The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  “They stay lost in this world,” Ruthann says.

  I hold up my palm. I try to convince myself that I feel a drop of rain.

  * * *

  “Ruthann,” I ask, as we drive back from the Heard, “how come you live in Mesa?”

  “Because the Phoenician just isn’t swanky enough for me.”

  “No, really.” I glance in the rearview mirror to make sure Sophie is still sleeping. “I didn’t realize you had family in the area.”

  “Why does anyone move to a place like where we live?” she asks, shrugging. “Because there’s nowhere left to go.”

  “Do you ever go back?”

  Ruthann nods. “When I need to remember where I came from, or where I’m headed.”

  Maybe I should go, I think. “You haven’t asked me why I came to Arizona.”

  “I figured if you wanted to tell me, you would,” Ruthann says.

  I keep my eyes on the highway. “My father kidnapped me when I was a baby. He told me my mother had died in a car accident, and he took me from Arizona to New Hampshire. He’s in jail now, in Phoenix. I didn’t know any of this until a week ago. I didn’t know my mother’s been alive the whole time. I didn’t even know my real name.”

  Ruthann looks over her shoulder, where Sophie is curled up like a mollusk against Greta’s back. “How did you come to call her Sophie?”

  “I . . . I guess I just liked it.”

  “On the morning of my daughter’s naming, it was up to each of her aunties to suggest a name for her. Her father was Póvolnyam, Butterfly Clan, so each of the names had something to do with that: There was Pólikwaptiwa, which means Butterfly Sitting on Flower. And Tuwahóima, which means Butterflies Hatching. And Talásveniuma, Butterfly Carrying Pollen on Wings. But the one Grandmother picked was Kuwányauma, Butterfly Showing Beautiful Wings. She waited until dawn, and then took Kuwányauma and introduced her to the spirits for the first time.”

  “You have a daughter?” I say, amazed.

  “She was named for her father’s clan, but she belonged to mine,” Ruthann says, and then she shrugs. “When she got initiated, she got a new name. And in school, she was called Louise by the teachers. What I’m saying is that what you’re called is hardly ever who you are.”

  “What does your daughter do?” I ask. “Where does she live?”

  “She’s been gone a long time. Louise never figured out that Hopi isn’t a word to describe a person, but a destination.” Ruthann sighs. “I miss her.”

  I look through the windshield at the clouds, stretched across the horizon. I think about Ruthann’s brother-in-law, raining on his family’s fortune. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to get you upset.”

  “I’m not upset,” she answers. “If you want to know someone’s story, they have to tell it out loud. But every time, the telling is a little bit different. It’s new, even to me.”

  As I listen to Ruthann, I start to think that maybe the math is not reciprocal; maybe depriving a mother of a child is greater than depriving the child of the mother. Maybe knowing where you belong is not equal to knowing who you are.

  “Have you seen your mother since you’ve been here?” Ruthann asks me.

  “It didn’t go so well,” I say after a moment.

  “How come?”

  I am not ready to tell her about my mother’s drinking. “She’s not what I expected her to be.”

  Ruthann turns her head, looks out the window. “No one ever is,” she says.

  * * *

  My favorite museum, as a child, was the New England Aquarium, and my favorite exhibit was the tide pool where you got to play God. There were sea stars, which could spit out their own stomachs and grow back limbs that were damaged. There were anemones, which might spend all their lives in one place. There were hermit crabs and limpets and algae. And there was a red button for me to push, which created a wave in the tank and spun all the sea life like the clothes inside a washing machine, before letting them settle again.

  I loved being the agent of change, at the touch of a finger. I’d wait until it seemed the hermit crab had just settled, and then I would push the button again. It was amazing to think of a society where the status quo meant having no status quo at all.

  There was a second exhibit at the aquarium that I liked, too. A strobe, spitting over the flow of an oversized faucet. I knew it was just an optical illusion, but I used to think that in this one corner of the world, water might be able to run backward.

  * * *

  Ruthann puts me to work, creating her butchered dolls. One day when we are sitting around her kitchen table making Divorced Barbie—she comes with Ken’s boat, Ken’s car, and the deed to Ken’s house—she asks, “What did you do in New Hampshire?”

  I bend closer with the hot glue gun, trying to attach a button. Instead, I wind up affixing Barbie’s purse to her forehead. “Greta and I found people.”

  Ruthann’s brows lift. “Like K-nine stuff?”

  “Yeah, except we worked with a whole bunch of police stations.”

  “So why aren’t you doing it here?”

  I look up at her. Because my father is in jail. Because I am embarrassed to have done this for a living, without knowing that I was missing. “Greta isn’t trained for desert work,” I say, the first excuse that comes to mind.

  “So train her.”

  “Ruthann,” I say, “it’s just not the right time for us.”

  “You don’t get to decide that.”

  “Oh, really. And who does?”

  “The kúskuska. The ones who are lost.” She bends down over her work again.

  Is there a little girl, somewhere, being driven across a border right now? A man with a razor poised over his wrist? A child with one leg over the fence meant to keep him safe from the rest of the world? The desperate usually succeed because they have nothing to lose. But what if that isn’t the case? If someone like me had worked in the Phoenix area twenty-eight years ago, would my father have gotten away with it?

  “I suppose I could put out flyers,” I tell Ruthann.

  She reaches for the hot glue gun. “Good,” she says. “Because you suck at dollmaking.”

  * * *

  On the way to the desert, Fitz tells me remarkable stories about a heart transplant patient who woke up with a love of the French Riviera, although he’d never left Kansas in his life; of a teetotaling kidney recipient who, postsurgery, began to drink the same martini her donor favored.

  “By that logic,” I argue, “then the memory of seeing you for the first time gets stored in my eyeballs.”

  Fitz shrugs. “Maybe it does.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I’m just telling you what I read . . .”

  “What about the guy in the 1900s who had a steel pike driven through his brain by accident?” I challenge. “He woke up speaking Kyrgyzstani—”

  “Well, I highly doubt that,” Fitz interrupts, “since Kyrgyzstan wasn’t a country until five years ago.”

  “You’re missing the point,” I say. “What if memories get stored in the brain, and they aren’t even necessarily ones we’ve had? What if we’re hardwired with a whole iceberg of experiences, and our minds use only a tip of them?”

  “That’s a pretty cool thought . . . that you and I would have the same memories, just because it’s how we’re made.”

  “You and I do have the same memories,” I point out.

  “Yeah, but my seeing-Eric-naked recollection has a whole different causal effect on my system,” Fitz laughs.

  “Maybe I’m not really remembering that stupid lemon tree. Maybe everyone has a lemon stuck in their mind.”

  “Yes,” Fitz agrees. “Mine, however, is a ’seventy-eight Pacer.”

  “Very funny—”

  “It wasn’t, if you were the guy driving it. God, do you remember the time it broke down on the way to the senior prom?”

  “I remember the oil on your date’s dress. What wa
s her name? Carly . . . ?”

  “Casey Bosworth. And she wasn’t my date by the time we got there.”

  I pull off the road, into a vista of pebbles and red earth, and then hand Fitz a bottle of water and a roll of toilet paper. “You remember the drill, right?”

  He will lay a trail for Greta and me to follow, just like he’s done for years in New Hampshire. But because this terrain is unfamiliar to me, Fitz will leave bits of toilet paper on trees and cacti as he goes, to let me know that Greta is on the right trail. He gets out of the car and leans down into the window. “I don’t think we covered coyote protection in the training manual.”

  “I wouldn’t worry about the coyotes,” I say sweetly. “I’d be far more panicked about the snakes.”

  “Funny,” Fitz replies, and he starts walking, a massive redhead who is going to be a hectic shade of sunburned pink in no time at all. “If Greta screws up, drive south. I’ll be hanging out with the border patrol drinking tequila.”

  “Greta won’t screw up. Hey, Fitz,” I call out, and wait until he turns, shading his eyes. “I actually wasn’t kidding about the snakes.”

  As I drive off, I watch Fitz in the rearview mirror, staring down nervously at his feet. It makes me laugh out loud. Memories aren’t stored in the heart or the head or even the soul, if you ask me, but in the spaces between any given two people.

  * * *

  According to the Hopi, sometimes we no longer fit the world we’ve been given.

  In the beginning, there was only darkness and Taiowa the sun spirit. He created the First World and filled it with creatures that lived in a cave deep in the earth. But they fought among themselves, so he sent Spider Grandmother down to prepare them for a change.

  As Spider Grandmother led the creatures into the Second World, Taiowa changed them. They were no longer insects, but animals with fur, and webbed fingers, and tails. They were happy to have the space to roam free, but they didn’t understand life any better than before.

  Taiowa sent Spider Grandmother back to lead the way into the Third World. By now, the animals had transformed into people. They made villages, and planted corn. But it was cold in the Third World, and mostly dark. Spider Grandmother taught them to weave blankets to keep warm; she told the women to make clay pots to store water and food. But in the cold, the pots couldn’t be baked. The corn wouldn’t grow.

  One day a hummingbird came to the people in the fields. He had been sent by Masauwu, Ruler of the Upper World, and Caretaker of the Place of the Dead. He brought with him fire, and he taught the people its secret.

  With this new discovery, the people could harden their pots and warm their fields and cook their food. For a while, they lived in peace. But sorcerers emerged, with medicine to hurt those they didn’t like. Men gambled, instead of farming. Women grew wild, forgetting their babies, so that the fathers had to care for the children. People began to brag that there was no god, that they had created themselves.

  Spider Grandmother returned. She told the people that those of good heart would leave this place, and the evil ones, behind. They did not know where to go, but they had heard footsteps overhead in the sky. So the chiefs and the medicine men took clay and shaped a swallow out of it, wrapped it in a bride’s robe, and sang it to life.

  The swallow flew toward the opening in the sky, but he was not strong enough to make it through. The medicine men decided to make a stronger bird, and they sang forth a dove. It flew through the opening and returned, saying, “On the other side, there is a land that spreads in all directions. But there is nothing alive up there.”

  Still, the chiefs and the medicine men had heard footsteps. They fashioned a catbird this time, and asked him to ask the One Who Made the Footsteps for permission to enter his land.

  The catbird flew past the point where all the other birds had gone. He found sand, and mesas. He found ripe squash and blue corn and splitting melons. He found a single stone house, and its master, Masauwu. When he returned, he told the chiefs and the medicine men that Masauwu would allow them to come. They looked up, wondering how they would ever reach the hole in the sky.

  They went off to find Chipmunk, the planter. Chipmunk planted a sunflower seed in the ground, and by the power of singing, the people made it grow. But it bent over with its own weight, and could not reach the hole.

  Chipmunk planted a spruce, and then a pine, but neither grew tall enough. Finally, he planted a bamboo, and the people began to sing. Every time they stopped to catch their breath, the bamboo stopped growing and a notch formed. Finally the bamboo passed through the hole in the sky.

  Only the pure people were allowed into this Fourth World. Spider Grandmother went up the bamboo first, with her two warrior grandsons. As the people emerged, a mockingbird sorted them into Hopi and Navajo, Zuni and Pima, Ute and Supai, Sioux and Comanche and whites. The warrior grandsons took their buckskin ball and played their way across the earth, creating mountains and mesas. Spider Grandmother made a sun and a moon. Coyote tossed the leftover materials into the sky, to make the stars.

  The Hopi will tell you that evil managed to sneak in up the bamboo, anyway. That the time of this Fourth World is almost done. Any day now, they say, we might find ourselves in a new one.

  * * *

  Tracking with a bloodhound takes away from the romance of scent. The smell that makes you want to bury your face in the neck of your lover, the trace of perfume that turns men’s heads when a beautiful woman walks by—these are merely skin cells decomposing. For Greta and me, scent is a matter of serious business.

  After buckling on her leash, I walk Greta over to the baseball cap Fitz has left behind. Lifting it up, I watch her breathe in so deeply the fabric sucks into her nostrils. “Find him,” I instruct, and Greta leaps over the bent fence and heads off, nose to the ground.

  This is a world populated by birds with unlikely names: the Common Flicker, the Harris Hawk, the Mexican Jay. We see agave plants, and chain-fruit cholla, rose mallow, paintbrush, tackstem. We walk by flora that I have only seen in books—brittlebush and cheeseweed, filaree, jojoba. We pass cacti that are mutations, their arms growing inward instead of out; their heads twisted like the folds of a human brain.

  Greta moves across the flat of the land slowly. I keep my eyes on the plump arms of the saguaros and the Modigliani necks of the ocotillo, where every now and then Fitz has left me a piece of toilet paper to let me know that Greta’s heading in the right direction.

  She stops at the dried-out husk of a saguaro, and sits down. Suddenly she plants all four feet firmly on the ground and bares her teeth. The hair on the line of her spine stands on end; she growls.

  The javelina is about four feet long, with a bristled gray hide. Its yellowed tusks turn down at the ends; it has a mane that runs the length of its back. It looks up from its meal of prickly pear and grunts.

  I can never remember if you are supposed to run from a bear or stay perfectly still; I have absolutely no clue if there is safety etiquette for a javelina. The pig takes a cocky step toward Greta, who skitters sideways. I pull on her leash just in time to keep her from crashing into a stubby Medusa of a cactus.

  Suddenly Greta yelps, and falls to the ground, clawing at her nose. The cactus she didn’t brush into has somehow managed to hook itself into her snout. Spines cover her muzzle, a few have worked their way into the gummy black gasket of her lips.

  Greta’s mournful howl sends a flock of cactus wrens to the skies. The javelina, startled, thunders off. Without a second thought I kneel down and haul Greta over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. I don’t feel her seventy-five pounds as I start running. “Fitz,” I yell as loud as I can, and I try to find him with the clues he’s left us.

  * * *

  We are bent over Greta in the back of the Explorer. I’m lying over her, to keep her from moving, and stroking her head and her ears. Fitz leans close to her snout, pulling the spines free with a pair of needlenose pliers I carry in my emergency kit. “I think they call it tedd
y bear cholla,” he says. “Nasty stuff . . . it jumps at you.” When he opens Greta’s mouth, gently, she snaps at him. “Almost finished, sweetheart,” Fitz soothes, and he pulls the last spines out of her gums. Then he leans forward to make sure he hasn’t missed any. “That’s it. You may want to double check my veterinary skills with a professional, but I think she’s going to be okay.”

  I take one look at Greta, and then at Fitz, and burst into tears. “I hate it here,” I say. “I hate how hot it is and that there are snakes and that nothing’s green. I hate the smell of that stupid jail. I want to go home.”

  Fitz looks at me. “Then go,” he says.

  His easy answer is enough to bring me up short. “Why aren’t you talking me out of it?”

  “Why should I?” Fitz says. “Your father isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and he’d be the first one to tell you to get on with your life. Sophie would do better back in New Hampshire, in an environment she’s used to. It’s not like you have to stick around to get to know your mother—”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “True or false: You don’t care whether or not you see her again.”

  True, I want to say. Except, I can’t.

  “I thought I’d come here, and it would all make sense,” I say, wiping my eyes with the hem of my T-shirt. “I just wish I could remember it all.”

  “Why?”

  No one has asked me that question yet.

  “Well, because I don’t know who I used to be,” I say.

  “I do. Eric does. Christ, Delia, you have a hundred witnesses to help you with that. If you really want something to worry about, try figuring out who you’re going to be from now on.” He bends his knees and rolls onto his side. “You want to know what I think?”

  “Would you stop if I said no?”

  “I think you’re angry at your mother for losing you in the first place.”

  Grudgingly, I nod.

  “And you’re angry at your father for taking you.”

  “Well . . .”

  “But most of all, I think you’re angry at yourself for not being smart enough to figure this all out on your own,” Fitz says. “So what if you lived in New Hampshire, instead of Arizona? What’s important is where you’ll be living five years from now. So what if you had some lemon tree growing in your backyard? I’d rather know if you want to plant one in your garden now. So what if you have some crazy fear of spiders? That’s what hypnosis is for.” He reaches out and pulls on one of my braids. “If you don’t want someone to change your life for you again, Dee, you’ve got to change it yourself.”