommy? Can we go home now?”
I know precisely the last time Jacob called me that. It was after his middle school graduation, when he was fourteen. He had received a diploma. Mommy, he had said, running up to show me. The other kids had heard him, and they burst out laughing. Jacob, they teased, your mommy’s here to take you home. Too late, he had learned that, when you’re fourteen, looking cool in front of your friends trumps unadulterated enthusiasm.
“Soon,” I say, but the word comes out like a question.
Jacob doesn’t cry. He doesn’t scream. He just lets the receiver drop from his hand, and then he puts his head down.
I automatically reach toward him, and my hand smacks into the Plexiglas.
Jacob’s head lifts a few inches, and then falls. His forehead strikes the metal plate of the counter. Then he does it again.
“Jacob! Don’t!” But of course, he can’t hear me. His receiver dangles from its metal umbilicus, where it fell when he let go.
He keeps hitting his head, over and over. I throw open the door to the visitation booth. The officer who brought me there is standing outside, leaning against the wall. “Help me,” I cry, and he glances over my shoulder to see what Jacob is doing, then runs down the hallway to intervene.
Through the window of the visitation booth, I watch him and a second officer grab Jacob by the arms and haul him away from the window. Jacob’s mouth is twisted, but I cannot tell if he is screaming or sobbing. His arms are pinned behind his back so that he can be handcuffed, and then one of the officers shoves him in the small of the back to propel him forward.
This is my son, and they are treating him like a criminal.
The officer returns a moment later, to take me back to the jail lobby. “He’s going to be fine,” I am told. “The nurse gave him a sedative.”
When Jacob was younger and more prone to tantrums, a doctor put him on olanzapine, an antipsychotic. It got rid of his tantrums. It also got rid of his personality, period. I would find him sitting on the bedroom floor with one shoe on, the other still on the floor beside him, staring unresponsively at the wall. When he began to have seizures, we took him off the drug and never experimented with any others.
I picture Jacob lying on his back on the floor of a cell, his pupils dilated and unfocused, as he slips in and out of consciousness.
As soon as I reach the lobby, Oliver approaches with a big smile on his face. “How’d it go?” he asks.
I open my mouth and burst into tears.
I fight for Jacob’s IEPs, and I wrestle him to the ground when he goes ballistic in a public place. I have carved a life out of doing what needs to be done, because you can rail to the heavens, but in the end, when you’re through, you will still be ankle-deep in the same situation. I am the one who’s strong, so that Jacob doesn’t have to be.
“Emma,” Oliver says, and I imagine he is as embarrassed as I am to find me sobbing in front of him. But to my surprise, he folds his arms around me and strokes my hair. Even more surprising… for a moment, I let him.
This is what you can’t explain to a mother who doesn’t have an autistic child: Of course I love my son. Of course I would never want a life without him. But that doesn’t mean that I am not exhausted every minute of the day. That I don’t worry about his future, and my lack of one. That sometimes, before I can catch myself, I imagine what my life would have been like if Jacob did not have Asperger’s. That-like Atlas-I think just for once it would be nice to have someone else bear the weight of my family’s world on his shoulders, instead of me.
For five seconds, Oliver Bond becomes that person.
“I’m sorry,” I say, pushing away from him. “I got your shirt all wet.”
“Yeah, Woolrich flannel is really delicate. I’ll add the dry-cleaning bill to the retainer.” He approaches the control booth and retrieves my license and keys, then leads me outside. “Now. What happened in there?” Oliver asks.
“Jacob hurt himself. He must have been smacking his head against something-his forehead is completely bruised, and there were bandages, and blood all over his scalp. He started to do it again just now in the visitation booth, and they gave him a tranquilizer. They won’t give him his supplements, and I don’t know what he’s eating, or if he’s eating at all, and-” I break off, meeting his gaze. “You don’t have children, do you?”
He blushes. “Me? Kids? I, um… no.”
“I watched my son slip away once, Oliver. I fought too hard to bring him back to let him go again. If Jacob is competent to stand trial, he won’t be after two weeks of this. Please,” I beg. “Can’t you do anything to get him out?”
Oliver looks at me. In the cold, his breath takes shape between us. “No,” he says. “But I think you can.”
1
1
2
3
5
8
13
And so on.
This is the Fibonacci sequence. It can be defined explicitly:
It can be defined recursively, too:
This means that it is an equation based on its previous values.
I am forcing myself to think in numbers, because no one seems to understand what I say when I speak English. It is like a Twilight Zone episode where words suddenly have changed their meaning: I say stop and it keeps going; I ask to leave and they lock me up tighter. This leads me to two conclusions:
1. I am being punk’d. However, I don’t think my mother would have let the joke go on for quite this long, which leads me to:
2. No matter what I say, no matter how clearly I say it, no one understands me. Which means I must find a better method of communication.
Numbers are universal, a language that transcends countries and time. This is a test: if someone-just one person-can understand me, then there is hope that he’ll understand what happened at Jess’s house, too.
You can see Fibonacci numbers in the flowering of an artichoke or the scales of a pinecone. You can use their sequence to explain how rabbits reproduce. As n approaches infinity, the ratio of a(n) to a(n -1) approaches phi, the golden ratio-1.618033989-which was used to build the Parthenon and appears in compositions by Bartók and Debussy.
I am walking, and with every step I let another number in the Fibonacci sequence come into my head. I move in smaller and smaller circles to the middle of the room, and when I get there, I start over.
1
1
2
3
5
8
13
21
34
55
89
144
An officer comes in, carrying a tray. Behind him is a nurse. “Hey, kid,” he says, waving his hand in front of me. “Say something.”
“One,” I reply.
“Huh?”
“One.”
“One what?”
“Two,” I say.
“It’s dinnertime,” the officer tells me.
“Three.”
“You gonna eat this, or throw it again?”
“Five.”
“I think it’s pudding tonight,” the officer says, pulling the cover off the tray.
“Eight.”
He inhales deeply. “Yum.”
“Thirteen.”
Finally, he gives up. “I told you. It’s like he’s on a different planet.”
“Twenty-one,” I say.
The nurse shrugs and lifts up a needle. “Blackjack,” she says, and she plunges the syringe into my bottom while the officer holds me still.
After they are gone, I lie on the floor, and with my finger, I write the equation of the Fibonacci sequence in the air. I do this until it gets blurry, until my finger is as heavy as a brick.
The last thing I remember thinking before I disappear is that numbers make sense. You cannot say the same about people.
The Vermont public defender’s office is not called the public defender’s office but rather something that sounds like it was ripped from the pages of a Dickens novel: the Office of the Defender General. However, like in all public defender’s offices, the staff is overworked and underpaid. Which is why, after I send Emma Hunt off with her own homework, I head to my apartment-office to complete my own.
Thor greets me by jumping up and nailing me right in the groin. “Thanks, buddy,” I wheeze, and I brush him off. He’s hungry, though, so I feed him leftover pasta mixed with kibble while I look up the information I need on the Internet and make a phone call.
Although it’s 7:00 P.M.-long past office hours-a woman picks up. “Hi there,” I say. “My name’s Oliver Bond. I’m a new attorney in Townsend.”
“We’re closed now-”
“I know… but I’m a friend of Janice Roth, and I’m trying to track her down?”
“She doesn’t work here anymore.”
I know this. In fact, I also know that Janice Roth recently got married to a guy named Howard Wurtz and that they moved to Texas, where he had a job waiting with NASA. Public record searches are the best friend of the defense attorney.
“Oh, shoot-really? That’s a bummer. I’m a friend of hers from law school.”
“She got married,” the woman says.
“Yeah, to Howard, right?”
“Did you know him?”
“No, but I know she was crazy about him,” I say. “By any chance, are you a defender general, too?”
“Sadly, yes,” she sighs. “You’re in private practice? Believe me, you’re not missing out.”
“Nah, you’ll get into heaven long before me.” I laugh. “Look, I have a really quick question. I’m new to practicing criminal law in Vermont, and I’m still learning the ropes.”
I’m new to practicing criminal law, period, but I don’t tell her that.
“Sure, what’s up?”
“My client’s a kid-eighteen-and he’s autistic. He sort of flipped out in court during the arraignment and now he’s locked up until his competency hearing. But he can’t adapt to jail. He keeps trying to hurt himself. Is there any way to speed up the wheels of justice here?”
“Vermont’s decidedly crappy when it comes to psychiatric care for inmates. They used to use the state hospital as a lockup for competency exams, but it lost its funding, so now Springfield gets most of the cases, since they’ve got the best medical care,” she says. “I once had a client being held pending competency who liked to slick himself head to toe-he did it the first night with a one-pound block of butter at dinner, and with deodorant before a visit with me.”
“A contact visit?”
“Yeah, the officers didn’t care. I guess they thought the worst he could do was rub me down with something. Anyway, with that guy, I filed a motion to set bail,” the attorney says. “That gets you back in front of the judge. Put his shrink or counselor on the stand to back up your story. But waive your client’s appearance, because you don’t want a repeat performance in the courtroom that will piss off the judge. Your main job is to convince the judge he’s not a danger if he’s not locked up, and if he’s running around like a lunatic in court, that sort of messes up your case.”
Motion to set bail, I write down on a pad in front of me. “Thanks,” I say. “That’s awesome.”
“No problem. Hey, you want Janice’s email?”
“Absolutely,” I lie. She reads it to me, and I pretend to write it down.
When I hang up, I go to the fridge and pull out a bottle of Poland Spring. I pour half into Thor’s bowl and then raise the bottle in a toast. “To Janice and Howard,” I say.
“Mr. Bond,” Judge Cuttings says the next day, “aren’t we waiting for our competency evaluation in this case?”
“Your Honor,” I reply, “I don’t think we can.”
The courtroom is empty, with the exception of Emma, Dr. Murano, and the prosecutor-a woman named Helen Sharp, who has very short red hair and pointed canine teeth that make me think of a vampire, or a pit bull. The judge looks at her. “Ms. Sharp? What are your feelings?”
“I don’t know anything about this case, Judge,” she says. “I literally got notice of this hearing this morning. The defendant is charged with murder, you ordered a competency hearing, it’s the State’s position that he remain locked up until then.”
“With all due respect, Your Honor,” I reply, “I think the court should listen to my client’s mother and psychiatrist.”
The judge waves me on, and with a gesture, I motion Emma to come forward to the witness stand. She has dark shadows beneath her eyes, and her hands are shaking. I watch her move them from the railing to her lap, so that the judge cannot see. “Please state your name and address,” I say.
“Emma Hunt… 132 Birdseye Lane in Townsend.”
“Is Jacob Hunt, the defendant in this case, your son?”
“Yes, he is.”
“Can you tell us how old Jacob is?”
Emma clears her throat. “He turned eighteen in December.”
“Where does he live?”
“With me, in Townsend.”
“Is he in school?” I ask.
“He goes to Townsend Regional High School; he’s a senior.”
I look directly at her. “Ms. Hunt, does Jacob have any particular medical condition that makes you concerned for his safety while he’s in jail?”
“Yes. Jacob’s been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s high-functioning autism.”
“How does Asperger’s affect Jacob’s behavior?”
She pauses for a moment, glancing down. “When he decides to do something, he needs to do it immediately,” Emma says. “If he can’t, he gets very agitated. He hardly ever shows emotion-either happy or sad-and he can’t relate to the conversations of kids his own age. He takes words very, very literally-if you asked him to eat with his mouth closed, for example, he’d tell you that’s impossible. He has hypersensitivity issues: bright lights, loud noises, and light touches set him off. He doesn’t like being the center of attention. He needs to know exactly when something is going to happen, and if his routine gets disrupted, he becomes extremely anxious and acts in a way that makes him stand out even more: flapping his hands at his sides, or talking to himself, or repeating movie lines over and over. When things are really overwhelming, he’ll go somewhere to hide-his closet, or under his bed-and he’ll stop speaking.”
“Okay,” says Judge Cuttings. “So your son is moody, literal, and wants to do things his way and on his own timetable. That sounds very much like a teenager.”
Emma shakes her head. “I’m not explaining this well. It’s more than just being literal, or wanting a routine. An ordinary teenager decides not to interact… for Jacob, it’s not a choice.”
“What sorts of changes have you seen since your son’s incarceration?” I ask.
Emma’s eyes fill with tears. “He’s not Jacob,” she says. “He’s hurting himself, on purpose. He’s regressing in his speech. He’s started stimming again-flapping his hands, bouncing on his toes, walking in circles. I’ve spent fifteen years trying to make Jacob a part of this world instead of allowing him to isolate himself… and a single day in that jail reversed everything.” She looks at the judge. “I just want my son to come back, before it’s too late to reach him.”
“Thank you,” I say. “Nothing further.”
Helen Sharp stands up. She is easily six feet tall. Did I not notice that when she walked in? “Your son… has he ever been incarcerated before?”
“No!” Emma answers.
“Has he ever been arrested before?”
“No.”
“Are there other times you’ve witnessed a backslide in your son’s behavior?”
“Yes,” Emma says. “When plans change at the last minute. Or when he’s upset and can’t verbalize that.”
“Then isn’t it possible that his current behavior has nothing to do with incarceration, and everything to do with him feeling guilty for committing a horrific crime?”
Heat floods Emma’s face. “He would never do what you’ve accused him of doing.”
“Maybe, ma’am, but at this point your son’s been charged with first-degree murder. You understand that, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Emma says tightly.
“And your son has been placed in protective custody, so his safety isn’t at issue-”
“If his safety wasn’t at issue, would he have to be in a padded cell in the first place?” Emma retorts, and I want to run up there and give her a high five.
“Nothing further,” the prosecutor says.
I stand up again. “The defense calls Dr. Moon Murano.”
Jacob’s psychiatrist’s name may sound like that of someone who grew up on a commune, but that was her parents. She must have rebelled and joined the Young Republicans, because she’s turned up for court in a power suit, killer heels, and a bun so tight it is practically functioning as a face-lift. I walk her through her credentials and then ask her how she knows Jacob.
“I’ve been working with him for fifteen years,” she says. “In conjunction with his Asperger’s diagnosis.”
“Tell us a little about Asperger’s,” I say.
“Well, the syndrome was discovered by Dr. Hans Asperger in 1944, but it wasn’t known in the English-speaking world until the late 1980s, and it wasn’t classified as a psychiatric disorder until 1994. Technically, it’s a neurobiological disorder that affects several areas of development. Unlike some other children on the autism spectrum, kids with Asperger’s are very bright and verbal and crave social acceptance… they just don’t know how to get it. Their conversations might be one-sided; they might be focused on a very narrow topic of interest; they might use repetitive language or a monotone voice. They won’t be able to read social cues or body language and therefore can’t identify the feelings of people around them. Because of this, someone with Asperger’s is often considered to be odd or eccentric, which leads to social isolation.”
“Well, Doctor, there are a lot of folks in the world who are odd or eccentric and haven’t been diagnosed with Asperger’s, right?”
“Of course.”
“So how do you diagnose it?”
“It’s theory of mind: the child who chooses privacy versus the child who can’t connect but wants to, desperately, and cannot put himself in the shoes of another child to better understand how to facilitate that.” She glances at the judge. “Asperger’s is a developmental disability, but it’s a hidden one. Unlike, for example, a mentally challenged individual, a child with Asperger’s might look normal and even sound fairly normal and appear incredibly competent, yet he will have crippling difficulties with communication and social interaction.”
“Doctor, how often do you see Jacob?” I ask.
“I used to see him weekly when he was younger, but now we’re down to once a month.”
“And he’s a senior in public school?”
“That’s correct.”
“So he doesn’t have any educational delays due to his Asperger’s?”
“No,” Dr. Murano says. “As a matter of fact, Jacob’s IQ is probably higher than yours, Mr. Bond.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Helen Sharp murmurs.
“Does Jacob have any special accommodations at school?”
“He has an individualized education plan-an IEP-which is mandated by law for children with disabilities. Ms. Hunt and I meet with the principal and Jacob’s teachers four times a year to review strategies that will help him function well at school. What’s normal to certain high school students would set Jacob off into a tailspin.”
“Such as?”
“Commotion in a classroom is going to be very overwhelming for Jacob. Flashing lights. Being touched. Crumpled paper. Something that’s unexpected in terms of sensation-like darkness in preparation for a video or film-is hard for Jacob if he doesn’t know in advance that it’s going to happen,” Murano says.
“So his accommodations are meant to keep him from becoming overstimulated?”
“Exactly.”
“How’s he doing in school this year?”
“He got all A’s and one B the first semester,” Dr. Murano says.
“Before he was incarcerated,” I ask, “when was the last time you saw Jacob?”
“Three weeks ago, for a routine visit.”
“How was Jacob doing?”
“Very, very well,” the psychiatrist says. “In fact, I commented to Ms. Hunt that Jacob initiated a conversation with me, instead of the other way around.”
“And this morning?”
“This morning, when I saw Jacob, I was appalled. I haven’t seen him in a state like this since he was three years old. You need to understand, this is something chemical in his brain, mercury poisoning of a sort, caused by vaccinations-”
Oh crap.
“-it’s only the diligent biomedical treatment regimen and Emma Hunt’s commitment to her son’s social interaction that’s brought Jacob to the point he was prior to incarceration. You know who really ought to be tossed in jail? The drug companies that are getting rich off the vaccinations that triggered a wave of autism in the nineties-”
“Objection!” I yell.
“Mr. Bond,” the judge says, “you can’t object to your own witness.”
I smile, but it’s really a grimace. “Dr. Murano, thanks for your political opinion, but I don’t think that’s necessary right now.”
“But it is. I’m seeing the same pattern: a sweet, interactive, social child has suddenly isolated himself, removing himself from stimuli, not interacting with people. We don’t know enough about the autistic brain to understand what it is that brings these kids back to us, and why only some of them manage to return. But we do understand that a severely traumatic incident-like incarceration-can lead to a permanent regression.”
“Do you have any reason to believe that if Jacob was released to the care of his mother, he’d be a danger to himself or others?”
“Absolutely not,” Dr. Murano says. “He follows rules to the letter. In fact, that’s an Asperger’s trait.”
“Thank you, Doctor,” I finish.
Helen Sharp taps her pen on the desk in front of her. “Dr. Murano, you just referred to Jacob as a boy, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose I did.”
“Well, he’s actually eighteen years old.”
“That’s true.”
“He’s legally an adult,” Helen says. “He’s responsible for his actions, isn’t he?”
“We all know there’s a chasm between legal responsibility and emotional capacity.”
“Does Jacob have a guardian?” Helen asks.
“No, he has a mother.”
“Has his mother applied to be his legal guardian?”
“No,” Dr. Murano says.
“Have you applied to be his legal guardian?”
“Jacob only turned eighteen a month ago.”
The prosecutor stands up. “You said that it’s very important to have Jacob adhere to a stable routine?”
“It’s critical,” the psychiatrist says. “Not knowing what’s happening to him right now is likely what led to this breakdown.”
“So Jacob needs to be able to predict his schedule, in order to feel secure?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, what if I were to tell you, Doctor, that in the Southern State Correctional Facility, Jacob will rise at the same time every day, will eat his meals at the same time every day, will shower at the same time every day, will go to the library at the same time every day, and so on. Why isn’t that perfectly in line with what Jacob’s accustomed to?”
“Because it’s not what he’s accustomed to. It is such a deviation from his ordinary daily routine, such an unplanned break, that I worry it’s irrevocably affected him.”
Helen smirks. “But Dr. Murano, you do understand that Jacob’s been charged with the murder of his social skills counselor?”
“I understand that,” she says, “and I find it very difficult to believe.”
“Do you know what the evidence is against Jacob at this point?” Helen asks.
“No.”
“So you’re basing your assumption of his guilt or innocence on what you know of Jacob, and not on the evidence.”
Dr. Murano raises a brow. “And you’re basing your assumption on the evidence, without ever having met Jacob.”
Oh, snap, I think, grinning.
“Nothing further,” Helen murmurs.
Judge Cuttings watches Dr. Murano step off the witness stand. “Does the prosecution have any witnesses?”
“Your Honor, we would like a continuance, given the short notice we had-”
“If you want to make a motion to review, Ms. Sharp, that’s fine, provided we get that far,” the judge says. “I’ll hear arguments now, counselors.”
I stand up. “Judge, we want that competency hearing, and you can review the bail again after it’s completed. But at this point, I have a young man who’s deteriorating psychologically by the minute. I ask you to put limitations on him, on his mom, on his psychiatrist, even on me. You want him to come in here every day and check in with you? Great, I’ll bring him. Jacob Hunt has a constitutional right to bail, but he also has human rights, Your Honor. If he’s kept in jail much longer, I think it’s going to destroy him. I’m asking-no, I’m begging-you to set bail in a reasonable amount and release my client until after the competency hearing.”
Helen looks at me and rolls her eyes. “Judge, Jacob Hunt has been charged with the first-degree murder of a young woman he knew and supposedly liked. She was his teacher, they spent leisure time together, and the facts surrounding this crime-without getting into details-include incriminating statements the defendant made to the police and strong forensic evidence linking him to the crime scene. We believe this is a very, very strong case for the State. If the defendant is doing this poorly even before his bail hearing, Judge, you can imagine how much incentive he’ll have to flee the jurisdiction if you let him out now. The victim’s parents are already devastated by the loss of their daughter and they’re terrified that this young man, who’s been exhibiting violent behavior inside a jail cell and who doesn’t know right from wrong, might be released. We ask that no bail be considered until after the competency hearing.”
The judge looks into the gallery at Emma. “Ms. Hunt,” he says. “Do you have any other children?”
“Yes, Your Honor. I have a fifteen-year-old son.”
“I assume he requires attention, not to mention food and carpooling.”
“Yes.”
“You do understand that if the defendant were released into your custody, you’d have to be responsible for him twenty-four hours a day, and that this could significantly affect your own freedom of movement, as well as your responsibilities to your younger son?”
“I will do anything I have to do in order to get Jacob home,” Emma says.
Judge Cuttings takes off his reading glasses. “Mr. Bond, I am going to release your client on certain conditions. First, his mother will have to post the family home as surety on bail. Second, I’m going to require that the defendant be on home electronic monitoring, that he not attend school, that he stay in the house at all times, and that either his mother or another adult over the age of twenty-five be with him at all times. He is not allowed to leave the state. He’ll have to sign a waiver of extradition, and he is required to see Dr. Murano and follow all her directives, including taking medication. Finally, he will comply with the competency evaluation when it is scheduled, and you will get in touch with the prosecutor to determine when and where that might take place. The prosecution does not need to file a motion; I am going to set this case down for review on the day the competency evaluation comes back.”
Helen packs herself up. “Enjoy your reprieve,” she tells me. “This one’s a slam dunk for my side.”
“Only because you’re a giant,” I mutter.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I said you haven’t met my client.”
She narrows her eyes and stalks out of the courtroom.
Behind me, Emma is locked in an embrace with Moon Murano. She looks up at me. “Thank you so much,” she says, her voice breaking like waves over the syllables.
I shrug, as if I do this all the time. In reality, I’ve sweated through my dress shirt. “Anytime,” I reply.
I lead Emma to the clerk’s office to fill out paperwork and pick up the sheets that Jacob has to sign. “I’ll meet you in the lobby,” I say.
Although Jacob was not in court, he had to be here while we deliberated on his behalf. And now, he needs to sign the conditions of his release and the waiver of extradition.
I haven’t seen him yet. In all honesty, I’m a little scared to do so. The testimony from his mother, and from Moon Murano, made him out to be a vegetable.
When I approach the holding cell, he’s lying on the floor, knees curled to his chest. On his head, he’s sporting a bandage. The skin around his eyes is black and blue, and his hair is matted.
Christ, if I’d had him in the courtroom, he would have gotten out of jail in ten seconds flat. “Jacob,” I say quietly. “Jacob, it’s me, Oliver. Your lawyer.”
He doesn’t move. His eyes are wide open, but they don’t flicker as I come closer. I motion for the deputy to open the door of the cell and squat down beside him. “I have some papers I need you to sign,” I tell him.
He whispers something, and I lean in.
“One?” I repeat. “Actually, it’s several. But hey, you don’t have to go back to jail, buddy. That’s the good news.”
For now, anyway.
Jacob wheezes. It sounds like one, two, three, five.
“You’re counting. You’re down for the count?” I stare at him. This is like playing charades with someone who has no arms and no legs.
“Ate,” Jacob says, loud and clear.
He’s hungry. Or was hungry?
“Jacob.” My voice is firmer. “Come on already.” I start to reach for him but see his whole body tense an inch before my hand makes contact.
So I back off. I sit down on the floor beside him.
“One,” I say.
His eyelids blink once.
“Two.”
He blinks three times.
That’s when I realize that we’re having a conversation. We’re just not using words.
One, one, two, three. Why five, and not four?
I take my pen out of my pocket and write the numbers on my hand until I see the pattern. It’s not ate, it’s eight. “Eleven,” I say, staring at Jacob. “Nineteen.”
He rolls over. “Sign these,” I say, “and I will take you to your mother.” I push the papers toward him on the floor. I roll the pen in his direction.
At first Jacob doesn’t move.
And then, very slowly, he does.
Once Theo asked me if there was an antidote for Asperger’s, would I take it?
I told him no.
I am not sure how much of me is wrapped up in the part that’s Asperger’s. What if I lost some of my intelligence, for example, or my sarcasm? What if I could be afraid of ghosts on Halloween instead of the color of the pumpkins? The problem is that I do not remember who I was without Asperger’s, so who knows what would remain? I liken it to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that you peel apart. You can’t really get rid of the peanut butter without taking some of the jelly as well, can you?
I can see my mother. It’s like the sun when you’re underwater, and brave enough to open your eyes. She’s unfocused and slightly runny and too bright to see clearly. I am that far below the surface.
I have a sore throat from screaming so loud; I have bruises that reach to the bone. The few times I fell asleep, I woke up crying. All I wanted was someone who understood what I had done, and why. Someone who gave a damn as much as I did.
When they gave me that injection at the jail, I dreamed that my heart had been cut out of my chest. The doctors and the correctional officers passed it around in a game of Hot Potato and then tried to sew it back into place, but it only made me look like the Frankenstein monster. See, they all exclaimed, you can’t even tell, and since that was a lie, I could trust nothing they said anymore.
I would not take the jelly without the peanut butter, but sometimes, I wonder why I could not have been lunch meat, which everyone prefers.
There used to be a theory that autistic brains didn’t work right because of the gaps between the neurons, the lack of connectivity. Now there’s a new theory that autistic brains work too well, that there is so much going on in my head at once I have to work overtime to filter it out, and sometimes the ordinary world becomes the baby tossed out with the bathwater.
Oliver-who says he is my lawyer-spoke to me in the language of nature. That’s all I’ve ever wanted: to be as organic as the whorl of seeds in a sunflower or the spiral of a shell. When you have to try so hard to be normal, that means you’re not.
My mother walks forward. She’s crying, but there’s a smile on her face. For God’s sake, is it any wonder I can’t ever understand what you people are feeling?
Usually, when I go where I go, it’s a room with no doors and no windows. But in jail, that was the world, and so I had to go somewhere else. It was a metal capsule, sunk to the bottom of the sea. If anyone tried to come for me, with a knife or a chisel or a crust of hope, the ocean would sense the change and the metal would implode.
The problem was the same rules applied to me, trying to get out.
My mother is five steps away. Four. Three.
When I was very small, I watched a Christian television program on a Sunday morning geared to kids. It was about a special-needs boy playing hide-and-seek with some other children in a junkyard. The other kids forgot about him, and a day later, the police found him suffocated in an old refrigerator. I did not get a religious message out of that, like the Golden Rule or eternal salvation. I got: Do not hide in old refrigerators.
This time, when I went where I went, I thought I’d gone too far. There was no more pain and nothing mattered, sure. But no one would find me, and they’d eventually stop looking.
Now, though, my head is starting to hurt again, and my shoulders ache. I can smell my mother: vanilla and freesia and the shampoo she uses that comes in a green bottle. I can feel the heat of her, like asphalt in the summer, the minute before she wraps her arms around me. “Jacob,” she says. My name rises on the roller coaster of a sob. My knees give with relief, with the knowledge that I have not faded away after all.