A month later I am sprawled on the couch in the Hunts’ living room, caught in a weird déjà vu: I am scanning the discovery that’s been sent to me, which includes Jacob’s journals on CrimeBusters, while he sits on the floor in front of me watching on TV the very same episode I’m reading about. “Want me to tell you how it ends?” I ask.
“I already know.” Not that that’s kept him from writing down yet another journal entry, this one in a brand-new composition-style notebook.
Episode 49: Sex, Lies, and iMovie
Situation: After a suicide note is spliced into the credits of a feature at a film festival, a B-movie director is found dead in the back of a car-but the team suspects foul play.
Evidence:
Trailer from festival
Cuttings from editing studio-who is the blonde and is she really dead or just acting?
Hard drive of director’s computer
Director’s collection of rare butterflies-red herring, entomology not involved
Acid in pipes
Solved: By ME! 0:24.
“You figured it out in twenty minutes?”
“Yeah.”
“The butler did it,” I say.
“No, actually, it’s the plumber,” Jacob corrects.
So much for making a joke.
We’ve gotten into a routine: instead of staying at my office during the day, I do my trial preparation here at the Hunts’. That way, I can watch Jacob if Emma needs to run out, and I have my client available to answer any questions I’ve got. Thor likes it, because he spends most of the day curled up in Jacob’s lap. Jacob likes it, because I bring the Wii with me. Theo likes it because if I bring guacamole on Green Monday for his brother, I slip a personal-size nongreen sausage pizza into the fridge for him.
I don’t really know if Emma likes it.
Theo walks past us in the living room to a file cabinet in the back. “You still doing your homework?” Jacob asks.
There’s not really any malice in his tone-it’s flat, like everything else Jacob says-but Theo flips him the bird. Usually Theo’s the one to finish his work first, but today, he seems to be dragging.
I wait for Jacob to tell him to go fuck himself, but instead, he just fixes his glassy gaze on the television again.
“Hey,” I say, approaching Theo.
He startles and takes the piece of paper he’s scanning and stuffs it into his jeans pocket. “Stop sneaking up on me.”
“What are you doing in here anyway? Isn’t this your mother’s file cabinet?”
“Isn’t this none of your business?” Theo says.
“No. But Jacob is. And you should apologize.”
“I should also have five servings of vegetables a day, but that rarely happens,” he replies, and he heads back into the kitchen to finish his homework.
I know Jacob well enough by now to pick up on the cues that flag his emotions. The fact that he’s rocking back and forth slightly means whatever Theo just said rattled him more than he’s letting on. “If you tell your mother he does that shit to you,” I say, “I can bet you it will stop.”
“You don’t tell on your brother-you take care of him. He’s the only one you’ve got,” Jacob recites. “It’s a rule.”
If I could only make the jury see how Jacob lives from one decree to another; if I could make the connection between a kid who won’t even break one of his mother’s rules much less the law governing our country; if I could somehow prove that his Asperger’s makes it virtually impossible for him to cross that line between right and wrong-well, I could win his case.
“Hey, after lunch I want to talk to you about what’s going to happen later this week when we-”
“Shh,” Jacob says. “The commercial’s over.”
I flip the page and see an entry that doesn’t have an episode number.
I start reading, and my jaw drops. “Oh, shit,” I say out loud.
A month ago, after the suppression hearing, I’d called Helen Sharp. “I think you need to give up,” I told her. “You can’t prove the case. We’re willing to take probation for five years.”
“I can win this without his police department confession,” she said. “I’ve got all the statements that were made at the house before Jacob was in custody; I have the forensic evidence at the scene and eyewitness evidence that goes to motive. I’ve got his history of violence, and I’ve got the defendant’s journals.”
At the time, I’d shrugged it off. Jacob’s journals were formulaic, and every other piece of evidence she listed was something I could excuse away on cross.
“We’re going forward,” Helen had said, and I’d thought, Good freaking luck.
Here’s what the journal says:
At Her House. 1/12/10.
Situation: Girl missing.
Evidence:
Clothes in pile on bed
Toothbrush missing, lip gloss missing
Victim’s purse and coat remain
Cell phone missing… cut screen… boot prints outside match up with boyfriend’s footwear.
“Jesus Christ, Jacob,” I explode, so loud that Emma comes running in from the laundry room. “You wrote about Jess in your CrimeBusters journals?”
He doesn’t respond, so I stand and turn off the TV.
“What do you mean?” Emma says.
I pass her the photocopy of the notebook. “What were you thinking?” I demand.
Jacob shrugs. “It was a crime scene,” he says simply.
“Do you have any idea what Helen Sharp is going to do with this?”
“No, and I don’t care,” Emma replies. “I want to know what you’re going to do about it.” She folds her arms and moves a step closer to Jacob.
“I don’t know, to be honest. Because after all the work we did to get the police station statement thrown out, this brings it all back in.”
Jacob repeats what I said, and then repeats it again: Brings it all back. Brings it all back. The first time I heard him do it, I thought he was mimicking me. Now I know it’s echolalia; Emma explained it to me as just the repetition of sounds. Sometimes Jacob does that by reciting movie quotes, and sometimes it’s an immediate parroting of something he’s heard.
I just hope no one hears him doing it in court, or they’ll assume he’s a wiseass.
“Bring it all back,” Jacob says again. “Bring what all back?”
“Something that’s going to make the jury assume you’re guilty.”
“But it’s a crime scene,” Jacob says again. “I just wrote down the evidence like usual.”
“It’s not a fictional crime scene,” I point out.
“Why not?” he asks. “I’m the one who created it.”
“Oh my God,” Emma chokes. “They’re going to think he’s a monster.”
I want to put my hand on her arm and tell her I will be able to keep that from happening, but I cannot make that kind of promise. Even having been with Jacob for the past month, like I have, there are still things he does that strike me as utterly chilling-like now, when his mother is hysterical and he turns away without registering any remorse and cranks up the volume on his TV show. Juries, which are supposed to be about reason, are actually always about the heart. A juror who watches Jacob stare blankly through the graphic testimony about Jess Ogilvy’s death will deliberate his fate with that image etched in her mind, and it cannot help but sway her decision.
I cannot change Jacob, which means I have to change the system. This is why I’ve filed a motion, and why we’re going to court tomorrow, although I haven’t yet broken the news to Emma yet.
“I need to tell you both something,” I say, as Emma’s watch begins to beep.
“Hold on,” she says, “I’m timing Theo on a math quiz.” She faces the kitchen. “Theo? Put your pencil down. Jacob, lower that volume. Theo? Did you hear me?”
When there’s no answer, Emma walks into the kitchen. She calls out again, and then I hear her footsteps overhead, in Theo’s room. A moment later, she is back in the living room, her voice wild. “He never did his math quiz. And his coat and sneakers and backpack are missing,” she says. “Theo’s gone.”
Let me just say that I think it’s pretty insane that a kid who’s fifteen, like me, can fly across the country without a parent. The hardest part was getting the ticket, which turned out to not be very hard at all. It was no secret that my mother keeps an emergency credit card buried in her file cabinet, and honestly, didn’t this count as an emergency? All I had to do was dig it out, get the number off the front and the PIN code on the back, and book my ticket on Orbitz.com.
I had a passport, too (we’d driven up to Canada once on a vacation that lasted approximately six hours, after Jacob refused to sleep in the motel room because it had an orange carpet), which was stored one file folder away from the emergency credit card. And getting to the airport was a piece of cake; it took two hitched rides, and that was that.
I wish I could tell you I had a plan, but I didn’t. All I knew was that, directly or indirectly, this was my fault. I hadn’t killed Jess Ogilvy, but I’d seen her the day she died, and I hadn’t told the police or my mother or anyone else-and now Jacob was going to be tried for murder. In my mind, it was like a chain reaction. If I hadn’t been breaking into houses at the time, if I hadn’t been in Jess’s, if I had never locked eyes with her-maybe that missing link would have broken the string of events that happened afterward. It was no great secret that my mother was totally freaking out about where the money would be coming from for Jacob’s trial; I figured that if I was ever going to remove my karmic debt, I might as well start by finding the solution to that problem.
Hence: this visit to my father.
On the plane, I am sitting between a businessman who’s trying to sleep and a woman who looks like a grandmother-she’s got short white hair and a light purple sweatshirt with a cat on it. The businessman is shifting in his seat because he’s got a kid behind him who keeps kicking it.
“Jesus H. Christ,” he says.
I’ve always wondered why people say that. Why the H? I mean, what if his middle name was Stanley?
“I’m stuck on the last one,” the grandma says.
I pull my iPod earphone free. “Sorry?”
“No, that doesn’t fit.” She is hunched over a crossword puzzle in the back of the US Airways magazine. It had been filled out halfway. I hate that; doesn’t the jerk who is sitting in the seat on the previous flight think someone else might want to try it on his own? “The clue is Regretted. And it’s four letters.”
Theo, I think.
Suddenly the businessman comes out of his seat and twists around. “Madam,” he says to the kid’s mom, “is there any chance you could keep your brat from being so incredibly rude?”
“That’s it,” the grandma says. “Rude!”
I watch her write it in pencil. “I, uh, think it’s spelled differently,” I suggest. “R-U-E-D.”
“Right,” she says, erasing it to make the correction. “I admit to being a horrendous speller.” She smiles at me. “Now, what’s bringing you out to sunny California?”
“I’m visiting someone.”
“Me, too. Someone I’ve never met-my first grandbaby.”
“Wow,” I say. “You must be pretty stoked.”
“If that’s a good thing, then yes, I guess I am. My name’s Edith.”
“I’m Paul.”
Okay, I don’t know where the lie came from. I shouldn’t have been surprised-after all, I’d hidden my involvement in this whole nightmare for over a month now, and I was getting really good at pretending I wasn’t the same person I was back then. But once I made up the name, the rest kept coming. I was on school break. I was an only child. My parents were divorced (Ha! Not a lie!), and I was going to see my dad. We were planning on taking a college tour of Stanford.
At home, we don’t talk about my father. In world studies class we learned about indigenous cultures who no longer speak the names of the dead-well, we no longer say the name of the person who quit when the going got tough. I don’t really know the details of my parents’ split, except that I was still a baby when it happened, and so of course there’s a piece of me that thinks I must have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. But I do know that he tries to pay off his guilt by sending my mom a child support check every month. And I also know that he has replaced Jacob and me with two little girls who look like china dolls and who probably have never broken into a house or stimmed a day in their short lives. I know this because he sends us a Christmas card every year, which I throw out if I get to the mail before my mother does.
“Do you have brothers or sisters?” Edith asks.
I take a sip of the 7-Up I bought for three bucks. “Nope,” I say. “Only child.”
“Stop it,” the businessman says, and for one awful moment I think he’s going to tell this woman who I really am. Then he turns around in his seat. “For the love of God,” he says to the little kid’s mom.
“So, Paul,” Edith says, “what do you want to study at Stanford?”
I am fifteen, I have no idea what I want to do with my life. Except fix the mess I’ve made of it.
Instead of answering, I point down at her crossword puzzle. “Quito,” I say. “That’s the answer to forty-two across.”
She gets all excited and reads aloud the next clue. I think about how happy she’ll be if we finish this crossword puzzle. She’ll get off the plane and tell her son-in-law, or whoever is picking her up, about the nice young man she met. About how helpful I was. How proud my parents must be of me.
My brother is not as smart as I am.
I am not saying this to be mean; I’m just stating a fact. For example, he has to study all his vocabulary words if he wants to do well on a test; I can look at the page and it’s stuck in my head for easy retrieval after that first glance. He would leave the room if two adults started discussing adult things, like current events; I would just pull up a chair and join the conversation. He doesn’t care about storing information away like a squirrel would save nuts for the winter; it’s only interesting to Theo if it has current real-life applications.
However, I am not nearly as intuitive as my brother. This is why when I begin to let some of that stored information bleed free-like for example how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak released the Apple I computer on April Fool’s Day 1976-and the person I am speaking with begins to go glassy-eyed and make excuses, I will keep talking, although Theo would easily read the clues and shut up.
Being a detective is all about intuition. Being a good crime scene investigator, however, requires great thoroughness and intelligence. Which is why, while my mother is rendered immobile by her panic over Theo’s disappearance and Oliver is doing stupid things like patting her shoulder, I go to Theo’s bedroom and get on his computer.
I am very good with computers. I once took my guidance counselor’s laptop apart and put it back together, motherboard and all. I could probably configure your wireless network in my sleep. Here is the other reason I like computers: when you are talking to someone online, you don’t have to read expressions on faces or interpret tones of voice. What you see is what you get, and that means I don’t have to try so hard when I interact. There are chat rooms and message boards for Aspies like me, but I don’t frequent them. One of the house rules in the family is to not go to websites my mother has not vetted. When I asked her why, she made me sit down with her and watch a television show about sexual predators. I tried to explain that the website I wanted to chat on wasn’t quite the same thing-that it was only a bunch of people like me trying to connect without all the bullshit that’s part of face-to-face meetings-but she wouldn’t take no for an answer. You don’t know what these people are like, Jacob, she said to me. In fact, I did. It was the people in the real world I didn’t understand.
It takes only a few clicks to delve into his cache-even though he thinks he’s emptied it, nothing is ever really gone on a computer-and to see where he was last surfing the Net. Orbitz.com, flights to San Jose.
When I bring downstairs the printout of the webpage that has his ticket information on it, Oliver is trying to convince my mother to call the police. “I can’t,” she says. “They won’t want to help me.”
“They don’t get to pick and choose their cases-”
“Mom,” I interrupt.
“Jacob, not now,” Oliver says.
“But-”
My mother looks at me and starts crying. I watch one tear make an S-curve down her cheek. “I want to talk to you,” I say.
“I’m getting the phone,” Oliver says. “I’m dialing 911.”
“I know where Theo is,” I tell them.
My mother blinks. “You what?”
“It was on his computer.” I hand her the printed page.
“Oh my God,” my mother says, holding her hand up to her mouth. “He’s going to Henry’s.”
“Who’s Henry?” Oliver asks.
“My father,” I answer. “He walked out on us.”
Oliver takes a step backward and rubs his chin.
“He’s connecting in Chicago,” I add. “His plane leaves in fifteen minutes.”
“You can’t catch him before he takes off,” Oliver says. “Does Henry know? About Jacob?”
“Of course he knows about me. He sends checks every year for my birthday and Christmas.”
“I meant does Henry know about the murder charge?”
My mother looks down at the fault line between the cushions of the couch. “I don’t know. He might have read about it in the papers, but I didn’t talk to him about it,” she admits. “I didn’t know how to tell him.”
Oliver holds out the phone. “Now’s the time to figure that out,” he says.
I don’t like to think of Theo on a plane; I don’t like planes. I understand Bernoulli’s principle, but for the love of God, no matter how physical forces are being exerted on the wings for lift, the hardware weighs a million pounds. For all intents and purposes, it should fall out of the sky.
My mother takes the phone and starts to dial a long-distance number. It sounds like the notes of a game show theme song, but I can’t remember which one.
“Christ,” Oliver says. He looks at me.
I don’t know how I’m supposed to respond. “We’ll always have Paris,” I say.
When Theo was eight, he became convinced that there was a monster living underneath the house. He knew this because he could hear its breath every night when the radiators in his room hissed awake. I was eleven and very into dinosaurs at the time, and as thrilling as it was for me to assume that there might be a sauropod rooting around under the foundations of our house, I knew this was not likely:
1. Our house was built in 1973.
2. To build it, there would have been an excavation.
3. The probability of the world’s sole long-lost dinosaur surviving the excavation and residing beneath my basement floor would be pretty slim.
4. Even if it had survived, what the hell would it be eating?
“Grass clippings,” Theo said, when I told him all this. “Duh.”
One of the reasons I like having Asperger’s is that I don’t have an active imagination. To many-teachers and guidance counselors and shrinks included-this is a great detriment. To me, it’s a blessing. Logical thinking keeps you from wasting time worrying, or hoping. It prevents disappointment. Imagination, on the other hand, only gets you hyped up over things that will never realistically happen.
Like running into a hadrosaur on your way to the bathroom at 3:00 A.M.
Theo spent two weeks freaking out in the middle of the night when he heard the hiss from heating registers in his room. My mother tried everything-from warm milk before bedtime to an illustrated diagram of the heating system of the house to an unnecessary dose of children’s Benadryl at night to knock Theo out-but like clockwork, he’d start screaming in the middle of the night and would run out of his room and wake both of us.
It was getting old, frankly, which is why I did what I did.
After my mother tucked me in, I stayed up with a flashlight hidden under my pillow and read until I knew she had gone to bed, too. Then I took my pillow and blankets and sleeping bag and camped outside Theo’s bedroom door. That night, when he woke up screaming and tried to run to my mother’s room to wake her up, too, he tripped over me.
He blinked for a second, trying to figure out if he was dreaming. “Go back to bed,” I said. “There’s no stupid dinosaur.”
I could tell he didn’t believe me, so I added, “And if there is, he’ll kill me first before he gets to you.”
This actually worked. Theo crawled back into bed, and we both fell asleep again. My mother was the one who found me sprawled on the floor the next morning.
She panicked. Assuming I’d had some kind of seizure, she started shaking me. “Stop, Mom,” I finally said. “I’m fine!”
“What are you doing out here?”
“I was sleeping…”
“In the hallway?”
“Not the hallway,” I corrected. “In front of Theo’s room.”
“Oh, Jacob. You were trying to make him feel safe, weren’t you?” She threw her arms around me and held me so tight I thought I just might have a seizure after all. “I knew it,” she babbled. “I knew it! All those books; all those idiot doctors who said kids with Asperger’s have no theory of mind and can’t empathize… You do love your brother. You wanted to protect him.”
I let her embrace me, because it seemed to be what she wanted to do. Behind Theo’s door, I could hear him starting to stir.
What my mother had said was not technically inaccurate. What those doctors and books all say about how Aspies like me cannot feel anything on behalf of others-that’s total bullshit. We understand when someone else is in pain; it just affects us differently than it affects other humans. I see it as the next step of evolution: I cannot take away your sadness, so why should I acknowledge it?
In addition, I hadn’t slept in front of Theo’s door because I wanted to protect him. I’d slept in front of his door because I was exhausted after a week of midnight crying, and I only wanted to get a good night’s rest. I was looking out for my own best interests.
You could say, actually, that this was the impetus behind what happened with Jess, too.
Emma wants to call US Airways and make them stop the plane from departing, but the entire system is automated. When we finally do reach a human employee, he’s in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has no way of contacting the Burlington gate. “Here’s the thing,” I tell her. “You can beat him there by flying direct to San Francisco. It’s almost the same distance to Palo Alto from the San Jose airport.” She looks over my shoulder at the computer screen, which has the flight I’ve found. “With the layover in Chicago that Theo’s going to make, you’ll still get in an hour before he does.”
She leans forward, and I can smell the shampoo in her hair. Her eyes flicker over the flight information, hopeful-and then land on the bottom, and the price. “$1,080? That’s ridiculous!”
“Same-day fares aren’t cheap.”
“Well, that’s not in my budget,” Emma says.
I click on the button to purchase the ticket. “It’s in mine,” I lie.
“What are you doing! You can’t pay for that-”
“Too late.” I shrug. The truth is, financially, I’m a little shaky now. I have one client, and she can’t afford to pay me, and worse, I’m okay with that. Surely I missed the Bloodsucking Your Client class in law school, since all evidence points to me being the poster boy for Financially Ruined Defense Attorneys. But at the same time, I’m thinking that I can sell my saddle-I have a beautiful English one that’s in storage below the pizza place. No use having it when I don’t have a horse anyway.
“I’ll add it to the bill,” I say, but we both know I probably won’t.
Emma closes her eyes for a moment. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Then just be quiet.”
“You shouldn’t have to get involved in this mess.”
“Lucky for you the only other thing I had to do today was organize my sock drawer,” I joke, but she’s not laughing.
“I’m sorry,” Emma replies. “It’s just… I don’t have anyone else.”
Very slowly, very deliberately, so that she will not startle or pull away, I thread my fingers through hers and squeeze her hand. “You have me,” I say.
If I were a better man, I wouldn’t have eavesdropped on Emma’s conversation with her ex-husband. Henry, she said. It’s Emma.
No, actually, I can’t really call back later. It’s about Theo.
He’s fine. I mean, I think he’s fine. He’s run away from home.
Well, of course I know that. He’s on his way to your place.
Yes, California. Unless you’ve moved lately.
No, I’m sorry. That wasn’t an insult…
I don’t know why. He just took off.
He used my credit card. Look, can we just talk about this when I get there?
Oh. Did I forget to mention that?
If all goes well, I’ll land before Theo.
Meeting us at the airport would be great. We’re both on US Airways.
Then there is a hesitation.
Jacob? she replies. No, he won’t be joining me.
It is decided that I will camp out for the night to be the over-twenty-five-year-old adult watching Jacob while Emma hauls Theo’s ass back across the country. At first, after she leaves, it seems like a piece of cake-we can play the Wii. We can watch TV. And, thank God, it’s Brown Thursday, which is relatively easy: I can cook Jacob a burger for dinner. It isn’t until an hour after she leaves that I remember my hearing tomorrow-the one I had not yet told Emma about, the one I will have to take Jacob to by myself.
“Jacob,” I say, while he is engrossed in a television show about how Milky Way bars are made. “I have to talk to you for a second.”
He doesn’t respond. His eyes don’t even flicker from the screen, so I step in front of it and turn it off.
“I just want to have a little chat.” When Jacob doesn’t answer, I keep speaking. “Your trial starts in a month, you know.”
“A month and six days.”
“Right. Well, I’ve been thinking about how… hard it might be for you to be in court all day long, and I figured we need to do something about it.”
“Oh,” Jacob says, shaking his head. “I can’t be in court all day. I have schoolwork to do. And I have to be home by four-thirty so that I can watch CrimeBusters.”
“I don’t think you get it. It’s not your call. You go to court when the judge says you go to court, and you get to come home when he’s ready to let you go.”
Jacob chews on this information. “That’s not going to work for me.”
“Which is why you and I are going back to court tomorrow.”
“But my mother’s not here.”
“I know that, Jacob. I didn’t plan for her to be away. But the fact of the matter is, the whole reason we’re going is something you said to me.”
“Me?”
“Yes. Do you remember what you told me when you decided I could run an insanity defense?”
Jacob nods. “That the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination by the state or local governments, including the courts,” he says, “and that some people consider autism to be a disability, even if I don’t happen to be one of them.”
“Right. But if you do consider Asperger’s syndrome to be a developmental disability, then under the ADA you’re also entitled to provisions in court that will make the experience easier for you.” I let a slow smile loose, like a card that’s been played close to the chest. “Tomorrow, we’re going to make sure you get them.”
From Auntie Em’s column archives:
Dear Auntie Em,
Recently I have been dreaming about my ex. Should I consider this a sign from a higher power and call him to say hi?
Sleepless in Strafford
Dear Sleepless,
Yes, but I wouldn’t tell him you are calling because he’s starring in your dreams. Unless he happens to say, “Gosh, it’s so strange that you called today, because I dreamed about you last night.”
Auntie Em
I asked Henry out on our first date, because he didn’t seem to be picking up on hints that I was his for the taking. We saw the movie Ghost and went out to dinner afterward, where Henry told me that, scientifically, ghosts could simply not exist. “It’s basic physics and math,” he said. “Patrick Swayze couldn’t walk through walls and tag along behind Demi Moore. If ghosts can follow someone, that means their feet apply force to the floor. If they go through walls, though, they don’t have any substance. They could either be material or be unmaterial, but they can’t be both at the same time. It violates Newton’s rule.”
He was wearing a T-shirt that said FULL FRONTAL NERDITY, and his corn silk hair kept falling into his eyes. “But don’t you wish it could be true?” I asked him. “Don’t you wish love was so strong it could come back to haunt you?”
I told him the story of my mother, who one night had woken up at 3:14 A.M. with a mouth full of violet petals and the scent of roses so thick in the air that she could not breathe. An hour later she was roused by a phone call: her own mother, a florist by trade, had died of a heart attack at 3:14 a.m. “Science can’t answer everything,” I told Henry. “It doesn’t explain love.”
“Actually it does,” he told me. “There have been all kinds of studies done. People are more attracted to people with symmetrical features, for example. And symmetrical men smell better to women. Also, people who have similar genetic traits are attracted to each other. It probably has something to do with evolution.”
I burst out laughing. “That is awful,” I said. “That is the most unromantic thing I’ve ever heard.”
“I don’t think so…”
“Oh, really. Say something that will sweep me off my feet,” I demanded.
Henry looked at me for a long moment, until I could feel my head growing lighter and dizzier. “I think you might be perfectly symmetrical,” he said.
On our second date, Henry took me to Boston. We had dinner at the Parker House, and then he hired a hansom cab to take us around the Boston Common. It was late November, and frost crouched in the bare branches of the trees; when we settled into the back of the carriage, the driver handed us a heavy wool blanket to put over our laps. The horse was spirited, stamping its feet and snorting.
Henry was telling me riddles. “The ratio of an igloo’s circumference to its diameter?”
“I give up.”
“Eskimo pi,” he said. “How about half of a large intestine?”
“I don’t know…”
“A semicolon.”
“That’s not a math or science joke,” I said.
“I’m a Renaissance Guy.” Henry laughed. “Eight nickels?”
I shook my head.
“Two paradigms,” he said.
The puns weren’t, by definition, funny. But on Henry’s lips, they were. Lips that were curved at the ends and that always seemed a little embarrassed to smile, lips that had kissed me good night on our first date with a surprising amount of force and intensity.
I was staring at his lips when the horse dropped dead.
Technically, it wasn’t dead. It had slipped on a patch of black ice, and its front legs had buckled. I had heard one snap.
We rolled in slow motion out of the hansom cab, Henry twisting so that he would cushion my fall. “You all right?” he asked, and he helped me to my feet. He held the rough blanket around me while the police came, and then animal control. “Don’t watch,” Henry whispered, and he turned my face away when the officer pulled out a pistol.
I tried to focus on the words on Henry’s T-shirt, where his coat was gaping open: DOES THIS PROTON MAKE MY MASS LOOK FAT? But the sound was like the world cracking in half, and the last thing I remember was wondering who wore a T-shirt in the winter, and if that meant his skin was always warm, and if I would ever get to lie against it.
I woke up in an unfamiliar bed. The walls were cream-colored, and there was a dresser made of dark wood with a television on it. It was very clean and… corporate. You fainted, I told myself. “The horse,” I said out loud.
“Um,” a voice said quietly. “He’s in that big carousel in the sky?”
I rolled over to find Henry pressed against the far wall, still wearing his coat. “You don’t believe in heaven,” I murmured.
“No, but I figured you would. Are you… are you okay?”
I nodded gingerly, testing. “What’s wrong? Don’t women swoon around you all the time?”
He grinned. “It was a little Victorian of you.”
“Where are we?”
“I got a room at the Parker House. I thought you might need to lie down for a while.” His cheeks bloomed a bright red. “I, um, don’t want you to get the wrong idea, though.”
I came up on an elbow. “You don’t?”
“Well… n-not unless you want me to,” he stammered.
“Well, that’s a little Gothic,” I said. “Henry, can I ask you something?”
“Okay.”
“What are you doing all the way over there?”
I held out my hand and felt the mattress give under his weight as Henry crawled onto it. I felt his mouth come down against mine, and I realized that this relationship would not be what I’d imagined it to be: me, playing teacher to the shy young computer science geek. I should have known from watching Henry work at the office: programmers moved slowly and deliberately, and then waited to see the reaction. And if they did not succeed the first time, they would try over and over again, until they broke through that fifth dimension and got it right.
Later, when I was wearing Henry’s T-shirt and his arms were wrapped around me, when we had turned on the television and were watching a show on primates in the Congo with the volume muted, when he had fed me chicken nuggets from the kids’ room service menu, I thought how clever I’d been to see past what other people saw in Henry. The silly T-shirts, the Star Wars canteen in which he stored his coffee, the way he could barely look a woman in the eye-beneath that exterior was a man who touched me as if I were made of glass, who focused with such intensity on me that sometimes I had to remind him to breathe when we were making love. I never imagined at the time that Henry wouldn’t be able to love anything other than me-not even a baby he’d made. I never imagined that all that passion between us would pool beneath the tangled threads of Jacob’s genetic code, waiting for just the perfect storm to dig in its roots, to burst and blossom into autism.
Henry is waiting for me when I get off my plane. I walk toward him, stopping an awkward foot away. I lean forward to embrace him just as he turns away toward the arrivals monitor, which means I close my arms around nothing but air. “He should be landing in twenty minutes,” Henry says.
“Good,” I reply. “That’s good.” I look at him. “I’m really sorry about this.”
Henry stares down the empty corridor past the security barrier. “You going to tell me what’s going on, Emma?”
For five minutes, I tell him about Jess Ogilvy, about the murder charge. I tell him I’m sure Theo’s escape had something to do with all of this. When I’m finished, I listen to the call for a passenger about to miss his plane and then muster the courage to meet Henry’s gaze. “Jacob’s on trial for murder?” he says, his voice shaky. “And you didn’t mention it?”
“What would you have done?” I challenge. “Fly back to Vermont to be our white knight? Somehow I doubt that, Henry.”
“And when this hits the papers out here? How am I supposed to explain to my seven- and four-year-old that their half brother is a murderer?”
I reel back as if he’s slapped me. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that,” I murmur. “And if you knew your son at all, if you had ever actually spent time with Jacob instead of just sending a check every month to ease your conscience, you’d know that he’s innocent.”
A muscle tics in Henry’s jaw. “Do you remember what happened on our fifth anniversary?”
That time of my life, when we were trying every intervention and therapy possible to get Jacob to connect with the world again, is a dark blur.
“We were out at a movie-the first time we’d been alone in months. And suddenly this strange man walks down the aisle and crouches down and starts talking to you, and a minute later you walk out with him. I sat there thinking, Who the hell is this guy and where is my wife going with him? And I followed you into the lobby. Turned out that he was the father of our babysitter-and an EMT. Livvie had called him in a panic because Theo was bleeding like crazy. He went to the house, put a butterfly bandage on Theo, and came and got us.”
I stare at Henry. “I don’t remember any of this.”
“Theo wound up getting ten stitches in his eyebrow,” Henry says. “Because Jacob had gotten angry and knocked over his high chair when Livvie had her back turned.”
Now it is coming back to me-the panic we came home to with Jacob in total meltdown mode and Theo hysterically crying, a knot the size of his tiny fist rising over his left eye. Henry making the hospital run while I was left behind to calm Jacob. I wonder how it is possible to put something so far out of one’s mind, to rewrite history. “I can’t believe I forgot that,” I say softly.
Henry glances away from me. “You were always good at seeing what you wanted to see,” he answers.
And then suddenly, we both notice our son.
“What the hell?” Theo says.
I fold my arms. “My thoughts exactly,” I reply.
It is a strange thing to be in an airport and to not be celebrating a reunion or a departure. It is even stranger to sit in the backseat of Henry’s car and listen to him making small talk with Theo as if Theo isn’t smart enough to know that, at some point, a colossal bomb is going to drop.
When Theo went into the restroom at the airport, Henry came up with a plan. “Let me talk to him,” Henry said.
“He won’t listen to you.”
“Well, he ran away from you,” Henry pointed out.
The freeways here are white as bone and clean. There’s no cracking from frost heaves, like in Vermont. Shiny and happy and new. No wonder Henry likes it. “Theo,” I say, “what were you thinking?”
He twists in his seat. “I wanted to talk to Dad.”
In the rearview mirror, Henry meets my gaze. I told you so.
“Haven’t you ever heard of a phone?”
But before he can answer, Henry pulls into a driveway. His house has Spanish tiles on its roof and a plastic, child-size princess castle on the front lawn. That makes my chest tighten.
Meg, Henry’s new wife, bursts out the front door. “Oh, thank goodness,” she says, clasping her hands together when she sees Theo in the front seat. She is a tiny blonde with überwhite teeth and a shiny ponytail. Henry approaches her, leaving me to wrestle my own bag out of the trunk. Standing beside each other, with their blue eyes and golden hair, they look like a poster for the quintessential Aryan family. “Theo,” Henry says, all fatherly, too little too late, “let’s go into the library and talk a little.”
I want to hate Meg, but I can’t. She immediately surprises me by linking her arm through mine and leading me into the house. “You must have been worried sick,” she says. “I know I would have been.”
She offers me coffee and a slice of lemon-poppy seed cake while Theo and Henry vanish deeper into the house. I wonder if the cake was just lying around, if she is the sort of mother who makes sure there is a homemade baked good at all times on the kitchen counter, or if she’d popped it in the oven after Henry told her I was coming. I’m not quite sure which image upsets me more.
Her daughters (well, Henry’s, too) dart across the living room threshold to get a peek at me. They are sprites, little towheaded fairies. One of them wears a pink sequined tutu. “Girls,” Meg says. “Come on in here and meet Ms. Hunt.”
“Emma,” I say automatically. I wonder what these little girls make of a stranger who has the same last name they do. I wonder if Henry has ever explained me to them.
“This is Isabella,” Meg says, lightly touching the taller girl on the crown of her head. “And this is Grace.”
“Hello,” they chime, and Grace pops her thumb in her mouth.
“Hi,” I answer, and then I don’t know what to say.
Did Henry feel there was some balance to his second life, having two girls instead of two boys? Grace tugs on her mother’s shirt and whispers in her ear. “She wants to show you what she does in ballet,” Meg says apologetically.
“Oh, I love ballet,” I say.
Grace puts her arms in the air and touches her fingertips together. She begins to turn in a circle, wobbling only a little. I clap for her.
Jacob used to spin. It was one of his stims, when he was little. He’d go faster and faster until he crashed into something, usually a vase or another breakable item.
I already know it’s not true by looking at her, but if little Grace turned out to be autistic, would Henry run away again?
As if I’ve conjured him, Henry ducks into the room. “You were right,” he says to me. “He won’t talk without you there.” Whatever small satisfaction this gives me vanishes as Grace sees her father. She stops spinning and hurls herself at him with the force of a tropical storm. He lifts her into his arms and then tousles Isabella’s hair. There is an ease to Henry that I have not seen in him before, a quiet confidence that this is where he belongs. I can see it etched on his face, in the tiny lines that now fan out from his eyes, lines that were not there when I loved him.
Meg takes Grace on her hip and grasps Isabella’s hand. “Let’s give Daddy a chance to talk to his friends,” she says.
Friends. I loved him; I created children with him, and this is what we have been demoted to.
I follow Henry down a corridor to the room where Theo is waiting. “Your family,” I say. “They’re perfect.” But what I’m really saying is, Why didn’t I deserve this with you?
“Well, Mr. Bond,” the judge says. “Here you are again.”
“Like a bad penny,” I reply, smiling.
Jacob and I are in court again, this time without Emma. She had called late last night and left a message saying that she and Theo would be flying home today. I hoped to have good news for her when she arrived; God knows she would need some by then.
The judge glances over the half-moons of his glasses. “We’ve got a motion before the court for accommodations during the trial of Jacob Hunt. What are you looking for, Counselor?”
Sympathy for a client who is incapable of showing any himself… but I can’t admit that. After Jacob’s last outburst in court, I thought about asking the judge to let him watch the proceedings from a separate room, but I need him in full view of the jury in order to make my defense work. If I’m playing the disability card, they have to be able to see Asperger’s manifesting itself in its full glory. “First, Your Honor,” I say, “Jacob needs sensory breaks. You’ve seen how he can get agitated by courtroom procedure-he has to be able to get up and leave the courtroom when he feels the need to do so. Second, he would like to have his mother sitting at the defense table beside him. Third, due to Jacob’s sensitivity to stimuli, we ask that Your Honor not use his gavel during the proceedings, and that the lights be turned down in the courtroom. Fourth, the prosecution needs to ask questions in a very direct and literal manner-”
“For God’s sake,” Helen Sharp sighs.
I glance at her but keep talking. “Fifth, we request that the length of the day in court be abbreviated.”
The judge shakes his head. “Ms. Sharp, I’m quite sure you have objections to those requests?”
“Yes, Your Honor. I don’t have a problem with numbers one, three, and five, but the others are absolutely prejudicial.”
“Mr. Bond,” the judge says, “why are you asking for your client’s mother to sit at counsel table?”
“Well, Your Honor, you’ve seen Jacob’s outbursts. Emma Hunt serves as a coping mechanism for him. I think that, given the stress of a court experience, having his mother beside him would be beneficial to all involved.”
“And yet, Ms. Hunt is not with us today,” the judge points out. “But the defendant seems to be faring well.”
“Ms. Hunt wanted to be here, but there has been a… family emergency,” I say. “And in terms of stress, there’s a huge difference between coming to court for a motion and coming for a full-blown murder trial.”
“Ms. Sharp,” the judge asks, “what is the basis for your objection to having the defendant’s mother sit at counsel table?”
“It’s twofold, Your Honor. There’s a concern about how to explain to the jury the defendant’s mother’s presence there. She’s testifying as a witness, so she will clearly be identified as the defendant’s mother, and as the court well knows, it is not good protocol to allow anyone other than the attorney and clients to sit at counsel table. Giving her the elevated position at table awards her more importance in the eyes of the jury, and it becomes an unexplained incident that negatively impacts the State. Moreover, we’ve heard all too often that the defendant’s mother interprets for him. She intervenes at his school with teachers, with strangers, with police officers. She’s the one who burst into the station and told the detective she had to be present at the interrogation. Judge, what’s to prevent her from writing an entire script for Jacob and passing it to him or whispering in his ear during the course of the trial to coach him into saying or doing something inappropriate and prejudicial?”
I stare at her for a moment. She’s really good.
“Mr. Bond? How do you respond?” the judge asks.
“Judge, Jacob’s mother’s presence at counsel table is the equivalent of having a Seeing Eye dog for a defendant who’s blind. The jury will understand if told that it’s not just an animal in the courtroom-it’s a necessity, an accommodation being made for the defendant because of his disability. Jacob’s mother, and her proximity to him during the trial, can be explained the same way,” I say. “What you’re ruling on today, Judge, is what accommodations need to be made to ensure that my client has a fair trial. That right, and those accommodations, are assured to him pursuant to the Americans with Disabilities Act and, even more important, pursuant to the Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Amendments of the United States Constitution. Does this mean giving Jacob some minor concessions that other defendants don’t get in court? Yes, because those other defendants don’t have to deal with the crippling inability to communicate effectively and to interact with other people like Jacob does. For them, a trial is not a gigantic mountain standing between them and freedom, without even having the most basic tools with which they can begin climbing.”
I glance surreptitiously at the judge and make the snap decision to tone it down a little. “So how do we explain Jacob’s mother’s position to the jury? Easy. We say that the judge has given her a right to sit at counsel table. We say that this isn’t usual practice, but in this case she has a right to sit there. As for her role in the trial, Your Honor, I will have her agree not to speak to Jacob but instead to communicate with him via writing, and those notes can be turned in to the court at the close of the day or during each recess, so that Ms. Sharp gets to see exactly what dialogue is going on between them.”
The judge removes his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. “This is an unusual case, with unusual circumstances. I’ve certainly had a good number of defendants come in front of me who had a hard time communicating… But in this case, we have a young man facing very serious charges and possible incarceration for the rest of his life, and we know he has a diagnosed inability to communicate the way the rest of us do… so it would be an oversight to expect him to behave in a courtroom the way the rest of us would.” He looks at Jacob, who-I imagine-is still not meeting his gaze. “What a fair trial looks like for this defendant may well be different from what it looks like for others, but that’s the nature of America-we make room for everyone, and that’s what we’re going to do for Mr. Hunt.” He looks down at the motion before him. “All right. I’m going to allow for the sensory breaks. We will ask the bailiff to set up a special room at the back of the courtroom, and anytime the defendant feels the need to leave, he is to pass a note to you, Mr. Bond. Is that satisfactory?”
“Yes,” I say.
“Then, Counselor, you may approach and ask me to call for a recess. You will explain to your client that he may not leave the courtroom until the recess has been called and he’s been excused by the court.”
“Got it, Your Honor,” I reply.
“As for your third request, I will not use my gavel for the duration of this trial. However, I’m not going to turn down the lights. It’s a security hazard for the bailiffs. Hopefully, having sensory breaks will help compensate, and I have no objection to the defendant turning out the lights in the break room in the rear of the court.”
Jacob tugs on my coat. “Can I wear sunglasses?”
“No,” I say curtly.
“Third, I’ll shorten the court sessions. We will break the trial into three forty-five-minute sessions in the morning, two in the afternoon, with fifteen-minute breaks in between. We will adjourn at four P.M. every day. I assume that will be satisfactory, Mr. Bond?”
“Yes, Your Honor.”
“I agree to allow the defendant’s mother to sit at counsel table; however, they can only communicate in writing, and those notes must be turned in to the court at every break. Finally, in regard to your request for the prosecution’s questioning to be direct and simple,” the judge says, “that I will deny. You can ask whatever short, literal questions you like, Mr. Bond, but the defendant has no constitutional right to direct how the State chooses to present its case.” He sticks my motion back inside a folder. “I trust that’s all satisfactory, Mr. Bond?”
“Of course,” I say, but inside, I’m doing handsprings. Because all of these little quirks and concessions are greater than the sum of their parts: the jury cannot help but see that Jacob’s different from your average defendant, from the rest of us.
And should be judged accordingly.
I wake up sneezing.
When I open my eyes, I’m in a pink room and there are feathers tickling my nose. I jackknife upright in the narrow little bed and remember where I am-one of the girls’ rooms. There are mobiles with glittery stars and piles of stuffed animals and a pink camouflage rug.
I sneeze again, and that’s when I realize I’m wearing a pink feather boa.
“What the fuck,” I say, unspooling it from my neck, and then I hear giggling. I lean over the side of the bed and find my father’s younger kid-I think her name is Grace-hiding under the bed.
“You said a bad word,” she tells me.
“What are you doing here?”
“What are you doing here?” she asks. “This is my room.”
I flop back down on the mattress. Between the time my flight arrived and the Talk, I probably got all of four hours of sleep. No wonder I feel like shit.
She slips out from underneath the bed and sits down beside me. She’s really little-I’m not good with kid ages, though. She has purple nail polish on her toes, and she’s wearing a plastic tiara.
“How come you’re not in school?”
“Because it’s Friday, silly,” Grace says, although this doesn’t make any sense to me. “You have really big feet. They’re bigger than Leon.”
I’m wondering who Leon is, but then she takes a stuffed pig and holds it up against the bare sole of my foot.
My watch is on the nightstand, next to a book about a mouse too shy to tell anyone her name. I read it last night before I went to bed. It’s only 6:42 A.M., but we are leaving early. We’ve got a plane to catch.
“Are you my brother?” Grace asks.
I look at her. I try really hard, but I can’t see a single feature we have in common. And that’s really weird, because my mom has always told me I remind her of my dad. (For the record, now that I’ve seen for myself, it’s not true. I’m just blond, that’s all, and everyone else in my household has dark hair.) “I guess you could say that,” I tell her.
“Then how come you don’t live here?”
I look around at the princess poster on the wall, the china tea set on a table in the corner. “I don’t know,” I say, when the real answer is Because you have another brother, too.
This is what happened last night:
I got off the plane and found my parents-both of them-waiting for me outside airport security. “What the hell?” I blurted out.
“My thoughts exactly, Theo,” my mother said curtly. And then, before she could tear me a new one, my father said we were going to his house to discuss this.
He made stupid conversation for the twenty-minute drive, while I felt my mother’s eyes boring holes into the back of my skull. When we reached his home, I got a glimpse of a really pretty woman who had to be his wife before he led me into the library.
It was very modern, and totally unlike our house. There were windows that made up one entire wall, and the couch was black leather and full of right angles. It looked like the kind of room you see in magazines at doctors’ offices, and not anywhere you’d want to live. Our couch was made of some red, stain-proof fabric, and yet there was a stain on the arm from where I spilled grape juice once. The zippers on two of the pillows were broken. But when you wanted to flop down and watch TV, it fit you perfectly.
“So,” my father said, gesturing to a seat. “This is a little awkward.”
“Yeah.”
“I mean, I don’t really have much of a right to tell you that running away was a stupid thing to do. And that you scared your mother to death. And I’m not going to tell you that she’s out for blood-”
“You don’t have to tell me that.”
He clasps his hands between his knees. “Anyway, I’ve been thinking about it, and I’m not going to tell you any of those things.” He looks at me. “I figured you came all the way out here so that I would listen.”
I hesitate. He seems so familiar to me, but that’s crazy-given that I talk to him twice a year, on Christmas and my birthday. And yet, maybe that’s what being related to someone does for you. Maybe it lets you pick up where you left off, even if that was fifteen years ago.
I want to tell him why I’m there-the story of Jacob’s arrest, the truth behind my own breaking and entering, the phone message I never gave my mother from the bank, denying her the second mortgage loan-but all the words jam in my throat. I choke on the sentences until I cannot breathe, until tears spring to my eyes, and what comes out finally is none of these things.
“Why didn’t I matter?” I say.
This is not what I wanted. I wanted him to see me as the responsible young man I’ve become, trying to save my family, and I wanted him to shake his head and think, I sure fucked up. I should have stayed with him, gotten to know him. He turned out so well. Instead, I’m a blubbering mess, with my nose running and my hair in my eyes and I’m so tired; I’m suddenly so freaking tired.
When you expect something, you’re sure to be disappointed. I learned that a long time ago. But if this had been my mother sitting next to me, her arms would have wrapped around me in an instant. She would have rubbed my back and told me to relax, and I would have let myself melt against her until I felt better.
My father cleared his throat, and didn’t touch me at all.
“I’m, uh, not very good at this kind of thing,” he said. He shifted, and I wiped my eyes, thinking he was trying to reach out to me, but instead he took his wallet out of his back pocket. “Here,” he says, holding out a few twenties. “Why don’t you take this?”
I look at him, and before I know it, a laugh has snorted its way out of me. My brother is about to be tried for murder, my mother wants my head on a silver platter, my future’s so dim I might as well be buried in a coal mine-and my father can’t even pat me on the back and tell me I’m going to be okay. Instead, he thinks sixty bucks is going to make everything better.
“I’m sorry,” I say, laughing in earnest now. “I’m really sorry.”
It strikes me that I’m not the one who should be saying that.
I don’t know what I was thinking, coming out here. There are no silver bullets in life, there’s just the long, messy climb out of the pit you’ve dug yourself.
“I think maybe you should go get Mom,” I say.
I’m sure my father thinks I’m crazy, laughing my ass off like this when a minute before I was sobbing. And as he gets up-relieved to get the hell away from me, I’m sure-I realize why my father seems familiar. It’s not because we have anything in common, much less share a genetic code. It’s because, with his obvious discomfort and the way he won’t look at me now and the fact that he doesn’t want physical contact, he reminds me so much of my brother.
I don’t speak to my mom the whole time my father is driving us to the airport. I don’t say a word when my father gives her a check, and she looks at the number written on it, and cannot speak. “Just take it,” he says. “I wish… I wish I could be there for him.”
He doesn’t mean it. What he really wishes is that he was capable of being there for Jacob, but my mother seems to understand this, and whatever money he’s given her helps, too. She gives him a quick good-bye hug. Me, I hold out my hand. I don’t make the same mistake twice.
We don’t talk in the departure lounge, or as we’re boarding, or during takeoff. It isn’t until the pilot gets on the loudspeaker to mumble about our cruising altitude that I turn to my mother and tell her I’m sorry.
She is flipping through an in-flight magazine. “I know,” she says.
“Really sorry.”
“I’m sure.”
“Like, about stealing your credit card number. And all of that.”
“Which is why you’re paying me back for these tickets-return trips, too-even if it takes you till you’re fifty-six,” she says.
The flight attendant walks by, asking if anyone would like to purchase a beverage. My mother holds up her hand. “What do you want?” she asks me, and I say tomato juice. “And I’ll have a gin and tonic,” she tells the flight attendant.
“Really?” I am impressed. I didn’t know my mother drank gin.
She sighs. “Desperate times call for desperate measures, Theo.” Then she looks up at me, her brow wrinkled in thought. “When was the last time you and I were alone like this?”
“Um,” I say. “Never?”
“Huh,” my mother says, considering this.
The flight attendant returns with our drinks. “Here you go,” she chirps. “You two getting off in L.A. or continuing on to Hawaii?”
“I wish,” my mother says, and when she twists the bottle top of the gin, it makes a sighing sound.
“Don’t we all?” The flight attendant laughs, and she moves down the aisle.
The page my mother has stopped at in her magazine is a tourism spread of Hawaii, actually, or at least something equally tropical. “Maybe we should just stay on the plane and go there,” I say.
She laughs. “Squatters’ rights. Sorry, sir, we’re not vacating seats Fifteen A and B.”
“By dinnertime, we could be sitting on a beach.”
“Getting tan,” my mother muses.
“Drinking piña coladas,” I suggest.
My mother raises a brow. “Virgin for you.”
There is a pause, as we both imagine a life that will never be ours.
“Maybe,” I say after another moment, “we should bring Jacob along. He loves coconut.”
This will never happen. My brother won’t get on a plane; he’d have the Mother of all Meltdowns before that happened. And you can’t exactly row a boat to Hawaii. Not to mention the fact that we are categorically broke. But still.
My mother lays her head on my shoulder. It feels weird, like I’m the one taking care of her, instead of the other way around. Already, though, I’m taller than her, and still growing. “Let’s do that,” my mother agrees, as if we have a prayer.
I have a joke:
Two muffins are in an oven.
One muffin says, “Wow, it’s really hot in here.”
The other one jumps and says, “Yikes! A talking muffin.”
This is funny because
1. Muffins don’t talk.
2. I am sane enough to know that. In spite of what my mother and Oliver and practically every psychiatrist in Vermont seem to think, I have never struck up a conversation with a muffin in my entire life.
3. That would just be plain corny.
4. You got that joke, too, right?
My mother said that she would be talking to Dr. Newcomb for a half hour, yet it has been forty-two minutes and she still has not come back into the waiting room.
We are here because Oliver said we have to be. Even though he managed to get all those concessions at court for me, and even though all of those help him prove his insanity defense to the jury (although don’t ask me how-insanity is not equivalent to disability, or even quirkiness), apparently we also have to meet with a shrink he’s found whose job it will be to tell the jury that they should let me go because I have Asperger’s.
Finally, when it has been sixteen minutes longer than my mother said it would be-when I have started to sweat a little and my mouth has gone dry, because I’m thinking maybe my mother forgot about me and I will be stuck in this little waiting room forever-Dr. Newcomb opens the door. “Jacob?” she says, smiling. “Why don’t you come in?”
She is a very tall woman with an even taller tower of hair and skin as smooth and rich as dark chocolate. Her teeth gleam like headlights, and I find myself staring at them. My mother is nowhere in the room. I feel a hum rise in my throat.
“Where’s my mom?” I ask. “She said she’d be back in a half hour, and now it’s forty-seven minutes.”
“We took a little longer than I expected. Your mom went out the back way and is waiting for you just outside,” Dr. Newcomb says, as if she can read my mind. “Now, Jacob, I’ve had a lovely talk with your mom. And Dr. Murano.” She sits down and offers me the seat across from her. It’s upholstered in zebra stripes, which I don’t really like. Patterns in general make me uneasy. Every time I look at a zebra, I can’t figure out whether it’s black with white stripes or white with black stripes, and that frustrates me.
“It’s my job to examine you,” Dr. Newcomb says. “I have to give a report back to the court, so what you say here isn’t confidential. Do you understand what that means?”
“Intended to be kept secret,” I say, rattling off the definition and frowning. “But you’re a doctor?”
“Yes. A psychiatrist, just like Dr. Murano.”
“Then what I tell you is privileged,” I say. “There’s doctor-patient confidentiality.”
“No, this is a special circumstance where I’m going to tell people what you say, because of the court case.”
This whole procedure is starting to sound even worse-not only do I have to speak to a psychiatrist I don’t know, but she plans to blab about the session. “Then I’d rather talk to Dr. Moon. She doesn’t tell anyone my secrets.”
“I’m afraid that’s not an option,” Dr. Newcomb says, and then she looks at me. “Do you have secrets?”
“Everyone has secrets.”
“Does having secrets sometimes make you feel bad?”
I sit very upright on the chair, so that my back doesn’t have to touch the crazy zigzagged fabric. “Sometimes, I guess.”
She crosses her legs. They are really long, like a giraffe’s. Giraffes and zebras. And I am the elephant, who cannot forget.
“Do you understand that what you did, Jacob, was wrong in the eyes of the law?”
“The law doesn’t have eyes,” I tell her. “It has courts and judges and witnesses and juries, but no eyes.” I wonder where Oliver dug this one up. I mean, honestly.
“Do you understand that what you did was wrong?”
I shake my head. “I did the right thing.”
“Why was it right?”
“I was following the rules.”
“What rules?”
I could tell her more, but she is going to tell other people, and that means that I will not be the only one who gets into trouble. But I know she wants me to explain; I can tell by the way she leans forward. I shrink back in the chair. It means touching the zebra print, but it’s the lesser of two evils.
“I see dead people.” Dr. Newcomb just stares at me. “It’s from The Sixth Sense,” I tell her.
“Yes, I know,” she says, and she tilts her head. “Do you believe in God, Jacob?”
“We don’t go to church. My mom says religion is the root of all evil.”
“I didn’t ask what your mom thinks about religion. I asked what you think about it.”
“I don’t think about it.”
“Those rules you mentioned,” Dr. Newcomb says.
Didn’t we get off this topic?
“Do you know that there’s a rule against killing people?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” Dr. Newcomb asks, “do you think it would be wrong to kill somebody?”
Of course I do. But I can’t say that. I can’t say it because to admit to this rule would break another one. I stand up and start walking, bouncing up and down on my toes because sometimes it helps me jog the rest of my brain and body into sync.
But I don’t answer.
Dr. Newcomb isn’t giving up, though. “When you were at Jess’s house on the day she died, did you understand that it’s wrong to kill somebody?”
“I’m not bad,” I quote. “I’m just drawn that way.”
“I really need you to answer the question, Jacob. On the day that you were at Jess’s house, did you feel like you were doing something wrong?”
“No,” I say immediately. “I was following the rules.”
“Why did you move Jess’s body?” she asks.
“I was setting up a crime scene.”
“Why did you clean up the evidence at the house?”
“Because we’re supposed to clean up our messes.”
Dr. Newcomb writes something down. “You had a fight with Jess during your tutoring session a couple of days before she died, right?”
“Yes.”
“What did she say to you that day?”
“‘Just get lost.’”
“But you went to her house on Tuesday afternoon anyway?”
I nod. “Yes. We had an appointment.”
“Jess was obviously upset with you. Why did you go back?”
“People are always saying things that aren’t true.” I shrug. “Like when Theo tells me to get a grip. It doesn’t mean hold something, it means calm down. I assumed Jess was doing the same kind of thing.”
“What were your reactions to the victim’s responses?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“When you got to Jess’s house, did you yell at her?”
At one point I had leaned right down into her face and screamed at her to wake up.
“Yes,” I say. “But she didn’t answer me.”
“Do you understand that Jess is never coming back?”
Of course I understand that. I could probably tell Dr. Newcomb a thing or two about body decomposition. “Yeah.”
“Do you think Jess was scared that day?”
“I don’t know.”
“How do you think you would have felt, if you were the victim?”
For a moment, I consider this. “Dead,” I say.
Three weeks before we go to trial, we start jury selection. You would think that, with autism being diagnosed at the rate it currently is, finding a jury of Jacob’s peers-or at least parents who have children on the spectrum-would not be as difficult as it is. But the only two jurors with autistic children who are in our initial pool are the ones Helen uses her peremptory strikes against to get them removed.
In between my stints in court, I receive the reports from Dr. Newcomb and Dr. Cohn, the two psychiatrists who’ve met with Jacob. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Cohn has found Jacob quite sane-the State’s shrink would declare a toaster sane-and Dr. Newcomb has said that Jacob was legally insane at the time the crime was committed.
Even so, Newcomb’s report isn’t going to be that much help. In it, Jacob comes off sounding like an automaton. The truth is, jurors might want to be fair, but their gut instinct about a defendant has a great deal to do with the verdict rendered. Which means that I’d better stack the odds to make Jacob look as sympathetic as possible, since I have no intention of letting him actually testify. With his flat affect, his darting eyes, his nervous tics-well, that would just be a disaster.
A week before the trial begins, I turn my attention to getting Jacob ready for court. When I reach the Hunt household, Thor bolts out of the car and runs to the porch, his tail wagging. He’s gotten pretty attached to Theo, to the point where I sometimes wonder if I ought to just leave him curled up on the kid’s bed overnight, since he seems to have taken up residence there anyway. And God knows Theo needs the company-in the wake of his cross-country journey, he’s been grounded until he’s thirty-although I keep telling him that I can probably find a reason to appeal.
I knock, but no one answers the door. I’ve gotten used to letting myself inside, though, so I walk in and watch Thor trot upstairs. “Hello,” I call out, and Emma steps forward with a smile.
“You’re just in time,” she says.
“For what?”
“Jacob got a hundred on a math test, and as a reward I’m letting him set up a crime scene.”
“That’s macabre.”
“Just another day in my life,” she says.
“Ready!” Jacob calls from upstairs.
I follow Emma, but instead of heading to Jacob’s room, we continue on to the bathroom. When she pushes open the door, I gag, my hand pressed against my mouth.
“What… what is this?” I manage.
There is blood everywhere. It’s like I’ve stepped into the lair of a serial killer. One long line of blood arcs horizontally across the white shell of the shower wall. Facing that, on the mirror, are a series of drops in various elongated shapes.
Even more strange, Emma doesn’t seem to be the least bit upset that the walls of the shower and the mirror and sink are completely drenched with blood. She takes one look at my face and starts laughing. “Relax, Oliver,” she says. “It’s just corn syrup.”
She reaches over to the mirror, dabs her finger to the mess, and holds it up to my lips.
I can’t resist the urge to taste her. And yeah, it is corn syrup, with red dye, I’m guessing.
“Way to contaminate a crime scene, Mom,” Jacob mutters. “So you remember that the tail of the bloodstain usually points in the direction the blood was traveling…”
All of a sudden I can see Jess Ogilvy standing in the shower, and Jacob across from her, standing right where Emma is.
“I’ll give you a hint,” Jacob tells Emma. “The victim was right here.” He points to the bath mat between the shower stall and the mirror over the sink.
I can easily picture Jacob with a bleach solution, wiping down the mirror and the tub at Jess Ogilvy’s place.
“Why the bathroom?” I ask. “What made you choose to set your crime scene here, Jacob?”
Those words are all it takes to make Emma understand why I’m so shaken. “Oh, God,” she says, turning. “I didn’t think… I didn’t realize…”
“Blood spatter’s messy,” Jacob says, confounded. “I thought my mom would be less likely to yell at me if I did it in the bathroom.”
A line from Dr. Newcomb’s report jumps out at me: I was following the rules.
“Clean it up,” I announce, and I walk out.
“New rules,” I say, when the three of us are sitting at the kitchen table. “First and foremost: No more crime scene staging.”
“Why not?” Jacob demands.
“You tell me, Jake. You’re on trial for homicide. You think it’s smart to create a fake murder a week before your trial? You don’t know what neighbors are peeking through your curtains-”
“(A) Our neighbors are too far to see through the windows and (B) that crime scene upstairs was nothing like what was at Jess’s house. This one showed the arterial bleed in the shower and also the cast-off pattern of blood flung from the knife that killed the victim behind her, on the mirror. At Jess’s-”
“I don’t want to hear it,” I interrupt, covering my ears.
Every time I think I have a chance to save Jacob’s ass, he does something like this. Unfortunately, I waver between thinking that behavior like what I’ve just witnessed proves my case (how could he not be considered insane?) and thinking that it’s chillingly off-putting to a jury. After all, Jacob’s not talking to imaginary giant rabbits, he’s pretending to kill someone. That looks pretty fucking deliberate to me. That looks like practice so that, in reality, he might get it perfect.
“Rule number two: you need to do exactly what I tell you in court.”
“I’ve been to court, like, ten times now,” Jacob says. “I think I can figure it out.”
Emma shakes her head. “Listen to him,” she says quietly. “Right now, Oliver’s the boss.”
“I’m going to give you a stack of Post-its every time we walk into that courtroom,” I tell him. “If you need a break, you hand me a note.”
“What kind of note?” Jacob says.
“Any note. But you only do it if you need a break. I’m also going to give you a pad and a pen, and I want you to write stuff down-just like you would if you were watching CrimeBusters.”
“But there’s nothing interesting going on in that courtroom-”
“Jacob,” I tell him flatly, “your life is being decided in there. Rule number three: you can’t talk to anyone. Not even your mother. And you,” I say, turning to Emma, “cannot tell him how he’s supposed to feel, or react, or what he should look like or how he should act. Everything you two pass back and forth is going to be read by the prosecution and the judge. I don’t even want you two discussing the weather, because they’re going to interpret it, and if you do anything suspicious, you’re going to be kicked off that counsel table. You want to write Breathe, that’s fine. Or It’s okay, don’t worry. But that’s as specific as I want you to get.”
Emma touches Jacob’s arm. “You understand?”
“Yes,” he says. “Can I go now? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get corn syrup off a wall once it dries?”
I completely ignore him. “Rule number four: you will wear a button-down shirt and a tie, and I don’t want to hear that you haven’t got the money for it because this isn’t negotiable, Emma-”
“No buttons,” Jacob announces, in a tone that brooks no argument.
“Why not?”
“Because they feel weird on my chest.”
“All right,” I say. “How about a turtleneck?”
“Can’t I wear my lucky green sweatshirt?” Jacob asks. “I wore it when I took my SATs, and I got 800 on the math section.”
“Why don’t we go up to your closet and find something?” Emma suggests, and we all trudge upstairs again, this time to Jacob’s room. I studiously avoid looking into the bathroom as we pass.
Although the police still have his fuming chamber as evidence, Jacob has configured a new one, an overturned planter. It’s not transparent, like his fish tank, but it must be getting the job done, because I can smell the glue. Emma throws open the closet door.
If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. Chromatically ordered, Jacob’s clothes hang side by side, not quite touching. There are jeans and chinos in the blue area; and a rainbow of long- and short-sleeved tees. And yes, in its correct sequence, the lucky green sweatshirt. It looks like a Gay Pride shrine in there.
There is a fine line between looking insane in court and looking disrespectful. I take a deep breath, wondering how to explain this to a client who cannot think beyond the feeling of a placket of buttons on his skin. “Jacob,” I say, “you have to wear a shirt with a collar. And you have to wear a tie. I’m sorry, but none of this will work.”
“What does the way I look have to do with you telling the jury the truth?”
“Because they still see you,” I answer. “So you need to make a good first impression.”
He turns away. “They’re not going to like me anyway. Nobody ever does.”
He doesn’t say this in a way that suggests he feels sorry for himself. More like he’s just telling me a fact, relating the way the world works.
After Jacob leaves to clean up his mess, I remember that Emma’s in the room with me. “The bathroom. I… I don’t know what to say.” She sinks down onto Jacob’s bed. “He does this all the time-sets up scenes for me to solve. It’s what makes him happy.”
“Well, there’s a big difference between using a bottle of corn syrup to get your jollies and using a human being. I don’t need the jury to be wondering how far a leap there is from one to the other.”
“Are you nervous?” she asks, turning to face me.
I nod. I probably shouldn’t be admitting this to her, but I can’t help it.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I say. “Anything.”
“Do you believe he killed Jess?”
“I already told you that doesn’t matter to a jury-we’re utilizing the defense most likely to-”
“I’m not asking you as Jacob’s lawyer,” Emma interrupts. “I’m asking you as my friend.”
I draw in my breath. “I don’t know. If he did, I don’t believe it was intentional.”
She folds her arms. “I just keep thinking that if we could get the police to reopen the case, to look harder at Jess’s boyfriend-”
“The police,” I say, “think they’ve found their murderer, based on the evidence. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be going to court on Wednesday. The prosecutor thinks she’s got enough proof to make a jury see things her way. But Emma, I’m going to do everything I can to keep that from happening.”
“I have a confession to make,” Emma says. “When we saw Dr. Newcomb? I was supposed to meet with her for a half hour. I told Jacob that I’d be thirty minutes. And then I very intentionally kept talking for another fifteen. I wanted Jacob to get rattled, because I was late. I wanted him stimming by the time he met with her, so that she’d be able to write about all that behavior in the court report.” Emma’s eyes are dark and hollow. “What kind of mother does that?”
I look at her. “One who’s trying to save her son from going to prison.”
Emma shivers. She walks to the window, rubbing her arms, even though it is downright hot in the room. “I’ll find him a collared shirt,” she promises. “But you’ll have to get it on him.”