The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Josie wasn’t looking at the camera. She was staring at Matt, as if she couldn’t see anything else.

  Somehow, it seemed safer to fall apart here in front of a makeshift memorial than at home, where Josie might hear her crying. No matter how cool and collected she had been—for Josie’s sake—the one person she could not fool was herself. She might pick up her daily routine like a missed stitch, she might tell herself that Josie was one of the lucky ones, but when she was alone in the shower, or caught in the interstitial space between waking and sleep, Alex would find herself shaking uncontrollably, the way you do when you’ve swerved to avoid an accident and have to pull to the side of the road to make sure you are really, truly all in one piece.

  Life was what happened when all the what-if’s didn’t, when what you dreamed or hoped or—in this case—feared might come to pass passed by instead. Alex had spent enough nights thinking of good fortune, of how it was thin as a veil, how seamlessly you might stream from one side to the other. This could easily have been Josie’s cross she was kneeling before, Josie’s memorial that hosted this photo. A twitch of the shooter’s hand, a fallen footstep, a bullet’s ricochet—and everything might have been different.

  Alex got to her feet and took a fortifying breath. As she headed back to her car, she saw the narrow hole where an eleventh cross had been. After the ten had been erected, someone had added one with Peter Houghton’s name on it. Night after night that extra cross had been taken down or vandalized. There had been editorials in the paper over it: Did Peter Houghton deserve a cross, when he was still very much alive? Was putting up a memorial for him a tragedy or a travesty? Eventually, whoever had carved Peter’s cross decided to leave well enough alone and stopped replacing it every day.

  As Alex slipped inside her car again, she wondered how—until she’d come here for herself—she had managed to forget that someone, at some point, considered Peter Houghton to be a victim, too.

  * * *

  Since That Day, as Lacy had taken to calling it, she’d delivered three babies. Each time, although the birth was uneventful and the delivery easy, something had gone wrong. Not for the mother, but for the midwife. When Lacy stepped into a delivery room, she felt poisonous, too negative to be the one to welcome another human being to this world. She had smiled her way through the births and had offered the new mothers the support and the medical care that they needed, but the moment she’d sent them on their way, cutting that last umbilical cord between hospital and home, Lacy knew she was giving them the wrong advice. Instead of easy platitudes like Let them eat when they want to eat and You can’t hold a baby too much, she should have been telling them the truth: This child you’ve been waiting for is not who you imagine him to be. You’re strangers now; you’ll be strangers years from now.

  Years ago, she used to lie in bed and imagine what her life would have been like had she not been a mother. She’d picture Joey bringing her a bouquet of dandelion weeds and clover; Peter falling asleep against her chest with the tail of her braid still clutched in his hand. She relived the clenching fist of labor pains, and the mantra she’d used to get through them: When this is done, imagine what you’ll have. Motherhood had painted the colors of Lacy’s world a bit brighter; had swelled her to the seams with the belief that her life could not possibly be more complete. What she hadn’t realized was that sometimes when your vision was that sharp and true, it could cut you. That only if you’d felt such fullness could you really understand the ache of being empty.

  She had not told her patients—God, she hadn’t even told Lewis—but these days, when she lay in bed and imagined what her life would have been like had she not been a mother, she found herself sucking on one bitter word: easier.

  Today Lacy was doing office visits; she’d gone through five patients and was about to move on to her sixth. Janet Isinghoff, she read, scanning the folder. Although she was another midwife’s patient, the policy of the group was to have each woman see all of the midwives, since you never knew who’d be on call when you delivered.

  Janet Isinghoff was thirty-three years old, primigravid, with a family history of diabetes. She had been hospitalized once before for appendicitis, had mild asthma, and was generally healthy. She was also standing in the door of the examination room, clutching her hospital johnny shut as she argued heatedly with Priscilla, the OB nurse.

  “I don’t care,” Janet was saying. “If it comes down to that, I’ll just go to a different hospital.”

  “But that’s not the way our practice works,” Priscilla explained.

  Lacy smiled. “Anything I can do here?”

  Priscilla turned, putting herself between Lacy and the patient. “It’s nothing.”

  “Didn’t sound like nothing,” Lacy replied.

  “I don’t want my baby delivered by a woman whose son is a murderer,” Janet burst out.

  Lacy felt her feet root on the floor, her breath go so shallow that she might as well have fielded a blow. And hadn’t she?

  Priscilla turned crimson. “Mrs. Isinghoff, I think I can speak for the whole of the midwifery team when I say that Lacy is—”

  “It’s all right,” Lacy murmured. “I understand.”

  By now the other nurses and midwives were staring; Lacy knew that they would rally to her defense—tell Janet Isinghoff to find herself another practice, explain that Lacy was one of the best and most seasoned midwives in New Hampshire. But that hardly mattered, really—it wasn’t about Janet Isinghoff demanding to have another midwife deliver her child; it was that even after Janet had left, there would be another woman here tomorrow or the next day with the same uneasy request. Who would want the first hands touching her newborn to be the same hands that had held a murderer’s when he crossed the street; that had brushed his hair off his forehead when he was sick; that had rocked him to sleep?

  Lacy walked down the hall to the fire door and ran up four flights of stairs. Sometimes, when she’d had a particularly difficult day, Lacy would take refuge on the roof of the hospital. She’d lie on her back and stare up at the sky and pretend, with that view, she could be anywhere on earth.

  A trial was just a formality—Peter would be found guilty. It didn’t matter how she tried to convince herself—or Peter—otherwise; the fact was there between them at those horrible jail visits, immense and unmentionable. It reminded Lacy of running into someone you hadn’t seen for a while, and finding her bald and missing her eyebrows: you knew she was in the throes of chemotherapy, but pretended you didn’t, because it was easier that way for both of you.

  What Lacy would have liked to say, if anyone had given her the podium on which to do it, was that Peter’s actions were just as surprising to her—as devastating to her—as they were to anyone else. She’d lost her son, too, that day. Not just physically, to the correctional facility, but personally, because the boy she’d known had disappeared, swallowed by this beast she didn’t recognize, capable of acts she could not conceive.

  But what if Janet Isinghoff was right? What if it was something Lacy had said or done . . . or not said or done . . . that had brought Peter to that point? Could you hate your son for what he had done, and still love him for who he had been?

  The door opened, and Lacy spun around. No one ever came up here, but, then again, she rarely left the floor this upset. It wasn’t Priscilla, though, or one of her colleagues: Jordan McAfee stood on the threshold, a sheaf of papers in his hand. Lacy closed her eyes. “Perfect.”

  “Yes, that’s what my wife tells me,” he said, coming toward her with a wide smile on his face. “Or maybe it’s just what I wish she’d tell me. . . . Your secretary told me you were probably up here, and—Lacy, are you all right?”

  Lacy nodded, and then she shook her head. Jordan took her arm and led her to a folding chair that someone had carted all the way up to the roof. “Bad day?”

  “You could say that,” Lacy answered. She tried to keep Jordan from seeing her tears. It was stupid, she knew, but she didn’t want P