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Summary
Chapter 3
Andy waits for Detective Palazzolo to leave the restroom before exiting the stall, picking up the detective’s card as she leaves. As she exits the hospital, Andy sees a group of people watching the video of Laura killing Jonah on CNN and reflects again on her mother’s calm demeanor during the incident. She waits outside the hospital for Gordon to arrive in his car and bumps into a young man wearing an Alabama baseball cap, whom she nicknames Alabama. He attempts to make small talk with her, though she remains silent. Laura is helped by hospital orderlies into Gordon’s car, and on the ride home she repeats her demand that Andy leave the house by the end of the day. Already emotionally overwhelmed, Andy asks what she has done wrong, and Laura responds impatiently, telling her that she has done nothing wrong but must learn to stop relying on her mother and to be more independent. Gordon and Laura, who are divorced, then have a tense conversation, during which Gordon outlines the legal difficulties that Laura will likely face. Jonah, he notes, was the son of a local sheriff who was recently killed on duty, and his family are prominent in the police force. Laura, he suggests, might even face the death penalty and must begin to organize a legal defense immediately, but Laura reacts angrily, shutting down the conversation and insulting her ex-husband.
At home, Andy showers and packs in her room above the detached garage while her parents argue in Laura’s house. In a distressed state, Andy reflects upon her mother’s past and her strange behavior. Her biological father, she notes, died in a car accident when Andy was an infant. Her maternal grandparents are dead, and her paternal grandparents, whom she suspects are racist, have had no contact with her or Laura since Laura’s marriage to Gordon. Gordon goes up to Andy’s room and hands her a sandwich and a bottle of wine. He informs Andy that Laura has agreed to pay off Andy’s student loans and to fund her return to New York, though Gordon intuits that Andy had struggled to succeed there and suggests that she move elsewhere. They discuss Laura’s behavior while a TV shows a local news report on the incident. They cannot make sense of Laura’s decision to kill rather than disarm Jonah, and Gordon notes that Laura has always been mysterious, often taking long, unexplained drives alone. Gordon offers to drive Andy back to his house, where she can stay until she figures out her next step, but Andy declines, preferring to walk to his house on foot to get some time alone.
Chapter 4
Andy wakes up in bed, having fallen asleep in a tipsy state despite her promise to pack quickly and make her way to Gordon’s house. Rather than calling him to pick her up, she decides to run to his house despite a heavy thunderstorm. She packs some things and begins to run in the rain before turning back home for her bike. In the garage, she fetches her bike and then realizes that an unknown man wearing a hoodie is walking around the house. He passes by the garage but doesn’t see her, and he then moves towards the main house. Though she is terrified, Andy follows him into the house, hoping to call the police on Laura’s phone. She hears the man, whom she nicknames Hoodie, speaking to her mother in her office as she sends a text message to the police from the kitchen. The man declares that he isn’t going to kill Laura yet, because he wants to scare her first. Laura offers him money, and when he declines, she says that he is never going to get what he wants. Andy looks on in horror as the man puts a plastic bag around Laura’s head, intending to suffocate her. Acting on instinct, she grabs a cast iron frying pan and runs into the office, hitting Hoodie in the side of the head before he can react.
The man falls and Laura, after freeing herself, instructs Andy to retriever the gun from Hoodie before he recovers. This soon proves unnecessary, however, as it becomes clear that Hoodie has received a fatal injury. As Andy looks on in horror, Hoodie’s eyes roll back into his head, he urinates, and then begins convulsing wildly. Laura embraces a shocked and guilt-stricken Andy and then instructs her to fetch the dead man’s wallet. While Andy cries, Laura hands her the man’s car keys and a makeup bag containing a flip phone, a key-card, and a wad of cash. Laura instructs her to take Hoodie’s car, drive to West Georgia, find a specific storage unit containing a car, and then exchange cars after unhooking the battery cables to cut power to the GPS. As police sirens get closer, she further instructs Andy not to use credit cards or contact her until she herself first contacts Andy. Laura, who expects to be arrested when the police arrive, reassures Andy of her love and then hurriedly sends her out of the house.
Chapter 5
Andy sees the police circle Laura’s house as she flees in the rain. She runs along the beach and crosses a sand dune to get to the road, where she looks for Hoodie’s car and finds a Ford truck with dark tinted windows. Using the key taken from Hoodie’s pocket, she commandeers the car and starts her journey towards West Georgia.
Analysis: Chapters 3-5
A major theme in Pieces of Me is the difficulty of truly knowing everything about another person, even a loved one. In these chapters of the novel, Andy is repeatedly forced to confront just how little she knows about Laura, and ultimately, about her own background. Andy is unable to reconcile her own image of her mother to the efficient, cold-blooded killer who so easily killed Jonah at the diner. The Laura she has always known is a kind, mild-mannered, and responsible woman who respects the law and has never received any form of military or self-defense training. The Laura she sees in the video, however, retains her calm, cool demeanor throughout a shocking and violent incident, dispatches the spree-shooter with ease, and unemotionally kills him even when it would have been just as simple to disarm him. Laura’s behavior following the incident is no easier for Andy to comprehend. She smokes cigarettes, dismisses the police as “pigs,” and coldly demands that Andy leave the house that very night. Her conversation with Hoodie implies familiarity with the criminal, and her stash of emergency supplies points to Laura’s involvement in a broader conspiracy. All at once, then, Laura is forced to reconsider everything that she thought she knew about her own mother, a woman she has known and relied upon her entire life.
Further, Laura’s surprising behavior at the diner raise thorny ethical questions that resist easy answers. Jonah Helsinger entered the diner with a clear plan to murder multiple people and then commit “suicide by cop” in a shootout with the police. His possessive and violent attitudes towards women – another major theme in the novel – lead to the death of both his ex-girlfriend and her mother, and he also would have killed Andy if not for Laura. Laura’s behavior, then, could be interpreted as reasonable self-defense in the face of a committed killer. Laura’s calm, calculated, and deliberate actions, however, seem far from those of a terrified mother or would-be victim. She overpowers the young man with ease and could have simply disarmed him or even just fled the scene with Andy. The video of the incident circulating on news networks makes Laura look like a deliberate, cold-blooded killer, and though Andy reasons that Laura may have been acting on adrenaline, she herself remains unconvinced by this explanation. At this point in the novel, it is unclear whether Laura’s decision to kill Jonah can be morally justified.
Read more about the Theme of Male Violence Against Women in the novel.
This already difficult ethical question is further complicated by Jonah’s background, which suggests that he may have been, at least in part, affected by a mental health crisis. His plans to commit a mass murder began around the same time as the murder of his father, a sheriff, by a bank robber. His almost child-like decision to dress up like a cowboy and his clear desire to be shot by the police hint at a psychological connection between his father’s death while on duty and his own plans to kill. Gordon is quick to point out that these details will work against Laura in a court of law, as a prosecutor would likely portray Jonah as the emotionally disturbed teenage son of a heroic cop whose turn to violence was a cry for help. Gordon’s concerns additionally point to the novel’s interests in broader social issues such as the relationship of law and justice. Because Jonah came from a family that is prominent in the local police force, Gordon anticipates that law enforcement will work together, even perhaps conspiring illegally, to avenge Jonah by seeking the maximum possible punishment for Laura. The novel, then, suggests that the police officers who are responsible for upholding the law might manipulate it to serve their own ends, sticking together to defend “their own” even at the cost of justice. Throughout the novel, the police often serve as a morally ambiguous force, sometimes working in the public interest but occasionally bending the law to their own needs.
