For just a moment, I am certain that I’m hallucinating. My ex-husband is not standing in my kitchen, is not coming forward to awkwardly kiss my cheek.
“What are you doing here?” I demand.
He looks at Jacob, who is pouring chocolate soy milk into a glass. “For once in my life, I wanted to do the right thing,” Henry says.
I fold my arms. “Don’t flatter yourself, Henry. This has less to do with Jacob than it does with your own guilt.”
“Wow,” he says. “Some things never change.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“No one’s allowed to be a better parent than you are. You have to be the gold standard, and if you’re not, you’ll cut everyone else down to make sure of it.”
“That’s pretty funny, coming from a man who hasn’t seen his son in years.”
“Three years, six months, and four days,” Jacob says. I had forgotten he was still in the room. “We went out to dinner in Boston because you flew in for work. You ate beef tenderloin, and you sent it back because it was too rare at first.”
Henry and I look at each other. “Jacob,” I say, “why don’t you go upstairs and take the first shower?”
“What about breakfast-”
“You can eat it when you come back down.”
Jacob hustles upstairs, leaving me alone with Henry. “You have got to be kidding,” I say, furious. “You think you can just show up here like some white knight and save the day?”
“Considering that I’m the one who cut the check for the lawyer,” Henry says, “I have a right to make sure he’s doing his job.”
That, of course, makes me think of Oliver. And the things we did that were not job-related.
“Look,” Henry says, the bluster falling from him like snow from a tree limb. “I didn’t come here to make things more difficult for you, Emma. I came to help.”
“You don’t just get to be their father, now, because your conscience reared its ugly head. You’re either a father twenty-four/seven or not at all.”
“Why don’t we ask the kids if they want me to stick around or leave?”
“Oh, right. That’s like dangling a brand-new video game in front of them. You’re a novelty, Henry.”
He smiles a little. “Can’t remember the last time I’ve been accused of that.”
There is a commotion as Theo clatters down the stairs. “Wow, you are here,” he says. “Weird.”
“It’s because of you,” Henry replies. “After you came all the way to see me, I realized I couldn’t sit at home and pretend this wasn’t happening.”
Theo snorts a laugh. “Why not? I do it all the time.”
“I’m not listening to this,” I say, moving around the kitchen. “We have to be in court by nine-thirty.”
“I’ll come,” Henry said. “For moral support.”
“Thank you so much,” I say drily. “I don’t know how I’d get through the day if you weren’t here. Oh, wait. I’ve gotten through five thousand days without you here.”
Theo skirts between us and opens the refrigerator. He pulls out a carton of grapefruit juice and drinks directly from it. “Gosh. What a happy little family unit we are.” He glances overhead as the water in the pipes stops running. “I call the shower next,” he says, and he heads back upstairs.
I sink down into a chair. “So how does this work? You sit in the courtroom and act concerned while your real family is waiting just outside the escape hatch?”
“That’s not fair, Emma.”
“Nothing’s fair.”
“I’m here for as long as I need to be. Meg understands that I’ve got a responsibility to Jacob.”
“Right. A responsibility. But somehow she’s neglected to invite him to sunny California to meet his stepsisters-”
“Jacob won’t get on a plane, and you know it.”
“So your plan is to just come step into his life and then step out of it again after the trial?”
“I don’t have a plan-”
“What about afterward?”
“That’s why I came.” He takes a step closer. “If… if the worst happens, and Jacob doesn’t come home… well, I know you’ll be there for him to lean on,” Henry says. “But I thought you might need someone to lean on, too.”
There are a hundred comebacks running through my head-most of which ask why I would trust him now when he has a track record of abandoning me. But instead, I shake my head. “Jacob’s coming home,” I say.
“Emma, you have to-”
I hold up the flat of my hand, as if I can stop his words midstream. “Help yourself to breakfast. I need to get dressed.”
I leave him sitting in the kitchen, and I go upstairs to my bedroom. Through the wall I can hear Theo singing in the shower. I sit down on the bed, clasp my hands between my knees.
When the boys were little, we had house rules. I’d write them on the bathroom mirror when they were in the tub so that the next time the room steamed up, they would magically appear: commandments for a toddler and his painfully literal autistic brother, laws that were not to be broken.
1. Clean up your own messes.
2. Tell the truth.
3. Brush your teeth twice a day.
4. Don’t be late for school.
5. Take care of your brother; he’s the only one you’ve got.
One night Jacob had asked me if I had to follow the rules, too, and I said yes. But, he pointed out, you don’t have a brother.
Then I will take care of you, I said.
However, I didn’t.
Oliver will stand up in court today, and maybe the next day and the next, and try to accomplish what I have unsuccessfully tried to do for eighteen years now: make strangers understand what it is like to be my son. Make them feel sympathy for a child who cannot feel it himself.
When Theo’s done in the bathroom, I go in. The air is still thick with heat and steam; the mirror’s fogged. I can’t see the tears on my face, but it’s for the best. Because I may know my son, and I may believe viscerally that he is not a murderer. But the odds of a jury seeing this as clearly as I do are minimal. Because no matter what I tell Henry-or myself, for that matter-I know that Jacob isn’t coming home.
Theo is still getting dressed when I knock on his door. “What the fuck, dude?” he says, holding up a towel to his body. I close my eyes until he tells me it’s okay to look, and then I walk into his room.
“I need help with my tie,” I say.
I am very proud of the fact that I got dressed today without any issues. I was a little freaked out by the buttons on the shirt, which felt like hot coals on my chest, but I put on a T-shirt underneath, and now it isn’t quite as painful.
Theo stands in front of me in his jeans and a sweatshirt. I wish I could wear that to the courthouse. He straightens my collar and starts to loop the ends of the tie around and around so that it will be a tie, instead of the knot I’ve managed to make twice. The tie is like a long, skinny knit scarf; I like it a lot more than the striped thing Oliver made me wear yesterday.
“There you go,” Theo says. Then he hunches his shoulders. “So what do you think about Dad?”
“I don’t think about Dad,” I say.
“I mean about him being here.”
“Oh,” I say. “I guess it’s good.”
(In reality, I don’t think it’s either good or bad. It’s not as if it’s going to make much difference, after all, but it seems like normal people would have a more positive reaction to seeing a close family member, and he did travel 3,000 miles on a plane, so I have to give him credit for that.)
“I thought Mom was going to blow her stack.”
I don’t know what he means by that, but I nod and smile at him. You’d be surprised at how far that response can get you in a conversation where you are completely confused.
“Do you remember him?” Theo asks.
“He called on my birthday, and that was only three and a half months ago-”
“No,” Theo interrupts. “I mean, do you remember him from back then? When he lived with us?”
I do, actually. I remember being in bed between him and my mother, and holding my hand up to his cheek while he slept. It was scratchy with incoming beard, and the texture used to intrigue me, plus I liked the sound it made when he scraped it. I remember his briefcase. He had floppy disks inside in different colors that I liked to sort by spectrum, and paper clips in a small container that I would line up on the floor of his office while he worked. Sometimes, though, when he was doing programming and got stuck or excited, he yelled, and that usually made me yell, and he would call for my mother to take me so that he could get some work done.
“He took me apple picking once,” I say. “He let me ride on his shoulders and showed me how the apple pickers get the apples out of their baskets without bruising them.”
For a while, I kept a list of apple facts as I learned them, because what I remembered about my father was that he at least had a passing interest in pomology, enough of one to take me out to an orchard for the day. I know, for example, that:
1. The world’s top apple producers are China, the United States, Turkey, Poland, and Italy.
2. It takes about thirty-six apples to create a gallon of cider.
3. Red Delicious is the most widely grown variety in the United States.
4. It takes the energy of fifty leaves to produce a single apple.
5. The largest apple ever picked weighed three pounds.
6. Apples float because a quarter of their volume is air.
7. Apple trees are related to roses.
8. Archaeologists have found evidence of apples being eaten as early as 6500 B.C.
“That’s cool,” Theo says. “I don’t remember anything about him at all.”
I know why; it is because Theo was only a few months old when my father left. I don’t remember that day, but I do remember a lot leading up to it. My mother and father often fought right in front of me. I was there, but I wasn’t there-those were the days when I would find myself completely entranced by the static on the television screen or the lever of the toaster. My parents assumed that I was not paying attention, but that isn’t the way it works. I could hear and see and smell and feel everything at once back then, which is why I had to focus so hard to pay attention to only one of the stimuli. I’ve always sort of pictured it like a movie: imagine a camera that can record the entire world at once-every sight, every sound. That’s very impressive, but it isn’t particularly useful if you want to specifically hear a conversation between two people, or see a ball coming toward you while you’re standing at bat. And yet, I couldn’t change the brain I’d been born with, so instead I learned how to narrow the world with makeshift blinders, until all I noticed was what I wanted to notice. That’s autism, for those who’ve never been there themselves.
Anyway, this is also why, even though my parents might have assumed my attention was otherwise occupied, I can remember the fights they had verbatim:
Do you remember me, Emma? I live here, too…
For God’s sake, Henry. Are you really jealous of the time I spend with your own son?
And
I don’t care how we’re going to pay for it. I’m not going to pass up a treatment for Jacob just because-
Because what? Say it… You don’t think I make enough money.
Your words, not mine.
And
I want to come home from my fucking job to my fucking house and not have ten fucking strangers on my living room floor. Is that so much to ask?
Those strangers are the ones who are going to bring Jacob back to us-
Wake up, Emma. He is what he is. There’s not some miracle locked inside him waiting to come out.
And
You’ve worked late every night this week.
Well, what have I got to come home to?
And
What do you mean, you’re pregnant? We said no more. We already have too much on our plate-
I didn’t exactly get pregnant by myself, you know.
You’d know. You’re the one who takes the pills.
You think I tricked you? Jesus, Henry, I’m glad to know you think so highly of me. Just get out. Get out of here.
And one day he did.
Suddenly, my father knocks on Theo’s door and pokes his head into the room. “Boys,” he says. “How, um, how are you doing?”
Neither of us says a word.
“Jacob,” he asks. “Can we talk?”
We sit down in my room, with me on the bed and my father on my desk chair. “Are you… okay with me being here?”
I look around. He isn’t messing anything up on my desk, so I nod.
This makes him feel better, I think, because his shoulders relax. “I owe you an apology,” he says. “I don’t really know how to put this into words.”
“That happens to me,” I tell him.
He smiles a little and shakes his head. Theo looks so much like him. I’ve heard this all my life from my mother, but now I can also see that there’s a lot of my father that reminds me of me. Like the way he ducks his head before he starts a sentence. And how he drums his fingers on his thighs.
“I wanted to apologize to you, Jacob,” he says. “There are some people- like your mother-who just won’t give up. I’m not one of those people. I’m not saying it’s an excuse, only a fact. I knew enough about myself, even back then, to understand that this wasn’t a situation I could handle.”
“By this,” I say, “you mean me.”
He hesitates, and then he nods. “I don’t know as much about Asperger’s as your mother does,” he says. “But I think maybe we’ve all got something in us that keeps us from connecting to people, even when we want to.”
I like the concept: that Asperger’s is like a flavoring added to a person, and although my concentration is higher than those of others, if tested, everyone else would have traces of this condition, too.
I make myself look my father in the eye. “Did you know apples can rust?” I say.
“No,” he says, his voice softer. “No, I did not.”
In addition to the list of apple facts, I have kept another list for my father, of questions I might ask if the chance arose:
1. If it hadn’t been for me, would you have stayed?
2. Were you ever sorry you left?
3. Do you think one day we could be friends?
4. If I promised to try harder, would you consider coming back?
It is worthwhile to note that while we were sitting in my room we discussed apples, the medical examiner’s testimony of yesterday, and the article in Wired magazine about whether Asperger’s was on the rise in Silicon Valley due to the preponderance of math-and-science genes in the geographical area. Yet I did not ask him a single one of these questions, which are still on a list in the back of my bottommost left desk drawer.
We all ride to the courthouse together in my father’s rental car. It is silver and smells like pine trees. I am sitting in my usual seat in the back behind my father, who is driving. My mother sits next to him, and Theo’s beside me. As we drive I look at the spaces between the power lines on the telephone poles, which narrow at the ends and then widen in the middle, like giant canoes.
We are five minutes from the courthouse when my mother’s cell phone rings. She nearly drops it before she manages to answer the call. “I’m fine,” she says, but her face gets red. “We’ll meet you in the parking lot.”
I suppose I should be nervous, but I’m actually excited. Today is the day that Oliver gets to tell everyone the truth about what I did.
“Now, Jacob,” my mother says. “You remember the rules?”
“Let Oliver do the talking,” I mutter. “Pass him a note if I need a break. I’m not a moron, Mom.”
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Theo says.
She twists around in her seat. Her pupils are large and dark, and a pulse beats in the hollow of her throat. “It’s going to be harder for you today,” she says quietly. “You’re going to hear things said about you that might not make sense. Things that maybe you even think aren’t true. But just remember, Oliver knows what he’s doing.”
“Is Jacob testifying?” my father asks.
My mother turns to him. “What do you think?”
“I was just asking, for God’s sake.”
“Well, you can’t come in at the third act and expect me to tell you what you’ve missed,” she snaps, and silence fills the car like sarin gas. I start to whisper the Fibonacci sequence under my breath, to make myself feel better, and Theo must feel the same way, because he says, “So… are we there yet?” and then laughs hysterically, as if he’s told a really funny joke.
As we drive in, Oliver is leaning against his truck. It is an old pickup that, he says, is more suited to a farrier than an attorney, but it still gets him from point A to point B. We are parked in the back of the courthouse, away from the cameras and the television news vans. He glances up as we drive by, but this isn’t my mother’s car, so he doesn’t realize it’s us. It isn’t until we park and step out of the rental car that Oliver sees my mother and comes forward with a big smile on his face.
And then he notices my dad.
“Oliver,” my mother says, “this is my ex-husband, Henry.”
“Are you kidding?” Oliver looks at my mother.
My father sticks out his hand to shake Oliver’s. “Nice to meet you.”
“Um. Right. Pleasure.” Then he turns to me. “Oh, for the love of God… Emma, I can’t let him go into the courtroom like this.”
I look down. I’m wearing brown corduroy pants and a brown shirt, with a brown tweed blazer and the stretchy brown tie that Theo tied for me.
“It’s Thursday, and he’s dressed in a jacket and tie,” my mother says tightly. “You might imagine that this morning I had a lot on my plate.”
Oliver turns to my father. “What does he look like to you?”
“A UPS driver?” my father says.
“I was thinking Nazi.” Oliver shakes his head. “We don’t have time for you to go home and change, and you’re too big to fit into my-” Suddenly he breaks off and sizes up my father with one glance. “Go trade shirts with him in the bathroom.”
“But it’s white,” I say.
“Exactly. The look we’re going for is not modern-day serial killer, Jake.”
My father glances at my mother. “See,” he says. “Aren’t you glad I came?”
The first day I met Jess for social skills training I happened to be fearing for my very life. I had been in Mrs. Wicklow’s English class that year. It wasn’t a particularly interesting class, and Mrs. Wicklow had the bad fortune to have a face that looked a little like a sweet potato-long and narrow, with a few sprouting hairs at the chin and an orange spray-on tan. But she always let me read aloud when we were doing plays, even if I sometimes had trouble remembering my place, and the time I forgot my notebook on the day of the open-book exam she let me take it the next day. One day, when she was out with the flu, a boy in the class named Sawyer Trigg (who had been suspended once for bringing NyQuil to school to sell in the cafeteria) ignored the substitute teacher and plucked bits of the spider plant off, then stuck it to his chin with gum. He jammed wadded-up paper under his shirt and started prancing through the aisles between our desks. “I’m Mrs. Witchlow,” he said, and everyone laughed.
I laughed, too, but only to fit in. Because you’re supposed to respect teachers, even if they’re not there. So when Mrs. Wicklow came back, I told her what Sawyer had been doing, and she sent him to the principal. Later that day, he slammed me up against my locker and said, “I could fucking kill you, Hunt.”
Well, I spent the rest of the day in an utter panic, because he could kill me, I had no doubt of that. And when Jess arrived at the school to meet me for the first time, I had a butter knife in my pocket stolen from the cafeteria-the best I could do on short notice-just in case Sawyer Trigg was lurking in the shadows of the hallways.
She told me that what I said to her was private, and that she wouldn’t tell my mother about anything I wanted to keep a secret between us. I liked that-it sounded like having a best friend, at least the way it is always portrayed on television-but I was too distracted to comment. “Um, Jacob?” Jess said, when she caught me looking over my shoulder for the eighth time. “Is everything okay?”
That was when I told her everything about Mrs. Wicklow and Sawyer Trigg.
She shook her head. “He’s not going to kill you.”
“But he said-”
“That’s his way of letting you know he’s mad at you for tattling on him.”
“You’re not supposed to make fun of teachers-”
“You’re not supposed to tell on your peers, either,” Jess said. “Especially if you want them to like you. I mean, Mrs. Wicklow has to be nice to you; it’s part of her contract. But you have to earn the trust of your classmates. And you just lost that.” She leaned forward. “There are all kinds of rules, Jacob. Some of them are explicit, like not making fun of teachers. But others are like secrets. They’re the ones you’re supposed to know, even if they never get said.”
That was exactly what I never seemed to understand: those unwritten rules that other people seemed to pick up as if they had a social radar device that was missing in my own brain.
“Did you laugh when Sawyer made fun of Mrs. Wicklow?”
“Yes.”
“He thought you were on his side, that you were enjoying the performance. So imagine how he felt when you tattled on him.”
I stared at Jess. I wasn’t Sawyer, and I had been adhering to a rule; whereas he was deliberately breaking one. “I can’t,” I said.
A few minutes later, my mother came to pick me up. “Hello,” she said, smiling at Jess. “How did it go?”
Jess looked at me, making sure she caught my eye. Then she turned to my mother. “Jacob got another boy in trouble today. Oh, and he stole a knife from the school cafeteria.”
I felt my heart go to stone in my chest, and my mouth was dry as cotton. I thought this girl was going to be my friend, was going to keep my secrets. And the first thing she did was turn around and tell my mother everything that had happened today?
I was furious; I never wanted to see her again. And I felt soft and spongy in my stomach, too, as if I had just gotten off an amusement park ride, because I knew my mother was going to want to follow up on this conversation on the drive home.
Jess touched my arm to get my attention. “That,” she said, “is how Sawyer felt. And I will never do that to you again. Will you?”
The next day I went to school, and I waited near Sawyer’s locker. “What are you doing here, prick?” he asked.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, and I really, truly meant it.
Maybe it was my face, or the tone of my voice, or just the fact that I sought him out-but he stood there for a second with his locker open and then he shrugged. “Whatever,” Sawyer said.
I decided that was his way of saying thanks. “Are you still thinking of killing me?”
He shook his head and laughed. “I don’t think so.”
I’m telling you, Jess Ogilvy was the best teacher I’ve ever had. And she would have understood, better than anyone, why I had to do what I did.
What happened last night was the single most remarkable experience of my sexual history, unless you count the time I was a sophomore in college and got a letter published in Penthouse-the difference being, of course, that that was fictional, whereas last night really happened.
I’ve been thinking about it. (Okay, I’ve been thinking of nothing but it.) Once Emma and I had both admitted our biggest fears to each other, we were on equal footing. Vulnerability trumps age. When you’re emotionally bare, the leap to being physically bare isn’t all that far.
I woke up this morning with her hair loose over my arm and her body warm against mine and I decided that I didn’t care if she had slept with me out of desperation or frustration or even distraction-I wasn’t going to let her go. I had charted every inch of her last night; I wanted to return to that territory until I knew it better than anyone ever had or ever would.
Which meant I had to get her son acquitted, because otherwise, she’d never want to see me again.
To that end, I came to court this morning intending to give Jacob the best defense in the history of the State of Vermont. I was single-minded and focused and determined, until I saw her emerge from another man’s car.
Her ex’s.
He has a right to be here, I suppose-he’s Jacob’s father-but Emma had led me to believe that he wasn’t really in the picture.
I don’t like the way Henry held on to her when we were walking up the steps of the courthouse. I don’t like the fact that he’s bigger than I am. I don’t like the fact that the one time I touched Emma’s arm, as we were about to come into the courtroom, Theo saw me do it and his brows shot up to his hairline, so I had to immediately pretend it was an accidental brush of the hand.
I really don’t like the fact that I’m preoccupied with Emma when I ought to be focused solely on her son.
As the jury files in, I take my seat beside Jacob. He looks like he’s had sixty cups of coffee. He’s bouncing, even though he’s seated next to me at the defense table. Emma is on his right side, and I swear, I can feel the heat of her skin even with her son between us. “I don’t like this,” Jacob mutters.
You and me both, kid. I think. “What don’t you like?”
“Her hair.”
“Whose hair?”
“Hers,” Jacob says, and he points to Helen Sharp without glancing at her.
Today the prosecutor is wearing her hair loose around her face. It’s auburn and brushes her shoulders. It actually makes her look almost compassionate, although I know better. “Well,” I say. “It could be worse.”
“How?”
“It could be longer.”
This makes me think of Emma last night, with her hair free and falling down her back. I’d never seen it like that, because of Jacob.
“It’s a bad omen,” Jacob says, and his fingers flutter on his thigh.
“There seems to be a lot of that going around,” I say, and I turn to Emma. “What’s Henry doing here?”
She shakes her head. “He showed up this morning when I was out for my run,” she stresses, and doesn’t meet my eye. Conversation closed.
“Make sure you tell the truth,” Jacob states, and Emma and I both jerk our heads toward him. Is Jacob more intuitive than either of us gave him credit for?
“All rise,” the bailiff says, and the judge strides in from his chambers.
“If the defense wishes to deliver an opening statement,” Judge Cuttings says, “you may begin.”
I would have preferred to give my opening statement back when Helen had given hers, so that the whole time the jury was watching Jacob’s reactions during the prosecution’s turn, they could have been thinking his inappropriate affect was because he has Asperger’s-not because he is a sociopathic killer. But the judge didn’t give me that opportunity, and so now, I just have to leave an impression that’s twice as deep.
“The truth,” Jacob whispers again. “You’ll tell them what happened, right?”
He is talking about the jury, I realize; he is talking about Jess’s murder. And there is so much riding on that one question that suddenly I have no idea how to answer Jacob without it becoming a lie. I hesitate, and then take a deep breath. “Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya,” I murmur to Jacob. “You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
I know he’s grinning as I stand up and face the jury. “During a trial, lawyers ask the jury to see in shades of gray. You’re supposed to look at both sides of an issue. To not prejudge anything. To wait until you’ve heard all the evidence to make a decision. The judge has instructed you to do this, and will instruct you to do this again at the end of the trial.”
I walk toward them. “But Jacob Hunt doesn’t know how to do that. He can’t see shades of gray. To him, the world is black or white. For example, if you ask Jacob to pitch a tent, he will toss it at you. Part of Jacob’s diagnosis with Asperger’s syndrome means that he won’t understand the concept of a metaphor. To him, the world is a literal place.” I glance over my shoulder at Jacob, who’s staring down at the table. “You might have also noticed that yesterday, during this trial, Jacob didn’t look the witnesses in the eye. Or that he didn’t show much emotion when the prosecution enumerated the horrors of a murder scene. Or that he might not be able to sit through testimony for long periods of time and needs a break in that room in the back. In fact, there may be many moments during this trial where it seems to you that Jacob is acting rudely, or immaturely, or even in a manner that makes him appear guilty. But ladies and gentlemen, Jacob cannot help it. Those behaviors are all hallmarks of Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder on the autism spectrum with which Jacob’s been diagnosed. People with Asperger’s might have a normal or even exceptional IQ but will also show severe deficiencies in social and communication skills. They might be obsessed by routine or rules, or be fixated on a certain subject. They can’t read expressions very well, or body language. They are overly sensitive to lights, textures, smells, and sounds.
“You are going to hear from Jacob’s doctors and his mother about his limitations, and how they’ve tried hard to help Jacob overcome them. Part of what you’re going to hear is Jacob’s very concrete sense of what’s right and what’s wrong. In his world, rules are not just important, they’re infallible. And yet, he has no understanding of the underlying bases of those rules. He can’t tell you how his behavior might affect another person, because it is impossible for Jacob to put himself in someone else’s metaphorical shoes. He might be able to recite to you every line from CrimeBusters episode forty-four, but he can’t tell you why the mother is upset in scene seven of the show, or how the loss of a child impacted the parents in that show. If you ask Jacob, he can’t explain it. Not because he doesn’t want to, and not because he’s a sociopath, but because his brain simply doesn’t function that way.”
I walk behind the defense table and put my hand lightly on Jacob’s shoulder. Immediately he flinches, just like I figured, beneath the jury’s watchful eye. “If you spend some time with Jacob,” I say, “you’ll probably think there’s something… different about him. Something you can’t quite put your finger on. He may seem odd, or quirky… but you probably also won’t think of him as insane. After all, he can hold a legitimate conversation with you; he knows more about certain subjects than I’ll ever know; he isn’t running around listening to voices in his head or setting small animals on fire. But the definition of legal insanity, ladies and gentlemen, is very different than what we typically think of when we think of the word insanity. It says that, at the moment an act was committed, the defendant-as a result of a severe mental disease or defect-was unable to appreciate the wrongfulness of his acts. What that means is that a person with a neurological disorder like Asperger’s who commits a crime-a person like Jacob-can’t be held responsible in the same way you or I should be held responsible. And what you will hear from the witnesses for the defense is proof that having Asperger’s syndrome makes it impossible for Jacob to understand how his actions might cause harm to someone else. You will hear how having Asperger’s syndrome might lead a person like Jacob to have an idiosyncratic interest that becomes overwhelming and obsessive. And you will see, ladies and gentlemen, that having Asperger’s syndrome impaired Jacob’s ability to understand that what he did to Jess Ogilvy was wrong.”
Behind me, I hear whispering. From the corner of my eye, I see a dozen notes, stacked on my side of the defense table. Jacob is rocking back and forth, his mouth tight. After a minute he starts to write notes to Emma as well.
“No one is suggesting that Jess Ogilvy’s death is anything less than a tragedy, and our sympathies must lie with her family. But don’t compound that tragedy by creating a second victim.”
I nod, and sit back down at the table. The notes are brief and angry:
NO.
YOU HAVE TO TELL THEM.
WHAT I DID WAS RIGHT.
I lean toward my client. “Just trust me,” I say.
Yesterday, I was sitting alone in the back of the courtroom squished between a woman who was knitting a newborn baby cap and a man in a tweed jacket who kept texting on his phone during the testimony. No one knew who I was, and I liked it that way. After Jacob’s first sensory break, when I went to the little curtained room and the bailiff let me slip inside, my secret identity was not so much of a secret anymore. The knitting woman, I noticed, moved to a spot on the other side of the courtroom, as if I had some dread contagious disease instead of just a last name shared with the defendant. The man in the tweed coat, though, stopped texting. He kept asking me questions: Had Jacob ever been violent before? Did he have the hots for Jess Ogilvy? Did she turn him down? It didn’t take long for me to figure out he was some kind of reporter, and after that, I just stood in the back near one of the bailiffs.
Today, I’m sitting next to my father, a guy I don’t know at all.
When Oliver starts talking, my father leans toward me. “What do you know about this guy?”
“He likes long walks on the beach, and he’s a Scorpio,” I say.
Here’s what I really know. Oliver was rubbing my mom’s arm today. Not in the oh-you’re-about-to-fall-are-you-okay way, but in a sweet-child-o’-mine mode. What the fuck is that all about? He’s supposed to be saving my brother’s ass, not hitting on my mother.
I know I should be relieved that my father is here, but actually, I’m not. I’m sitting here wondering why we are spectators at a murder trial, instead of on the first base line at Fenway, watching the Sox play. I’m wondering how I learned to tie a tie, like I did for Jacob today, considering that my own father wasn’t the one to teach it to me. I’m wondering why sharing the same DNA with a person doesn’t make you automatically feel like you have something in common.
As soon as Oliver finishes his statement, I turn to my father. “I don’t know how to fish,” I say. “I mean, I wouldn’t know how to stick a worm on a hook, or how to use a pole, or anything like that.”
He just stares at me, frowning a little.
“It would have been cool if we’d fished,” I say. “You know. Like in that pond behind the school.”
This, of course, is just plain stupid. I was six months old when my father left us. I could barely hold myself upright, much less a fishing pole.
My father ducks his head. “I get seasick,” he says. “Even just standing on a dock. Always have.”
After that, we don’t really talk at all.
I went to Dr. Moon once. My mother thought it would be a good idea for me to talk to a shrink about feelings I might be having, given the fact that my brother sucked up all the time and energy in our household like some giant karmic Hoover. I can’t say I remember much about her, except that she smelled like incense and told me I could take off my shoes, because she herself could think better without shoes, and maybe I would, too.
On the other hand, I do still remember what we talked about. She said that, sometimes, it would be hard for me to be the younger brother, because I had to do all the stuff the older brother usually did. She told me that this might frustrate Jacob and make him mad, and that would make him act even more immature. In this she was the psychological equivalent of a weather forecast: she could tell me with precise probability what was coming, but she was completely unequipped to help me prepare for the storm.
She looks different on the witness stand than she does when she is at her office. For example, she is wearing a business suit, and her crazy long hair is tamed into a bun. Oh, and she’s wearing shoes. “At first, Jacob was diagnosed with general autism spectrum disorder. Then we tweaked his diagnosis to pervasive developmental disorder. It wasn’t until sixth grade that we amended his diagnosis to Asperger’s syndrome, based on his inability to interpret social cues and to interact with peers in spite of his high IQ and verbal ability. For kids Jacob’s age, that progression of diagnoses is very common. It doesn’t mean he didn’t always have Asperger’s-he did-it just means that we didn’t necessarily have the correct language to label it.”
“Can you give a definition of Asperger’s syndrome for people who aren’t familiar with it, Doctor?” Oliver asks.
“It’s a developmental disorder that affects the way information is processed in the brain, and it’s considered to fall at the upper end of the autism spectrum. People with Asperger’s are often very intelligent and very competent-in this, they differ from profoundly autistic children, who can’t communicate at all-but they have crippling disabilities in the area of social interaction.”
“So someone with Asperger’s might be smart?”
“Someone with Asperger’s might even have a genius-level IQ. However, when it comes to making small talk, he’ll be completely inept. He has to be taught social interaction as if it’s a foreign language, the way you or I would need to be taught Farsi.”
“Lawyers sometimes have trouble finding friends,” Oliver says, raising some laughter on the jury. “Does that mean we all have Asperger’s?”
“No,” Dr. Moon responds. “A person with Asperger’s desperately wants to fit in but simply can’t understand social behavior that’s intuitive to the rest of us. He won’t be able to read gestures or facial expressions to assess the mood of the person he’s speaking to. He won’t be able to interpret a nonverbal cue, such as a yawn signifying boredom when he’s hogging the conversation. He won’t be able to understand what someone else is thinking or feeling; that kind of empathy is unnatural to him. He truly is the center of his own universe and will react based on that principle. For example, I had a patient who caught his sister shoplifting and ratted her out-not because he thought he was morally responsible to report his sister’s crime but because he didn’t want to be known as the boy whose sister had a criminal record. Whatever a child with Asperger’s does, he does because he’s thinking of how it will affect him, not anyone else.”
“Are there other hallmarks of the disorder?”
“Yes. Someone with Asperger’s might have difficulty organizing and prioritizing rules and tasks. He’ll tend to focus on details instead of the big picture and often will become obsessed for months or years at a time by one specific subject. And he can talk about that subject-even if it’s a sophisticated topic-for hours at a time. For this reason, the disorder is sometimes referred to as the Little Professor syndrome. Children with Asperger’s speak in such an adult manner they often get along better with their parents’ friends than with their own peers.”
“Does Jacob have that sort of obsessive focus on one subject?”
“Oh, yes. He’s had several over the years-dogs, and dinosaurs, and most recently, forensic science.”
“What else might we notice about a person with Asperger’s syndrome?”
“He’ll adhere slavishly to routine and rules. He’s painfully honest. He will dislike making eye contact. He might have hypersensitivity to light or noise or touch or taste. For example, right now, Jacob is probably working very hard to block out the sound of the fluorescent lights in this courtroom, which you and I can’t even hear. One moment a child with Asperger’s might present as an extremely bright, if awkward, child-and the next, when his routine is disrupted, he might have a meltdown that lasts between ten minutes and several hours.”
“Like a toddler’s tantrum?”
“Exactly. Except it’s a lot more debilitating when the child is eighteen and 180 pounds,” Dr. Moon says.
I can feel my father staring at me, so I turn to him. “Does that happen a lot?” he whispers. “The tantrums?”
“You get used to it,” I say, although I’m not sure this is true. In reality, you don’t ever change the hurricane. You just learn how to stay out of its path.
Oliver is walking toward the jury now. “Will Jacob ever be cured of Asperger’s?”
“At present,” the shrink says, “there’s no cure for autism. It’s not something you outgrow; it’s a condition you have forever.”
“Dr. Murano, which of the symptoms you’ve related here today has Jacob manifested over the years?”
“All of them,” she says.
“Even now, at age eighteen?”
“Jacob’s gotten much better at rolling with the punches if a routine is disrupted. Although it’s still upsetting, now he has coping mechanisms he can draw upon. Instead of having a screaming fit, like he did at age four, he’ll find a song or a movie and repeat the lyrics or lines over and over.”
“Doctor, this court has allowed Jacob to take sensory breaks when necessary. Can you explain what that is?”
“It’s a way for Jacob to get away from the overstimulation that’s upsetting him. When he feels like he’s spiraling out of control, he can remove himself and go to a place that’s quiet and less chaotic. In school, he has a room where he can pull himself together again, and in court, he has the same type of area. Inside are all sorts of materials that Jacob can use to calm himself down-from deep-pressure weighted blankets to a rope swing to fiber-optic lamps.”
“You said that kids with Asperger’s have an affinity for rules. Is that true of Jacob?”
“Yes. For example, Jacob knows that school starts at eight-twelve A.M. and because of that rule, he is on time every day. However, one week his mother told him that he would be late for school because he had a dentist appointment. He had a meltdown, put his fist through a wall in his bedroom, and could not be calmed down enough to be taken to the dentist. In Jacob’s mind, he was being asked to break a rule.”
“He punched in a wall? Do kids with Asperger’s have a propensity for violence?” Oliver asks.
“That’s a myth. In fact, a child with Asperger’s is more likely to not misbehave than neurotypical children are, simply because he knows that’s the rule. However, a child with Asperger’s also has a very low fight-or-flight threshold. If he feels cornered in any way-verbally, physically, or emotionally-he might either run or strike out blindly.”
“Have you ever seen Jacob do that?”
“Yes,” Dr. Moon says. “At school last year he was given detention for swearing at a teacher. Apparently a young woman tricked him into behaving inappropriately by saying she’d be his friend if he did it. Afterward, he retaliated by shoving her and was suspended.”
“What triggered the violent response in Jacob?”
“Being belittled, I imagine.”
“Did you talk to him about the episode?” Oliver asks.
“I did.”
“Did you explain why his violent response wasn’t appropriate?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think he understood that what he did was wrong?”
She hesitates. “Jacob’s sense of right and wrong isn’t based on an internalized moral code. It’s based on what he has been told to do, or not to do. If you asked him whether it’s right to hit someone, he would tell you no. However, he would also tell you that it’s wrong to make fun of someone-and in his mind, the young woman broke that rule first. When Jacob hit her, he was not thinking of how he might hurt her, or even of how his actions would be going against a rule of behavior. He was thinking of how she’d hurt him, and he simply… reacted.”
Oliver approaches the witness stand. “Dr. Murano, if I told you that Jacob had argued with Jess Ogilvy two days before she died, and that she’d told him to get lost, how would you think that had affected his behavior?”
She shakes her head. “Jess was very important to Jacob, and if they had a fight, he would have been extremely upset. In going to her house that day, he was clearly manifesting that he didn’t know how to behave. He stuck to his routine rather than let the argument run its course. Most likely, Jacob’s mind processed the fight like this: Jess told me to get lost. I can’t possibly get lost because I always know where I am. Therefore she didn’t really mean what she said, so I will just go on as if she never said it. Jacob would not have understood from Jess’s language that she might truly not have wanted to see him. It’s this inability to put himself in Jess’s frame of mind that separates Jacob from his peers. Whereas another child may just be socially awkward, Jacob is dissociated entirely from empathy, and his actions and perceptions revolve around his own needs. He never stopped to imagine what Jess was feeling; all he knew was how much she was hurting him by arguing with him.”
“Does Jacob know that it’s against the law to commit murder?”
“Absolutely. With his fixation on forensic criminology, he probably could recite the legal statutes as well as you could, Mr. Bond. But for Jacob, self-preservation is the one inviolable rule, the one that trumps everything else. So just like he lost his temper with the girl at school who’d humiliated him-and truly didn’t understand why that was problematic, given what she’d done to him first-well, I can only imagine that’s what happened with Jess, too.”
Suddenly Jacob stands up. “I didn’t lose my temper!” he shouts, as my mother grabs his arm to make him sit down again.
Of course, the fact that he’s losing his temper at this very second sort of negates what he’s saying.
“Control your client, Mr. Bond,” the judge warns.
When Oliver turns around, he looks the way soldiers do in movies when they crest a hill and see a swarm of enemy forces below them-and realize that, no matter what, they don’t have a prayer. “Jacob,” he sighs. “Sit down.”
“I need a break,” Jacob yells.
Oliver looks at the judge. “Your Honor?” And then suddenly, the jury is being led out and Jacob is practically running to the sensory break room.
My father looks completely lost. “What happens now?”
“We wait fifteen minutes.”
“Should I… Are you going to go back there with them?”
I have, every time so far. I’ve hung out in a corner, playing with some Koosh balls, while Jacob gets his act together. But now, I glance up at my father. “Do what you want,” I say. “I’m staying here.”
In my first memory, I’m really sick and I can’t stop crying. Jacob is around six or seven, and he keeps asking my mother-who has been up with me all night-to get breakfast ready. It is early; the sun hasn’t even come up yet.
I’m hungry, Jacob says.
I know, but I have to take care of Theo right now.
What’s the matter with Theo?
His throat hurts, very bad.
There’s a moment where Jacob takes this information in. I bet if he had ice cream his throat would feel better.
Jacob, my mother says, stunned. You’re thinking about how Theo feels?
I don’t want his throat to hurt, Jacob says.
Ice cream! Ice cream! I yell. It’s not even really ice cream I’m screaming for-it’s soy-based, like everything else in the freezer and fridge. But it’s still something that’s supposed to be a treat, not a breakfast food.
My mother gives in. Okay. Ice cream, she says. She puts me in my booster seat and gives me a bowl. She gives Jacob a bowl, too, and pats his head. I’m going to have to tell Dr. Moon that you were looking out for your brother, she says.
Jacob eats his ice cream. Finally, he says. Peace and quiet.
My mother still holds that up as an example of Jacob transcending his Asperger’s to exhibit empathy for his poor, sick kid brother.
Here’s what I see, now that I’m older:
Jacob got a bowl of ice cream for breakfast and didn’t even have to be the one to beg for it.
Jacob got me to stop making a racket.
My brother wasn’t trying to help me that day. He was trying to help himself.
I am lying underneath the blanket that feels like a hundred hands pressing down on me, like I’m deep at the bottom of the sea and cannot see the sun or hear what’s happening on the shore.
I didn’t lose my temper.
I don’t know why Dr. Moon would think that.
I don’t know why my mother didn’t stand up and object. I don’t know why Oliver isn’t telling the truth.
I used to have nightmares where the sun was coming too close to the earth and I was the only one who knew it, because my skin could sense a change in temperature more accurately than anyone else’s. No matter what I did to try to warn people, nobody ever listened to me, and eventually trees started to burst into flame and my family was burned alive. I would wake up and see the sunrise, and I’d freak out all over again, because how could I really be sure that my nightmare had been a nightmare after all and not actually a premonition?
I think the same thing is happening now. After years of imagining I’m an alien in this world-with senses more acute than those of normal people, and with speech patterns that don’t make sense to normal people, and behaviors that look odd on this planet but that, on my home planet, must be perfectly acceptable-it has actually become true. Truth is a lie and lies are the truth. The members of the jury believe what they hear, not what’s right in front of their eyes. And no one is listening, no matter how loud I am screaming inside my own head.
The space beneath the blanket feels like it has a heartbeat. In the dark, I find Jacob’s hand and I squeeze it. “Honey,” I say, “we have to go.”
He turns to me. In the blackness I can see the reflection of his eyes. “I didn’t lose my temper with Jess,” he mutters.
“We can talk about that later…”
“I didn’t hurt her,” Jacob says.
I stop and stare at him. I want to believe him. God, I want to believe him. But then I imagine that quilt I sewed for him, wrapped around the body of a dead girl.
“I didn’t mean to hurt her,” Jacob corrects.
Nobody looks into the face of a newborn son and imagines all the things that will go wrong in his life. Instead, you see nothing but possibility: his first smile, his first steps, his graduation, his wedding dance, his face when he is holding his own baby. With Jacob, I was constantly revising the milestones: when he willingly looks me in the eye, when he can accept a change in plans without falling apart, when he wears a shirt without meticulously cutting out the tag in the back. You don’t love a child for what he does or doesn’t do; you love him for who he is.
And even if he is a murderer, by design or by accident, he is still mine.
“Not connecting with his peers,” Helen Sharp says. “Being the center of his own universe. Self-preservation is the one inviolable rule. Temper tantrums and anger management issues… Sounds to me, Dr. Murano, like Asperger’s is the new selfish.”
“No. It’s not an unwillingness to consider someone else’s feelings, it’s an inability to do it.”
“Yet this is a relatively new diagnosis, isn’t it?”
“It first appeared in the DSM-IV manual in 1994, but it wasn’t new by any means. There were plenty of people with Asperger’s prior to that who simply weren’t labeled.”
“Such as?”
“Steven Spielberg, the director. John Elder Robison, the author. Satoshi Tajiri, who created the Pokémon phenomenon. Peter Tork, of the band the Monkees. They were all diagnosed formally with Asperger’s as adults.”
“And they are all extremely successful, aren’t they?” Helen asks.
“It seems that way.”
“They’ve led very productive lives interacting with other people?”
“I assume so.”
“Do you think any of them have trouble relating to others socially?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you think any of them might have experienced a moment where they were picked on, or felt marginalized?”
“I don’t know, Ms. Sharp.”
“Really? Have you seen Peter Tork’s old haircut? I’ll go out on a limb and say yes, they have been teased. And yet none of these men with Asperger’s is on trial for murder, are they?”
“No. Like I said, there isn’t a causal link between Asperger’s and violence.”
“If Asperger’s doesn’t make someone violent, how can it be an excuse for someone like Jacob committing a horrific act of violence?”
“Objection!” Oliver says. “That’s prejudicial.”
“Sustained,” the judge replies.
The prosecutor shrugs. “Withdrawn. Dr. Murano, how did you formalize your diagnosis of Jacob’s Asperger’s?”
“I had an IQ test administered, and an assessment of adaptive skills, to see how Jacob would handle certain social situations. I did interviews with Emma Hunt and with his teachers, to get a sense of Jacob’s history of behavior. Asperger’s doesn’t show up overnight. I saw videotapes of him prior to age two, when he was still meeting developmental milestones for neurotypical children, and then the subsequent decline in behavior and interpersonal connections. And I observed him during a number of sessions, both in my office and at his school in social settings.”
“There’s no blood test, or any other scientific test, that can be administered to see if a child has Asperger’s, is there?”
“No. It’s based primarily on observation of repetitive behavior and interests, and a lack of social interaction that impairs everyday functioning, without a significant delay in language.”
“So… it’s a judgment call?”
“Yes,” Dr. Murano says. “An educated one.”
“If Jacob had seen another psychiatrist, isn’t it possible he or she might have determined that Jacob doesn’t have Asperger’s?”
“I highly doubt it. The diagnosis most often confused with Asperger’s is attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and when they put Aspie kids on ADHD medicine and they don’t respond, it’s often clear that the diagnosis needs to be revisited.”
“So the criteria you used to diagnose Jacob were his inability to communicate with other people, his trouble reading social cues, his desire for routine and structure, and his fixation on certain topics?”
“Yes, that’s about right,” the psychiatrist says.
“Say I have a seven-year-old who is completely obsessed with Power Rangers and who has to have his cookie and milk every night before bedtime, who isn’t very good about telling me what happens in school every day or sharing his toys with his younger brother. Does my seven-year-old have Asperger’s?”
“Not necessarily. Let’s say you have two three-year-olds in the sandbox. One says, ‘Look at my truck.’ The other responds, ‘I have a doll.’ That’s parallel play, and it’s normal at that age. But if you study those same two children at age eight, and one says, ‘Look at my truck,’ the appropriate response is something like ‘That’s a cool truck’ or ‘Can I touch it?’ or some other sentence that continues the interaction with the child who made the conversational overture. However, a kid with Asperger’s might still say, in response, ‘I have a doll.’ When the playmate walks away, the kid with Asperger’s won’t understand why. In his mind, he’s responded to the sentence and kept the conversation going. He doesn’t comprehend that what he said wasn’t a valid rejoinder.”
“Or,” Helen Sharp says, “the kid with the doll might just be really self-centered, right?”
“With Asperger’s that’s often the case.”
“But without Asperger’s, it’s occasionally the case, too. My point, Doctor, is that the diagnosis you make and the assumptions you have about Jacob are not based on anything other than your own opinion. You’re not looking at a tox screen or brain waves-”
“There are a variety of psychiatric disorders where clinical observation is the only method of diagnosis, Ms. Sharp. This happens to be one of them. And any psychiatrist in this country will tell you that Asperger’s syndrome is a valid disorder. It may be difficult to describe to someone else in concrete terms, but when you see it, you know what it is.”
“And just to be clear. You feel that having Asperger’s syndrome affected Jacob’s behavior the day Jess Ogilvy was murdered.”
“That’s right.”
“Because Jacob couldn’t handle social situations well. And he wasn’t empathetic. And his frustration sometimes led to anger management problems.”
“That’s right,” Dr. Murano says.
“Which are traits you find in someone with Asperger’s.”
“Yes.”
“What a coincidence,” the prosecutor says, folding her arms. “They’re also traits you find in cold-blooded killers.”
Once Jacob told me that he could hear plants dying. They scream, he said. I thought for certain this was ridiculous until I talked to Dr. Murano about it. Kids with Asperger’s, she said, have senses we can’t even imagine. We filter out sounds and sights that are constantly barraging their brains, which is why sometimes it seems like they’re off in their own little world. They’re not, she said. They’re in our world, but they’re more engaged in it than we’ll ever be.
I went home that day and I looked up plant death on the Internet. As it turned out, plants under stress emit ethylene gas, and scientists in Germany have created a device that measures the energy of those molecules as vibrations-or sound.
Now I wonder if it gets tiring, bearing witness to the last gasp of nature. If it’s not only plants my son hears but the gnash of an angry ocean. A shy sunrise. A breaking heart.
My high school guidance counselor, Mrs. Inverholl, once had me take an aptitude test to figure out my future. The number one job recommendation for my set of skills was an air traffic accident investigator, of which there are fewer than fifty in the world. The number two job was a museum curator for Chinese-American studies. The number three job was a circus clown.
I’m pretty sure lawyer wasn’t even on the list.
Sometime after I graduated from college I heard through the grapevine that this same guidance counselor had taken an early retirement and moved to a Utopian community in Idaho, where she renamed herself Blessing and now raises alpacas.
Frances Grenville doesn’t look like she’s in any danger of starting a llama farm anytime soon. She is wearing a blouse buttoned to the throat, and her hands are clasped so tightly in her lap that I imagine her nails are leaving marks on the skin. “Mrs. Grenville,” I say, “where are you employed?”
“At Townsend Regional High School.”
“And how long have you been a guidance counselor there?”
“This is my tenth year.”
“What are your responsibilities?” I ask.
“I help students with college search and selection. I write recommendations for students applying to college. And I work with students who face behavioral issues during their school career.”
“Do you know Jacob?”
“I do. Because he has an IEP, I’ve been intimately involved in the organization of his school day, to accommodate his special needs.”
“Can you explain what an IEP is?”
“An individualized education program,” she says. “It’s an educational plan mandated by federal law to improve educational results for children with disabilities. Each IEP is different, based on the child. For Jacob, for example, we created a list of rules to be adhered to in a school setting-because he functions well with strictures and routines.”
“Have you met with Jacob for reasons other than his learning needs?”
“Yes,” Mrs. Grenville says. “There have been instances where he’s gotten into trouble with teachers for acting out in class.”
“How so?”
“In one case, he kept telling his biology teacher that he was wrong when the teacher made certain factual statements in class.” She hesitates. “Mr. Hubbard was teaching the structure of DNA. He paired adenine with adenine instead of pairing it with thymine. When Jacob told him this was incorrect, Mr. Hubbard got angry. Jacob didn’t realize the teacher was angry and kept pointing out the inaccuracy. Mr. Hubbard sent him to the principal’s office for being disruptive in class.”
“Did he explain to you why he didn’t know his teacher was angry?”
“Yes. He said that Mr. Hubbard’s angry face looks a lot like other people’s when they’re happy.”
“Does it?”
Mrs. Grenville purses her lips. “I have noticed that Mr. Hubbard has a tendency to smirk when he gets frustrated.”
“Do you happen to know if it is incorrect to pair adenine with adenine?”
“As it turns out, Jacob was right.”
I glance back at the defense table. Jacob is smiling from ear to ear.
“Were there any other incidents when you had to help Jacob?”
“Last year, he got into trouble with a young woman. She was very upset over a poor grade and somehow communicated to Jacob that if he really wanted to be her friend, he’d tell the math teacher to go…” She looks down at her lap. “Fornicate with himself. Jacob was given detention for that, and later confronted the young woman and grabbed her by the throat.”
“Then what happened?”
“A teacher saw him and pulled him away from the girl. Jacob was suspended for two weeks. He would have been expelled if not for his IEP and the understanding that he was provoked.”
“What have you done to modify Jacob’s social behavior in school?”
“He attended social skills class, but then Emma Hunt and I discussed getting a private tutor for Jacob instead. We thought he might be able to better work on specific situations that tended to upset him, so that he could deal with them more constructively.”
“Did you find a tutor?”
“Yes. I contacted the university, and they put feelers out in their education department.” She looks at the jury. “Jess Ogilvy was the first student to respond to the request.”
“Had Jacob been meeting with her?”
“Yes, since last fall.”
“Mrs. Grenville, since Jacob began his tutoring with Jess Ogilvy, have there been any incidents of him losing his temper?”
She shakes her head. “Not one,” she says.
“Your witness,” I say to Helen.
The prosecutor stands up. “Mr. Hubbard-the biology teacher-he was angry and Jacob didn’t realize it?”
“No.”
“Would you say that’s a problem for Jacob? Knowing when someone’s angry at him?”
“From what I know about Asperger’s, yes.”
“The other incident you raised involved Jacob cursing out a teacher on a dare and then attacking the girl who dared him, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Had Jacob been told before to not use physical violence to solve problems?”
“Certainly,” the counselor says. “He knew that was a school rule.”
“But he broke that rule?” Helen asks.
“He did.”
“Even though, according to your own testimony, following rules is very important to Jacob?”
“Even though,” Mrs. Grenville says.
“Did he have any explanation for you as to why he broke that rule?”
Mrs. Grenville shakes her head slowly. “He said that he just snapped.”
Helen considers this. “You also said, Mrs. Grenville, that since starting his tutoring sessions, Jacob hasn’t lost his temper in school.”
“That’s correct.”
“Apparently he was saving that for after school,” Helen says. “Nothing further.”
Court adjourns early that day because Judge Cuttings has a doctor’s appointment. As the room empties, I gather up my files and stuff them into my briefcase. “So,” I say to Emma, “I’d like to come over and talk to you about your testimony.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see Theo and Henry making their way toward us.
“I thought we discussed this,” Emma says pointedly.
We did. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to go back to my office while I know Henry is under her roof.
“You can never be too ready,” I tell her. “We have two cars. No sense in all of you being crammed into one. Would anyone like to ride with me?”
I am staring straight at Emma. “That’s a good idea,” she says. “Jacob, why don’t you go?”
Which is how I wind up trailing Henry’s rental car with Jacob sitting beside me in the passenger seat of the truck-and only after a small fit, because he prefers to ride in the backseat and there isn’t one. He fiddles with the radio, which is AM stations only because my truck is old enough to have been built by Moses. “You know why you can pick up AM stations better at night?” Jacob says. “Because the ionosphere reflects radio signals better when the sun isn’t radiating the heck out of the upper atmosphere.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I couldn’t have gone to sleep tonight without knowing that.”
Jacob looks at me. “Really?”
“No, I’m kidding.”
He folds his arms. “Haven’t you been listening to yourself in court? I don’t ‘get’ sarcasm. I’m totally self-centered. Oh, and at any moment I might just go totally crazy.”
“You’re not crazy,” I tell him. “I’m just trying to get the jury to see you as legally insane.”
Jacob slumps in his seat. “I’m not a big fan of labels.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I first got my diagnosis, my mother was relieved, because she saw it as something that would be helpful. I mean, teachers don’t look at kids who are reading eight grade levels above where they should be and doing complex mathematical proofs in third grade and think they need special help, even if they are being teased all the time. The diagnosis helped me get an IEP, which was great, but it also changed things in a bad way.” Jacob shrugs. “I guess I expected it to be like this other girl in my grade who has a port-wine stain on half her face. People go right up to her and ask about it, and she says it’s a birthmark and that it doesn’t hurt. End of story. No one ever asks if they can catch it like a virus, or doesn’t want to play with her because of it. But you tell someone you’re autistic, and half the time they talk louder to you, like you might be deaf. And the few things that I used to get credit for-like being smart, or having a really excellent memory-were all of a sudden just things that made me even more weird.” He is quiet for a moment, and then he turns to me. “I’m not autistic; I have autism. I also have brown hair and flat feet. So I don’t understand why I’m always ‘the kid with Asperger’s,’” Jacob says.
I keep my eyes on the road. “Because it’s better than being the kid who killed Jess Ogilvy,” I reply, and after that, we don’t talk at all.
It figures; Henry’s showed up on a day when the food is not noticeably Aspergian. Emma’s made steak and baked potatoes and gravy and gluten-free brownies. If Henry notices the lack of a green vegetable-or anything on the plate that isn’t brown, for that matter-he doesn’t mention it.
“So, Henry,” I say. “You do programming?”
He nods. “Right now I’m parsing XML for a point-and-click web app for the iPhone that’ll spice up four hundred contemporary American ethnic dishes with Chinese herbs and sauces.” He launches into a fifteen-minute discussion of esoteric computer programming that none of us can follow.
“Guess the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” I say.
“Actually, I work for Adobe,” Henry says.
Theo and I are the only ones who find that funny. I wonder if Henry’s ever been diagnosed. “And you’re remarried, right?” I look at Emma when I say this.
“Yes. I’ve got two girls,” he says, and then hurries to add, “in addition to the two boys, of course.”
“Of course,” I answer, and I break a brownie in half. “So when are you leaving?”
“Oliver!” Emma says.
Henry laughs. “Well, I guess that depends on how long the trial goes on.” He leans back in his chair. “Emma, that was a great dinner.”
Just wait till Blue Friday, I muse.
“I’d better go find myself a hotel, since I’ve been up for about thirty-six straight hours and I’m bound to crash and burn soon,” Henry says.
“You’ll stay here,” Emma announces, and both Henry and I look at her, surprised. “Well, it’s silly to have you stay a half hour away when we’re all going to the same place tomorrow morning, isn’t it? Theo, your father can sleep in your room and you can have the couch.”
“What?” Theo yelps. “Why do I have to give up my room? What about Jacob?”
“Let me put it to you this way,” Emma answers. “Do you want to sleep on the couch or do you want to help me when Jacob has a meltdown?”
He shoves away from the table, angry. “Where are the extra freaking pillows?”
“I don’t want to put anyone out-” Henry says.
“Emma,” I interrupt, “can I have a few minutes?”
“Oh, right. You wanted to go over testimony?” She turns to Jacob. “Honey, can you clear the table and load the dishwasher?”
He stands up and starts clearing as I drag Emma upstairs. “We need to go somewhere quiet,” I say, and I lead her into her own bedroom.
I’ve never been in here. It’s peaceful-all cool greens and sea blues. There’s a Zen garden on the dresser with a rake and three black stones. In the sand, someone has written H-E-L-P.
“The only part I’m still nervous about is the cross-exam,” Emma says, all she can manage to get out before I grab her and kiss her. It’s not gentle, either. It’s the physical equivalent of pouring into her all the feelings I can’t put into words.
When she breaks away from me, her mouth is rosy and swollen, and that makes me take a step toward her again, but she puts her hand on my chest to hold me off. “Oh my God,” she says, with a slow smile. “You’re jealous.”
“Well, what the hell was that all about? ‘It’s silly to have you stay a half hour away…’”
“It is. He’s the boys’ father, not some stranger who just came in off the street.”
“So he’s going to be sleeping right on the other side of this wall?”
“Sleeping would be the operative word in that sentence,” Emma says. “He’s here for Jacob. Believe me, there’s no ulterior motive for Henry.”
“But you used to love him.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “Do you think I’ve been sitting here for fifteen years pining for him? Waiting for the moment he would walk through that door again so I could hide him in a bedroom upstairs and seduce him?”
“No,” I tell her. “But I wouldn’t put it past him.”
She stares at me for a moment, and then she bursts out laughing. “You haven’t seen his perfect little wife and his perfect little girls. Believe me, Oliver, I’m not the great love of his life, the one he’ll never forget.”
“You are to me,” I say.
The smile fades from her face, and then she rises up on her toes and kisses me back.
“Don’t you need this?”
At the sound of Jacob’s voice we jump apart, putting a few feet of space between us. He stands in the doorway, one hand still on the knob and the other one holding my legal briefcase.
“Were you just…” He stumbles over his words. “Are you two…” Without saying anything else, he throws my briefcase hard at me, so forcefully that I grunt when I catch it. He runs down the hallway into his room and slams the door.
“What did he see?” Emma asks frantically. “When did he walk in?”
Suddenly Henry is standing in the doorway, looking quizzically down the hall where Jacob’s gone and then at Emma. “Everything all right up here?”
Emma faces me. “I think maybe you ought to go home,” she says.
When I walk into Jacob’s room, he is hunched over his desk, humming Marley and writing furiously across his green blotter:
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233
I take the pencil out of his hand, and he turns in his swivel chair. “Do I make you horny, baby?” he says, bitter.
“No movie quotes,” I tell Jacob. “Especially not Austin Powers. I know you’re upset.”
“Let me think about that. My mother is supposed to be practicing her testimony with my lawyer and instead she has her tongue halfway down his throat? Yeah, that might make me a little upset.”
I tamp down the flash of anger that rises inside me. “First of all, I’m completely ready to testify. And second of all, I didn’t expect to kiss him. It just happened.”
“Things like that don’t just happen,” Jacob argues. “You want them to happen or you don’t.”
“Well, all right then, I suppose after fifteen years of being alone I don’t mind being attractive to someone.”
“Not someone,” he says. “My lawyer.”
“He’s completely focused on your trial, Jacob.”
“I don’t care about him. I mean, if he isn’t doing his job I can just fire him. But you,” he yells. “How could you do this to me right now? You’re my mother!”
I stand up, toe to toe with him. “One who’s given up her whole life to take care of you,” I say. “One who loves you so much she would trade places with you in a heartbeat. But that doesn’t mean I don’t deserve to be happy, too.”
“Well, I hope you’re really happy when I lose this trial because you were too busy being a slut.”
And just like that, I slap him.
I don’t know which one of us is more surprised. I have never struck Jacob in my life. He holds his palm to his cheek as the red print of my hand rises on his skin. “I’m sorry. Oh, God, Jacob, I’m sorry,” I say, the words somersaulting over each other. I pull his hand down so that I can see the damage I’ve done. “I’ll get you some ice,” I say, but he is staring at me as if he’s never seen me before.
So instead of leaving, I sit him down on the bed and I pull him against me the way I used to when he was little and the world became too much for him to bear. I rock, so that he doesn’t have to.
Slowly, he relaxes against me. “Jacob,” I tell him. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.” It is only after he nods that I realize I’ve repeated the very same words Jacob said earlier to me about Jess Ogilvy.
In all the years that Jacob has had tantrums and meltdowns and panic attacks, I have restrained him; sat on him; held him like a vise-but I have never hit him. I know the unwritten strictures: Good parents don’t spank. Reward works better than punishment. Yet it only took a single moment of frustration, of realizing that I couldn’t simultaneously be whom he needed me to be and whom I wanted to be-for me to snap.
Is that what happened to Jacob, too?
Oliver has called four times tonight, but I didn’t pick up the phone when I recognized the number on the caller ID. Maybe this is my penance; maybe I just don’t know what to say.
It is just after two in the morning when my bedroom door opens a crack. I sit up immediately, expecting Jacob. But instead Henry enters. He’s wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt that reads THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE 127.0.0.1. “I saw your light on,” he says.
“Can’t sleep?”
Henry shakes his head. “You?”
“No.”
He gestures to the edge of the bed. “May I?”
I shift over. He sits down on my side of the bed, but I see him staring at the pillow beside me. “I know,” I say. “It must seem a little weird.”
“No… It’s just that now, I sleep on the left side of the bed, like you. And I’m wondering how that happened.”
I lean back against the headboard. “There are lots of things I don’t have the answers for.”
“I… don’t know exactly what all the yelling was about,” Henry says delicately. “But I did hear it.”
“Yeah. We’ve had better nights.”
“I owe you an apology, Emma,” he says. “First of all, for showing up like this. I should have asked, at least. You’ve got enough on your plate without having to deal with me. I guess I was really only thinking of myself.”
“Luckily, I have a lot of practice with that.”
“That’s the other thing I have to apologize for,” Henry says. “I should have been here all the other nights there was yelling, or… or tantrums, or anything else that was part of raising Jacob. I probably learned more about him today in that courtroom than I’ve known in the eighteen years he’s been alive. I should have been here to help during all the bad times.”
I smile a little. “I guess that’s the difference between us. I wish you’d been here for the good times.” I look over his shoulder, into the hallway. “Jacob is sweet, and funny, and so smart he leaves me reeling sometimes. And I’m sorry you never got to know that part of him.”
He reaches across the quilt and squeezes my hand. “You’re a good mom, Emma,” he says, and I have to look away, because that makes me think of my argument with Jacob.
Then Henry speaks again. “Did he do it?”
I turn to him slowly. “Does it matter?”
I can only remember one concrete instance when I blew up at Jacob before. It was when he was twelve and had not acknowledged the fact that it was my birthday with a card or a gift or even a hug, although I had dropped enough hints in the weeks prior. So one evening when I made dinner, I slapped it on the table in front of him with more force than usual and waited in vain-like always-for Jacob to thank me. “How about a little gratitude?” I exploded. “How about some recognition that I’ve done something for you?”
Confused, Jacob glanced at his plate, and then at me.
“I make your dinner. I fold your laundry. I drive you to school and back. Did you ever wonder why I do that?”
“Because it’s your job?”
“No, it’s because I love you, and when you love someone, you do things for them without complaining about it.”
“But you are complaining,” he said.
That was when I realized Jacob would never understand love. He would have bought me a birthday gift if I’d told him explicitly to do so, but that wouldn’t really have been a gift from the heart. You can’t make someone love you; it has to come from inside him, and Jacob wasn’t wired that way.
I remember storming out of the kitchen and sitting on the porch for a while, under the light of the moon, which isn’t really light at all, just a pale reflection of the sun.
“Jacob,” I say, as soon as I see him the next morning, “we need to talk.”
I fall into step beside him as we move across the parking lot, putting enough space between us and his family to ensure privacy. “Did you know there’s not really a term for a man-whore?” Jacob asks. “I mean, there’s gigolo, but that suggests money was exchanged-”
“All right, look,” I sigh. “I’m sorry you walked in on us. But I’m not going to apologize for liking her.”
“I could fire you,” Jacob says.
“You could try. But it’s up to the judge, since we’re in the middle of the trial.”
“What if he found out about your misconduct with clients?”
“She’s not my client,” I say. “You are. And if anything, my feelings for your mother only make me more determined to win this case.”
He hesitates. “I’m not talking to you anymore,” Jacob mutters, and he increases his speed until he is nearly sprinting up the steps of the courthouse.
Ava Newcomb, the forensic shrink hired by the defense, is the linchpin of my case. If she cannot make the jury understand that some of the traits associated with Asperger’s might have caused Jacob to kill Jess Ogilvy without really understanding why that was wrong, then Jacob will be convicted.
“Dr. Newcomb, what’s the legal definition of insanity?”
She is tall, poised, and professional-right out of central casting. So far, I think, so good. “It states that, at the time an act was committed, the defendant was not able to know right from wrong due to a severe mental defect or illness.”
“Can you give us an example of a mental defect or illness that qualifies?”
“Something that suggests psychotic breaks from reality, like schizophrenia,” she says.
“Is that the only kind of mental defect that constitutes legal insanity?”
“No.”
“Does Asperger’s syndrome cause someone to have psychotic breaks?”
“No, but there are other symptoms of Asperger’s that might prevent someone from distinguishing right from wrong at a particular moment in time.”
“Such as?”
“The intense fixation on a subject that someone with Asperger’s has can be overwhelming and obsessive-to the point where it impedes function in daily activities or even crosses the boundary of the law. I once had a patient who was so focused on horses that he continually was arrested for breaking into a local stable. Jacob’s current special interest is forensic analysis and crime scene investigation. It was evident in my interview with him, as well as in his obsession with the television show CrimeBusters and the detailed journals he kept about each episode’s plot.”
“How might a fixation like that contribute to some of the evidence we’ve heard in this courtroom?” I ask.
“We have heard that Jacob was increasingly popping up at crime scenes, thanks to his police scanner,” the psychiatrist says. “And Jess Ogilvy’s death was part of an elaborate crime scene. The evidence was arranged to look at first glance like a kidnapping, then eventually revealed the victim. It is possible that the opportunity to create a crime scene, instead of just observing fictional ones, led Jacob to act in a way that went against rules, laws, and morality. At the time, he would only have been thinking about the fact that he was creating a real crime scene that would be solved by law enforcement officials. In this way, an Aspergian fixation on forensic analysis led Jacob to the delusional belief that, at that moment, Jess’s death was a necessary part of his study of forensic science. As chilling as it seems to us, the victim becomes collateral damage during the pursuit of a greater goal.”
“But didn’t Jacob know that murder is illegal?”
“Absolutely. He is the poster child for following rules, for seeing things as either right or wrong with no mitigating circumstances. However, Jacob’s actions wouldn’t have been voluntary at that moment. He had no understanding of the nature and consequences of his actions, and he couldn’t have stopped if he wanted to.”
I frown slightly. “But we’ve also heard that Jess Ogilvy and Jacob were extremely close. Surely that would have affected him?”
“Actually, that’s another reason we can conclude that Asperger’s played a role in what happened to Jess. People with Asperger’s have a greatly impaired theory of mind-they can’t put themselves into someone else’s position to imagine what the other person might be thinking or feeling. To the layperson, it’s a lack of empathy. So for example, if Jess were crying, Jacob wouldn’t try to comfort her. He might know that people with tears in their eyes are usually sad, but he’d be making a cognitive judgment, not an emotional one. For someone with Asperger’s, this lack of empathy is a neurobiological deficit, and it affects behavior. In Jacob’s case, it would have lessened his ability to perceive the impact of his own actions on Jess.”
“But still, Doctor,” I say, playing devil’s advocate, “there’s a big difference between not handing someone a hankie when she’s crying and killing her so that she can be a pawn in a crime scene setup.”
“Of course there is.” The psychiatrist turns to the jury. “And this is probably the hardest thing for the layperson to understand. We’re always looking for motive in a crime that’s as horrific as this one is. I’ve considered this from my discussions with Jacob and with Dr. Murano, and I think that the answer lies in the argument Jess and Jacob had the Sunday before her death.
“The calling card for Asperger’s is impaired social interaction. To that end, someone with Asperger’s has a very naϊve and limited understanding of relationships, which might lead him to seek contact in an inappropriate way. This leads to disappointment, and even anger, if a relationship doesn’t work out the way he’s anticipated.” She looks at Jacob. “I don’t know what was said between Jacob and Jess the afternoon of her death, but I believe Jacob had a crush on his tutor. Ironically, his rigid sense of right and wrong-which you’d think would deter criminal behavior-might actually have backfired here. If Jess rebuffed Jacob’s advances, he would have felt that she’d done something wrong to him, that he was the victim.”
“And then what?” I ask.
“He snapped. He lashed out without realizing what he was physically doing at the time he did it.”
“Nothing further,” I say, and I sit down. I glance at Jacob, who is glaring at me. Emma stares straight ahead. She seems determined to not acknowledge my existence today.
Helen Sharp stands up. “There are a lot of kids who’ve been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. So are you telling us that the world’s full of ticking time bombs? That at any moment, if we look at one of those kids the wrong way, he might come after us with a carving knife?”
“No, in fact, it’s the opposite. People with Asperger’s aren’t prone to violence. Since they don’t have an active theory of mind, they aren’t motivated to hurt someone; in fact, they’re not thinking about that person’s feelings at all. If someone with Asperger’s does become violent, it’s during the single-minded pursuit of a special interest, during a state of panic, or during a moment of complete ignorance about appropriate social interaction.”
“Isn’t it true, Doctor, that most defendants who claim insanity do so because of a psychotic break from reality?”
“Yes.”
“But Asperger’s isn’t a psychotic disorder?” Helen says.
“No. It would fall more in line with personality disorders, which are characterized by perceptual and interpersonal distortions.”
“In legal terms, doesn’t the absence of psychotic episodes suggest that the person is personally-and criminally-responsible for his or her actions?”
The psychiatrist shifts. “Yes, but there might be a loophole for Asperger’s. We can’t scientifically prove that someone with Asperger’s has a very different experience of subjective reality than someone who doesn’t have Asperger’s, and yet the extreme sensitivity to light and sound and taste and touch and texture indicate that this is the case. If that could be measured, there would be strong parallels between Asperger’s and psychosis.”
There is a sharp jab in my side as Jacob elbows me. He passes me a blank piece of paper.
“If that were true,” Helen says, “wouldn’t this suggest that someone with Asperger’s has a hard time being aware of reality and his role in it?”
“Exactly. Which is why it might very well contribute to legal insanity, Ms. Sharp.”
“But didn’t you also say that Jacob’s fixation on forensics led him to use Jess Ogilvy’s death to create his own crime scene?”
“Yes.”
“And wouldn’t such premeditation and careful calculation suggest he knew very well what he was doing at the moment?”
Dr. Newcomb shrugs. “It’s a theory,” she says.
“You also mentioned a lack of empathy.” Helen approaches the witness stand. “You said it’s one of the features of Asperger’s syndrome?”
“That’s right.”
“Would you consider that an emotional measure or a cognitive one?”
“Emotional.”
“Is lack of empathy part of the test for legal insanity, Doctor?”
“No.”
“Isn’t it true that the determination for legal insanity is whether the defendant knew right from wrong at the time the act was committed?”
“Yes.”
“Is that an emotional measure or a cognitive one?”
“A cognitive one.”
“So lack of empathy simply means someone is cold, heartless, without remorse,” Helen says. “But it doesn’t necessarily mean he’s unaware of the nature and consequence of his actions.”
“They often go hand in hand,” Dr. Newcomb says.
“Do they?” Helen asks. “A mafia hit man has no empathy when he offs his victims, but that doesn’t make him legally insane, just psychopathic.”
Jacob elbows me again, but I am already getting to my feet. “Objection,” I say. “Is there a question buried under Ms. Sharp’s grandstanding?”
“If I may,” Dr. Newcomb says, turning to the judge for his permission. “Ms. Sharp seems to be trying hard to draw a parallel between someone with Asperger’s and a psychopath. However, people with Asperger’s don’t demonstrate the superficial charm that psychopaths do, nor do they try to manipulate others. They don’t have enough interpersonal skills to do it well, frankly, and that usually makes them the prey for psychopaths, rather than the predators.”
“And yet,” Helen qualifies, “Jacob has a history of aggression, doesn’t he?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Did he or did he not have an argument with Jess two days before her death, one that was overheard by employees of Mama S’s Pizzeria?”
“Well, yes, but that wasn’t a physical assault-”
“Okay, what about the fact that he was given detention last year for trying to strangle a classmate?”
A flurry of blank notes land in front of me, and again, I sweep them aside. “Just hang on,” I say through my teeth to Jacob, and then I signal to the judge. “Objection-”
“I’ll rephrase. Did you know that Jacob was given detention for physically assaulting a girl in his grade?”
“Yes, I remember Dr. Murano mentioning that to me. Yet it seems the trigger was the same: an interpersonal relationship that didn’t quite match Jacob’s intentions. He felt humiliated, and he-”
“Snapped,” the prosecutor interrupts. “Right?”
“Right.”
“And that’s why Jess Ogilvy was killed.”
“In my opinion, yes.”
“Tell me this, Doctor,” Helen says. “Had Jacob still snapped when he was alphabetizing the CD collection in her residence, after her death?”
“Yes.”
“How about when he moved Jess’s body three hundred yards to a culvert behind the house?”
“Yes.”
“Had he still snapped when he sat her upright and carefully covered her with his quilt and set her hands in her lap?”
Dr. Newcomb jerks her chin the slightest bit.
“And had he still snapped days later when he went back to visit Jess’s body and phoned 911 so that the police would find her?”
“Well,” the psychiatrist says quietly. “I guess so.”
“Then tell me, Doctor,” Helen Sharp asks. “When did Jacob snap out of it?”
“They’re lying,” Jacob says heatedly, as soon as we are alone. “They’re all lying.”
I have been watching him grow more tightly wound with each passing minute of the forensic psychiatrist’s cross-examination; even though Jacob passed multiple notes to Oliver, he didn’t ask for a break until Helen Sharp finished going for the kill. I didn’t know what would happen, to be honest-if he would refuse to let me join him for the recess, if he’d still be holding a grudge from last night’s episode-but apparently, I am the lesser of the two evils at the defense table, which is why I’m granted admission to the sensory break room and Oliver is not.
“We talked about this, Jacob,” I say. “Remember? How saying you’re legally insane doesn’t mean anything; it just gives the jury something to use to find you not guilty. It’s a tool, like telling the school district you have Asperger’s. That didn’t change who you were… it only made it easier for teachers to understand your learning style.”
“I don’t care about the defense,” Jacob argues. “I care about what those people are saying I did.”
“You know how the law works. The burden of proof is on the prosecution. If Oliver can find witnesses who’ll weave another scenario about what could have happened, the jury might find reasonable doubt, and then they can’t convict.” I reach for Jacob’s hand. “It’s like giving someone a book, baby, and saying there might be more than one ending.”
“But I didn’t want her to die, Mom. It wasn’t my fault. I know it was an accident.” Jacob’s eyes are full of tears. “I miss her.”
My breath freezes in my throat. “Oh, Jacob,” I whisper. “What did you do?”
“The right thing. So why can’t we tell the jury that?”
I want to block out his words, because I am about to testify, and that means I cannot lie if the prosecutor asks what Jacob’s told me about Jess’s death. I want to run until all I can hear is the rush of my blood, instead of his confession. “Because,” I say softly, “sometimes the hardest thing to hear is the truth.”
Here’s what I know:
Before we took that last sensory break, Jacob was a jittery, wild mess.
Now that we’re back in session, Emma’s on the witness stand, and she’s a jittery, wild mess.
After I lead her through the basics of her identity and her relationship to Jacob, I walk up to the witness box and pretend to fumble and drop my pen. As I bend down, I whisper to her: Just breathe.
What the hell could have happened in the fifteen minutes they were gone?
“What do you do for a living, Ms. Hunt?”
She doesn’t answer, just stares into her lap.
“Ms. Hunt?”
Emma’s head jerks up. “Can you repeat the question?”
Focus, sweetheart, I think. “Your job. What do you do?”
“I used to write an advice column,” she says quietly. “I was asked to take a leave of absence after Jacob’s arrest.”
“How did you get into that business?”
“Desperation. I was a single parent with a newborn, and a three-year-old who’d suddenly developed autistic behaviors.” As she speaks, her voice gets stronger and picks up steam. “There were therapists in and out of my house all day long who were trying to keep Jacob from completely slipping away from me. I had to find work, but I couldn’t leave the house.”
“How did Jacob’s diagnosis come about?”
“He was a perfectly healthy, happy baby,” Emma says, and she looks at Jacob. For a moment she can’t speak, and she shakes her head. “We gave him his shots, and within a week this very loving, interactive, verbal boy stopped being the child I knew. Suddenly he was lying on his side, spinning the wheels of his toy trucks instead of zooming them around the living room.”
“What did you do?”
“Everything,” Emma says. “I put Jacob through applied behavior analysis, occupational therapy, physical therapy, speech therapy. I put him on a gluten-free, casein-free diet. I gave him a regimen of vitamins and supplements that had been successful for other parents of autistic kids.”
“Did it work?”
“To some extent. Jacob got to the point where he wasn’t isolating himself. He could function in the world, with limitations. Eventually, his diagnosis changed from a generic autism spectrum disorder to pervasive developmental disorder to, finally, Asperger’s.”
“Is there a silver lining to that diagnosis?”
“Yes,” Emma says. “Jacob has an amazing, dry sense of humor. He’s the smartest person I know. And if I want someone to keep me company when I’m running errands or unloading the dishwasher or just taking a walk, he’s quick to volunteer. He’ll do anything I ask him to. And he’ll also not do something, if I ask. I’m probably the only mother who’s never had to worry about her son doing drugs or drinking underage.”
“But there must be times that it’s hard for you, as a parent.”
“All the things I listed that make Jacob a perfect kid-well, that’s what makes him different from the average kid. All his life, Jacob’s wanted to fit in with his peers, and all his life, I’ve watched him be teased or turned down. You can’t imagine what it’s like to force a smile when your son wins a medal at his Pee Wee T-ball team banquet for getting hit by the most pitches. You have to close your eyes when you drop him off at school and he gets out of the car, wearing a big pair of headphones to help block out the noise of the busy hallways, and then as he walks away, you see other kids teasing him behind his back.”
“If I were to come to your house on a Tuesday,” I say, “what would I notice?”
“The food. If it’s Tuesday, all the food has to be red. Raspberries and strawberries and tomato soup. Sushi-grade tuna. Shaved rare roast beef. Beets. If it’s not red, Jacob will get very agitated, and sometimes he’ll go to his room and stop speaking to us. There’s a color for each day of the week, for food and for clothing. In his closet, his clothes hang in rainbow order, and the different colors aren’t allowed to touch.”
She turns to the jury, as we’ve practiced. “Jacob craves routine. He gets up at six-twenty every morning-whether it’s a school day or a weekend-and he knows exactly what time he has to leave for school and when he’ll get back home. He never misses an episode of CrimeBusters, which is on the USA Network at four-thirty every day of the week. He writes notes in his journals while he’s watching, even though in some cases he’s seen the episode a dozen times. He always puts his toothbrush on the left side of the sink when he’s done using it, and he sits behind the driver in the backseat of the car, even when he’s the only other passenger.”
“What happens when Jacob’s routine is disrupted?”
“It’s very upsetting for him,” Emma says.
“Can you explain?”
“When he was little, he’d scream or throw a tantrum. Now he’s more likely to withdraw. The best way I can explain it is that you’ll be looking right at Jacob, and he’s not with you.”
“You have another son, don’t you?”
“Yes. Theo is fifteen.”
“Does Theo have Asperger’s?”
“No.”
“Are Theo’s clothes arranged in rainbow order?”
She shakes her head. “Most of the time they’re in a heap on his floor.”
“Does he eat only red food on Tuesdays?”
“He eats anything that’s not nailed down,” Emma says, and some of the women on the jury laugh.
“Are there times that Theo doesn’t feel like talking to you?”
“Absolutely. He’s a very ordinary teenager.”
“Is there a difference between Theo withdrawing and Jacob withdrawing?”
“Yes,” Emma says. “When Theo doesn’t communicate with me, it’s because he doesn’t want to. When Jacob doesn’t communicate with me, it’s because he can’t.”
“Did you take steps to help Jacob adapt better to social situations?”
“Yes,” Emma says. She pauses, clears her throat. “I hired a private tutor to help him practice those skills-Jess Ogilvy.”
“Did Jacob like Jess?”
Emma’s eyes fill with tears. “Yes.”
“How do you know?”
“He was comfortable with her, and there aren’t many people he’s comfortable with. She got him to do- She got him to do things that he wouldn’t normally…” Emma breaks off and buries her face in her hands.
What the fuck?
“Ms. Hunt,” I say, “thank you. Nothing fur-”
“Wait,” she interrupts. “I just… I’m not finished.”
This is news to me. I shake my head just the tiniest bit, but Emma is staring at Jacob. “I just… I wanted to say…” She turns to the jury. “Jacob told me he didn’t want her to die; that it wasn’t his fault-”
My eyes widen. This is unscripted territory, dangerous ground. “Objection,” I blurt out. “Hearsay!”
“You can’t object to your own witness,” Helen says, delighted.
But I don’t have to give my own witness enough rope to hang herself, either, and the rest of us as well. “Then I’m finished,” I say, sitting down beside Jacob, suddenly afraid that I’m not the only one.
She told them.
My mother told them the truth.
I look at the jury, at each of their expectant faces, because now they must know I am not the monster that all these other witnesses have made me out to be. Oliver cut my mother off before she could say the rest, but surely they understand.
“Before we begin the cross-examination, counselors,” the judge says, “I’d like to make up some of the ground we lost yesterday with an early dismissal. Do either of you object to finishing out this witness’s testimony before we adjourn for the day?”
That’s when I look at the clock and see that it is four o’clock.
We are supposed to leave now, so I can be home in time for CrimeBusters at 4:30.
“Oliver,” I whisper. “Say no.”
“There is no way I’m leaving your mother’s last words in the jury’s minds all weekend long,” Oliver hisses back at me. “I don’t care how you deal with it, Jacob, but you’re going to deal with it.”
“Mr. Bond,” the judge says, “would you care to let us in on your conversation?”
“My client was just letting me know the delay in adjournment is agreeable to him.”
“I’m tickled pink,” Judge Cuttings says, although he doesn’t look tickled or pink. “Ms. Sharp, your witness.”
The prosecutor stands up. “Ms. Hunt, where was your son on the afternoon of January twelfth?”
“He went to Jess’s house for his lesson.”
“What was he like when he came home?”
She hesitates. “Agitated.”
“How did you know?”
“He ran up to his room and hid in the closet.”
“Did he exhibit any self-destructive behaviors?”
“Yes,” Emma says. “He hit his head against the wall repeatedly.”
(It is interesting for me to hear this. When I have a meltdown, I don’t remember the meltdown very well.)
“But you were able to calm him down, weren’t you?”
“Eventually.”
“What techniques did you use?” the prosecutor asks.
“I turned off the lights and put on a song that he likes.”
“Was it Bob Marley’s ‘I Shot the Sheriff’?”
“Yes.”
(It’s 4:07, and I’m sweating. A lot.)
“He uses a song called ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ as a calming technique?” Helen Sharp asks.
“It has nothing to do with the actual song. It happened to be a melody he liked, and it would soothe him when he was having a tantrum when he was little. It just stuck.”
“It certainly ties in to his obsession with violent crime, doesn’t it?”
(I’m not obsessed with violent crime. I’m obsessed with solving it.)
“Jacob’s not violent,” my mother says.
“No? He is on trial for murder,” Helen Sharp replies, “and last year he assaulted a girl, didn’t he?”
“He was provoked.”
“Ms. Hunt, I have here the report of the school resource officer who was called in after that incident.” She gets it stamped as evidence (now it is 4:09) and gives it to my mother. “Can you read the highlighted passage?”
My mother lifts the paper. “A seventeen-year-old juvenile female stated that Jacob Hunt walked up to her, slammed her against the lockers, and pinned her by the throat until he was forcibly removed by a staff member.”
“Are you suggesting that’s not violent behavior?” Helen Sharp asks.
Even if we leave now, we will be eleven minutes late for CrimeBusters.
“Jacob felt cornered,” my mother says.
“I’m not asking you how Jacob felt. The only person who knows how Jacob felt is Jacob. What I’m asking you is whether you would categorize slamming a young woman up against a locker and pinning her by her neck as violent behavior.”
“This victim,” my mother says, her voice hot, “is the same charming girl who said that if Jacob told his math teacher to go fuck himself she’d be his friend.”
One of the ladies on the jury shakes her head. I wonder if it’s because of what Mimi did or because my mother said fuck.
Once during a ratings sweep episode of CrimeBusters that was aired live, like a Broadway show, an extra dropped a hammer on his foot and said the f-bomb and as a result the network was fined. The censors bleeped it, but for a while it was circulating on YouTube in its full blue glory.
CrimeBusters is airing in thirteen minutes.
Oliver nudges my shoulder. “What is the matter with you? Stop it. You look crazy.”
I look down. I’m slapping my hand hard against the side of my leg; I haven’t even realized I am doing it. But now I’m even more confused. I thought I was supposed to look crazy.
“So this girl was mean to Jacob. I think we can both agree on that, right?”
“Yes.”
“But that doesn’t negate the fact that he was violent toward her.”
“What he did was just,” my mother replies.
“So, Ms. Hunt, you’re saying that if a young woman says something to Jacob that isn’t very nice or that hurts his feelings, he’s justified in acting violent toward her?”
My mother’s eyes flash, like they always do before she gets really, really, really mad. “Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m saying that my son is kind and sensitive and that he wouldn’t intentionally hurt a fly.”
“You’ve heard the evidence in this case. Are you aware that Jacob argued with Jess two days before she was last seen alive?”
“That’s different-”
“Were you there, Ms. Hunt?”
“No.”
Right now is the last commercial for Law & Order: SVU, which is the show that is on the network before CrimeBusters. There will be four thirty-second spots and then the opening bars of music. I close my eyes and start to hum.
“You said that one of the behaviors that’s indicative of Jacob’s Asperger’s is that he gets uncomfortable around people or circumstances he doesn’t know, correct?”
“Yes.”
“And that he sometimes withdraws from you?”
“Yes,” my mother says.
“That he has a hard time expressing his feelings to you verbally?”
“Yes.”
It’s the one where a child falls into a well and when Rhianna is lowered in to save the little boy, she shines a flashlight and there is a complete human skeleton there are pearls there are diamonds but the bones belong to a man it’s an heiress who disappeared in the sixties and at the end you learn that she was actually a he-
“Wouldn’t you agree, Ms. Hunt, that your other son, Theo, exhibits every single one of these behaviors from time to time? In fact, that every teenager on the planet exhibits them?”
“I wouldn’t exactly-”
“Does that make Theo insane, too?”
It’s 4:32 it’s 4:32 it’s 4:32.
“Can we please leave now?” I say, but the words are as loose as molasses and they don’t sound right; and everyone is moving slowly and slurring their words, too, when I stand up to get their attention.
“Mr. Bond, control your client,” I hear, and Oliver grabs my arm and yanks me off my feet.
The prosecutor’s lips pull back from her teeth like a smile, but it’s not a smile. “Ms. Hunt, you were the one who contacted the police when you saw Jacob’s quilt on the news broadcast, isn’t that true?”
“Yes,” my mother whispers.
“You did it because you believed your son had killed Jess Ogilvy, didn’t you?”
She shakes her head (4:34) and doesn’t answer.
“Ms. Hunt, you thought your own son had committed murder, isn’t that true?” the lawyer says with a voice that’s a hammer.
Ms. Hunt
(4:35)
Answer the
(no)
question.
Suddenly the room goes still, like the air between the beats of a bird’s wings, and I can hear everything rewinding in my head.
Control your client.
You look crazy.
The hardest thing to hear is the truth.
I stare at my mother, right into her eyes, and feel the fingernails on the chalkboard of my brain and belly. I can see the chambers of her heart, and the ruby cells of her blood, and the twisting winds of her thoughts.
Oh, Jacob, I hear, instant replay. What did you do?
I know what she is going to say a minute before she says it, and I can’t let her do that.
Then I remember the prosecutor’s words: The only person who knows how Jacob felt is Jacob.
“Stop,” I yell as loud as I can.
“Judge,” Oliver says, “I think we need to adjourn for the day-”
I get to my feet again. “Stop!”
My mother comes out of her seat on the witness stand. “Jacob, it’s okay-”
“Your Honor, the witness has not answered the question-”
I cover my ears with my hands because they are all so loud and the words are bouncing off the walls and the floor and I stand on my chair and then on the table and finally I jump right into the middle of the space in front of the judge, where my mother is already reaching for me.
But before I can touch her I am on the floor and the bailiff has his knee in my back and the judge and jury are scrambling and suddenly there is quiet and calm and no more weight and a voice I know.
“You’re okay, buddy,” Detective Matson says. He reaches out a hand, and he helps me to my feet.
Once at a fair, Theo and I went into a hall of mirrors. We got separated, or maybe Theo just left me behind, but I found myself walking into walls and looking around corners that didn’t really exist, and finally, I sat down on the floor and closed my eyes. That’s what I want to do now, with everyone staring at me. Just like then, there’s no way out that I can foresee.
“You’re okay,” Detective Matson repeats, and he leads the way.
Most of the time if a town cop comes into the sheriff’s domain, a pissing contest ensues: they don’t want me telling them how to run their outfit any more than I want them screwing up one of my crime scenes. But with Jacob on the loose in the courtroom, they probably would have welcomed the National Guard’s help if it had been available, and when I hop over the bar and grab Jacob, everyone else steps away and lets me, as if I actually know what I am doing.
His head is bobbing up and down as if he is having a conversation with himself, and one of his hands makes a weird stretching motion against his leg, but at least he isn’t yelling anymore.
I walk Jacob into a holding cell. He turns away from me, shoulders pressed to the bars.
“You okay?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer.
I lean against the bars from the outside of the cell, so that we are practically back-to-back. “There was a guy once who killed himself in a holding cell in Swanton,” I say, as if this is ordinary conversation. “The officers booked him and left him there to sleep off a good drunk. He was standing like you, but with his arms crossed. Wearing a flannel shirt, button-down. Security camera on him the whole time. You probably can’t guess how he did it.”
At first, Jacob doesn’t answer. Then he turns his head slightly. “He made a noose by tying the arms of the shirt around his neck,” he answers. “So it looked like he was standing up against the bars on the security camera, but actually, he’d already hanged himself.”
A laugh barks out of me. “Goddammit, kid. You’re really good.”
Jacob pivots so that he is facing me. “I shouldn’t be talking to you.”
“Probably not.”
I stare at him. “Why did you leave the quilt? You know better than that.”
He hesitates. “Of course I left the quilt. How else would anyone know that I was the one who set this all up? You still missed the tea bag.”
Immediately I know he is talking about the evidence at Jess Ogilvy’s house. “It was in the sink. We didn’t get any prints off the mug.”
“Jess was allergic to mango,” Jacob says. “And me, I hate the taste.”
He had been too thorough. Rather than forgetting to erase this evidence, he’d left it on purpose, as a test. I stare at Jacob, wondering what he is trying to tell me.
“But other than that,” he says, smiling, “you got it right.”
Helen and I stand in front of Judge Cuttings like recalcitrant schoolchildren. “I don’t ever want to see that happen again, Mr. Bond,” he says. “I don’t care if you have to medicate him. Either you keep your client under control for the remainder of this trial or I’m going to have him handcuffed.”
“Your Honor,” Helen says. “How is the State supposed to have a fair trial when we have a circus sideshow going on every fifteen minutes?”
“You know she’s right, Counselor,” the judge replies.
“I’m going to ask for a mistrial, Your Honor,” I say.
“You can’t when it’s your client causing the problems, Mr. Bond. Surely you know that.”
“Right,” I mutter.
“If there are any motions you two want to make, think hard before you make them. Mr. Bond, I will hear you with warning before we start.”
I hurry out of chambers before Helen can say anything that infuriates me even more. And then, just when I think things can’t get any worse, I find Rich Matson chatting up my client. “I was just keeping him company until you got here,” Matson explains.
“Yeah, I bet.”
He ignores me, turning to Jacob instead. “Hey,” the detective says. “Good luck.”
I wait until I can’t hear his footsteps anymore. “What the hell was that all about?”
“Nothing. We were talking about cases.”
“Oh great. Because that was such a good idea the last time you two sat down for a chat.” I fold my arms. “Listen, Jacob, you need to straighten out. If you don’t behave, you’re going to jail. Period.”
“If I don’t behave?” he says. “Schwing!”
“You can’t possibly be old enough to remember Wayne’s World. And regardless, I’m not the one who’s the defendant. I’m totally serious, Jacob. If you pull another stunt like that, the prosecution is going to throw your ass in jail or else declare a mistrial, and that means doing this all over again.”
“You promised that we’d adjourn at four o’clock.”
“You’re right. But in a courtroom the judge is God, and God wanted to stay late. So I don’t care if we’re here till four in the morning, or if Judge Cuttings announces that we’re all going to get up and do the hokey pokey. You are going to park your butt in that chair next to me and not say a damn thing.”
“Will you tell the jury why I did it?” Jacob asks.
“Why did you do it?”
I know better than to ask that. But at this point I am not thinking of perjury. I am thinking that Jacob and I need to be on the same page once and for all.
“Because I couldn’t leave her,” he says, as if this should be obvious.
My jaw drops. Before I can ask another question-Did she spurn you? Did you try to kiss her, and did she struggle too much? Did you hold her too close, and suffocate her accidentally?-a bailiff comes into the holding cell area. “They’re ready for you.”
I motion to the bailiff to open the cell. We are the last ones into the courtroom, with the exception of the judge and jury. Emma’s eyes go straight to her son. “Is everything okay?”
But before I can fill her in, the jury files in and the judge returns. “Counsel,” he says, settling himself on the bench. “Approach.” Helen and I move closer. “Mr. Bond, have you spoken with your client?”
“Yes, Your Honor, and there will be no further outbursts.”
“I can hardly contain myself,” Judge Cuttings says. “You may continue, then.”
Knowing what I know now, that insanity defense is looking stronger and stronger. I just hope the jury got that message, loud and clear. “The defense rests,” I announce.
“What?” Jacob explodes behind me. “No it doesn’t!”
I close my eyes and start to count to ten, because I’m pretty sure it’s not a good idea to kill your client in front of an entire jury, and then a paper airplane sails over my shoulder. It’s one of Jacob’s notes, which I unfold:
I WANT TO TALK.
I turn around. “Absolutely not.”
“Is there a problem, Mr. Bond?” the judge asks.
“No, Your Honor,” I reply, at the same moment Jacob says “Yes.”
Scrambling, I face the judge again. “We need a sensory break.”
“We’ve been in session for ten seconds!” Helen argues.
“Do you rest, Mr. Bond?” asks Judge Cuttings. “Or is there more?”
“There’s more,” Jacob says. “It’s my turn to talk. And if I want to take the stand, you have to let me.”
“You’re not taking the stand,” Emma insists.
“You, Ms. Hunt, do not have leave to speak! Am I the only person here who knows we’re in a court of law?” Judge Cuttings roars. “Mr. Bond, put on your final witness.”
“I’d like a brief recess-”
“I bet you would. I’d like to be in Nevis instead of here, but neither one of us is going to get what we want,” the judge snaps.
Shaking my head, I walk Jacob to the witness stand. I am so angry I can barely see straight. Jacob will tell the jury the truth, like he’s told me, and dig his own grave. If not with the substance of what he says then with the style: no matter what’s been said up to this point, no matter what’s been said by the witnesses, all the jury is going to remember is this awkward boy who speaks in bursts of words and fidgets and doesn’t register appropriate emotion and can’t look them in the eye-all traditional expressions of guilt. It doesn’t matter what Jacob says; his demeanor will convict him before he even opens his mouth.
I open the gate for him so that he can step inside. “It’s your funeral,” I murmur.
“No,” Jacob says. “It’s my trial.”
I can tell the moment he realizes that this wasn’t such a great idea. He’s been sworn in, and he swallows hard. His eyes are wide and dart all over the courtroom.
“Tell me what happens when you get nervous, Jacob,” I say.
He licks his lips. “I walk on my toes, or bounce. Sometimes I flap or talk too fast or laugh even though it’s not funny.”
“Are you nervous now?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He pulls his lips back in a smile. “Because everyone’s looking at me.”
“Is that all?”
“Also the lights are too bright. And I don’t know what you’re going to say next.”
Whose goddamn fault is that? I think. “Jacob, you told the court that you wanted to talk.”
“Yes.”
“What do you want to tell this jury?”
Jacob hesitates. “The truth,” he says.
There’s blood all over the floor and she is lying in it. She doesn’t answer even though I call her name. I know I need to move her so I lift her up and take her into the hallway and when I do there is even more blood that comes from her nose and her mouth. I try not to think about the fact that I am touching her body and she is naked; it isn’t like in the movies where the girl is beautiful and the boy is backlit; it’s just skin against skin and I am embarrassed for her because she doesn’t even know she isn’t wearing clothes. I don’t want to get blood on the towels so I wipe her face with toilet paper and flush it.
There is underwear on the floor and a bra and sweatpants and a shirt. I put the bra on first and I know how because I watch HBO and have seen them being taken off; all I have to do is reverse it. The underwear I don’t understand because there is writing on one side and I don’t know if it’s the front or the back, so I just put it on her any which way. Then the shirt and the sweatpants and finally socks and Ugg boots, which are the hardest because she cannot press down with her feet.
I pick her up over my shoulder-she is heavier than I thought she would be-and try to get her down the stairs. There is a turn on the landing and I trip over my feet and we both fall. I land on top of her and when I roll her over her tooth is knocked out. I know it didn’t hurt her but it still makes me feel like I am going to be sick. The bruises and the broken nose for some reason weren’t nearly as bad as seeing her with that missing front tooth.
I sit her up in an armchair. Wait here, I say, and then I laugh out loud because she can’t hear me. Upstairs I mop up the blood with more toilet paper, the whole roll. It is still smeary and wet. In the laundry closet I find bleach and I pour it on the floor and use another roll of toilet paper to dry it all off.
It does cross my mind that I might get caught, and that is when I decide not just to clean up but to make a crime scene that leads in a different direction. I pack a bag of extra clothes and take her toothbrush. I type a note and stick it in the mailbox. I put on a pair of boots too big to be hers and walk around outside, cut the screen, put the kitchen knife in the dishwasher, and turn on the quick cycle. I want to be obvious, because Mark is not too smart.
I make sure to wipe away the footprints on the porch and the driveway.
Inside, I put the backpack on my shoulders and make sure I am not forgetting anything. I know I should leave the stools knocked over and the CDs scattered on the living room floor but I just can’t. So I pick up the stools and the mail and then I organize the CDs the way I think she would have liked them.
I try to carry her into the woods but she gets heavier with every step so instead after a while I have to drag her. I want her to be somewhere where I know she won’t have to sit in wind or rain or snow. I like the culvert because I can get to it from the highway, instead of going past her house.
I think about her even when I’m not here; even when I know the police are all looking and I could so easily be distracted by tracking their progress or lack thereof. That’s why when I come back to visit I bring my quilt. It was something I always liked and I think if she could talk she would have been really proud of me for wrapping her in it. Good job, Jacob, she would have said. You’re thinking of someone else for a change.
Little did she know, that was all I was thinking about.
When I’m done the courtroom is so quiet I can hear the pop and hiss of the radiator and the building stretching its beams. I look at Oliver, and at my mother. I expect them to be pretty pleased, because everything should make sense now. I can’t read their faces, though, or the faces of the jury. One woman is crying; and I don’t know if she’s sad because I was talking about Jess or because she’s happy to finally know what really happened.
I’m not nervous now. If you want to know, I’ve got so much adrenaline in my bloodstream I could probably run to Bennington and back. I mean, holy cow, I have just outlined how I set up a crime scene with a dead body after successfully fooling the police into believing it was a kidnapping attempt. I have connected all the dots that the State raised as evidence in this trial. It is like the best episode of CrimeBusters ever, and I am the star.
“Mr. Bond?” the judge prompts.
Oliver clears his throat. He rests one hand on the railing of the witness stand, looking away from me. “All right, Jacob. You told us a lot about what you did after Jess’s death. But you haven’t told us about how she died.”
“There isn’t much to tell,” I say.
Suddenly, I realize where I’ve seen that expression on everyone’s face in this courtroom. It’s the one on Mimi Scheck’s face, and Mark Maguire’s face, and everyone else who thinks that they have absolutely nothing in common with me.
I start to get that burning sensation in my stomach, the one that comes when I realize too late I might have done something that actually wasn’t such a great idea.
And then, Oliver throws me a lifeline. “Jacob, are you sorry for killing Jess?”
I smile widely. “No,” I say. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all along.”
Here’s the bittersweet thing: Jacob has made himself look more insane than I ever could with a witness’s testimony. Then again, he’s also made himself look like a ruthless murderer.
Jacob is once again sitting at the defense table, holding his mother’s hand. Emma is white as a sheet, and I can’t blame her. After listening to Jacob’s testimony-a detailed description in his own words of how to clean up after a mess of your own making-I find myself in the same position.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” I begin, “there’s been a lot of evidence produced here about how Jess Ogilvy died. We’re not disputing that evidence. But if you’ve been paying attention at this trial, you also know that you can’t judge this book by its cover. Jacob is a young man with Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder that precludes him from having empathy for others in the same way you or I might. When he talks about what he did with Jess’s body, and at Jess’s residence, he doesn’t see his involvement in a horrific murder. Instead, as you’ve heard, he takes pride in the fact that he set up a complete crime scene, a crime scene worthy of inclusion in a journal, just like an episode of CrimeBusters. I’m not going to ask you to excuse him for Jess Ogilvy’s death-we grieve with her parents for that loss, and do not seek to diminish the tragedy in any way. However, I am going to ask you to take the information you’ve been given about Jacob and his disorder, so that when you question whether he was criminally responsible at the time of Jess’s death-whether he understood right from wrong in that moment the way you understand right from wrong-you will have no choice but to answer no.”
I walk toward the jury. “Asperger’s is a tough nut to crack. You’ve heard a lot about it these past few days… and I bet you’ve thought, So what? Not being comfortable in new situations, wanting to do things the same way every day, finding it hard to make new friends-these are struggles we’ve all faced from time to time. Yet none of these traits impair our ability to make judgments, and none of us are on trial for murder. You might be thinking that Jacob doesn’t fit your impression of a person with a diagnosable neurological disorder. He’s smart, he doesn’t look crazy in the colloquial sense of the word. So how can you be certain that Asperger’s syndrome is a valid neurological disorder, and not just the latest label du jour for a kid with problems? How can you be sure Asperger’s provides an explanation of his behavior at the moment a crime was committed-instead of just a fancy legal excuse?”
I smile. “Well, I offer an example from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart. In the fifties and sixties the Court was involved in deciding a number of obscenity cases. Since obscenity isn’t protected under the First Amendment, they had to determine whether a series of pornographic films met the legal definition of obscenity, and so they’d screen them. Every week, on what was known as Obscenity Tuesday, the justices watched these films and rendered decisions. It was in Jacobellis v. Ohio that Justice Stewart became legendary in the legal field for saying that hard-core pornography was hard to define but that-and I quote-‘I know it when I see it.’”
I turn to Jacob. “I know it when I see it,” I repeat. “You haven’t just listened to experts and seen medical files and seen forensic evidence-you’ve also watched and heard Jacob. And based on that alone, it must be clear to you that he’s not just a kid with a few personality quirks. He’s a kid who doesn’t communicate particularly well and whose thoughts are often jumbled. He talks in a monotone and doesn’t show a great deal of emotion, even when it seems warranted. Yet he was brave enough to stand up in front of you and try to defend himself against one of the most serious charges a young man like him could ever face. What he said-and how he said it-might have been upsetting to you. Shocking, even. But that’s because a person with Asperger’s-a person like Jacob-is not your typical witness.
“I didn’t want my client to testify. I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t think that he could do it. When you’re a witness in a trial, you have to practice saying things in a way that works to make your case. You have to present yourself in a manner that is sympathetic to the jury. And I knew Jacob could not-and would not-do that. Hell, I could barely get him to wear a tie here… I certainly couldn’t make him express remorse, or even sadness. I couldn’t tell him what he should and shouldn’t say in front of you. To Jacob, that would have been lying. And to Jacob, telling the truth is a rule that has to be followed.”
I look at the jurors. “What you have here is a kid who isn’t working the system, because he’s physically and psychologically incapable of working the system. He doesn’t know how to play to your sympathies. He doesn’t know what will help or hurt his chances of acquittal. He simply wanted to tell you his side of the story-so he did. And that’s how you know that Jacob’s not a criminal trying to squeak through a loophole. That’s how you know that his Asperger’s can and did and still does impair his judgment at any given moment. Because any other defendant-any ordinary defendant-would have known better than to tell you what Jacob did.
“You and I know, ladies and gentlemen, that the legal system in America works very well if you happen to communicate a certain way, a way Jacob doesn’t. And yet everyone in this country is entitled to a fair trial-even people who communicate differently from the way that works best in court.” I take a deep breath. “Maybe for justice to be done, then, in Jacob’s case, we simply need people who are willing to listen a little more closely.”
As I take my seat again, Helen stands up. “When I was a little girl I remember asking my mother why, instead of saying toilet paper on the wrapper, it said bath tissue. And you know what my mom told me? You can call it whatever you want, but all the words in the world can’t dress up what it is. This isn’t a case about a young man who has a hard time holding a conversation, or making friends, or eating something other than blue Jell-O on Wednesday-”
Friday, I mentally correct. Jacob reaches for his pencil and starts to write a note, but before he can, I pluck the pencil out of his hand and slip it into my coat pocket.
“It’s a case about a boy who committed a cold-blooded murder and then, using his brains and his fascination with crime scenes, tried to cover his tracks. I don’t contest that Jacob has Asperger’s syndrome. I don’t expect any of you to contest it, either. But that doesn’t absolve him of responsibility for this brutal, vicious killing. You’ve heard from the crime scene investigators who went to the house and found traces of Jess’s blood all over the bathroom floor. You’ve heard Jacob himself say that he washed it away with bleach and then flushed the toilet paper away. Why? Not because there’s a rule about where toilet paper goes when you’re done with it… but instead, because he didn’t want anyone to know he had cleaned up that mess. He told you, ladies and gentlemen, about how he set up that entire crime scene, and how much thought he put into it. He deliberately tried to lead police down the wrong trail, to make them think Jess had been kidnapped. He slit the screen and used Mark Maguire’s boots to leave footprints, to purposefully suggest that someone else was responsible for the crime. He dragged Jess’s body the length of three football fields and left it outside, so that it would be harder for people to find. And when he grew tired of playing his own little game of CrimeBusters, he took Jess’s cell phone and dialed 911. Why? Not because it was easier for him to interface with a dead body than a live one but because it was all part of Jacob Hunt’s perverse plan to selfishly discard Jess Ogilvy’s life in order to allow him to play forensic detective.”
She faces the jury. “Mr. Bond can call this whatever he wants, but that doesn’t change what it is: a young man who committed a brutal murder and who actively, over a period of days, covered it up with careful clues to mislead the police. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the MO of a calculating killer-not a kid with Asperger’s syndrome.”
From the archives of Auntie Em:
Dear Auntie Em,
What do you do if all signs point to the fact that the world as you know it is going to come to a crashing halt?
Sincerely,
HumptyDumptyWasPushed
Dear Humpty,
HELP!
Love,
Auntie Em
Three days later, the jury is still deliberating.
We have settled into a routine: in the morning, Oliver brings Thor over for breakfast. Jacob takes him into the yard to throw a ball while Henry and Theo slowly animate themselves with coffee. Henry’s been teaching Theo C# programming to create his own computer game, which has fascinated Theo to no end. In the afternoons, Oliver and I play Scrabble, and every now and then Jacob will call out obscure, legitimate words from the couch where he’s watching CrimeBusters: Qua! Za! We don’t turn on the news or read the paper, because all they talk about is Jacob.
We are not allowed to leave the house for two reasons: technically, Jacob is still under arrest, and we must be in a spot where we can get to the courthouse in twenty minutes when the jury returns. It is still strange to me to turn a corner in my own house and find Henry there-I expected him to leave by now, to come up with the excuse that one of his daughters has strep or his wife has to visit a dying aunt-but Henry insists he’s here until the verdict comes back. Our conversation is full of clichés, but at least it is a conversation. I’m making up for lost time, he says. Better late than never.
We’ve become a family. An unorthodox one, and one cobbled together by someone else’s tragedy, but after years of being the only parent in this house, I will take what I can get.
Later, while the boys are getting ready for bed, Oliver and I take Thor for a walk around the block before he goes back to his apartment over the pizza place. We talk about the horse that stepped on his ankle and broke it. We talk about how I used to want to be a writer. We talk about the trial.
We don’t talk about us.
“Is it good or bad if the jury can’t reach a verdict?”
“Good, I think. It probably means someone’s holding out on a conviction.”
“What happens next?”
“If Jacob’s convicted,” Oliver says, as Thor runs back and forth in front of us, lacing up the path, “he’ll go to prison. I don’t know if it will be the same one he was in. If he’s found not guilty by reason of insanity, the judge will probably want another psychiatric evaluation.”
“But then he’ll come home?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver admits. “We’ll get Ava Newcomb and Dr. Murano to put together an outpatient treatment plan, but it depends on Judge Cuttings. He could weigh the fact that Jacob committed murder and decide that he can’t ignore that, and isolate him from the rest of the community.”
He has told me this before, but it never seems to sink in. “In a state mental hospital,” I finish. As we reach my driveway again, I stop walking, and Oliver stops, too, his hands in the pockets of his jacket. “I fought my whole life to have Jacob treated like ordinary kids in regular school, with regular programming,” I say, “and now his only chance of staying out of jail means playing the Asperger’s card.”
“I honestly don’t know what’s going to happen,” Oliver says. “But it’s better to be prepared.”
“I haven’t told Jacob yet.”
He looks down at his shoes. “Maybe you should.”
As if we have conjured him, the door opens and Jacob stands in silhouette in his pajamas. “I’m waiting for you to say good night,” he tells me.
“I’ll be right there.”
Jacob looks at Oliver, impatient. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“Will you just kiss her good-bye already?”
My jaw drops with surprise. Since my fight with Jacob, Oliver and I have been careful to steer clear of each other in his company. But now Oliver takes me into his arms. “I don’t have to be asked twice,” he says, and he presses his lips against mine.
When Jacob was little, I used to sneak into his bedroom after midnight and sit on a rocking chair next to his bed so that I could watch him sleep. There was a wonderful magic brush that painted him when he was unconscious. In his bed, I could not tell that the hand curled under the covers was the same one that had stimmed fiercely that afternoon when a girl at the park came into the sandbox where he was happily playing alone. I couldn’t tell that those eyes, closed, winced when I asked him to look right at me. I couldn’t watch him, easy and relaxed in his dreams, and think this was the same boy who could not remember the sequence of words to ask the lunch lady for apple juice instead of milk.
When Jacob slept, the slate was wiped clean, and he could have been any child. Any ordinary child.
Instead, during his waking hours, he was extraordinary. And that truly was the definition for him-outside the perimeter of the norm. At some point in the English language, that word had acquired positive connotations. Why hadn’t Asperger’s?
You could say I was different. I had willingly traded my own future for Jacob’s, giving up whatever fame or fortune I might have achieved in order to make sure his life was a better one. I had let every relationship slide, with the exception of the one I’d built with Jacob. I had made choices that other women would not have made. At best that made me a fierce, fighting mother; at worst, it made me single-minded. And yet, if I walked into a crowded room, people did not mystically part from me as if there was an invisible magnetic field, a polarizing reaction between my body and theirs. People did not turn to their friends and groan, Oh, God, save me-she’s heading this way. People didn’t roll their eyes behind my back when I was talking. Jacob might have acted strangely, but he’d never been cruel.
He simply didn’t have the self-awareness for it.
Now, I sink down on that same chair I used to sit on years ago, and I watch Jacob sleep again. He isn’t a child anymore. His face has the planes of that of an adult; his hands are strong and his shoulders sculpted. I reach out and brush his hair back from where it has fallen over his forehead. In his sleep, Jacob stirs.
I do not know what kind of life I’d have had without Jacob, but I don’t want to know. If he hadn’t been autistic, I could not love him any more than I already do. And even if he is convicted, I could not love him any less.
I lean down, just like I used to, and I kiss him on the forehead. It is the age-old, time-honored way for mothers to test for fever, to give a blessing, to say good night.
So why does it feel like I’m saying good-bye?
My sixteenth birthday is today, but I’m not expecting much. We’re still waiting, six days later, for the jury to reach a verdict. I’m guessing, actually, that my mother won’t even remember-which is why I am struck speechless when she yells “Breakfast” and I come downstairs with my hair still wet from my shower and there’s a chocolate cake with a candle in it.
Granted, it’s Brown Thursday and it’s no doubt gluten-free, but beggars can’t be choosers.
“Happy birthday, Theo,” my mother says, and she starts the round of singing. My dad, my brother, and Oliver all join in. I have a big, fat smile on my face. As far as I know, my father has never been to one of my birthday parties, unless you count the minute I was delivered in the hospital, and that wasn’t really a party, I imagine.
Was it worth it? A little voice inside me curls like the smoke from the candle. Was it worth all this to get a family like the ones you used to spy on?
My mother puts her arm around my shoulders. “Make a wish, Theo,” she says.
A year ago, this is exactly what I would have wished for. What I did wish for, with or without the cake. But there’s something in her voice, like a string made of steel, that suggests there’s a right answer here, one collective heart’s desire for all of us.
Which just happens to rest in the hands of twelve jurors.
I close my eyes and blow out the candle, and everyone claps. My mother starts to cut slices from the cake and gives me the first one. “Thanks,” I say.
“I hope you like it,” my mother replies. “And I hope you like this.”
She hands me an envelope. Inside is a note, handwritten:
Your debt is paid.
I think of my crazy trip to California to find my father, of how much money those tickets had cost, and for a second I can’t talk.
“But,” she says, “if you do that again, I’ll kill you.”
I laugh, and she wraps her arms around me from behind and kisses the top of my head.
“Hey, there’s more.” My father hands me an envelope, which has a cheesy “To My Son” Hallmark card inside, and forty bucks.
“You can start saving for a faster router,” he says.
“That’s awesome!”
Then Oliver hands me a package wrapped in Bounty paper towels. “It was this or a pizza box,” he explains.
I shake it. “Is it a calzone?”
“Give me a little credit here,” Oliver says.
I rip it open and find the Vermont Driver’s Manual.
“After this trial’s over, I thought you and I could make an appointment at the DMV and finally get that learner’s permit.”
I have to look down at the table, because if I don’t, everyone’s going to realize I’m totally about to cry. I remember how, when I was little, my mother would read us these ridiculous fairy tales where frogs turned into princes and girls woke up from comas with a single kiss. I never bought into any of that crap. But who knows? Maybe I was wrong. Maybe a person’s life can change in an instant after all.
“Wait,” Jacob says. Until now, he’s been watching, his face bisected by a smile-and this is an improvement. At all my birthday parties growing up, the unwritten rule was that Jacob had to help me blow out the candles. It was easier to share my moment than to have him ruin the festivities with a meltdown. “I’ve got a present for you, too, Theo.”
I don’t think, in all the years that I’ve been alive, Jacob’s ever gotten me a present. I don’t think he’s ever gotten anyone a present, unless you count the perfume I pick out at CVS for Christmas and give to my mother, after putting both my name and Jacob’s on the tag. Giving gifts just isn’t on my brother’s radar.
“What’s he got?” Oliver murmurs, as Jacob hightails it upstairs.
“I don’t know,” my mother answers.
A minute later, Jacob’s back. He is holding a stuffed duck he used to sleep with when he was small. “Open it,” he says, holding it out.
I take it and turn it over in my hands. There’s no wrapping; nothing to be opened. “Um,” I say, laughing a little. “How?”
Jacob turns the duck upside down and pulls on a loose thread. It unravels a little, and some of the stuffing comes out in a clump. I poke my finger into the hole and feel something smooth and hard.
“Is that where my Tupperware went?” my mother says when I pull it out of the chest cavity of the duck. Inside, there’s something I cannot quite make out. I open the lid and find myself staring at a pink iPod Nano. Gingerly, I pick it up, knowing even before I turn it over that Jess Ogilvy’s name is etched into the metal on the back.
“Where did you get that?” my mother whispers, from somewhere on the other end of the vacuum I’ve fallen into.
“You wanted it, didn’t you?” Jacob says, still excited. “You dropped it on the way out of her house that day.”
I can barely move my lips. “What are you talking about?”
“I already told you-I know you were there. I saw the tread from the bottom of your sneakers, the same ones I used here for my fake crime scene. And I knew you’d been taking other stuff from other houses-”
“What!” my mother says.
“-I saw the video games in your room.” Jacob beams at me. “At Jess’s, I cleaned up for you, so no one would know what you did. And it worked, Theo. No one ever found out that you killed her.”
My mother gasps.
“What the hell is going on?” Oliver asks.
“I didn’t kill her!” I say. “I didn’t even know she lived there. I didn’t think anyone was home. I was going to look around, maybe take a CD or two, but then I heard water running upstairs and I peeked in. She was naked. She was naked and she saw me. I freaked out, and she got out of the shower and she slipped. She hit her face on the edge of the sink, and that’s when I ran. I was afraid she’d catch me.” I can’t breathe; and I’m sure that my heart’s turned to clay in my chest. “She was alive when I left, in the bathroom. And then all of a sudden the news says she’s dead and her body’s found outside. I knew I wasn’t the one who moved her out there… someone else had, someone who probably murdered her. I thought maybe she told Jacob about me, when he came for his lesson. And they had a fight about it. And that Jacob… I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought.”
“You didn’t kill Jess,” my mother says.
I shake my head, numb.
My mother looks at Jacob. “And you didn’t kill Jess.”
“I just moved her body.” He rolls his eyes. “I’ve been telling you that the whole time.”
“Jacob,” Oliver asks, “was Jess alive when you got to the house?”
“No! But I saw that Theo had been there, so I did what was right.”
“Why didn’t you call your mother, or an ambulance?” my father asks. “Why would you set up a crime scene to cover up for Theo?”
Jacob stares right at me. It hurts; it actually hurts. “House rules,” he says simply. “Take care of your brother; he’s the only one you’ve got.”
“You have to do something,” my mother says to Oliver. “It’s new evidence. Theo can testify-”
“He might be implicated or charged with withholding-”
“You have to do something,” my mother repeats.
Oliver is already reaching for his coat. “Let’s go,” he says.
Jacob and I are the last ones out of the kitchen. The cake is still sitting on the table, along with my other presents. It already looks like a museum exhibit, untouched. You’d never guess that, five minutes ago, we were celebrating. “Jacob?” My brother turns around. “I don’t know what to say.”
He awkwardly pats my shoulder. “Don’t worry,” Jacob replies. “That happens to me all the time.”
Today is April 15. It is the day, in 1912, that the Titanic sank. It’s the day, in 1924, that Rand McNally published its first road atlas. It’s the day, in 1947, that Jackie Robinson first played for the Brooklyn Dodgers. It is also the birthday of Leonardo da Vinci, author Henry James, the girl who plays Hermione in the Harry Potter movies, and my brother Theo.
I used to be jealous of Theo’s birthday. On mine, December 21, the most impressive thing that happened was the explosion of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, in 1988. Frank Zappa was born on my birthday, but honestly, that doesn’t compare to da Vinci, does it? Plus, my birthday is on the shortest day of the year. I’ve always felt like I’d gotten shafted. Probably Frank Zappa did, too.
Today, though, I was not jealous of Theo’s birthday. In fact, I couldn’t wait to give him the present I’d been keeping for him.
Oliver says that, at the courthouse, Theo and I will both have a chance to talk. Apparently, it is not enough for the jury to know, as the medical examiner testified, that Jess’s facial bruises were caused by a basilar skull fracture in the periorbital region, blood dissecting along fascial planes and creating the appearance of contusion. Or in other words, what looked like a girl who was beaten might very well have been a girl who simply fell down and hit her own head. Apparently, the jury-and the judge-need to hear Theo and me explain the same exact thing in different words.
I guess I’m not the only one who doesn’t always understand what’s been said.
My mother is driving, with Oliver in the passenger seat, and I’m in the back with Theo. My father is at our house, in case the court happens to call in the twenty minutes it takes for us to get there in person. Every time the car goes over a frost heave it makes me think of jumping on a mattress, something Theo and I used to do together when we were little. We used to believe that, if we got enough bounce going, we could reach the ceiling, but I don’t think we ever did.
After all those years of Theo sticking up for me, I finally got to be the big brother. I did the right thing. I don’t know why that’s so difficult for these jurors to comprehend.
Theo opens his fist; inside it is the pink iPod that used to be Jess’s. From his pocket, he takes out a white tangle of wires-his earbuds. He sticks them in his ears.
To all of those experts who said that because I have Asperger’s I can’t empathize:
So there.
People who can’t empathize surely don’t try to protect the people they love, even if it means having to go to court.
Suddenly Theo pulls one of the earbuds out and offers it to me. “Listen,” he says, and I do. Jess’s music is a piano concerto that swirls behind my eyes. I bend my head toward my brother so that the wires reach, so that, for the rest of the journey, we stay connected.