Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult Page A

trial attorney knows, you never ask the witness a question to which you do not know the answer.
    Five weeks later, Lacy was no longer just Alex’s midwife. She was also her confidante, her best friend, her sounding board. Although Lacy didn’t normally socialize with her clients, for Alex she’d broken the rules. She told herself it was because Alex-who had now decided to keep this baby-really needed a support system, and there wasn’t anyone else she felt comfortable with.
    It was the only reason, Lacy decided, she’d agreed to go out with Alex’s colleagues this evening. Even the prospect of a Girls’ Night Out, without babies, lost its luster in this company. Lacy should have realized two back-to-back root canals would have been preferable to dinner with a bunch of lawyers. They all liked to hear themselves talk, that was clear. She let the conversation flow around her, as if she were a stone in a river, and she kept refilling her wineglass with Coke from a pitcher.
    The restaurant was some Italian place with very bad red sauce and a chef who went heavy on the garlic. She wondered if, in Italy, there were American restaurants.
    Alex was in the middle of a heated discussion about some trial that had gone to jury. Lacy heard terms being tossed and fielded around the table: FLSA, Singh v. Jutla, incentives. A florid woman sitting to Lacy’s right shook her head. “It’s sending a message,” she said. “If you award damages for work that’s illegal, you’re sanctioning a company to be above the law.”
    Alex laughed. “Sita, I’m just going to take this moment to remind you that you’re the only prosecutor at the table and there’s no way in hell you’re going to win this one.”
    “We’re all biased. We need an objective observer.” Sita smiled at Lacy. “What’s your opinion on aliens?”
    Maybe she should have paid more attention to the conversation-apparently it had taken a turn for the interesting while Lacy was woolgathering. “Well, I’m certainly not an expert, but I did finish a book a little while ago about Area 51 and the cover-up by the government. It went into specific detail about cattle mutilation-I find it very suspicious when a cow in Nevada winds up missing its kidneys and the incision doesn’t show any trauma to tissue or blood loss. I had a cat once that I think was abducted by aliens. She went missing for exactly four weeks-to the minute-and when she came back, she had triangle patterns burned out on the fur on her back, sort of like a crop circle.” Lacy hesitated. “But without the wheat.”
    Everyone at the table stared at her, silent. A woman with a pinhole of a mouth and a sleek blond bob blinked at Lacy. “We were talking about illegal aliens.”
    Lacy felt heat creep up her neck. “Oh,” she said. “Right.”
    “Well, if you ask me,” Alex said, drawing attention in her own direction, “Lacy ought to be heading up the Department of Labor instead of Elaine Chao. She’s certainly got more experience…”
    Everyone broke up in laughter, as Lacy watched. Alex, she realized, could fit anywhere. Here, or with Lacy’s family at dinner, or in a courtroom, or probably at tea with the queen. She was a chameleon.
    It struck Lacy that she didn’t really know what color a chameleon was before it started changing.
    There was a moment at each prenatal exam when Lacy channeled her inner faith healer: laying her hands on the patient’s belly and divining, just from the lay of the land, in which direction the baby lay. It always reminded her of those Halloween funhouses she took Joey to visit-you’d stick your hand behind a curtain and feel a bowl of cold spaghetti intestines, or a gelatin brain. It wasn’t an exact science, but basically, there were two hard parts on a fetus: the head and the bottom. If you rocked the baby’s head, it would twist on the stem of its spine. If you rocked the baby’s bottom, it swayed. Moving the head moved only the head; moving the bottom