by Jodi Picoult
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 majored 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.”
It occurs to me that there are Ritz-Carltons in every corner of the planet. That this might not be a break for my mother, but a beginning. What if it turns out I didn’t come here to bring her back, but to say goodbye?
“You must be exhausted,” my mother says. “Why don’t you go to sleep?”
I want to tell her that I’m fine; that I don’t have to sleep at all, but suddenly I am so tired that I can’t even form the words. I fit my curves against hers, as if we are carved from the same stone.
When Devon and I were little we used to put on gymnastics shows on the front lawn. Sometimes, when a somersault came out wobbly or a cartwheel landed wrong, we’d shout out Do over! This was the cue for Mom, who was the audience, to pretend that the first one had never happened. “If you could,” I ask, “would you start over?”
Not only does my mother listen; she understands what I’m asking. She reaches across me to turn out the light; it feels like an embrace. “No,” she answers. “I wouldn’t have missed you for the world.”
#
For a moment when I wake up, I think I’ve died. I have a cloud drawn up to my chin; the world is washed in the watercolors of early morning. Then I remember where I am, where we are, and I focus on the insistent knocking on the door. My mother wraps the terrycloth robe around herself; pulls open the door and falls into my father’s arms.
Then she lets go so that she can gather Devon beneath her wing; and from the way he clutches her, it’s hard to believe this is the same brother who barely acknowledges her when his friends are around, because it’s uncool to have a mother, I guess. Instead, he grabs onto her – awkward, because he’s bigger than she is by now – and if I am not mistaken, he might be crying.
Meanwhile, my father’s spied me. He stumbles in an effort to get closer and crawls onto the bed to wrap me in his arms. “If you ever run away again,” he threatens, the words muffled into my hair, “I will kill you.” But he’s holding me so tight, I know he couldn’t possibly mean it.
I wonder if this is why people run away – not because they want to get anywhere, but because they need to remember what they’d miss if they left for good.
#
Devon eats a waffle with strawberries and whipped cream; I have oatmeal and raisin toast and tea poured out of a little pot just for me. It would be great to get a little china teapot like this, even just to use in our boring old house. Maybe then it wouldn’t be quite so boring.
“We don’t have to go home just yet,” my father says. “The only times I’ve been to San Francisco, I’ve been stuck in business meetings. I haven’t really seen anything.”
He has apologized to my mother, and my mother has apologized to him. Or something like that. They spent a long time with their arms around each other, their whispered words a screen. It reminded me of the wild animals you see on HD television channels, the ones who find a long lost pack member and nuzzle and circle and huddle close for days, lest the other one disappear again.
There is quiet music in the restaurant; and women stroll across the lobby, their high heels kissing the marble. Businessmen hold folded newspapers beneath their arms and talk in languages I don’t understand. A waiter comes by with a fresh glass of orange juice for my father, before he’s even finished his first. “Maybe we should all move in here,” he jokes.
I listen to my family talk about how to spend the day, all the possibilities. And I cannot remember the last time we did this: made choices as a unit, instead of individuals.
I set my spoon on the edge of my oatmeal bowl. “What person,” I ask quietly, “would you most want to trade places with?”
At first, everyone keeps talking, and I figure they haven’t heard me. But then, one by one, they stop speaking. I bet they’re all going to laugh – it was one thing to play games at the table when we were younger, but now? I might as well have IDIOT written on my forehead.
“Bill Gates,” my father says. “For all the obvious reasons.”
Devon is next. “Brad Pitt. Helloooo, Angelina.”
We look at my mother, it’s her turn. “No one,” she says, smiling. “There isn’t a single person who’s got it better than me right now.”
I almost want to let her know, at that moment, that she was wrong all those years ago about the memory you’d keep. It isn’t the last best one you want to save; it’s the one you haven’t had yet. But I’ll have years to explain that. And I’ll have a lifetime to prove that even if an exotic destination has dazzling culture, stunning scenery, spectacular hotels, there’s something it can never be: your home.
My mother and father and brother, they’re all looking at me. I can’t remember the last time anyone was hanging on my words. I recall what I thought last night, when I first saw my mother: what if it turns out this isn’t about going back, but starting over?
What if?
I open my mouth, and I tell them what they’re waiting to hear.
Books by Jodi Picoult
Songs of the Humpback Whale
Harvesting the Heart
Picture Perfect
Mercy
The Pact
Keeping Faith
Plain Truth
Salem Falls
Perfect Match
Second Glance
My Sister's Keeper
Vanishing Acts
The Tenth Circle
Nineteen Minutes
Change of Heart
Handle With Care
House Rules
Sing You Home (Coming March, 2011)