Mercy (38 page)

"He can't," Allie admitted. "But I couldn't change that on my Christmas budg et."

Mia had had a difficult time finding a Christmas present for Cam. She woul d have loved to buy him a sweater or a faded old chambray shirt, so that w hen she undressed him she would finally be removing something chosen for h im by her own hand, but she'd realized this was impossible. How could he e xplain to his wife a new item in his wardrobe that Allie knew nothing abou t? Cam wasn't the type to do casual shopping in a mall; he would tell Alli e he needed a pair of jeans and scribble down his waist size and inseam. The same went for pieces of art, or things electronic. Mia couldn't buy him t ickets to a Bruins game because she herself was a beggar for his time, and sh e couldn't presume to steal any more of it. She had worked herself into a fur y over choosing a gift, to the point where one morning she had called in sick to the flower shop and spent the day sifting through catalogs that she'd spr ead over the bed at the Inn like a bright-colored quilt.

Jodi Picoult

"So Jamie's trial is coming up," Mia said.

Allie stopped sweeping for a fraction of a second. "In less than a month. It's hard to believe."

"That it came so soon?"

"No," Allie said. "That it's coming at all." She set the broom against the worktable and put her hands on her hips. "I'm probably going to be out mo st of the time between now and New Year's. Graham asked me to do some kind of telephone survey."

"A survey?" Mia spooned up the last of her yogurt and rested the cup on the large waxy leaf of a plantain. "For what?"

"For the jury. I think he's trying to outsmart the process. I'm supposed to m eet with some university guy today who's going to explain it all to me." And then I'll go home to Cam. The words were unspoken, because they were ro utine for Allie. Mia looked down at the table, following the whorls in the wood. She wanted what this woman had. She wanted to be able to take Cam's e xits and entries so easily that her heart would not beat at the back of her throat and her palms would not itch with anticipation.

Six more hours, she told herself. Six more hours and he belongs to you aga in. She looked up to find Allie watching her, a strange expression written across her face. "You don't mind?" Allie asked, and for a moment Mia froz e, wondering how important the question she had missed was.

"Mind?" she repeated.

"Running the shop alone." Allie smiled a little. "Being your own boss. Again

."

Mia stood up and dumped her empty yogurt container down the hole in the wor ktable that was centered over a thirty-two-gallon trash can. "Of course not

," she said. "I'd be happy to take your place." As a personal rule, Graham MacPhee did not believe in blind dates. He thou ght they revealed a flaw as deep as a mountain fissure, as if simply agree ing to one meant you were branding your forehead with the word DESPERATE. He went out when he felt like it, which was not often in this tiny town. I n the back of his mind was the niggling suspicion that his mother believed he was gay.

His mother was a dental hygienist, and was always offering up the daughter o r niece of one of her patients. "Lovely," she'd say over 267

Sunday dinner. "Magna cum laude from Skidmore." Graham had once picked up g irls at a country-western bar two towns south of Wheelock, but it was a hal f-hour drive and one of his excursions had left him with a raging case of c rabs, so he had been single and celibate for some time. For his last birthd ay, his mother had enrolled him in a video dating service. He had never bee n to their office; he threw out their newsletter.

Then his mother found Veronica Daws. She had come in with an emergency cav ity. She taught third grade. She had curly blond hair and a figure, his mo ther said, to die for. She was willing to go out with Graham.

"That's fine," he had said, "but you don't have my consent." So his mother had started making Veronica Daws her personal crusade. She so mehow procured a picture of the girl, who was passably attractive, and mail ed it to Graham return receipt requested. She brought up the girl's name du ring every phone conversation and meal until Graham realized it would be ea sier to simply go out on one blind date than have his mother on his back fo r the rest of his natural life.

"I heard about your trial," Veronica Daws said, playing with her Caesar sal ad. Through an entire appetizer and now the salad course, she had managed t o shuffle her food into unlikely configurations, but Graham had yet to see her put a bite into her mouth. "It sounds pretty heavy." Heavy? Fie scowled, then tried to cut the woman a little slack. How else wo uld she be able to reduce the mass of roiling emotions that made up Jamie M

acDonald's defense to a third-grader's level?

"Did he do it?" she asked.

She was looking up at him with these baby-blue eyes, raking her fork over h er plate, flawlessly acting out the suggestions in whatever universal women

's dating manual said that you were supposed to get the guy talking about h imself. "Yes," Graham said.

Veronica shuddered. "Eww. How can you be in the same room as him?" Graham glanced over her shoulder at the clock. "It's not like he's Charlie Man son," he said. "I don't exactly have to fear for my life."

"But still," Veronica pressed. "He killed her. I mean, I know she was dying a nd all, but that doesn't mean he has the right to play God." Graham flashed her a smile. "Would you excuse me?" He

| Jodi Picoult

walked to the rest room and stepped inside, mentally taking note of the fact that the only window was too high off the floor for him to reach and too narr ow for him to ever escape through. Sighing, he sat down on a toilet seat in a stall, still wearing his trousers.

Sure, Jamie had been playing God. But then again, he'd assumed the position at Maggie's request. Graham could rationalize a hundred different ways--a life spent as a vegetable was not a life; a person in pain has the right to end that pain; an act of mercy precludes an act of murder. In the abstract

, most people would agree to those statements. We were all programmed to th ink the best, weren't we? But that didn't cancel out the fact that Jamie Ma cDonald had held a pillow over his wife's face until she stopped breathing. Whatever he had believed he was doing, he had believed strongly, and these emotions were so real that he had killed another person. In the long run, it didn't matter what label Graham pinned on these feelings. Call it love, call it fear, call it desperation, call it mercy. It could have been all or none of these. And still, Jamie Mac-Donald had felt it and had don e the thing that the overwhelming majority of us wouldn't do. Graham knew why Veronica Daws didn't buy it. Why the waiter had looked at h im sideways when he'd first given his name at the reservations desk. It was difficult to see past the reality of a victim's body into the shady areas of motivation and controlling passions. It was tough to admit to yourself t hat someone else had more courage than you would in the same situation, or that it was possible to love someone in a way that you had not personally e xperienced.

And because it was so hard for outsiders to understand, Graham knew the on ly chance he had of getting Jamie off was to make him look like he'd gone crazy.

Graham flushed the toilet twice, as if this would help to clear his mind. H

e washed his hands and patted them dry against his thighs and decided he wo uld use the rest of the dinner as a mock trial, trying to sway Veronica ove r to his side. She was young and impressionable; she could have been a memb er of a jury. You know, he would say when he sat down again, in law there's often a lot that does not meet the eye.

Graham mentally reviewed a hasty opening statement and walked out of the bathroom. Veronica Daws, fluffed and bubbly and

waiting, immediately gave a tiny wave. Graham straightened his tie and wond ered if in matters of love, he'd ever be as lucky as Jamie.

#,'yvel Adams, professor of sociology at the University of Massa-X chusetts in Amherst, worked out of a closet. He said he didn't need a lot of light an d space to collect and shape data.

Allie and Graham stood out in the hall. It was lit by fluorescent balls stra tegically hung every three feet, which gave Graham dark shadows beneath his eyes and a five o'clock beard. Allie wondered if it was just the dungeon off ices, or if he'd been having trouble sleeping.

Graham had explained the principle of a jury survey on the long ride to Amh erst. The final list of jurors for Jamie's case would come from a list of t hree hundred names, pulled from a random sampling of citizens in Berkshire County. The survey she'd be working on with Fyvel Adams would involve quest ioning their own sampling of citizens. Then, personality attributes of resp ondents who had been sympathetic would be computer-matched to demographics such as age, sex, occupation, political affiliation. Based on the results o f the computer run, the characteristics of the perfect juror for Jamie's ca se could be outlined, and these would be used as a benchmark when it came t ime for Graham to select a jury.

Fyvel Adams was of a height such that his Adam's apple bobbed directly in f ront of Allie's eyes. He seemed all throat--he was skinny and his head seem ed to recede to a point at the top. He had two students working with him, t hesis candidates who were happy to volunteer their services to Allie. He spread out several papers on the floor so that Allie and Graham could re ad them. "We've got the basics," he said, running his fingertip down the fi rst page. "Age, sex, religion, nationality, what have you." He flipped this over and began making a graph that neither Allie nor Graham could decipher

. "Then you get the fuzzy gray statements."

Allie knelt down and read the poorly typed second page. The instructions as ked respondents to rate their answers, 1 being strong agreement, 4 being st rong disagreement. She glanced at the first statement: In certain circumsta nces, a person should be allowed to break the law. She glanced at Graham. Success can be measured directly from how hard you work at it. Jodi Picoult

God created man: science had little to do with it.

If a person is pronounced brain-dead, he or his family should be able to ask a doctor to turn off the life-support machines.

"Well," she said, taking a deep breath. "This ought to be fun." She pulled out of her pocketbook the Berkshire County voter registry, mark ed off with a red dot at every ninety-seventh name. "How long do we have t o finish this?"

Graham rubbed his hand over his face. "A week," he said. "You can call from my office; the kids will take the last half of the registry pages and call f rom the sociology department phones."

He smiled at Adams, thanked him for his cooperation, and gently turned Al lie away by the elbow. "Who the hell am I kidding?" Allie smiled up at him. "You get a gold star for effort." Graham smirked. "In this case, I need to have the highest grades in the who le goddamned class."

They drove in near silence back to the law offices of MacPhee and MacPhee, where Allie spent the remainder of the afternoon with a tub of chicken sa lad from the coffee shop and a headset she'd taken from Graham's secretary which allowed her to talk on the phone without holding a receiver. She ha d just made her fortieth call when Graham walked into the room.

"Any luck?" he asked, flipping through the pile of completed surveys. Allie shrugged. "Incredibly inflexible people. I think everyone I've called moonlights for the KKK," she said. "Except for those few who told me they di dn't have time to talk to a telemarketer, and how would I like it if they ca lled me at home?"

Graham laughed. "I hope you gave out your number." He stuck a spoon into t he chicken salad and took a bite. "I'm going out. I have my own hunches ab out jury surveys."

Allie glanced up at him. "Bring me coffee. It's going to be a rough night." When he reached his car, Graham opened his briefcase and pulled out his co py of the voter registration list. The first name on it was Arlene Abbot, 59 Cheshire Road, Wheelock.

He drove down Main Street, making only one wrong turn on his way to find a vaguely familiar street. The Abbot house was a tiny ranch, with a huge Am erican flag hanging from a pole in the front yard. He noted this next to h er name.

Two more Wheelock residents had what Graham considered symbols of inflexi bility: chain-link fences, German shepherds, manicured hedges. With a sin king feeling in his gut, he wrote down these details.

The next name he picked was Lawrence Alban, 7572 Groundhog Path, Hancock. It was a bit of a drive to the bordering town, but he found the house with the help of a local map. Hubcaps in the yard, house painted shocking gree n, homemade bird feeders. He smiled, and scrawled a big star next to this first glimmer of nonconformity.

For Christmas, Mia had given him the world. Cam turned the tiny globe around in his hands, letting the tissue paper from the box fall to the floor. Ther e was no axis; it was speared in place by a strange magnetic attraction, or maybe by magic.

"Brush up on your geography," she said, spinning the globe and offering one of those lies that always seem just within reach when it is Christmas. "We

're going to go, someday."

"This is great," he said, delighted. He kissed her. "This is perfect." He t hought of Allie, who had bought him a guitar that he didn't know how to pla y. Mia hadn't purchased something she wanted him to have; she had read his mind and given him what he wanted. "Where did you get it?" Mia couldn't stop smiling. He liked it; he really liked it. "A catalog. One o f those stores that have presents for the man who already has everything."

"I don't have everything," Cam said. / don't have you.

"Oh, I don't know." Mia slid an arm around his waist. "You've got a toehol d on the American dream."

Cam thought about that. The house, the cars, the backyard. The wife and the shadows of kids who would someday arrive. It made a pretty, colorful paint ing, but it was frightening to think of Mia standing somewhere outside the frame.

"I thought you should have something you could keep at the office," Mia sai d quietly. "Small enough to stuff in a bottom drawer." Cam brushed her hair away from her face. "I'm not hiding this. I'd just spen d the whole day taking it out and playing with it, anyway." They lay on their bellies on the bed at the Inn, the globe at arm's length. Li ke blind men, they shirred their fingers over the relief map Jodi Picoult