House Rules

by Jodi Picoult

‘But this one guy followed me to the bathroom. I have to be able to protect myself.’ ‘Right. And what do you think is going to happen tomorrow morning when you walk into the courthouse and the metal detectors start beeping? And the stupid reporters all watch you pull a steak knife out of your sock?’ He frowns. This is one of those harebrained Aspie schemes of his, the ones he never thinks through. Like when he called the cops on my mom two months ago. To Jacob, I’m sure it seemed perfectly logical. To the rest of the free world, not so much.

These are the movies my mother took as evidence, as proof that I was now a different child than the one she’d started with. I don’t know what she was thinking when she recorded them. Surely she didn’t want to sit and watch all this over and over, the visual equivalent of a slap in the face. Maybe she was keeping them in the hope that one day a pharmaceutical executive might arrive unexpectedly for dinner, watch the tapes, and cut her a check for damages.

Suddenly, my chest feels like it’s shrinking, the way it sometimes does when I am standing with a group of kids in school and I realize I’m the only one who did not get the punch line of the joke. Or that I am the punch line of the joke. I start to think maybe I’ve done something wrong. Really wrong. Because I do not know how to fix it, I pick up the remote control and rewind the tape almost back to the beginning, to the time when I was no different from anyone else.

I don’t believe in self-pity. I think it’s for people who have too much time on their hands. Instead of dreaming of a miracle, you learn to make your own. But the universe has a way of punishing you for your deepest, darkest secrets; and as much as I love my son – as much as Jacob has been the star around which I’ve orbited – I’ve had my share of moments when I silently imagined the person I was supposed to be, the one who got lost, somehow, in the daily business of raising an autistic child.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

‘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,

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.

‘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. H...

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.

Think whatever you want. The only thing that really matters is this: I’d do it all over again.