The Jodi Picoult Collection #3

by Jodi Picoult

  This means that the prosecution has established a witness to tie Andrew to the abduction—and for reasons I’ve never understood, juries hang on the words of witnesses, even when their accounts aren’t accurate. I open my mouth to tell Emma that I could actually care less, that I’m excusing myself from this case starting immediately, but instead I only hang up the phone and walk back to where Delia is now standing alone.

  She looks like she has been stung, like she is still smarting. And why shouldn’t she? It’s not every day you find out that someone you trust has been lying behind your back; for Delia, this is becoming commonplace. “I told Fitz to go to hell,” she says quietly. “I said he could quote me on that in twenty-point type.” She turns to me. “I should have realized that if he came all the way out here, it was because he had an agenda.”

  “For what it’s worth,” I say, “I don’t think he wanted to write this story any more than you want to see it written.”

  “I told him things I haven’t even told you . . . God, Eric, I took him with me the last time I went to see my mother.” She pushes her hair off her face. “What else is wrong?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fitz said you had something to tell me. Is there something wrong with my father’s case?”

  She is staring at me with those beautiful brown eyes, the same ones I remember from a thousand moments in my life: the summer Sunday when I showed off by jumping off the high dive at the town pool; the February vacation when I broke my leg skiing; the night I made love to her for the first time.

  To the left of her foot, the paper that had been beside Fitz’s glasses bursts into flame.

  “There’s nothing wrong with his case,” I lie, and I don’t tell her that I’m giving up, either.

  * * *

  Nighttime in Arizona is an embarrassment of riches. Sophie and I sit on the roof of the trailer, wrapped in a blanket. I show Sophie the Big Dipper, and Orion’s Belt, and a winking red star. She is more interested, though, in locating the alphabet. Just this morning I found one of my depositions on the kitchen table, covered with multiple streams of the letter B. “Daddy,” she says, pointing. “I see a W.”

  “Good for you.”

  “There’s another W, too.”

  The moon is full tonight, and when Sophie points at the stars I can clearly see the trio: W-O-W. To my surprise, when I spell out the letters, she tells me what the word is. “Ruthann taught me,” Sophie says. “I know wow and cat and dog and yes.”

  As she settles back in the V of my legs, I realize that if someone stole Sophie away from me, even if that person was Delia, I would search for her forever. I would turn over every single star, if that’s what it took to find her. But by the same token, if I knew that someone was going to steal her away from me, I guarantee you that I’d take her first and run.

  Suddenly Sophie stands up and bends over, so that her head is between her legs. She looks up at the sky from this vantage point while I panic about her falling off the top of the trailer. “Did you know,” she says, “that WOW, upside down, is MOM?”

  “I guess I never noticed.”

  Sophie leans against my heart. “I think it’s like that on purpose,” she says.

  * * *

  Sometime after midnight Delia climbs up to the roof of the trailer and sits down cross-legged behind me. “My father’s going to go to jail, isn’t he,” she says.

  I gently lay Sophie down on a bed of blankets; she’s fallen asleep against me. “You can’t ever tell in a jury trial—”

  “Eric.”

  I duck my head. “There’s a good chance.”

  She closes her eyes. “For how long?”

  “A maximum of ten years.”

  “In Arizona?”

  I slip my arm around her. “Let’s deal with that when and if it happens.”

  With the moon watching like a hawk, I run my hands over the river of her hair and the landscape of her shoulders. We slip into my sleeping bag together—a tight fit—and she slides over me, her legs pressed the length of mine and her skin slick. We are attentive to silence—Sophie is asleep a few feet away—and that changes the tenor of the act. Without words, the other sensations expand. Sex becomes desperate, secret, precise as a ballet.

  We move, while coyotes pace the desert and snakes write in code across the sand. We move, while the stars rain down on us like sparks. We move, and her body blooms.

  Then we turn onto our sides, still linked, too close for anything to come between us. “I love you,” I whisper against her skin. My words fall into the tiny divot at the base of her throat, the pockmark left behind after a sledding accident.

  But Delia has had that mark ever since I met her, at age four. The sledding accident would have occurred beforehand, when she was living in Phoenix.

  Where it doesn’t snow.

  “Dee,” I say urgently, but she is already asleep.

  That night I dream of running on the surface of the moon, where everything weighs less, even doubt.

  * * *

  Andrew enters the private attorney-client conference room. “I thought you quit.”

  “That was yesterday,” I reply. “Listen, that scar, on Delia’s neck . . . it didn’t come from a sledding accident, did it.”

  “No. It was a scorpion sting.”

  “She was stung by a scorpion on her throat?”

  “She got stung on the shoulder, but by the time Elise found her, she was already in bad shape. At the hospital, they tried to intubate her, but couldn’t do it the regular way, so they cut a hole in her windpipe and put her on a ventilator for three days until she could breathe on her own again.”

  “What hospital did you bring her to?”

  “Scottsdale Baptist,” Andrew says.

  If Delia had been brought into a hospital in 1976 for a scorpion bite, there will be records: written proof that in her mother’s solitary care, this child had been harmed. If it happened once, there was every chance it would happen again. And that might be enough justification for a jury to understand why a protective father might run off with his little girl.

  I gather up my papers and tell Andrew I’ll be in touch. Then I race into the parking lot behind the jail, where I turn the air-conditioning on full blast and call Delia on my cell phone. “Guess what,” I say when she answers. “I think I know why you’re afraid of bugs.”

  * * *

  Scottsdale Baptist Hospital is now Scottsdale Osborn. An administrative assistant who has been following the kidnapping on local news channels has given Delia her old hospital records in return for an autograph. We sit down together in an archive closet, surrounded by walls of files with the colorful confetti of routing tabs. Delia opens the folder, and the musty scent of the past rises up from the small stack of paperwork. I watch her scan the pages, and wonder if she realizes she’s fingering the dime-size hollow at the base of her throat.

  “You read it,” she says a moment later, shoving the folder at me.

  BETHANY MATTHEWS. Date of Visit: 11/24/76.

  History: 3 y/o WF brought in by mother following questionable scorpion sting to L shoulder approximately 1 h PTA. Pt c/o pain to L shoulder as well as difficulty breathing, nausea, and double vision. Mother reports patient has had intermittent “jerking” of her arms as well as two episodes of non-bloody, non-bilious emesis. No LOC, no chest pain, no bleeding.

  PMH: None

  Allergies: NKDA

  Tetanus: UTD

  PE: 128/88 177 34 99.8 98% on RA 20 kg. Anxious, agitated 3 y/o ♀ in moderate distress.

  HEENT: Horizontal nystagmus, PERRLA, copious salivation, OP clear

  Neck: Supple, non-tender, no LAD, no thyromegaly

  Lungs: Slight rhonchi bilaterally, slight incr. WOB, no retractions

  CV: Regular, tachy, no m,r,g

  Abd: s/nt/nd/+bs

  EXT: 2x3 area of erythema on posterior left shoulder, no ecchymoses, no bleeding. 2+ distal pulses x 4

  Neuro: Alert, anxious, horizontal nys
tagmus to L side, dysconjugate gaze, facial droop on L side, gag reflex not intact. 5/5 strength x 4 extremities, sensitive to light touch except at area around envenomation, occasional opisthonos

  Laboratory data: WBC 11/6 Hct-36 Plt 240 Na 136 K 3.9 Cl 100 HCO3 24 BUN 18 Cr 1.0 gluc 110 Ca 9.0 INR 1.2 PTT 33.0; Urinalysis Sp Gr 1.020, 25–50 WBC, 5–10 RBC, 3+ BAC 1+ SqEpi, +nitrite, +LE

  ED decision-making: Pt presented to ED with s/s consistent with severe envenomation. After receiving 2 mg versed i.v. the patient was initially improved, but became agitated when Dr. Young attempted to remove the patient’s clothing in order to fully assess her. Antivenin was unavailable. Additional doses of versed were ineffective, and the decision was made to sedate and paralyze the patient for intubation. Because of the copious secretions, orotracheal intubation was impossible, and a needle cricothyrotomy was performed successfully. The patient was then admitted to the PICU and underwent a subsequent tracheostomy by peds general surgery. Pt ventilated for 3 days. Urinalysis also revealed a urinary tract infection, and the PICU team has been notified of this finding.

  “I don’t understand what it says,” Delia murmurs.

  “You couldn’t breathe,” I say, skimming the notes. “So the doctors made a surgical opening in your throat and hooked you up to machines that breathed for you.” I read further down the page:

  ED social worker was requested because mother presented as intoxicated; father notified.

  Here is proof, in black and white, that medical professionals thought Elise Hopkins was so drunk she was unable to take care of her child.

  Delia turns to me. “I can’t believe I don’t remember this.”

  “You were young,” I justify.

  “Shouldn’t I have at least some sense of being in a hospital for a few nights? Of breathing with a ventilator? Or of fighting the doctor? I mean, look at what it says, Eric. I had to be sedated.”

  She gets up suddenly and walks out of the closet, asking the administrative assistant where the pediatric ICU ward is. Determined, she gets into the elevator and heads upstairs.

  It looks different, surely, than it used to. There are bright murals of aquariums and Disney princesses on the walls and rainbows painted on the windows. Children tethered to IV poles navigate the halls with their parents; babies cry behind closed doors.

  A candy striper gets off another elevator and pushes past us, her face hidden by a bouquet of balloons. She brings them into the room opposite us; the patient is a little girl. “Can we tie them to the bed,” she asks, “and see if I float?”

  “I didn’t have balloons,” Delia murmurs. “They weren’t allowed in the ICU.” She crosses in front of me, but she might as well be a thousand miles away. “He brought me candy instead . . . a lollipop shaped like a scorpion. He told me to bite it back.”

  “Your dad?”

  “I don’t think so. This is crazy, but it was someone who looked like Victor. The guy my mother’s married to now.” She shakes her head, bewildered. “He told me not to tell anyone he came to visit.”

  I scuff my shoe on the linoleum. “Huh,” I say.

  “If I got bitten in 1976, my parents were still married.” Delia looks up at me. “What if . . . what if my mother was having an affair, Eric?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Eric,” Delia says, “did you hear me?”

  “She was.”

  “What?”

  “Your father told me.”

  “And you didn’t tell me?”

  “I couldn’t tell you, Delia.”

  “What else are you holding back?”

  A hundred answers run through my mind, from details of conversations I have had with Andrew in jail to the deposition I took from Delia’s former nursery school teacher, things that she is better off not hearing, although she would never believe me if I told her so. “You’re the one who wanted me to represent your father,” I argue. “If I tell you the things he tells me, I get tossed off the case, or disbarred. So, you pick, Delia. Do you want me to put you first . . . or him?”

  Too late I realize I never should have asked that question. She shoves past me without saying a word, and strides down the hallway.

  “Delia, wait,” I say, as she steps into the elevator. I put my hand between the doors to keep it from closing. “Stop. I promise; I’ll tell you everything I know.”

  The last thing I see before the doors close are her eyes: the soft, bruised brown of disappointment. “Why start now,” she says.

  * * *

  The taxi drops me off at Hamilton, Hamilton, but instead of going into the office building I take a left and start walking the streets of Phoenix. I walk far enough that the tony stucco storefronts disappear and I find myself in places where kids in low-riding pants hang out on the corner, watching traffic without flicking their yellow eyes. I pass a boarded-up drugstore, a wig shop, and a kiosk that reads CHECKS CASHED in multiple languages.

  Delia is right. If I managed to figure out a way to keep her from knowing what her father told me, surely I would have been able to figure out a way to keep the Bar Association from knowing what I might have told her. It doesn’t matter that, in terms of legal ethics, I shouldn’t have disclosed to her any information about her father’s case, or her own absent history. It doesn’t matter that I promised as much to Judge Noble, and to Chris Hamilton, my sponsor in this state. The bottom line is that ethics are a lofty standard, but affection ranks higher. What is the point of being an exemplary attorney in the long run? You never see that on anyone’s tombstone. You see who loved them; you see who they loved back.

  I duck into the next store and let the air-conditioning wash over me. There is the unmistakable yeasty smell of cardboard cartons; the ching of a cash register. One wall is covered with the emerald green bottles of foreign wines; the entire back shelf is a transparent panorama of gins and vodka and vermouth. The full-bellied brandies sit side by side like Buddhas.

  I head to the corner of whiskeys. The cashier puts the Maker’s Mark into a brown bag for me and hands me back my change. When I leave the store I twist off the cap of the whiskey bottle. I lift the bottle to my lips and tilt back my head and savor that first, blessed, anesthetic mouthful.

  And, like I expect, that’s all I need for the fog in my head to clear, leaving one honest admission: Even if I had been free to tell Delia anything and everything, I still wouldn’t have done it. As Andrew has been trying to explain for weeks: It was easier to hide the truth than to hurt her.

  So does that make me guilty . . . or admirable?

  What is right, in the end, is not always what it seems to be, and some rules are better broken. But what about when those rules happen to be laws?

  Tipping the whiskey bottle, I spill the entire contents down a sewer grate.

  It is a longshot, but I think I’ve just found a way out for Andrew Hopkins.

  Delia

  By the time I reach my mother’s house, my emotions are hanging by a thread. I’ve been lied to by Fitz and by Eric; I’ve been lied to by my father. I have come here because, ironically, my mother is my last resort. I need someone to tell me the things I want to hear: that she loved my father; that I have jumped to the wrong conclusion; that the truth is not always what you think it is.

  When my mother doesn’t answer the doorbell, I let myself into her unlocked house. I follow her voice down a hallway. “How does that feel?” she asks.

  “Much better,” a man answers.

  I peer through a doorway to find my mother gently tying a knot in a silk cord around a younger man’s neck. Seeing me, he startles, nearly falling off his stool.

  “Delia!” she says.

  The man’s face turns bright red; he seems incredibly embarrassed to have been caught, even fully clothed, with my mother. “Stay,” she says. “Henry and I are finishing up.”

  He digs in his pants for his wallet. “Gracias, Doña Elise,” he mutters, shoving a ten-dollar bill into her hands.

  He’s paying her?

 
; “You have to keep wearing your red socks, and your red underwear for me. Understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he replies, and he backs out of the room in a hurry.

  I stare at her, speechless for a moment. “Does Victor know?”

  “I try to keep it a secret.” My mother blushes. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure how you’d react, either.” Her eyes suddenly brighten. “If you’re interested, though, I’d love to teach you.”

  It is then that I notice the rows of jars behind her, filled with leaves and roots and buds and soil, and I realize we are talking about very different things. “What . . . is all this?”

  “It’s part of the business,” she says. “I’m a curandera, a healer. Sort of a doctor for the people doctors can’t help. Henry, for example, has been here three times already.”

  “You’re not sleeping with him?”

  She looks at me as if I’m crazy. “Henry? Of course not. He’s been hospitalized twice because his throat keeps swelling shut, but no medical professional can find anything wrong with him. The minute he walked in here, I knew it was one of his neighbors hexing him—and I’m working with him to break the spell.”

  My own business involves things that cannot be seen, but it’s rooted in the basics of science: human cells, attacked by bacteria, which create vapor trails. Once again, I look at this woman and think she is an utter stranger. “Do you honestly believe that?”

  “What I believe doesn’t matter. It’s what he believes. People come to me because they get to help with their cure. The client knots the special cord, or buries the sealed matchbox, or rubs the candle. Who doesn’t want to have a hand in controlling their own future?”

  It was what I had thought I wanted. But now that I am starting to remember, I am not so sure. I touch my hand to the scar at my throat; the discovery that brought me here. “If you’re a healer, why couldn’t you save me?”

  Her eyes fall to the small hollow. “Because back then,” she admits, “I couldn’t even save myself.”

  Suddenly this is all too hard. I am tired of putting up walls. I want someone with the strength—and the honesty—to break them down.