The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  IV

  Sometimes it is necessary

  To reteach a thing its loveliness.

  —Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow”

  Eric

  When I was thirteen years old I met the perfect girl. She was nearly as tall as I was, with cornsilk hair and eyes the color of thunderstorms. Her name was Sondra. She smelled like lazy summer Sundays—mowed grass and sprinklers—and I found myself edging closer to her whenever I could, just to breathe in deeply.

  I imagined things in Sondra’s company that I’d never bothered to imagine before: what it would feel like to walk barefoot on a volcano; how to find the patience to count all the stars; whether it physically hurt to grow old. I wondered about kissing: which way to turn my head, if her lips would save the impression of mine, the way my pillow always knew how to come back to the curve of my head night after night.

  I didn’t talk to her, because this was all so much bigger than words.

  I was walking beside Sondra when she suddenly turned into a rabbit and hopped away, disappearing underneath the hedge in the front of my house.

  The next morning when I woke up from my dream, it didn’t matter that this girl had never existed, that I had been unconscious when I had conjured her. I found myself crying when I took the milk out of the refrigerator for my cereal; it was all I could do to get from one minute to the next. I spent hours sitting on the lawn, trying to find a rabbit in our shrubbery.

  Sometimes we don’t know we’re dreaming; we can’t even fathom that we’re asleep.

  I still think of her, every now and then.

  * * *

  Our first week in Arizona passes slowly. I immerse myself in state case law; I wade through the prosecution’s discovery. The environment seems to stir something up in Delia, who starts remembering more and more about her childhood—snippets that usually make her cry. She summons the courage to go visit her father a couple more times; she takes long walks with Sophie and Greta.

  One morning I wake up to find Ruthann’s trailer on fire. Smoke rolls over the roof in a thick gray cloud as I burst through the front door, yelling for my daughter, who spends more time over there than she does with us these days. But there are no flames inside, not even any smoke. And Sophie and Ruthann are nowhere to be found.

  I run around to the yard behind the trailer. Ruthann sits on a stump; Sophie’s at her feet. The plume of gray smoke I saw in the front of the house comes from a small campfire. Set in its center are two cinder blocks with a thin, flat stone balanced on top. A bead of water on the hot stone spits and dances. Ruthann does not look up at me, but takes a bowl filled with blue batter and ladles a spoonful onto the stone. She uses the flat of her hand to spread the batter as thin as it will go, pressing her palm down on the searing surface.

  As the batter solidifies into a circle, Ruthann takes an onion-skin-thin tortilla from a plate beside her and settles it on top of the one still cooking on the stone. She folds in the sides and then rolls from the bottom up, making a hollow tube that she passes over to me. “An Egg McMuffin it’s not,” she says.

  It looks, and tastes, like pale blue tracing paper. It sticks to the roof of my mouth. “What’s in it?”

  “Blue corn, rabbit-ear sage, water. Oh, and ashes,” Ruthann adds. “Piki is an acquired taste.”

  But my daughter—the one who will eat macaroni and cheese only if the noodles are straight, not curly, who insists that I cut the crusts off her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and slice on the diagonal, instead of the half—is stuffing this piki in her mouth as if it’s candy.

  “Siwa helped me grind the cornmeal yesterday,” Ruthann says.

  “Siwa means Sophie,” Sophie adds.

  “It means youngest sister,” Ruthann corrects, “but that’s still you.” She spreads another circle of batter on the burning stone with her bare hand, lets it set, and flips it over in a seamless motion.

  “Finish telling me the story, Ruthann.” Sophie looks over her shoulder at me. “You interrupted.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s about a rabbit who got too hot.”

  Sondra, I think.

  Ruthann folds up another piece of piki and rolls it in a paper towel, handing it to Sophie. “Where did I leave off?”

  “In the Great Heat,” Sophie says, settling down cross-legged in front of Ruthann. “The animals were all droopy.”

  “Yes, and Sikyátavo, Rabbit, was worst of all. His fur was matted with red dirt from the desert. His eyes were so dry they burned. He wanted to teach the sun a lesson.”

  She folds another cone of piki. “So Rabbit ran off to the edge of the world where every morning, Sun came up. He practiced with his bow and arrow the whole way. But when he got there, Sun had left the sky. Rabbit thought that was cowardly, but he decided to wait for Sun to return the next day. Sun, though, had seen Rabbit practicing and decided to have a little fun with him. Back in those days, you see, Sun didn’t come up slowly like he does now. He’d burst into the sky with one leap. So the next day, Sun rolled far away from where he usually jumped into the sky and then leaped up. By the time Rabbit got his bow and arrow together, Sun was already so high he couldn’t be touched. Rabbit stamped his foot and shouted, but Sun only laughed.

  “One morning,” Ruthann continues, “Sun got careless. He jumped more slowly than usual, and Rabbit’s arrow plunged into his side. Rabbit was delighted! He’d shot the Sun! But when he looked up again he saw how flames bled from the wound. Suddenly the whole world seemed to be on fire.”

  She stands up. “Rabbit ran to a cottonwood, and a greasewood tree, but neither one would hide him—they were too afraid of being burned to a crisp. Suddenly he heard a voice calling to him: ‘Sikyátavo! Under me! Hurry!’ It was a small green bush with flowers like cotton. Rabbit ducked beneath it, just as the flames leaped over the bush. Everything crackled and hissed, and then went quiet.” Ruthann looks at Sophie. “The earth all around was black and burnt, but the fire was gone. And the little bush that had saved Rabbit wasn’t green anymore, but a deep yellow. Even today, that kind of bush grows green, and then turns yellow when it feels the sun.”

  “What happened to Rabbit?” Sophie asks.

  “He was never the same. He has brown spots on his fur, from where the fire burned him. And he’s not so tough anymore, you know. He runs away and hides, instead of putting up a fight. Sun isn’t the same, either,” Ruthann says. “He makes himself so bright that no one can look at him long enough to shoot straight.”

  Ruthann cracks her knuckles; silver and turquoise rings wink like fireflies. “Let’s clean up,” she says to Sophie, “and then if your dad says it’s okay, you can come with me to the garage sale around the corner and scope out inventory.”

  Sophie runs into the house, leaving me alone with Ruthann. “You don’t have to keep her with you.”

  “It’s good to have a child to tell a story to.”

  “Do you have any of your own?”

  The lines of Ruth’s face carve deeper. “I had a daughter once.”

  Maybe we can all be divided along this rift: Those who have been lucky enough to keep our children, and those who have had them taken away from us. Before I can find the appropriate response, Sophie comes out of the house, dragging a bucket of sand behind her. She pours it onto the fire, banking the embers, a small cloud of soot sighing up around her knees.

  “Soph,” I say, “if you can be a good girl, you can stay with Ruthann a little longer.”

  “Of course she can be good,” Ruthann says. “Where I come from, on Second Mesa, our grandmothers give us our names, and our grandfathers give us our manners. The ones who aren’t good don’t have grandfathers to tell them how to behave. And you have a grandfather, don’t you, Siwa?” She hands Sophie the bowl of leftover batter. “Kitchen sink,” she instructs.

  The sun has risen high enough to gnaw on the back of my neck. I think of Rabbit, and his arrow. “Thanks, Ruthann.”

  She gives me a half smile. �
�Watch your aim, Sikyátavo,” she warns, and she follows Sophie inside.

  * * *

  In 1977, in Arizona, a man could squirrel his daughter away to another part of the country and it was considered kidnapping. By 1978 the laws had changed, and that same man, for the same act, would be charged with custodial interference—a lesser felony. “Jesus, Andrew,” I murmur, poring over the books in my borrowed conference room at Hamilton, Hamilton. “Couldn’t you have waited a few months?” Frustrated, I pick up one of the law books and whip it across the room, narrowly missing Chris as he walks in.

  “What’s the matter with you?” he asks.

  “My client is an idiot.”

  “Of course he is. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t need a lawyer.” Chris sits down and leans back in the chair across from me. “Boy, did you miss out last night, bud. Picture a natural redhead named Lotus, following me into the men’s room at The Frantic Gecko to demonstrate how flexible a yoga instructor can actually be. And she had a friend who could lift her wineglass with her foot.” He smiles. “I know, I know. You’re practically married. But still. You got any Tylenol?”

  I shake my head.

  “Then I definitely need coffee. You take cream or sugar?”

  “I don’t drink—”

  “Coming right up,” he says, and he leaves.

  I break out in a sweat, imagining already what it will be like to have a cup sitting on the table a few inches from me, steaming and fragrant. What most people don’t understand is the interstitial space between lifting that mug and emptying its contents in the sink. In that instant, which is only as long as a thought, need can grow to such enormous proportions that it muscles reason out of the way, and before you know it, I am lifting the drink to my mouth.

  To drive my mind away from this, I start to flip through the pages of Arizona statutes to see if there’s an affirmative defense for kidnapping, and finally find the paragraph I am looking for.

  §13–417. Necessity defense. Conduct that would otherwise constitute an offense is justified if a reasonable person was compelled to engage in the proscribed conduct and the person had no reasonable alternative to avoid imminent public or private injury greater than the injury that might reasonably result from the person’s own conduct.

  Or in other words: I had to do it.

  Having an alcoholic wife isn’t a reason to steal a child. However, if I can prove that Elise was an alcoholic, that she couldn’t care for the child, that a call was made to protective services or the police, and that they didn’t respond adequately; well, then Andrew has a shot at acquittal. A jury might be convinced that Andrew had exhausted all other possible options, that he had no choice but to take his daughter and run . . . provided, first, that Andrew can convince me.

  Chris walks into the conference room. “Here you go,” he says, sliding the mug across the table. “The breakfast of champions. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to find a physician to surgically remove my head.”

  After he leaves, I walk toward the steaming mug. It has been years since I’ve taken a sip, and I can still taste the beautiful bitter of it. I inhale deeply. Then I dump the coffee—china mug and all—into the trash.

  * * *

  The detention officer manning the visiting area at the jail nods at me. “Take any empty one,” he says. It’s a quiet morning; the doors are all shut, and the lights are off. I open the first door on the right and turn on the light—only to find an inmate with his striped pants down around his ankles, screwing his attorney on top of the Formica conference table. “Sonofabitch,” the guy says, his hand reaching to pull up his shorts. The woman blinks in the sudden light and tugs her pencil skirt down, knocking over a box full of files.

  “Let me guess,” I say cheerfully to the lawyer. “Pro boner work?”

  With an apology, I settle myself into the next room to wait for Andrew. He comes in as I’m still picturing the attorney next door—a pubic defender, I guess you’d call her—and smiling. “What’s so funny?” Andrew asks.

  It is the kind of story that, a week ago, I would have told him over dessert. But Andrew is dressed in the same stripes and pink thermals as the man next door, and that is sobering. “Nothing.” I clear my throat. “Look, we need to talk about your case.”

  There is a right way and a wrong way to go about presenting an affirmative defense to a client. You basically explain where the escape hatch is and then say, “Hmm, if you had a ladder to get up there, you’d be home free”—hoping like hell that your client will be bright enough to then volunteer that he does indeed have a ladder hidden away in his breast pocket. The fact that a ladder can’t possibly fit in his breast pocket or that he never in his life owned a ladder is not nearly as important as the fact that he tells you, flat out, that he is in possession of one. As the attorney, all you need to do is hint to the jury about the ladder, you don’t have to physically present it.

  Sometimes the client gets what you’re trying to do, sometimes he doesn’t. At best, you are leading your star witness; at worst, you are suggesting that he lie to you so that you have some semblance of a defense.

  “Andrew,” I say carefully, “I’ve been looking at the charges that were filed against you, and there is a defense that we might be able to use. Basically, it means saying that things were so bad in the household that you had no other alternative but to do what you did, which is take Delia away. The thing is, for this defense to apply . . . you also have to show that you had no alternative legal means of solving the problem.” I give Andrew a moment to let this all sink in. “Delia told me that your ex-wife is an alcoholic. Maybe that impaired her ability to function as a good mother . . . ?”

  Slowly, Andrew nods.

  “Maybe you felt you deserved custody of Delia, because of this . . . ?”

  “Well, wouldn’t you have—”

  I hold up a hand. “Did you call the police? Or child protective services? A social worker? Did you try to get your custody agreement revisited in court?”

  Andrew shifts in his seat. “I thought about it, but then I realized it wasn’t a good idea.”

  My heart sinks. “Why not?”

  “You saw that assault conviction the prosecutor had—”

  “What the hell was that all about, anyway?”

  He shrugs. “Nothing. A stupid bar fight. But I wound up in jail overnight because of it. Back then, the courts automatically gave custody to a mother even when the father had a spotless background. If you had a strike against you already, well, you might as well kiss your kid good-bye.” He looks up at me. “I was scared that if I went to complain about Elise, they’d look up my record and decide I shouldn’t even have visitation anymore, much less full custody.”

  The necessity defense implies there was no legal alternative remaining, but this is not the scenario Andrew’s painted. He didn’t even try a legal route before exacting his own vigilante justice. But instead of telling him how damaging this is to his case, I just nod. The first rule of defense law is to keep your client believing that there is always a light at the end of the tunnel, a slim possibility for a better outcome.

  When you get right down to it, the relationship between a defendant and a lawyer is not all that different from the one between a child and an alcoholic parent.

  “It’s not like I didn’t try,” Andrew says. “I spent months following the rules. Even the day I left, I took her home first.”

  My head snaps up; this is news to me. “You what?”

  “Beth had forgotten this blanket she used to take everywhere, and I knew she’d be miserable all weekend without it. So we went back. The place was a mess—the kitchen was piled high with dishes, and food was rotting on the counter; the refrigerator was empty.”

  “Where was Elise?”

  “In the living room, out cold.”

  I have a sudden mental picture of the woman, lying facedown with her arm trailing off the couch and the sweet curl of bourbon soaking into the cushions where the bottle has spilled.
But in my picture the woman doesn’t have black hair, like Elise Vasquez did when I saw her in court. She is a blonde, and she is wearing a pair of orange Capri pants that were my mother’s favorite.

  All of the memories I have of my mother smell like alcohol—even the good ones, when she was bending down to kiss me good night, or straightening my tie before my high school graduation. Her disease was a perfume, one I used to lean into when I was a child and one I itched for when I was an adult. If you ask me for five concrete recollections from when I was a kid, chances are that three of them will involve some fiasco based on my mother’s drinking: the time it was her turn to be Den Mother and the Boy Scout troop arrived to find her completely lit and dancing in her underwear; the track championship she slept through; the sting of her hand on my face when she actually wanted to punish herself.

  These memories are the pillars I built my life on. But hiding behind them are the other memories, the ones that peek out only when I let down my guard: the hazy afternoon my mother and I sat with our heads bent over the sidewalk, watching ants construct a mobile city. Her voice, off-key, singing me awake in the morning. The summer days when she staked trash bags on the lawn and ran a hose, a makeshift Slip-N-Slide for the two of us. Her inconsistency, in a better light, became spontaneity. You cannot hate someone until you know what it might be like to love them.

  Was having an occasional mother better than not having one at all?

  Andrew has read my mind. “You know what that’s like for a kid, Eric. If it had been up to you, would you have wanted a household like the one you grew up in?”

  No. I didn’t want to grow up in a household like mine, but I did. And I hadn’t wanted to turn out just like my mother, either, but I had. “What did you do?” I ask.