by Jodi Picoult
Win bursts out laughing. “I promise you that you categorically will not have to tape down my erection when I die.”
“Well, if I do, I’m charging extra.” Win is someone I could see myself being friends with, had we met under different circumstances. That alone is probably enough reason for me to realize I need more distance; yet I somehow know she will become my client. “Is there anything I can get you right now?” I ask.
“Time,” Win says immediately.
“I was thinking more along the lines of a pillow, or a chocolate chip milkshake,” I answer. But if she is worried about time, it is likely because of the fear of leaving people she loves behind. Felix. Or her son. “We could Skype Arlo.”
“If you can do that,” Win says, “I will leave you everything in my will.”
“Arlo’s gone,” Felix explains. “He died three years ago.”
“I’m so sorry. I’d like to hear more about him.” But for the first time in our visit, a wall has come up between us, and Win shifts subtly away from me. Eager to change the subject, I try a simpler question. “What have you been doing today?”
She looks up, allowing me to draw her back out. “I’ve been reading up on Willard Wigan, the microsculptor.”
“Microsculptor?”
“He’s an artist, but his art fits inside the eye of a needle or on the head of a pin,” Win explains. “You need a microscope to see it.”
“Felix tells me you’re an artist, too.”
“Wigan’s quite famous. I…only dabbled,” Win demurs.
“Past tense.”
She ignores what I’ve said, choosing instead to talk about the artist. “I’m fascinated by the idea of walking past a piece of art because you can’t see it with the naked eye. Imagine all the times you’ve told yourself, Oh, it’s nothing. Well, nothing can be pretty goddamned big.”
I look at Win and know she is seeing the trajectory of her disease: that first twinge, that dull ache, the way she dismissed it at first. I look inside myself, and I think of Brian.
Lifting my chin, I smile at Win and Felix. “Tell me how you fell in love,” I say.
* * *
—
FELIX TELLS ME that Win was wearing a yellow sundress that looked like electricity wrapped around her body, and he couldn’t turn away. Win says that’s not accurate. He couldn’t turn away because he was paid to make sure she didn’t drive off the road or into a tree.
They swap off, telling their story. They finish each other’s sentences, as if the words are a sweet they’re trading bite by bite.
Win says she had never met someone who was so steady. Ten and two, he had told her. That’s how you keep your hands on the wheel so nothing surprises you. Somehow, she had gotten to her late twenties without anyone imparting that life lesson.
Felix says that he knew he was in love when she told him she knew all the words to “A Whiter Shade of Pale.”
Win says he had kind eyes.
Felix proposed after he took her bowling. Win had grown up with candlepins in New England, and had never used a big, heavy ball. When she drew her arm backward, the ball popped off her fingers and smacked Felix in the mouth, knocking out his two front teeth.
He asked her to marry him at the emergency dental surgeon’s office.
It was a sure thing, he tells me. If she didn’t love him, he figured she could still be guilted into saying yes.
* * *
—
ON MY WAY home from Win’s, I pull into a lot near Boston Harbor. It is by no means on my way, but it’s the place I go when I want the world to stop spinning.
On any given day in the summer, you can see the whale watching boats, as large and steady as the prey they search for, tourists streaming on board like krill through baleen. There are ice cream vendors and couples with selfie sticks and men dressed up like Colonial patriots promoting historical tours. In the distance you can see the USS Constitution, and in the other direction, the angled roof of the New England Aquarium, where my mother would teach kids who weren’t us about mollusks and sea stars and tide pools.
My mother was the first person to bring me here. She had Kieran in a baby sling across her chest and she held my hand so tight it hurt. “When I first came to Boston,” she told me, with her lilting accent—which always reminded me of summer, and the way bees would bounce from blossom to bright blossom—“it was the last place I wanted to be. I’d come to this spot every day because I thought maybe, if I looked hard enough, I could still see home.”
There was no way that Ireland was visible, even on the clearest of days, but it didn’t stop her from hoping.
“One day I couldn’t wait anymore, and I jumped into the harbor from this very place and started swimming.”
None of this had surprised me. My mother was meant for the ocean. In Ireland, she used to swim off the coast of Kerry each morning, no matter how cold the water. She told me that dolphins followed her and that sometimes she would swim for hours and wind up so many miles down the coast that her father would have to come and pick her up in his old truck. When she was pregnant with me, she swam for hours at a YMCA. I was a breech baby, the midwives said, because I had no idea what gravity was, which way was up, which way was down.
My mother said that for a while, no one noticed her in the water. Her stroke would have been clean and sure, slicing between buoys and boats until the waves turned darker and choppier, the invisible line where the harbor turned into ocean. She told me that a cormorant guided her, its elegant white belly an arrow forward as it flew overhead. She told me that night had already fallen when she was picked up by the captain of a tugboat who only spoke Portuguese and who kept pointing to her legs and shaking his head, as if he were otherwise convinced she was a mermaid.
“Here’s the thing, Maidan,” she told me, using her nickname for me, the Irish word for morning. “I almost made it. The ocean’s different in Ireland, you know. Sweeter, less salt. And I could see the shoreline. I was that close.”
I believed her, when I was little. Now, of course, I know it is impossible that one small woman might have swum across the Atlantic in a matter of hours. But that doesn’t really matter, does it? We all have stories we tell ourselves, until we believe them to be true.
My mother spent most of her life wondering who else she might have been, if she hadn’t left Ireland. An Olympic swimmer, maybe. Or just someone who worked in her father’s pub. A different man’s wife, a different girl’s mother.
I’ve thought about that, too. If you had asked me fifteen years ago, I would have said that by now, I’d be published and well established in the field of Egyptology. Maybe I would be a curator for the Met, living in Chelsea, with subway maps memorized and a little dog I took running in Central Park. Maybe I’d be a professor with my own concession in Egypt, taking students twice a year and pulling secrets out of the dusty earth. Maybe I’d teach at Queen’s College at Oxford, wandering the stacks of the Ashmolean or presenting at the annual conferences for Current Research in Egyptology in Madrid or Prague or Krakow.
Maybe I would be at the Grand Café on High Street, scrambling through my purse to find a few pound coins for my latte, when the man behind me in line offered to pay instead.
Maybe that man would be Brian, in town to give a guest lecture on multiverses at Oxford’s physics department.
This is what I tell myself: that we were inevitable.
That it was meant to be.
* * *
—
WHEN MERET WAS seven, Brian bought her a microscope for Christmas. I argued that it was an expensive gift for a child who really shouldn’t be playing with glass slides, but I was wrong. Meret spent hours hunched over it, switching among the five magnification settings, looking at prepared slides of dragonfly wings, cucumber ovaries, horsehair, and tulip pollen. She would meticulously use tweezers and
swabs to make her own specimens, highlighting them with eosin or methylene blue. Her bedroom walls were filled with magnified drawings of what she saw: the lace of an overblown lilac leaf, the tangled spaghetti of bacteria, geometric evil eyes of onion cells. That was the beginning of her love affair with science, and to date, it hasn’t stopped.
Teachers love her, and why shouldn’t they? She is smart and curious and wise beyond her years. They look at her and they see what she has the potential to become. Other students, though, can’t seem to get past how she looks.
When most kids in elementary school began to outgrow their round bellies and chubby cheeks, Meret didn’t. It is not that she isn’t active or that she doesn’t eat healthily. It’s just how she is made, and if that isn’t everyone’s standard of perfect, then maybe they just have to revise their damn standard.
But.
I remember what it felt like to be fourteen. I remember looking in the mirror and not recognizing myself. I know that’s what Meret sees, when she forces herself to see her reflection—although I also notice the way she avoids that at all costs. What’s different is that my body was changing, and that’s what made me uncomfortable. For Meret, it’s the opposite. Her body stays the same—curved, softer, larger—and that’s what she is desperate to hide.
Last year, when she started wearing clothes that were bigger than mine, I told her that sizing wasn’t standard; that I could wear a four in some brands and an eight in others. She stared at me for a long moment. That’s exactly the kind of thing a skinny person would say, she told me, and she locked herself in her room for the rest of the day.
As her mother I am damned if I do and damned if I don’t. If I cook only vegetables for dinner, she thinks I’m judging her. I try to completely avoid the topics of food, of exercise, of therapy, of weight. I know every time someone tells her she is the spitting image of me, she is thinking: yeah, buried under the extra pounds. I wish I knew how to get her to see that her name describes her: a homonym for a word that means worth.
Brian is equally at a loss. He was never overweight as a kid; he isn’t now. His relationship with Meret has one advantage over mine, though—she does not look at him and compare herself. Maybe for that reason, the bond they have has always been a little fiercer, a little more. Say what you will about Brian, but he loves being a father more than anything in the world. He would have had ten more kids, but that wasn’t in the cards for us, and eventually we stopped trying. Clearly, he would say to me each month, when I told him—again—that I wasn’t pregnant, we can’t improve on the original model.
This summer, Meret is at a STEM camp for teenage girls. We had to nearly force her to go, but since she will be moving into a new school next year as a ninth grader, this gives her the chance to make some connections with new kids before the academic year begins. It seems to be working. She keeps talking about a girl named Sarah, who like her, is a budding biologist. Today she texted me, asking if she could go to Sarah’s for dinner.
Which is why I’m surprised when she walks through the front door while I’m cooking for myself and Brian. “Hi,” I say. “What are you doing home?”
“Don’t I live here?” she asks, and flops down on the couch. She immediately takes a throw pillow and covers her midsection. I don’t even know if she realizes that she does that, every time she takes a seat. “What’s for dinner?”
“I thought you ate at Sarah’s,” I say, and wince, because I don’t want her to read between the lines and think that I’m criticizing her for being hungry.
“I did and I didn’t.” Meret picks at the tasseled edge of the throw pillow. “I mostly picked.”
I glance up, sympathetic. “Did they make pork?”
Meret hates pork. She has boycotted it ever since she learned that pigs are smarter than any other domestic animal. “No, fried chicken and Caesar salad.” Color rises in her cheeks. “It’s hard, you know. If I only eat salad, they’re thinking, Poor thing, she’s trying so hard. If I eat the chicken, they’re thinking, Oh, that’s why she’s huge.”
I wipe my hands on a dish towel and walk into the family room to sit beside her on the couch. “Baby,” I tell her, “no one is thinking that.”
“She asked me to come over Saturday to hang out.”
“That’s great!” There is too much cheer in those words.
Meret sinks lower into the couch.
“What did you work on today?”
Her face lights up. “We isolated the DNA of spinach.”
“Wow.” I blink. “Why?”
“Because we can. It looked like cobwebs.” She drops the pillow, talking with her hands. “Did you know we share eighty-five percent of our genes with zebra fish? And that less than two percent of our DNA actually has the instructions to make proteins? The rest is called ‘junk DNA,’ because it’s just a bunch of random sequences that doesn’t seem to be code for anything important.”
“That’s a lot of wasted space in a chromosome,” I point out.
“Yeah. Unless it is important and no one’s figured out the DNA Rosetta stone yet.”
I tug on one of her curls. “Maybe that’s going to be your big contribution to science.”
She shrugs. “You know what they say. If you need the right man for the job…get a woman.” Then, suddenly, she launches forward and hugs me. Adolescence is like summer weather in Boston—storms chased by sunshine, in the span of a minute. Occasional hail. And every now and then, a cloudless sky.
I wrap my arms around her, as if I could cocoon her again, and keep anything bad from happening. I remember what it felt like to have her settled under the umbrella of my rib cage, to have a double beat of a heart. I still do. It’s just harder to hear, sometimes.
Just then Brian comes in. After calling the Perimeter Institute and canceling his speech at the last minute, he went to his lab. He tosses his briefcase onto the kitchen counter and eats a slice of mozzarella off a platter of caprese salad I’ve made. “Ugh,” I say, “not before you wash your hands.”
“She’s right,” Meret says. “A single gram of human poop can contain a trillion germs.”
“So much for being hungry…” Brian leans down and hugs Meret, and then, after only a tiny hesitation does the same to me.
I breathe in. Neutrogena shampoo. Old Spice.
I exhale.
“Meret isolated DNA today,” I tell him.
He whistles. “How much is this camp costing?”
“It was vegetable DNA. But still.” Suddenly she leaps up. “Oh! But thank you for my birthday present! It’s perfect.”
He must have bought her something and left it in her room when I was visiting with Win. His gaze slides to mine as Meret hugs him. “I’m sorry it was late,” he says.
“That’s okay,” Meret tells him.
I feel, for just a moment, a pang of jealousy. Why does he get a free pass, every time; why am I always judged?
I know parents with more than one kid say they love the kids equally, but I don’t believe it. I think it is the same in the other direction. A kid will say they love both their parents the same amount, but when there’s a rough edge, sometimes that ragged border fits flush against one parent, and prickles against the other.
I just wish, sometimes, I could be the one she loves more.
But I never say this. I paste a smile on my face, and I ask Meret, “What did Dad get you?”
Before she can answer, Brian interrupts. “I almost forgot. I bought tickets for a thing Saturday at MIT. Guest lecturer in zoology who’s going to talk about the time she was bitten by a vampire bat and chased by a gorilla. Rumor has it she’s bringing a live octopus.”
“Sounds cool,” Meret says.
“But you were invited to Sarah’s.” I try to catch Brian’s eye, to silently urge him to not push; to realize that spending time with another teenage girl is a lot
more important than meeting a cephalopod.
“I never said I was going.” Meret glares at me. “She wants to hang out at her pool.”
It is ninety degrees out, and humid. “That sounds perfect.” I look meaningfully at Brian. “Doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I’m sure we can watch the lecture online.”
“I’m. Not. Going.”
“But, Meret—”
She swings around, her fists balled at her sides. “If I go to her pool, I have to take off my shirt. And I don’t want to take off my shirt.”
“She won’t make fun of you—”
“Right. She’ll pity me. And that’s worse.” Meret folds her arms across her chest like they are wings, like she can disappear behind them. “You don’t understand anything,” she says, and she runs upstairs.
I scrub my hands over my face. “Jesus.”
Brian follows me into the kitchen. “It was just an octopus.”
“You didn’t know.”
I take the chicken breast out of the oven, cut it into thirds, and separate it onto plates. Then I spoon rice on each, and a few slices of tomato and mozzarella. We both look up the stairs. “You want to call her down?” I ask.
Brian shakes his head. “Not for a million bucks.”
I cover the plate with foil. “I’ll bring it up in a little bit.”
He dances around me to the cabinet, a choreographed routine, pulling glasses and silverware as I carry the food to the kitchen table. There’s a beauty in the way we revolve around each other in that tight space, a moon around a sun. I am just not sure which of us is which.