It isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled my brother into a coat and tie. “Jesus, Jacob, cut it out before you give me a black eye,” I mutter, holding his hands pinned over his head and straddling his body, which twists like a fish that’s suddenly found itself on a dock. My mother is working her hardest to make a knot in his tie, but Jacob’s thrashing so much that it’s practically a noose.
“Do you really need to button it?” I yell, but I doubt she can hear me. Jacob’s got us beat in sheer decibels. I bet the neighbors can hear him, and I wonder what they think. Probably that we’re sticking pins in his eyeballs.
My mother manages to fasten one of the tiny buttons on the oxford shirt collar before Jacob bites her hand. She makes a little squeak and jerks her fingers away from his neck, leaving one of the buttons still unfastened. “That’s good enough,” she says, just as Oliver arrives to pick us all up for the first day of the trial.
“I knocked,” he says, but obviously we wouldn’t have heard him downstairs.
“You’re early,” my mother answers. She is still wearing a bathrobe.
“Well, let’s see the finished product,” Oliver says, and my mom and I both step away from Jacob.
Oliver looks at him for one long moment. “What the hell is this?” he asks.
Okay, I’ll admit, Jacob’s not going to win any fashion awards, but he’s in a coat and tie, which were the criteria. He is wearing a polyester suit the color of an egg yolk that my mother found at a thrift store. A pale yellow shirt, with a stretchy golden knit tie.
“He looks like a pimp,” Oliver says.
My mother presses her lips together. “It’s Yellow Wednesday.”
“I don’t care if it’s polka-dot Sunday,” Oliver says. “And neither does anyone on that jury. That’s the kind of suit Elton John wears to a gig, Emma, not what a defendant wears to trial.”
“It was a compromise,” my mother insists.
Oliver runs a hand down his face. “Didn’t we talk about a blue blazer?”
“Fridays are blue days,” Jacob says. “I’m wearing one then.”
“And coincidentally you are also wearing it today,” Oliver replies. He glances at me. “I want you to help me, while your mother goes and gets dressed.”
“But-”
“Emma, I don’t have time to fight with you right now,” Oliver tells her.
My mother is planning to wear a very simple dark gray skirt with a blue sweater. I was here when Oliver went through her entire closet channeling his inner Heidi Klum and picked out what he said would be “dark and conservative.”
Angry, my mother huffs out of Jacob’s room. I fold my arms. “I just got him into those clothes. No way I’m getting him out of them.”
Oliver shrugs. “Jacob, take that off.”
“Gladly,” Jacob explodes, and he rips the clothes off his own body in seconds flat.
Oliver tackles him. “Get the pin-striped shirt and the blazer and the red tie,” he orders, squinting into Jacob’s open closet. The second I do, Jacob takes one look at the clothing-styles he hates, plus they’re the wrong color-and lets out a bloodcurdling scream.
“Holy shit,” Oliver murmurs.
I reach for Jacob’s hands and pin them over his head again. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I say.
The last time I had to dress my brother in a coat and tie we were headed to my grandfather’s funeral. My mother was not herself that day, which is maybe why Jacob didn’t put up as big a fight about the clothes as he did today. Neither of us owned a coat and tie, so my mother had borrowed them from a neighbor’s husband. We were younger then, and a man’s jacket fit neither of us. We sat on the side of the viewing room where the coffin was with our clothes swimming on us, as if we’d been bigger before our grief hit.
In reality, I didn’t know my grandfather very well. He’d been in a nursing home since my grandmother died, and my mom dragged us to visit him twice a year. It smelled like pee, and I used to get totally creeped out by the old people in their wheelchairs, whose skin seemed stretched too shiny and tight over bony knuckles and knees. The one good memory I had of my grandfather involved sitting on his lap when I was really little and having him pull a quarter out of my ear. His breath smelled like whiskey, and his white hair, when I touched it, was stiff as a Brillo pad.
But still, he was dead, and I thought I should feel something…
because if I didn’t, that meant I was no better than Jacob.
My mother had, for the most part, left us to our own devices while she accepted the condolences of people whose names she didn’t even know. I sat next to Jacob, who was staring straight ahead at the casket. It was black and propped up on fancy sawhorses that were covered with red velvet drapes. “Jacob,” I whispered. “What do you think happens after?”
“After what?”
“After, you know. You die. Do you think you still get to go to heaven even if you never went to church?” I thought about this for a moment. “Do you think that you recognize people in heaven, or is it like moving to a new school and starting over?”
Jacob looked at me. “After you die, you decompose. Calliphoridae arrive on a body within minutes of death. The blowflies lay eggs in open wounds or natural orifices even before death, and their larvae hatch out in twenty-four hours. So even though maggots can’t live underground, the pupal cases might be buried alive with the corpse and do their work from inside the coffin.”
My jaw dropped.
“What?” Jacob challenged. “Did you really think embalming lasted forever?”
After that, I didn’t ask him any more questions.
Once Jacob has been forced into his new formal wear, I leave Oliver to deal with the fallout and go to my mother’s bedroom. She doesn’t answer when I knock, so I push the door open a little bit and peek inside. “In here,” she calls from her closet.
“Mom,” I say, and I sit down on her bed.
“Is Jacob dressed?” She pokes her head around the doorframe.
“Pretty much.” I pick at a thread on her quilt.
In all the years we have lived here, my mother has slept on the left side of the bed. You’d think by now she would have branched out and taken over the whole damn thing, but no. It’s like she’s still waiting for someone to crawl into the other side.
“Mom,” I repeat. “I have to talk to you.”
“Sure, baby. Shoot,” she says. And then, “Where the hell are my black heels?”
“It’s kind of important. It’s about Jacob.”
She steps out of the closet and sits down beside me on the bed. “Oh, Theo,” she sighs. “I’m scared, too.”
“It’s not that-”
“We’re going to do this the way we’ve done everything when it comes to Jacob,” she promises. “Together.”
She gives me a tight squeeze, which only makes me feel more miserable, because I know I’m not going to say what I want to say to her, what I need to say.
“How do I look?” she asks, drawing away from me.
For the first time, I notice what she’s wearing. Not the conservative skirt and blue sweater and pearls that Oliver picked out for her but instead, a totally out-of-season bright yellow sundress. She grins at me. “It’s Yellow Wednesday,” she says.
The first job from which I was fired was a pet store. I will not give the name of the chain, because I’m not sure if that’s printable, and I have enough legal trouble to last me a lifetime right now. However, I will say-objectively- that I was the best employee they had and that, in spite of this, they still dismissed me.
Even though when someone bought a corgi puppy, I offered facts along with Puppy Chow. (It’s related to the dachshund! Its name is Welsh and means dwarf dog!)
Even though I didn’t steal from the cash register, like one of my coworkers.
Even though I didn’t tell on that coworker.
Even though I wasn’t rude to customers and never bitched when it was my turn to clean the public restrooms.
What my boss (Alan, who was nineteen and an extremely viable candidate for Proactiv) told me was that customers had complained because of my appearance.
No, I did not have snot running down my face. I wasn’t drooling. I didn’t wear my pants halfway to my knees, like the coworker I referenced above. All I did, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, was refuse to wear the store uniform. It was a blue button-down shirt. I wore it on Fridays, but honestly, it was bad enough I had to deal with buttons-was I supposed to put up with wearing colors on their off days, too?
No one had complained, by the way. And it was easy to spot me as an employee because, even when I wasn’t wearing the uniform, I still wore a tag as big as a newborn’s head that read, HELLO MY NAME IS JACOB, CAN I HELP YOU?
The real reason I was fired was that, after several weeks of making excuses to Alan about why my uniform did not appear on my body unless I happened to be scheduled to work on a Friday, I finally told him that I was autistic and that I had a thing about clothing colors, not to mention buttons. So in spite of the fact that the puppies genuinely loved me, and that I sold more of them than any other person working here; in spite of the fact that even at the moment I was fired one of the employees was texting her boyfriend instead of ringing up a customer and another one was flirting with Steve in Amphibians-in spite of all these things, I was made a scapegoat because of my disability.
Yeah, I’m playing the Asperger’s card.
All I know is that before I told Alan I had AS he was willing to make excuses along with me, and afterward, he just wanted me gone.
This is the story of my life.
We ride to the courthouse in Oliver’s car. My mother is in the front seat, and Theo and I are in the back. I spend most of the trip looking at the things I took for granted, sights I hadn’t seen while I was cooped up under house arrest: the Colony diner, with its busted neon sign, advertising EAT AT THE COLON. The picture window of the pet store where I used to work, with a Gordian knot of puppies on view. The movie theater where I lost my first tooth and the cross on the side of the road where a teenager once died en route to school during an ice storm. The Restwood Bible Church billboard that reads, FREE COFFEE! ETERNAL LIFE! MEMBERSHIP HAS ITS PRIVILEGES!
“Okay,” Oliver says, after he pulls into a parking spot and turns off the ignition. “Here we go.”
I open my door and step out of the car, and suddenly there are a thousand sounds hitting me like arrows and so much light that everything goes white. I can’t hold my hands up to my eyes and my ears at the same time, and somewhere in between the screaming I can hear my name and my mother’s voice and Oliver’s. They multiply before my eyes, microphones like cancer cells, and they are coming closer.
Oliver: Shit-I should have thought of this…
Mom: Jacob, close your eyes, baby. Can you hear me? Theo? Have you got ahold of him?
And then there is a hand on my arm, but who can say if it belongs to my brother or to one of the strangers, the ones who want to cut my veins lengthwise and bleed me dry, the ones with headlight eyes and cavern mouths who want a piece of me to stick into their pockets and take away, until there’s nothing left.
I do what any ordinary person would do when faced with a horde of wild animals gnashing their teeth and wielding microphones: I run.
It feels fantastic.
Keep in mind I have been in a cage that’s twenty by forty feet, two stories high. I may not be as fast as I’d like to be, because I am wearing dress shoes and also I am a natural klutz, but I manage to get far enough away to not hear their voices anymore. I can’t hear anything, really, but the wind whistling in my ears and my breathing.
And then suddenly I’m knocked off my feet.
“Fuck it,” Oliver wheezes. “I’m getting too old for this.”
I can barely speak because he’s lying flat on my back. “You’re… twenty-eight…,” I grunt.
He rolls off me, and for a moment we are both sprawled on the pavement underneath a sign at a gas station. UNLEADED $2.69.
“I’m sorry,” Oliver says after a moment. “I should have seen that coming.”
I push up on my elbows to look at him.
“There are a lot of people who want to see what happens with your case,” he says, “and I should have prepared you.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” I say.
“Jake, the judge is going to put you back in jail if you don’t.”
I run through the list of rules in my head, the ones Oliver gave me for court behavior. I wonder why he didn’t give the reporters the same rules, because clearly shoving a microphone up my nostrils doesn’t qualify as good etiquette. “I want a sensory break,” I announce, one of the appropriate responses to Oliver when we are at the trial.
He sits up and draws his knees into his chest. A car pulls up to the gas pump a few feet away, and the guy who gets out looks at us strangely before swiping his credit card. “Then we’ll ask the judge for one as soon as we get inside.” He tilts his head. “What do you say, Jake? You ready to fight with me?”
I roll my toes in the bells of the dress shoes. I do it three times, because that’s lucky. “I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” I answer.
Oliver looks away from me. “I’m nervous,” he admits.
This doesn’t seem like a great thing to hear from one’s attorney before going into a trial, but I like the fact that he’s not lying to me. “You tell the truth,” I say.
It’s a compliment, but Oliver interprets it as a directive. He hesitates. “I’ll tell them why you’re not guilty.” Then he gets up, dusting off his pants. “So what do you say?”
This phrase has always seemed to be a trick question. Most of the time it’s uttered by a person when you haven’t even said a damn thing, but of course, the minute you point out that you haven’t said anything, you have.
“Do I have to go through all those people again?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Oliver says, “but I’ve got an idea.”
He leads me to the edge of the parking lot, where Theo and my mom are anxiously waiting. I want to tell Oliver something, but it fades in the face of this more immediate problem. “Close your eyes,” he instructs, so I do. Then I feel him grab my right arm, and my mother grabs my left. My eyes are still closed, but I start to hear the humming of the voices, and without even realizing it, I make the same sound in the back of my throat.
“Now… sing!”
“I shot the sheriff… but I didn’t shoot no deputy-” I break off. “I can still hear them.”
So Theo starts singing. And Oliver, and my mother. All of us, a barbershop quartet but without the harmony, up the stairs of the courthouse.
It works. Probably because they are so surprised by the musical number, the Red Sea of reporters parts and we walk right up the middle.
I’m so amazed that it takes me a while to remember what was stuck like a fish bone in my throat before we walked up the steps of the courthouse.
1. I said to Oliver the verbal equation we’ll call p: “You tell the truth.”
2. He replied with q: “I’ll tell them why you’re not guilty.”
3. In the logic equation of this conversation, I had made the assumption that p and q were equivalent.
4. Now I realize that’s not necessarily true.
Before Jess and I started to work together, I had to go to social skills class at my school. This was largely populated by kids who, unlike me, were not particularly interested in joining the social scene. Robbie was profoundly autistic and spent most of the sessions lining crayons from end to end across the room. Jordan and Nia were developmentally disabled and spent all their time in special ed instead of being mainstreamed. Serafima was probably the most similar to me, although she had Down syndrome. She wanted to be part of the action so badly she’d crawl into the lap of a stranger and hold his face between her hands, which was cute when she was six but not so much when she was sixteen.
Lois, the teacher, had all sorts of interactive games that we had to participate in. We’d role-play and have to greet each other as if we hadn’t been sitting in the same room together for the past half hour. We’d have contests to see how long we could keep eye contact. Once, she used an egg timer to show us when we should stop talking about a topic so that someone else could have a turn in the conversation, but that stopped quickly when Robbie went ballistic the first time the buzzer went off.
Every day we had to end with a circle time, where we each gave a compliment to the person next to us. Robbie always said the same thing, no matter whom he was placed beside: I like terrapins.
(He did, too. He knew more about them than anyone I’ve ever met since and probably ever will, and if not for him I’d still be confusing them with box turtles.)
Jordan and Nia always gave compliments based on appearance: I like that you brush your hair. I like that your skirt is red.
One day Serafima told me that she liked hearing me talk about mitochondrial DNA. I turned to her and said that I didn’t like the fact that she was a liar, since she had just that very day used the hand signal we agreed on as a class-a peace sign raised in the air-to tell Lois that she was tired of the topic, even though I hadn’t gotten to the part about how all of us in this world are related.
That was when Lois called my mother, and my mother found Jess.
I worked on compliments with Jess, too, but it was different. For one thing, I really wanted to give them to her. I did like the way her hair looked like the stringy silk you pull out of a corn husk before it goes into the boiling water, and how she drew smiley faces on the white rubber rims of her sneakers. And when I went on and on about forensic science, she didn’t wave a peace sign in the air; instead, she’d ask more questions.
It was almost like that was her way of getting to know me-through how my mind worked. It was like a maze; you had to follow all the twists and turns in order to figure out where I started from, and I was amazed that Jess was willing to put in the time. I guess I didn’t really think about the fact that my mother must have been paying her to do that, at least not until that idiot Mark Maguire said so at the pizza place. But still, it wasn’t like she was sitting there counting down the minutes she had to suffer with me. You would have realized that, if you’d seen her.
My favorite session with Jess was the one where we practiced asking a girl to the dance. We were sitting at a Wendy’s because it was raining-we had gotten caught in a sudden downpour. While it passed Jess decided to get a snack, although there wasn’t much fast food that was gluten- and casein-free. I had ordered two baked potatoes and a side salad without dressing, while Jess had a cheeseburger. “You can’t even have French fries?”
“Nope,” I said. “It’s all about the coating, and the oil they’re fried in. The only fast-food fries that are gluten-free are at Hooters.”
Jess laughed. “Yeah, I won’t be taking you there.” She peered at my bare potato, my undressed salad. “You can’t even have a little butter?”
“Not unless it’s soy.” I shrug. “You get used to it.”
“So this,” she said, turning the cheeseburger over in her hand, “is the kiss of death for you?”
I felt my face go bright red. I didn’t know what she was talking about, but hearing her say the word kiss was enough to make me feel like I’d just eaten a butterfly instead of a cucumber. “It’s not like an allergy.”
“What would happen if you ate it?”
“I don’t know. I’d get upset more easily, I guess. The diet just works, for some reason.”
She looked at the bun and picked a seed off it. “Maybe I should go cold turkey, too.”
“Nothing upsets you,” I told her.
“Little do you know,” Jess said, and then she shook her head and went back to the topic of the day. “Go ahead. Ask.”
“Um,” I said, looking into my potato, “so do you want to go to the dance with me?”
“No,” Jess said flatly. “You’ve got to sell it, Jacob.”
“I’m, uh, going to the dance and I thought since you might be there, too-”
“Blah blah blah,” she interrupted.
I forced myself to look Jess in the eye. “I think you’re the only person who gets me.” I swallowed hard. “When I’m with you, the world doesn’t feel like a problem I can’t figure out. Please come to the dance,” I said, “because you’re my music.”
Jess’s mouth dropped open. “Oh, Jacob, yes!” she shouted, and then all of a sudden she was out of her seat and pulling me up and hugging me, and I could smell the rain in her ponytail and I didn’t mind at all that she was in my space and too close. I liked it. I liked it so much that you know what happened and I had to push her away before she noticed or (worse) felt it hard against her.
An old couple that was sitting across from us was smiling. I have no idea what they thought we were up to, but chances are Autistic Kid with Social Skills Tutor was not high on the list. The elderly woman winked at Jess. “Looks like that’s one cheeseburger you won’t forget.”
There’s a lot about Jess I won’t forget. Like the way her fingernails were painted with sparkly purple polish that day. And how she hated barbecue sauce. How when she laughed, it wasn’t a tiny, delicate thing but a sound that came from her belly.
So much time is spent with people superficially. You remember all the fun you had but nothing specific.
I’ll never forget anything about her.
When Jacob and Emma and I reach the defense table, the courtroom is already full and Helen Sharp is reviewing her notes. “The fun room’s great,” she says, sliding a glance toward me. “Gotta get me one of those.”
By fun room, she means the sensory break zone, which has been erected at the rear of the courtroom. There are heavy soundproof curtains that seal it off from the gallery. Inside there are rubber balls with knobs on them and a vibrating pillow and a Lava lamp and something that reminds me of the long fabric tongues in a car wash. Emma swears all of these function as soothing devices, but if you ask me, they might just as easily have come from a fetish porn movie set.
“If you’re going to ask the wizard for something, Helen,” I suggest, “start with a heart.”
The bailiff calls us to attention, and we stand for the arrival of Judge Cuttings. He takes one look at the four cameras in the back of the courtroom. “I’d like to remind the media they are here only by my decree-a decision that can be changed at any minute if they become intrusive in any way. And the same goes for the gallery-outbursts will not be tolerated during this trial. Counselors, please approach.”
I walk toward the bench with Helen. “Given the previous experiences we’ve had during closed court sessions,” the judge says, “I thought it might be prudent to check in with you before we begin. Mr. Bond, how is your client this morning?”
Well, he’s on trial for murder, I think. But other than that, he’s doing swell.
I have a brief flash of myself sitting on Jacob’s chest so that I can button his shirt, of him sprinting down the divided highway. “Never better, Your Honor,” I say.
“Are there any other problems we need to be made aware of?” the judge asks.
I shake my head, heartened by the fact that the judge seems to truly care about Jacob’s welfare.
“Good. Because a lot of people are watching this trial, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be made to look like a fool,” he snaps.
So much for human charity.
“And you, Ms. Sharp? You’re prepared?”
“One hundred percent, Your Honor,” Helen says.
The judge nods. “Then let’s begin with the prosecution’s opening argument.”
Emma offers me a brave smile as I sit down on Jacob’s other side. She turns around to locate Theo, who is tucked in the back of the gallery, and then faces forward as Helen begins to speak.
“Four months ago, Jess Ogilvy was a bright, beautiful girl full of hopes and dreams. A graduate student at the University of Vermont, she was working toward a master’s in child psychology. She balanced her studies with part-time jobs-like her recent position as caretaker for a professor’s home at sixty-seven, Serendipity Way, Townsend… and student teaching, and tutoring special needs kids. One of her pupils was a young man with Asperger’s syndrome-the same young man, Jacob Hunt, who sits before you as a defendant today. Jess helped Jacob specifically with social skills-teaching him how to engage others in conversation, how to make friends, and how to interact in public-all tasks that were difficult for him. Jess and Jacob met twice a week, on Sundays and on Tuesdays. But on Tuesday, January twelfth, Jess Ogilvy did not tutor Jacob Hunt. Instead, that young man-the same one she had treated with kindness and compassion-murdered her in a brutal and vicious attack inside her own residence.”
Behind the prosecutor’s table, a woman starts weeping quietly. The mother; I don’t have to turn around to see that. But Jacob does, and his face twists as he registers something familiar about her-maybe the same line of jaw her daughter had, or the color of the hair.
“Two days before her death, Jess took Jacob out for pizza on Main Street in Townsend. You’ll hear evidence from Calista Spatakopoulous, the owner of the restaurant, that Jacob and Jess got into a heated argument that ended with Jess telling Jacob to ‘just get lost.’ You’ll hear from Mark Maguire, Jess’s boyfriend, that when he saw her later that night and on Monday, she was fine-but that she’d disappeared by Tuesday afternoon. You’ll hear from Detective Rich Matson of the Townsend Police Department, who will tell you how officers searched for any sign of Jess for five days to see if she’d been abducted, and finally tracked a GPS signal on her cell phone to find her bruised and battered body lying lifeless in a culvert several hundred yards from her home. You’ll hear the medical examiner testify that Jess Ogilvy had abrasions on her back, choke marks around her neck, a broken nose and bruises on her face, a broken tooth… and that her underwear was on backward.”
I scan the faces of the jurors, each of whom is thinking, What kind of animal would do that to a girl? and then glancing furtively at Jacob.
“And, ladies and gentlemen, you will get to see the quilt that Jess Ogilvy’s body was found wrapped in. A quilt that belonged to Jacob Hunt.”
Beside me, Jacob’s started to shake. Emma puts her hand on his arm, but he knocks it off. With a finger, I push the Post-it pad I’ve set in front of him a little closer. I uncap the pen I’ve given him, willing him to take out his frustration in writing instead of having an outburst.
“The evidence we present will clearly show that Jacob Hunt murdered Jess Ogilvy with premeditation. And at the end of this trial, when the judge instructs you to decide who’s responsible, we are confident that you will find that Jacob Hunt killed Jess Ogilvy-a vibrant young woman who considered herself his teacher, mentor, and friend-and then…” She walks to the prosecutor’s table and rips the top piece of paper off her legal pad.
Suddenly, I realize what she’s about to do.
Helen Sharp crumples the paper in one fist and lets it drop to the floor. “He threw her away like trash,” she says, but by that time, Jacob’s started to scream.
The minute the prosecutor reaches for the legal pad, I can finish the end of her sentence. I start to rise from my seat, but it’s too late; Jacob’s out of control, and the judge-who has no gavel-is pounding his fist. “Your Honor, can we have a brief recess?” Oliver yells, struggling to be heard over Jacob’s shrieks. “No… wire hangers… ever!” Jacob screams.
“We’ll take ten minutes,” the judge says, and suddenly one bailiff is moving toward the jury to escort them out of the courtroom and another one is coming toward us to take us to the sensory break room. “Counsel, I want to see you at the bench.”
The bailiff is taller than Jacob and is shaped like a bell, heavy in his hips. He wraps one beefy hand around Jacob’s arm. “Let’s go, buddy,” he says, and Jacob tries to jerk away from him, and then starts thrashing. He clips the bailiff hard enough to cause him to grunt, and then suddenly Jacob goes boneless, all 185 pounds of him, and falls heavily to the floor.
The bailiff reaches down for him, but I throw myself on top of Jacob instead. “Don’t touch him,” I say, well aware that the jury is straining to see what’s going on even as they’re being shooed away, certain that every one of those cameramen has his lens trained on me.
Jacob’s crying into my shoulder, making small snuffling sounds as he tries to catch his breath. “Okay, baby,” I murmur into his ear. “You and I, we’re going to do this together.” I tug until he starts to sit up, and then I wrap my arms around him, struggling to bear the brunt of his weight as we get to our feet. The bailiff opens the gate of the bar for us and leads us down the gallery aisle to the sensory break room. As we pass, the entire courtroom falls dead silent until we are ensconced within the black curtains and all I can hear outside is the tidal swell of a murmur of sound: What was that? … Never seen anything like it… The judge won’t stand for stunts… A ploy to get sympathy, I’ll bet…
Jacob buries himself beneath a weighted blanket. “Mom,” he says from beneath it. “She crumpled paper.”
“I know.”
“We have to fix the paper.”
“It’s not our paper. It’s the prosecutor’s paper. You have to let it go.”
“She crumpled the paper,” Jacob repeats. “We have to fix it.”
I think of the woman on the jury who looked at me with abject pity on her face the moment before she was hustled out of the courtroom. That’s a good thing, Oliver would say, but he is not me. I have never wanted to be pitied for having a child like Jacob. I’ve pitied other mothers, who could slip by on loving their children maybe only 80 percent of the time, or less, instead of giving it their all every minute of every day.
But I have a son who is on trial for murder. A son who behaved the same way the afternoon of Jess Ogilvy’s death as he did minutes ago when a piece of paper was torn apart.
If Jacob is a murderer, I will still love him. But I will hate the woman he’s turned me into-one whom others talk about when her back is turned, one whom people feel sorry for. Because although I’d never feel that way about a mother whose child has Asperger’s, I would feel that way about a mother whose child took the life of another mother’s child.
Jacob’s voice is a hammer at the back of my head. “We have to fix it,” he says.
“Yes,” I whisper. “We do.”
“That must be a record, Mr. Bond,” Judge Cuttings drawls. “We made it a whole three minutes and twenty seconds without an outburst.”
“Judge,” I say, thinking on the fly, “I can’t predict everything that’s going to set this kid off. That’s part of why you’re allowing his mother to be here. But you know, with all due respect, Jacob doesn’t just get ten hours of justice. He gets as much justice as he needs. That’s the whole purpose of the constitutional system.”
“Gee, Oliver, I don’t mean to interrupt,” Helen says, “but aren’t you forgetting the all-American marching band and the flag that’s supposed to drop from the rafters right now?”
I ignore her. “Look. I’m sorry, Your Honor. I’m sorry in advance if Jacob makes you look silly or makes me look silly or-” I glance at Helen. “Well. As I was saying, I certainly don’t want my client having fits in front of the jury; it doesn’t do my case any good, either.”
The judge peers over his glasses. “You’ve got ten minutes to pull your client together,” he warns. “Then we’re coming back in and the prosecution will have a chance to refinish her closing.”
“Well, she can’t crumple the paper again,” I say.
“I believe you lost that motion,” Helen replies.
“She’s right, Counselor. If Ms. Sharp is inclined to crumple a boatload of paper, and your client goes ballistic every time, it’s to your own detriment.”
“That’s okay, Judge,” Helen says. “I won’t be doing that again. From now on, only folded paper.” She bends down, picks up the little ball that sent Jacob sky-high, and tosses it in the trash can beside the stenographer’s table.
I glance down at my watch-by my calculations I have four minutes and fifteen seconds to get Jacob’s perfectly Zen butt into the chair beside me at the defense table. I stalk up the aisle and slip between the black curtains of the sensory break room. Jacob is hidden under a blanket, and Emma sits doubled over a vibrating pillow. “What else aren’t you telling me?” I demand. “What else sets him off? Paper clips? When the clock reads a quarter to twelve? For Christ’s sake, Emma, I’ve only got one trial to convince the jury Jacob didn’t snap in a fit of rage and kill Jess Ogilvy. How am I supposed to do that when he can’t even make it ten minutes without losing control?”
I’m yelling so loudly that even those stupid curtains probably can’t drown me out, and I wonder if the television cameras are picking everything up with their microphones. But then Emma lifts her face, and I see how red her eyes are. “I’ll try to keep him calmer.”
“Aw, shit,” I say, all the bluster fizzing out of me. “You’re crying?”
She shakes her head. “No. I’m fine.”
“Right, and I’m Clarence Thomas.” I reach into my pocket and pull out a Dunkin’ Donuts napkin, press it into her hand. “You don’t have to lie to me. We’re on the same side.”
She turns away and blows her nose, then folds-folds, not crumples-the napkin and tucks it into the pocket of her yellow dress.
I pull the blanket off Jacob’s head. “Time to go,” I say.
For a minute I think he’s coming, but then he rolls away from me. “Mom,” he mutters. “Fix it.”
I turn to Emma, who clears her throat. “He wants Helen Sharp to smooth out the paper first,” she says.
“It’s already in the trash can.”
“You promised,” Jacob says to Emma, his voice rising.
“Jesus,” I mutter under my breath. “Fine.”
I stalk down the aisle of the courtroom and fish through the trash at the stenographer’s feet. She stares as if I’ve lost my mind, which isn’t entirely impossible. “What are you doing?”
“Don’t ask.” The paper is underneath a candy wrapper and a copy of the Boston Globe. I tuck it into my jacket pocket and walk back to the sensory break room, where I remove it and smooth it out as best as I can in front of Jacob. “That’s the best I can do,” I tell him. “So… what’s the best you can do?”
Jacob stares at the paper. “You had me at hello,” he says.
I hated Mark Maguire before I even laid eyes on him. Jess had changed-instead of focusing only on me when we had our sessions, she’d answer her cell phone or fire back a text message, and every time she did, she smiled. I assumed that I was the reason for her distraction. After all, everyone else seemed to get sick of me quick enough when we were in the middle of a conversation, and it was bound to happen with Jess, although that was my greatest fear. Then one day she said she wanted to tell me a secret. “I think I’m in love,” she said, and I swear to you, my heart stopped beating for a second.
“Me, too,” I burst out.
CASE STUDY 1: Let me stop here for a minute and just talk about prairie voles. They are part of only a tiny fraction of the animal kingdom that practice monogamy. They mate for twenty-four hours, and then, just like that, they’re together for life. However, the montane vole-which is a close relative, sharing 99 percent of the prairie vole’s genetic makeup-has no interest in anything except a wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am one-night stand. How come? When prairie voles have sexual intercourse, the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin flood the brain. If the hormones are blocked, prairie voles behave more like those slutty montane voles. Even more interesting, if prairie voles get injections of those hormones but then are prevented from having sex, they still become slavishly devoted to their would-be mates. In other words: you can make a prairie vole fall in love.
The opposite, though, isn’t true. You can’t give a shot of hormones to a montane vole and make it lovesick. It just doesn’t have the right receptors in the brain. It does, however, get a flood of dopamine to the brain when it mates, the hormonal equivalent of Man, that feels good. It’s just missing the other two hormones, the ones that help pinpoint that ecstasy to a particular individual. Sure enough, if you genetically modify mice, removing the genes that affect oxytocin or vasopressin, they can’t recognize mice they’ve already met.
I am a prairie vole, trapped in the body of a montane vole. If I think I’ve fallen in love, it’s because I’ve considered it analytically. (Heart palpitations? Check. Lack of stress in her company? Check.) And it seems to me to be the most likely explanation for what I feel, although I could not truly tell you the difference between feelings for a romantic interest versus feelings for a close friend. Or in my case, my only friend.
Which is why, when Jess told me she was in love, I reciprocated.
Her eyes widened, and so did her smile. “Oh my God, Jacob,” she said. “We’ll have to double-date!”
That was when I realized we weren’t talking about the same thing.
“I know you like having time alone for our sessions, but it’s good for you to meet people, and Mark really, truly wants to get to know you. He’s a part-time ski instructor over at Stowe, and he thought maybe he could give you a free lesson.”
“I don’t think I’d be very good at skiing.” One of the hallmarks of Asperger’s is that we can barely walk and chew gum at the same time. I am forever tripping over my feet or stumbling on a curb; I could easily see myself falling off a chairlift or snowballing down a mountain.
“I’ll be there to help, too,” Jess promised.
And so, the following Sunday, Jess drove me to Stowe and got me fitted for rental skis and boots and a helmet. We hobbled outside and waited near the ski school sign until a black blur whizzed down the hill and sprayed us in a tsunami of powdered snow. “Hey, babe,” Mark said, pulling off his helmet so that he could grab Jess and kiss her.
In one glance I could tell that Mark Maguire was everything I was not:
1. Coordinated
2. Attractive (if you’re a girl, I mean)
3. Popular
4. Muscular
5. Confident
I could also tell that I was one thing Mark Maguire was not:
1. Smart
“Mark, this is my friend Jacob.”
He leaned down into my face and yelled, “Hey, dude, cool to meet you!”
I yelled back, “I’m not deaf!”
He grinned at Jess. He had perfect, white teeth. “You’re right. He is funny.”
Had Jess told him I was funny? Had she meant that I made her laugh because I told good jokes or because I was a joke?
In that instant I hated Mark Maguire viscerally, because he’d made me doubt Jess, and up until then I had known, unequivocally, that we were friends.
“So what do you say we give the bunny hill a try?” Mark asked, and he held out a pole so that he could drag me to the rope tow. “Like this,” he said, showing me how to grab on to the moving rope, and I thought I had it right but my left hand got screwed up with my right and I wound up spinning backward and collapsing on the little kid behind me. The guy running the rope tow had to shut it off while Mark hauled me to my feet again. “You okay, Jacob?” Jess asked, but Mark brushed her off.
“He’s doing great,” Mark said. “Relax, Jake. I teach retarded kids all the time.”
“Jacob is autistic,” Jess corrected, and I turned around so fast that I forgot about the skis and fell down in a heap again. “I’m not retarded,” I shouted, but that statement is somewhat less resonant when one cannot even untangle one’s own legs.
I will say this for Mark Maguire: he taught me how to snowplow efficiently enough to make it down the bunny hill twice, solo. Then he asked Jess if she wanted to take a run up the big hill while I practiced. They left me in the company of seven-year-olds in pink snowsuits.
CASE STUDY 2: In laboratory studies, scientists have learned that, when it comes to love, a very tiny portion of the brain is actually involved. For example, friendship lights up receptors all over the cerebral cortex, but this isn’t true with love, which activates parts of the brain more commonly associated with emotional responses like fear and anger. The brain of a person in love will show activity in the amygdala, which is associated with gut feelings, and in the nucleus accumbens, an area associated with rewarding stimuli that tends to be active in drug abusers. Or, to recap: the brain of a person in love doesn’t look like the brain of someone overcome by deep emotion. It looks like the brain of a person who’s been snorting coke.
That day at Stowe, I did two runs with the help of a kid who was learning to snowboard, then inched myself toward the main ski lift. I leaned against a rack where people could store their skis while they were in the lodge getting hot chocolate and chicken nuggets, and I waited for Jess to come back to me.
Mark Maguire is wearing a suit. He has dark circles under his eyes and I almost feel bad for him, because he must be missing Jess, too, until I remember how he hurt her.
“Can you state your name for the record?” the prosecutor asks.
“Mark Maguire.”
“Where do you live, Mr. Maguire?”
“Forty-four Green Street in Burlington.”
“How old are you?”
“I’m twenty-five,” he says.
“And what do you do for a living?”
“I’m a grad student at UVM and a part-time ski instructor at Stowe.”
“How did you know Jess Ogilvy, Mr. Maguire?”
“She’d been my girlfriend for five months.”
“Where were you on Sunday, January tenth, 2010?” Helen Sharp asks.
“At Mama’s Pizza in Townsend. Jess had a tutoring session with Jacob Hunt, and I liked to come along every now and then.”
That is not true. He just didn’t like that she was spending time with me and wouldn’t give me up for him.
“So you know Jacob?”
“Yes.”
“Do you see him in the courtroom today?”
I stare down at the table so I can’t feel the serrated edges of Mark’s eyes. “He’s sitting over there.”
“Let the record reflect that the witness has identified the defendant,” the prosecutor says. “How many times, before January tenth, had you met Jacob?”
“I don’t know. Maybe five or six?”
The prosecutor walks toward the witness box. “Did you get along with him?”
Mark is looking at me again, I can tell. “I didn’t really pay attention to him,” he says.
We are in Jess’s dorm room watching a TV movie about the JonBenét Ramsey murder case, which of course was one in which Dr. Henry Lee was involved. I tell Jess what is true and what Hollywood has changed. She keeps checking her voice-mail messages, but there aren’t any. I am so excited about the movie that for a while I don’t realize she is crying. You’re crying, I say, the obvious, and I don’t get it because she didn’t know JonBenét and usually people who cry at someone’s death knew them very well. I’m just not very happy today, I guess, Jess says, and she stands up. When she does, she makes a sound like a dog that’s been kicked. She has to stand on a chair to reach a high shelf where she keeps her extra toilet paper and Ziploc bags and Kleenex. When she grabs the box of tissues, her sweater rides up on the side and I can see them, red and purple and yellow like a tattoo, but I’ve watched enough CrimeBusters to know bruises when I see them.
What happened to you? I ask, and she tells me she fell down.
I’ve watched enough CrimeBusters to know that’s what girls always say when they don’t want you to know that someone is beating them up.
“We ordered pizza,” Mark says, “the kind that Jacob can eat, without wheat in the crust. While we were waiting for it, Jacob asked Jess out. Like on a date. It was hilarious, but when I laughed at him, she got pissed off at me. I didn’t have to sit around and take that, so I left.”
Even worse than Mark’s stare, it turns out, is my mother’s.
“Did you talk to Jess at any point after that?” Helen asks.
“Yeah, on Monday. She called me and begged me to come over that night, and I did.”
“What was her state of mind?”
“She thought I was mad at her-”
“Objection,” Oliver says. “Speculation.”
The judge nods. “Sustained.”
Mark looks confused. “What was her emotional state?” Helen asks.
“She was upset.”
“Did you continue to argue?”
“No,” Mark says. “We kissed and made up, if you get my drift.”
“So you spent the night?”
“Yes.”
“What happened on Tuesday morning?”
“We were having breakfast and we started to fight again.”
“About what?” Helen Sharp asks.
“I don’t even remember. But I got really angry, and I… I sort of shoved her.”
“You mean your fight became physical?”
Mark looks down at his hands. “I didn’t mean to. But we were yelling and I grabbed her and pushed her against the wall. I stopped right away, said I was sorry. She told me to leave, so I did. I only had my hands on her for a minute.”
My head snaps up. I grab the pen in front of me and write so hard on the legal pad that it rips through the paper. HE IS LYING, I write, and I push the pad toward Oliver.
He glances at it, and writes:?
BRUISES ON HER NECK.
Oliver rips off the piece of paper and tucks it into his pocket. Meanwhile, Mark covers his eyes, and his voice cracks. “I called her all day long, to apologize again, and she wouldn’t answer her phone. I figured she was ignoring me, and I deserved it, but by Wednesday morning I was getting worried. I went over to her place, figuring I could catch her before she went to class, but she wasn’t there.”
“Did you notice anything unusual?”
“The door was open. I went in, and her coat was hanging up and her purse was on the table, but she didn’t answer when I called. I looked all over for her, but she was gone. There were clothes all over the bedroom, and the bed was messed up.”
“What did you think?”
“At first, I figured she might have left on a trip. But she would have told me that, and she had a test that day. I called her phone, but no one answered. I called her parents and her friends, and no one had seen her; and she hadn’t told anyone she was leaving. That’s when I went to the police.”
“What happened?”
“Detective Matson told me I couldn’t file a missing person’s report for thirty-six hours, but he came with me to Jess’s place. I didn’t get the sense he was taking me seriously, to be honest.” Mark looks at the jury. “I skipped class and stayed at the house, in case she came back. But she didn’t. I was sitting in the living room when I realized that someone had organized all the CDs, and I told the police that, too.”
“When the police began a formal investigation,” Helen Sharp asks, “were you cooperative in giving them forensic samples?”
“I gave them my boots,” Mark says.
The prosecutor turns around and looks at the jury. “Mr. Maguire, how did you find out what had happened to Jess?”
He sets his jaw. “A couple of cops came to my apartment and arrested me. When Detective Matson was interrogating me, he told me Jess was… was dead.”
“Were you released from custody shortly thereafter?”
“Yes. When they arrested Jacob Hunt.”
“Mr. Maguire, did you have anything to do with Jess Ogilvy’s death?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Do you know how she sustained a broken nose?”
“No,” Mark says tightly.
“Do you know how her tooth got knocked out?”
“No.”
“Do you know how she got abrasions on her back?”
“No.”
“Did you ever strike her in the face?”
“No.” Mark’s voice sounds like it is wrapped up in wool. He has been looking down at the floor, but when he lifts his face now, everyone can see how his eyes are wet, how he is swallowing hard. “When I left her,” he says, “she looked like an angel.”
As Helen Sharp finishes, Oliver stands up and buttons his suit jacket. Why do lawyers always do that? On CrimeBusters, the actors playing lawyers do it, too. Maybe it’s so that they look professional. Or they need something to do with their hands.
“Mr. Maguire, you just testified that you were actually arrested for the murder of Jess Ogilvy.”
“Yes, but they had the wrong guy.”
“Still… for a little while, anyway, the police believed you were involved, isn’t that true?”
“I suppose.”
“You also testified that you grabbed Jess Ogilvy during your fight?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“On her arms.” He touches his biceps muscle. “Here.”
“You choked her, too, didn’t you?”
He goes beet red. “No.”
“You are aware, Mr. Maguire, that the autopsy revealed bruises around Jess Ogilvy’s neck, as well as on her upper arms?”
“Objection,” the prosecutor says. “Hearsay.”
“Sustained.”
“You are aware that you’re testifying here today under oath?”
“Yes…”
“So let me ask you again if you choked Jess Ogilvy.”
“I didn’t choke her!” Mark argues. “I just… put my hands on her neck. For a second!”
“While you were fighting?”
“Yes,” Mark says.
Oliver raises his eyebrows. “Nothing further,” he says, and he sits back down beside me.
Me, I duck my head, and smile.
I was nine when my mother made me go to a therapy group for siblings of autistic kids. There were only four of us-two girls with faces that looked like ground over a sinkhole, who had a baby sister who apparently never stopped screaming; a boy whose twin was severely autistic; and me. We all had to go around a circle and say one thing we loved about our sibling, and one thing we really hated.
The girls went first. They said they hated the way the baby kept them up all night, but they liked the fact that her first word had not been Mama or Dada but instead Sissy. Then I went. I said that I hated when Jacob took my stuff without asking and how it was okay for him to interrupt me to give some dinosaur fact nobody cared about but that if I interrupted him he’d get really angry and have a meltdown. I liked the way he said things, sometimes, that were hilarious-even though they weren’t meant to be-like when a camp counselor told him swimming would be a piece of cake and he freaked out because he thought he’d have to eat underwater and surely would drown. Then it was the other boy’s turn. But before he could speak the door burst open and his twin brother ran inside and sat down on his lap. The kid reeked-and I mean reeked. All of a sudden their mom poked her head into the room. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Harry doesn’t like anyone but Stephen to change his diaper.”
Sucks to be Stephen, I thought. But instead of getting totally embarrassed, like I would have been, or pissed off, like I also would have been, Stephen just laughed and hugged his brother. “Let’s go,” he said, and he held his twin’s hand and led him out of the room.
We did other stuff that day with the therapist, but I wasn’t concentrating. I couldn’t get out of my head the image of nine-year-old Harry wearing a giant diaper, of Stephen cleaning up the messes. There was one more thing I liked about my own sibling with autism: he was potty-trained.
At our lunch break, I found myself gravitating toward Stephen. He was sitting by himself, eating apple slices from a plastic bag.
“Hey,” I said, climbing into the seat next to him.
“Hey.”
I opened the straw of my juice pack and poked it into the cardboard box. I stared out the window, trying to figure out what he was looking at.
“So how do you do it?” I asked, after a minute.
He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He picked an apple slice out of the bag, chewed it, swallowed. “It could have been me,” he said.
Mama Spatakopoulous can’t fit into the witness chair. She has to push and wedge, and finally the judge asks the bailiff to get a seat that might be more comfortable. If it were me up there, I’d want to hide under the stupid chair in embarrassment, but she seems to be perfectly happy. Maybe she thinks it’s a testimonial to how good her food is.
“Mrs. Spatakopoulous, where do you work?” asks the Dragon Bitch, a.k.a. Helen Sharp.
“Call me Mama.”
The prosecutor looks at the judge, who shrugs. “Mama, then. Where do you work?”
“I own Mama S’s Pizzeria, on Main Street in Townsend.”
“How long have you run the restaurant?”
“Fifteen years this June. Best pizza in Vermont. You come by, I’ll give you a free sample.”
“That’s very generous of you… Mama, were you working the afternoon of January tenth, 2010?”
“I work every afternoon,” she says proudly.
“Did you know Jess Ogilvy?”
“Yes, she was a regular. Good girl, with a good head on her shoulders. Helped me salt the walkway once after an ice storm because she didn’t want me to throw my back out.”
“Did you speak to her on January tenth?”
“I waved to her when she came in, but it was a madhouse.”
“Was she alone?”
“No, she came with her boyfriend, and the kid she tutored.”
“Do you see that kid in the courtroom today?”
Mama S. blows my brother a kiss.
“Had you ever seen Jacob before January tenth?”
“Once or twice, he came in with his mama to get pizza. Got celiac problems, like my father, God rest his soul.”
“Did you talk to Jacob Hunt that afternoon?” the prosecutor asks.
“Yes. By the time I brought the pizzas they had ordered, he was sitting alone at the table.”
“Do you know why Jacob Hunt was sitting alone?” Helen Sharp asks.
“Well, they were all fighting. The boyfriend was angry at Jacob, Jess was angry at the boyfriend for being angry at Jacob, and then the boyfriend left.” She shakes her head. “Then Jess got angry at Jacob, and she left.”
“Did you hear what they were fighting about?”
“I had eighteen take-out orders to fill; I wasn’t listening. The only thing I heard was what Jess said, before she left.”
“Which was what, Mama S.?”
The woman purses her lips. “She told him to get lost.”
The prosecutor sits back down, and then it is Oliver’s turn. I don’t watch cop shows. I don’t really watch anything, unless it’s CrimeBusters, since Jacob hogs the TV. But being in court is kind of like watching a basketball game-one side scores, and then the other takes the ball back and scores, and this goes on and on. And just like basketball, I bet it all comes down to the last five minutes.
“So you really don’t know what the argument was about,” Oliver says.
“No.” She leans forward. “Oliver, you look very handsome in your fancy suit.”
He smiles, but it looks a little painful. “Thanks, Mama. So, you were in fact paying attention to your customers.”
“I’ve got to make a living, don’t I?” she says, and then she shakes her head. “You’re losing weight, I think. You’ve been eating out too much. Constantine and I are both worried about you…”
“Mama, I kind of need to get through this?” he whispers.
“Oh. All right.” She turns to the jury. “I didn’t hear the argument.”
“You were behind the counter?”
“Yes.”
“Near the ovens.”
“Yes.”
“And there were other people working around you?”
“Three, that day.”
“And there was noise?”
“The phone, and the pinball, and the jukebox were all going.”
“So you’re not really sure what upset Jess in the first place?”
“No.”
Oliver nods. “When Jacob was sitting alone, did you talk to him?”
“I tried. He wasn’t big on conversation.”
“Did he ever make eye contact with you?”
“No.”
“Did he do anything threatening?”
Mama S. shakes her head. “No, he’s a good boy. I just left him alone,” she says. “It seemed to be what he wanted.”
My whole life, Jacob’s wanted to be part of the group. This is one of the reasons why I never brought friends home. My mother would have insisted we include Jacob, and frankly, that would have pretty much guaranteed the end of the friendship for me. (The other reason is I was embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone to know what my household was like; I didn’t want to have to explain Jacob’s antics, because even though my mother insisted they were just quirks of his, to the rest of the free world, they looked freaking ridiculous.)
Every now and then, though, Jacob managed to infiltrate my separate life, which was even worse. It was the social equivalent of when I once built a house of cards using all fifty-two of them and Jacob thought it would be funny to poke it with his fork.
In elementary school I was a total social outcast because of Jacob, but when we got to middle school, there were people from other towns who didn’t know about my brother with Asperger’s. Through some miracle I managed to become friends with two guys named Tyler and Wally, who lived in South Burlington and played Ultimate Frisbee. They invited me to play after school, and when I told them sure and didn’t have to even call my mom to check if it was okay, that only made me seem cooler. I didn’t explain that the reason I didn’t have to call was because I spent as much time away from my house as possible, that my mother was used to me not coming home until it got dark out and, half the time, probably didn’t even notice I was gone.
It was, and I am not just saying this, the best day of my life. We were flinging the Frisbee around the softball field, and a few girls who had stayed after for field hockey practice came to watch in their short skirts, with the sun all caught up in their hair. I jumped extra high, showing off, and when I worked up a sweat, one of the girls let me have a drink from her water bottle. I got to put my mouth where hers had been a minute before, which was practically like kissing her, if you want to get technical.
And then Jacob showed up.
I don’t know what he was doing there-apparently it had to do with some kind of testing that was being administered at my school instead of his, and he was waiting with his aide for my mother to come pick him up. But the minute he saw me and called out my name, I knew I was screwed. At first I pretended I didn’t hear him, but he ran right onto the field. “Friend of yours, Hunt?” Tyler asked, and I just laughed it off. I whipped the Frisbee in his direction, extra hard.
To my surprise, Jacob-who couldn’t catch a freaking cold if he tried-nabbed the Frisbee and started to run with it. I froze, but Tyler took off after him. “Hey, retard,” he yelled at Jacob. “I’m gonna kick your ass!”
He was faster than Jacob, big surprise, and he tackled my brother to the ground. He lifted his hand to deck Jacob, but by then I was on his back, yanking him off and straddling his body as the Frisbee went spinning into the street. “You don’t fucking touch him,” I yelled into Tyler’s face. “If anyone’s going to beat up my brother, it’s going to be me.”
I left him in the dirt, coughing, and then took Jacob’s hand and walked him to the front of the school, where I couldn’t hear the girls whispering about me and my dork of a brother, where there were enough teachers milling around to keep Tyler and Wally from jumping me in revenge.
“I wanted to play,” Jacob said.
“Well, they didn’t want you to play,” I told him.
He kicked at the dirt. “I wish I could be the big brother.”
Technically, he was, but he wasn’t talking about age. He just didn’t know how to say what he meant. “You could start by not stealing someone’s goddamn Frisbee,” I said.
And then my mother drove up and rolled down the window. She was smiling a huge smile. “I thought I was only picking up Jacob, but look at that,” she said. “You two found each other.”
I am sure that the jury isn’t absorbing anything that Marcy Allston, the CSI, is saying. She’s so drop-dead gorgeous that I can practically imagine the dead bodies she stumbles across sitting up and panting.
“The first time we came to the house, we dusted for fingerprints and found some on the computer and in the bathroom.”
“Can you explain the process?” Helen asks.
“The skin of your fingers, the palms of your hands, and the soles of your feet aren’t smooth-they are friction ridge skin, with lines that start, stop, and have certain contours or shapes. Along those lines of skin are a series of sweat pores, and if they become contaminated with sweat, blood, dirt, dust, and so on, they leave a reproduction of those lines on the object that’s been touched. My job is to make that reproduction visible. Sometimes you need a magnifying glass to do it, sometimes you need a light source. Once I make the print visible, it can be photographed, and once it can be photographed I can preserve it and make a comparison against a known sample.”
“Where do those known samples come from?”
“The victim, the suspects. And from AFIS, a fingerprint database for all criminals in the United States who have been processed.”
“How do you make the comparison?”
“We look at specific areas and find patterns-deltas, whorls, arches, loops-and the core, the centermost part of the fingerprint. We make a visual comparison between the known fingerprint and the unknown one, looking for general shapes that match, and then we look at more specific details-ending ridges, or bifurcations where one line might split into two. If approximately ten to twelve similarities occur, a person trained in fingerprint identification will be able to determine whether the two fingerprints came from the same individual.”
The prosecutor enters into evidence a chart that shows two fingerprints, side by side. Immediately, Jacob sits up a little straighter. “This fingerprint on the right was found on the kitchen counter. The one on the left is a known sample taken from Jacob Hunt during his arrest.”
As she walks through the ten little red flags that show similarities between the prints, I look at Jacob. He is grinning like mad.
“Based on your comparison, did you come to a conclusion?” Helen asks.
“Yes. That this was Jacob Hunt’s fingerprint in the kitchen.”
“Was there anything else of note during your processing of the house?”
Marcy nods. “We found a kitchen window screen that had been cut from the outside, and the sash jimmied and broken. A screwdriver was found in the bushes below the window.”
“Were there any fingerprints on the sash, or on the screwdriver?”
“No, but the temperature that day was extremely cold, which often compromises fingerprint evidence.”
“Did you find anything else?”
“A boot print beneath the windowsill. We made a wax cast of the print and were able to match it to a boot on the premises.”
“Do you know who that boot belonged to?”
“Mark Maguire, the victim’s boyfriend,” Marcy said. “We determined that these were boots he kept at the house, since he often stayed there overnight.”
“Did you find anything else in the house?”
“Yes. Using a chemical called Luminol, we found significant traces of blood in the bathroom.”
Jacob writes a note on the pad and gives it to me:
Bleach + Luminol = false positive for blood.
“At some point did you receive a 911 call from the victim’s cell phone?” Helen asks.
“Yes. Early on January eighteenth, we responded to a culvert approximately three hundred yards from the home where Jess Ogilvy had been house-sitting, and found the victim’s body.”
“What was the position of the body?”
“She was propped up with her back against the cement wall, and her arms were folded in her lap. She was fully clothed.”
“Was there anything else noteworthy about how the body was found?”
“Yes,” Marcy replies. “The victim was wrapped in a distinctive, handmade quilt.”
“Is this the quilt that you found with the victim that day?” the prosecutor asks, and she offers Marcy a bulky roll of fabric in all the colors of the rainbow, the pattern marred by dark brown areas of dried blood.
“That’s the one,” Marcy says, and as it is entered into evidence, I can hear Emma draw in her breath.
Helen thanks her witness, and I stand up to cross-examine. “How long have you been a CSI?”
“Four years,” Marcy says.
“So not that long, then.”
She raises a brow. “How long have you been a lawyer?”
“Have you seen a lot of dead bodies at crime scenes?”
“Fortunately, not as many as I would if I worked in Nashua or Boston,” Marcy says. “But enough to know what I’m doing.”
“You said that you found a fingerprint at Jess Ogilvy’s house, in the kitchen, that belongs to Jacob.”
“That’s right.”
“Can you say that the presence of that fingerprint identifies him as a murderer?”
“No. It only places him at the scene of the crime.”
“Is it possible that Jacob might have left the fingerprint there at some other point?”
“Yes.”
“You also found Mark Maguire’s boot prints beneath a window sash that had been jimmied and cut,” I say. “Is that correct?”
“Yes, we did.”
“Did you find Jacob’s boot prints anywhere outside?”
“No,” Marcy says.
I take a deep breath. I hope you know what you’re doing, I think silently, looking back once at Jacob. “And the blood in the bathroom-were you able to determine whether it belonged to the victim?”
“No. We tried to run a DNA test, but the results were not conclusive. There were traces of bleach in the swabs, and bleach often compromises DNA tests.”
“Isn’t it true, Ms. Allston, that when sprayed on bleach, Luminol also gives a positive reading?”
“Yes, sometimes.”
“So the traces of blood you found might be traces of bleach instead.”
“It’s possible,” she concedes.
“And the alleged blood in the bathroom might simply have been Jess cleaning the tile floor with Clorox?”
“Or,” Marcy says, “your client cleaning blood off the tile floor with Clorox, after he murdered her.”
I wince and immediately back off. “Ms. Allston, you can tell a lot about a body from the way that person is positioned at death, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Was there anything that struck you about Jess Ogilvy’s body when it was found?”
Marcy hesitates. “She wasn’t discarded. Someone had taken the time to sit her upright and to wrap her in a quilt, instead of dumping her.”
“Someone who cared for her?”
“Objection,” Helen interrupts, and like I expect, it’s sustained by the judge.
“Do you know my client, Ms. Allston?”
“Actually, I do.”
“How?”
“He’s a crime scene junkie. He’s been at a few I’ve been called to, and he starts giving us advice we don’t particularly want or need.”
“Have you ever let him help out at a crime scene?”
“Absolutely not. But it’s pretty clear he’s fascinated by all that stuff.” She shakes her head. “Only two kinds of people show up at crime scenes: the serial killers who are checking their handiwork, and the crazies who think police work is like the television shows and want to help solve the crime.”
Great. Now she’s got the jury wondering which of those two categories Jacob fits. I decide to cut my losses before I completely implode. “Nothing further,” I say, and Helen gets up to redirect.
“Ms. Allston, did Jacob Hunt show up at the culvert when you were processing the body?”
“No,” she says. “We didn’t see him at all.”
Helen shrugs. “I guess this time, there was nothing for him to solve.”
If I do not become a crime scene investigator famous in my field, like Dr. Henry Lee, I am going to become a medical examiner. It is the same work, really, except that your canvas is smaller. Instead of processing an entire house or a stretch of woods to determine the story of the crime, you coax the story out of the dead person on your autopsy table.
There are many things that make dead bodies preferable to live ones:
1. They don’t have facial expressions, so there’s no worry about mistaking a smile for a smirk, or any of that nonsense.
2. They don’t get bored if you’re hogging the conversation.
3. They don’t care if you stand too close or too far away.
4. They don’t talk about you when you leave the room, or tell their friends how annoying you are.
You can tell, from a dead body, the sequence of events that occurred: if the abdominal gunshot wound caused the peritonitis and septicemia; if those complications were the cause of death, or if it was the respiratory distress syndrome they led to that was the final blow. You can tell if the person died in a field or was left in the trunk of a car. You can tell if a person’s been shot in the head before the body was set on fire or vice versa. (When the skull is removed, you can see the blood that has started seeping as a result of the brain being boiled, a thermal injury. If you don’t see that, it usually means that execution was the cause of death, not the fire. Admit it: you wanted to know.)
For all these reasons, I am very attentive when Dr. Wayne Nussbaum takes the stand to testify. I know him; I’ve seen him before at crime scenes. Once, I wrote him a letter and got his autograph.
He lists his credentials: Yale University Medical School followed by rotations in pathology and emergency medicine before becoming an assistant medical examiner for the State of New York and, finally, twenty years as chief medical examiner in Vermont. “Did you perform an autopsy on Jess Ogilvy?” asked Helen Sharp.
“I did. On the afternoon of January eighteenth,” he said. “The body was brought to my office in the morning but had to thaw.”
“What was the temperature outside when she was found?”
“Twelve degrees, which allowed for excellent preservation.”
“How was she dressed?”
“She was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt and a light jacket. She had on a bra, but her underwear was on backward. There was a tooth wrapped in toilet paper in a small front pocket of the sweatpants, and her cell phone was zipped into the pocket of her jacket.”
Usually on CrimeBusters, when a medical examiner takes the stand, it is a five-minute testimony, tops. Helen Sharp, however, walks Dr. Nussbaum through his findings three times: once verbally, a second time with a diagram of a body while Dr. Nussbaum draws his findings in red marker; and finally with photographs he’d taken during the autopsy. Me, I’m loving every minute. I don’t know about that lady on the jury, though, who looks like she is about to throw up.
“You said, Doctor, that you took samples of Jess Ogilvy’s urine, heart blood, and vitreous humor from her eyes for toxicology purposes?”
“That’s correct.”
“What’s the purpose of those exams?”
“They let us know what foreign substances are in the victim’s bloodstream. In the case of the heart blood and the vitreous humor, it’s at the time of death.”
“What were the results?”
“Jessica Ogilvy did not have any drugs or alcohol in her system at the time of death.”
“Did you take photographs of the body during the autopsy?”
“Yes,” he says. “It’s routine procedure.”
“Did you make any notations as to unusual marks or bruises on the body?”
“Yes. The victim had bruises on her throat consistent with choking and bruises on her arms consistent with being restrained. The bruises were reddish violet and had sharp edges, which suggested that they occurred within twenty-four hours of death. In addition, the skin on her lower back had been scraped postmortem, most likely as a result of being dragged. You can see the difference in the photograph, here, between the two sorts of bruises. The postmortem one is yellowish and leathery.” He pointed to another photograph, this one of Jess’s face. “The victim was badly beaten. She had suffered a basal skull fracture, bruises around the eyes, and a broken nose. She was missing a front tooth.”
“Were you able to tell if those injuries were pre- or postmortem?”
“The fact that bruising occurred indicates the injury was prior to death. The tooth; well, that I can’t say for sure, but it did seem to be the one tucked in her pocket.”
“Can you punch someone so hard in the face that they lose a tooth?”
“Yes, it’s possible,” Dr. Nussbaum says.
“Would someone who had been punched hard in the face present with the same sorts of injuries you found on the victim’s body?”
“Yes.”
“Doctor,” Helen Sharp asks, “after having done the autopsy and studied the results from the toxicology labs, did you form an opinion within a reasonable degree of medical certainty about the manner of death?”
“Yes, I ruled it a homicide.”
“What was the cause of Jess Ogilvy’s death?”
“Blunt head trauma, which led to subdural hematoma-bleeding inside the skull, consistent with a blow or a fall.”
“How long does it take to die from a subdural hematoma?”
“It can be immediate, or it can take hours. In the victim’s case, it was relatively soon after injury.”
“Did the bruises you found on Jess Ogilvy’s neck and arms contribute to her death?”
“No.”
“How about the tooth that was knocked out?”
“No.”
“And there were no drugs or alcohol in her system?”
“No, there were not.”
“So, Dr. Nussbaum,” Helen Sharp says, “the sole cause of fatal injury to Jess Ogilvy that you found during the autopsy was a basal skull fracture that caused internal bleeding in the skull?”
“That’s correct.”
“Your witness,” the prosecutor says, and Oliver stands up.
“All those injuries you found on Jess Ogilvy’s body,” he says. “You have any idea who caused them?”
“No.”
“And you said that a subdural hematoma could be caused by either a blow or a fall.”
“Correct.”
“Isn’t it possible, Doctor,” Oliver asks, “that Jess Ogilvy tripped and fell and suffered a subdural hematoma?”
The medical examiner looks up and smiles a little.
It’s one of those smiles I hate, the kind that might mean You are so smart but might also mean You moron. “It’s possible Jess Ogilvy tripped and fell and suffered a subdural hematoma,” Dr. Nussbaum says. “But I highly doubt that she tried to strangle herself, or knocked out her own tooth, put on her underwear backward, dragged herself three hundred yards away, and wrapped herself in a quilt in a culvert.”
I laugh out loud-that’s such a great line it might have been scripted for CrimeBusters. My mother and Oliver both look at me, and that expression’s easy to read. They’re both one hundred percent pissed off.
“Perhaps now’s a good time for a serenity break?” the judge asks.
“Sensory!” Oliver snaps. “It’s a sensory break!”
Judge Cuttings clears his throat. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
In the sensory break room, I lie underneath the weighted blanket. My mother’s in the bathroom; Theo has his head on the vibrating pillow. He talks through his teeth and sounds like a robot. “Tickle me, Elmo,” he says.
“Jacob,” Oliver says after a minute and thirty-three seconds of silence. “Your behavior in this courtroom is making me very angry.”
“Well, your behavior in this courtroom is making me very angry,” I say. “You still haven’t told them the truth.”
“You know it’s not our turn yet. You’ve seen trials on television. The prosecution goes first, and then we get to undo the damage Helen Sharp’s done. But Jacob, Jesus. Every time you have an outburst or you laugh at something a witness says, that adds to the damage.” He looks at me. “Imagine you’re a juror, and you’ve got a daughter about Jess’s age, and then the defendant laughs out loud when the medical examiner talks about the gruesome way Jess died. What do you think that juror’s saying to himself?”
“I’m not a juror,” I say, “so I don’t really know.”
“What the medical examiner said at the end was pretty amusing,” Theo adds.
Oliver frowns at him. “Did I ask you for your opinion?”
“Did Jacob ask you for yours?” Theo says, and then he tosses me the pillow. “Don’t listen to him,” Theo tells me, and he slips out of the sensory break room.
I find Oliver staring at me. “Do you miss Jess?”
“Yes. She was my friend.”
“Then why don’t you show it?”
“Why should I?” I ask, sitting up. “If I know I feel it, that’s what counts. Don’t you ever look at someone who’s hysterical in public and wonder if it’s because they really feel miserable or because they want others to know they’re miserable? It kind of dilutes the emotion if you display it for the whole world to see. Makes it less pure.”
“Well, that’s not how the majority of people think. Most people, confronted with photographic evidence of the autopsy of someone they loved, would get upset. Maybe even cry.”
“Cry? Are you kidding?” I mimic a phrase I’ve heard kids say at school. “I would have killed to be at that autopsy.”
Oliver turns away. I’m pretty sure I hear him wrong.
Did you?
The running joke among those of us sequestered for the trial involves the sensory break room. If the defendant can get some special accommodation, why not the witnesses? Me, I want a Chinese food take-out room. I tell this to Helen Sharp when she comes to let me know that I’m testifying next.
“Dumplings,” I say, “have been scientifically proven to enhance witness focus. And General Tso’s chicken clogs the arteries just enough to increase blood flow to the brain-”
“And here all this time I thought your disability was your short-”
“Hey!”
“-attention span,” Helen says. She smiles at me. “You have five minutes.”
I’m only half kidding. I mean, if the court was willing to bend over backward for Jacob Hunt’s Asperger’s syndrome, how long will it be before this is used as a precedent by some career criminal who insists that going to jail will inflame his claustrophobia? I’m all for equality, but not when it erodes the system.
I decide to take a leak before court reconvenes and have just turned the corner toward the hallway where the restrooms are located when I smack directly into a woman who’s walking in the opposite direction. “Whoa,” I say, steadying her. “I’m sorry.”
Emma Hunt looks up at me with those incredible eyes of hers. “I bet,” she says.
In another lifetime-if I had another job, and she had a different kid-maybe we would have been talking over a bottle of wine, maybe she would be smiling at me, instead of looking like she’d just been confronted by her worst nightmare. “How are you holding up?”
“You have no right to ask me that.”
She tries to push past me, but I block her with an outstretched arm. “I was just doing my job, Emma.”
“I have to get back to Jacob-”
“Look, I’m sorry this happened to you, because you’ve already had to go through a lot. But the day Jess died, a mother lost her child.”
“And now,” she says, “you are going to make me lose mine.”
She pushes at my arm. This time, I let her go.
It takes ten minutes for Helen to walk me through my credentials-my rank as captain, my training as detective in Townsend, the fact that I’ve been doing this since before Jesus was born, yada yada, all the stuff a jury wants to hear to know they are in good hands. “How did you become involved in the investigation into Jess Ogilvy’s death?” Helen begins.
“Her boyfriend, Mark Maguire, came to the police station and reported her missing on January thirteenth. He hadn’t seen her since the morning of the twelfth and had been unable to make contact with her. She had no planned trips, and her friends and parents did not know where she was, either. Her purse and coat were at her house, but other personal items were missing.”
“Such as?”
“Her toothbrush, her cell phone.” I glance at Jacob, who raises his brows expectantly. “And some clothes in a backpack,” I finish, and he smiles and ducks his head, nodding.
“What did you do?”
“I went with Mr. Maguire to the house and listed the items that were missing. I also took a typed note found in the mailbox, asking for the mail to be held, and sent it to the lab for fingerprints. Then I told Mr. Maguire that we’d have to wait and see if Ms. Ogilvy returned.”
“Why did you send the note to the lab?” Helen asks.
“Because it seemed strange to type a note to your mailman.”
“Did you get results back from the laboratory?”
“Yes. They were inconclusive; no fingerprints were found on the paper. That led me to believe that it was possibly a note typed by someone smart enough to wear gloves when placing it. A red herring, to make us think Jess had run away on her own.”
“What happened next?”
“I received a call from Mr. Maguire a day later, saying that a rack of CDs had been knocked over and then alphabetized. It didn’t seem to be a clear sign of foul play-after all, this was something that Jess might have done, and in my experience, felons don’t tend to be neat freaks. However, we formally opened an investigation into Ms. Ogilvy’s disappearance. A CSI team was dispatched to her residence to gather evidence. I took her date book from her purse, which was found in the kitchen, and began to follow up on the meetings she had prior to her disappearance and was scheduled to have afterward.”
“Did you attempt to contact Jess Ogilvy during this investigation?”
“Numerous times. We called her cell phone, but it went right into voice mail, until even that was full. With the help of the FBI, we attempted to ping her cell phone.”
“What does that mean?”
“Using a GPS locator built into the device, the FBI has a software program which can find coordinates within a meter of actual physical location anywhere in the world, but in this case, the results were inconclusive. The phone has to be powered up in order for that software to work, and apparently, Jess Ogilvy’s was not,” I say. “We also screened the messages that came into her residence. One was from Mr. Maguire. One was from a vendor, one from the defendant’s mother, and three were missed calls that originated from Jess Ogilvy’s own cell phone number. Based on the time stamps of the answering machine, it suggested that Ms. Ogilvy was still alive somewhere at the time the calls were placed-or that we were being led to believe this by whoever had her cell phone.”
“Detective, when did you first meet the defendant?”
“On January fifteenth.”
“Had you seen him before?”
“Yes-at a crime scene a week earlier. He crashed an investigation.”
“Where did you meet Mr. Hunt on January fifteenth?”
“At his house.”
“Who else was present?”
“His mother.”
“Did you take the defendant into custody at that time?”
“No, he wasn’t a suspect. I asked him questions about his appointment with Jess. He said that he had gone to her house for the two thirty-five appointment but did not meet with her. He indicated that he walked home. He also revealed that Mark Maguire was not present when he arrived at Ms. Ogilvy’s place. When I asked him whether he had ever seen Jess fight with her boyfriend, he said, ‘Hasta la vista, baby.’”
“Did you recognize that statement?”
“I believe it’s attributed to the former governor of California,” I say. “Before he entered politics.”
“Did you ask the defendant anything else at that meeting?”
“No, I was… dismissed. It was four-thirty, and at four-thirty he watches a television show.”
“Did you see the defendant again?”
“Yes. I received a call from Emma Hunt, his mother, indicating that Jacob had something else to tell me.”
“What did Jacob say during that second conversation?”
“He presented me with Jess Ogilvy’s missing backpack, and some of her clothing. He admitted that he had gone to her house and found signs of a struggle, which he cleaned up.”
“Cleaned up?”
“Yes. He righted stools and picked up the mail, which had been thrown on the floor, and restacked the CDs and alphabetized them. He took the backpack, because he thought she might need it. He then proceeded to show me the backpack and the items inside.”
“Did you take Jacob into custody at that time?”
“I did not.”
“Did you take the clothes and backpack with you?”
“Yes. We tested them, and the results were negative. There were no prints, no blood, no DNA.”
“Then what happened?” Helen asks.
“I met the CSI team at Jess Ogilvy’s home. They had found trace evidence of blood in the bathroom, and a cut screen in the kitchen window, as well as a broken window sash. They also found a boot print outside the house that seemed to match the boots worn by Mark Maguire.”
“What happened after that?”
I face the jury. “Early Monday morning, January eighteenth, shortly after three A.M., Townsend Dispatch received a 911 call. All 911 calls are traced through GPS technology so responders can reach whoever is making the call. This call originated from a culvert approximately three hundred yards from the home where Jess Ogilvy was residing. I responded to the call. The victim’s body-and her phone-were found there, and she was wrapped in a blanket. There’s a video clip from the midday news that aired on WCAX-” I hesitate, waiting for Helen to take the tape and enter it as evidence, to pull the television monitor closer to the jury so that they can see it.
There is utter silence as the reporter’s face fills the screen, her eyes watering in the cold, while crime scene investigators move along behind her. The reporter shifts her feet, and Helen freezes the image.
“Do you recognize that blanket, Detective?” she asks.
It is a multicolored quilt, definitely hand-sewn. “Yes. It was wrapped around Jess Ogilvy’s body.”
“Is this the same blanket?”
She holds up the quilt, with its bloodstains ruining the pattern here and there. “That’s it,” I say.
“What happened after that?”
“With the discovery of the body, I had several officers arrest Mark Maguire for the murder of Jess Ogilvy. I was interrogating him when I received another call.”
“Did the caller identify him- or herself?”
“Yes. It was Jacob Hunt’s mother, Emma.”
“What was her demeanor?” Helen asks.
“She was frantic. Extremely upset.”
“What did she tell you?”
The other lawyer, the one who looks like he’s still in high school, objects. “That’s hearsay, Your Honor,” he says.
“Counsel, approach,” the judge says.
Helen speaks quietly. “Judge, I would make an offer of proof that the mother called because she had just seen the news clip with that quilt on the screen and was able to link it to her son. Therefore, Your Honor, it’s an excited utterance.”
“The objection’s overruled,” the judge says, and Helen approaches me again.
“What did the defendant’s mother tell you?” she repeats.
I don’t want to look at Emma. I can already feel the heat of her gaze, the accusations. “She told me that the quilt belonged to her son.”
“Based on the results of your conversation, what did you do?”
“I asked Ms. Hunt to bring Jacob down to the station, so that we could speak further.”
“Did you place Jacob Hunt under arrest for the murder of Jess Ogilvy?”
“Yes.”
“Then what happened?”
“I dismissed all charges against Mr. Maguire. I also executed a search warrant for the defendant’s house.”
“What did you find there?”
“We found Jacob Hunt’s police scanner, a self-constructed fuming chamber for fingerprinting, and hundreds of black-and-white composition notebooks.”
“What was in those notebooks?”
“Jacob used them to record information about CrimeBusters episodes he watched. He’d write down the date the episode aired, and the evidence, and then whether or not he solved the crime before the television detectives did. I saw him writing in one the first time I came to his house to speak to him.”
“How many did you find?”
“A hundred and sixteen.”
The prosecutor enters one into evidence. “Do you recognize this, Detective Matson?”
“It’s one of those notebooks. The one with the most recent entries.”
“Can you turn to the fourteenth page of this notebook and tell us what you find there?”
I read aloud the subject heading.
At Her House. 1/12/10.
Situation: Girl reported missing by her boyfriend.
Evidence:
Clothes in pile on bed
Toothbrush missing, lip gloss missing
Victim’s purse and coat remain
Cell phone missing
Luminol bathroom-blood detected
Knapsack taken with clothing & mailbox note-red herring for kidnapping
Cut screen-boot prints outside match up with boyfriend’s footwear
Cell phone traced by 911 call to location of body in culvert
“Is there anything intriguing about this entry in particular?”
“I don’t know if it’s a CrimeBusters episode, but it’s the exact crime scene we found at Jess Ogilvy’s residence. It’s the exact way we found Jess Ogilvy’s body. And all this information is information nobody should have had,” I say. “Except for the police… and the killer.”
I knew that Jacob was going to have trouble when those journals were presented as evidence. I wouldn’t want the equivalent of my diary being read to a jury. Not that I keep a diary, or not that I would recount the evidence at a murder scene in one. So I am expecting it when he starts rocking a little bit as Helen enters the journal into evidence. I can feel the stiffening of his spine, the way he is breathing hard, the fact that he barely blinks.
When Jacob leans toward the table, I meet Emma’s gaze over his head. Now, she mouths, and sure enough, Jacob shoves a piece of paper into my hands.
F#, it reads.
It takes me a moment to realize that he’s passed me a note, just like I told him to do if he needed a sensory break.
“Your Honor,” I say, standing up. “Could we take a short recess?”
“We just had a recess, Mr. Bond,” Judge Cuttings says, and then he looks at Jacob, whose face is bright red. “Five minutes,” he announces.
With me on one side and Emma locked on the other, we hustle Jacob up the aisle to the sensory break room. “Just hold it together for another thirty seconds,” Emma soothes. “Ten more steps. Nine… eight…”
Jacob ducks inside and spins around to face us. “Oh my God!” he shrieks, a smile splitting his face. “Wasn’t that awesome?”
I just stare at him.
“I mean, that was the whole point. They finally got it. I set up a crime scene and the cops figured the whole thing out, even the red herrings.” He pokes me in the chest with his finger. “You,” Jacob says, “are doing a great job.”
Behind me, Emma bursts into tears.
I don’t look at her. I can’t. “I’ll fix it,” I say.
There is a moment when I stand up to do the cross-examination of Detective Matson that I think we might have a pissing contest instead. He takes a look at Emma-her eyes still red, her face still puffy-and narrows his gaze at me, as if her condition is my fault instead of his. And that only makes me want to sink him even more.
“The first time you met with Jacob at his house, Detective,” I begin, “he quoted the movie Terminator to you, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And the second time you met with Jacob… he recommended a variety of tests for you to run on the backpack?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“Several.”
I grab the legal pad that’s in front of Jacob. “Did he recommend a DNA test on the straps of the backpack?”
“Yes.”
“And an AP test on the underwear inside.”
“I guess.”
“Luminol?”
“That sounds about right.”
“And what about ninhydrin on the card inside?”
“Look, I don’t remember them all, but that’s probably true.”
“In fact, Detective,” I say, “Jacob seemed to know your job better than you do.”
He narrows his eyes. “He certainly knew the crime scene better than I did.”
“Those composition notebooks that you found. Did you read them all?”
“Yes.”
“What did the other hundred and fifteen notebooks contain?”
“Synopses,” he says. “Of episodes of CrimeBusters.”
“Do you know what CrimeBusters is, Detective?”
“I think you’d have to be living under a rock to not know,” he says. “It’s a police procedural television show that’s probably syndicated on Mars by now.”
“You ever watch it?”
He laughs. “I try not to. It’s not exactly realistic.”
“So the cases aren’t true crime.”
“No.”
“Then is it fair to say that the hundred and sixteen journals you seized from Jacob’s room are full of descriptions of fictional crime scenes?”
“Well, yes,” Matson says, “but I don’t think the one he wrote in the hundred and sixteenth journal was fictional at all.”
“How do you know?” I take a few steps toward him. “In fact, Detective, there was media coverage of Jess Ogilvy’s disappearance before you got hold of this notebook, wasn’t there?”
“Yes.”
“Her name was on the news, her parents were asking for help solving the crime?”
“Yes.”
“You testified that Jacob would show up at crime scenes looking to help, correct?”
“Yes, but-”
“Did he ever offer up information that was surprising to you?”
Matson hesitates. “Yes.”
“So isn’t it possible, especially given that he knew this particular victim, that he wasn’t using the notebook to brag about a murder… but rather, like he did with every CrimeBusters episode, using it to help solve the case?”
I turn to the jury before he can even answer. “Nothing further,” I say.
Helen stands up at the prosecutor’s table. “Detective Matson,” she says, “can you read the notation at the bottom of the first page of the notebook?”
“It says SOLVED: ME, twenty-four minutes.”
“What about the notation at the bottom of the entry on page six?”
“SOLVED: THEM, fifty-five minutes… Good one!”
She walks toward Matson. “Do you have any idea what that notation indicates?”
“Jacob told me, when I first saw him writing in the journals. He marks down whether he solved the crime before the TV detectives did, and how long it took.”
“Detective,” Helen says, “can you read the notation at the bottom of page fourteen, the entry entitled ‘At Her House’ that you read for us earlier?”
He glances down at the page. “It says SOLVED: ME.”
“Anything else notable about that line?”
Matson looks at the jury. “It’s underlined. Ten times.”
At dinner, I’m the one who sees my brother stealing the knife.
I don’t say anything at first. But it’s perfectly clear to me, the way he pauses in the middle of his yellow rice and scrambled eggs to carve the kernels off an ear of corn-and then pushes the knife with his thumbs to the edge of the table, so that it falls into his lap.
My mother yammers on about the trial-about the coffee machine at the courthouse which only dispenses cold coffee; about what Jacob is going to wear tomorrow; about the defense, which will present its case in the morning. I don’t think either of us is listening, because Jacob is trying to not move his shoulders while he wraps the knife in a napkin and I am trying to study his every move.
When he starts to get up from the table and my mother cuts him off with a sharp, forced cough, I am sure she’s going to call him on his stolen cutlery. But instead, she says, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“May I be excused?” Jacob mutters, and a minute later he’s scraped his plate and heads upstairs.
“I wonder what’s the matter,” my mother says. “He hardly ate.”
I shovel the rest of my food into my mouth and then mumble a request to be excused. I hurry upstairs, but Jacob’s not in his room. The bathroom door is wide open, too. It’s like he’s just vanished.
I walk into my own bedroom, and all of a sudden I’m grabbed and pulled against the wall, and there’s a knife at my throat.
Okay, I’m just going to say it’s pretty depressing that this is not the first time I’ve found myself in this scenario with my brother. I do what I know works: I bite his wrist.
You’d think he’d see it coming, but he doesn’t; the knife clatters to the floor, and I elbow him in his soft gut. He doubles over, grunting. “What the fuck are you doing?” I yell.
“Practicing.”
I reach for the knife and stick it inside my desk drawer, the one I keep locked, where I’ve learned to keep the things I don’t want Jacob to get. “Practicing murder?” I say. “You crazy motherfucker. This is why you’re going to get convicted.”
“I wasn’t going to actually hurt you.” Jacob sits down heavily on my bed. “There was someone looking at me funny today.”
“I’d think a lot of people in that courtroom were looking at you funny.”
“But this one guy followed me to the bathroom. I have to be able to protect myself.”
“Right. And what do you think is going to happen tomorrow morning when you walk into the courthouse and the metal detectors start beeping? And the stupid reporters all watch you pull a steak knife out of your sock?”
He frowns. This is one of those harebrained Aspie schemes of his, the ones he never thinks through. Like when he called the cops on my mom two months ago. To Jacob, I’m sure it seemed perfectly logical. To the rest of the free world, not so much.
“What if there’s nothing wrong with me?” Jacob says. “What if the reason I act like I do and think like I do is that I’m left out all the time? If I had friends, you know, maybe I wouldn’t do things that look strange to everyone else. It’s like bacteria that only grows in a vacuum. Maybe there’s no such thing as Asperger’s. Maybe all there is is what happens to you when you don’t fit in.”
“Don’t go telling your lawyer that. He needs Asperger’s to exist big-time right now.” I look at Jacob’s hands. His cuticles are bitten down to the skin; often he draws blood. My mother used to have to wrap Band-Aids around all his fingers before she sent him to school. Once, in the hallways, I heard two girls calling him the Mummy. “Hey, Jacob,” I say quietly. “I’ll tell you something no one else knows.”
His hand flutters on his thigh. “A secret?”
“Yeah. But you can’t tell Mom.”
I want to tell him. I’ve wanted to tell someone for so long now. But maybe Jacob is right: in the absence of having space in the world, the thing that’s left behind just gets bigger and more unrecognizable. It swells in my throat; it steals all the air in the room. And suddenly, I’m blubbering like a baby; I’m wiping my eyes with my sleeves and trying to pretend that my brother isn’t in court; my brother isn’t going to jail; that this isn’t karmic payment for all the bad things I’ve done and all the bad thoughts I’ve had.
“I was there,” I blurt out. “I was there the day Jess died.”
Jacob doesn’t look at me, and maybe that’s easier. He flutters his hand a little faster and then brings it up to his throat. “I know,” he says.
My eyes widen. “You do?”
“Of course I do. I saw your footprints.” He stares just over my shoulder. “That’s why I had to do it.”
Oh my God. She told Jacob that I’d been spying on her naked and that she was going to go to the cops, and he shut her up. Now I’m sobbing; I can barely catch my breath. “I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t touch me or hug me or comfort me, the way my mom would. The way any other human would. Jacob just keeps fanning his fingers, and then he says I’m sorry I’m sorry like I did, an echo that’s been stripped of its music, like rain on tin.
It’s prosody. It’s part of Asperger’s. When Jacob was little, he would repeat questions I asked and throw them back at me like a baseball pitch instead of answering. My mother told me this was like his movie quotes, a verbal stim. It was Jacob’s way of feeling the words in his mouth when he had nothing to say in return.
But all the same, I let myself pretend it’s his robotic, monotone way of asking for my forgiveness, too.
That day when we come home from court, instead of watching CrimeBusters, I choose a different video instead. It is a home movie of me when I was a baby, only one year old. It must be my birthday because there is a cake, and I am clapping and smiling and saying things like Mama and Dada and milk. Every time someone says my name I look up, right into the camera.
I look normal.
My parents are happy. My dad’s there, and he’s not even in any videos we have of Theo. My mother doesn’t have the line between her eyes that she has now. Most people take home movies, after all, to capture something they want to remember, not a moment they’d rather forget.
That’s not the case later on in the video. All of a sudden, instead of sticking my fingers in a cake and offering up a big gummy smile, I’m rocking in front of the washing machine, watching the clothes turn in circles. I’m lying in front of the television, but instead of watching the programming, I’m lining up Lego pieces end to end. My father isn’t in the film anymore; instead there are people I don’t know-a woman with frizzy yellow hair and a sweatshirt with a cat on it who gets down on the floor with me and moves my head so that I focus on a puzzle she’s set down. A lady with bright blue eyes is having a conversation with me, if you can call it that:
Lady: Jacob, are you excited about going to the circus?
Me: Yes.
Lady: What do you want to see at the circus?
Me: (No answer)
Lady: Say, At the circus, I want to see…
Me: I want to see clowns.
Lady (gives me an M &M): I love clowns. Are you excited about the circus?
Me: Yeah, I want to see clowns.
Lady (gives me three M &M’s): Jacob, that’s great!
Me: (I stuff the M &M’s into my mouth)
These are the movies my mother took as evidence, as proof that I was now a different child than the one she’d started with. I don’t know what she was thinking when she recorded them. Surely she didn’t want to sit and watch all this over and over, the visual equivalent of a slap in the face. Maybe she was keeping them in the hope that one day a pharmaceutical executive might arrive unexpectedly for dinner, watch the tapes, and cut her a check for damages.
As I’m watching, there’s a sudden streak of silver static that makes me cover my ears, and then there’s another segment of video. It’s been accidentally taped over my Oscar-worthy autistic toddler film, and in it I am much older. It is only a year ago, and I am getting ready for my junior prom.
Jess took the video. She came over that afternoon while I was getting ready so that she could see the final result of our preparations. I can hear her voice. Jacob, she says, for God’s sake, get closer to her. She’s not going to bite you. The video swings like an amusement park ride, and I hear Jess’s voice again. Oops, I suck at this.
My mother has a camera and is taking a picture of me with my date. The girl’s name is Amanda, and she goes to my school. She’s wearing an orange dress, which is probably the reason I refuse to get closer to her, even though I usually do what Jess wants.
On television, it’s like I’m watching a make-believe show and Jacob isn’t me, he’s a character. It’s not really me who closes his eyes when my mother tries to take a picture on the front lawn. It’s not really me who walks to Amanda’s car and sits in the back like I always do. Oh no, my mother’s voice says, and Jess starts laughing. We totally forgot about that, she says.
Suddenly the camera turns around fast, and Jess’s face is fishbowl-close. Hello, world! she says, and she pretends to swallow the camera. She’s smiling.
Then there’s a line of red that moves down the television screen like a curtain, and suddenly I am only three years old again and I am stacking a green block on top of a blue block on top of a yellow block, just like the therapist has shown me. Jacob! Good work! she says, and she pushes a toy truck toward me as a reward. I flip it over and spin its wheels.
I want Jess to be on the screen again.
“I wish I knew how to quit you,” I whisper.
Suddenly, my chest feels like it’s shrinking, the way it sometimes does when I am standing with a group of kids in school and I realize I’m the only one who did not get the punch line of the joke. Or that I am the punch line of the joke.
I start to think maybe I’ve done something wrong. Really wrong.
Because I do not know how to fix it, I pick up the remote control and rewind the tape almost back to the beginning, to the time when I was no different from anyone else.
From Auntie Em’s archives:
Dear Auntie Em,
How do I get a boy’s attention? I am hopeless at flirting, and there are so many other girls out there who are prettier and smarter than I am. But I’m sick of never being noticed; maybe I can reinvent myself. What can I do?
Baffled in Bennington
Dear Baffled,
You don’t have to be anyone except who you already are. You just have to get a guy to take a second look. For this, there are two approaches:
1. Stop waiting: take the initiative and go talk to him. Ask him if he got the answer to number 7 on your math homework. Tell him he did a great job in the school talent show.
2. Start walking around naked.
But it’s your choice.
Love,
Auntie Em
When I can’t sleep, I pull a cardigan over my pajamas and sit outside on the porch steps and try to imagine the life I might have had.
Henry and I would be waiting, with Jacob, for college acceptance letters. We might pop out a bottle of champagne and let him have a glass to celebrate once he made his choice. Theo would not hole himself up in his room doing his absolute best to pretend he doesn’t belong to this family. Instead, he would sit at the kitchen table, doing crosswords in the daily paper. “Three letters,” he’d say, and he’d read the clue. “Hope was often found here.” And we’d all guess at the answer-God? Sky? Arkansas?-but Jacob would be the one to get it right: USO.
Our boys would be listed on the honor roll quarterly. And people would stare at me when I went shopping for groceries, not because I was the mother of that autistic boy, or worse, the murderer, but because they wished they were as lucky as me.
I don’t believe in self-pity. I think it’s for people who have too much time on their hands. Instead of dreaming of a miracle, you learn to make your own. But the universe has a way of punishing you for your deepest, darkest secrets; and as much as I love my son-as much as Jacob has been the star around which I’ve orbited-I’ve had my share of moments when I silently imagined the person I was supposed to be, the one who got lost, somehow, in the daily business of raising an autistic child.
Be careful what you wish for.
Picture your life without Jacob, and it just may come true.
I listened to the testimony today. And yes, as Oliver has said, it’s not our turn yet. But I watched the faces of the jury as they stared at Jacob, and I saw the same expression I’ve seen a thousand times before. That mental distancing, that subtle acknowledgment that there is something wrong with that boy.
Because he doesn’t interact the way they do.
Because he doesn’t grieve the way they do.
Because he doesn’t move or speak the way they do.
I fought so hard to have Jacob mainstreamed at school-not just so that he could see the way other kids behaved but because other kids needed to see him, and to learn that different isn’t synonymous with bad. But I cannot say, honestly, that his classmates ever learned that lesson. They gave Jacob enough rope to hang himself in social situations, and then set the blame squarely on his shoulders.
And now, after all that work to shoehorn him into an ordinary school setting, he is in a courtroom peppered with accommodations for his special needs. His only chance at acquittal hinges on his diagnosis on the spectrum. To insist that he is just like anyone else, at this moment, would be a sure prison sentence.
After years of refusing to make excuses for Jacob’s Asperger’s, this is the only chance he has.
And suddenly, I am running, as if my life depends on it.
It’s after 2:00 A.M. and the pizza parlor is dark, the Closed sign flipped on the door, but in the tiny window above, a light is burning. I open the door to the narrow staircase that leads to the law office, climb the steps, knock.
Oliver answers, dressed in sweats and a T-shirt that has an old, faded picture of a man with furry, ursine arms. SUPPORT THE SECOND AMENDMENT, it reads. His eyes are bloodshot, and he has ink stains on his hands. “Emma,” he says. “Is everything okay?”
“No,” I say, pushing past him. There are take-out containers on the floor, and an empty two-liter jug of Mountain Dew lies on its side. Thor, the dog, is asleep with his chin notched over the green plastic bottle. “No, everything’s not okay.” I face him again, my voice catching. “It’s two in the morning. I’m in my pajamas. I just ran here-”
“You ran here?”
“-and my son’s going to prison. So no, Oliver, everything is not okay.”
“Jacob’s going to get acquitted-”
“Oliver,” I say. “Tell me the truth.”
He moves a stack of papers off the couch and sits down heavily. “You know why I’m awake at two in the morning? I’m trying to write my opening statement. Want to hear what I’ve got so far?” He lifts up the paper he’s holding. “Ladies and gentlemen, Jacob Hunt is…” He stops.
“Is what?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver says. He crumples it into a ball, and I know he’s thinking of Jacob’s meltdown, just like I am. “I don’t fucking know. Jacob Hunt is saddled with an attorney who should have stayed a farrier, that’s what. I shouldn’t have said yes to you. I shouldn’t have gone to the police station. I should have given you the name of some guy who can do criminal law in his sleep, instead of pretending a novice like me might have half a chance of pulling this off.”
“If this is your way of trying to make me feel better, you’re doing a really lousy job,” I tell him.
“I told you I suck at this.”
“Well. At least now you’re being honest.” I sit down beside him on the couch.
“You want honest?” Oliver says. “I have no idea if that jury is going to buy the defense. I’m scared. Of losing, of the judge laughing me out of court as a total sham.”
“I’m scared all the time,” I admit. “Everyone thinks I’m the mother who never gives up; that I’d drag Jacob back from the edge of hell a hundred times if I had to. But some mornings I just want to pull the covers over my head and stay in bed.”
“Most mornings I want to do that,” Oliver says, and I swallow a smile.
We are leaning against the back of the couch. The blue light from the streetlamps outside turns us both into ghosts. We aren’t in this world anymore, just haunting its edges.
“You want to hear something really sad?” I whisper. “You’re my best friend.”
“You’re right. That is really sad.” Oliver grins.
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Are we still playing True Confessions?” he asks.
“Is that what we’re doing?”
He reaches toward me and rubs a strand of my hair between his fingers. “I think you’re beautiful,” Oliver says. “Inside and out.”
He leans forward the tiniest bit and breathes in, closing his eyes, before he lets the hair fall back against my cheek. I feel it inside me, as if I’ve been shocked.
I don’t pull away.
I don’t want to pull away.
“I… I don’t know what to say,” I stammer.
Oliver’s eyes light up. “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” he quotes. He moves slowly, so that I know what’s coming, and kisses me.
I should be with Jacob, by court order. I am already breaking rules. What’s one more?
His teeth catch my lip. He tastes like sugar. “Jelly beans,” he murmurs against my ear. “My biggest vice. After this.”
I tangle my hands in his hair. It’s thick and golden, wild. “Oliver,” I gasp, as he slides his hands under my camisole. His fingers span my ribs. “I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to sleep with your clients.”
“You’re not my client,” he says. “And I’m not nearly as attracted to Jacob.” He peels back the cardigan I’m wearing; my skin burns. I cannot remember the last time someone treated me as if I were the hallowed museum piece that he had received permission to touch.
Somehow we have inched ourselves down onto the couch. My head falls to the side, along with my best intentions, when his mouth closes over my breast. I find myself staring directly into Thor’s eyes. “The dog…”
Oliver lifts his head. “Jesus,” he says, and he stands up, grabbing Thor like a football in one arm. “You’ve got lousy timing.” He opens a closet and tosses a handful of Milk-Bones on a pillow inside, then sets Thor down and closes the door.
When he turns around again, I draw in my breath. Somehow, his T-shirt has gotten lost between the cushions. His shoulders are wide and strong, his waist tapered, his sweats riding low. He has the easy beauty of someone young enough to dismiss how lucky he is to look like that without trying.
Me, on the other hand: I’m lying on a ratty couch in a cramped room with a jealous dog in the nearby closet, with freckles and wrinkles and fifteen more pounds than I ought to have and-
“Don’t,” Oliver says softly, as I pull the edges of my cardigan together again. He sits down on the edge of the couch beside me. “Or I will have to kill Thor.”
“Oliver, you could have any girl you want. Any girl your age.”
“You know what young wine is? Grape juice. There are some things worth the wait.”
“That argument would have been much more convincing coming from someone who hadn’t just finished off a trough of Mountain Dew-”
He kisses me again. “Shut the hell up, Emma,” he says amiably, and he puts his hands over mine where they rest on the edges of my sweater.
“It’s been forever.” The words are quiet, hidden against his shoulder.
“That’s because,” Oliver says, “you were waiting for me.” He slips aside the sweater again and kisses my collarbone. “Emma. Is everything okay?” he asks, for the second time this night.
Except this time, I say yes.
I should have gotten rid of the king-size bed. There is something horribly depressing about only having to tuck in half the sheets each morning, because the other side always remains pristine. I never cross the Mason-Dixon Line of my marriage and sleep, every now and then, on Henry’s side. I’ve left it for him, for whoever might take his place.
That turned out to be Theo, during thunderstorms, when he was afraid. Or Jacob when he was sick and I wanted to keep an eye on him. I told myself that I liked the extra space anyway. That I deserved to spread out if I wanted to, even though I have always slept curled on my side like a fiddlehead fern.
Which is why, I suppose, it feels perfect when the pink fingers of the morning stroke the sheet that Oliver’s tossed over us sometime in the night, and I realize that he’s curled around me: a comma, his knees tucked up behind mine and his arm tight around my waist.
I shift, but instead of letting go of me, Oliver tightens his grasp. “What time is it?” he murmurs.
“Five-thirty.”
I turn in his embrace, so that I am facing him. There’s stubble on his cheeks and his chin. “Oliver, listen.”
His eyes squint open. “No.”
“No, you’re not going to listen? Or no, you’re not Oliver?”
“I’m not going to listen,” he replies. “It wasn’t a mistake, and it wasn’t just a onetime, what-the-hell night. And if you keep fighting me on this, I’ll make you read the fine print on the retainer you signed, which very clearly states that the attorney’s sexual services are included in the fee.”
“I was going to tell you to come over for breakfast,” I say drily.
Oliver blinks at me. “Oh.”
“It’s Thursday. Brown day. Gluten-free bagels?”
“I prefer Everything,” he answers, and then he blushes. “But I guess I made that fairly obvious last night.”
I used to wake up in the morning and lie in bed for thirty seconds, when whatever I had dreamed might still be possible, before I remembered that I had to get up and make whatever breakfast fit the color code and wonder whether we would survive the day without some schedule change or noise or social conundrum triggering a meltdown. I had thirty seconds when the future was something I anticipated, not feared.
I wrap my arms around Oliver’s neck and kiss him. Even knowing that, in four and a half hours, this trial will start again; even knowing that I have to hurry home before Jacob realizes I am missing; even knowing that I have likely made a mess of things by doing what I’ve done… I have figured out a way to stretch those thirty seconds of bliss into one long, lovely moment.
Three letters: a place where hope was found.
Joy.
Him.
Yes.
If this happened… well, maybe anything can.
He puts his hands on my shoulders and gently pushes me away. “You have no idea how much it’s killing me to say no,” Oliver says, “but I’ve got an opening argument to write, and my client’s mother is, well, incredibly demanding.”
“No kidding,” I say.
He sits up and pulls my camisole out from under his head, helps me stretch it over my head. “This isn’t nearly as much fun in reverse,” he points out.
We both dress, and then Oliver frees Thor from his banishment and hooks a leash onto his collar, offering to walk me partway home. We are the only people on the streets at this hour. “I feel like an idiot,” I say, glancing down at my slippers and my pajama bottoms.
“You look like a college student.”
I roll my eyes. “You are such a liar.”
“You mean lawyer.”
“Is there a difference?”
I stop walking and look up at him. “This,” I say. “Not in front of Jacob.”
Oliver doesn’t pretend to misunderstand me. He keeps walking, tugging at Thor’s leash. “All right,” he says.
We part ways at the skateboarding park, and I walk quickly with my head ducked against the wind-and the view of drivers in passing cars. Every now and then, a smile bubbles up from inside me, rising to the surface. The closer I get to home, the more inappropriate that feels. As if I am cheating somehow, as if I have the audacity to be someone other than the mother I am expected to be.
By 6:15 I am turning the corner of my street, relieved. Jacob wakes up like clockwork at 6:30; he’ll be none the wiser.
But as I get closer, I see that the lights are on in the house, and my heart skips a beat. I start running, panicked. What if something happened to Jacob in the middle of the night? How stupid have I been, leaving him? I hadn’t scribbled a note, I hadn’t taken my cell phone, and as I throw open the front door, I am nearly bent double by the weight of what might have gone wrong.
Jacob stands at the kitchen counter, already making his own brown breakfast. There are two place settings. “Mom,” he blurts, excited, “you’ll never guess who’s here.”
Before I can, though, I hear the downstairs toilet flush, and the running of the faucet, and the footsteps of the guest, who enters the kitchen with an uncomfortable smile.
“Henry?” I say.