When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound.
You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart.
You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like.
Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?
A mathematical formula for happiness: Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.
Happiness is what you choose to remember.
If you were drifting with a thousand other people, could you really still say you were lost?
Whether or not belive in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it's your fault - that if you'd tried better, worked harder, it wouldn't have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?
I know poeple who'll hear about the people who died, and will say that it was God's will. I know people who'll say it was bad luck. And then there's my personal favorite: They were just in the wrong place at hte wrong time.
Then again, you could say the same thing about me, couldn't you? One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.
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?
Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it.
But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?
The first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wound one day and heal the next.
Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person.
She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.
Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.
Imagine a world that seemed so much bigger than you. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn't even know existed.
A child who suffers from PTSD has made unsuccessful attempts to get help, and as the victimization continues, he stops asking for it. He withdraws socially, because he's never quite sure when interaction is going to lead to another incident of bullying.
Different people have different responses to stress. In Peter's case, I saw an extreme emotional vulnerability, which, in fact, was the reason he was teased. Peter didn't play by the codes of boys. He wasn't a big athlete. He wasn't tough. He was sensitive. And difference is not always respected, particularly when you're a teenager. Adolescence is about fitting in, not standing out.
Everyone would remember Peter for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy would be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive. For every recollection of him that involved a bullet or a scream, she would have a hundred others: of a little boy splashing in a pond, or riding a bicycle for the first time, or waving from the top of a jungle gym. Of a kiss good night, or a crayoned Mother's Day card, or a voice off-key in the shower. She would string them together - the moments when her child had been just like other people's. She would wear them, precious pearls, every day of her life; because if she lost them, then the boy she had loved and raised and known would really be gone.
Isn't it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?
When I was little, I used to pour salt on slugs. I liked watching them dissolve before my eyes. Cruelty is always sort of fun until you realize that something's getting hurt. It would be one thing to be a loser if it meant that no one paid attention to you, but in school, it means you're actively sought out. You're the slug, and they're holding all the salt. And they haven't developed a conscience. There's a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It's when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question though, is why? I think part of it is self preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it's banded together against an enemy. It doesn't matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself. You know why salt works on slugs? Because it dissolved in the water that's part of a slug's skin, so the water on the inside its body starts to flow out. They slug dehydrates. This works with snails, too. And with leeches. And with people like me. With any creature, really, too thin-skinned to stand up for itself.
I think a persons life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the directors cut-the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way. There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you've survived, or the minutes you've been stuck there. Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over.
"You came back fighting and furious at me. You told me you'd been looking for mermaids, and I interrupted you... I said that next time, you had to take me with you."
"Was there a next time?"
"Well, you tell me, you don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?"
"What's the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you're faking.
There was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher. You can feel people staring: it's like heat that rise from the pavement during summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don't have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it's about you.
I use to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they are staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn't tell. I mean, I was just me.
Then one day. When I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did.
That was the day I started to believe they might be right.
And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.
Once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?
"If there isn't a them, there can't be an us."
What she hadn't realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you'd felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.
If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were?
She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn't been thinking, she knew exactly what he'd felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.
To be truly popular, it has to look like something you are, when in reality, it's what you make yourself.
But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.
You can't undo something that's happened; you can't take back a word that's already been said out loud.
But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secret that some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else's smile; that she was standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real, and who, when you got right down to it, didn't want to remember, because it hurt even more than this.
Hope, Patrick knew, was the exact measure of distance between himself and the person who'd come for help.
He was a detective, but he didn't detect anything. It fell into his lap, already broken,
every time.
A trial was a stupid word, considering that an attempt was never good enough: you were supposed to toe the line, period.
When the truth came out, and no one wanted to be around her anymore, it stood to reason Josie wouldn't want to be around herself either.
Lacy truly believed that when you asked a patient How do you feel?, what was wrong wasn't nearly as important as what was right.
Happiness was relative what made you happy once might not make you happy now.
"Listen," she said. "I may not be what you want right now, but I'm all you've got."
It struck Lacy that she didn't really know what color a chameleon was before it started changing.
Bleeding heart, he'd called her.
Well. He should know.
He'd been the first to rip it to pieces.
She had tried to hide the discomfort behind the mask of competence that she usually wore, only to realize that in her hurry, she must have left it behind somewhere.
Success would come only at the expense of losing her cool, at the risk of turning into
someone she did not want to be.
Lie to yourself until it's true.
When you're hurting deeply, you go inward.
Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's because it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone's ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end.
But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.
"You couldn't argue the facts; you could only change the lens through which you looked at them."
"The problem isn't with rock lyrics, it's with the fabric of this society itself.
Since it had gotten so quiet in the room that you could hear the sound of your own doubts...
People had figured out all sorts of ways to make things seem different than they truly were.
Fumbling in the dark, Josie reached underneath the frame of her bed for the plastic bag she'd stashed-her supply of sleeping pills. She was no better than any of the other stupid people in this world who thought if they pretended hard enough, they could make it so. She'd thought that death could be an answer, because she was too immature to realize it was the biggest question of all.
Yesterday, she hadn't known what patterns blood could make when it sprayed on a whitewashed wall. She hadn't understood that life left a person's lungs first, and their eyes last. She had pictured suicide as a final statement, a fuck you to the people who hadn't understood how hard it was for her to be the Josie they wanted her to be. She'd somehow thought that if she killed herself, she'd be able to watch everyone else's reaction; that she'd get the last laugh. Until yesterday, she hadn't really understood. Dead was dead. When you died, you did not get to come back and see what you were missing. You didn't get to apologize. You didn't get a second chance.
Death wasn't something you could control. In fact, it would always have the upper hand.
He remembered learning in one of his social studies classes that in the Old West, when Native Americans were thrown into jail, they sometimes dropped dead. The theory was that someone so used to the freedom of space couldn't handle the confinement, but
Peter had another interpretation. When the only company you had was yourself, and when you didn't want to socialize, there was only one way to leave the room.
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?
He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that doesn't make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.
Why hadn't he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectation divided by reality-you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.
Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to create optimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, a fraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zero without reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at any provocation. Someone who was happy
would have little need to hope for change. But, conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality. He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the
unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.
"They're a-"
"-band," Patrick finished. "I know."
"They're not just a band," Orestes said with reverence, his fingers flying over the keyboard. "They're the modern voice of the collective human conscience."
"Tell that to Tipper Gore."
"Who?"
Patrick laughed. "She was before your time, I guess."
"What did you used to listen to when you were a kid?"
"The cavemen, banging rocks together," Patrick said dryly.
Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows up
and becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won't catch anyone's attention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.
It never failed to amaze Alex how, with the brush of a hand, the track of someone's life might veer in a completely different direction.
He wished he knew what to say to make her feel better, but the truth was, he
didn't feel all that great himself and he didn't know if there were even any words in the English language to take away this kind of stunning shock, this understanding that the world isn't the place you thought it was.
"I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn't tell. I mean, I was just me.
Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did.
That was the day I started to believe they might be right.
Peter was, simply, what a person would look like if you boiled down the most raw emotions and filtered them of any social contract. If you hurt, cry. If you rage, strike out.
If you hope, get ready for a disappointment.
If only you could keep them that way: cast in amber, never growing up.
"What does it feel like?" he asked.
"What does what feel like?"
Peter thought for a moment. "Being at the top."
Josie reached across him for another packet of material and fed it into the stapler. She did three of these, and Peter was certain that she was going to ignore him, but then she spoke. "Like if you take one wrong step," she said, "you're going to fall."
Over her shoulder was Josie-and for the first time, Alex could really see a piece of herself in her daughter. It wasn't so much the shape of the face but the shine of it; not the color of the eyes but the dream caught like smoke in them. There was no amount of expensive makeup that would make her look the way her Josie did; that was simply what falling in
love did to a person.
Could you be jealous of your own child?
She had smiled her way through the births and had offered the new mothers the support and the medical care that they needed, but the moment she'd sent them on their way, cutting that last umbilical cord between hospital and home, Lacy knew she was giving them the wrong advice. Instead of easy platitudes like Let them eat when they
want to eat and You can't hold a baby too much, she should have been telling them the truth: This child you've been waiting for is not who you imagine him to be. You're strangers now; you'll be strangers years from now.
In reality, Lacy realized, this dividing line between her and Peter had been there for years. If you kept your chin up, you might even be able to convince yourself there was
nothing separating you. It was only when you tried to cross it, like now, that you understood how real a barrier it could be.
"You're lying," he said-not angry, not accusing. Just as if he was stating the facts, in a way that she wasn't.
"I am not-"
"You can say it a million times, but that doesn't make it any more true." Peter smiled then, so guileless that Lacy felt it smart like a stripe from a whip. "You might be able to fool Dad, and the cops, and anyone else who'll listen," he said. "You just can't fool another liar."
"Can I tell you something? Off the record?"
Alex nodded.
"Before I took this job, I used to work in Maine. And I had a case that wasn't just a case, if you know what I mean."
Alex did. She found herself listening in his voice for a note she hadn't heard before-a low one that resonated with anguish, like a tuning fork that never stopped its vibration. "There was a woman there who meant everything to me, and she had a little boy who meant everything to her. And when he was hurt, in a way a kid never should be, I moved heaven and earth to work that case, because I thought no one could possibly do a better job than I could. No one could possibly care more about the outcome." He looked directly at Alex. "I was so sure I could separate how I felt about what had happened from how I had to do my job."
Alex swallowed, dry as dust. "And did you?"
"No. Because when you love someone, no matter what you tell yourself, it stops being a job."
"What does it become?"
Patrick thought for a moment. "Revenge."
Security was a mirage; being tied down hardly counted when the other end of the rope had unraveled.
He felt, sometimes, like the keeper of memories-the one who had to facilitate that invisible transition between the way it used to be and the way it would be from now on.
"I knew that all the attributes he was teased for, at age five, were going to work in his favor by the time he was thirty-five; ¦but I couldn't get him there overnight. You can't fast-forward your child's life, no matter how much you want to.
"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."
"I didn't want to invade his privacy; I didn't want to fight with him; I didn't want anyone else to ever hurt him. I just wanted him to be a child forever." She glanced up, crying harder now. "But you can't do that, if you're a parent. Because part of your job is letting them grow up."
"What if what you know isn't what people want to hear?"
Peter tucked the glasses into the front pocket of Jordan's jacket. "I kind of like knowing you're taking care of them," he said. "And there isn't all that much I really want to see."
Jordan nodded. He walked out of the holding cell and said good-bye to the deputies. Then he headed toward the lobby, where Selena was waiting.
As he approached her, he put on Peter's glasses. "What's up with those?" she asked.
"I kind of like them."
"You have perfect vision," Selena pointed out.
Jordan considered the way the lenses made the world curve in at the ends, so that he had to move more gingerly through it. "Not always," he said.
"What's your name again?"
"Peter. Peter Granford."
Lewis opened up his mouth to speak, but then just shook his head.
"What?" The boy ducked his head. "You just, uh, looked like you were going to say something important."
Lewis looked at this namesake, at the way he stood with his shoulders rounded, as if he did not deserve so much space in this world. He felt that familiar pain that fell like a hammer on his breastbone whenever he thought of Peter, of a life that would be lost to prison. He wished he'd taken more time to look at Peter when Peter was right in front of his eyes, because now he would be forced to compensate with imperfect memories or-even worse-to find his son in the faces of strangers.
Lewis reached deep inside and unraveled the smile that he saved for moments like this, when there was absolutely nothing to be happy about. "It was important," he said. "You remind me of someone I used to know."
Lacy took the box she'd brought up from the basement and placed each item inside. Here was the crime scene: look at what was left behind and try to re-create the boy.
Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details. It couldn't save a single child-not the ones who'd gone to Sterling High that day, expecting the normal; not Josie Cormier; certainly not Peter. So what was the recipe? Was it love, mixed with something else for good measure? Luck? Hope? Forgiveness?
Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuous room, sure - a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter - but it was also a room from which there really wasn't an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn't want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted.
You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart.
You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like.
Can you hate someone for what they have done, but still love them for whom they had been?
A mathematical formula for happiness: Reality divided by Expectations.There were two ways to be happy:improve your reality or lower your expectations.
Happiness is what you choose to remember.
If you were drifting with a thousand other people, could you really still say you were lost?
Whether or not belive in Fate comes down to one thing: who you blame when something goes wrong. Do you think it's your fault - that if you'd tried better, worked harder, it wouldn't have happened? Or do you just chalk it up to circumstance?
I know poeple who'll hear about the people who died, and will say that it was God's will. I know people who'll say it was bad luck. And then there's my personal favorite: They were just in the wrong place at hte wrong time.
Then again, you could say the same thing about me, couldn't you? One person's trauma is another's loss of innocence.
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?
Something still exists as long as there's someone around to remember it.
But will you miss me? More importantly - will I miss you? Does either one of us really want to hear the answer to that question?
The first question she was asked was What do you do? as if that were enough to define you. Nobody ever asked you who you really were, because that changed. You might be a judge or a mother or a dreamer. You might be a loner or a visionary or a pessimist. You might be the victim, and you might be the bully. You could be the parent, and also the child. You might wound one day and heal the next.
Love [is] supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it [falls] apart at the deatils. It [can't] save a single person.
She suddenly remembered studying the brain in science class- how a steel rod pierced a man's skull, and he opened his mouth to speak Portuguese, a language he'd never studied. Maybe it would be like this, now, for Josie. Maybe her native tongue, from here on in, would be a string of lies.
Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.
Imagine a world that seemed so much bigger than you. Imagine waking up one morning and finding a piece of yourself you didn't even know existed.
A child who suffers from PTSD has made unsuccessful attempts to get help, and as the victimization continues, he stops asking for it. He withdraws socially, because he's never quite sure when interaction is going to lead to another incident of bullying.
Different people have different responses to stress. In Peter's case, I saw an extreme emotional vulnerability, which, in fact, was the reason he was teased. Peter didn't play by the codes of boys. He wasn't a big athlete. He wasn't tough. He was sensitive. And difference is not always respected, particularly when you're a teenager. Adolescence is about fitting in, not standing out.
Everyone would remember Peter for nineteen minutes of his life, but what about the other nine million? Lacy would be the keeper of those, because it was the only way for that part of Peter to stay alive. For every recollection of him that involved a bullet or a scream, she would have a hundred others: of a little boy splashing in a pond, or riding a bicycle for the first time, or waving from the top of a jungle gym. Of a kiss good night, or a crayoned Mother's Day card, or a voice off-key in the shower. She would string them together - the moments when her child had been just like other people's. She would wear them, precious pearls, every day of her life; because if she lost them, then the boy she had loved and raised and known would really be gone.
Isn't it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?
When I was little, I used to pour salt on slugs. I liked watching them dissolve before my eyes. Cruelty is always sort of fun until you realize that something's getting hurt. It would be one thing to be a loser if it meant that no one paid attention to you, but in school, it means you're actively sought out. You're the slug, and they're holding all the salt. And they haven't developed a conscience. There's a word we learned in social studies: schadenfreude. It's when you enjoy watching someone else suffer. The real question though, is why? I think part of it is self preservation. And part of it is because a group always feels more like a group when it's banded together against an enemy. It doesn't matter if that enemy has never done anything to hurt you-you just have to pretend you hate someone even more than you hate yourself. You know why salt works on slugs? Because it dissolved in the water that's part of a slug's skin, so the water on the inside its body starts to flow out. They slug dehydrates. This works with snails, too. And with leeches. And with people like me. With any creature, really, too thin-skinned to stand up for itself.
I think a persons life is supposed to be like a DVD. You can see the version everyone else sees, or you can choose the directors cut-the way he wanted you to see it, before everything else got in the way. There are menus, probably, so that you can start at the good spots and not have to relive the bad ones. You can measure your life by the number of scenes you've survived, or the minutes you've been stuck there. Probably, though, life is more like one of those dumb video surveillance tapes. Grainy, no matter how hard you stare at it. And looped: the same thing, over and over.
"You came back fighting and furious at me. You told me you'd been looking for mermaids, and I interrupted you... I said that next time, you had to take me with you."
"Was there a next time?"
"Well, you tell me, you don't need water to feel like you're drowning, do you?"
"What's the difference between spending your life trying to be invisible, or pretending to be the person you think everyone wants you to be? Either way, you're faking.
There was a difference between people looking at you because they wanted to be like you, and people looking at you because your misfortune brought them one rung higher. You can feel people staring: it's like heat that rise from the pavement during summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don't have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it's about you.
I use to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they are staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn't tell. I mean, I was just me.
Then one day. When I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did.
That was the day I started to believe they might be right.
And that was the greatest heartbreak of all- no matter how spectacular we want our children to be, no matter how perfect we pretend they are, they are bound to disappoint. As it turns out, kids are more like us than we think: damaged, through and through.
Once the world was pulled out from beneath your feet, did you ever get to stand on firm ground again?
"If there isn't a them, there can't be an us."
What she hadn't realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you'd felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.
If you spent your life concentrating on what everyone else thought of you, would you forget who you really were?
She stared at Peter, and she realized that in that one moment, when she hadn't been thinking, she knew exactly what he'd felt as he moved through the school with his backpack and his guns. Every kid in this school played a role: jock, brain, beauty, freak. All Peter had done was what they all secretly dreamed of: be someone, even for just nineteen minutes, who nobody else was allowed to judge.
To be truly popular, it has to look like something you are, when in reality, it's what you make yourself.
But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.
You can't undo something that's happened; you can't take back a word that's already been said out loud.
But there was a part of her that wondered what would happen if she let them all in on the secret that some mornings, it was hard to get out of bed and put on someone else's smile; that she was standing on air, a fake who laughed at all the right jokes and whispered all the right gossip and attracted the right guy, a fake who had nearly forgotten what it felt like to be real, and who, when you got right down to it, didn't want to remember, because it hurt even more than this.
Hope, Patrick knew, was the exact measure of distance between himself and the person who'd come for help.
He was a detective, but he didn't detect anything. It fell into his lap, already broken,
every time.
A trial was a stupid word, considering that an attempt was never good enough: you were supposed to toe the line, period.
When the truth came out, and no one wanted to be around her anymore, it stood to reason Josie wouldn't want to be around herself either.
Lacy truly believed that when you asked a patient How do you feel?, what was wrong wasn't nearly as important as what was right.
Happiness was relative what made you happy once might not make you happy now.
"Listen," she said. "I may not be what you want right now, but I'm all you've got."
It struck Lacy that she didn't really know what color a chameleon was before it started changing.
Bleeding heart, he'd called her.
Well. He should know.
He'd been the first to rip it to pieces.
She had tried to hide the discomfort behind the mask of competence that she usually wore, only to realize that in her hurry, she must have left it behind somewhere.
Success would come only at the expense of losing her cool, at the risk of turning into
someone she did not want to be.
Lie to yourself until it's true.
When you're hurting deeply, you go inward.
Nobody wants to admit to this, but bad things will keep on happening. Maybe that's because it's all a chain, and a long time ago someone did the first bad thing, and that led someone else to do another bad thing, and so on. You know, like that game where you whisper a sentence into someone's ear, and that person whispers it to someone else, and it all comes out wrong in the end.
But then again, maybe bad things happen because it's the only way we can keep remembering what good is supposed to look like.
"You couldn't argue the facts; you could only change the lens through which you looked at them."
"The problem isn't with rock lyrics, it's with the fabric of this society itself.
Since it had gotten so quiet in the room that you could hear the sound of your own doubts...
People had figured out all sorts of ways to make things seem different than they truly were.
Fumbling in the dark, Josie reached underneath the frame of her bed for the plastic bag she'd stashed-her supply of sleeping pills. She was no better than any of the other stupid people in this world who thought if they pretended hard enough, they could make it so. She'd thought that death could be an answer, because she was too immature to realize it was the biggest question of all.
Yesterday, she hadn't known what patterns blood could make when it sprayed on a whitewashed wall. She hadn't understood that life left a person's lungs first, and their eyes last. She had pictured suicide as a final statement, a fuck you to the people who hadn't understood how hard it was for her to be the Josie they wanted her to be. She'd somehow thought that if she killed herself, she'd be able to watch everyone else's reaction; that she'd get the last laugh. Until yesterday, she hadn't really understood. Dead was dead. When you died, you did not get to come back and see what you were missing. You didn't get to apologize. You didn't get a second chance.
Death wasn't something you could control. In fact, it would always have the upper hand.
He remembered learning in one of his social studies classes that in the Old West, when Native Americans were thrown into jail, they sometimes dropped dead. The theory was that someone so used to the freedom of space couldn't handle the confinement, but
Peter had another interpretation. When the only company you had was yourself, and when you didn't want to socialize, there was only one way to leave the room.
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?
He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something that doesn't make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.
Why hadn't he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectation divided by reality-you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.
Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to create optimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, a fraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zero without reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at any provocation. Someone who was happy
would have little need to hope for change. But, conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality. He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the
unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.
"They're a-"
"-band," Patrick finished. "I know."
"They're not just a band," Orestes said with reverence, his fingers flying over the keyboard. "They're the modern voice of the collective human conscience."
"Tell that to Tipper Gore."
"Who?"
Patrick laughed. "She was before your time, I guess."
"What did you used to listen to when you were a kid?"
"The cavemen, banging rocks together," Patrick said dryly.
Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be a quarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows up
and becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won't catch anyone's attention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.
It never failed to amaze Alex how, with the brush of a hand, the track of someone's life might veer in a completely different direction.
He wished he knew what to say to make her feel better, but the truth was, he
didn't feel all that great himself and he didn't know if there were even any words in the English language to take away this kind of stunning shock, this understanding that the world isn't the place you thought it was.
"I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn't tell. I mean, I was just me.
Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did.
That was the day I started to believe they might be right.
Peter was, simply, what a person would look like if you boiled down the most raw emotions and filtered them of any social contract. If you hurt, cry. If you rage, strike out.
If you hope, get ready for a disappointment.
If only you could keep them that way: cast in amber, never growing up.
"What does it feel like?" he asked.
"What does what feel like?"
Peter thought for a moment. "Being at the top."
Josie reached across him for another packet of material and fed it into the stapler. She did three of these, and Peter was certain that she was going to ignore him, but then she spoke. "Like if you take one wrong step," she said, "you're going to fall."
Over her shoulder was Josie-and for the first time, Alex could really see a piece of herself in her daughter. It wasn't so much the shape of the face but the shine of it; not the color of the eyes but the dream caught like smoke in them. There was no amount of expensive makeup that would make her look the way her Josie did; that was simply what falling in
love did to a person.
Could you be jealous of your own child?
She had smiled her way through the births and had offered the new mothers the support and the medical care that they needed, but the moment she'd sent them on their way, cutting that last umbilical cord between hospital and home, Lacy knew she was giving them the wrong advice. Instead of easy platitudes like Let them eat when they
want to eat and You can't hold a baby too much, she should have been telling them the truth: This child you've been waiting for is not who you imagine him to be. You're strangers now; you'll be strangers years from now.
In reality, Lacy realized, this dividing line between her and Peter had been there for years. If you kept your chin up, you might even be able to convince yourself there was
nothing separating you. It was only when you tried to cross it, like now, that you understood how real a barrier it could be.
"You're lying," he said-not angry, not accusing. Just as if he was stating the facts, in a way that she wasn't.
"I am not-"
"You can say it a million times, but that doesn't make it any more true." Peter smiled then, so guileless that Lacy felt it smart like a stripe from a whip. "You might be able to fool Dad, and the cops, and anyone else who'll listen," he said. "You just can't fool another liar."
"Can I tell you something? Off the record?"
Alex nodded.
"Before I took this job, I used to work in Maine. And I had a case that wasn't just a case, if you know what I mean."
Alex did. She found herself listening in his voice for a note she hadn't heard before-a low one that resonated with anguish, like a tuning fork that never stopped its vibration. "There was a woman there who meant everything to me, and she had a little boy who meant everything to her. And when he was hurt, in a way a kid never should be, I moved heaven and earth to work that case, because I thought no one could possibly do a better job than I could. No one could possibly care more about the outcome." He looked directly at Alex. "I was so sure I could separate how I felt about what had happened from how I had to do my job."
Alex swallowed, dry as dust. "And did you?"
"No. Because when you love someone, no matter what you tell yourself, it stops being a job."
"What does it become?"
Patrick thought for a moment. "Revenge."
Security was a mirage; being tied down hardly counted when the other end of the rope had unraveled.
He felt, sometimes, like the keeper of memories-the one who had to facilitate that invisible transition between the way it used to be and the way it would be from now on.
"I knew that all the attributes he was teased for, at age five, were going to work in his favor by the time he was thirty-five; ¦but I couldn't get him there overnight. You can't fast-forward your child's life, no matter how much you want to.
"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."
"I didn't want to invade his privacy; I didn't want to fight with him; I didn't want anyone else to ever hurt him. I just wanted him to be a child forever." She glanced up, crying harder now. "But you can't do that, if you're a parent. Because part of your job is letting them grow up."
"What if what you know isn't what people want to hear?"
Peter tucked the glasses into the front pocket of Jordan's jacket. "I kind of like knowing you're taking care of them," he said. "And there isn't all that much I really want to see."
Jordan nodded. He walked out of the holding cell and said good-bye to the deputies. Then he headed toward the lobby, where Selena was waiting.
As he approached her, he put on Peter's glasses. "What's up with those?" she asked.
"I kind of like them."
"You have perfect vision," Selena pointed out.
Jordan considered the way the lenses made the world curve in at the ends, so that he had to move more gingerly through it. "Not always," he said.
"What's your name again?"
"Peter. Peter Granford."
Lewis opened up his mouth to speak, but then just shook his head.
"What?" The boy ducked his head. "You just, uh, looked like you were going to say something important."
Lewis looked at this namesake, at the way he stood with his shoulders rounded, as if he did not deserve so much space in this world. He felt that familiar pain that fell like a hammer on his breastbone whenever he thought of Peter, of a life that would be lost to prison. He wished he'd taken more time to look at Peter when Peter was right in front of his eyes, because now he would be forced to compensate with imperfect memories or-even worse-to find his son in the faces of strangers.
Lewis reached deep inside and unraveled the smile that he saved for moments like this, when there was absolutely nothing to be happy about. "It was important," he said. "You remind me of someone I used to know."
Lacy took the box she'd brought up from the basement and placed each item inside. Here was the crime scene: look at what was left behind and try to re-create the boy.
Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fell apart at the details. It couldn't save a single child-not the ones who'd gone to Sterling High that day, expecting the normal; not Josie Cormier; certainly not Peter. So what was the recipe? Was it love, mixed with something else for good measure? Luck? Hope? Forgiveness?
Sometimes Josie thought of her life as a room with no doors and no windows. It was a sumptuous room, sure - a room half the kids in Sterling High would have given their right arm to enter - but it was also a room from which there really wasn't an escape. Either Josie was someone she didn't want to be, or she was someone who nobody wanted.
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