The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  She did not know what was going on in the courtroom across town, and at this moment, she truly did not care. In fact, she was not thinking of her father, seated behind Matt Houlihan like the dragon who guarded Gilly’s virtue. She was not thinking of Jack St. Bride. Sweet sage tickled the inside of her nose, and with all she had inside her, Gillian wished for her mother.

  Just on the edge of the circle, she could see her, a translucent figure with a laugh that fell into the shell of Gilly’s ear. And this time, something happened. Instead of the candle sputtering out and her mother simply disappearing, she looked Gillian in the eye and sang her name, a series of bells. “You shouldn’t,” her mother said, and the flame on the candle roared so bright it was blinding.

  By the time Gillian realized the rug was on fire, her mother had gone. She batted at the flames but didn’t manage to save the photograph. It was charred through, the only remaining fragment a piece of her mother’s hand, now curled and scorched with heat.

  Gillian threw herself down beside the ashes, breathing in the smoke and sobbing. She would not learn until much later that she had burned her hands putting out the flames, that each broken blister would scar in the shape of a heart.

  Matt Houlihan was tired. He wanted to go home and have Molly fall asleep on his chest while Syd rubbed his feet. He wanted to drink himself into oblivion, so that when he was tottering at the edge of consciousness, he wouldn’t have to see Gillian Duncan’s face.

  He was almost done.

  That, more than anything else, drew Matt to his feet. He slipped a piece of paper from a manila envelope and offered it to McAfee, who’d known ever since the motions hearing that it was coming. “Judge, the state has no more witnesses for its case in chief. However, at this time I’d like to offer a certified copy of the conviction of Jack St. Bride for sexual assault on a plea of guilty entered August 20, 1998, in Grafton County, New Hampshire. To wit, Mr. McBride admitted that he sexually assaulted a fifteen-year-old victim and received a sentence of eight months to serve in the Grafton County Correctional Facility.”

  The jury gaped. They looked at Matt, they looked at the defendant, and they thought what any reasonable man or woman would think when presented with this evidence—if he’s done it before, he most likely has done it again.

  Matt placed the conviction on the clerk’s desk, then looked directly at Jack St. Bride, hoping to hell the bastard was fully suffering the terror of being at someone else’s mercy, someone who held all the cards. “Your Honor,” Matt said. “The state rests.”

  1969

  New York City

  That morning, while drinking her imported Sumatran coffee, Annalise St. Bride had read a story in the New York Times about a woman whose baby had been born in a tree. The woman lived in Mozambique, a country suffering from a flood, and had climbed to safety when her hut washed away. The baby was healthy, male, and rescued by helicopter a day later.

  Surely that was worse than what was happening now.

  She had been on Astor Place shopping for the most darling christening outfit when her water broke. Two weeks early. The ambulance told her she couldn’t get to Lenox Hill—the hospital where she’d planned to have her baby—because there was a parade blocking traffic one way, and a broken water main had locked up the conduit through Central Park. “I am not going to St. Vincent’s,” she insisted, as two paramedics hefted her into the back of the ambulance.

  “Fine, lady,” one said. “Then drop the kid right here.”

  A band of pain started at her groin, then radiated out to every nerve of her skin. “Do you know,” she gasped, “who my husband is?”

  But the paramedics had already set the ambulance screaming crosstown.

  Through the tiny window over her feet, Annalise watched the city roll past, a palette of gray angles and swerving pedestrians. In minutes, they arrived at the last hospital in New York City she could possibly wish to be.

  Drug addicts and homeless people were splashed along the sides of the building like decorative puddles; Annalise had even heard of patients who had died in the halls simply waiting to be cared for. It was a far cry from Lenox Hill, with its lushly appointed exclusive birthing suites meant to offer a couple the feel of being at home.

  St. Vincent’s? Being born in a tree was a better pedigree than this.

  As the paramedics loaded the stretcher off the ambulance, she realized she had to fight in earnest. But the moment the wheels of the gurney slapped onto the pavement, she felt shock rocket through her. Her spine was shattering—she could feel the vertebrae at the base cracking, she was certain of it. In her womb, where she’d been carrying a baby, there was now a huge fist. It twisted like a puppeteer’s, pulled so hard and so long that she writhed, at odds in her own body.

  I am going to die, she thought.

  When she opened her mouth, all she could say was, “Get Joseph.”

  She was admitted before the shifty-eyed drunks and the mothers with six sniffling children hanging like ornaments from their limbs. The curtained room smelled of alcohol and cleaning fluids, and Annalise’s gaily wrapped package stuck out awkwardly, a Meissen vase in a Woolworth’s living room. “She’s eight centimeters,” said the doctor, an Asian man with hair that stood straight, like a rooster’s comb.

  “I want to wait for my husband,” Annalise gritted out. The contractions were slicing her in half, like the magician’s assistant.

  “I don’t think your baby’s got the same idea,” a nurse murmured, coming up behind Annalise to brace her shoulders.

  She and Joseph had toured the rooms at Lenox Hill, with their silk bedding and faux fireplaces. Just around the corner was their favorite Italian restaurant. Joseph had promised to bring her penne alla diavolo, the restaurant’s specialty, the night she delivered.

  Suddenly, there was a crash as a new patient was wheeled into the cubicle beside Annalise’s. “Maria Velasquez. Thirty-year-old female, primip, twenty-seven weeks’ gestation,” the paramedic said. “BP one thirty over seventy, heart rate one-oh-five sinus rhythm. Beaten up one side and down the other by her husband.”

  Annalise stared at the curtain that separated her from this woman. The nurse behind her gently turned her face away. “You concentrate on you,” she said.

  “Are you having contractions?” The question came from the other side of the drape, the one Annalise was gazing at so fixedly she expected it to fly off its hangers at any moment in a feat of telekinesis.

  “Sí, los tiene,” the woman moaned.

  “Looks like she’s bleeding. Could be a placenta previa. Call OB.”

  Annalise licked dry lips. “What’s . . . what’s the matter with the woman over there?”

  Her doctor glanced up from a spot between her legs. “I need you to push,” he said. “Now, Annalise.”

  She bore down with all her strength, squeezing her eyes so tight the room swam about her, and the words that filtered through the curtain came thin and quivering.

  “No pueda!”

  “It’s coming . . . get me a gown and gloves, for Christ’s sake.”

  “BP’s falling. She’s ninety over palp.”

  “Ah, damn. She’s bleeding out.”

  “Respire, Mrs. Velasquez. No empuje.”

  “Primero salvo mi bebé! Por favor, salvo mi bebé!”

  Annalise felt herself being opened from the inside, a seal yawning and widening. She had a sudden vision of Joseph pulling on a weekend turtleneck sweater, the wool stretching taut as his head slowly emerged to show his smile, his tousled hair.

  “Here we go,” the doctor said.

  “Ringer’s lactate, wide open. Type and cross her. Where the hell is OB?”

  “We’ve got to do this now. Ahora, Mrs. Velasquez. Empuje.”

  “Pedi’s here.”

  “About time. Take the baby.”

  “Él se llamo Joaquim!”

  “Yes, Mrs. Velasquez. That’s a lovely name.”

  “One more push,” the nurse said to Annalise, �