The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  At that moment, everything comes clear. It’s like having someone walk up to a chalky window that you’ve been trying to see through for days, and wiping it clean. Some people have a detailed history, others don’t. There are plenty of adopted children who grow up without knowing an ounce of information about their birth parents; there are criminals who walk out of jail and become pillars of the community. At any moment, a person can start over. And that’s not half a life, but simply a real one.

  It is also a terrifying prospect: that the relationships we use as the cornerstones of our personalities are not given by default but are a choice; that it’s all right to feel closer to a friend than we do to a parent; that someone who’s betrayed us in the past might be the same person with whom we build a future. I lean back against the wall of the car, dizzy. “You make it sound so easy.”

  “And you make it more complicated than it has to be,” Fitz counters. “Bottom line: Do you love your father?”

  “Yes,” I say quickly.

  “Do you love your mother?”

  “He wouldn’t let me.”

  Fitz shakes his head. “Delia,” he corrects. “He couldn’t stop you.”

  I watch Greta’s breathing even out in sleep. “Maybe I’ll stay a little longer,” I say.

  Fitz

  It takes only a week in Arizona to turn me into a professional liar. When my editor calls, asking me for something about the Hopkins trial, I let my voice mail pick up until my mailbox is full. When she finally wises up and calls me in the middle of the night on my hotel phone to say that I have six hours to produce a story or lose my assignment, I tell her that I’ll have it on her desk. Then I e-mail her and say that motions were filed in the case that kept me in court all day, and beg an extension. When a second week goes by and I have produced absolutely nothing, Marge tells me to come back home to New Hampshire and earn my paycheck. She assigns me a piece about army engineers who have discovered a composite compound to prevent frost heaves, a topic that lets me clearly know I have been demoted in her mind. I tell her I’ll be on the first flight out.

  I don’t leave Phoenix.

  Instead, I sit down and fabricate a piece about the Army Corps of Engineers, and asphalt and spring thaw and water tables. I decide that since it will be buried in the middle of the paper, fudging it a bit—okay, completely—isn’t awful.

  Before I know it, this lying jag of mine has spread like maple syrup into all other venues of my life, sticky and somehow impossible to clean up. I call the owners of the pizza place I live above and say there has been a death in my family, would they be kind enough to give an extension on my rent check? I phone the office and explain that I can’t make the Monday meeting because I have a respiratory virus—something SARS-like and highly contagious. I let Sophie weave me a crown of Indian paintbrush, and when she asks when we are going home, I tell her soon.

  When Delia leans on me, I tell myself I’d do the same for any old friend.

  That’s the crazy thing about lies. You start to fall for them, yourself.

  * * *

  Every journalist wants a “death row” exclusive. You want to be the voice of truth that is heard; you want to be the megaphone through which the penitent’s words are carried. You want the reader to listen to the inmate and think, Maybe we are not all that different. But not every journalist knows that his exposé will break the heart of the woman he loves.

  When Andrew walks in—thinner than I remember him being, and with a badly shaved head—everything stops for me. Seeing him in his stripes is a little embarrassing, like catching your grandfather in his boxer shorts, a vision that you wish, the very moment you see it, that you never had. He seems so completely different from the man I used to know, as if this is a distant cousin, with similar features arranged in an entirely new way. I wonder which came first: this Andrew, or the other?

  I am surprised that he’s agreed to see me, if you want to know the truth. In spite of the fact that I practically grew up in his living room, Andrew knows that I write for the Gazette.

  He picks up the handset, I do the same. What I want to ask Andrew, as he stares at me through this sheer wall, is why he did it. What I say instead is, “I hope you didn’t have to pay a lot for the haircut.”

  When he starts to laugh, I can see it for just a glimmer of a second—the man I used to know.

  My defining memory of Andrew involves communicating. Delia and Eric and I had been poking around an old dump site in the woods for pottery shards and Indian arrowheads and elixir bottles when we stumbled upon an ancient suitcase. Opening it, we discovered what seemed to be spy equipment—headphones and a switchboard and a frequency meter—with the wires torn out of the back and the speakers falling off the seams. It was too big for us to carry home, but we desperately wanted it, and a fast vote decided that of all of our parents, the only one who seemed remotely likely to help us with it was Andrew. “That’s a ham radio,” he told us, when he cracked open the suitcase. “Let’s see if we can get it to work.”

  Andrew asked around at the senior center—some of the old-timers remembered that particular brand, and what knobs and buttons controlled volume and frequency. He took us with him to the library to get electronics books, to the hardware store to get wire and clamps, and to the basement while he tinkered.

  One day, with the three of us clustered beside him, he turned on the radio. A high, dizzy whine came out of the speakers while he fiddled and spoke into the microphone. He had to repeat his message twice, but then, to our shock and delight, someone answered. Someone in England. The thing about a ham radio, he told us, is that you could always find someone to talk to. But you had to be careful, he warned, about giving away too much information about yourself. People were not always who they seemed to be.

  “Andrew,” I say to him now, “did you really think you’d get away with it?”

  He rubs his palms over the knees of his pants. “Is this on or off the record?”

  “You tell me,” I say.

  Andrew bows his head. “Fitz,” he confesses, “I wasn’t thinking at all.”

  * * *

  While I am trapped in the desert, waiting for Delia and her wonderdog to find me underneath a paloverde tree, I look at the parched throat of this cracked earth and imagine all the ways a man might die.

  Naturally, the first one to come to mind is thirst. Having finished my token bottle of water an hour ago, and finding myself in the beating heat of this dry desert, I imagine dehydrating to the point of delirium. The tongue would swell like cotton batting, the lids of the eyes would stick. More preferable—now, anyway—would be drowning. Must be a nasty fight at first, all that fluid going where it shouldn’t. But at present, the thought of water—extra water—is really just too enticing. I wonder what it would be like at the end; if mermaids come to string your neck with shells and give you openmouthed kisses. If you just lie down on the sand and watch the sun shimmy a million leagues away.

  Suffocation, hanging, a gunshot wound—all of these are too damn painful. But cold . . . I’ve heard that’s sort of a nice way to go. To lie down in snow and go numb, at this moment, would be nothing short of a miracle. And then, of course, there is martyrdom, which I’m approaching at a damn fast rate. I’m burning, after all, even if it’s not for my convictions. Does flesh charring off at the bone hurt less when you know you are right, even though everyone thinks you are wrong?

  That line of reasoning leads me right to Andrew.

  And then it’s a fast beeline to thinking of Delia.

  I don’t think anyone has ever died of unrequited love. I wonder if I’ll be the first.

  * * *

  After we ring the doorbell, I squeeze Delia’s hand. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. Delia smooths Sophie’s hair and adjusts the collar on her shirt until she twists around, shrugging off her mother’s touch. “Does this lady have kids?” Sophie asks.

  Delia hesitates. “No,” she says.


  Elise Vasquez opens the door and drinks in Delia, there’s really no other way to describe it. I have a sudden recollection of Delia in the hospital bed after she delivered Sophie, when the world had shrunk small enough to only hold the two of them. I guess it is like this for every mother and child.

  Someone who doesn’t know Delia as well as I do would not notice the little flicky thing she is doing with her left hand, a nervous habit. “Hi,” she says. “I thought maybe we could try this again.”

  But Elise is staring at Sophie as if she’s seen a ghost—and of course, that’s exactly what Sophie is: a little girl who looks considerably like the one Elise Vasquez lost. “This is Sophie,” Delia introduces. “And Soph, this is . . .” When she gets to the spot where she should fill in the blank, her cheeks burn and she says nothing at all.

  “Call me Elise,” Delia’s mother says, and she squats down to smile into her granddaughter’s eyes.

  * * *

  Elise has shiny dark hair twisted into a knot at the base of her neck, and a fine graph of lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She is wearing a peasant shirt embroidered with colorful birds, and jeans covered with Sharpie-marker lines of text. My eyes focus on one: Oh daughter of ashes and mother of blood.

  “Sandburg,” I murmur.

  Elise looks up at me, impressed. “Not many people read poetry these days.”

  “Fitz is a writer,” Delia says.

  “Actually, I’m a hack for a second-rate paper.”

  Elise traces the phrase on her jeans. “I always thought it would be wonderful to be a writer,” she says. “To know, just like that, how to put the right words together.”

  I smile politely. The truth is, if I do miraculously manage to put the right words together, it’s by default, because I’ve already used up all the wrong ones. And when you get right down to it, what I don’t say is probably more important than what I do.

  Then again, maybe Elise Vasquez already knows this.

  She stares out the sliding glass door into the backyard, where Victor has taken Sophie to see a bird’s nest, where the eggs are hatching. He lifts her up so she can get a closer look, and then they disappear behind a wall of cacti.

  “Thank you,” Elise says, “for bringing her.”

  Delia turns to her. “I won’t keep you from seeing Sophie.”

  Elise glances at me uncomfortably.

  “He’s my best friend,” Delia says. “He knows about all of it.”

  Just then Sophie comes running back inside. “It’s so cool . . . they have teeth on their beaks,” she says breathlessly. “Can we stay until they’re out?”

  Sophie tugs on Delia’s hand, until she stands up. In the doorway, Victor chuckles. “I tried to explain that it might take a while,” he says.

  Delia answers him, but she is looking at her mother. “That’s all right,” she says. “I don’t mind waiting.” She lets Sophie pull her outside, toward the tree.

  Elise Vasquez and I stand shoulder to shoulder, watching the woman we both feel we lost, and maybe never really had.

  * * *

  On the way home, we stop for coffee. Sophie squats on the sidewalk at the café, drawing a crime-scene outline around Greta with colored chalk. Delia drums her fingers on the edge of her cup but doesn’t seem to be inclined to drink anything from it. “Can you picture them together?” she asks finally, when the wheels of her mind have stopped turning.

  “Elise and Victor?”

  “No,” Delia says. “Elise and my father.”

  “Dee, no one can ever imagine their parents doing it.”

  Take mine, for example. The sad fact is, my parents didn’t do it. They managed to have me, of course, but most of the time I was growing up, my salesman father was off screwing a flight attendant in another city, and my mother was furiously busy pretending he wasn’t.

  But my father was not Andrew Hopkins. In all the years I’ve known Delia, I can’t remember him dating anyone seriously, so I can’t even fathom what he’d look for in a woman. If you asked me, though, I’d never have imagined him falling for someone like Elise. She reminds me of an orchid, exotic and fragile. Andrew is more like ragweed: stealthy, resilient, stronger than you think.

  I look at the comma curve of Delia’s neck, at the bony points of her shoulder blades, a terrain that has been mapped by Eric. “Some people aren’t meant to be together,” I say.

  Suddenly a ragged man wearing a hairnet and flip-flops walks toward us, holding a stack of pamphlets. Sophie, scared, hides behind her mother’s chair. “My brother,” the vagrant asks me, “have you found the Lord Jesus Christ?”

  “I didn’t know he was looking for me.”

  “Is He your personal savior?”

  “You know,” I say, “I’m still kind of hoping to rescue myself.”

  The man shakes his head, dreadlocks like snakes. “None of us are strong enough for that,” he replies, and moves on.

  “I think that’s illegal,” I mutter to Delia. “Or at least it should be. Nobody should have to swallow religion with their coffee.”

  When I look up, she’s staring at me. “How come you don’t believe in God?” Delia asks.

  “How come you do?”

  She looks down at Sophie, and her whole face softens. “I guess it’s because some things are too incredible for people to take all the credit.”

  Or the blame, I think.

  Two tables over, the zealot approaches an elderly couple. “Believe in the Father,” he preaches.

  Delia turns in his direction. “It’s never that simple,” she says.

  * * *

  When Delia was pregnant with Sophie, I was the labor coach. I sort of fell into it by default, when Eric, who had promised that he wouldn’t fuck up this time, wound up drying out just about the time Lamaze classes started. I found myself sitting in a circle of married couples, trying not to let my heart race as the nurse instructed me to settle Delia between my legs and trace my hands over the swell of her belly.

  Delia went into labor in the middle of the frozen foods aisle at Shaw’s market, and she phoned me from the manager’s office. By the time we got to the hospital, I had worked myself into a near panic about how I would be able to do whatever it was that I was supposed to do as a labor coach, without having to look between her legs. Maybe I could request a position at her shoulders. Maybe I could pull the doctor aside and explain the logistics of the situation.

  As it happened, I didn’t have to worry about that at all. The minute the anesthesiologist rolled Delia onto her hip to insert the epidural, I took one look at the needle, passed out, and wound up with sixty stitches at my hairline.

  I awakened on a cot next to her. “Hey, Cowboy,” she said, smiling over the tiny peach of a head that poked out from the blanket in her arms. “Thanks for all the help.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I said, wincing as my scalp throbbed.

  “Sixty stitches,” Delia explained, and then she added, “I only had ten.”

  I found myself looking at her head. “Not there,” she said, giving me a moment to figure it out. “You’re not going to pass out again, are you?”

  I didn’t. Instead, I managed to lurch to the edge of Delia’s hospital bed, so that I could take a look at the baby. I remember looking into the fuzzy blue of Sophie’s eyes and marveling at the fact that there was now one other person in this world who understood what it was like to be completely surrounded by Delia, who’d already learned that it couldn’t stay that way.

  I had Sophie in my arms when Eric came in. He went straight to Delia and kissed her on the mouth, then bent his forehead against hers for a moment, as if whatever he was thinking might be transferred by osmosis. Then Eric turned, his eyes locking on his daughter. “You can hold her,” Delia prompted.

  But Eric didn’t make any move to take Sophie from me. I took a step toward him, and saw what Delia must have overlooked—Eric’s hands were shaking so hard that he had buried them in his coat pockets.


  I pushed the baby against his chest, so that he’d have no choice but to grab hold. “It’s okay,” I said under my breath—To Eric? To Sophie? To myself?—and as I transferred this tiny prize to Eric’s arms, I held on longer than I had to. I made damn sure he was steady, before I let go.

  * * *

  I have seventeen messages, all from my editor. The first starts by asking me to call her back. By the third, Marge is demanding it. Message eleven reminds me that if monkeys can be sent into space, they can certainly be trained to write for the New Hampshire Gazette.

  In the last voice mail, Marge tells me that if I don’t have something on her desk by nine A.M., she is going to fill my page space with the Xeroxes of my ass that I took at the office Christmas party.

  So I pull down the shades in the motel. I turn up the TV, to drown out the moans of a couple one thin wall away from me. I crank up the air-conditioning. Andrew Hopkins, I type, is not what you expect when you walk through the corridors of the Madison Street Jail.

  I shake my head and hit the delete button, erasing the paragraph.

  Like any father, all Andrew Hopkins wants to talk about is his daughter.

  That sentence, I backspace into oblivion.

  Andrew Hopkins has ghosts in his eyes, I write, and then think: We all do.

  I pace around the island of the bed. Who wouldn’t jump at the chance to change something about his life? Two hundred more points on an SAT, a Pulitzer, a Heisman, a Nobel. A more handsome face, a thinner body. A few more years with the babies that grew up when you had forgotten to pay attention. Five more minutes with a loved one who has died.

  The moment I would do over is the one I’ve never been brave enough to have. I’d tell Delia how much I love her, and she would look at me the way she has always looked at Eric.