To a considerable extent, he lived in solitude with his fantasies.
Under orders to use it. When and where? “My lord, I shall use it in the middle of the night, and no one will be able to tell”-He broke off. Deliberately changed his thoughts. However, the first thoughts returned. But of course he wasn’t really going to use it, was he?
If he did, what would happen then? For once he couldn’t imagine. However, one thing was clear. There would be a tremendous row; the most tremendous row ever. But suppose no one could tell it was him?
He wouldn’t be beaten again, would he? The beating would be swallowed up in the awful row. Everything would change. Yes, that was the real point. Everything would change, including his life.
No one knew he had a knife. And no one would want to claim it after he’d used it as he meant to. Before house prayers that evening he had thought out exactly what he was going to do.
Going upstairs to bed he was so much preoccupied that he stumbled into someone without noticing who. “Oh, damn you, Jevons, why can’t you look where you’re going?” “Sorry, er-sorry, er-”
Most of the senior boys had single rooms. He had had one now for two terms. That night after lights out he lay silently in the dark, willing himself to keep awake.
But he fell asleep. When he woke it was two in the morning by his watch. Last chance to say no. But yes, he was still determined to do it. What had he to lose?
Got the knife? Got the torch? Got someone else’s bath towel he’d pinched from the changing room? He opened the door of his room, stepped into the passage and stood listening. Not a sound anywhere. It wasn’t far to the door of Stafford’s room (mind, no fingerprints).
And now he was standing beside Stafford’s bed, listening to his steady breathing as he lay on his back. He turned on the torch, shone it on Stafford’s throat and all in one movement plunged in the knife. The point was so sharp that he hardly felt it pierce. He let go of the hilt and all in one movement spread the towel over throat, knife and all, ran back to his room, shut the torch in a drawer and got back into bed.
All this he remembered clearly. And the aftermath? Well, the tremendous row. The shock throughout the school. The shock throughout the country. The newspapers, the headmaster, the police, the fingerprinting. (To what purpose? He had readily given his own.)
Apparently, no one had told the police that he was a boy on the wrong side of Stafford. So many boys were.
His parents had not been hard to persuade when he had asked them if he could leave at the end of the term.
I’M HIS GODFATHER, AND I’ve always kept up a friendly interest in him. We’ve been close friends for many years.
One night last week, after he’d come to dinner with me, he told me everything and said that he’d often had a mind to give himself up. I’ve told him to dismiss that notion altogether and assured him that his secret is entirely safe with me. I wouldn’t let on to a living soul.
Well, would you?
Jodi Picoult. WEIGHTS AND MEASURES
THE LOUDEST SOUND IN THE WORLD is the absence of a child. Sarah found herself waiting for it, the moment she opened her eyes in the morning: that satin ribbon of a giggle, or the thump of a jump off the bed-but instead all she heard was the hiss of the coffeemaker that Abe must have preset in the kitchen last night, spitting angrily as it finished its brewing. She glanced at the clock over the landscape of Abe’s sleeping body. For a moment, she thought about touching that golden shoulder or running her hand through his dark curls, but like most moments, it was gone before she remembered to act on it. “We have to get up,” she said.
Abe didn’t move, did not turn toward her. “Right,” he said, and from the pitch of his voice she knew that he hadn’t been asleep either.
She rolled onto her back.
“Right,” he repeated. He pushed off the bed in one motion and closeted himself in the bathroom, where he ran the shower long before he stepped inside, incorrectly assuming the background noise would keep anyone outside from hearing him cry.
THE WORST DAY OF Abe’s life had not been the one you’d imagine, but the one after that, when he went to choose his daughter’s coffin. Sarah begged him to go; said she could not sit and talk about what to do with their daughter as if she were a box of outgrown clothing that had to be stored somewhere safe and dry. The funeral director was a man with a bad comb-over and kind, gray eyes, and his first question to Abe was whether he’d seen his daughter…afterward. Abe had-once the doctors and nurses had given up and the tubes had been removed and the crash carts pulled away, he and Sarah were given a moment to say good-bye. Sarah had run out of the hospital room, screaming. Abe had sat down on the edge of the bed with the plastic mattress that crinkled beneath his weight, and had threaded his fingers with his daughter’s. For a brief, heart-stopping moment, he thought he’d felt her move, but it turned out to be his own sobbing, jarring the bed. He’d sat like that for a while, and then somehow managed to pull her onto his lap and crawl onto the cot himself, as if he were the patient.
What he remembered was not how still she was, or how her skin grew ashen under his touch, but how she had weighed just the tiniest bit less than she had that morning, when he’d carried her through the double doors of the emergency room. It wasn’t remarkable to think that he-a man who lived by weights and measures-would be sensitive to this even at a moment as overwhelming as that one. Abe recalled hearing medical examiners say a person who died lost twenty-one grams of weight-the measure of a human soul. He realized, though, holding his daughter in his arms, that the scale was all wrong. Loss should have been measured in leagues: the linear time line he would not spend with her as she lost her first tooth, lost her heart over a boy, lost the graduation cap she tossed into a silvered sky. Loss should have been measured circularly, like angles: the minutes between the two of them, the degrees of separation.
There were other questions, and decisions to be made, and finally, the funeral director took Abe into another room to choose a coffin. The samples were stacked against the wall, jet and mahogany sarcophagi gleaming at such a high polish he could see his own ravaged features in their reflections. The funeral director led Abe to the far end of the room, where three stunted coffins were propped like brave soldiers. They ranged from some that came up as high as his hip to one that was barely bigger than a bread box.
Abe picked one painted a glossy white, with gold piping, because it reminded him of his daughter’s bedroom furniture. He kept staring at it. Although the funeral director assured him that it was the right size, it did not seem large enough to Abe to hold a girl as full of life as his daughter. It was certainly not large enough, he knew, to pack inside the turtle shell of grief that he’d armored himself in this past day. Which meant, of course, that even after his daughter was gone, the sorrow would remain behind.
THE FUNERAL WAS HELD at a church neither Abe nor Sarah attended, a service arranged by Sarah’s mother, who in spite of this still managed to believe in God. At first, Sarah had fought it-how many idealistic discussions had she and Abe had about religion being akin to brainwashing; about letting their child choose her own rainbow of beliefs? — but Sarah’s mother put her foot down, and Sarah-still reeling-was weak enough to be toppled.
Sarah wondered why the pastor hadn’t mentioned the truly important things: like the fact that her daughter could take a toilet paper roll and turn it into a pretend video camera that occupied her imagination for hours. Or that
