The Jodi Picoult Collection

by Jodi Picoult

  “Wash them,” Sam suggests. He starts to walk outside and leaves my mother standing beside me, gaping.

  “He’s a hell of a host,” she says to me.

  Sam explains the different sections of the orchard as we walk through it en route to see my uncle. The top, which we drove past, is the commercial section, which gets sold to supermarket chains. The bottom is retail, which ripens later and gets sold to local farmstands and the general public. Each section is sectioned again according to the type of apples grown. The lake down at the edge of the orchard is Lake Boon, and yes, you can swim in it.

  At one point he calls to a tall man who is cutting branches off one tree. “Hadley,” Sam says, “come meet Joley’s relatives.”

  When the man approaches us I see that he isn’t old at all. He has sunny hair cut irregularly, and soft brown eyes. Like the cows, I think. He smiles at me first. Then he shakes my mother’s hand and introduces himself. “Hadley Slegg. It’s nice to meet you, ma’am.”

  “Ma’am,” my mother whispers to me. She raises her eyebrows.

  Hadley drops behind Sam and my mother so that he can speak to me as we are walking. “You must be Rebecca.” I am thrilled that he knows me. I don’t even ask how. “What do you think of Massachusetts?”

  “It’s pretty,” I tell him. “Much more quiet than California.”

  “I’ve never been to California. I’ve heard things, of course, but I’ve never been.” I’d like him to tell me what he’s heard but he doesn’t elaborate. “You still in school?”

  Nobody has asked me about school in the longest time. “Are you?”

  Hadley laughs. “God, no. I finished with that a long time ago. I wasn’t the best student, if you know what I mean.” He waves his hand out over the trees we’re passing. “But I like what I’m doing, and I’ve got a good job thanks to Sam.” He looks at me a little more closely. “So you’re a swimmer?”

  “How did you know that?” I say, amazed.

  “I can see it through your shirt.” How stupid of me. I am wearing my “GUARD” bathing suit under this T-shirt because it is so hot today.

  “I was a lifeguard in San Diego. Not a real ocean guard, but just at a pool.” I look at him, but I get embarrassed and turn away.

  “That’s tough work,” Hadley says, “a lot of responsibility.” He raises his hand to his head and ruffles his fingers through his hair. I smell strawberries. “You know, I could take you around and show you how this place works. It’s kind of interesting, really.”

  “I’d like that.” I had been wondering what I would do all day on a farm full of busy people. “I could help, if there’s something I’d be able to do.”

  Hadley smiles at me. “Hey Sam, we’ve got some cheap labor. Rebecca is going to work for free.”

  Sam, who has been talking to my mother on and off, twists around so he can see me. “Okay. You can shear the sheep next time they need it.” He grins. “Unless your mom wants to do it.”

  At this point, my mother starts to run across the field. “It’s Joley,” she shouts. “Joley!”

  Uncle Joley is standing on a ladder, wrapping green tape around a branch of a tree. He sees my mother but makes no motion to stop wrapping the tape. He winds it slowly and carefully, and I watch Sam smile as he does this. Then he holds his hands to the branch for a moment, and closes his eyes. Finally he climbs down the ladder to where my mother is waiting, and hugs her.

  “Looks like you survived the trip, Rebecca,” Uncle Joley says to me when he walks closer. He kisses me on the forehead. He has not changed a bit. He turns to Sam and Hadley. “I assume you’ve all met.”

  “Unfortunately,” my mother mutters, looking at Sam, and I’m positive he can hear her.

  Joley looks from Sam to my mother, but neither one says anything else. “Well, it’s great that you’re here. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

  Sam says, “Why don’t you take the rest of the afternoon, Joley. On account of you never see your sister.”

  Joley thanks him and takes my mother’s hand. “Are you all right?” he says, looking deep at her, as if the rest of us have disappeared. It makes us uncomfortable, though, and Sam starts to head back to the sheep pen. Hadley watches Sam leave and asks if I want to stay with Joley or learn abut pruning. I consider staying—I haven’t seen my uncle in a long time, after all—but on second thought I tell Hadley I’d like to go with him.

  Hadley takes me through the retail orchard, pointing out various types of apples by tree. Some of the names I recognize: Golden Delicious, Mcintosh, Cortlands. Most are foreign: Gravensteins, Miltons. “They sound like the names of mailboxes on a very rich street,” I tell Hadley, and he laughs. He stands very tall when he walks, and from my position it looks like he touches the sun.

  He takes a deep breath as we come to the corner where the lake hits the orchard. “Smell it?” he asks, and there is mint all around. “It grows wild here.”

  “Did you grow up in Stow? You know so much.”

  Hadley smiles. “I grew up on a farm in Massachusetts. Hudson. But my mom sold the place when my dad died. She lives in New Hampshire now. In the mountains.” He turns to me. “You grew up in San Diego?”

  I glance up at him. “Do I look it?”

  He picks a reed from the water’s edge and clamps it between his front teeth. “I don’t know. What do people from San Diego look like?”

  “Well, they’re usually blond and skinny and real airheads.”

  I mean it as a joke, but Hadley stares at me so intently that I think he will burn a hole through my shirt. He starts at my feet and winds up looking at my eyes. “Two out of three,” Hadley says. “I won’t tell you which two.”

  We walk for a while along the shore of Lake Boon, letting the cattails whip around our knees. At one point Hadley reaches down and very casually plucks a tick from my thigh. He tells me about Uncle Joley, and about Sam. “Joley just came in here one day, and I have to tell you I was a little jealous—I’d been working with Sam for seven years and here this city boy struts into the place and can work miracles. But it’s true, no doubt about it. Your uncle—Cod that sounds funny—can heal things. He’s saved more dying trees single-handedly than I don’t know what.”

  I am impressed. I want to try to touch a tree myself, to see if this skill might be inherited. Hadley keeps talking. His voice had a strange twang to it—a Boston accent, I guess it’s called—with weird A sounds and missing Rs. “Sam took over the orchard when his dad had the heart attack. Parents live in Fort Lauderdale now, in Florida. He’d had ideas though, for a while. His dad walked out the frontdoor of the Big House, and that very day Sam had tractors uprooting and moving trees.” He surveys the land up the hill. “I mean, it looks good now, and it turned out all right, but that’s not something I would have done. Sam’s like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “A kind of gambler, I guess. It’s a real risk to move around well-rooted trees, and he knew that—he’s smarter than me when it comes to agriculture. But the way it was here, well, it just wasn’t the way he saw it in his mind. And he had to make all the pieces fit together.”

  Hadley sits down on a cluster of rocks on the edge of the lake and points to the tree overhead. “You hear that cardinal?”

  There is a noise like a squeaky toy—high and low and high and low and high and low. Then out of the branches flies a bright red bird. The things this guy knows, I think.

  “It’s really nice of Sam to let us stay here,” I say, making conversation.

  “No insult to you and your mom, but he’s doing it for Joley. Sam isn’t really big on visitors, especially women from California. He’s been griping about it all week, actually.” He stops and looks at me. “I guess I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

  “Well, that’s all right. He seems to have it out for my mother. She fell into a pile of manure before and he didn’t do anything to help her.”

  Hadley laughs. “Not much you can do if someone falls in a pile o
f shit,” he says. “Didn’t your mom grow up around here?”

  “Newton. Is it close by?”

  Hadley whistles through his teeth. “Close in miles but a world away. Sam’s got this chip on his shoulder about the suburbs in Boston. They’re the ones with all the power who always vote down local aid to farms, but they haven’t got any idea what kind of work we do here. Newton girls, when we were in school, were the ones who used to giggle when we walked by, you know, come on to us but not let us near them. Like we were always dirty, because we worked with our hands instead of pushing a pencil. Some of them were really hot, too. Drove Sam nuts.”

  Hadley turns to face me. He is smiling and about to say something but when he looks at me his smile falls away and he is just left staring. “You have really pretty eyes.”

  “Oh, they’re a mutation,” I say. “In biology we had to go around class and tell our genetic combinations—you know, big B, little b, et cetera. So all the blue-eyed kids said little b, little b, and all the brown-eyed kids said big B, little b, or big B, big B, and when the teacher came to me I said ‘I have green eyes,’ and the teacher said that green eyes are a mutation of blue. Like a radioactive monster.”

  “Well, they’re a really nice mutation, then.” Hadley grins at me and I think I have never seen anyone with such an open smile. It’s like he’s saying, Come with me, come along, we have all the time in the world.

  We walk for a little while along the edge of the lake (Hadley says it’s stocked with freshwater bass, thanks to him and Sam when they were kids), and then we cut up the north side of the orchard. Finally, far away from the house, I begin to see apple trees that really have apples hanging on them. Hadley tells me these are the Puritans and Quintes—a little tart for eating but great for cooking. As we come closer, I see Sam and Uncle Joley and my mother.

  “Where have you guys been?” Uncle Joley says. “We were getting ready to have lunch.”

  Hadley pushes me gently between the shoulder blades so that I take a step forward. “We’ve been down by the lake. Rebecca was telling me all the stupid things you did at family Christmas parties,” Hadley says, and everyone laughs.

  “Sam,” my mother says, “Joley says you have one hundred acres?”

  Sam nods, but you can tell from the look on his face he doesn’t want to talk about it. I wonder if it is the subject, or my mother. “You know anything about apples?” he says, and my mother shakes her head. “Then it wouldn’t really interest you.”

  “Sure it would. What varieties do you grow here?”

  Sam ignores her, so Joley and Hadley take turns reeling off the names of the different apples growing at the orchard.

  “And what are these?” My mother reaches out to the tree we are passing and picks one of these early apples—a Puritan, Hadley had said. It all happens very fast, the way she holds it to the sun to observe and then lowers it to her teeth, ready to bite into it. Suddenly Sam, who is walking behind her, throws his arm over her shoulder and knocks the apple out of her hand. It rolls on the clipped grass and settles under a different tree.

  “What in God’s name is your problem?” my mother hisses.

  Sam’s eyes darken until they are the color of a thunderstorm. “They were sprayed today,” he says finally. “You eat it, you die.” He pushed past her and walks ahead of us towards the Big House. As he passes the fallen apple he steps on it with his work boot. My mother holds her throat. For several seconds we stare at the pulp of this apple, ruined.

  27 OLIVER

  I have never been to Salt Lake City, which worries me. What if this impromptu trip was motivated by my own subconscious desires, rather than tapping into the quality of Jane? What if Jane and Rebecca are well into, or through, Colorado by now? If I miss them in Colorado, I will catch up with them in Kentucky. Or Indiana, wherever. As long as I reach them before they get to Massachusetts; as long as I have a chance to offer my side of the story before Joley begins brainwashing Jane again.

  Joley Lipton, the bane of my existence. We have never really understood each other. Even after I had won over Jane’s parents—a twenty-year-old dating their teenage baby—I never got her brother’s approval. Not then, not years later. He almost refused to attend the wedding, until he saw his stubbornness was literally wasting Jane away. So he did come, but sat in a corner throughout the ceremony and the reception. He belched loudly (I assume it was he) when we were pronounced man and wife. He did not offer me congratulations; he never has. He spread a rumor that the salmon mousse was rancid. And he left early.

  In my opinion he is terribly in love with his sister, beyond the usual parameters of a brother-sister relationship. He has always been a drifter, and Jane has always been fiercely loyal to him. I don’t find him deserving of such support; I have heard about their childhood and it seems he was the one to get off the proverbial hook. Yet, there is something about him. Perhaps he annoys me because of this: I cannot pin down my emotions about him. He instigates. He fills Jane’s head with ridiculous notions about the institution of marriage—he, whom I have never seen with a woman. He calls at the wrong times and shows up unexpected. If Jane gets to Joley before I reach her, she may never come back. She will have been conditioned otherwise. She will most certainly not listen to me.

  This blinding whiteness hits me quickly, a desert of salt. Suddenly I am in its midst, driving, a blot against this expanse. I know better; it is not colorless. White is all the colors in the rainbow, reflected at once.

  I pull the car into the shoulder of the road, where several other tourists have stopped to take photographs. The terrain is flat and sweeping. If not for the record heat, I could easily be convinced I am seeing snow. A woman taps me on the shoulder. “Sir, would you mind?” She waves a camera in my face and motions where I have to push the button. Then she runs to the guardrail where her traveling companion—an elderly man in green overalls—is already sitting. “One, two, three,” I say, and the flash cube goes off. The man has no teeth, I see this when he smiles.

  I have always wanted to see the Great Salt Lake because of its incongruity. The idea of it: saltwater in a landlocked state, an ocean away from the ocean. I have heard that it is so large it may as well be an ocean (a small one, anyway). I look at my watch—5:20. There is not much I will do today, anyway. I can go to the lake, take a look around and check into a motel for the night. If I must travel across America, I might as well enjoy myself.

  I try to avoid the route through the city, since there might be a rush hour; if Mormons have rush hours. Instead I skirt the perimeter, bordered on both sides of the road by white earth. From time to time a breeze or a passing truck blows salt onto the asphalt, which swirls in front of the car like a wailing ghost. There are no signs for the lake and I do not want to waste the time to ask at a service station, so I follow the other cars on the road in front of me. Surely one of them, maybe more than one, will be going to the Great Salt Lake. I pass cars earnestly, searching the windows for children or watermelon floats or shining inner tubes, the telltale symbols.

  The seventh car has someone in a bathing suit. From my point of view, the passenger is young, female, and wearing a red suit criss-crossed in the back, much like Rebecca’s GUARD suit. It is a station wagon just like Jane’s—same color, same dent in the fender. I try to pull alongside the car because my blood begins to beat in my ears. Who is the driver? I cannot tell, but as I advance I see that the girl has long blond hair, wrapped into a knot of some kind at the back of her neck. Rebecca. I accelerate, my foot pushing hard against the floor of the car, weaving around a slower car in front of me. I pass them, and then swerve into their lane, relying on the rearview mirror. When I lift my eyes, I expect to see Jane, her fingers drumming on the steering wheel, her sunglasses slanted and reflective. Instead I see a burly man with a black beard and a tattoo on his chest that reads COME TO MAMA. The girl is not Rebecca at all, and the driver honks at me for cutting him off.

  They are, however, going to the Great Salt Lake, and I fol
low them until I can see the lake from the car. Then I drive another half-mile down its edge, so that I will not have to face them in person. I park the car in a no-parking zone and walk to the edge of the water.

  As far as the eye can see there is water. Deep and calm, marble-blue, with the tiny waves one finds on the Great Lakes. Well, it could be the ocean. I sit on the shore and pull off my shoes and socks. Leaning back on my elbows, I try to imagine a whale surfacing in the center of this lake, black and white, like a picture show. Then I listen to the wind and imagine instead it is that tearing sound whales make as they break through the water’s surface, and then the hollow moan through the blowhole, clearing. The sun, on its way down, beats a steady rhythm. What a day, I think. What a day.

  I have second thoughts about it but I roll up my pants and take off my shirt, leaving it with my shoes and socks on the banks of the lake. Then I wade in, letting the water mat my underwear against my thighs. I dive underneath and swim as hard as I can to the spot where I pictured that whale.

  Amazing, the salt content of this lake. It tastes like the ocean, feels like the ocean, buoys like the ocean. In some places it probably reaches great depths. Children play along its edges, but there is hardly anyone where I stop and tread water. I shake my hair from my eyes and survey the shore. People are starting to leave; it’s dinnertime. I should go too, and rent a room somewhere, so that I can get an early start tomorrow. To wherever it is that I am supposed to be going.

  I float face down in the water and then jackknife at the waist, plunging headfirst towards the bottom of the lake. I would love to see what is there: fire coral or anemone or even white-bellied sharks and continental ridges. I kick my feet vigorously until the pressure of the depth threatens to break my eardrums. At this point all I can see is a milky black. I pivot and begin to swim to the surface, breaking with the force of a whale and embracing the air with a skeletal gasp.

  A biplane comes remarkably close to the surface of the water and then circles towards the sun. It is the same sun, I realize with relief, that Jane and Rebecca are watching, wherever they may be. For a moment the plane hovers in silhouette like an artificial eagle. Well, I think, at least I don’t have to worry about them leaving the country. Jane couldn’t get Rebecca on a plane come hell or high water.