Sing You Home

by Jodi Picoult

  They are not militant, crazy people. The protesters are calm and organized, and wearing black suits with skinny ties, or modest floral print dresses. They look like your neighbor, your grandmother, your history teacher. In this, I suppose, they have something in common with the people they are slandering.

  Beside me, I feel Vanessa's spine go rigid. "We can leave," I murmur. "Let's just rent a video and watch it at home."

  But before I can pull away, I hear my name being called. "Zoe?"

  At first, I don't recognize Max. The last time I saw him, after all, he was drunk and disheveled, and trying to explain to a judge why we should be granted a divorce. I'd heard that he started going to Reid and Liddy's church, but I hadn't quite expected a transformation this . . . radical.

  Max is wearing a fitted dark suit with a charcoal tie. His hair has been trimmed neatly, and he's clean-shaven. On the lapel of his suit is a pin: a small gold cross.

  "Wow," I say. "You look great, Max."

  We do an awkward dance, where we move toward each other for a kiss on the cheek, but then I pull away, and he pulls away, and we both look down at the ground.

  "So do you," he says.

  He is wearing a walking cast. "What happened?" I ask. It seems crazy that I wouldn't know. That Max would have gotten hurt, and no one relayed the message to me.

  "It's nothing. An accident," Max says.

  I wonder who took care of him, when he was first hurt.

  Behind me, I am incredibly conscious of my mother and Vanessa. I can feel their presence like heat thrown from a fireplace. Someone in the front of the line buys a ticket to July, and the protest starts up in earnest, with chanting and yelling and sign waving. "I heard you were part of Eternal Glory, now," I say.

  "Actually, it's a part of me," Max replies. "I let Jesus into my heart."

  He says this with a brilliant white smile, the same way he'd say, I got my car waxed this afternoon or I think I'll have Chinese food for dinner--as if this is part of normal everyday conversation instead of a statement that might give you pause. I wait for Max to snicker--we used to make fun of Reid and Liddy sometimes for the glory-be snippets that fell out of their mouths--but he doesn't.

  "Have you been drinking again?" I ask, the only explanation I can come up with to reconcile the man I know with the one standing in front of me.

  "No," Max says. "Not a drop."

  Maybe not of alcohol, but it's pretty clear to me that Max has been chugging whatever Kool-Aid the Eternal Glory Church is offering. There's something just off about him--something Stepford-like. I preferred Max with all his complicated imperfections. I preferred Max when we used to make fun of Liddy for saying "Jeezum Crow" when she was frustrated, for being gullible enough to believe him when he told her that Rick Warren was mounting a presidential campaign.

  Full disclosure: I'm not a religious person. I don't begrudge people the right to believe in whatever they believe, but I don't like having those same beliefs forced on me. So when Max says, "I've been praying for you, Zoe," I have absolutely no idea what to say. I mean, it's nice to be prayed for, I suppose, even if I've never asked for it.

  But do I really want to be prayed for by a bunch of people who are using God to camouflage a message of hate? There are beautiful, wholesome teenage girls standing in front of the ticket booth handing out flyers that say: I WAS BORN BLOND. YOU CHOOSE TO BE GAY. Their clean-cut attentiveness, their claim of being "Good Christians" are the icing, I realize, on a cake that's laced with arsenic. "Why would you want to do this kind of thing?" I ask Max. "Why does a movie even matter to you?"

  "Perhaps I can answer that," a man says. He has a cascade of white hair and stands nearly six inches taller than Max; I think I recognize him from news clips as the pastor of this church. "We wouldn't be here if the homosexuals weren't promoting their own agenda, their own activism. If we sit back, who's going to speak for the rights of the traditional family? If we sit back, who's going to make sure our great country doesn't become a place where Johnny has two mommies and where marriage is as God intended it to be--between a man and woman?" His voice has escalated. "Brothers and sisters--we are here because Christians have become the minority! Homosexuals claim they have a right to be heard? Well, so do Christians!"

  There is a roar from his congregants, who push their placards higher in the air.

  "Max," the pastor says, tossing him a set of keys, "we need another box of pamphlets from the van."

  Max nods and then turns to me. "I'm really glad you're doing well," he says, and for the first time since we've started talking I believe him.

  "I'm glad you're doing well, too." I mean it, even if he's on a road I'd never walk myself. But in a way, this is the ultimate vindication for me, the proof that our relationship could never have been mended. If this is where Max was headed, it was not somewhere I'd ever have wanted to go.

  "You're not going to see July, I hope?" Max says, and he offers up that half smile that made me fall in love with him.

  "No. The Sandra Bullock movie."

  "Wise choice," Max replies. Impulsively, he leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. I breathe in the scent of his shampoo and am viscerally hit with an image of the bottle in the shower, with its blue cap and its little sticker about tea tree oil and its health properties. "I think about you every day . . . ," Max says.

  Drawing back, I am suddenly dizzy; I wonder if this is the ghost of old love.

  ". . . I think of how much happier you could be, if you let the Lord in," Max finishes.

  And just like that, I am firmly rooted in reality again. "Who are you?" I murmur, but Max has already turned his back, headed to the parking lot to do his pastor's bidding.

  The bar is called Atlantis and is tragically hip, set in a new boutique hotel in Providence. On the walls a projector ripples color, to simulate being under the sea. The drinks are all served in cobalt glassware, and the booths are carved out of fake coral, with cushions fashioned to look like bright sea anemone. The centerpiece of the room is a huge water tank, where tropical fish swim with a woman squeezed into a silicone mermaid tail and shell bra.

  Fortunately, my mother has decided to go home after the movie, leaving Vanessa and me to have a drink by ourselves. I am fascinated by the woman in the tank. "How does she breathe?" I ask out loud, and then see her surreptitiously sneak a gulp of oxygen from a scubalike device that she's concealing in her hand, which is attached to an apparatus at the top of the tank.

  "I stand corrected," Vanessa says. "There is a career path for women who dreamed of being mermaids when they were girls."

  A waitress brings us our drinks and nuts served, predictably, in a large shell. "I could see where this would get old very fast," I say.

  "I don't know. I was reading about how, in China, theme restaurants are all the rage right now. There's one that serves only TV dinners. And another that only has medieval food, plus you have to eat with your hands." She looks up at me. "The one I'm itching to go to, though, is the prehistoric restaurant. They serve raw meat."

  "Do you have to kill it yourself?"

  Vanessa laughs. "Maybe. Imagine being the hostess: 'Uh, miss, we reserved a table with the hunters, but we were seated with the gatherers instead.'" She lifts her drink--a dirty martini, which tastes like paint thinner to me (when I told Vanessa this, she said, "When did you last drink paint thinner?"), and toasts. "To Eternal Glory. May they one day succeed in separating Church and Hate."

  I lift my glass, too, but I don't drink from it. I'm thinking about Max.

  "I don't understand people who complain about the mysterious 'homosexual agenda,'" Vanessa muses. "You know what's on that agenda, for my gay friends? To spend time with family, to pay their bills, and to buy milk on the way home from work."

  "Max was an alcoholic," I say abruptly. "He had to drop out of college because of his drinking. He used to surf whenever the conditions were right. We'd fight because he was supposed to be running a business, and then I'd find out that he ditch
ed his clients for the day because of some ten-foot swells."

  Vanessa sets down her drink and looks at me.

  "My point is," I continue, "that he wasn't always like this. Even that suit . . . I don't think he owned more than a sports jacket the entire time we were married."

  "He looked a little like a CIA operative," Vanessa says.

  My lips twitch. "All he needs is an earpiece."

  "I'm pretty sure the hotline to God is wireless."

  "People must see through all that rhetoric," I say. "Does anyone really take Clive Lincoln seriously?"

  Vanessa runs her finger around the lip of her martini glass. "I was at the grocery store yesterday and there was a bumper sticker on the pickup truck next to my car. It said, SAVE A DEER . . . SHOOT A QUEER." She glances up. "So yeah. I think some people take him seriously."

  "But I never expected Max to be one of them." I hesitate. "Do you think this is my fault?"

  I expect Vanessa to immediately dismiss the idea, but instead, she thinks for a moment. "If you hadn't been pulling yourself together after you lost the baby, then maybe you would have been able to help Max when he needed it. Sounds to me, though, like Max was already broken when you met him. And if that's the case, no matter how much you patched him up, sooner or later he was going to fall apart again." She picks up her glass and drains it. "You know what you need? You need to let go."

  "Of what?"

  "Max, obviously."

  I can feel my cheeks burn. "I'm not holding on to him."

  "Hey, I get it. It's only natural, since you two--"

  "He wasn't even my type," I blurt out, and I realize after I say it that it is true. "Max was--well, he was just completely different from the kinds of guys who were usually interested in me."

  "You mean big and brawny and sexy?"

  "You think?" I ask, surprised.

  "Just because I don't hang modern art in my house doesn't mean I can't appreciate it," Vanessa says.

  "Max was always trying to teach me about football, and I hated football. All those guys piling on top of each other on Astroturf. And basketball is pointless. You don't even have to watch a whole game--it always comes down to the last two minutes. And he was messy. He'd leave a melon on the counter after he cut himself a slice, and by nighttime, the kitchen would be crawling with ants. And he could hold a grudge like nobody's business. I wouldn't even know he was upset until six months went by and he brought it up during an argument about something totally different."

  "But you married him," Vanessa points out.

  "Well," I answer. "Yeah."

  "Why?"

  I don't even know how to answer that. "Because," I say finally, "when you love someone, you don't see the parts of him you don't like."

  "Seems to me you need to do a better job next time of getting what you really want."

  "Next time!" I repeat. "I don't think so. I'm through with relationships."

  "Oh really. You're putting yourself on the shelf at forty?"

  "Shut up," I say. "Get back to me after you're divorced."

  "Zo, I'd take you up on that, if only because it means I'd have the right to be married. Seriously, look around. There's got to be someone attractive in here for you . . ."

  "I am not letting you set me up, Vanessa."

  "Then just tell me. As an academic exercise, of course . . ."

  "Tell you what?"

  "What you're looking for."

  "For God's sake, Vanessa, I have no idea. I'm not thinking about any of that yet."

  I glance at the mermaid. She is on break, emerging from the tank by hopping up a ladder. When she gets to the top, where there is a ledge she can sit on, she reaches for a towel and dries herself off before checking her BlackBerry.

  "Someone real," I hear myself saying. "Someone who never has to pretend, and who I never have to pretend around. Someone who's smart, but knows how to laugh at himself. Someone who would listen to a symphony and start to cry, because he understands that music can be too big for words. Someone who knows me better than I know myself. Someone I want to talk to first thing in the morning and last thing at night. Someone I feel like I've known my whole life, even if I haven't."

  When I'm done, I look up to find Vanessa smirking at me. "Gee," she says. "I'm certainly glad you aren't thinking about this yet."

  I finish my wine. "Well, you asked."

  "I did. So that when I bump into your future spouse on the street, I can give out your number."

  "What's your perfect date?" I ask.

  Vanessa tosses a twenty-dollar bill on the table. "Oh, I'm not nearly as discriminating. Female, desperate, willing." She glances up at the mermaid, now drinking sullenly from a whiskey glass. "Human."

  "You're so picky," I say, laughing. "How are you ever going to find someone?"

  "Story of my life," she replies. "Story of my life."

  It is not until I am home and lying in bed that I realize Vanessa never seriously answered my question, at least not nearly as seriously as I'd answered hers.

  And that--with the exception of the pronoun I'd used--the verbal sketch I gave of my perfect match had actually described Vanessa.

  What songs would be on a mix tape that describes you?

  It's a question I've used my whole life, as a foolproof test of character. It grew out of the old "Witch Doctor" record that reminded my mother so much of my missing dad. There's no question that, for her, this would be one of the tracks. And "Always and Forever"--the song she and my dad danced to at their wedding--which, when heard in its elevator Muzak incarnation, always made them circle around in each other's arms no matter where they were or how large the crowd, which to me was magical and mortifying all at once. And a Beatles song--she tells a story about sleeping outside a hotel where the Fab Four were camped for a press junket, just so that she could get a glimpse of them as they left for the airport. And Enya and Yanni, which she uses now for mindful breathing. Seriously, if you looked through the Favorites list on my mother's iPod, you could probably sketch her out as thoroughly as if you'd met her in person.

  This is true of anyone: the music we choose is a clear reflection of who we really are. There is a lot you can tell about a person who lists Bon Jovi among his favorites. Or, for that matter, Weezer. Or the original cast recording of Bye Bye Birdie.

  I first used the mix tape test to check romantic compatibility in high school, when my boyfriend insisted on playing one Journey track over and over again on his car stereo whenever we were steaming up the windows. He'd stop in the middle of whatever we were doing to belt out the chorus. I should have known better than to trust a man who loved power ballads.

  After that, I asked all my potential love interests about the fictional mix tape. I told them there was no right answer, which is true. There are, however, some blatantly wrong answers:

  "Crazy."

  "I'm Too Sexy."

  "Mmmbop."

  "The Streak."

  "All My Ex's Live in Texas."

  Max's list was a collection of country music, a genre of which I've never been a fan. Somehow the songs always seem to talk about drinking and having your wife leave you, or else they compare women to large pieces of farm equipment, like tractors and trucks. You know that old joke about the cowboy and the biker who are on death row, set to be executed on the same day? The prison guard asks the cowboy for his last request, and he begs to hear the song "Achy Breaky Heart" before he dies. The guard then asks the biker for his last request. "To be killed before you play that song," he says.

  The most interesting people I've ever met are the ones who answer the question with music I have never experienced before: South African a cappella groups, Peruvian drummers, up-and-coming alt rockers from Seattle, Jane Birkin, the Postelles. When I was at Berklee I dated a boy whose list was all rap. I had grown up in the suburbs listening to Casey Kasem and didn't know much about hip-hop music. But he explained how its roots grew from the griots of West Africa--traveling singers and poets who were keeping
a centuries-old oral storytelling tradition. He played me rap songs that were social commentary. He taught me how to write my own flow, how to feel poetry in syllables and rhythm in the spaces between the words. He taught me that what wasn't said was just as important as what was.

  I fell pretty hard for him, actually.

  I stopped using the question to learn more about potential dates once I met Max, of course, but I didn't retire the inquiry. Now, I ask my clients. I've met people whose lists are all classical; I've met people who choose only heavy metal. I've met burly, tattooed motorcyclists who love opera and grandmothers who know Eminem's lyrics by heart.

  The music we listen to may not define who we are.

  But it's a damn good start.

  In February, Vanessa and I sign up for a Bikram yoga class, the kind that's done in an abnormally hot room. We go to one session and leave at the halfway point five-minute break, certain we are both about to have strokes.

  So the next week I call her up and tell her that maybe belly dancing is more our thing. We are pretty good at it, actually, but our classmates are not. We get booted by the instructor because we can't stop laughing when we are supposed to be focusing.

  On Saturdays, we fall into a habit. Vanessa comes to my house with coffee and bagels, and we read the paper at the kitchen table. Then we make a list of all the errands we need to accomplish during the weekend. Like me, she is too busy during business hours to get to the cleaners or the grocery store or the post office, so we pool our destinations. Instead of going alone, it is a lot more fun to wander the aisles of Walmart together debating whether plus-size Tinker Bell lingerie is serving a niche market or creating an aberrant one.

  We go to the farmers' market--which is mostly jars of honey and beeswax candles and crafts made from homespun wool, at this time of year--and we wander from booth to booth, trying free samples. Sometimes we get inspired and pick a recipe out of Cooking Light, then cobble together the ingredients and spend the afternoon making the souffle or the ragout or the beef Wellington.

  One Saturday in early March, I am left to my own devices. Vanessa's gone to San Francisco to a friend's wedding, which is actually a good thing--since I have more to do than usual. The student Vanessa spoke with me about months ago--Lucy DuBois--has just been released from a six-week inpatient program for depressed adolescents at McLean Hospital. She is coming back to school, and I'm going to start working with her. I have been poring over books about teens and depression, and music therapy for mood disorders.