Nineteen Minutes

by Jodi Picoult

If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn’t be filled?

It came down to this, Lacy realized: You stared at the stranger in front of you and decided, categorically, that this was no longer your son. Or you made the decision to find whatever scraps of your child you still could in what he had become. Was that even really a choice, if you were a mother?

“Everyone talks like it’s all right to be different, but America’s supposed to be this melting pot, and what the hell does that mean? If it’s a melting pot, then you’re really just trying to make everyone the same, aren’t you?”

It was simple to say that behind every terrible child stood a terrible parent, but what about the ones who had done the best they could? What about the ones, like Lacy, who had loved unconditionally, protected ferociously, cherished mightily—and still had raised a murderer?

So much of the language of love was like that: you devoured someone with your eyes, you drank in the sight of him, you swallowed him whole. Love was sustenance, broken down and beating through your bloodstream.

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.

Happiness wasn’t just what you reported; it was also how you chose to remember.

As she stared at the papers coming out of the machine, she considered how strange it was to measure success by how closely each product resembled the one that had come before.

I’ve always sort of wondered, though: If everyone else’s opinion is what matters, then do you ever really have one of your own?

Who would want the first hands touching her newborn to be the same hands that had held a murderer’s when he crossed the street; that had brushed his hair off his forehead when he was sick; that had rocked him to sleep?

When you begin a journey of revenge, start by digging two graves: one for your enemy, and one for yourself.

Maybe it was our own damn fault that men turned out the way they did, Selena thought. Maybe empathy, like any unused muscle, simply atrophied.

And he realized that this was a sort of happiness, too: you would say anything—do anything—to keep your son smiling like that, as if there was something to still smile about, even if every word felt like you were swallowing glass.

“I didn’t want to be treated like him,” Josie said, answering her mother, when what she really meant was, I wasn’t brave enough.

“When you look into your baby’s eyes,” Lacy said softly, “you see everything you hope they can be . . . not everything you wish they won’t become.”

Something still exists as long as there’s someone around to remember it.