Nineteen Minutes (31 page)

“I can’t believe you dragged us here,” Joey said.

Peter kicked at the gravel in the parking lot. “This sucks.”

“Language,” Lacy warned. “And as for all of us being here, I cannot believe you’d be selfish enough to not want to say good-bye to a member of the family.”

“We could have said good-bye at home,” Joey muttered.

Lacy put her hands on her hips. “Death is a part of life. I’d want to be surrounded by people I love when it’s my time, too.” She waited for Lewis to haul Dozer into his arms, then closed the hatch of the door.

Lacy had requested the last appointment of the day, so that the doctor wouldn’t be rushed. They sat alone in the waiting room, the dog draped like a blanket over Lewis’s legs. Joey picked up a Sports Illustrated magazine from three years ago and started to read. Peter folded his arms and stared up at the ceiling.

“Let’s all talk about our best Dozer memory,” Lacy said.

Lewis sighed. “For God’s sake…”

“This is lame,” Joey added.

“For me,” Lacy said, as if they hadn’t even spoken, “it was when Dozer was a puppy, and I found him on the dining room table with his head stuck inside the turkey.” She stroked the dog’s head. “That was the year we had soup for Thanksgiving.”

Joey slapped the magazine back on the end table and sighed.

Marcia, the vet’s assistant, was a woman with a long braid that reached past her hips. Lacy had delivered her twin sons five years ago. “Hi, Lacy,” she said, and she came right up and folded her in her arms. “You okay?”

The thing about death, Lacy knew, was that it robbed you of your vocabulary for comfort.

Marcia walked up to Dozer and rubbed him behind the ears. “Did you want to wait out here?”

“Yes,” Joey mouthed toward Peter.

“We’re all coming in,” Lacy said firmly.

They followed Marcia into one of the treatment rooms and settled Dozer on the examination table. He scrabbled for purchase, his claws clicking against the metal. “That’s a good boy,” Marcia said.

Lewis and the boys filed into the room, standing against the wall like a police lineup. When the vet walked in, bearing his hypodermic, they shrank back even further. “Would you like to help hold him?” the vet asked.

Lacy moved forward, nodding, and settled her arms around Marcia’s.

“Well, Dozer, you put up a fine fight,” the vet said. He turned to the boys. “He won’t feel this.”

“What is it?” Lewis asked, staring at the needle.

“A combination of chemicals that relax the muscles and terminate nerve transmission. And without nerve transmission, there’s no thought, no feeling, no movement. It’s a bit like drifting off to sleep.” He felt around for a vein in the dog’s leg, while Marcia kept Dozer steady. He injected the solution and rubbed Dozer’s head.

The dog took a deeper breath, and then stopped moving. Marcia stepped away, leaving Dozer in Lacy’s arms. “We’ll give you a minute,” she said, and she and the vet left the room.

Lacy was used to holding new life in her hands, not feeling it pass from the body in her arms. It was just another transition-pregnancy to birth, child to adult, life to death-but there was something about letting go of the family pet that was even more difficult, as if it were silly to have feelings this strong for something that wasn’t human. As if admitting that you loved a dog-one that was always underfoot and scratching the leather and tracking mud into the house-as much as you loved your biological children were foolish.

And yet.

This was the dog who had stoically and silently allowed two-year-old Peter to ride him like a horse around the yard. This was the dog who had barked the house down when Joey had fallen asleep on the couch while his dinner was cooking, until the entire oven was on fire. This was the dog who sat beneath the desk on Lacy’s feet in the dead of winter as she answered email, sharing the heat of his pale, pinkened belly.

She bent over the dog’s body and began to weep-quietly, at first, and then with loud sobs that made Joey turn away and Lewis wince.

“Do something,” she heard Joey say, his voice thick and ropy.

She felt a hand on her shoulder and assumed it was Lewis, but then Peter began to speak. “When he was a puppy,” Peter said. “The time we went to pick him out from the litter. All his brothers and sisters were trying to climb over the pen, and he was on the top of the stairs, and he looked at us and tripped and fell down them.” Lacy raised her face and stared at him. “That’s my best memory,” Peter said.

Lacy had always considered herself lucky to have somehow received a child who was not the cookie-cutter American boy, one who was sensitive and emotional and so in tune with what others felt and thought. She let go of her fist-grip on the dog’s fur and opened her arms so that Peter could move into them. Unlike Joey, who was already taller than her and more muscular than Lewis, Peter still fit into her embrace. Even that square span of his shoulder blades-so expansive underneath a cotton shirt-seemed more delicate underneath her hands. Unfinished and rough-hewn, a man still waiting to happen.

If only you could keep them that way: cast in amber, never growing up.

At every school concert and play in Josie’s life, she’d had only one parent in the audience. Her mother-to her credit-had rearranged court dates so that she could watch Josie be plaque in the school dental hygiene play, or hear her five-note solo in the Christmas chorale. There were other kids who also had single parents-the ones who came from divorced families, for example-but Josie was the only person in the school who had never met her father. When she was little and her second-grade class was making necktie cards for Father’s Day, she was relegated to sitting in the corner with the girl whose dad had died prematurely at age forty-two of cancer.

Like any curious kid, she’d asked her mother about this when she was growing up. Josie wanted to know why her parents weren’t married anymore; she hadn’t expected to hear that they were never married. “He wasn’t the marrying type,” she’d told Josie, and Josie hadn’t understood why that also meant he wasn’t the type to send a present for his daughter’s birthday, or to invite her to his home for a week during the summer, or to even call to hear her voice.

This year, she was supposed to be taking biology, and she was already nervous about the unit on genetics. Josie didn’t know if her father had brown eyes or blue ones; if he had curly hair or freckles or six toes. Her mother had shrugged off Josie’s concerns. “Surely there’s someone in your class who’s adopted,” she said. “You know fifty percent more about your background than they do.”

This is what Josie had pieced together about her father:

His name was Logan Rourke. He’d been a teacher at the law school her mother had attended.

His hair had gone white prematurely, but-her mother assured her-in a cool, not creepy, way.

He was ten years older than her mother, which meant he was fifty.

He had long fingers and played the piano.

He couldn’t whistle.

Not quite enough to fill a standard biography, if you asked Josie, not that anyone ever bothered to.

She was sitting in bio lab next to Courtney. Josie ordinarily would not have picked Courtney as a lab partner-she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the chandelier-but that didn’t seem to matter. Mrs. Aracort was the teacher-adviser to the cheerleaders, and Courtney was one of those. No matter how skimpy their lab reports turned out, they still always managed to get A’s.

A dissected cat brain was sitting on the front desk next to Mrs. Aracort. It smelled of formaldehyde and looked like roadkill, which would have been bad enough, but in addition, last period had been lunchtime. (“That thing,” Courtney had shuddered, “is going to make me even more bulimic.”) Josie was trying not to look at it while she worked on her class project: each student had been given a wireless-enabled Dell laptop to surf the Net for examples of humane animal research. So far Josie had catalogued a primate study being done by an allergy pill manufacturer, where monkeys were made asthmatic and then cured, and another one that involved SIDS and puppies.

She hit a browser button by mistake and got a home page for The Boston Globe. Splashed across the screen was election coverage: the race between the incumbent district attorney and his challenger, the dean of students at Harvard Law School, a man named Logan Rourke.

Butterflies rose inside Josie’s chest. There couldn’t be more than one, could there? She squinted, leaning closer to the screen, but the photograph was grainy and there was a sunlight glare. “What’s wrong with you?” Courtney whispered.

Josie shook her head and closed the cover of her laptop, as if it, too, could hold fast to this secret.

He never used a urinal. Even if Peter just had to pee, he didn’t want to do it standing next to some gargantuan twelfth grader who might make a comment about, well, the fact that he was a puny ninth grader, particularly in his nether regions. Instead, he’d go into a stall and close the door for privacy.

He liked to read the bathroom walls. One of the stalls had a running series of knock-knock jokes. Others blurted the names of girls who gave blow jobs. There was one scribble that Peter found his eye veering toward repeatedly: TREY WILKINS IS A FAGGOT. He didn’t know Trey Wilkins-didn’t think he was even a student at Sterling High anymore-but Peter wondered if Trey had come into the bathroom and used the stalls to pee, too.

Peter had left English in the middle of a pop quiz on grammar. He truly didn’t think that in the grand scheme of life, it was going to matter whether or not an adjective modified a noun or a verb or just dropped off the face of the earth, which is what he was sincerely hoping would happen before he had to go back to class. He had already done his business in the bathroom; now he was just wasting time. If he failed this quiz, it would be the second in a row. It wasn’t even his parents’ anger that Peter was worried about. It was the way they’d look at him, disappointed that he hadn’t turned out more like Joey.

He heard the door of the bathroom open, and the busy slice of hallway noise that trailed on the heels of the two kids who entered. Peter ducked down, scanning beneath the stall door. Nikes. “I’m sweating like a pig,” said one voice.

The second kid laughed. “That’s because you’re a lard-ass.”

“Yeah, right. I could beat you on a basketball court with one hand tied behind my back.”

Peter could hear a faucet running, water splashing.

“Hey, you’re getting me soaked!”

“Aaaah, much better,” the first voice said. “At least now I’m not sweating. Hey, check out my hair. I look like Alfalfa.”

“Who?”

“What are you, retarded? The kid from the Little Rascals with the cowlick thing on the back of his head.”

“Actually, you look like a total fag…”

“You know…” More laughter. “I do sort of look like Peter.”

As soon as Peter heard his name, his heart thumped hard. He slid open the bolt in the stall door and stepped outside. Standing in front of the bank of sinks was a football player he knew only by sight, and his own brother. Joey’s hair was dripping wet, standing up on the back of his head the way Peter’s sometimes did, even when he tried to slick it down with his mother’s hair gel.

Joey flicked a glance his way. “Get lost, freak,” he ordered, and Peter hurried out of the bathroom, wondering if that was even possible when you’d been missing most of your life.

The two men standing in front of Alex’s bench shared a duplex, but hated each other. Arliss Undergroot was a Sheetrock installer with tattoos up and down both arms, a shaved head, and enough piercings in his head to have set off the metal detectors at the courthouse. Rodney Eakes was a vegan bank teller with a prized record collection of original cast recordings from Broadway shows. Arliss lived downstairs, Rodney lived upstairs. A few months back, Rodney had brought home a bale of hay, planning to use it for mulching his organic garden, but he never got around to it and the hay bale remained on Arliss’s porch. Arliss asked Rodney to get rid of the hay, but Rodney hadn’t moved fast enough. So one night, Arliss and his girlfriend cut the twine and spread the hay out over the front lawn.

Rodney called the police, and they had actually arrested Arliss on the grounds of criminal mischief: legalspeak for destroying a bale of hay.

“Why are the taxpayers of New Hampshire shelling out money for a case like this to be tried in court?” Alex asked.

The police prosecutor shrugged. “The Chief asked me to pursue it,” he said, but then he rolled his eyes.

He had already proven that Arliss had taken the bale of hay and spread it over the lawn-the burden of proof fulfilled. But a conviction in this case would mean Arliss would have a criminal record for the rest of his life.

He might have been a lousy neighbor, but he didn’t deserve that.

Alex turned to the prosecutor. “How much did the victim pay for that bale of hay?”

“Four dollars, Your Honor.”

Then she faced the defendant. “Do you have four dollars with you today?”

Arliss nodded.

“Good. Your case is filed without a finding conditional upon your paying the victim. Take four dollars out of your wallet and give it to the police officer over there, who will bring it to Mr. Eakes in the back of the courtroom.” She glanced at her clerk. “We’re taking a fifteen-minute recess.”

In chambers, Alex stripped off her robe and grabbed a pack of cigarettes. She took the back stairs to the bottom floor of the building and lit up, inhaling deeply. There were days when she was proud of her job, and then there were others, like today, when she wondered why she even bothered.

She found Liz, the groundskeeper, raking the lawn in front of the courthouse. “I brought you a cigarette,” Alex said.

“What’s wrong?”

“How did you know something was wrong?”

“Because you’ve been working here for how many years, and you’ve never brought me a cigarette.”

Alex leaned against the tree, watching leaves as bright as jewels catch in the tines of Liz’s rake. “I just wasted three hours on a case that never should have made it to a courthouse. I have a splitting headache. And I ran out of toilet paper in the bathroom in chambers and had to call the clerk in to get me a roll from maintenance.”