Sing You Home: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  “I’m sure there’s somewhere that can hold a party on short notice,” Vanessa says.

  “Yeah. And maybe Ronald McDonald will even agree to officiate.” Joel looks up sharply at Vanessa. “I have a reputation, you know. I will not, I repeat, not have French fries as an hors d’oeuvre.”

  “Maybe we should reschedule,” Vanessa says.

  “Or,” I suggest, “we could just go to a justice of the peace and be done with it.”

  “Honey,” Joel says. “You are not wasting that gorgeous peau de soie dress on a city hall wham-bam-stamp-you-ma’am wedding.”

  Vanessa ignores him and walks toward me. “Go on.”

  “Well,” I say. “The party’s the least important thing, isn’t it?”

  Behind me, Joel gasps. “I did not hear that,” he says.

  “I don’t want everyone to drive up here and risk their lives,” I say. “We’ve got Joel as a witness, and I’m sure we can drag in someone else off the street.”

  Vanessa looks at me. “But don’t you want your mother here?”

  “Sure I do. But more than that, I just want to get married. We’ve got the license. We’ve got each other. The rest, it’s just gravy.”

  “Do me a favor,” Joel begs. “Call your guests and leave it up to them.”

  “Should we tell them to bring their bathing suits for the reception?” Vanessa asks.

  “Leave that part up to me,” he says. “If David Tutera can fix a wedding catastrophe, so can I.”

  “Who the hell is David Tutera?” Vanessa asks.

  He rolls his eyes. “Sometimes you are such a dyke.” He takes her cell phone off the table and presses it into her hand. “Start calling, sister.”

  “The good news,” my mother says, as she closes the bathroom door behind her, “is that you’re still walking down an aisle.”

  It took her five hours, but she managed to make it to Massachusetts in the storm of the century. Now, she is keeping me company until it’s showtime. It smells of popcorn in here. I look at myself in the wide industrial mirror. My dress looks perfect; my makeup seems too dramatic in this dim light. My hair, in this humidity, doesn’t have a prayer of holding a curl.

  “The minister’s here,” my mother tells me.

  I know, because she already popped in to say hello to me. Maggie MacMillan is a humanist minister we found in the yellow pages. She’s not gay, but she performs same-sex marriages all the time, and both Vanessa and I liked the fact that there wasn’t a religious component to her ceremony. Frankly, after Max’s visit, we’d both had about as much religion as we could stand. But she really sold us in her office by whooping with delight when we’d told her we’d be crossing the border to Massachusetts to get married. “I wish Rhode Island would get with the program,” she’d said with a smirk. “But I suppose the legislature thinks if they give gays and lesbians civil rights, everyone in the state is going to want them . . .”

  Joel sticks his head inside the door. “You ready?” he asks.

  I take a deep breath. “Guess so.”

  “You know I tried to get you a gay magician for the reception, but it didn’t work out,” Joel says. “He vanished with a poof.” He waits for me to get the punch line and then grins. “Works every time with a nervous bride.”

  “How’s Vanessa doing?” I ask.

  “Gorgeous,” he says. “Almost as gorgeous as you.”

  My mom gives me a kiss on the cheek. “See you out there.”

  Vanessa and I made the decision to walk down the aisle together. Neither of us has a father around to escort the bride, and this time, I didn’t feel like I was being given away into someone’s safekeeping. I felt like we were there to balance each other. So I follow Joel out of the women’s room and wait while he gets Vanessa out of the men’s room. She is wearing her white suit, and her eyes are bright and focused. “Wow,” she says, staring at me. I see her throat working, as she tries to find words that are big enough for what we are feeling. Finally she reaches for my hands, and rests her forehead against mine. “I’m afraid that, any second now, I’m going to wake up,” she whispers.

  “Okay, lovebirds,” Joel says, clapping his hands to interrupt us. “Save it for the guests.”

  “All four of them?” I murmur, and Vanessa snorts.

  “I thought of another one,” she says. “Rajasi.”

  We have been trading, for the past four hours, the names of people we think will brave the elements to celebrate our wedding with us. Possibly Wanda, from the nursing home—she grew up in Montana and is used to blizzards. And Alexa, my office assistant—whose husband works for the DOT, and who could probably hijack a snow-plow to get her here. It stands to reason that Vanessa’s longtime hairdresser will probably be one of the guests waiting for us, too.

  With my mom, that makes a whopping four people at our party.

  Joel leads us through a tangle of gears and pulleys and equipment, past stacks of boxes and through a doorway. A short curtain has been set up, and Joel hisses a command: “Just follow the runner and be careful not to trip over the gutters . . . and, ladies, remember, you are fabulous.” He kisses us on our cheeks, and then Vanessa reaches for my hand.

  A string quartet begins to play. Together, Vanessa and I step onto the white runner and make the hard right turn at the edge of the curtain—the place where we step onto the aisle of the bowling alley we will be walking down, the place where the guests can see us.

  Except there aren’t four of them. There are nearly eighty. From what I can see, everyone we called earlier today—everyone we advised not to come in this treacherous weather—has made the trip to be here with us.

  That’s the first thing I notice. The second is that this AMC Lanes & Games bowling alley—the only spot in town that Joel could rent out completely on such short notice—doesn’t even look like a bowling alley anymore. There are vines woven with lilies lining the gutters on either side of the aisle we’re walking down. There are fairy lights strung overhead and on the walls. The automatic ball return is draped with white silk, and on it are frames with the faces of my father and both of Vanessa’s parents. The pinball machines are draped in velvet and covered with appetizers and heaping bowls of fresh shrimp. The air hockey table sports a champagne fountain.

  “What a quintessentially lesbian wedding,” Vanessa says to me. “Who else would tie the knot in a room full of balls?”

  We are still laughing when we reach the end of the makeshift aisle. Maggie’s waiting, wearing a purple shawl edged with a rainbow of beading. “Welcome,” she says, “to the blizzard of 2011 and the marriage of Vanessa and Zoe. I’m going to refrain from making any jokes about lucky strikes, and instead I’m going to tell you that they’ve come to honor their commitment to each other not only today but for all the tomorrows to come. We rejoice with them . . . and for them.”

  Maggie’s words fade as I look at my mother’s face, my friends’ faces, and, yes, even the face of Vanessa’s hairdresser. Then Vanessa clears her throat and begins to recite a Rumi poem:

  The moment I heard my first love story I began seeking

  you, not realizing the search was useless.

  Lovers don’t meet somewhere along the way.

  They’re in one another’s souls from the beginning.

  When she is through, I can hear my mother sniffling. I pull out of my mind the ribbon of words I’ve memorized for Vanessa, an E. E. Cummings poem with syllables full of music.

  i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

  my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

  i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

  by only me is your doing,my darling)

  i fear

  no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet)i want

  no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)

  and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

  and whatever a sun will always sing is you

  There are rings, and we are both crying, and laughing.

&
nbsp; “Vanessa and Zoe,” the minister says, “may you avoid splits and always play a perfect game. As you’ve pledged in this ceremony, in front of family and friends, to be partners for life, I can only say what’s been said thousands of times before, at thousands of weddings . . .”

  Vanessa and I both grin. It took us a long time to figure out how to end our ceremony. You can’t very well say I now pronounce you husband and wife. By the same token, I now pronounce you partners sounds somehow lesser-than, not a true marriage.

  Our minister smiles at us.

  “Zoe? Vanessa?” she says. “You may kiss the bride.”

  Just in case you aren’t sure that the Highlands Inn is lesbian-friendly after you call its phone number (877-LES-B-INN), there is a row of Adirondack chairs in all the colors of the rainbow set on a hilltop. It hasn’t escaped my sense of irony that this little corner of open-minded paradise is set in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, that maybe this sleepy namesake town at the edge of the White Mountains could be the birthplace of a new way of thinking.

  After our wedding ceremony—which may have been the only ceremony in the world that has included both a chocolate–Grand Marnier ganache cake with real gold leaf and a midnight game of cosmic bowling in the dark—Vanessa and I wait out the storm to drive to our honeymoon destination. We have plans to cross-country ski, to go antiquing. But we spend nearly the first twenty-four hours of our honeymoon in our room—not fooling around, although there are lovely interludes of just that. Instead, we sit in front of the fireplace, drinking the champagne the inn owner has given us, and we talk. It seems impossible to me that we haven’t exhausted our stories, but each one unfolds into another. I tell Vanessa things I have never even told my mother: about what my father looked like the morning he died; how I’d stolen his deodorant from the bathroom and kept it hidden in my underwear drawer for the next few years so that, when I needed his smell for comfort, I’d have it. I tell her how, five years ago, I found a bottle of gin in the toilet tank and I threw it out but never told Max I’d stumbled across it, as if not speaking of it would mean it hadn’t really happened.

  I sing the alphabet for her, backward.

  And in return, Vanessa tells me about her first year of school counseling, about a sixth grader who confessed that her father was raping her, who ultimately was moved out of the school and the state by the same father, and who—periodically—Vanessa still tries to Google to see if she survived. She tells me about how, when she buried her mother, there was still a bitter, hard nut in her heart that hated this woman for never accepting Vanessa the way she was.

  She tells me about the one and only time she tried pot in college, and wound up eating an entire large pepperoni pizza and a loaf of bread.

  She tells me that she used to have nightmares about dying alone on the floor of her living room, and it being weeks before some neighbor noticed she hadn’t left the house.

  She tells me that her first pet was a hamster, which escaped in the middle of the night and ran into the radiator vent and was never seen again.

  Sometimes, when we’re talking, my head is on her shoulder. Sometimes her arms are around me. Sometimes we are at opposite ends of a couch, our legs tangled. When Vanessa had first given me the brochure for this place, I had balked—did we have to hide out with the other quarantined lesbian couples during our honeymoon? Why couldn’t we just go to New York City, or the Poconos, or Paris, like any other newlyweds?

  “Well,” Vanessa had said, “we could. But there we wouldn’t be like any other newlyweds.”

  Here, we are. Here, no one bats an eye if we’re holding hands or checking into a room with a queen-size bed. We take a few excursions—to the Mount Washington Hotel for dinner, and to a movie theater—and each time we leave the grounds of this inn, I find us automatically putting a foot of space between us. And yet, the minute we come back home, we are glued at the hip.

  “It’s like tracking,” Vanessa says, when we are sitting in the inn’s dining room at a breakfast table one morning, watching a squirrel dance across a lip of ice on a stone wall. “I nearly got kicked out of graduate school for writing a paper that advocated separating students by ability. But you know what? Ask a kid who’s struggling in math if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he’ll tell you he feels like a moron. Ask the math genius if he likes being in a mixed-level class, and he’ll tell you he’s sick of doing all the work during group projects. Sometimes, it’s better to sort like with like.”

  I glance at her. “Careful, Ness. If GLAAD could hear you now, they’d strip you of your rainbow status.”

  She laughs. “I’m not advocating gay internment camps. It’s just—well, you know, you grow up Catholic, and it’s kind of nice when you make a joke about the Pope or talk about the Stations of the Cross and you don’t get a blank stare back in return. There’s something really nice about being with your people.”

  “Full disclosure,” I say. “I didn’t know the cross had stations.”

  “I want my ring back,” she jokes.

  We are interrupted by the shriek of a toddler who has run into the breakfast room, nearly crashing into a waitress. His mothers are in hot pursuit. “Travis!” The boy giggles and looks over his shoulder before he ducks under our tablecloth, a human puppy.

  “I’m sorry,” one of the women says. She fishes him out, nuzzles his belly, and then swings him onto her back.

  Her partner looks at us and grins. “We’re still looking for his off switch.”

  As the family walks off toward the reception area, I watch that little boy, Travis, and I imagine what my own son would have looked like at his age. Would he have smelled of cocoa and peppermint; would his laugh sound like a cascade of bubbles? I wonder if he would be afraid of the monsters that live beneath his mattress, if I could sing him the courage to sleep through the night.

  “Maybe,” Vanessa says, “that will be us someday.”

  Immediately I feel it—that flush of utter failure. “You told me it didn’t matter to you. That you have your students.” Somehow I choke out the words. “You know I can’t have kids.”

  “It didn’t matter to me before because I never wanted to be a single mom. I saw enough of that when I was a kid. And of course I know you can’t have babies.” Vanessa threads her fingers through mine. “But Zoe,” she says. “I can.”

  An embryo is frozen at the blastocyst stage, when it is approximately five days old. In a sealed straw filled with cryoprotectant fluid—a human antifreeze—it is gradually cooled to –196 degrees Celsius. The straw is then attached to an aluminum cane and stored in a canister of liquid nitrogen. It costs eight hundred dollars a year to keep the embryo frozen. When thawed at room temperature, the cryoprotectant fluid is diluted so that the embryo can be restored to its culture medium. It’s assessed for damage to see if it’s suitable for transfer. If the embryo survives mostly intact, it has a good chance of leading to a successful pregnancy. Cellular damage, if not extensive, is not a deal breaker. Some embryos have been frozen for a decade and still gone on to produce healthy children.

  When I was undergoing in vitro, I always thought of the extra embryos we froze as snowflakes. Tiny, potential babies—each one a little different from the next.

  According to a 2008 study in the journal Fertility and Sterility, when patients who didn’t want more children were asked about their frozen embryos, fifty-three percent didn’t want to donate them to others because they didn’t want their children finding an unknown brother or sister one day; and they didn’t want other parents raising their child. Sixty-six percent said they’d donate the embryos for research, but that option wasn’t always available at clinics. Twenty percent said they’d keep the embryos frozen forever. Often, the husband and wife are not in agreement.

  I have three frozen embryos, swimming in liquid nitrogen in a clinic in Wilmington, Rhode Island. And now that Vanessa has mentioned it, I cannot eat or drink or sleep or concentrate. All I can do is think of these babies, who are waiting for
me.

  Heads-up for all those activists out there trying so hard to prevent a constitutional amendment allowing gay marriage: nothing changes. Yes, Vanessa and I have a piece of paper that is now in a small fireproof safe in an envelope with our passports and social security cards, but that’s about all that is different. We are still best friends. We still read each other the editorials in the morning paper, and we kiss good night before we turn out the lights. Or in other words, you can stop law, but you can’t stop love.

  The wedding was anticlimactic, a speed bump in the road of real life. But now that we are back home, it’s life as usual. We get up, we get dressed, we go to work. Which for me proves a necessary distraction, because when I am alone I find myself staring at the paperwork from the fertility clinic that was a second home to me for five years, trying to gather the courage to make the call.

  I know there is no logical reason to believe that all the medical complications I faced will affect Vanessa as well. She’s younger than me; she’s healthy. But the thought of putting her through what I went through—not the physical worries but the mental ones—is almost too much for me to handle. In this, I have a newfound respect for Max. The only thing harder than losing a baby, I think, is watching the person you love most in the world lose one.

  So I am actually looking forward to occupying my thoughts with something else today—my next session with Lucy. After all, at our last meeting, when I belted out a string of curses, I got her smiling.

  When she walks into our classroom, however, she isn’t happy at all. Her burgeoning dreadlocks have been brushed out, and her hair is lank and unwashed. She has dark circles under her eyes, which are bloodshot. She is wearing black leggings and a ripped T-shirt and two different-colored Converse sneakers.