by Jodi Picoult
'Girls,' I shouted. 'Dinner!'
I heard the distant thunder of both your feet moving down the hallway upstairs. You were tentative - one foot on a step joined by another - whereas Amelia nearly skidded into the kitchen. 'Oh, God,' she moaned. 'Spaghetti again?'
To be fair, it wasn't like I'd just opened a box of Prince. I'd made the dough, rolled it, cut it into strands. 'No, this time it's fettuccine,' I said, unfazed. 'You can set the table.'
Amelia stuck her head in the fridge. 'News flash, we don't have any juice.'
'We're drinking water this week. It's better for us.'
'And conveniently cheaper. Tell you what. Take twenty bucks out of my college fund and splurge on chicken cutlets.'
'Hmm, what is that sound?' I said, looking around with my brow furrowed. 'Oh, right. The sound of me not laughing.'
At that, Amelia cracked a smile. 'Tomorrow, we'd better get some protein.'
'Remind me to buy a little tofu.'
'Gross.' She set a stack of dishes on the table. 'Remind me to kill myself before dinner then.'
You came into the kitchen and scooted into your high chair. We didn't call it a high chair - you were nearly six, and you were quick to point out that you were a big girl - but you couldn't reach the table without some sort of booster; you were just too tiny. 'To cook a billion pounds of pasta, you'd need enough water to fill up seventy-five thousand swimming pools,' you said.
Amelia slouched into the chair beside you. 'To eat a billion pounds of pasta, you only have to be born into the O'Keefe family.'
'Maybe if you all keep complaining, I'll make something gourmet tomorrow night . . . like squid. Or haggis. Or calves' brains. That's protein, Amelia--'
'A long time ago there was this guy, Sawney Beane, in Scotland, who ate people,' you said. 'Like, a thousand of them.'
'Well, luckily, we're not that desperate.'
'But if we were,' you said, your eyes lighting up, 'I'd be boneless.'
'Okay, enough.' I dumped a serving of steaming pasta on your plate. 'Bon appetit.'
I glanced up at the clock; it was 6:10. 'What about Dad?' Amelia said, reading my thoughts.
'We'll wait for him. I'm sure he'll be here any minute.'
But five minutes later, Sean had not arrived. You were fidgeting in your seat, and Amelia was picking at the congealed mass of pasta on her plate. 'The only thing more disgusting than pasta is ice-cold pasta,' she muttered.
'Eat,' I said, and you and your sister dove into your dinners like hawks.
I stared down at my meal, not hungry anymore. After a few minutes, you girls carried your plates to the sink. The plumber came back downstairs to say he was finished and left me a bill on the kitchen counter. The phone rang twice and was picked up by one of you.
At seven thirty, I called Sean's cell, and it immediately rolled over into the voice mail.
At eight, I scraped the cold contents of my plate into the trash.
At eight thirty, I tucked you into bed.
At eight forty-five, I called the nonemergency line for dispatch. 'This is Charlotte O'Keefe,' I said. 'Do you know if Sean took on another shift tonight?'
'He left around five forty-five,' the dispatcher said.
'Oh, right, of course,' I replied lightly, as if I'd known that all along, because I didn't want her to think I was the kind of wife who had no idea where her husband might be.
At 11:06, I was sitting in the dark on a couch in the family room, wondering if it could still arguably be called a family room if one's family was splintering apart, when the front door of the house opened gingerly. Sean tiptoed into the hallway, and I switched on the lamp beside me. 'Wow,' I said. 'Traffic must have been a bitch.'
He froze. 'You're up.'
'We waited for you for dinner. Your plate's still on the table, if you're in the mood for fossilized fettuccine.'
'I went to O'Boys after my shift with some of the guys. I was going to call . . .'
I finished his sentence for him. 'But you didn't want to talk to me.'
He came closer, then, so that I could smell his aftershave. Licorice, and the faintest bit of smoke. You could blindfold me and I would be able to pick Sean out from a crowd with my other senses. But identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through - the man you fell in love with years ago might look the same and speak the same and smell the same yet be completely different.
I supposed Sean could say that about me, too.
He sat down on a chair across from me. 'What do you want me to tell you, Charlotte? You want me to lie and say I look forward to coming home at night?'
'No.' I swallowed. 'I want . . . I just want things to go back to the way they were.'
'Then stop,' he said quietly. 'Just walk away from what you've started.'
Choices are funny things - ask a native tribe that's eaten grubs and roots forever if they're unhappy, and they'll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don't know there's an alternative, you can't miss it. Marin Gates had offered me a brass ring that I never, in my wildest dreams, would have considered - but now that she had, how could I not try to grab it? With every future break, with every dollar we moved further into debt, I would be thinking about how I should have reached out.
Sean shook his head. 'That's what I thought.'
'I'm thinking of Willow's future . . .'
'Well, I'm thinking about here and now. She doesn't give a shit about money. She cares about whether her parents love her. But that's not the message she's going to hear when you get up in that damn courtroom.'
'Then you tell me, Sean, what's the answer? Are we just supposed to sit around and hope Willow stops breaking? Or that you--' I broke off abruptly.
'That I what? Get a better job? Win the fucking lottery? Why don't you just say it, Charlotte? You think I can't support all of you.'
'I never said that--'
'You didn't have to. It came through loud and clear,' he said. 'You know, you used to say that you felt like I'd rescued you and Amelia. But I guess in the long run, I let you down.'
'This isn't about you. It's about our family.'
'Which you're ripping apart. My God, Charlotte, what do you think people see when they look at you now?'
'A mother,' I said.
'A martyr,' Sean corrected. 'No one's ever as good as you when it comes to taking care of Willow. You don't trust anyone else to get it right. Don't you see how fucked up that is?'
I felt a tightening at the back of my throat. 'Well, excuse me for not being perfect.'
'No,' Sean said. 'You just expect that of the rest of us.' With a sigh, he walked to the fireplace hearth, where a pillow and a quilt were neatly stacked. 'If you don't mind, you're sitting on my bed.'
I managed to hold in my sob until I was upstairs. I lay down on Sean's side of the mattress, trying to find the spot where he used to sleep. I turned my face in to the pillow, which still smelled of his shampoo. Although I had changed the sheets since he'd moved to the couch, I hadn't washed his pillowcase, on purpose - and now I wondered why. So I could pretend he was still here? So that I'd have something of him if he never came back?
On our wedding day, Sean told me that he'd step in front of a bullet to save me. I knew he'd wanted me to confess the same thing, but I couldn't. Amelia needed me to take care of her. On the other hand, if that bullet had been heading straight for Amelia, I wouldn't have thought twice before diving forward.
Did that make me a very good mother, or a very bad wife?
But this wasn't a bullet, and it hadn't been fired at us. It was an oncoming train, and the cost of saving my daughter was throwing myself onto the tracks. There was only one catch: my best friend was tied to me.
It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else's. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party - a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitl
y.
It had seemed so simple: a lawsuit that acknowledged how hard it was for us, and that would make things so much better. But in my haste to see the silver lining, I missed the storm clouds: the fact that accusing Piper and convincing Sean would sever those relationships. And now, it was too late. Even if I called Marin and told her to stop everything, it wouldn't make Piper forgive me. It wouldn't keep Sean from judging me.
You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it's a catch-22: all of those things you're willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you've lost yourself.
For a moment I imagined tiptoeing down the stairs and kneeling in front of Sean and telling him I was sorry. I imagined asking him to start over. Then I looked up to find that the door had opened a crack, and your little white triangle of a face was poking through. 'Mommy,' you said, coming closer with your awkward gait and climbing onto the bed, 'did you have a nightmare?'
Your body tucked into mine, back to front. 'Yeah, Wills. I did.'
'Do you need me to stay here with you?'
I wrapped my arms around you, a parenthesis. 'Forever,' I said.
Christmas had been too warm this year, green instead of white, Mother Nature's confirmation that life wasn't as it should have been. After two weeks of temperatures in the forties, winter returned with a vengeance. That night, snow fell. We woke up with our throats dry and the heat humming from the radiators. Outside, the air smelled of chimney smoke.
Sean was already gone by the time I came downstairs at seven. He'd left behind a neatly folded stack of bedding in the laundry room and an empty coffee mug in the sink. You came downstairs rubbing your eyes. 'My feet are cold,' you said.
'Then put on slippers. Where's Amelia?'
'Still asleep.'
It was Saturday; there was no reason to wake her up early. I watched you rubbing your hip, probably not even aware of what you were doing. You needed exercise to strengthen the muscles around your pelvis, although it still hurt you to do it after your femur fractures. 'Tell you what. If you go get the paper, we can make waffles for breakfast.'
I watched your mind work through the calculations - the mailbox was a quarter of a mile down the driveway; it was freezing out. 'With ice cream?'
'Strawberries,' I bargained.
'Okay.'
You went into the mudroom to pull your coat over your pajamas, and I helped you strap on your braces before stuffing your feet into low boots that could accommodate them. 'Be careful on the driveway.' You zipped up your jacket. 'Willow? Did you hear me?'
'Yes, be careful,' you parroted, and you opened up the front door and headed outside.
I stood at the doorway and watched for a few moments, until you turned around on the driveway, planted your hands on your hips, and said, 'I'm not going to fall! Stop watching!'
So I stepped back and closed the door - but through the window, I tracked you for a few more moments anyway. In the kitchen, I began to pull ingredients from the fridge and I plugged in the waffle iron. I took out the plastic batter bowl you liked so much, because it was light enough for you to lift and pour.
I headed to the front porch again, to wait for you. But when I stepped outside, you were gone. I had a clear view from the driveway to the mailbox, and you were nowhere in it. Frantic, I stuffed my feet into a pair of boots and ran down the driveway. About halfway, I saw footsteps pressed into the snow that still blanketed the stiff grass, heading toward the skating pond.
'Willow!' I yelled. 'Willow!'
Goddamn Sean, for not backing a load of fill into the pond like I'd asked him to.
Suddenly, there you were, at the edge of the reeds that fringed the thin ice.
You had one foot balanced on the surface. 'Willow,' I said softly, so that I didn't startle you, but when you turned around, your boot slipped and you pitched forward with your hands outstretched to break your fall.
I had seen it coming. I had seen it, and so I was already moving as you turned to face me. I stepped onto ice, which was still too new and thin to support any weight, and felt the lettuce edge shatter underneath my foot. My boot filled with frigid water, but I was able to wrap my arms around you, to keep you from falling.
I was soaked to midthigh, and your body was slung over my forearm like a sack of cake flour, the breath knocked out of you. I staggered backward, pulling my foot from the muck and the weeds that lined the bottom of the pond, and sat down hard to cushion your fall. 'Are you all right?' I gasped. 'Is anything broken?'
You did a quick internal assessment and shook your head.
'What were you thinking? You know better--'
'Amelia gets to walk on the ice,' you said, your voice small.
'First, you're not Amelia. And second, this ice isn't strong enough.'
You twisted around. 'Like me.'
I turned you gently, so that you were sitting on my lap, with your legs on either side of mine. A spider, that's what kids called it when they did it on swing sets, although you'd never been allowed. Too easily, a leg could snag on a chain, or get twisted with a friend's limbs.
'It's not like you,' I said firmly. 'Willow, you are the strongest person I know.'
'But you still wish I didn't have to use a wheelchair. Or go to the hospital all the time.'
Sean had insisted that you were well aware of what was going on around you; I had naively assumed that, after the talk we'd had months ago, if you did have doubts about my words, they'd be assuaged by my actions. But I had been worried about the things you'd hear me say - not the messages you might still read between the lines. 'Remember how I told you that I'd have to say things that I don't mean? That's all it is, Willow.' I hesitated. 'Imagine you're at school and your friend asks you if you like her sneakers, and you don't - you think they're incredibly ugly. You wouldn't tell her you hate them, would you? Because it would make her sad.'
'That's lying.'
'I know. And it's wrong, most of the time, unless you're trying not to hurt someone's feelings.'
You stared at me. 'But you're hurting my feelings.'
The knife in my stomach twisted. 'I don't mean to.'
'So,' you said, thinking hard, 'it's like when Amelia plays Opposite Day?'
Amelia had invented that when she was about your age. Confrontational even then, she'd refuse to do her homework and then burst out laughing when we yelled at her, saying it was Opposite Day and she'd already finished it all. Or she'd terrorize you, calling you Glass Ass, and when you came to us in tears, Amelia would insist that on Opposite Day, this meant you were a princess. I'd never been able to tell if Amelia had invented Opposite Day because she was imaginative or because she was subversive.
But maybe this was a way to unravel the tangled thicket that was wrongful birth, to spin a lie, like Rumpelstiltskin, into something golden. 'Exactly,' I said. 'Just like Opposite Day.'
You smiled at me so sweetly that I could feel the frost melting around us. 'Okay then,' you said. 'I wish you'd never been born, too.'
When Sean and I were first dating, I would leave treats in his mailbox. Sugar cookies cut in the shapes of his initials, a roll of babka, sticky buns with candied pecans, almond roca. I took literally the term sweet heart. I imagined him reaching in for his bills and catalogs and coming up instead with a jelly roll, a honey cake, a building block of fudge. 'Will you still love me when I put on thirty pounds?' Sean would ask, and I'd laugh at him. 'What makes you think I love you?' I'd say.
I did, of course. But it was always easier for me to show love than to say it. The word reminded me of pralines: small, precious, almost unbearably sweet. I would light up in his presence; I felt like a sun in the constellation of his embrace. But trying to put what I felt for him into words diminished it somehow, like pinning a butterfly under glass, or videotaping a comet. Each night he'd wrap his arms around me and tip into my ear that sentence, bubbles that burst on contact: I love you. And then he'd wait. He'd wait, and ev
en though I knew he did not want to pressure me before I was ready to make my confession, I would feel in that silence his disappointment.
One day, when I came out of work still dusting flour off my hands so that I could rush to pick up Amelia from school, I found a small index card wedged under my windshield wiper. I LOVE YOU, it read.
I tucked it into my glove compartment, and that afternoon, I made truffles and left them in Sean's mailbox.
The next day, when I left work, there was an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch piece of paper taped on my windshield: I LOVE YOU.
I called Sean. 'I'm going to win,' I said.
'I think we both are,' he replied.
I'd baked a lavender panna cotta and left it on top of his MasterCard bill.
He countered with poster board. You could read the message all the way from the front window of the restaurant, which made me the object of plenty of ribbing from the maitre d' and the head chef.
'What's your problem?' Piper said to me. 'Just tell him how you feel, already.' But Piper didn't understand, and I couldn't explain to her. When you showed someone how you felt, it was fresh and honest. When you told someone how you felt, there might be nothing behind the words but habit or expectation. Those three words were what everyone used; simple syllables couldn't contain something as rare as what I felt for Sean. I wanted him to feel what I felt when I was with him: that incredible combination of comfort, decadence, and wonder; the knowledge that, with just a single taste of him, I was addicted. So I cooked tiramisu and left it wedged between a package from Amazon.com and a flyer for a painting company.
This time, Sean phoned me. 'Opening someone else's mailbox is a felony, you know,' he said.
'So arrest me,' I answered.
That day, I left work - trailed by the rest of the staff, who had come to view our courtship as a spectator sport - and found my car completely wrapped in butcher paper. Painted in letters as tall as me was Sean's message: I'M ON A DIET.
Sure enough, I baked him poppy scones, and they were still in the mailbox the next day when I went to leave off ginger cookies. And the next day, with those two items untouched, I couldn't even fit the strawberry tart. I carried it up to his house instead, and rang the doorbell. His blond hair was backlit; his white tee stretched across his chest. 'How come you're not eating what I made for you?' I asked.