The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  In my mind, I can still see those lights—red and blue and yellow, blinking over and over on a tree as overdressed as an Eskimo in Bali. “So Christmas morning, my parents come to the neighbors to collect me. They look like hell, the both of them, but when they bring me home there are presents under the tree. I’m all excited and I find one with my name on it, and it turns out to be this little windup car—something that would have been great for a three-year-old, but not me, and that I happened to know was for sale in the hospital gift shop. As was every single other present I got that year. Go freaking figure.” I stab my cigarette butt out on the thigh of my jeans. “They never even said anything about the tree,” I tell her. “That’s what it’s like growing up in this family.”

  “Do you think it’s the same for Anna?”

  “No. Anna’s on their radar, because she plays into their grand plan for Kate.”

  “How do your parents decide when Anna will help Kate medically?” she asks.

  “You make it sound like there’s some process involved. Like there’s actually a choice.”

  She lifts her head. “Isn’t there?”

  I ignore her, because that’s a rhetorical question if I’ve ever heard one, and stare out the window. In the front yard, you can still see the stump from that spruce. No one in this family ever covers up their mistakes.

  • • •

  When I was seven I got it in my head to dig to China. How hard could it be, I figured—a straight shot, a tunnel? I took a shovel out of the garage and I started a hole just wide enough for me to slip into. Every night I would drag the old plastic sandbox cover across it, just in case of rain. For four weeks I worked at this, as the rocks bit into my arms to make battle scars, and roots grabbed at my ankles.

  What I didn’t count on were the tall walls that grew around me, or the belly of the planet, hot under my sneakers. Digging straight down, I’d gotten hopelessly lost. In a tunnel, you have to light your own way, and I’ve never been very good at that.

  When I yelled out, my father found me in seconds, although I’m sure I waited through several lives. He crawled into the pit, torn between my hard work and my stupidity. “This could have collapsed on you!” he said, and lifted me onto solid ground.

  From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest.

  Darkness, you know, is relative.

  BRIAN

  IT TAKES ANNA LESS THAN TEN MINUTES to move into my room at the station. While she puts her clothes into a drawer and sets her hairbrush next to mine on the dresser, I go out to the kitchen where Paulie is chefing up dinner. The guys are all waiting for an explanation.

  “She’s going to stay with me here for a while,” I say. “We’re working some things out.”

  Caesar looks up from a magazine. “Is she gonna ride with us?”

  I haven’t thought of this. Maybe it will take her mind off things, to feel like she’s an apprentice of sorts. “You know, she just might.”

  Paulie turns around. He’s making fajitas tonight, beef. “Everything okay, Cap?”

  “Yeah, Paulie, thanks for asking.”

  “If there’s anyone upsetting her,” Red says, “they’ll have to go through all four of us now.”

  The others nod. I wonder what they would think if I told them that the people upsetting Anna are Sara and me.

  I leave the guys finishing up dinner preparations and go back to my room, where Anna sits on the second twin bed with her feet pretzeled beneath her. “Hey,” I say, but she doesn’t respond. It takes me a moment to see that she’s wearing headphones, blasting God knows what into her ears.

  She sees me and shuts off the music, pulling the phones to rest on her neck like a choker. “Hey.”

  I sit down on the edge of the bed and look at her. “So. You, uh, want to do something?”

  “Like what?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. Play cards?”

  “You mean like poker?”

  “Poker, Go Fish. Whatever.”

  She looks at me carefully. “Go Fish?”

  “Want to braid your hair?”

  “Dad,” Anna asks, “are you feeling all right?”

  I am more comfortable rushing into a building that is going to pieces around me than I am trying to make her feel at ease. “I just—I want you to know you can do anything you want here.”

  “Is it okay to leave a box of tampons in the bathroom?”

  Immediately, my face goes red, and as if it’s catching, so does Anna’s. There is only one female firefighter, a part-timer, and the women’s room is on the lower level of the station. But still.

  Anna’s hair swings over her face. “I didn’t mean . . . I can just keep them—”

  “You can put them in the bathroom,” I announce. Then I add with authority, “If anyone complains, we’ll say they’re mine.”

  “I’m not sure they’ll believe you, Dad.”

  I wrap an arm around her. “I may not do this right at first. I’ve never bunked with a thirteen-year-old girl.”

  “I don’t shack up with forty-two-year-old guys too often, either.”

  “Good, because I’d have to kill them.”

  Her smile is a stamp against my neck. Maybe this will not be as hard as I think. Maybe I can convince myself that this move will ultimately keep my family together, even though the first step involves breaking it apart.

  “Dad?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Just so you know: no one plays Go Fish after they’re potty-trained.”

  She hugs me extra tight, the way she used to when she was small. I remember, in that instant, the last time I carried Anna. We were hiking across a field, the five of us—and the cattails and wild daisies were taller than her head. I swung her up into my arms, and together we parted a sea of reeds. But for the first time we both noticed how far down her legs dangled, how she was too big to sit on my hip, and before long she was struggling to get down and walk on her own.

  Goldfish get big enough only for the bowl you put them in. Bonsai trees twist in miniature. I would have given anything to keep her little. They outgrow us so much faster than we outgrow them.

  • • •

  It seems remarkable that while one of our daughters is leading us into a legal crisis, the other is in the throes of a medical one—but then again, we have known for quite some time that Kate’s at the end stages of renal failure. It is Anna, this time, who’s thrown us for a loop. And yet—like always—you figure it out; you manage to deal with both. The human capacity for burden is like bamboo—far more flexible than you’d ever believe at first glance.

  While Anna was packing up her things that afternoon, I went to the hospital. Kate was having her dialysis done when I came into the room. She was asleep with her CD headphones on; Sara rose from a chair with one finger pressed to her lips, a warning.

  She led me into the hallway. “How’s Kate?” I asked.

  “About the same,” she answered. “How’s Anna?”

  We traded the status of our children like baseball cards that we’d flash for a peek, but didn’t want to give up just yet. I looked at Sara, wondering how I was supposed to tell her what I’d done.

  “Where did you two run off to while I was fending off the judge?” she said.

  Well. If you sit around and think about how hot the fire’s going to be, you’ll never get into the thick of it. “I took Anna to the station.”

  “Something going on at work?”

  I took a deep breath and leaped off the cliff that my marriage had become. “No. Anna’s going to stay with me there for a few days. I think maybe she needs a little time by herself.”

  Sara stared at me. “But Anna’s not going to be by herself. She’s going to be with you.”

  The hallway seemed too bright and too wide all of a sudden. “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Do you really think that buying into Anna