by Jodi Picoult
“If you’ve got something to say,” I suggested, “say it.”
“Me?” Izzy frowned. “Hey, it’s none of my business, is it?”
“No, it’s not.”
“Right. So I’ll just keep my opinion to myself.”
I rolled my eyes. “Out with it, Isobel.”
“Thought you’d never ask.” She sat down beside me on the couch. “You know, Julia, the first time a bug sees that big purple zapper light, it looks like God. The second time, he runs in the other direction.”
“First, don’t compare me to a mosquito. Second, he’d fly in the other direction, not run. Third, there is no second time. The bug’s dead.”
Izzy smirked. “You are such a lawyer.”
“I am not letting Campbell zap me.”
“Then request a transfer.”
“This isn’t the Navy.” I hugged one of the throw pillows from the couch. “And I can’t do that, not now. It’ll make him think that I’m such a wimp I can’t balance my professional life with some stupid, silly, adolescent . . . incident.”
“You can’t.” Izzy shook her head. “He’s an egotistical dickhead who’s going to chew you up and spit you out; and you have a really awful history of falling for assholes that you ought to run screaming from; and I don’t feel like sitting around listening to you try to convince yourself you don’t still feel something for Campbell Alexander when, in fact, you’ve spent the past fifteen years trying to fill in the hole he made inside you.”
I stared at her. “Wow.”
She shrugged. “Guess I had a lot to get off my chest, after all.”
“Do you hate all men, or just Campbell?”
Izzy seemed to think about that for a while. “Just Campbell,” she said finally.
What I wanted, at that moment, was to be alone in my living room so that I could throw things, like the TV remote or the glass vase or preferably my sister. But I couldn’t order Izzy out of a house she’d moved into just hours before. I stood up and plucked my house keys off the counter. “I’m going out,” I told her. “Don’t wait up.”
• • •
I’m not much of a party girl, which explains why I hadn’t frequented Shakespeare’s Cat before, although it was a mere four blocks from my condo. The bar was dark and crowded and smelled of patchouli and cloves. I pushed my way inside, hopped up on a stool, and smiled at the man sitting next to me.
I was in the mood to make out in the back row of the movie theater with someone who did not know my first name. I wanted three guys to fight for the honor of buying me a drink.
I wanted to show Campbell Alexander what he’d been missing.
The man beside me had sky-eyes, a black ponytail, and a Cary Grant grin. He nodded politely at me, then turned away and began to kiss a white-haired gentleman flush on the mouth. I looked around and saw what I had missed on my entrance: the bar was filled with single men—but they were dancing, flirting, hooking up with each other.
“What can I get you?” The bartender had fuchsia porcupine hair and an oxen ring pierced through his nose.
“This is a gay bar?”
“No, it’s the officers’ club at West Point. You want a drink or not?” I pointed over his shoulder to the bottle of tequila, and he reached for a shot glass.
I rummaged in my purse and pulled out a fifty-dollar bill. “The whole thing.” Glancing down at the bottle, I frowned. “I bet Shakespeare didn’t even have a cat.”
“Who peed in your coffee?” the bartender asked.
Narrowing my eyes, I stared at him. “You’re not gay.”
“Sure I am.”
“Based on my track record, if you were gay, I’d probably find you attractive. As it is . . .” I looked at the busy couple beside me, and then shrugged at the bartender. He blanched, then handed me back my fifty. I tucked it back into my wallet. “Who says you can’t buy friends,” I murmured.
Three hours later, I was the only person still there, unless you counted Seven, which was what the bartender had rechristened himself last August after deciding to jettison whatever sort of label the name Neil suggested. Seven stood for absolutely nothing, he had told me, which was exactly the way he liked it.
“Maybe I should be Six,” I told him, when I’d made my way to the bottom of the tequila bottle, “and you could be Nine.”
Seven finished stacking the clean glasses. “That’s it. You’re cut off.”
“He used to call me Jewel,” I said, and that was enough to make me start crying.
A jewel’s just a rock put under enormous heat and pressure. Extraordinary things are always hiding in places people never think to look.
But Campbell had looked. And then he’d left me, reminding me that whatever he’d seen wasn’t worth the time or effort.
“I used to have pink hair,” I told Seven.
“I used to have a real job,” he answered.
“What happened?”
He shrugged. “I dyed my hair pink. What happened to you?”
“I let mine grow out,” I answered.
Seven wiped up a spill I’d made without noticing. “Nobody ever wants what they’ve got,” he said.
• • •
Anna sits at the kitchen table by herself, eating a bowl of Golden Grahams. Her eyes widen, as she is surprised to see me with her father, but that’s as much as she’ll reveal. “Fire last night, huh?” she says, sniffing.
Brian crosses the kitchen and gives her a hug. “Big one.”
“The arsonist?” she asks.
“Doubt it. He goes for empty buildings and this one had a kid in it.”
“Who you saved,” Anna guesses.
“You bet.” He glances at me. “I thought I’d take Julia up to the hospital. Want to come?”
She looks down at her bowl. “I don’t know.”
“Hey.” Brian lifts her chin. “No one’s going to keep you from seeing Kate.”
“No one’s going to be too thrilled to see me there, either,” she says.
The telephone rings, and he picks it up. He listens for a moment, and then smiles. “That’s great. That’s so great. Yeah, of course I’m coming in.” He hands the phone to Anna. “Mom wants to talk to you,” he says, and he excuses himself to change clothes.
Anna hesitates, then curls her hand around the receiver. Her shoulders hunch, a small cubicle of personal privacy. “Hello?” And then, softly: “Really? She did?”
A few moments later, she hangs up. She sits down and takes another spoonful of cereal, then pushes away her bowl. “Was that your mom?” I ask, sitting down across from her.
“Yeah. Kate’s awake,” Anna says.
“That’s good news.”
“I guess.”
I put my elbows on the table. “Why wouldn’t it be good news?”
But Anna doesn’t answer my question. “She asked where I was.”
“Your mother?”
“Kate.”
“Have you talked to her about your lawsuit, Anna?”
Ignoring me, she grabs the cereal box and begins to roll down the plastic insert. “It’s stale,” she says. “No one ever gets all the air out, or closes the top right.”
“Has anyone told Kate what’s going on?”
Anna pushes on the box top to get the cardboard tab into its slot, to no avail. “I don’t even like Golden Grahams.” When she tries again, the box falls out of her arms and spills its contents all over the floor. “Shoot!” She crawls under the table, trying to scoop up the cereal with her hands.
I get on the floor with Anna and watch her shove fistfuls into the liner. She won’t look in my direction. “We can always buy Kate some more before she gets home,” I say gently.
Anna stops and glances up. Without the veil of that secret, she looks much younger. “Julia? What if she hates me?”
I tuck a strand of hair behind Anna’s ear. “What if she doesn’t?”
• • •
“The bottom line,” Seven explained last night, �
��is that we never fall for the people we’re supposed to.”
I glanced at him, intrigued enough to muster the effort to raise my face from where it was plastered on the bar. “It’s not just me?”
“Hell, no.” He set down a stack of clean glasses. “Think about it: Romeo and Juliet bucked the system, and look where it got them. Superman has the hots for Lois Lane, when the better match, of course, would be with Wonder Woman. Dawson and Joey—need I say more? And don’t even get me started on Charlie Brown and the little redheaded girl.”
“What about you?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Like I said, it happens to everyone.” Leaning his elbows on the counter, he came close enough that I could see the dark roots beneath his magenta hair. “For me, it was Linden.”
“I’d break up with someone who was named for a tree, too,” I sympathized. “Guy or girl?”
He smirked. “I’ll never tell.”
“So what made her wrong for you?”
Seven sighed. “Well, she—”
“Ha! You said she!”
He rolled his eyes. “Yes, Detective Julia. You’ve outed me at this gay establishment. Happy?”
“Not particularly.”
“I sent Linden back to New Zealand. Green card ran out. It was that, or get married.”
“What was wrong with her?”
“Absolutely nothing,” Seven confessed. “She cleaned like a banshee; she never let me wash a dish; she listened to everything I had to say; she was a hurricane in bed. She was crazy about me, and believe it or not, I was the one for her. It was, like, ninety-eight percent perfect.”
“What about the other two percent?”
“You tell me.” He started stacking the clean glasses on the far side of the bar. “Something was missing. I couldn’t tell you what it was, if you asked, but it was off. And if you think of a relationship as a living entity, I guess it’s one thing if the missing two percent is, like, a fingernail. But when it’s the heart, that’s a whole different ball of wax.” He turned to me. “I didn’t cry when she got on the plane. She lived with me for four years, and when she walked away, I didn’t feel much of anything at all.”
“Well, I had the other problem,” I told him. “I had the heart of the relationship, and no body to grow it in.”
“What happened then?”
“What else,” I said. “It broke.”
• • •
The ridiculous irony is that Campbell was attracted to me because I stood apart from everyone else at The Wheeler School; and I was attracted to Campbell because I desperately wanted a connection with someone. There were comments, I knew, and stares sent our way as his friends tried to figure out why Campbell was wasting his time with someone like me. No doubt, they thought I was an easy lay.
But we weren’t doing that. We met after school at the cemetery. Sometimes we would speak poetry to each other. Once, we tried to have an entire conversation without the letter “s.” We sat back to back, and tried to think each other’s thoughts—pretending clairvoyance, when it only made sense that his whole mind would be full of me and mine would be full of him.
I loved the way he smelled whenever his head dipped close to hear what I was saying—like the sun striking the cheek of a tomato, or soap drying on the hood of a car. I loved the way his hand felt on my spine. I loved.
“What if,” I said one night, stealing breath from the edge of his lips, “we did it?”
He was lying on his back, watching the moon rock back and forth on a hammock of stars. One hand was tossed up over his head, the other anchored me against his chest. “Did what?”
I didn’t answer, just got up on one elbow and kissed him so deep that the ground gave way. “Oh,” Campbell said, hoarse. “That.”
“Have you ever?” I asked.
He just grinned. I thought that he’d probably fucked Muffy or Buffy or Puffy or all three in the baseball dugout at Wheeler, or after a party at one of their homes when they both still smelled of Daddy’s bourbon. I wondered why, then, he wasn’t trying to sleep with me. I assumed that it was because I wasn’t Muffy or Buffy or Puffy, but just Julia Romano, which wasn’t good enough.
“Don’t you want to?” I asked.
It was one of those moments where I knew we were not having the conversation that we needed to be having. And since I didn’t really know what to say, never having crossed this particular bridge between thought and deed before, I pressed my hand up against the thick ridge in his pants. He backed away from me.
“Jewel,” he said, “I don’t want you to think that’s why I’m here.”
Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them. “Then why are you here?”
“Because you know all the words to ‘American Pie,’” Campbell said. “Because when you smile, I can almost see that tooth on the side that’s crooked.” He stared at me. “Because you’re not like anyone I’ve ever met.”
“Do you love me?” I whispered.
“Didn’t I just say that?”
This time, when I reached for the buttons of his jeans, he didn’t move away. In my palm he was so hot I imagined he would leave a scar. Unlike me, he knew what to do. He kissed and slipped, pushed, cracked me wide. Then he went perfectly still. “You didn’t say you were a virgin,” he said.
“You didn’t ask.”
But he’d assumed. He shuddered and began to move inside me, a poetry of limbs. I reached up to hold on to the gravestone behind me, words I could see in my mind’s eye: Nora Deane, b. 1832, d. 1838.
“Jewel,” he whispered, when it was over. “I thought . . .”
“I know what you thought.” I wondered what happened when you offered yourself to someone, and they opened you, only to discover you were not the gift they expected and they had to smile and nod and say thank you all the same.
• • •
I blame Campbell Alexander entirely for my bad luck with relationships. It is embarrassing to admit, but I have only had sex with three and a half other men, and none of those were any great improvement on my first experience.
“Let me guess,” Seven said last night. “The first was a rebound. The second was married.”
“How’d you know?”
He laughed. “Because you’re a cliché.”
I swirled my pinky in my martini. It was an optical illusion, making the finger look split and crooked. “The other one was from Club Med, a windsurfing instructor.”
“That must have been worthwhile,” Seven said.
“He was absolutely gorgeous,” I answered. “And had a dick the size of a cocktail frank.”
“Ouch.”
“Actually,” I mused, “you couldn’t feel it at all.”
Seven grinned. “So he was the half?”
I turned beet red. “No, that was some other guy. I don’t know his name,” I admitted. “I sort of woke up with him on top of me, after a night like this one.”
“You,” Seven pronounced, “are a train wreck of sexual history.”
But this is inaccurate. A runaway train is an accident. Me, I’ll jump in front of the tracks. I’ll even tie myself down in front of the speeding engine. There’s some illogical part of me that still believes if you want Superman to show up, first there’s got to be someone worth saving.
• • •
Kate Fitzgerald is a ghost just waiting to happen. Her skin is nearly translucent, her hair so fair it bleeds into the pillowcase. “How are you doing, baby?” Brian murmurs, and he leans down to kiss her on the forehead.
“I think I might have to blow off the Ironman competition,” Kate jokes.
Anna is hovering at the door in front of me; Sara holds out her hand. It is all the encouragement Anna needs to crawl up on Kate’s mattress, and in my mind I mark off this small gesture from mother to child. Then Sara sees me standing at the threshold. “B
rian,” she says, “what is she doing here?”
I wait for Brian to explain, but he doesn’t seem inclined to utter a word. So I paste a smile on my face and step forward. “I heard Kate was feeling better today, and I thought it might be a good time to talk to her.”
Kate struggles to her elbows. “Who are you?”
I expect a fight from Sara, but it is Anna who speaks up. “I don’t think it’s such a good idea,” she says, although she knows this is the very reason I’ve come here. “I mean, Kate’s still pretty sick.”
It takes me a moment, but then I understand: in Anna’s life, everyone who ever talks to Kate takes Kate’s side. She is doing what she can to keep me from defecting.
“You know, Anna’s right,” Sara hastily adds. “Kate’s only just turned a corner.”
I place my hand on Anna’s shoulder. “Don’t worry.” Then I turn to her mother. “It’s my understanding that you wanted this hearing—”
Sara cuts me off. “Ms. Romano, could we have a word outside?”
We step into the hallway, and Sara waits for a nurse to pass with a Styrofoam tray of needles. “I know what you think of me,” she says.
“Mrs. Fitzgerald—”
She shakes her head. “You’re sticking up for Anna, and you should. I practiced law once, and I understand. It’s your job, and part of that is figuring out what makes us us.” She rubs her forehead with one fist. “My job is to take care of my daughters. One of them is extremely ill, and the other one’s extremely unhappy. And I may not have it all figured out yet, but . . . I do know that Kate won’t get better any quicker if she finds out that the reason you’re here is because Anna hasn’t withdrawn her lawsuit yet. So I’m asking you not to tell her, either. Please.”
I nod slowly, and Sara turns to go back into Kate’s room. With her hand on the door, she hesitates. “I love both of them,” she says, an equation I am supposed to be able to solve.
• • •
I told Seven the Bartender that true love is felonious.
“Not if they’re over eighteen,” he said, shutting the till of the cash register.
By then the bar itself had become an appendage, a second torso holding up my first. “You take someone’s breath away,” I stressed. “You rob them of the ability to utter a single word.” I tipped the neck of the empty liquor bottle toward him. “You steal a heart.”