by Jodi Picoult
“Don’t tell me,” Sam says.
Oliver takes a picture out of his wallet, one of Rebecca and me. It’s not even a good one. “If anyone out there has seen my wife or this little girl, please call in,” Oliver says.
I have grabbed Sam’s hand; I didn’t even notice myself doing it. “That’s Oliver. That’s my husband.”
Oliver stares at me, painfully honest. I wonder how much he can see. I wonder if he knows what I have done. “I love you,” Oliver says to me, just me. “I don’t care if the whole world knows.”
62 JOLEY
After the news broadcast, Sam takes off. He says he has something to do; he doesn’t mention what it is. He doesn’t say anything to my sister.
“Come on,” I say, taking her hand. “Help me make dinner.” She follows me into the kitchen, weak, easily led. She sits down on a ladderback chair.
“Oh, Joley,” she sighs. “What have I done?”
I take carrots and lettuce from the refrigerator. I’m not gourmet, but salads are easy. “You tell me.“
She looks up, her eyes wild. “Maybe we can run away. If we leave now we’ll be gone by the time Oliver gets here.”
“You can’t drag Rebecca away again. It’s not healthy. She’s just a kid.”
“I’m not talking about Rebecca,” Jane mutters. “I’m talking about Sam.”
I drop several carrots I have been peeling in the sink. “You knew Oliver would come to find you. You told me that yourself. And you didn’t want to talk about what would happen when he got here.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“You’re right. Maybe if we don’t think about him, he’ll disappear.” I throw the vegetable peeler into the sink. “All right, then, let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about Sam.”
“I don’t want to talk about Sam,” Jane says.
“Look at me.” She will not.
“What’s going on?” When I spoke to Sam earlier, he gave me the runaround. I first heard from Rebecca, who came running to me in the morning, crying. Uncle Joley, she sobbed, I hate her. I hate her.
“Nothing,” Jane says. Then she sighs. “I’m not going to lie to you. You know what’s going on. Everyone knows what’s going on.”
“You tell me,” I say. I want to hear it from her.
I am expecting her to tell me she slept with Sam. But instead she tilts her head, and says, “Sam’s the person I was supposed to fall in love with.”
“Then what is Oliver?”
Jane looks at me and blinks quickly. “Extra baggage.”
“You’ve been with Sam for five days. How can you come to a conclusion in five lousy days?” He doesn’t know you, I think. I’ve been by your side for thirty years. I’m the one to whom you are tied.
“Remember what I said to you when we first got here?”
“That Sam was a stubborn pig.”
“Besides that,” Jane says, smiling. “I did say that, didn’t I? Well, I also said that I’d know what I was looking for when it hit me. I said that all I needed in my life was an instant of time when I could honestly say I was on top of the world, and not be lying. This is it.”
“You also said that if you got those five terrific minutes you’d go back to Oliver. You’d live the life you started with and you’d never complain.”
“But that was before. How do you know my five minutes are up? I said I’d go back when it was over. But it’s not over yet. Not by a long shot, Joley.”
I start to tell her about Rebecca, and what happened this morning. I tell her because it gets me off the hook; it keeps me from thinking about Jane and Sam, together. Rebecca came up to me, and told me what she had seen. She said, Does this mean my parents are getting a divorce? Does this mean I’m never going to go home?
I watched her standing in front of me, and I knew how she felt. I remembered what it was like to crawl into the safety of Jane’s bed, under the covers, and listen to the screaming going on downstairs between my mother and father. Nothing seemed so loud, or so awful, if I had Jane’s arms around me.
Even my father started to go to Jane’s room at night. At first I thought it was for the same security that I went there for. I figured everyone has something he is afraid of, something he needs to forget about, even Daddy. I began to piece together the differences slowly, and by the time I understood, Jane stopped letting me come into her room. It was right at the time when she started to change; when Jane sprouted breasts and I began to notice the hair under her arms and vined on her legs. She wouldn’t let me in the room when she was dressing. She wouldn’t let me under the covers. Instead we would sit primly on the bedspread and play Hearts.
It killed me when she went to college. She left me home alone. She’d visit, almost every weekend, but it wasn’t the same. I always expected that she’d come back to me, but instead, she married Oliver Jones.
What I told Rebecca this morning is that Jane was always meant to be a mother. Look at how young she started taking care of me. But right now Rebecca would have to be the logical one. “Your mother will come around,” I told her, but she winced as I said it. She wanted to know how long it would take. She wanted to know how many people would have to be hurt. Most of all she asked why Jane was the one who got to make the final decision.
What decision? I asked Rebecca.
To throw it all away, she cried. Can’t you see that’s what she’s trying to do?
I tell my sister all this, and she nervously winds her hair around her finger.
“I don’t get it, Joley. You spend your whole life as my biggest cheerleader. You’re always there to tell me I’m not paying enough attention to myself; that I deserve better. So after fifteen years I finally take your stupid advice and you tell me I’d better slow down. Make up your mind,” she says. “I’m not going to lie to Rebecca. I’m going to tell her everything; I’m just not going to do it today. Give me a little time. I’ve never asked for anything my whole life. I’ve given and given and given. So can’t I just get this one small thing?”
“No,” I say, too quickly, and Jane explodes.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Come to me. I’ve always wanted you to come to me.”
“I can’t hear you,” Jane says irritably.
I clear my throat. “I said I wanted you to come to me.”
She throws her hands up. “I did come to you. I traveled three thousand miles to come to you. And all I’ve gotten is a lecture.”
The day that Jane married Oliver, the day that she kissed me on the cheek and told me she was happier than she’d ever been, something happened to me. Quite concretely I felt my chest swell and then contract, and that’s when I understood that you can clearly feel a broken heart. I turned away without saying anything to her, but she didn’t notice, engulfed in a flood of guests. I promised myself that I wouldn’t let myself get hurt like this again.
I have never stopped looking after Jane, but I have kept my distance. Almost immediately after she got married I started to travel, bouncing from college to college and then across the United States, into Mexico, to Bangladesh, Morocco, Asia. I put as many miles between us as I could allow, assuming this was the easiest way. I have always wanted the best for her because she means so much to me. So, when all this was beginning with Sam, I gave my blessing. I wanted him to have her. If it could not be me.
She puts her arms around me, and for a minute I’m back where I used to be, where love could be tucked in a pillow fold. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you.”
I used to think about dying and being cremated. I wanted my ashes placed in a leather pouch and I wanted Jane to wear it around her neck. I used to imagine her pulling on layers of clothing in the winter, turtlenecks and sweaters and bulky down parkas, knowing that I was the thing that came closest to her heart.
This is the most it will ever be, I think. “Don’t worry about me.” I smile at her. “I’ve always had trouble adjusting to your boyfriends.”
&
nbsp; Jane holds me at arm’s length. She opens her mouth to say something—what?—but she closes it again, silent.
Just then Rebecca and Hadley swing into the kitchen. Hadley is giving Rebecca a piggyback ride, and she kicks the door open with her foot. They just make it over the threshold before Hadley loses his hold on Rebecca and half drops, half tumbles her onto the floor. They are both laughing so hard it takes them a minute to realize that I am in the kitchen, that Jane is in the kitchen. “Did we interrupt?” Hadley says, good-natured and grinning, dusting off the legs of his jeans.
“No,” Jane says. “Not at all.” He is staring at Rebecca, who has deliberately taken a good deal of time to get to her feet. Funny, she is exactly as tall as Jane.
63 SAM
You should have seen the look on her face when that guy came onto the television. I mean, she just shriveled up inside. I could tell from the way she almost fell out of the chair. She kept saying his name: Oliver.
I would have given anything then to tear her away from that TV. Give her a sedative, a stiff drink, I don’t know what. Maybe I could just hold her. But seeing her like that knotted up my gut. I had to do something. And I couldn’t very well just kneel down next to her, with her goddamned husband larger than life, swollen in technicolor. So I chickened out. I left; said I had something to do in the field. Instead, I’m taking a walk through the woods that border the orchard.
The mosquitoes are awful this time of year, and the land is swampy. Part of the woods has become a makeshift dump, even for neighboring farmers. There’s an old enamel bathtub and a few dead washing machines at a certain point on the trail. But it’s quiet, so quiet you can hear your mind snapping as it jumps from one idea to another.
I walk for quite a distance, because I come to the foundation of a house that must have burned to the ground. It’s a small ring of stones with a crumbling fireplace at one end. My father used to say it dated to the 1700s.
When Hadley and me were kids we’d come out here a lot. When we were about nine, we made this our secret clubhouse, and we lugged beams and old boards from the barn all the way here, trying to hammer together some kind of enclosure. We had a password: Yaz, after our favorite player on the Red Sox. We’d meet every day at sunset, just so we could hear our mothers hollering from different edges of the woods, calling us to supper.
I’ve been hanging around with Hadley since we were seven. That’s eighteen years. That’s longer than Rebecca’s even been alive. Under any other circumstance, I’d stand behind him. He’s my best friend. He knows what he’s doing; he wouldn’t take a fifteen-year-old on a joy ride. But I know as sure as I know the boundaries of my orchard, what is happening to me now comes once in a lifetime. I can’t stand to see Jane upset, and for selfish reasons: it hurts me to see her like that.
By the time I get back to the Big House, I’ve missed dinner. Joley’s doing the dishes; he tells me Jane’s upstairs. “Where’s Hadley? I’ve got to talk to him.”
“I think he went out on the back porch with Rebecca. Why?”
But I don’t have time to answer him. I stroll out the back door, immediately feeling that I have interrupted something. Rebecca and Hadley are on the swinging bench, and when the door creaks open they fly to opposite ends. “Hey,” I say, noncommittally. “You busy?”
They shake their heads. Rebecca’s making me uncomfortable. I can feel her stare burning into the collar of my shirt. I pull at it, trying to let in some air. “What’s up?” Hadley says. He’s bolder now. He’s got his arm around Rebecca, on the back of the bench.
“I kind of need to talk to you.” I turn to Rebecca. “Alone.” I open the screen door. “I’ll just wait in here.” I walk inside and let the door slam behind me. Hadley asks how long this is going to take. “I was figuring we’d go grab a beer, if that’s okay with you.”
I hear Rebecca say, “Do you have to?” but I can’t tell what Hadley says in return. He walks into the house, that wide smile on his face, and slaps me on the back. “Let’s roll. You paying?”
We go to Adam’s Rib, a restaurant with a big bar section frequented mostly by motorcycle gangs. We don’t go there much, but I don’t want to have this conversation in a place I go to often, so that every time I walk in the door in the future I’ll have a memory of the time I let down my best friend. Hadley and I take a table near the door, one that is really a Pac-Man game dotted with two napkins and an ashtray. A waitress with very high teased red hair asks us what we’re drinking. “Glenfiddich,” I say. “Two.”
Hadley lifts his eyebrows. “You getting married or having a baby or something? What’s the occasion?”
I lean my elbows on the table. “I got to ask you something. What’s going on between you and Rebecca?”
Hadley grins. “What’s going on between you and Jane?”
“Come on,” I say, “that’s not the question here.”
“Sam, I don’t mess in your business; you don’t mess in mine.” The drinks come, and Hadley lifts his glass and toasts me. “Cheers.”
“She’s really young. You’ve got Jane all upset.”
Hadley scowls. “Rebecca’s got a more grown-up head on her shoulders than either one of us. I wouldn’t fuck around with a kid, Sam, if I didn’t think it was right.”
I take a long, deep drink of the whiskey. It burns the back of my throat, which makes me think the words may come easier. “I wouldn’t fuck around, either, if I didn’t know it was right.” I swirl the liquid in the glass. “I think you’d better go away for a little while.”
Hadley stares at me. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m saying I think you should take a vacation. Get away from the orchard. Go visit your mom,” I say. “She hasn’t seen you since Christmas.”
“You’re doing this because of her fucking mother.”
“I’m doing it because of me. And you. I’m doing what I think is right.”
“She told you to do it, didn’t she? She’s making you do this. You’ve known me all your life. You’ve known her for five days. I can’t believe you’re doing this.”
“Leave Jane out of this,” I say, floundering. “This is between you and me.”
“Like hell it is. Jesus!” He kicks the table again, and then takes a deep breath and eases himself into his chair. “Okay,” he says. “I want to know one thing. I want to know why nobody asked me or Rebecca what we think. I want to know why the whole goddamned world is voting on our future, everyone but us.”
“It’s not for long. A week, maybe two. I just want to give Jane a little time to herself. You don’t know her, Hadley. She’s not just some rich bitch. She’s had a really rough life.”
“Yeah, well, you don’t know Rebecca,” Hadley says. “Do you know what it’s like when I’m with her? She believes in me more than my own folks ever did. Shit, I’ve told her things I’ve never even told you. No matter what I’m doing or where I am, she’s in my head.”
Hadley flattens his palms against the game table. “Have you ever even talked to her, Sam? She’s lived through a plane crash. She takes better care of her mother than the other way around. She knows about you two, that’s for sure. You think Jane’s had a rough life? You should see the trip she’s laid on her own kid.”
Hadley drains his glass, and then reaches for mine. “So if you want to know, Am I in love with her, the answer’s yes. If you want to know, Am I going to take care of her, I will. No one else seems to be doing a bang-up job of it.” When Hadley looks at me, there’s a purpose in his eyes I’ve never seen before. “Don’t think about what I’m doing to Rebecca, Sam. Think about what Jane’s doing to her.”
“Look,” I say. “I need you to do this for me. I’ll make it up to you. I swear it.”
Hadley swallows hard and blinks. He’s looking for more to drink, but there’s nothing left between us. “Yeah, right.”
“Hadley—”
He holds his hands up to stop me. “I don’t want your explanations. I don’t want to hear about
it at all, okay? And I want my back pay.” I nod. “You listen to me, Sam. You’d better work this out good. Because you’re making me leave behind someone I care about a lot. I’m going to come after her, sooner or later, no matter how long you keep me away. I’ll find her. Tell Jane that, straight from my lips. I’m going to be with Rebecca no matter what.”
For what seems like minutes, we sit facing each other, absolutely silent. Finally I break the tension. “You’ll go in the morning.”
“Fuck that,” Hadley says, snorting. “I’m out of here tonight.”
We leave just after that. We ride home in the pickup and I swear I notice every bump and grit in the road. I notice the way both of our bodies bounce up and down at the same time. It’s gravity; we both weigh about the same. We pull into the driveway, and most of the lights downstairs in the house have been turned off.
Neither Hadley nor I make a motion to get out of the truck. The crickets slide the bows of their wings back and forth. “Who gets to tell her?” Hadley asks.
“Rebecca? You do. You should tell her.” Hadley looks at me, waiting for me to say more. “Go ahead. Go on up there. Stay as long as you want. I won’t tell Jane.”
He opens the truck door, and it buzzes the way it does when the seat belts are off. The inside light goes on, so I know he sees me lean my head against the steering wheel. I don’t feel like getting out of the car just yet. “She’s not a kid, Sam,” Hadley says quietly. “I’m not like that.” When he shuts the door, it makes a jointed, neat sound.
64 OLIVER
God bless America. My heart goes out to every sympathetic, kindhearted man and woman who has called the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies since hearing my broadcast on the shores of Gloucester. The switchboard operator patches them into the tiny closet where Windy has installed a telephone for me, for privacy. I am told that Jane has been spotted at an Exxon station on the Mass. Pike. A man remembers Rebecca’s face in his convenience store in Maynard. And last, but certainly not least, a young fellow who works at an ice cream stand in Stow calls in. He asks if I am the whale guy. He has seen my wife and my child. “Came in here with a local man who runs an apple farm.” Victory.