by Jodi Picoult
Leaving Home
-Short Pieces-
By Jodi Picoult
Forward
Hi readers,
Very often, I'll get an email that says, "I've read all your books. NOW what do I read?" I can't write my novels any faster -- but now that Kindle's created a space for short pieces, I'm happy to tide you over with some stories that have been published previously in different venues around the globe. The pieces are quite different - one a short story about the greatest loss imaginable; one a non-fiction letter I wrote my son as he went off to college, and one a story about a mother who finally takes the vacation all of us mothers deserve. The thread that connects them? They are all variations of leaving home. I hope you enjoy them!
Jodi Picoult
Weights and Measures
The loudest sound in the world is the absence of a child. Sarah found herself waiting for it, the moment she opened her eyes in the morning: that satin ribbon of a giggle, or the thump of a jump off the bed – but instead all she heard was the hiss of the coffeemaker that Abe must have preset in the kitchen last night, spitting angry as it finished its brewing. She glanced at the clock over the landscape of Abe’s sleeping body. For a moment, she thought about touching that golden shoulder or running her hand through his dark curls, but like most moments, it was gone before she remembered to act on it. “We have to get up,” she said.
Abe didn’t move, did not turn toward her. “Right,” he said, and from the pitch of his voice she knew that he hadn’t been asleep, either.
She rolled onto her back. “Abe.”
“Right,” he repeated. He pushed off the bed in one motion and closeted himself in the bathroom, where he ran the shower long before he stepped inside, incorrectly assuming the background noise would keep anyone outside from hearing him cry.
The worst day of Abe’s life had not been the one you’d imagine, but the one after that, when he went to choose his daughter’s coffin. Sarah begged him to go; said she could not sit and talk about what to do with their daughter, as if she was a box of outgrown clothing that had to be stored somewhere safe and dry. The funeral director was a man with a bad comb-over and kind, gray eyes, and his first question to Abe was whether he’d seen his daughter…afterward. Abe had – once the doctors and nurses had given up and the tubes had been removed and the crash carts pulled away, he and Sarah were given a moment to say goodbye. Sarah had run out of the hospital room, screaming. Abe had sat down on the edge of the bed with the plastic mattress that crinkled beneath his weight, and had threaded his fingers with his daughter’s. For a brief, heart-stopping moment, he thought he’d felt her move, but it turned out to be his own sobbing, jarring the bed. He’d sat like that for a while, and then somehow, managed to pull her onto his lap and crawl onto the cot himself, as if he were the patient.
What he remembered was not how still she was, or how her skin grew ashen under his touch, but how she had weighed just the tiniest bit less than she had that morning, when he’d carried her through the double doors of the emergency room. It wasn’t remarkable to think that he – a man who lived by weights and measures – would be sensitive to this even at a moment as overwhelming at that one. Abe recalled hearing medical examiners say a person who died lost twenty-one grams of weight – the measure of a human soul. He realized, though, holding his daughter in his arms, that the scale was all wrong. Loss should have been measured in leagues: the linear timeline he would not spend with her as she lost her first tooth, lost her heart over a boy, lost the graduation cap she tossed into a silvered sky. Loss should have been measured circularly, like angles: the minutes between the two of them, the degrees of separation.
We suggest that you dress your daughter the way she would have wanted, the funeral director had said. Did she have a favorite party dress, or a pair of overalls she always wore to climb trees? A soccer uniform? A t-shirt from a favorite vacation?
There were other questions, and decisions to be made, and finally, the funeral director took Abe into another room to choose a coffin. The samples were stacked against the wall, jet and mahogany sarcophagi gleaming at such high polish he could see his own ravaged features in their reflections. The funeral director led Abe to the far end of the room, where three stunted coffins were propped like brave soldiers. They ranged from some that came up as high as his hip to one that was barely bigger than a breadbox.
Abe picked one painted a glossy white, with gold piping, because it reminded him of his daughter’s bedroom furniture. He kept staring at it. Although the funeral director assured him that it was the right size, it did not seem large enough to Abe to hold a girl as full of life as his daughter. It was certainly not large enough, he knew, to pack inside the turtle-shell of grief that he’d armored himself in this past day. Which meant, of course, that even after his daughter was gone, the sorrow would remain behind.
The funeral was held at a church neither Abe nor Sarah attended, a service arranged by Sarah’s mother, who in spite of this still managed to believe in God. At first, Sarah had fought it – how many idealistic discussions had she and Abe had about religion being akin to brainwashing; about letting their child choose her own rainbow of beliefs? – but Sarah’s mother put her foot down, and Sarah – still reeling – was weak enough to be toppled. What kind of parent, Felicity had said tearfully, doesn’t want a man of God to say a few words over her daughter? Now, Sarah sat in the front pew as this pastor spoke, words that flowed over the crowd like an anesthetic breeze. In her hand was a small teal-green Beanie Baby, a dog that had gone everywhere with her child, to the point where it was hairless and frayed and barely even recognizable in its animalhood. Sarah squeezed it in her fist, so tight that she could feel its seeded stuffing start to push at the seams.
Try to remember, as we celebrate her short and glorious life, that sadness comes out of love. Sadness is a kind of terrible privilege.
Sarah wondered why the pastor hadn’t mentioned the truly important things: like the fact that her daughter could take a toilet paper roll and turn it into a pretend video camera that occupied her imagination for hours. Or that the only songs that made her stop crying when she had colic as an infant were tracks from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. She wondered why he hadn’t told the people who’d come here that her daughter had only just learned how to do a roundoff in gymnastics and that she could pick the Big Dipper out of any night sky?
Oh, Lord, receive this child of Yours into the arms of Your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the company of angels.
At that, Sarah lifted her head. Not Your child, she thought. Mine.
Ten minutes later, it was over. She remained stone-still while everyone else left to get into their cars and drive to the cemetery. But she had worked out something special with Abe; the one request, really, she’d had for this funeral. She felt Abe’s hand come onto her shoulder and his lips move against her ear. “Do you still –“
“Yes,” she interrupted, and then he was gone too.
She walked up to the coffin, surrounded by an embarrassment of flowers. Fall flowers, like the ones she’d had in her wedding bouquet. She forced herself to glance down at her daughter – who looked, well, perfectly normal, which was the great irony here.
“Hey, baby,” Sarah said softly, and she tucked the small green dog underneath her daughter’s arm. Then she opened up the large purse she’d brought with her to the funeral service.
It had been critical for her to be the last one to see her daughter, before that casket was closed. She wanted to be the last one to lay eyes on her girl, the same way – seven years ago – she had been the first.
The book she p
ulled out of her purse was so dog-eared and worn that its spine had cracked and some of its pages were only filed in between others, instead of glued into place. “In a great green room,” she began to read, “there was a fireplace, and a red balloon, and picture of…”
She hesitated. This was the part where her daughter would have chimed in: The cow jumping over the moon. But now, Sarah had to say the words for her. She read through to the end, going by heart when the tears came so furiously that she could not see the words on the page. “Goodnight stars,” she whispered. “Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere.” Then she drew in a ragged breath and touched her finger to her daughter’s lips. “Sleep tight,” Sarah said.
In the gathering hall at the church, Abe noticed there were obscene amounts of food, as if pastries and deviled eggs and casseroles could make up for the fact that nobody really knew what to say to him. He stood holding a plate piled high that someone had brought him, although he hadn’t taken a single bite. From time to time, a friend or a relative would come up to him and say something stupid: How are you doing? Are you holding up okay? It won’t hurt as much, in time. Things like that only made him want to put down his plate and punch the speaker until his hand bled, because that kind of pain he could understand better than the empty ache in his chest that wouldn’t go away. No one said what they all were truly thinking, when they furtively glanced over at Abe with his bad-fitting black suit and his Styrofoam plate: I’m so glad it happened to you, and not me.
“Excuse me.”
Abe turned around to find a woman he’d never met before – middle-aged, with wrinkles around her eyes that made him think she had smiled, often, in her youth. Maybe one of Felicity’s church ladies, he thought. She was holding a box of daffodil bulbs. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said, and she held out the box.
He set down the plate on a chair beside him so that he could take the bulbs. “Plant these now,” she said, “and when they come up in the Spring, think of her.”
She touched his arm and walked off, leaving Abe holding onto this hope.
Sarah had met Abe when she was new to Los Angeles, and some friends had taken her to a cigar club that was so exclusive you had to enter through a corporate office building and give the doorman the password to be let into the correct elevator bank. The club was on the roof of the building, and Sarah’s friends had tried to cure her east-coast homesickness by showing off Mel Gibson’s humidor. It was a dark place, one where actors who fancied themselves to be musicians were likely to pick up a guitar and jam with the band; one that only made Sarah even more aware of how much she hated this city, this new job, this departure from where she really wanted to be.
They sat at the bar, pulling up stools beside a good-looking guy with hair as dark as ink and a smile that made Sarah feel like she was caught in a whirlpool. Sarah’s friends ordered Cosmos and tried to outflirt each other – getting him to reveal that he was the drummer in the band, and that his name was Abe. When one of the girls came back from the bathroom and exclaimed, Have you seen all the stars?, Abe leaned over and asked Sarah to dance. They moved like smoke over the empty dance floor, to a canned jazz track. “Why me?” Sarah asked simply.
His hand, resting on the small of her back, pulled her just that much closer. “Because,” Abe said. “When your friend started talking about stars, you were the only one in this whole fucking place who looked up at the sky.”
Three months later, they moved to Massachusetts together. Six months later, they got married, amidst many toasts and jokes about Abraham and Sarah and their destiny to create a tribe. But like their Biblical counterparts, it took years for them to have a child – eight, to be exact. Just long enough for Sarah to believe it was time to give up trying. Just short enough for her to be overwhelmed with the news of her pregnancy; to never give a second thought to the fact that this might not be the end of the struggle, but instead, the beginning.
On the way home from the church, Sarah turned to Abe and told him to stop at the grocery store. “There’s nothing in the house,” she said, as if this wasn’t obvious on so many levels. They were too numb to think about how they looked, at one in the afternoon, moving through the frozen foods aisle in coat and tie and pearls and heels. They wandered through the store, picking out the items that seemed to scream normal: eggs and bread and cheese and milk; things any family could use. In the cereal aisle, Abe started to automatically reach for the Berry Kix, her favorite, until he realized that they didn’t need it anymore; and he covered gracefully by taking instead the cereal box beside it, some godawful bran thing that looked like straw and that he knew he’d never eat.
They went to the line with their favorite checkout girl, the one who didn’t mind when their daughter helped scan the bar codes on the soup cans and the frozen peas. She smiled when she saw them. “Wow, look at you two!” she said, glancing at their clothes and winking. “Don’t tell me food shopping is what passes for a date without the kids, nowadays…”
Abe and Sarah froze. This woman wouldn’t know – how could she? She thought, as would any other stranger, that their daughter was home with a babysitter, watching The Princess Diaries for the six hundredth time or pretending the Tupperware was a drum set. As Abe signed the credit card receipt, the checkout clerk reached beneath her cash register and pulled out a lollipop. “She likes blue, right? Tell her I missed her.”
“Yes,” Abe said, grasping it so tightly that the stick curved. “Yes, I will.”
He followed Sarah as she pushed the cart outside, where the sun was so bright it brought tears to his eyes. Sarah turned to him, speechless and staring. “What?” Abe said, his voice raw. “What did I do wrong?”
Three days later, Sarah woke up and pulled on her favorite sweater only to realize that her arms now stretched a good three inches past the ends of the sleeves. Annoyed – did Abe shrink it in the wash? – she pulled out another only to realize that she’d outgrown that one, too. She stared at herself in the mirror for a moment and then pushed the sleeves up to her elbows, where she could not see anything wrong.
She tried to pretend that she didn’t notice when she unloaded the dishwasher and could, for the first time in her life, reach the top shelves of the cabinets without having to stand on a stool or ask Abe for his help.
On his last day of paid Bereavement Leave, Abe remembered sitting in the hospital with his daughter. There were starfish painted on the window glass, and while they waited for the doctor and Sarah read a waiting-room magazine from the turn of the century, his daughter had wanted to play I-Spy. It had gotten to the point, in the past seven years, where Abe could almost do this semi-conscious – since his daughter had a habit of changing mid-stream what her target object was, anyway, the game didn’t make any linear sense. He guessed the Exit sign over the door, the bathroom knob, the starfish on the far right; getting more and more impatient, and wishing the doctor would just come in already so that he didn’t have to play one more damn round.
It had only been a sore throat. Her fever wasn’t more than 101. That was the criteria – you weren’t supposed to worry about a fever until it spiked past 102; something Sarah had learned the hard way when she’d call the pediatrician early on freaking out over everything from hangnails to cradle cap. But over the course of their daughter’s life, they’d weaned themselves into health care confidence. They didn’t rush her into the office at the sign of the first cough; they made her sleep overnight on an earache to make sure it was present the next morning before they went to get it checked. And this time, Sarah had kept her home from school waiting to see if it was a virus, or strep throat. They’d done what they were supposed to do as parents; they’d listened to the doctors; they’d played by the rules – and by dinnertime, the rules didn’t apply. Children weren’t supposed to die of strep throat, but then again, you did not have to look far for the shouldn’ts. All over this world there were tsunamis sweeping entire countries out to sea; there were Eskimo women with breast milk full of mercury;
there were wars being fought that had been started for the wrong reasons. All over this world impossible things were happening, that never should have.
Abe realized he would play I-Spy for a thousand years, if he could.
The next day, when Abe left for work, Sarah cleaned. Not just a cursory vacuum and floor-mop, mind you, but toilets scrubbed by hand and radiator registers being dusted and the washing of the walls. She went into her drawers and bagged all the sweaters that did not fit, and the new pile of pants that ended above her ankles. She got rid of the travel coffee mugs and gravy boats and cherry pitters she never used, weeding through the kitchen drawers. She organized Abe’s clothes by color grouping; she threw out all the medicine bottles past their expiration date. She wiped down the shelves of the refrigerator and tossed the capers and the mustard and the horseradish that hadn’t been used except for that one recipe months ago.
She began to organize the closets in the house – the front one, with the winter coats still in hibernation and the boots tossed like gauntlets into a Rubbermaid bin on the floor – and then the hall closet with its piles of snowy towels and heady potpourri. It was in that one that she found herself reaching to the rear of the top shelf – the hiding spot she’d never been able to reach herself without a struggle, before, and that therefore became her cache of Christmas gifts bought and saved all year for her daughter. One by one, Sarah pulled out a remote control robot, an art set to make flower fairies, a dress-up kit – treasures she’d found in January or March or May and had known, in that instant, that her daughter would love. She stood immobile for a long moment, holding this bounty in her elongated arms, paralyzed by the most concrete evidence she’d found yet that her daughter was Not. Coming. Home.