Mad Honey: A Novel by Jodi Picoult, Jennifer Finney Boylan Page B

face close to the cage that separates him from the front of the squad car. You definitely want to be up front, I think, hearing Mike’s voice from a lifetime ago.
    I turn to him, standing on the driveway beside his unmarked car. “I’ll just grab my keys.”
    “Go back inside, Liv,” Mike says gently. “He’s going to the station. You can’t come.” He hesitates. “Don’t make this worse than it already is.”
    Don’t let him see you cry, I think.
    I haven’t thought that for a long time. I can barely force a reply through my throat. “What do I do?”
    Mike’s gaze is soft. “Your attorney will know,” he answers.
    I watch the police car until I cannot see the taillights, like the crimson blink of the creature you once thought lived under the bed or in the closet, the thing that scared you most.
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    —
    I TRY TO call Jordan, but of course, he’s on a plane and not answering. It takes me ten minutes to realize that I am going to ignore Mike, and another ten to get to the police station. Even though it is the middle of the night, there is a desk sergeant behind the Plexiglas, who looks at me with a bored expression.
    “My son was brought in here. Asher Fields. He was arrested.” The words dissolve on my tongue, bitter as almonds. “I would like to see him.”
    “Well, you can’t.”
    “I’m his mother.”
    “And he’s legally an adult,” the sergeant says. Something in my expression must dig at him, though, because he offers me a crumb of information. “Look. He’s getting booked. Fingerprints, photograph, searched, pockets emptied. He’ll be in a cell for the night. You can see him first thing in the morning—”
    I glance at my watch; six hours till sunrise…
    “—in superior court,” the sergeant finishes.
    In a daze I drive back home. I put on a kettle to make coffee, because there’s no way I’m going to get any sleep. But while the water is heating, I find myself wandering into Asher’s room.
    The sheets are mussed and musky with sleep. A bag of pretzelssits on his nightstand, half-empty. The charger of his cellphone curls shyly under the bed. On his desk is a stack of textbooks and the empty space where his laptop usually rests. There’s a plastic laundry basket of neatly folded clothes that he has been living out of, instead of bothering to put them away into his dresser.
    I sit on the bed and turn on the lamp on the nightstand. Then I pick up the pillow. It smells like Asher.
    I have a brief, panicked thought that he might not ever be in this room again.
    On the heels of that thought, I wonder if Ava Campanello is sitting in her daughter’s bedroom, thinking the same thing. And how much worse it would be to live with the reality of that, instead of simply the possibility.
    I quickly place the pillow back against its mate.
    I should call Braden, I think. He deserves to know what is happening.
    But at the same time, Braden and I do not speak for good reason. I have spent twelve years excising him cleanly from my life and Asher’s.
    To call Braden is to invite him to take control again, and I don’t know if I could survive that.
    Maybe I won’t need to tell Braden anything. Maybe this will be over and done with in a day, a misunderstanding realized, and we will all get back to our lives.
    My gaze catches on the wall directly across from the bed.
    There is a framed, signed Bobby Orr photo I got Asher for his birthday when he was fourteen, and a sketch he did once of my old Ford truck. Between them is a hole in the sheetrock.
    Asher put it there about a month and a half ago. He’d been in a foul temper, snarling like a bear with a thorn in his paw. I had heard the noise and had run upstairs to find him, red-faced and chagrined, holding his fist. I looked from the smashed wall to my normally stoic son, my mind tamping down the dormant memories of Braden. Well, I said, I hope whatever’s pissed you off is worth what you’re going to spend on repairing that . He swore he’d