Leaving Home: Short Pieces

by Jodi Picoult

  I wonder what commodity my mother thinks she is trading in. Love? Respect? Self-confidence?

  My father leans over and kisses my forehead. "You look so much like her."

  I have heard that all my life. "Do you really think she's just taking a vacation?"

  "How could it be anything else?" my father says, but I get the feeling he's asking me, not giving me the answer.

  #

  Before you could see the hairline cracks in our family - when Dad was actually home for dinner; before Devon hit puberty and became the slouched, hairy, sarcastic beast that he is now; back when my mother seemed happy - we used to play a game at dinner. Each night we'd take turns asking a question for which there was no easy answer: If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it? If you could change one event in history, what would it be? What would the title of your biography be, and who would you want to write it?

  I can't remember all the answers, but there were definitely some that surprised me. Like when Devon said that if he had to choose one person to have dinner with, it would be Nelson Mandela, when I would have bet my entire state quarter collection that he hadn't even known who Nelson Mandela was. Or when my father said that the one thing he'd take to a desert island - the only thing he needed - was not his Blackberry, but my mother. The one that sticks in my mind, though, was a question my mother had asked: If you had to have amnesia for the rest of your life, and you could only keep one memory, what would it be?

  We all had a different one. My father talked about the time we all went to a Mexican restaurant and stole the balloons reserved for little kids, then sucked out the helium and sang like the munchkins from the Wizard of Oz. Devon picked the time he gave me a haircut the day before my birthday - and clipped off my bangs right at the scalp. For me, it was the school play where I was the buttercup fairy. My mother had stood up in the audience the whole thirty seconds I was on that stage and whistled through her teeth so loud it was hard to hear the other kids with bigger parts speaking their lines.

  At the time, I'd thought my mother's memory was a cop-out - not detailed enough, not specific. "The last best one of the four of us," she'd said.

  #

  The morning after my mother leaves us, I am the Queen of Energy. I set bowls on the table, and spoons, and a variety of cereal. I feel so helpful I can barely stand it; usually I sit down and wait for everything to be brought to me while I yawn my way into consciousness. Devon clatters into the kitchen, his hair still wet from his shower. "I'm starving," he says, pouring himself a mountain of Special K.

  "What do you think they serve for breakfast at the Ritz?" I ask.

  "It's the Ritz," he mutters. "They probably serve you whatever you want."

  "Waffles?"

  "With whipped cream and strawberries."

  "Omelettes," I say. "Made to order."

  Devon snorts. "Special K. Except it's more special there." He reaches for the milk and shakes it. "Is there any more in the fridge?"

  "No."

  "Well, this is empty."

  "It's not my fault," I shoot back.

  "What else is there to eat?"

  "How am I supposed to know?"

  We both stop arguing; this is usually the moment where Mom turns around at the stove and tells us to do that very same thing. Devon reaches across the table for the carton of orange juice and pours it over his cereal. "What?" he accuses, when I stare at him. "It's orange juice plus calcium. That's practically milk."

  Last week, during dinner, Devon had announced he doesn't want to go to college. He wants to travel the world with his band, go build huts on a tropical island, find himself. My father had hit the ceiling at this announcement. You couldn't find yourself with both hands free, he said. You want to find yourself? Do it with a good, liberal arts education. Devon had lashed out like a bear caught in a trap he hadn't seen coming.

  How could Dad know anything about the world when he hadn't seen anything but the inside of the New York Mercantile Exchange for the past twenty years?

  By now, my father's come downstairs. He smells like the weekend: shampoo and fresh cut grass and aftershave on his cheeks. "So!" he says, too brightly. "What's for breakfast?"

  I picture Mom eating her Belgian waffle in bed.

  After the fight with Devon, my father had turned to my mother: Charlotte, tell him I'm right.

  I try, but I can't remember what she said.

  #

  Three days after my mother leaves us, we realize that the vacuum cleaner is missing. What's really unfortunate about this is that we make the discovery after Devon has knocked over a spider plant - and all its soil - onto the living room rug. Four days after she leaves us, we give up trying to cook a meal and get all its bits and pieces - meat, potatoes, vegetables - on the table at once; instead, we order in pizza.

  At school, I've had to make excuses - the reason my mother can't come to the Art Open House is because she's visiting her sister; she didn't sign my independent reading sheet because she's gone to a conference on Sanibel Island. The only person who knows the truth is my best friend, Nuala. I can trust her implicitly; I swear I could tell her I'm a hermaphrodite and she wouldn't even blink. When I said that my mother had left, she asked if it was an affair, something that I hadn't even thought of.

  One day Nuala comes into homeroom with an article she's printed off the Internet. "Check this out," she says. "Someone did a study on stay-at-home moms and figured out what their salary would be if they had one."

  I scan the article. Basically, the salary was a compilation of real jobs, pro-rated:

  22 hours of housekeeper, 15 hours of day care center teacher, 13.6 hours of chef, right on down to van driver (4.7 hours) and psychologist (3.9 hours). They figured in overtime pay, because it was a 91-hour week. If my mom was working for a company, instead of us, she'd be making $134,121.

  "That's a lot," I say.

  Nuala folds the paper and sticks it in her backpack again. "It's only a lot if you actually get paid," she said.

  #

  That night, I can't sleep. I pad downstairs in my bare feet to the kitchen. It is now Devon's job to wash the dishes, but he's been playing with his band after school and so there's a stack of bowls in the sink that's precariously curved, like a clock tower in a Dr. Seuss book. A round of melon on the cutting board has flies crawling across its belly.

  Someone's left the milk out. Again.

  It isn't until my father speaks, in a hushed whisper, that I even realize he's sitting at the kitchen table with the phone pressed up to his ear. "It will be different," he says.

  "I promise."

  I hear phrases snipped from their sentences: taken for granted, because, without you. I try not to listen. Instead, I think of all the things that fall apart when you remove their core: a head of lettuce; a solar system; a household like ours.

  There is a muffled beep; my father hanging up the phone. I am just about to back out of the kitchen when he says, "How much of that did you hear?"

  "Nothing," I lie.

  I sit down across from him at the table. "She left once before," my father says.

  He couldn't have surprised me more if he'd announced that my mother used to be a trapeze artist in the circus. "I don't remember that."

  "That's because you and Devon were babies." My father looks up at me. "She was gone for three months."

  Three months?

  I can feel the question that I've wanted to ask all this time, filling me like a hot-air balloon, so that I burst at the seams. "Didn't she love us?"

  "So much," my father says. "So much that she started to forget who she used to be."

  My eyes start to burn. What I haven't told anyone - not Nuala, not Devon, not my dad - is what I think about when it's just me and the stoic moon alone in my room at night. That if I'd been a better daughter - prettier, smarter, funnier - she might have had reason to stay. "Can't you go get her?" I beg. "Can't you just bring her back?"

  My father puts his hand over mine.
"That's what I did the first time, when she'd been gone a week. And she ran away again." He shakes his head. "You can't force a wind to blow the way you want it to, Jenna. You have to hope it gets there on its own."

  He leaves me sitting in the dark, and I guess I fall asleep there, because I dream about my mother. She is in the circus, wearing a sparkly bodysuit, her hair pulled back into a ballerina's bun. I see the cloud of chalk rising from her palms as she climbs a ladder hung on the rungs of real stars. I think of what it must feel like to fly.

  And then, I can see the rest of us. We're all miles below, looking up. We're connected to her by the thinnest of strings - spider-silk, gossamer - nearly invisible, unless you happen to be the ones tethering her to the ground.

  #

  The second week after my mother leaves us, I start missing appointments. My father is at work, and although Devon is supposed to drive me to my orthodontist appointment, he forgets and stays late at Yak's house writing a heavy metal ballad.

  Instead of relying on Devon to pick me up after soccer practice, I take my bike and ride home five miles every night. I have never been so strong, or in such good shape. I imagine my mother looking at me when she comes home, and being impressed. It's all because of you, I will say.

  Don't think she's neglecting us. Every night at seven o'clock, she calls. We talk like ordinary mothers and daughters, as if it is perfectly normal for her to be living in a hotel thousands of miles away. She tells us all about San Francisco. She talks about the hotel: slippers left beside the bed during turndown service; about the exercise room staffed with people who bring you cups of cold water while you're on the treadmill; about how, when you call the front desk, they say, Yes, Mrs. Hamilton, what can we do for you, as if you are the only guest in the entire hotel.

  "Wow," I say. "It sounds amazing."

  "Tell me about your day," she'll say. "How was your French test? Did you win your soccer game?"

  I answer, and then I ask her when she's coming home.

  On the sixteenth day, she says, "Why don't you come get me?"

  #

  It really shouldn't be this easy to slip away. Flying is out of the question, of course - even if I had the money or means to get to an airport, I couldn't get on a plane as an unaccompanied minor. But here's an interesting fact - you only have to be fifteen to travel alone on a bus. And I can get to San Francisco in twenty-two hours.

  I know where my father keeps his spare cash - Devon let me in on that secret two years ago. It's in the left dress shoe he wears when he puts on his tuxedo, which is never, which is why it's a good place to store money. I feel guilty taking it all ($546.93) so I conservatively borrow two hundred dollars. The Greyhound ticket only costs $88.50. No matter how expensive the cabs are in San Francisco, I'll still have enough to get to the Ritz.

  On the bus I sit next to an old woman who seems convinced I'm a teenage runaway. If only you knew, I think. I make up this story about how my mother and father are divorced; how my mom is sick and needs my help and I have a crippling fear of planes and have to travel this way. There is so much garbage coming out of my mouth that I might as well be littering the whole bus. But, amazingly, the woman buys it. She even gives me the potholder she's crocheted on the journey, as a special gift to boost my mother's spirits.

  I'm tired when I arrive - number one, it's 4:30 in the morning; number two, I've had to transfer buses twice - and I'm sure I look worse than I did when I had the stomach flu for a whole week, but the doorman still opens the door of the taxi as if I am royalty.

  "Checking in, Miss?" he asks, and he directs me up the elevators to reception.

  The lobby is a marble palace; an arrangement of flowers I have never even seen in books before rises like a fountain spray from a table in the center. Somewhere, there's a fountain; the water rushes like a river. It smells like jasmine, like peace.

  With my knapsack hiked on my shoulders I walk up to the front desk. I am almost expecting them to greet me by name, like my mother says they do when she calls downstairs, but then again, why would they know me yet? "I'm here to see my mother," I say. "Mrs. Hamilton?"

  The woman behind the desk has olive skin and a smile as neat and even as a string of pearls. "Is she expecting you?"

  "Sort of," I mumble, but by then the woman is calling my mother's room.

  I can't really remember the next few minutes. All I know is that almost as soon as the phone is hung back up again, the elevator behind me chimes and then there's something I've almost forgotten - the vanilla tones of her perfume, mixed with the sweet scent of the miracle you've been waiting for. My face fits into the curve of her neck, just like it did when I was little, and her arms close around me like a safety net. I can't even speak; as it turns out, there aren't words for when you're so full of light you think you might explode or faint or scream, or maybe all three.

  "Oh, Jenna. I missed you so much," my mother cries. She glances over my head at the lobby around us. "Where's Devon? And your dad?"

  I blink. "In White Plains."

  She draws away, her face flushed. "Are you telling me," she says, and then she swallows, as if the words rose too quickly in her throat. "Are you telling me you came here from New York all by yourself?"

  "Well," I point out, "you told me to come get you."

  "I meant all of you!" my mother cries. "Including an adult! Don't tell me your father let you---"

  "He doesn't know I'm here."

  She takes a step backward, as if I've slapped her. "For God's sake, Jenna, what were you thinking? You could have gotten lost, or hurt, or -"

  "So could you!" I shout. "You, of all people, have no right to tell me what to do!"

  We are both shocked; I don't think I've ever heard myself yell so loud. I'm supposed to be the quiet one, the one who never speaks, or at least the one who never makes herself heard.

  My mother's cheeks bloom, there's a color for shame. "I'm your mother."

  "Oh, really? What kind of mother leaves her family to go live at a Ritz-Carlton? You don't get to be a mother part-time, when you feel like it. It's all or nothing." By now, my face is flushed, too; my eyes are stinging. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

  The way I'd planned it in my mind, my mother would be so overjoyed to have me here that she wouldn't be able to let me out of her sight, much less her arms. The way I'd planned it, there was no screaming involved.

  My mother stares at me for a long moment, and then she reaches for my hand.

  She draws me toward the elevator, and only when we're inside, alone, does she start talking again. "I just wanted to know what it could have been like," she says softly.

  "What?"

  The elevator doors open, and she faces me. "Someone else's life," she answers.

  #

  As soon as we reach her room, she calls my father. There's no answer, but it's early - he and Devon could easily sleep through the ringing of the phone. "We'll try again a little later," she says, but I am too busy looking around.

  The bed, wide as an ocean, is dressed in white. An overstuffed chair sits across from the mahogany desk. In the bathroom I can just make out the jutting lip of a marble tub the color of sandstone. "I don't make the bed," my mother says. "I don't clean the bathroom. I don't have to cook. I don't have do anything, and it magically gets done."

  It is, I realize, the way I've lived my whole life.

  After I take a shower, I wrap a thick white robe around myself and towel dry my hair. My mother is propped up in bed, watching CNN. "Do you always watch the news?" I ask.

  She turns to me. "Sometimes. Why?"

  I shrug. "I guess I just wanted to know what you do when I leave for school."

  My mother grins. "I curl up near the door like a puppy, Jenna, and wait until you come home."

  "Yeah, right." I hesitate. "Did you ever want to be anything else?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Like, I don't know, join the circus. Or work in an office, like Dad. Anything."

  "I m
ajored in zoology in college," she says. "I had this vision of going to track elephant migration in Africa."

  My mother? In Africa? "You don't even like camping."

  "Yeah, well, the dreams are always different from the reality, aren't they?" She laughs. "Anyway, I met your father, and suddenly Africa seemed very far away."

  Suddenly, I remember what my mother said after the fight about Devon not going to college. When my father asked her to talk sense at my brother, she stood up and asked if anyone wanted more broccoli. "You think Devon should travel," I say.

  My mother sighs. "Maybe. Or go work for the Peace Corps or fall in love with a woman from Somalia or play at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. I don't know what he should do. I just know what he shouldn't." She glances up. "He shouldn't wake up one day when he's forty-three and wonder what it looks like in Bangledesh or Bali, or if the toilets really flush in the opposite direction in Australia. I guess I just wish...I wish I had spent a little more time in the world."