Mercy (35 page)

Roanoke was silent for a moment. "You seem to have a great deal of anger i n you."

Jamie laughed. "You went to school for this?"

The doctor shuffled around the papers that comprised the file 245

of James MacDonald. He already knew what he'd write in his report. The defe ndant was articulate, hostile, and perfectly sane. He was capable of standi ng trial. He had a full comprehension of what he had done to his wife three months before.

And no remorse.

With a sigh he pulled out the morality test he always gave to the state pati ents pending trial. Kohlberg had created it; it was controversial in his fie ld--something about the scoring that was disadvantageous to women, but Roano ke tended to simply listen to the responses of the patients rather than rati ng them on a scale of scrupulousness. It involved a hypothetical situation: someone is suffering from a very rare and painful disease. All the medicine in the world to treat this disease is located in a drugstore in Switzerland, kept under lock and key, and is outrageously expensive. Without the medicin e, this person will die. Would you steal the medicine?

Morality was judged, supposedly, by the criteria a patient used to make a de cision. Some inflexibly refused to break the law. Others said that exception s could be made. Still others suggested trying to bargain with the owner of the drugstore.

But then you tried to change their answer by giving a name to the person wh o was ill. What if it was not a stranger, but your friend? Your pet? Your m other?

Roanoke cleared his throat. "I'm going to present a situation to you, I'd like you to tell me what you'd do in the circumstances." He raised the paper to scan it in the original situational form, as Kohlberg had designed it. " 'Your wife

,' " he read, " 'is dying of a very rare and painful disease.' " He stopped when he realized something was casting a shadow on the page. Ja mie MacDonald was standing, all six feet four inches of him towering over Roanoke Martin and effectively ending the interview. "You'll forgive me," Jamie said quietly, turning to leave, "but I think we've already covered t his."

"IT/Vas she joking when she said it?" Graham asked. "You know, a Vr funny ha-ha kind of comment you'd make to your best friend?" He and Allie were sitting on one side of a red plastic booth at the Cummington Taco Bell; Pauline Cioffi was on the other side. Jodi Picoult

She had come with her children, apologetically saying she really didn't have a choice in the matter; they seemed to be parasitically attached until they got their learner's permits for driving.

"Maggie had a sense of humor," Pauline said, "but she also had taste. You do n't say, 'I'm going to ask Jamie to kill me,' in the same breath you'd say y ou were going to ask him to take the luggage down from the attic and then fi x the back sprinkler."

"Those were the words she used?" Allie asked. "Exactly?" Pauline shook her head. "I can't be entirely sure, but it was close."

"And what did you say?" Graham pressed.

"I offered her the use of my kids for a week," Pauline said. "That would do in Mother Teresa."

Graham scrunched down slightly on the banquette. "So you did make a joke o ut of it."

"/ did, but when I said that, she grabbed my hand. That wasn't something sh e did a lot--you have to understand, she wasn't one of these touchy-feely f riends who hug all the time. Anyway, so she grabbed my hand and she made me look right at her and she said, 'I mean it.' "

From the indoor playground at the back of the restaurant, one of Pauline's children started wailing. "What made her think Jamie would do it?" Allie as ked.

Pauline turned her head in the direction of her crying son. "You're all rig ht," she called out. "Now what was that? Why would Jamie do it?" She shrugg ed. "Jamie would have slit his own throat if it made Maggie happy, and thou ght about the consequences after the fact."

Graham made a low, strangled noise. Allie glanced at him, but his fingers we re steepled together in front of his face and she could not read him well en ough to know what he was thinking. "You'd call their relationship a close on e, then?"

Pauline smiled sadly. "Apparently too close for comfort." Graham's eyebrows drew together. "So you think what Jamie did was wrong

?"

For a long moment, she did not speak. She let her eyes wander over to her chi ldren, who were climbing onto an oversized plastic tortilla shell. "No," Paul ine said finally. "I don't think what he did

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was wrong. I think what Maggie did was wrong." She turned back to Graham an d Allie, her tired brown eyes rounding softly in a way that almost made her beautiful. "The way I see it, love is just a bigger, stickier form of trus t. Maggie promised him it would be all right, and Jamie never thought twice about believing her. But it didn't work out that way, did it? She was my b est friend, God help me, but she's the one who ought to be on trial. She to ok advantage of the fact that her husband was crazy about her, and now he's being called a murderer."

Pauline reached down and blindly found her Coke, taking a long sip before s he released it and leaned back against the seat. She closed her eyes, but s he was smiling. "Maggie and I used to say that for my fortieth birthday--mi ne would come three years before hers--we'd go to Hawaii. Just the two of u s, she said, and Jamie stowing away in a forty-inch suitcase, since he woul dn't know what to do with himself if she went away." She blinked at Allie a nd Graham then; her eyes bright, her smile brittle. "Well," she said. "You know what they say about the best-laid plans."

JTJTow come doctors," Graham hissed across the waiting room to X. JL Alli e, "only subscribe to magazines no one wants to read, and even those are from the year one?"

Allie smiled at him. He was a good man; he always offered to pay for lunch and he never complained about the times Allie started questioning the witne sses more than she was supposed to. "It's a conspiracy," she suggested. "Th ey know it pisses you off."

Graham tossed down the magazine--some tiny little thing printed by a Catholi c Charities organization--and stretched his legs out in front of him. "Maybe this is how he gets his patients," he mused. "He keeps them waiting until t heir bodily functions fail from old age."

"I'm sure he'll call us soon. You wouldn't have wanted to go before that litt le boy, would you?"

Actually, Graham would have preferred it, since that would have meant that he and Allie were through with Cummington after three grueling day trips for interviews. He let his eyes wander over Allie MacDonald. She was only a few years older than he was, and there was a lot to find appealing. She always looked put together,

Jodi Picouk

even when she was wearing clunky L.L. Bean boots with a silk shirtwaist s o that she could trudge through the snow and the mud. She was a very good copilot when it came to finding shortcuts on a map. And she was remarkab ly tenacious.

"The doctor will see you now."

At the words, Graham bolted to his feet. Allie followed him into the privat e office where she'd met Dr. Dascomb Wharton more than two months before. H

e was not eating this time, but his bulk seemed to seep out of the armholes of his swivel chair like poured batter.

Graham extended his hand. "Good afternoon, sir. I'm Graham MacPhee, de fense counsel for James MacDonald."

"Cut to the chase," Dr. Wharton said. "I'm a busy man." He sifted through sev eral files on his desk and opened one with a heavy sigh. "Before you ask, the answer is yes, I'll testify, and here's what you want to know. It was a duct al carcinoma, first diagnosed in 1993, although the secondary site was discov ered before the lump in the breast." He read through his notes, his florid fa ce rising and falling with the efforts of his lips as he meticulously detaile d Maggie's deterioration.

When the doctor finished, Graham shifted slightly. "Did Maggie MacDonald ask you to kill her?"

"Of course not."

"But she asked for pain medication? For radiation treatment?" The doctor furrowed his brow. "I offered it. It's standard, in cases like hers

, to do whatever you can."

"Dr. Wharton," Graham said, "do you believe in euthanasia?"

"I took the Hippocratic oath, Mr. MacPhee. I'm always going to favor living

."

Allie let her eyes dart over the doctor's diplomas, wondering where Graham w as going with this. He sounded like he was practicing for the real thing, al though she didn't really see the point of antagonizing a defense witness.

"You've never upped a morphine dosage for an elderly patient? You've never

, well, speeded things along?'

"Excuse me," the doctor said. "I didn't realize I was the one being prosecute d."

Graham had the grace to blush. It was a lovely thing, in Allies 249

opinion, the way the dull red worked its way from his collar to the middle o f his ears. Cam never blushed.

"I'm just trying to figure out what was going on in Maggie's head," Graham explained. "Why she picked this particular option, versus another more or thodox one."

"I don't imagine there was much going on in her mind at all at that point," Wharton said. "She was in a considerable amount of pain; she was living wi th the fact that she was going to die, but not knowing how or when it was g oing to happen. Doesn't leave a lot of room for extraneous thought."

"Maggie knew she was going to die?" Graham asked. Wharton looked at him strangely. "I would think that was obvious."

"But did she ever come out and tell you she knew that she was going to die? F

or that matter, did you tell her that it was going to happen by a certain dat e?"

The doctor removed his glasses and began to polish the lenses on the front o f his white smock. "We talked about it the last time I saw her. You have to understand that her system was just shutting off, bit by bit. And I mean wha t I say when I tell you that I'll fight to keep someone alive, no matter wha t, but that doesn't mean I don't see gradients in the quality of life. What I said to Maggie, specifically, was that nobody knew the answer. The cancer was going to surface again, but it was anybody's guess where and when. It co uld have been that afternoon; it could have been three months from then." He glanced up. "I imagine it was a bit like being locked in the dark with a ra ttlesnake you could hear but never see."

Allie winced. Graham reached over instinctively and knotted his bony fin gers around her hand. "When was the last time you saw Maggie MacDonald?" Wharton looked down at the file. "September fifteenth," he said. "She had th e last appointment of the day."

Allie and Graham glanced at each other. "That gave her three days," Allie murmured. "Three days to make it happen."

/t was the longest period of time they had spent together with their clothes o n.

Jodi Picoult

Mia arrived two hours after Ailie had gone off for the third day in Graha m MacPhee's car, headed to Cummington overnight. She didn't carry a suitc ase--that would have been presumptuous and obvious to the neighbors. But Kafka was in her knapsack, and a change of underwear.

She was giddy with the idea of playing house. She was going to cook for Cam and sleep next to him the whole night long and sit in front of a fire with h im, their feet tangled together on the floor while they read Cam's travel ma gazines.

"I love this," she said on Sunday morning. There were waffles cooking in a Belgian waffle maker that had been stashed behind a broken Mr. Coffee in one of the kitchen cupboards. "I may never move out." Cam wrapped his hand around his mug of hot chocolate. "Now that would pr ove interesting."

He hadn't left the house all weekend. There was something about seeing Mia in his own bathrobe, his own shower, his own bed, that made him feel like a teenager doing something illicit. The house was beginning to smell of her, and instead of wondering if Allie would notice the difference, he found hi mself questioning how long it would last for him to enjoy. She had her nose stuck into a cookbook now. Both of them were admittedly ine pt when it came to cooking, so they'd had to rely on the arsenal of texts Al lie kept on a shelf beside the microwave. "We're going to burn these," she s aid, sniffing.

Cam stared down at the machine, a big black thing that was emitting smoke a t a frightening rate. "We should have stuck to eggs." Mia turned in his arms and locked her wrists behind his neck. She grinned at him, "Oh, I don't know. When you dream, you're supposed to dream big." Cam wrapped his hands around her bottom and boosted her up onto the kitc hen counter. "If you could go anywhere, where would you go?" Mia smiled down at him. It was warming up outside, and the sun was melting the snow on the roof, sending it in a steady drip past the kitchen window

. "Are you coming too?"

"I might," he said. "Depends on the destination."

"Okay, then . . . Turkey." She closed her eyes, remembering the little villa on the sea that she had rented for the month she could stand being a paid e scort for visiting Arab oil magnates. It had been white; everything had been white, except for the bright poppies on the front stoop and the remarkable blue of the sea, which faded so seamlessly into the sky it was difficult to see where one ended and the other began. "You'd wear baggy pajama bottoms an d drink iced coffee on the lanai."

"I wear boxers to bed and I don't like iced coffee," Cam said. Mia jumped off the counter and slid down the length of him. "It's my fanta sy. Don't spoil it." She cocked her head. "Where would you go?" He thought about it for a moment. He pictured Mia on the Italian Alps, her skis dangling from a gondola. He pictured her in Tokyo, surrounded by gig gling Japanese schoolchildren who pointed to her bright blue eyes. He pict ured her being tugged by his own hand through the halls of Carrymuir.

"Eight years back," he said simply. "That's where I'd want to go." He did not know if what he was implying was true; if, given the chance, he would have done things differently. Even with Mia in his arms, he could not completely forget Allie, who held the spatula a different way and who had spackled the splashboard tiles behind the sink herself while sashaying arou nd the kitchen to a Motown CD. It was difficult to imagine a life that hadn