by Jodi Picoult
“I know it’s got alcohol in it, and I know we’re celebrating.” He lifts his glass after the sommelier pours it. “To our family,” he toasts.
We click glasses and take sips. “What are you getting?” I ask.
“What do you want me to get?”
“The filet. That way I can taste it if I get the sole.” I fold my menu. “Did you hear the results of the last CBC?”
Brian looks down at the table. “I was sort of hoping that we could come here to get away from all that. You know. Just talk.”
“I’d like to talk,” I admit. But when I look at Brian, the information that leaps to my lips is about Kate, not us. I have no call to ask him about his day—he has taken three weeks off from the station. We are connected by and through sickness.
We fall back into silence. I look around XO Café and notice that chatter happens mostly at tables where the diners are young and hip. The older couples, the ones sporting wedding bands that wink with their silverware, eat without the pepper of conversation. Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?
When the waiter arrives to take our order, we both turn eagerly, grateful for someone who keeps us from having to recognize the strangers we have become.
• • •
We leave the hospital with a child who is different from the one we brought in. Kate moves cautiously, checking the drawers of the nightstand for anything she might have left behind. She has lost so much weight that the jeans I brought do not fit; we have to use two bandannas knotted together as a makeshift belt.
Brian has gone down ahead of us to bring the car around. I zip the last Tiger Beat and CD into Kate’s duffel bag. She pulls a fleece cap on over her smooth, bare scalp and winds a scarf tight around her neck. She puts on a mask and gloves; now that we are venturing out of the hospital, she is the one who will need protection.
We walk out the door to the applause of the nurses we have come to know so well. “Whatever you do, don’t come back and see us, all right?” Willie jokes.
One by one, they walk up to say their good-byes. When they have all dispersed, I smile at Kate. “Ready?”
Kate nods, but she doesn’t step forward. She stands rigid, fully aware that once she sets foot outside this doorway, everything changes. “Mom?”
I fold her hand into mine. “We’ll do it together,” I promise, and side by side, we take the first step.
• • •
The mail is full of hospital bills. We have learned that the insurance company will not talk to the hospital billing department, and vice versa, but neither one thinks that the charges are accurate—which leads them to charge us for procedures we shouldn’t have to cover, in the hopes that we are stupid enough to pay them. Managing the monetary aspect of Kate’s care is a full-time job that neither Brian nor I can do.
I leaf through a grocery store flyer, an AAA magazine, and a long-distance rate announcement before I open the letter from the mutual fund. It’s not something I really pay attention to; Brian usually manages finances that require more than basic checkbook balancing. Besides, the three funds we have are all earmarked for the kids’ education. We are not the sort of family that has enough spare change to play the stock market.
Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:
This is to confirm your recent redemption from fund #323456, Brian D. Fitzgerald Custodian for Katherine S. Fitzgerald, in the amount of $8,369.56. This disbursement effectively closes the account.
As banking errors go, this is a pretty major one. We’ve been off by pennies in our checking account, but at least I’ve never lost eight thousand dollars. I walk out of the kitchen and into the yard, where Brian is rolling an extra garden hose. “Well, either someone at the mutual fund screwed up,” I say, handing the letter to him, “or the second wife you’re supporting is no longer a secret.”
It takes him one moment too long to read it, the same moment that I realize that this is not a mistake after all. Brian wipes his forehead with the back of one wrist. “I took that money out,” he says.
“Without telling me?” I cannot imagine Brian doing such a thing. There have been times, in the past, where we dipped into the children’s accounts, but only because we were having a month too tight to swing the cost of groceries and the mortgage, or because we needed the down payment for a new car when our old one had finally been put to rest. We’d lie awake in bed feeling guilt press down like an extra quilt, promising each other that we would put that money right back where it belonged as soon as humanly possible.
“The guys at the station, they tried to raise some money, like I told you. They got ten thousand dollars. With this added to it, the hospital’s willing to work out some kind of payment plan for us.”
“But you said—”
“I know what I said, Sara.”
I shake my head, stunned. “You lied to me?”
“I didn’t—”
“Zanne offered—”
“I won’t let your sister take care of Kate,” Brian says. “I’m supposed to take care of Kate.” The hose falls to the ground, dribbles and spits at our feet. “Sara, she’s not going to live long enough to use that money for college.”
The sun is bright; the sprinkler twitches on the grass, spraying rainbows. It is far too beautiful a day for words like these. I turn and run into the house. I lock myself in the bathroom.
A moment later, Brian bangs on the door. “Sara? Sara, I’m sorry.”
I pretend I can’t hear him. I pretend I haven’t heard anything he’s said.
• • •
At home, we all wear masks so that Kate doesn’t have to. I find myself checking her fingernails while she brushes her teeth or pours cereal, to see if the dark ridges made by the chemo have disappeared—a sure sign of the bone marrow transplant’s success. Twice a day I give Kate growth factor shots in the thigh, a necessity until her neutrophil count tops one thousand. At that point, the marrow will be reseeding itself.
She can’t go back to school yet, so we get her lessons sent home. Once or twice she has come with me to pick Anna up from kindergarten, but refuses to get out of the car. She will troop to the hospital for her routine CBC, but if I suggest a side trip to the video store or Dunkin’ Donuts afterward, she begs off.
One Saturday morning, the door to the girls’ bedroom is ajar; I knock gently. “Want to go to the mall?”
Kate shrugs. “Not now.”
I lean against the doorframe. “It’ll be good to get out of the house.”
“I don’t want to.” Although I am sure she does not even realize she is doing it, she skims her palm over her head before tucking her hand into her back pocket.
“Kate,” I begin.
“Don’t say it. Don’t tell me that nobody’s going to stare at me, because they will. Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter, because it does. And don’t tell me I look fine because that’s a lie.” Her eyes, lash-bare, fill with tears. “I’m a freak, Mom. Look at me.”
I do, and I see the spots where her brows have gone missing, and the slope of her endless brow, and the small divots and bumps that are usually hidden under a cover of hair. “Well,” I say evenly. “We can fix this.”
Without another word, I walk out of her room, knowing Kate will follow. I pass Anna, who abandons her coloring book to trail behind her sister. In the basement, I pull out a pair of ancient electric grooming clippers we found when we bought the house, and plug them in. Then I cut a swath right down the middle of my scalp.
“Mom!” Kate gasps.
“What?” A tumble of brown waves falls onto Anna’s shoulder; she picks them up delicately. “It’s only hair.”
With another swipe of the razor, Kate starts to smile. She points out a spot that I’ve missed, where a small thatch stands like a forest. I sit down on an overturned milk crate and let her shave the other side of my head herself. Anna crawls onto my lap. “Me next,” she begs.
An hour later, we walk through the mall holding hands, a trio of bald girls. We stay for hours. Everywhere we go, heads turn and voices whisper. We are beautiful, times three.
THE WEEKEND
There is no fire without some smoke.
—John Heywood, Proverbes
JESSE
DON’T DENY IT—you’ve driven by a bulldozer or front-end loader on the side of a highway, after hours, and wondered why the road crews leave the equipment out there where anyone, meaning me, could steal it. My first truckjacking was years ago; I put a cement mixer out of gear on a slope and watched it roll into a construction company’s base trailer. Right now there’s a dump truck a mile away from my house; I’ve seen it sleeping like a baby elephant next to a pile of Jersey barriers on I-195. Not my first choice of wheels, but beggars can’t be choosers; in the wake of my little run-in with the law, my father’s taken my car into custody, and is keeping it at the fire station.
Driving a dump truck turns out to be a hell of a lot different than driving my car. First, you fill up the whole freaking road. Second, it handles like a tank, or at least like what I suppose a tank would handle like if you didn’t have to join an army full of uptight, power-crazy assholes to drive one. Third—and least palatable—people see you coming. When I roll up to the underpass where Duracell Dan makes his cardboard home, he cowers behind his line of thirty-three-gallon drums. “Hey,” I say, swinging out of the cab of the truck. “It’s just me.”
It still takes Dan a minute to peek between his hands, make sure I’m telling him the truth. “Like my rig?” I ask.
He gets up gingerly and touches the streaked side of the truck. Then he laughs. “Your Jeep been taking steroids, boy.”
I load up the rear of the cab with the materials I need. How cool would it be if I just backed the truck up to a window, dumped in several bottles of my Arsonist’s Special, and drove away with the place bursting into flames? Dan stands by the driver’s-side door. Wash Me, he writes across the grit.
“Hey,” I say, and for no reason except the fact that I’ve never done it before, I ask him if he wants to come.
“For real?”
“Yeah. But there’s a rule. Whatever you see and whatever we do, you can’t tell anyone about it.”
He pretends to lock up his lips and toss the key. Five minutes later, we’re on our way to an old shed that used to be a boathouse for one of the colleges. Dan fiddles with the controls, raising and lowering the truck bed while we’re tooling along. I tell myself that I’ve invited him along to add to the thrill—one more person who knows only makes it more exciting. But it’s really because there are some nights when you just want to know there’s someone else besides you in this wide world.
• • •
When I was eleven years old I got a skateboard. I never asked for one; it was a guilt gift. Over the years I got quite a few of these big ticket items, usually in conjunction with one of Kate’s episodes. My parents would shower her with all kinds of cool shit whenever she had to have something done to her; and since Anna was usually involved, she got some amazing presents, too, and then a week later my parents would feel bad about the inequality and would buy me some toy to make sure I didn’t feel left out.
Anyway, I cannot even begin to tell you how amazing that skateboard was. It had a skull on the bottom that glowed in the dark, and from the teeth dripped green blood. The wheels were neon yellow and the gritty surface, when you stepped on it in your sneakers, made the sound of a rock star clearing his throat. I skimmed it up and down the driveway, around the sidewalks, learning how to pop wheelies and kickflips and ollies. There was only one rule: I wasn’t supposed to take it into the street, because cars could come around at any minute; kids could get hit in an instant.
Well, I don’t need to tell you that eleven-year-old budding derelicts and house rules are like oil and water. By the end of my first week with this board I thought I’d rather slide down a razor blade into alcohol than tool up and down the sidewalk yet one more time with all the toddlers on their Big Wheels.
I begged my father to take me to the Kmart parking lot, or the school basketball court, or anywhere, really, where I could play around a little. He promised me that on Friday, after Kate had a routine bone marrow aspiration, we could all go out to the school. I could bring my skateboard, Anna could bring her bike, and if Kate felt up to it, she could Rollerblade.
God, was I looking forward to that. I greased the wheels and polished up the bottom of the skateboard and practiced a double helix on the driveway ramp I’d made of old scrap plywood and a fat log. The minute I saw the car—my mom and Kate returning from the hematologist—I ran out to the porch so we wouldn’t waste any time.
My mother, it turned out, was in a huge hurry, too. Because the door to the van slid open and there was Kate, covered with blood. “Get your father,” my mother ordered, holding a wad of tissues up to Kate’s face.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t had nosebleeds before. And my mom was always telling me, when it freaked me out, that the bleeding looked way worse than it actually was. But I got my father, and the two of them hustled Kate into the bathroom and tried to keep her from crying, because it only made everything harder.
“Dad,” I said. “When are we going?”
But he was busy wadding up toilet paper, bunching it up under Kate’s nose.
“Dad?” I repeated.
My father looked right at me, but he didn’t answer. And his eyes were dazed and staring through me, like I was made out of smoke.
That was the first time I thought that maybe I was.
• • •
The thing about flame is that it’s insidious—it sneaks, it licks, it looks over its shoulder and laughs. And fuck, it’s beautiful. Like a sunset eating everything in its path. For the first time, I have someone to admire my handiwork. Beside me, Dan makes a small sound at the back of his throat—respect, no doubt. But when I look at him, proud, I see that he’s got his head ducked into the greasy collar of his army-surplus coat. He’s got tears running down his face.
“Dan, man, what’s going on?” Granted, the guy is nuts, but still. I put my hand on his shoulder and you’d think, from his reaction, that a scorpion just landed there. “You scared of the fire, Danny? You don’t have to be. We’re far enough away. We’re safe.” I give him what I hope is an encouraging smile. What if he freaks out and starts screaming, calls down some wandering cop?
“That shed,” Dan says.
“Yeah. No one’s gonna miss it.”
“That’s where the rat lives.”
“Not anymore,” I answer.
“But the rat . . . ”
“Animals make their own way out of a fire. I’m telling you. The rat will be totally cool. Chill.”
“But what about the newspapers? He has one with President Kennedy’s assassination . . . ”
It occurs to me that the rat is most likely not a rodent, but another homeless guy. One using this shed as a shelter. “Dan, are you saying someone lives in there?”
He looks at the crowning flames and his eyes fill. Then he repeats my own words. “Not anymore,” he says.
• • •
Like I said, I was eleven, so even to this day I can’t tell you how I made my way from our house in Upper Darby to the middle of downtown Providence. I suppose it took me a few hours; I suppose I believed that with my new superhero’s cloak of invisibility, maybe I could just disappear and reappear somewhere else entirely.
I tested myself. I walked through the business district, and sure enough, people passed right by me, their eyes on the cracks of the pavement or staring straight ahead like corporate zombies. I walked by a long wall of mirrored glass on the side of a building, where I could see myself. But no matter how many faces I made, no matter how long I stood there, none of the people funneling around me had anything to say.
I wound up that day at the middle of an intersection, smack under the traffic light, with taxis honking and a
car swerving off to the left and a pair of cops running to keep me from getting killed. At the police station, when my dad came to get me, he asked what the hell I’d been thinking.
I hadn’t been thinking, actually. I was just trying to get to a place where I’d be noticed.
• • •
First I take off my shirt and dunk it into a puddle on the side of the road; then wrap it around my head and face. The smoke is already billowing, angry black clouds. In the hollow of my ear is the sound of sirens. But I have made a promise to Dan.
What hits me first is the heat, a wall that’s way more solid than it looks. The frame of the shed stands out, an orange X ray. Inside, I can’t see a foot in front of me.
“Rat,” I yell out, already regretting the smoke that leaves me raw-throated and hoarse. “Rat!”
No answer. But the shed isn’t all that big. I get down on my hands and knees and begin to feel my way around.
I only have one really bad moment, when I put my hand down by accident on something that was made of metal before it became a searing brand. My skin sticks to it, blisters immediately. By the time I fall over a booted foot I’m sobbing, sure I will never get out. I feel my way up Rat, haul his limp body over my shoulder, stagger back the way I came.
Through some little joke of God, we make it outside. By now, the engines are pulling up, charging their lines. Maybe my father is even here. I stay under the screen of smoke; I dump Rat on the ground. With my heart racing, I run in the other direction; leaving the rest of this rescue to people who actually want to be heroes.
ANNA
DID YOU EVER WONDER how we all got here? On Earth, I mean. Forget the song and dance about Adam and Eve, which I know is a load of crap. My father likes the myth of the Pawnee Indians, who say that the star deities populated the world: Evening Star and Morning Star hooked up and gave birth to the first female. The first boy came from the Sun and the Moon. Humans rode in on the back of a tornado.
Mr. Hume, my science teacher, taught us about this primordial soup full of natural gases and muddy slop and carbon matter that somehow solidified into one-celled organisms called choanoflagellates . . . which sound a lot more like a sexually transmitted disease than the start of the evolutionary chain, in my opinion. But even once you get there, it’s a huge leap from an amoeba to a monkey to a whole thinking person.