Sing You Home: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  “Max said he had to talk to me,” I explain. “I figured it was about the divorce. I didn’t know he was bringing backup.”

  Vanessa snorts. She steps out of her high heels. “I don’t even like the fact that they were on my couch, frankly. I feel like we ought to fumigate. Or hold an exorcism or something—”

  “Vanessa!”

  “I just didn’t expect to see him in my house. Especially tonight, when I . . .” Her voice trails off into silence.

  “When you what?”

  “Nothing.” She shakes her head.

  “I guess you can’t blame them for wishing that, one day, we’ll wake up and realize how wrong we’ve been.”

  “Can’t I?”

  “No,” I say, “because that’s exactly what we wish about them.”

  Vanessa offers me a half smile. “Leave it to you to find the only thing I have in common with Pastor Clive and his band of merry heterosexuals.”

  She walks into the kitchen, and I assume she’s getting the wine out of the fridge. It is a tradition for us to unwind and tell each other about our days over a nice glass of Pinot Grigio. “I think we still have some of the Midlife Crisis,” I call out. It’s a wine from California that Vanessa and I bought just because of the name on the label. While I wait, I sit down on the couch, in the spot Max vacated. I flip through the channels on the television, pausing on Ellen.

  Max and I sometimes watched her, when he got home from landscaping. He liked her Converse sneakers and her blue eyes. He used to say that he wouldn’t want to be stuck in a room with Oprah, because she was intimidating—but Ellen DeGeneres, she was someone you’d take out for a beer.

  What I like about Ellen is that (yep) she’s gay, but that’s the least interesting thing about her. You remember her because she’s good at what she does on TV, not because she goes home to Portia de Rossi.

  Vanessa walks into the living room, but instead of bringing a glass of wine, she is carrying two champagne flutes. “It’s Dom Pérignon,” she says. “Because you and I are celebrating.”

  I look at the bubbles rising in the pale liquid. “I had a patient die today,” I blurt out. “She was only three.”

  Vanessa sets both glasses on the floor and hugs me. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to.

  You know someone’s right for you when the things they don’t have to say are even more important than the things they do.

  Crying won’t bring Marisa back. It won’t stop people like Max and Pauline from judging me. But it makes me feel better, all the same. I stay this way for a while, with Vanessa stroking my hair, until I am dry-eyed and feeling only empty inside. Then I look up at her. “I’m sorry. You wanted to celebrate something . . .”

  Color rises to Vanessa’s face. “Some other time.”

  “I’m not letting my crap day trump your good one—”

  “Really, Zo. It can wait—”

  “No.” I turn on the couch so that I am cross-legged, facing her. “Tell me.”

  She looks pained. “It’s stupid. I can ask you later—”

  “Ask me what?”

  Vanessa takes a deep breath. “If you meant what you said yesterday. After we ran into Max at the grocery store.”

  I had told her that I wanted to be with her forever. That forever wasn’t long enough.

  And in spite of the fact that this is never how I imagined my life—

  In spite of the fact that there are people I have never even met who will hate me for it—

  In spite of the fact that it has been only months, not years—

  The first thing I do every morning is panic. And then I look at Vanessa and think, Don’t worry; she’s still here.

  “Yes,” I tell her. “Every word.”

  Vanessa uncurls her fist. Inside is a gold ring with a constellation of diamonds dotting its surface. “If forever’s not long enough, how about the rest of my life?”

  For a moment I cannot move, cannot breathe. I am not thinking of logistics, of how people will react to this news. All I am thinking is: I get Vanessa. Me, and no one else.

  I start crying again, but for a different reason. “A lifetime,” I say, “is a decent start.”

  I am surrounded by clouds. They brush the toes of my sneakers. They litter the floor. I might go so far as to say I’ve landed in Heaven—except that I’ve been dragging my feet to avoid shopping for a bridal gown, which makes this whole experience a little more like Hell.

  My mother is holding out a gown with a sweetheart neckline that dissolves into a skirt of feathers. It looks like a chicken that ran into a combine. “No,” I say. “Emphatically no.”

  “There’s one over there with Swarovski crystals on the bodice,” my mother says.

  “You can wear it,” I mutter.

  It was not my idea to come to the bridal salon in Boston. My mother had a dream that revealed us shopping here, in the Priscilla showroom, and after that there was no escaping a trip. She is a big believer in the predictive power of the subconscious.

  My mother—who took a week to adjust to the fact that Vanessa and I were a couple—is even more excited about the wedding than we are. I secretly think she loves Vanessa more than she loves me, since Vanessa is the grounded, good-head-on-her-shoulders daughter she never had—the one who can talk about IRAs and retirement planning and who keeps a birthday book so she never forgets to send a card. I think my mother truly believes Vanessa will take care of me forever; whereas with Max, she had her doubts.

  But I’m itchy, in this place that’s full of other brides who have weddings without complications. I feel like I’m being smothered by tulle and lace and satin, and I haven’t even tried on a single dress yet.

  When the salesclerk approaches us and asks if she can help, my mother steps forward with a bright smile. “My gay daughter’s getting married,” she announces.

  I can feel my cheeks burn. “Why am I suddenly your gay daughter?”

  “Well, I’d think, of all people, you’d know the answer to that.”

  “You never introduced me before as your straight daughter.”

  My mother’s face falls. “I thought you wanted me to be proud of you.”

  “Don’t make this my fault,” I say.

  The salesclerk looks from me to my mother. “Why don’t I give you a few more minutes?” she asks, and she slinks away.

  “Now look at what you’ve done. You’ve made her uncomfortable,” my mother sighs.

  “Are you kidding?” I grab a sequined pump from a rack. “‘Hi,’” I mimic. “‘Do you have this shoe for my mother the sadomasochist? She wears a seven and a half.’”

  “First of all, I’m not into S and M. And second of all, that shoe is absolutely hideous.” She looks at me. “You know, not everyone is out to attack you. Just because you’re a new member of a minority group doesn’t mean you have to assume the worst about everyone else.”

  I sit down on the white couch, in the middle of a mountain of tulle. “That’s easy for you to say. You aren’t getting pamphlets, daily, from the Eternal Glory Church. ‘Ten Tiny Steps to Jesus.’ ‘Straight≠ Hate.’” I look up at her. “You may feel like trumpeting my relationship status, but I don’t. It’s not worth making someone squirm.” I glance at the salesclerk, who is wrapping a gown in plastic. “For all we know, she sings in the Eternal Glory Church choir.”

  “For all we know,” my mother counters, “she’s gay, too.” She sits down next to me, and the dresses pouf up around us, a tiny explosion. “Honey . . . what’s wrong?”

  To my great embarrassment, my eyes well up with tears. “I don’t know what to wear to my own wedding,” I admit.

  My mother takes one look at me, then grabs my hand and pulls me up from the couch and downstairs onto Boylston Street. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “The bride’s supposed to be the focus of all the attention,” I sob. “But what happens when there are two brides?”

  “Well, what’s Vanessa wearing?”
<
br />   “A suit.” A beautiful white suit she found at Marshalls that fits like it was tailored to her. But I have never worn a suit in my life.

  “Then I’d think you can wear anything you want . . .”

  “Not white,” I blurt out.

  My mother purses her lips. “Because you were already married?”

  “No. Because—” Before I can say what has been lying smooth and heavy on my heart, like a fresh layer of asphalt, I snap my mouth shut.

  “Because what?” my mother urges.

  “Because it’s a gay wedding,” I whisper.

  When Vanessa proposed, I never even thought twice about saying yes. But I would have been entirely happy to get married at a courthouse in Massachusetts, instead of having a big ceremony and reception. “Come on, Zo,” she had said. “There are two times in your life everyone you love comes together—your wedding and your funeral—and I know I won’t have nearly as much fun at the second one.” But even as I sat down every night with Vanessa at the computer to research bands and venues for the reception, I kept thinking I would find the escape hatch, the way to convince Vanessa to just take a vacation to Turks and Caicos instead.

  And yet.

  Unlike me, she’d never walked down an aisle. She’d never been fed wedding cake or danced until there were blisters on her feet. If that was what she wanted, then I wasn’t going to deny her the experience.

  I wanted everyone to know how happy I was with Vanessa, but I didn’t need a wedding to do it. I just wasn’t sure if that was because this was still new to me or because I had heard loud and clear what Max thought—that a gay marriage isn’t a real one.

  I cannot explain why this even mattered. We weren’t going to be asking Pastor Clive to officiate, after all. The people who would be invited to our wedding loved us and wouldn’t be judging the fact that there were two tiny brides on the cake, instead of a bride and a groom.

  But to get married, we had to cross the Rhode Island border. We had to find a minister who was supportive of gay marriage. Eventually we would have to hire a lawyer to draw up papers to give each other power of attorney for medical decisions, to become beneficiaries on each other’s life insurance policies. I wasn’t ashamed of wanting a lifetime with Vanessa. But I was ashamed that the steps I had to take in order to do it made me feel like a second-class citizen.

  “I’m happy,” I tell my mother, although I am bawling.

  My mother looks at me. “What you need,” she says, waving her hand dismissively at the bridal salon behind us, “is none of this. What you need is elegant and understated. Just like you and Vanessa.”

  We try three stores before we find it—a simple ivory, knee-length sheath that doesn’t make me look like Cinderella. “I fell in love with your father during a fire drill,” my mother says idly, as she fastens the buttons on the back. “We were both working at a law firm—he was an accountant and I was a secretary—and they evacuated the building. We met next to a chain-link fence, and he offered me half a Twinkie. When the building got the all clear, we didn’t go back inside.” She shrugs. “At his funeral, a lot of my friends said it was just bad luck that I fell for a guy who died in his forties, but you know, I never saw it that way. I thought it was good luck. I mean, what if there hadn’t been a fire drill? Then we never would have met. And I’d much rather have had a few great years with him than none at all.” She turns me so that I am facing her. “Don’t let anyone tell you who you should and shouldn’t love, Zoe. Yes, it’s a gay wedding . . . but it’s your wedding.”

  She turns me again so that I can see myself in the mirror. From the front, this could be any pretty, simple dress. But from the back, everything is different. A row of satin buttons gives way, at the waist, to a fan of pleats. It’s as if the dress is opening like a rose.

  As if someone watching me walk away might think, That’s not what I expected.

  I stare at myself. “What do you think?”

  Maybe my mother is talking about the dress, and maybe she’s talking about my future. “I think,” she says, “you’ve found the perfect one.”

  When Lucy walks into our conference room, I am already picking out a melody on my guitar and humming along. “Hey there,” I say, glancing up at her. Today her red hair is matted and twisted. “Trying for dreadlocks?”

  She shrugs.

  “I had a roommate in college who wanted dreads. She chickened out at the last minute because the only way to get rid of dreadlocks is to cut them all off.”

  “Well, maybe I’ll just shave my head,” Lucy says.

  “You could do that,” I agree, delighted that we are having what could almost be called a conversation. “You could be the next Sinéad O’Connor.”

  “Who?”

  I realize that, when the bald musician ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992, Lucy wasn’t even alive yet. “Or Melissa Etheridge. Did you see her perform at the Grammys when she was bald from chemo? She sang Janis Joplin.”

  I take out my pick and begin the chord progressions for “Piece of My Heart.” From the corner of my eye, I watch Lucy staring at my fingers as they move up and down the frets. “I remember hearing that performance and thinking how brave she was, as a cancer survivor . . . and how it was the perfect song. Suddenly it wasn’t about a woman standing up to a guy—it was about beating anything that thought it could take you down.” I play a thread of melody and then sing the next line: “I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough.”

  With a strong chord I finish. “You know,” I say, as if this thought has just occurred to me, instead of being a lesson I’ve planned all along, “the thing about lyrics is that they work really well when they connect personally to the musician—or the listener.” I start playing the same melody again, but this time I improvise the words:

  Didn’t you ever feel like you were all alone, well yeah,

  And didn’t you ever feel that you were on your own.

  Honey, you know you do.

  Each time you tell yourself that you’re out of luck

  You wonder how you ever, ever got so stuck.

  I want you to listen, listen, listen, listen already

  Gotta know that I am ready to help you, Lucy.

  Gonna show you I am ready to help you, Lucy—

  Just as I am beginning to really rock out, Lucy snorts. “That is the lamest crap I’ve ever heard,” she murmurs.

  “Maybe you want to take a stab at it,” I suggest, and I put the guitar down and reach for a pad and a pen instead. I write out the lyrics mad lib style, leaving gaps and spaces where Lucy can instead substitute her own thoughts and feelings.

  Sometimes you make me feel like._____

  Don’t you know that I_____?

  I do a fill-in-the-blank pattern like this for the entire song, and then set it on the table between us. For a few minutes Lucy just ignores it, focusing instead on a tangled strand of her hair. And then, slowly, her hand reaches out and pulls the paper closer.

  I try not to get too excited about the fact that she’s taken an active step toward participation. Instead, I pick up my guitar and pretend to tune it, even though I did this before Lucy arrived today.

  When she writes, she hunches over the paper, as if she’s protecting a secret. She’s a lefty; I wonder why I haven’t noticed that before. Her hair falls over her face like a curtain. Each of her fingernails is painted a different color.

  At one point, her sleeve inches up and I see the scars on her wrist.

  Finally, she shoves the paper in my direction. “Great,” I say brightly. “Let’s take a look!”

  In every blank, Lucy has written a string of expletives. She waits for me to look at her, and she raises her eyebrows and smirks.

  “Well.” I pick up my guitar. “All right, then.” I put the paper on the table where I can see it, and I begin to sing, certain that if anyone would understand anger and anguish it would be Janis Joplin, and that she won’t be rolling over in her grave. “Sometimes
you make me feel like a motherfucking asshole,” I sing, as loud as I can. “Don’t you know that I . . . cocksucker—” I break off, pointing to the page. “I can’t quite read that . . .”

  Lucy blushes. “Uh . . . fucktard.”

  “Don’t you know that I . . . cocksucker fucktard,” I sing.

  The door to the hallway is wide open. A teacher walks by and does a double take.

  “Come on, come on, come on, come on and take it . . . Take a motherfucking shithole asswipe . . .”

  I sing as if this is any song, as if the swear words mean nothing to me. I sing my heart out. And eventually, by the time I finish the chorus, Lucy is staring at me with the ghost of a smile playing over her lips.

  Unfortunately, there is also a small crowd of students standing in the open doorway, caught on the tightrope between shocked and delighted. When I finish, they start clapping and hollering, and then the bell rings.

  “Guess that’s all the time we have,” I say. Lucy slings her backpack over her shoulder and, like usual, makes a beeline to get as far away from me as possible. I reach for my guitar case, resigned.

  But at the threshold of the door, she turns around. “See you next week,” Lucy says, the first time she’s acknowledged to me that she has any plan to return.

  I know it’s supposed to be good luck if it rains on your wedding, but I’m not sure what it means when there’s a blizzard. It is the day of my wedding to Vanessa, and the freak April snowstorm the weathermen have predicted has taken a turn for the worse. The Department of Transportation has even closed patches of the highway.

  We came to Fall River the night before, to get everything sorted out, but the majority of our guests were driving up today for the evening ceremony. After all, Massachusetts is less than an hour away. But today, even that seems too far.

  And now, if a weather disaster isn’t enough, there’s a plumbing snafu, too. The pipes burst at the restaurant where we were planning to hold our reception. I watch Vanessa try to calm down her friend Joel—a wedding planner who took on our nuptials as his gift to us. “They’ve got three inches of standing water,” Joel wails, sinking his head into his hands. “I think I’m hyperventilating.”