The Pact

by Jodi Picoult

  PERHAPS IT WOULD HAVE gone well, but the physician scheduled the day of Emily's abortion was a man. She lay on the gurney, her legs bent up and revealing, Stephanie beside her. She watched the doctor enter and turn to the sink to wash. The soap slipped between his fingers, greasy and white, exaggerating the size and shape of him. He turned around and smiled at Emily. "Well," he said, "what have we got here?"

  Well. What have we got here?

  Then he reached under the gown, just like the other had, after saying that same awful thing, and slid his fingers into her. Emily began to kick, her ankles knocking aside the stirrups, her foot striking the doctor on the side of the head as he cautiously backed away.

  "Don't touch me," she yelled, trying to sit up, curling her hands between her legs and tucking the gown beneath her thighs. She felt Stephanie's hand on her shoulder and turned her face into the counselor's arm. "Don't let him touch me," she whispered, even after the physician left the room.

  Stephanie waited until Emily stopped crying, then sat down on the doctor's stool. "Maybe," she suggested, "it's time to tell the father."

  SHE WOULD NOT TELL CHRIS, especially not now. Because as soon as she did, she would have to tell him about this horrible abortion and the doctor and why she couldn't stand to have the man touching her. And why she couldn't stand to have Chris touch her. And why she was not the girl Chris thought she was. As soon as she told him, she'd have made her own bed, and she would have to lie in it--with him.

  Eventually, too, she would have to tell her parents. And they'd stare at her in shock--their little girl? Her fault, because she was having sex now, when she shouldn't. Her fault, because she attracted that disgusting man's attention when she was still so young.

  Everyone would find out soon enough, anyway. She was well and neatly trapped, with only one small and hidden exit, so dark and buried that most people never even considered breaching its hatch.

  Emily listened to Stephanie, her options counselor, talking and talking for over an hour. Amazing, considering there really were no options at all.

  "CAN YOU PASS the butter?" Melanie asked, and Michael handed it to her.

  "This is good," Michael said, pointing to his dinner. "Em, honey, you ought to try the chicken."

  Emily pressed her fingers to her temples. "I'm not that hungry," she said.

  Melanie and Michael exchanged a glance. "You haven't eaten anything all day," Melanie said.

  "How do you know?" Emily shot back. "I could have polished off a whole banquet at school. You weren't there." She bowed her head. "I need Tylenol," she murmured.

  "Did you see the application from the Sorbonne?" Melanie said. "It came with today's mail."

  Emily's fork clattered against her plate. "I'm not going."

  "What's the harm in applying?" Melanie said. She smiled at Emily across the table, clearly misreading her reluctance. "Chris will be just where you left him, when you get home," she teased.

  Emily shook her head, her hair flying. "Is that what you think this is? That I can't live without him?" She tamped down the question that burned at the base of her throat: Could she? Throwing her napkin on top of her plate, she stood. "Just leave me alone!" she cried, running out of the room.

  Melanie and Michael stared at each other. Then Michael cut a slice of chicken and placed it in his mouth, chewed it. "Well," he said.

  "It's the age," Melanie agreed, and reached for her knife.

  THERE WAS A CLEARING down the Class IV road that ran behind the Harte and Gold properties where people left off old stoves and refrigerators, bags of thick glass bottles and rusted tin cans. For lack of a better word, it was known in Bainbridge as the Dump, and had served for years as a field for target practice. Chris four-wheeled into the clearing and left Emily sitting on the hood of the Jeep while he set up a gallery of bottles and cans thirty yards away. He loaded the Colt revolver, batting away the flies that buzzed in the sweet, tall grass around the Jeep's tires. Chris snapped the chamber back into place as Emily leaned down to pluck one green stalk and threaded it between her front teeth. He took a Kleenex from his pocket and wadded small balls of it into his ears, then handed it to Emily. "Plugs," he said, pointing, urging her to do the same.

  He had just lifted the revolver, braced in both his hands, when he heard Emily's shout. "Wait! You can't just shoot," she said. "You have to tell me what you're aiming for."

  Chris grinned. "Oh, right. So that I can look bad when I miss." He squinted, shutting one eye, and raised the Colt again. "Blue label, I think it's an apple juice jug."

  The first shot was deafeningly loud, and in spite of the tissue Emily clapped her hands over her ears. She didn't see where it went, exactly, but the trees behind the targets rustled. The second shot hit the blue-labeled bottle dead on, the glass exploding against the rough bark of the trees.

  Emily hopped off the hood of the car. "I want to try," she said.

  Chris pulled the Kleenex from his ear. "What?"

  "I want to try."

  "You what?" He shook his head. "You hate guns. You tell me all the time you don't want me to hunt."

  "You use a rifle, and they're too big," Emily pointed out, staring at the revolver curiously, her eyes slightly narrowed. "This looks different." She sidled closer and touched her hand to Chris's. "So can I?"

  Chris nodded, wrapping her hands around the gun. She was surprised at how heavy it was, for such a little thing, and how unnatural her palms felt molded to its sleek, cool curves. "Like this," Chris said, coming up behind her. He showed her the bead on the barrel, explained sighting a target.

  She would not let him know she was sweating. Her hands slipped a bit on the metal as Chris raised them, still covered by his, to the level at which she should brace herself to shoot.

  "Wait," Emily cried, pivoting out of Chris's embrace so that she faced him with the gun. "How do I--"

  His face had gone white. Gingerly he raised a finger and pushed aside the short barrel. "You don't ever wave a pistol at someone like that," he said in a strangled voice. "It could have just gone off."

  Emily flushed. "But I didn't cock it yet."

  "Did I know that?" He sank down on the ground, his head on his knees, a puddle of limbs and muscle. "Holy Christ," he breathed.

  Chagrined, Emily lifted the revolver again, braced her legs, pulled back the hammer, and fired.

  A tin can sang and spun, lifting into the air and hanging there for a moment before tumbling to the ground.

  Emily herself had jerked backward with the recoil, and would have fallen if Chris hadn't scrambled to his feet to steady her.

  "Wow," he said, genuinely impressed. "I'm in love with Annie Oakley."

  "Beginner's luck," she said, but she was smiling, and her cheeks were red with pleasure. Emily looked down at her fingers, still clasped around the gun, now as comfortably warm as the hand of an old friend.

  IT WAS DAMP IN the Jeep, the heater fogging the windows and creating a sticky, tropical humidity. "What would you do," Emily said softly, sitting back against Chris, "if things didn't work out the way you planned?"

  She felt him frown. "You mean like if I didn't get into a good college?"

  "Like if you didn't even go to college. If your parents died in a car accident, and you had to take care of Kate all of a sudden."

  He exhaled softly, stirring her hair. "I don't know. I guess I'd try to make the best of it. Maybe go to college later on. Why?"

  "You think your parents would be disappointed in you, for not becoming what they thought you'd be?"

  Chris smiled. "My parents would be dead," he reminded her. "So the shock of it couldn't hurt them too badly." He shifted, so that he faced her, propped on an elbow. "And I don't really care what anyone else thinks. Except you, of course. Would you be disappointed?"

  She took a deep breath. "What if I was? What if I didn't want to be ... to be with you anymore?"

  "Well, then," Chris said lightly, "I'd probably kill myself." He kissed her forehead, smoothing a creas
e. "Why are we talking about this, anyway?" He curled forward, unlatching the rear door of the Jeep so that it flew open, exposing a night spread with stars.

  Indian summer was gone, and the air smelled crisp and thin, full of the tang of wild crab apples and the hint of an early frost. Emily drew it into her lungs and held it there, the sharpness itching at her nostrils, before her breath burst out in a small white cloud. "It's cold," she said, burrowing closer.

  "It's beautiful," Chris whispered. "Like you." He touched her face and kissed her deeply, as if he meant to drain away her sorrow. Their lips separated with a faint ripping sound.

  "I'm not beautiful," Emily said.

  "You are to me." Chris drew her between his bent legs, her back to his chest, and wrapped his arms around her ribs. The sky seemed rich and heavy, and the moment was suddenly full of a thousand tiny things which Emily knew she would always remember--the tickle of Chris's hair against the back of her neck, the seal-smooth callus on the inside of his middle finger, the parking lights of the Jeep, casting a blood-red shadow over the grass.

  Chris nuzzled her shoulder. "Did you read the science chapter yet?"

  "How romantic," Emily laughed.

  Chris grinned. "It is, kind of. It says how a star is just an explosion that happened billions of years ago. And the light's just reaching us now."

  Emily squinted at the sky, considering. "And here I thought it was something to wish on."

  Chris smiled. "I think you can do that, too."

  "You first," Emily said.

  He tightened his arms around her shoulders, and she felt the familiar sensation of wearing Chris's own skin, like a cloak of heat or a barrier for protection, maybe even a second self. "I wish that things could stay like this ... like now ... forever," he said softly.

  Emily turned in his arms, afraid to hope, even more afraid to let this opportunity slip by. Her head was canted at an angle, so that she could not quite look Chris in the eye but could make her words fall onto his lips. "Maybe," she said, "they can."

  NOW

  Christmas 1997

  "Harte to Control."

  Chris looked up from the book he was reading and rolled out of his bunk, studiously ignoring one of his cellmates, Bernard, who was sitting on his own bunk cracking ice between his teeth. The officers brought ice once a day and set it in a cooler in the common room, where it was supposed to last well into the night. Unfortunately, Bernard managed to siphon most of it away before other inmates even noticed it had arrived.

  He walked down the catwalk to the locked door at the end of the medium security unit, where he waited until one of the officers hovering at the control booth noticed his face. "Visitor," the officer told him, unlocking the door and waiting for Chris to take a step forward.

  His mother had tearfully informed Chris the last time she'd come that she'd be unable to make it on Saturday, since Kate's dance recital fell at the same exact time. Chris had told her, of course, that he understood, although he was jealous as hell. Kate had their mother seven days a week. Couldn't she give up one lousy hour?

  At the door of the basement, an officer was waiting. "There you go," he said, pointing Chris in the direction of the table farthest away.

  For a moment, Chris stood motionless. The visitor was not his mother. It was not even his father, which would have been enough of a shock.

  It was Michael Gold.

  Chris took one wooden step, and then another, mechanically bringing himself toward Emily's father. He took some courage from the fact that the same officers who kept him from escaping were also there to protect him. "Chris," Michael said, nodding toward a chair.

  Chris knew that he had the right to refuse a visitor. Before he could speak, however, Michael sighed. "I don't blame you," he said. "If I were you, I would have hightailed it upstairs the minute you saw my face."

  Chris sat down slowly. "The lesser of two evils," he said.

  A shadow passed across Michael's features. "Is it that bad here, then?"

  "It's a fucking party," Chris said bitterly. "What did you expect?"

  Michael blushed. "I just meant, well ... compared to the alternative." He looked into his lap for a second, and then raised his head. "If things had gone the way you planned, you wouldn't be here. You'd be dead."

  Chris's hands, drumming on the tabletop, stilled. He was wise enough to know an olive branch when he saw one, and unless he was mistaken, Michael Gold had just admitted that, in spite of whatever garbage the prosecution was dishing up, he believed Chris's story.

  Even though it wasn't the truth.

  "How come you're here?" Chris asked.

  Michael rolled his shoulders, one at a time. "I've been asking myself that question. The whole drive out here, I've been wondering." He turned his frank gaze onto Chris. "I don't really know," he said. "What do you think?"

  "I think you're spying for the AG," Chris said, not so much because he believed it but because he wanted to see the reaction on Michael's face.

  "God, no," Michael said, stunned. "Do they have spies?"

  Chris scuffed his sneaker on the floor. "I wouldn't put it past them," he said. "The whole point is to lock me away, right? To keep me from killing a whole string of girls, like I did to Em?"

  Michael shook his head. "I don't believe that."

  "Don't believe what?" Chris asked, his voice growing louder. "That the attorney general doesn't plan to throw away the key? Or that I didn't kill her?"

  "You didn't," Michael said, his eyes tearing. "You didn't kill her."

  Chris found his throat too tight to speak. He scraped his chair along the floor, wondering what the hell had ever made him sit down in the first place, what had made him think that he had anything to discuss with Emily's father.

  Michael stared at the table, running his thumb along the battered edge. "I came ... the reason I came," he began, "is because I wanted to ask you something. It's just that we didn't see it. Melanie and I, we didn't know Emily was upset. But you did; you must have. And what I was wondering is ... " He paused, glanced up. "How did I miss it?" he whispered. "What did she say when I wasn't listening?"

  Chris swore softly and rose, intending to escape, but Michael gripped his arm. Chris swung toward him, eyes burning. "What?" he said roughly. "What do you want me to say to you?"

  Michael swallowed. "That you loved her," he said thickly. "That you miss her." He pinched his fingers into the corners of his eyes, fighting for composure. "Melanie's not--well, I can't speak about Emily to her. But I thought ... I thought ... " He looked away. "I don't know what I thought."

  Chris rested his elbows on the table and buried his face in his hands. He couldn't promise Michael Gold anything. Then again, if the man wanted to talk about Emily, you couldn't get better than Chris for a captive audience. "Someone will find out you came," he warned. "You shouldn't be here, you know."

  Michael hesitated. "No," he said finally. "But neither should you."

  GUS PUSHED HER SHOPPING CART absently through the aisles of Caldor, amazed that her family, which was no longer by any means ordinary, would still cling to the trappings of the mundane, needing shampoo and toothpaste and toilet paper just like any other. Driven to shopping out of desperation, she wandered through the big store, sometimes so engrossed in her thoughts that she passed the Kleenex without putting any in her cart, that she stared blankly at cat food for minutes although they had never owned a cat.

  She wound up in the sporting goods section, idly passing shiny bicycles and Rollerblades until she stopped short, arrested by the display of the hunting/fishing area. Buffeted by huge camouflage-print raincoats and blaze orange vests, she examined the small items hanging on the pegboard--Hoppes Solvent #9, and gauze cleaning patches, and bluing. Fox urine, doe estrus. Things she could not believe were sold to the public, but that never failed to make her husband smile when he found them in his Christmas stocking or Easter basket.

  She stared at a picture of a hunter taking aim and realized that she didn't want Ja
mes ever to pick up a gun again.

  If he had never purchased the antique Colt, would this have happened?

  Gus sank down on the metal shelf that edged the floor of the pegboard. She took deep breaths, her head between her knees. And with her ears ringing, she did not hear the approaching cart until it nicked the edge of her shoe.

  "Oh," she said, her head snapping up at the same moment another voice said, "I'm so sorry."

  Melanie's voice.

  Gus stared at the tight lines of her face, the dulled skin, the anger that made her seem several inches taller than she actually was. Melanie drew the cart across the aisle. "You know," she said softly, "I'm not sorry, after all." She pushed her wagon away. Leaving her own cart in the middle of the aisle, Gus ran after her. She touched Melanie's arm only to have the woman swing around, her eyes filled with a cold, banked rage. "Go away," she bit out.

  Gus remembered what it had been like when she first met Melanie; how they would sit and hold their hands over their bellies, knowing that the other understood the ripple and hum of a stretching child; the quiver at the fingertips and nape and nipples that came late in the pregnancy, when you had given your body up to someone else.

  What she wanted to say to Melanie was: You aren't the only one who was hurt. You aren't the only one who lost a person you love. In fact, when it came down to it, Melanie grieved for one person, whereas Gus grieved for two. She had lost Emily--and she'd also lost her best friend.

  "Please," Gus finally managed, her throat working. "Just talk to me."

  Melanie abandoned her cart and headed out of the store.

  ALL OF A SUDDEN, Jordan stood up from the cramped table in the small conference room and yanked hard on the window sash, gritting it open. It was lined on the outside with bars, of course, but a cooling breeze threaded into the room. Chris leaned into it, smiled. "You trying to help me break out of here?"

  "No," Jordan said, "I'm trying to keep us from suffocating." He wiped his sleeve across his forehead. "I'd love to see the heating bills for this place."

  Chris laced his hands over his stomach. "You get used to it."

  Jordan looked up briefly. "I imagine you have to," he said, and then spread his hands on a stack of papers.