Nineteen Minutes (48 page)

Josie stared at her. In her whole life, she’d never known her mother to back down from any legal challenge; plus, hadn’t they just had a conversation about the fact that she wasn’t recusing herself?

She felt that sick sinking that came when the teacher called on her and she hadn’t been paying attention. What had her mother found out that she hadn’t known days ago?

“What happened?” Josie asked, and she hoped her mother wasn’t paying attention enough to hear the way her voice was jumping all over the place.

“Well, that’s the other thing I need to talk to you about,” her mother said. “The defense put you on their witness list. They may ask you to go to court.”

“What?” Josie cried, and for just one moment, everything stopped: her breath, her heart, her courage. “I can’t go to court, Mom,” she said. “Don’t make me. Please…”

Her mother reached out for her, which was a good thing, because Josie was certain that at any second, she was going to simply vanish. Sublimation, she thought, the act of going from solid to vapor. And then she realized that this term was one she’d studied for the science test she’d never had because of everything else that had happened.

“I’ve been talking to the detective, and I know you don’t remember anything. The only reason you’re even on that list is because you used to be friends with Peter a long, long time ago.”

Josie drew back. “Do you swear that I won’t have to go to court?”

Her mother hesitated. “Honey, I can’t-”

“You have to!”

“What if we go talk to the defense attorney?” her mother said.

“What good would that do?”

“Well, if he sees how upset this is making you, he might think twice about using you as a witness at all.”

Josie lay down on her bed. For a few moments, her mother stroked her hair. Josie thought she heard her whisper I’m sorry, and then she got up and closed the door behind her.

“Matt,” Josie whispered, as if he could hear her; as if he could answer.

Matt. She drew in his name like oxygen and imagined it breaking into a thousand tiny pieces, funneling into her red blood cells, beating through her heart.

Peter snapped a pencil in half and stuck the eraser end into his corn bread. “Happy birthday to me,” he sang under his breath. He didn’t finish the song; what was the point when you already knew where it was heading?

“Hey, Houghton,” a correctional officer said, “we got a present for you.”

Standing behind him was a kid not much older than Peter. He was rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet and he had snot running down his nose. The officer led him into the cell. “Make sure you share your cake,” the officer said.

Peter sat down on the lower bunk, just to let this kid know exactly who was in charge. The boy stood with his arms crossed tight around the blanket he’d been given, staring down at the ground. He reached up and pushed his glasses up his nose, and that’s when Peter realized there was something, well, wrong with him. He had that glassy-eyed, gum-lipped look of a special-needs kid.

Peter realized why they’d stuck the kid in his cell instead of anyone else’s: they figured Peter would be least likely to fuck with him.

He felt his hands ball into fists. “Hey, you,” Peter said.

The boy swiveled his head toward Peter. “I have a dog,” he said. “Do you have a dog?”

Peter pictured the correctional officers watching this comedy through their little video hookups, expecting Peter to put up with this shit.

Expecting something of him, period.

He reached forward and plucked the glasses off the kid’s nose. They were Coke-bottle-thick, with black plastic frames. The boy started to shriek, grabbing at his own face. His scream sounded like an air horn.

Peter put the glasses down on the floor and stomped on them, but in his rubber flip-flops that didn’t do much damage. So he picked them up and smashed them into the bars of the cell until the glass shattered.

By then the officers had arrived to pull Peter away from the kid, not that he was touching him anyway. They handcuffed him as the other inmates cheered him on. He was dragged down the hall to the superintendent’s office.

He sat hunched in a chair, with a guard watching him breathe, until the superintendent came in. “What was that all about, Peter?”

“It’s my birthday,” Peter said. “I just wanted to be alone for it.”

The funny thing, he realized, was that before the shooting, he’d believed that the best thing in the world was being left alone, so nobody could tell him he didn’t fit in. But as it turned out-not that he was about to tell the superintendent this-he didn’t much like himself, either.

The superintendent started to talk about disciplinary action; how this could affect him in the event of a conviction, what few privileges were left to be taken away. Peter deliberately tuned him out.

He thought instead of how angry the rest of the pod would be when this incident cost them television for a week.

He thought of Jordan’s bullied victim syndrome and wondered if he believed it; if anyone would.

He thought of how nobody who saw him in jail-not his mother, not his lawyer-ever said what they should: that Peter would be imprisoned forever, that he’d die in a cell that looked just like this one.

He thought of how he would rather end his life with a bullet.

He thought of how at night, you could hear the wings of bats beating in the cement corners of the jail, and screams. No one was stupid enough to cry.

At 9:00 a.m. on Saturday, when Jordan opened the door, he was still wearing pajama bottoms. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said.

Judge Cormier pasted on a smile. “I’m really sorry we got off on the wrong foot,” she said. “But you know how it is when it’s your child who’s in trouble…you just can’t think straight.” She stood arm in arm with the mini-me standing beside her. Josie Cormier, Jordan thought, scrutinizing the girl who was shaking like an aspen leaf. She had chestnut hair that hit her shoulders, and blue eyes that wouldn’t meet his.

“Josie is really scared,” the judge said. “I wondered if we could sit down for a minute…maybe you could put her at ease about being a witness. Hear whether or not what she knows will even help your case.”

“Jordan? Who is it?”

He turned around to find Selena standing in the entryway, holding on to Sam. She was wearing flannel pajamas, which might or might not have been one step more formal.

“Judge Cormier was wondering if we could talk to Josie about her testimony,” he said pointedly, trying desperately to telegraph to Selena that he was in deep trouble-since they all knew, with the exception perhaps of Josie, that the only reason he’d noticed up his intent to use her was to get Cormier off the case.

Jordan turned toward the judge again. “You see, I’m not really at that stage of planning yet.”

“Surely you have some idea of what you’re after if you call her as a witness…or you wouldn’t have put her on the list,” Alex pointed out.

“Why don’t you ring my secretary, and make an appointment-”

“I was thinking of now,” Judge Cormier said. “Please. I’m not here as a judge. Just as a mother.”

Selena stepped forward. “You come right on in,” she said, using her free arm to circle Josie’s shoulders. “You must be Josie, right? This here’s Sam.”

Josie smiled shyly at the baby. “Hi, Sam.”

“Baby, why don’t you get the judge some coffee or juice?”

Jordan stared at his wife, wondering what the hell she was up to now. “Right. Why don’t you come on in?”

Thankfully, the house looked nothing like it had the first time Cormier had showed up unannounced: there were no dishes in the sink; no papers cluttered the tables; toys were mysteriously missing. What could Jordan say-his wife was a neat freak. He pulled out one of the chairs at the kitchen table and offered it to Josie, then did the same for the judge. “How do you take your coffee?” he asked.

“Oh, we’re fine,” she said. She reached under the table for her daughter’s hand.

“Sam and I, we’re just going into the living room to play,” Selena said.

“Why don’t you stay?” He gave her a measured glance, one that begged her not to leave him alone to be eviscerated.

“You don’t need us distracting you,” Selena said, and she took the baby away.

Jordan sat down heavily across from the Cormiers. He was good at thinking on his feet; surely he could suffer through this. “Well,” he said, “it really isn’t anything to be scared of at all. I was just going to ask you some basic questions about your friendship with Peter.”

“We’re not friends,” Josie said.

“Yes, I know that. But you used to be. I’m interested in the first time you met him.”

Josie glanced at Alex. “Around nursery school, or maybe before.”

“Okay. Did you play at your house? His?”

“Both.”

“Did you have other friends who used to hang out with you?”

“Not really,” Josie said.

Alex listened, but she couldn’t help tuning a lawyer’s ear to McAfee’s questions. He’s got nothing, she thought. This is nothing.

“When did you two stop hanging around?”

“Sixth grade,” Josie answered. “We just kind of started liking different things.”

“Did you have any contact with Peter after that?”

Josie shifted in her chair. “Only in the halls and stuff.”

“You worked with him, too, right?”

Josie looked at her mother again. “Not for very long.”

Both mother and daughter stared at him, anticipatory-which was awfully funny, because Jordan was making this all up as he went. “What about the relationship between Matt and Peter?”

“They didn’t have one,” Josie said, but her cheeks went pink.

“Did Matt do anything to Peter that might have been upsetting?”

“Maybe.”

“Can you be more specific?”

She shook her head, her lips pressed tightly together.

“When was the last time you saw Matt and Peter together?”

“I don’t remember,” Josie whispered.

“Did they fight?”

Tears clouded her eyes. “I don’t know.” She turned to her mother and then slowly sank her head down to the table, her face pressed into the curve of her own arm.

“Honey, why don’t you go wait in the other room?” the judge said evenly.

They both watched Josie sit down on a chair in the living room, wiping her eyes, hunching forward to watch the baby playing on the floor.

“Look,” Judge Cormier sighed. “I’m off the case. I know that’s why you put her on the witness list, even if you’d never actually intended to call her. But I’m not questioning that right now. I’m talking to you parent to parent. If I give you an affidavit signed by Josie saying she doesn’t remember anything, would you think twice about putting her on the stand?”

Jordan glanced into the living room. Selena had coaxed Josie onto the floor with her. She was pushing a toy plane toward Sam’s feet. When he burst out with the sheer belly laugh that only a baby has, Josie smiled the tiniest bit, too. Selena caught his gaze, raised her brows in a question.

He’d gotten what he wanted: Cormier’s recusal. He could be generous enough to do this for her.

“All right,” he told the judge. “Get me the affidavit.”

“When they say to scald the milk,” Josie said, scrubbing another Brillo pad against the blackened bottom of the pot, “I don’t think they mean like this.”

Her mother picked up a dish towel. “Well, how was I supposed to know?”

“Maybe we should start with something easier than pudding,” Josie suggested.

“Like?”

She smiled. “Toast?”

Now that her mother was home during the day, she was restless. To that end, she’d taken up cooking-which was a good idea only if you happened to work for the fire department and needed job security. Even when her mother followed the recipe, it didn’t turn out the way it was supposed to, and then inevitably Josie would press her for details and find out she’d used baking powder instead of baking soda, or whole wheat flour instead of cornmeal (We didn’t have any, she complained).

At first, Josie had suggested nightly culinary classes out of self-preservation-she really didn’t know what to say when her mother plunked a charred brick of meatloaf down with the same dramatic reverence that might have been given to the Holy Grail. As it turned out, though, it was sort of fun. When her mother wasn’t acting like she knew it all (because she so totally didn’t, when it came to cooking), she actually was pretty amusing to hang out with. It was cool, too, for Josie to feel as if she had control over a situation-any situation, even if it happened to be making chocolate pudding, or scrubbing its final remains from the bottom of a saucepan.

Tonight, they’d made pizza-which Josie had counted as a success, until her mother had tried to slide the pizza out of the oven and it had folded, halfway, on the coils inside, which meant they had to make grilled cheese as a default dinner. They had salad out of a bag-something her mother couldn’t screw up, Josie figured, even if she worked hard at it. But now, thanks to the pudding disaster, there wasn’t any dessert.

“How did you get to be Julia Child, anyway?” her mother asked.

“Julia Child’s dead.”

“Nigella Lawson, then.”

Josie shrugged and turned off the water; stripped off the yellow plastic gloves. “I kind of got sick of soup,” she said.

“Didn’t I tell you not to turn on the oven when I wasn’t home?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t listen to you.”

Once, when Josie was in fifth grade, the students had had to build a bridge out of popsicle sticks. The idea was to craft a design that could withstand the most pressure. She could remember riding in the car across the Connecticut River, and studying the arches and struts and supports of the real bridges, trying her best to copy them. At the end of the unit, two engineers from the Army Corps came in with a machine specially designed to put weight and torque on each bridge, to see which child’s was the strongest.

The parents were invited in for the testing. Josie’s mother had been in court, the only mother not present that day. Or so she’d remembered until now, when Josie realized that her mother had been there, for the last ten minutes. She might have missed Josie’s bridge test-during which the sticks splintered and groaned, and then burst apart in catastrophic failure-but she’d been there in time to help Josie pick up the pieces.