by Jodi Picoult
"Than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance," I finished.
"Why is that written on your leg?"
"Because," I said, "I ran out of room on my jacket."
"You must be an English major."
"English majors smoke clove cigarettes and say things like de-construction and onomatopoeia just to hear the sound of their voices."
He started to laugh. "You're right. I used to date an English major. She was always looking at things like laundry in a dryer, or toast, and trying to relate them to the subtext of Paradise Lost."
I knew men. My mother had taught me how to read the sentences they did not say out loud, how to wear a red cord tied around my left wrist to keep away the ones who only saw you as a single step, rather than a destination. I could tell by the bitter almond smell that rose off a man's skin whether he had cheated on his partners in the past. But the men I had known were like me--boys who had grown up dreaming in Spanish, boys who believed you could light a red candle for a dose of luck, boys who knew that a man who spoke ill of his girlfriend might find his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth when he awakened. Men like Charlie, on the other hand, went to universities and wrestled with mathematical theorems and combined chemicals to watch them rise in lovely clouds of invisible gas. Men like Charlie were not meant for girls like me.
"If you're not an English major," he asked, "then what do you do?"
I looked at him as if he were crazy--did he not see the four walls of this squat building around me? Did he think I was here because I liked the view? But I wanted him to know that there was more to me than just this job. I wanted him to think I was mysterious and different and anyone except the person I really was: a Mexican girl who did not live in the same world as people like him. So I took my deck of cards out from beneath the counter. "I read los naipes."
"Tarot?" he said. "I don't buy that stuff."
"Then you have nothing to lose." I opened the wooden box that held my deck and removed them, as usual, with my left hand. Then I said an Ave, and looked up at him. "Don't you want to know if you'll get your wish?"
"What wish?"
"That," I told him, "is up to you."
He smiled so slowly that I had to look down. "All right then. Tell me my future."
I had him cut the deck three times, for the Holy Trinity, and hand them back to me. Then I laid out nine cards: four in the shape of the Cross, five and six balanced below the arms of it, seven at the base, eight tipped on its side at the very bottom, and the last card smack in the center of them all. "The first card," I said, turning it over, "shows your state of mind." It was the Seven of Wands.
"God, I hope it means money. Especially if it's my engine that's dead."
"It's a message," I told him. "It says that the truth can't stay hidden forever. These next three cards will tell you who's going to help you figure it out."
I flipped them over. "This is interesting. The Lovers, well, that's just what you'd think--a happy couple. Some sort of romantic relationship is going to be instrumental in helping you get what you want. The Strength card isn't as good as it sounds--it tells you not to take on more than you can handle. But I think that the Chariot cancels that out, because it's powerful, and means you're going to ultimately have good luck."
I turned over cards five and six. "The Eight of Wands is a warning against ugly actions that might destroy you ... and this card, the Hanged Man ... have you been committing any crimes lately? Because that's usually what this represents--someone who better mend his ways, or God will get him even if the law doesn't."
"I jaywalked yesterday," Charlie said.
Cards seven and eight were the enemies plotting against him. "These are both great cards," I said. "This is a child who's important to you, and who brings balance to your life."
"I don't really know any kids."
"A brother or sister?" I asked. "No nieces, nephews?"
"Not even a cousin."
I started scrubbing down the bar, although it was perfectly clean. "Then maybe it's yours," I said. "Sometime."
His hand crossed the wood, fingered the card. "What's she going to look like?"
The suit was Cups. "Light-skinned and dark-haired."
"Like you," he said.
I blushed, and busied myself by turning over the last card. "This lets you know if your wish will come true, or if all those other things will get in the way."
The card was the Seven of Cups--a wedding or alliance he would regret for the rest of his life. "So?" Charlie asked, and his voice rang with the future. "Do I get what I want?"
"Absolutely," I lied, and then I leaned across the bar and kissed him over the map of our lives.
I never forgot you.
I have boxes, somewhere in the crawl space of the garage, full of the Christmas gifts and birthday presents you weren't here to open--stuffed animals and charm bracelets, sequined slippers and dress-up clothes that would have fit you way back when. Once Victor realized that I was still buying for you, he got upset--it wasn't healthy, he told me--and he made me promise I would stop. Not everyone understands how you can spin two lassos at the same time, one of hope and one of grief.
When the elementary school you might have attended held its fifth-grade send-off, I went to the auditorium and listened to everyone else's children dream of what they might grow up to be: a pale-ontologist, a recording star, the first astronaut to walk on Mars. I imagined you wearing braids, although that would have been too babyish a style for you by then. I celebrated your sweet sixteen at the Biltmore, where I made the penguin-breasted waiter serve tea for two, although you were not sitting across from me.
I never stopped hoping that you'd come home, but I did stop expecting it. Having your breath freeze up every time the doorbell chimes or the phone rings takes its toll on a person, and whether it is conscious or not, you eventually make the decision to divide your life in half--before and after--with loss being that tight bubble in the middle. You can move around in spite of it; you can laugh and smile and carry on with your life, but all it takes is one slow range of motion, a doubling over, to be fully aware of the empty space at your center.
When you love someone more than he loves you, you'll do anything to switch the scales. You dress the way you think he'd like you to dress. You pick up his favorite figures of expression. You tell yourself that if you re-create yourself in his image, then he will crave you the same way you crave him.
Maybe you understand what happened between me and Charlie better than anyone else would--when you are told you're someone you aren't, over and over, you begin to believe it. You live that life. But you are wearing a mask, one that might slip if you aren't careful. You wonder what he will do when he finds out. You know you are bound to disappoint him.
There was a moment, I admit, where I thought I had made him love me as much as I needed him to. When you were about eighteen months old, I got pregnant again. Charlie would sneak out of work during his lunch break and come home to me; he'd rest his head on my belly. Matthew Matthews, he'd say, trying names on for size to make me laugh. Banjo. Sprocket. No, Cortisone. Cort for short. He'd bring me little gifts from the pharmacy: chocolate candy bars, cocoa butter, butterfly hair clips.
I was twenty-one weeks along when my membranes ruptured. The baby was perfect--a little boy, the size of a human heart. I developed an infection; started bleeding. I was taken back to the OR, and given a hysterectomy. The doctors used words like uterine atony and artery ligation, disseminated intravascular coagulation, but all I heard was that I couldn't have any more children. I knew, even if no one was willing to say it to me, that this had been my fault, some fatal flaw in me. And when I came home from the hospital, I realized that Charlie knew this, too. He couldn't stand to look at me. He spent more and more time in the office. He took you with him.
I drank a lot before I met your father, but I honestly think it took that miscarriage to make me an alcoholic. I drank until I didn't see the regret in Charlie's eyes. I drank until ev
en he could plainly see that I was a failure. I drank until I couldn't feel anything, most of all his touch. I think there was a part of me that knew if I drove him away, I would never have to say I'd been left behind.
But mostly I drank because that was when I could feel your baby brother, swimming through me like a silver fish. I didn't know until it was too late that trying to hold on to the baby I'd lost was going to cost me the child I already had.
I can't remember the moment I understood that I had to turn my life around, but I do know why. I was terrified that the detective assigned to your case would call me with news, and I'd be passed out. Or that--miracle--you'd show up at my door when I was out on a bender. What hurts the most, after all this time, is realizing that you had to disappear before I could find myself. Two years after you were gone, I was completely sober, and I've never strayed since.
The detective who was assigned to your kidnapping retired in 1990. He lives on a houseboat in Lake Powell. He sends Christmas cards, with pictures of himself and his wife. He was the one who called me to tell me you'd been found. But before the phone rang that morning, I had already opened a carton of eggs to find them all upended and cracked; I had seen a line of fire ants spell out your initials on my driveway. By the time Detective LeGrande called, I already knew what he was going to say.
There is one reading of los naipas that a person can do for herself: El Evangelio. It involves spreading fourteen cards in the outline of the Gospel and then five more in the shape of the Cross. The first time I ever did El Evangelio, I was learning to read the cards at my mother's side. For many years, I stopped doing it altogether, because too often the Fool card came up in places I did not want to see it. But after you disappeared, I spread the cards every Sunday night. And every time, the same two major Arcana would appear somewhere in the Cross. Number fourteen, Temperance, warned of rash actions I'd regret for the rest of my life; number fifteen, the Devil, said that someone had been lying to me.
After Detective LeGrande called, I took out los naipas. It was not a Sunday evening, and it was not in my santuario, just across the kitchen table. As always, the Devil and Temperance popped up in the Cross. But this time there were two other cards that I hadn't seen there before. The Star, which is the most potent card in the Tarot deck, and neutralizes the other cards around it. Set next to the Devil, like so, it meant that my old enemy was about to pay. From this day forth, your father would be powerless.
The other card was the Ace of Wands, which any novice bruja will tell you stands for chaos.
*
You have my hair, and my smile. You also have my stubbornness. It's a little like having your past self come calling, and wishing you could warn yourself about what will happen.
You told me what you remembered about your childhood, but you didn't ask me what I remember. If you had, I would have said everything--from the moment you arrived in this world and curled stiff as a snail against the overwashed cotton of my hospital gown, to the licorice twist of your braids beneath my fingers, to the way I went to kiss you before you left with Charlie for your weekend visitation, so sloppy and sure of myself that when I missed your cheek and landed on air I stupidly assumed I would have a thousand more chances to get it right.
After you vanished, I went to Mexico to visit a bruja with whom my mother had studied. She lived in a cottage with three blue iguanas who had the run of the house, and who were rumored to be former men who had treated her badly. I went on June 13, the feast of San Antonio de Padua. Her waiting room was packed with the needy, who shared their sad stories to pass the time: a woman who had left her grandmother's diamond ring in a public restroom; an elderly man who had misplaced the deed to his house; a child clutching a Perro Perdido flyer with a photo of a hot-eyed hound; a priest whose faith had gone off course. I waited silently, watching the red roosters peck at kernels of corn in her front yard. When it was my turn, I went into the santuario and handed the bruja the requisite small statue of San Antonio, along with my written description of what I had lost.
She whispered a prayer and wrapped the statue in the paper. She tied it with red string. "A hundred pesos," she said. I paid her, and then drove north, pulling over at the first body of water I could find. I threw the package as far as I could into the reservoir, and waited until I thought it might have sunk to the bottom.
San Antonio is the patron saint of things that have gone missing. Make an offering on his feast day, and what's lost will be back in your possession within a year. Unless, that is, it has been destroyed.
I went to that Mexican bruja every June until she died, and asked for the same spell each time. Year after year, when you were not returned to me, I never blamed her or San Antonio. I thought it was my fault; something I had left out or gotten wrong in the written description of you, which grew longer every year--from paragraph to epic poem to masterpiece. I would spend the following three hundred and sixty-four days crafting the note I would bring to the bruja the next time around, if you still hadn't turned up.
Although that bruja is long dead, I think I finally know what I should have written. Twenty-eight years is a long time to think about why I loved you, and it's not for the reasons I first assumed: because you swam in the space below my heart; or because you stanched the youth I was bleeding out daily; or because one day you might take care of me when I couldn't take care of myself. Love is not an equation, as your father once wanted me to believe. It's not a contract, and it's not a happy ending. It is the slate under the chalk and the ground buildings rise from and the oxygen in the air. It is the place I come back to, no matter where I've been headed. I loved you, Bethany, because you were the one relationship I never had to earn. You arrived in this world loving me more, even when I did not deserve it.
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 now
here 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 Sikyatavo, 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."