by Jodi Picoult
“So now what?”
When she begins to speak she stutters. “We’ll just stay for a little while. Stay and figure out some things, and then we’ll come to a decision.”
“In other words,” I say, “you have absolutely no idea when we’re leaving.”
My mother shoots me a look that suggests she still has the power to punish me. “What is this all about, Rebecca? Do you miss your father?”
“What makes you think that?”
“I don’t know. You can tell me if you do. I mean, he is your father. It’s natural.”
“I don’t miss Daddy.” My voice goes flat. “I don’t.” Humidity slides across the hills and hangs on the tree branches. It presses against my throat and makes me choke a little. I don’t miss my father, not even when I am trying to miss him.
“Sssh,” my other says, pulling me closer. We sit beneath the heavy arms of an old Mcintosh tree that has been grafted to bear Spartans. She is holding me for the wrong reasons and still it feels nice. Far away, I see the Jeep drive up with Sam and Uncle Joley. They get out and begin walking towards where we are sitting. At a certain point, Uncle Joley notices my mother and me. He says something to Sam and points. They stop walking and Sam’s eyes connect with my mother’s for a moment. Uncle Joley continues to walk towards us but Sam turns sharply to the left. He does not follow.
• • •
At dinner that night, Uncle Joley tells us about the buyer for Purity, a woman named Regalia Clippe. Although Sam had mentioned her, Uncle Joley hadn’t met her until today. She was five feet tall and weighed over two hundred pounds. She loved gossip and the story today was about herself: she had just returned from getting married at the Church of the Living Gospel in Reno, Nevada. Her brand new husband ran the only sod farm in New Hampshire and (could they tell from the circles beneath her eyes?) she hadn’t been getting a lot of sleep.
“I don’t know, Joley,” my mother said, laughing. “I think people like that follow you around. You’ve met more than your fair share.”
Hadley, who had come for dinner, asked me to pass the zucchini. It was more than he’d said to me all day.
“I met Regalia Clippe. She’s my buyer. It has nothing to do with Joley,” Sam says.
“I didn’t mean anything by it.” My mother looks at me.
“The Church of the Living Gospel,” Uncle Joley says, and my mother laughs. He leans his elbows on the table. “You’ve got a really nice laugh, Jane. Like bells.”
“Church of the Living Gospel Bells?’ Sam says, and everyone cracks up. I try to catch Hadley’s eye, but he’s staring at his food like it’s something he has never seen before.
“We’ve got to do something about the weeds in the west corner,” Hadley says to Sam. “They’re out of control. If you want we can let the sheep in—now that they’re sheared there’s no reason to keep them penned.” Sam nods, and Hadley grins at his plate. He is pleased, I can tell, to have made that decision.
“Well, the good news,” Sam says, “is that Regalia Clippe renewed our contract for Red Delicious.”
“That’s great,” I say.
Hadley looks up. “Yeah, but how many others is she buying from, Sam?”
“Sure, Hadley, just knock the wind out of my sails.” Sam is smiling; he is not really angry. “I don’t know. I didn’t ask her. But she was real happy to have us back again and last year we made up Collins’ shipment when the aphids hit him, so that’s that.”
For dinner we are having zucchini and almonds, fried chicken, peas and mashed potatoes. It is really very good. Sam cooked it all in a matter of minutes. Hadley says Sam always does the cooking.
“So what did you two do today?” Uncle Joley asks. My mother is about to answer when she notices that Uncle Joley is staring right at Hadley and me. Hadley’s face turns bright red. My mother folds her hands in her lap.
Sam drops his fork, which clatters on the edge of his plate. Finally Hadley looks up at my uncle. “We didn’t do anything, all right? I had a lot of stuff I had to get done.” He rolls his napkin into a ball and whips it across the room. It misses the garbage pail; instead, it hits the dog. “I’ve got somewhere I have to go,” Hadley mutters. He scrapes his chair back and runs out of the kitchen.
“What’s his problem?” Sam helps himself to a mountain of potatoes and shakes his head.
“Sam,” my mother says, “I was wondering why you don’t grow anything but apples here?”
I kick her under the table. It isn’t any of her business.
“Apples take a lot of time and effort.” I get the feeling he has been asked this before.
“But couldn’t you make more money if you diversify?”
“Excuse me,” Sam says quietly, “but who the hell are you? You come in here and two days later you’re telling me how to run things?”
“I wasn’t—”
“If you knew a damn thing about farming maybe I’d listen.”
“I don’t have to take this.” My mother is near tears, I can tell by the thick of her voice. “I was just making conversation.”
“You were making trouble,” Sam says, “plain and simple.”
My mother’s voice gets husky. I remember a story she likes to tell, about when she worked placing classified ads for the Boston Globe as a college kid, and one man fell in love with her voice. He sold his boat the first week but he’d keep calling her to hear her talk. He placed his ad the entire summer just so he could listen to my mother.
“Sam.” Uncle Joey touches my mother’s arm. She stands up and runs towards the barn.
The three of us—Sam, Uncle Joley and me—sit in silence for a moment.
“Want any more chicken?” Sam offers.
“I think you overreacted,” Uncle Joley says. “Maybe you could apologize.”
“Jesus, Joley,” Sam sighs, leaning back. “She’s your sister. You invited her here. Look. She just doesn’t belong in a place like this. She should be wearing high-heeled shoes and clicking along some marble parlor in L.A.”
“That’s not fair,” I protest. “You don’t even know her.”
“I know plenty like her,” Sam says. “Would it make it all right if I went out there and apologized? Shit. For a little peace and quiet.” He stands up and pushes away his plate. “So much for a happy little family dinner.”
Uncle Joley and I finish the zucchini. Then we finish the potatoes. We don’t say anything. My foot taps on the linoleum, fast. “I’m going out there.”
“Leave them alone, Rebecca. They’ll work it all out. They need to.”
He may be right but this is my mother we are talking about. I have visions of her like a hellcat, clawing at Sam and leaving him with raw scratch marks on his cheeks and arms. Then I picture Sam’s strength getting the best of her. Would he do that? Or is that only my father?
I hear their voices long before I see them, behind the shed that holds the tractor and the rototiller. Because Uncle Joley may be right, I decide I should not interfere. I slouch down and feel splinters crack through my shirt.
“I told you I was sorry,” Sam says. “What more can I do?”
My mother’s voice is farther away. “You’re right. It’s your house, your farm, and I shouldn’t be here. Joley imposed on you. He shouldn’t have asked you to do something like this.”
“I know what ‘imposed’ means.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t mean anything the way you take it. It’s like every sentence I say goes through your head the reverse of the way I intended it.”
Sam leans against the wall of the shed so heavily I think he may be able to feel me there. “When my father ran this place he was real haphazard about it. A stock here, another stock there. Commercial trees mixed right in with retail. Since I was eleven I told him this wasn’t the way to run an apple orchard. He told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, and no matter how much schoolwork I did on the subject I didn’t have as much experience running the place as he did. How could I? So
when he retired to Florida, I dug up the younger trees and replanted them the way I wanted them. I lost a couple, and I knew I was taking a hell of a risk. He hasn’t been up here since he retired, and when he calls I pretend the place still looks the way it was when he left.”
“I get your point, Sam.”
“No, you don’t. I don’t give a shit if you think this orchard should grow watermelons and cabbage. Go tell Joley and tell Rebecca and whoever the hell you want. And the day I die if you can convince everyone else, go ahead and replant the place. But don’t you ever tell me to my face what I’ve done so far is wrong. This farm—it’s the best thing I’ve ever done. It’s like—it’s like me telling you your daughter is no good.”
My mother doesn’t answer. “I wouldn’t plant watermelons,” she says finally, and Sam laughs.
“Let’s start over. I’m Sam Hansen. And you’re—?”
“Jane. Jane Jones. God,” my mother says, “I sound like the most boring person on earth.”
“Oh, I doubt it.” I hear, quite clearly, the sound of their fingers pressed into a handshake. It is quiet as night.
Their footsteps come in fours, and they get closer to where I am sitting. In a panic I crawl to the other side of the shed, away from their voices. The only place to go is into the barn. I try to be quiet when my sneakers scratch against the hay. I press my belly to the floor and pull myself in on my fingertips.
When I sit up the first thing I see is a bat. It is dark and folded into the corner of the hayloft. I consider screaming but what good would that do me?
The bat screeches and flies past me. I put my hands up to shield my face and something catches my wrists. When I turn around, it is Hadley.
“What are you doing here?” I say, terrified.
“I live here,” Hadley says. “What are you doing here?”
“I was eavesdropping. Did you hear them?”
Hadley nods. He picks a stalk from the hay bales lining the wall and puts it between his front teeth. “I was hoping for a knockout in the first round.”
“You’re awful,” I tell him, but I laugh. In this light, he looks taller than usual. And his lips, the way they come down so far in the front. I hold out my hand. I want to touch him. Embarrassed, I pull away. “Did you get all your stuff done?”
“What stuff?”
“Dinner. What you were saying to my uncle.”
“Oh,” Hadley says. He shuffles his boots on the loose hay. “That.”
He doesn’t say anything for such a long time I think something might be wrong. I turn around and stare at him. “What’s the matter with me?”
“There’s nothing the matter with you,” Hadley says. “You’re a very pretty little girl.”
“I’m not a little girl.” I hold my chin higher.
“I know how old you are. I asked Joley.”
So much for that. “Well I don’t get it. I was having a really good time with you the other day, and then clear out of the blue you act like I have the plague.”
“I just can’t spend a lot of time with you.” He paces back and forth in the little square of light the moon makes on the floor of the barn. “I get paid for this, Rebecca. This is my job, you know?”
“No, I don’t know. I don’t know about jobs at all, but I have a pretty good idea of the way you’re supposed to treat a friend.”
“Don’t do this to me,” Hadley said.
I clench my fists at my sides. Do what? I haven’t done anything at all.
He takes a step closer and my heart jumps, just like that. I take a step backward.
Pressed up against the stack of hay bales, I start to hyperventilate. I’m breathing in all this awful dry grass and it is getting to my lungs. Hadley leans in close to me, and I see my face reflected in his eyes.
I push my hand against his chest and walk to the other side of the barn. “So you have to get rid of the weeds, is that it? That’s what you were talking to Sam about. When do those apples drop—September?” I talk a mile a minute about a subject I do not know. “What are you going to do tomorrow? I was thinking, maybe I’ll walk into Stow Center tomorrow. I haven’t been there yet and Uncle Joley says there’s this record store I’d really like with a lot of neon and stuff. Did I ask you what you’re going to do tomorrow?”
“This,” Hadley says, and he wraps his arms around my waist and he kisses me.
I used to think that the best feeling in the world was flying on my bicycle down a hill that I had worked so hard to climb, flying faster than the speed of sound, with my arms and my hair waving. I’d cup one hand and try to catch the air and when I got to the bottom, after all that, there was nothing in my hand.
I think of this in the moments that Hadley is pressed up against me and I keep my eyes wide open, afraid that I’ll find nothing there when I am so convinced. He sees me, at one point, and smiles with my lips still touching his. “What are you looking at?” he whispers.
“You,” I tell him.
23 JOLEY
My father died three years before my mother. The doctor said it was a heart attack but Jane and I had our doubts. It had yet to be proven that my father had a heart at all.
Jane was living in San Diego by then, and I was in Mexico. I had been doing research on Cortèz, which turned into research on the Holy Grail, which turned into research about I don’t know what. Jane was the only person who knew where I was—in a little village near Tepehuanas that was so small it didn’t have a name of its own. I lived with a pregnant housekeeper named Maria and her three cats. I dug a small excavation site in the wilds of the mountains. I found nothing, but I told that to nobody but Jane.
My mother, of course, called Jane first. She would have called me, I imagine, but she didn’t know my address, or how to dial an international call. She said that just like that my father had dropped dead. The hospital kept asking her if he had complained of gas or made sounds during the night, but my mother did not know. She got used to sleeping with earplugs many years ago to combat my father’s snoring, and she always went to bed before he did.
“Do you think,” Jane said noncommittally on the flight to Boston, “they have had sex during this decade?”
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I don’t know what they do.”
Did I mention this all happened the weekend before Easter?
When we arrived at the house my mother was sitting on the front lawn. She was wearing a familiar purple bathrobe and Dearfoam slippers, although it was past noon. “Mama,” Jane said, rushing into her arms. My mother hugged Jane the way she always did: looking over her shoulder at me. I wondered, and I still do, if she looked at Jane when I was in her arms. For Jane’s sake, I always hoped so. “It’s over,” Jane said.
And my mother looked at her as if she was crazy. “What do you mean it’s over?”
Jane looked at me. “Nothing, Ma.” She pulled me aside as we climbed up the steps to the house. “What is it with her?” Jane said. “Or is it me?”
I wouldn’t know. I was the only person in that household my father did not inflict violence upon, thanks largely to my sister’s interference. Jane had given up her childhood for me, really, so what else could I say? “It’s not you,” I told her.
Jane and I were sent out to get a party platter for the guests after the funeral. Daddy’s body had been set on ice for three days now; no church would hold a service because of Easter. But now, with the funeral set for Monday, preparations had to be made. Jane and I went to Star Market’s deli counter; it was the closest and honestly neither of us cared about the caliber of the food. “Hey, honey,” said the burly man at the counter. “You having relatives over for Easter?”
While my mother went through the ritual of crying, pulling at her hair and stroking old photos, Jane and I sat upstairs in what used to be our rooms. We talked about everything we could remember that might help us put it all behind. I touched the places on Jane where there used to be bruises. I let her talk about the very worst time, but she only hinted at
what had happened that night she was driven to leave.
We slept in our respective beds the night before the funeral, with the doors open in case Mama needed us. A little after three Jane came into my room. She shut the door, sat on the edge of the bed, and then she handed me a picture of the two of us, one she had found trapped between the headboard of her bed and the wall. “I’ve been thinking there’s something wrong with me,” she whispered. “I don’t feel anything. I’m going through the motions, you know, but I couldn’t care less that he’s dead.”
I held her hand. She was wearing an old nightgown of our mother’s. I found myself wondering what she wore at night, next to Oliver, in her own home. She would never sleep naked like I did. She did not like the feeling. “There’s nothing wrong with you. Considering the circumstances.”
“But she’s crying. She’s upset. And he was worse with her than he was with me.” She let those last words run together and then she got into bed beside me. Her feet were very cold, and the strange thing was, they stayed like that the entire night.
At the funeral, the reverend talked about how my father had been such a pillar of the community. He mentioned that he was a doting husband and father. I held Jane’s hand. Neither of us cried, or pretended to for the sake of decency.
It was an open casket. My mother wanted it that way. Jane accepted everyone’s condolences and I kept my arm around my mother’s shoulders, holding her up most of the time. I brought her juice and biscuits and did everything my maiden aunts suggested, to help her through such a difficult time.
By the time all our relatives and assumed friends left for the graveyard it was mid-afternoon. The funeral manager gave Jane the bill and then she disappeared. When I asked him where she had gone he pointed to the anteroom, the place they had the coffin on display. I watched her standing over his image, this wax mask that carried none of the terror and the power I knew. She ran her finger over the silk that lined the box. She touched my father’s blue ancient matter tie. Then she raised her arm. Her wrist was shaking when she whipped her hand through the air, the hand that I caught before she struck a dead man.