The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “I gave you the mother you didn’t get,” my father pleads. “If I’d told you the truth—if I told you what she was really like—wouldn’t that have been worse than the way you lost her the first time?”

  For nearly a year after I was told about my mother’s death, I would run to the door every time the doorbell rang. I was certain that my father had gotten it wrong. That any moment my mother was going to show up so that we could live happily ever after.

  But she hadn’t. Not because she was dead, as my father had told me, but because she had never existed.

  I let the telephone receiver drop from my hand and turn around, away from the Plexiglas. I don’t look back at my father, not even when he starts screaming both of my names and a guard comes to take him away.

  * * *

  I have never been a very good drunk. Even when I was a student at UNH, a few beers would make me sick and hard liquor only made me hyperaware, prone to wondering why the tables had been stained the color of hazelnuts and whether anyone ever bothered to clean the flies out of the ceiling fan in the ladies’ bathroom.

  I didn’t know for a long time that Eric was an alcoholic. When Eric drank, he became only more engaging and funny and amusing. He did it so seamlessly, in fact, that it took me several years to understand that the reason Eric always seemed to be the same person, whether he had a beer in his hand or not, was not because he didn’t get drunk, but because he was hardly ever sober.

  The life of the party who can build geometric carbon models out of toothpicks and maraschino cherries and get a whole bar full of Japanese tourists to join in singing “Yellow Submarine” becomes less charming when that same person forgets he is supposed to pick you up after work and lies about where he has been all night, and cannot hold a conversation in the morning unless he’s had some hair of the dog that bit him. I’ve hesitated this long to accept his marriage proposal because I didn’t want my child to grow up with a parent who is unreliable and selfish.

  So how can I blame my own father for feeling the same way?

  When I pull into my mother’s driveway again, I am so upset that I am shaking. My mother comes to the door mixing something in a mortar and pestle; it smells like rosemary. Her face lights up when she sees me. “Come on in.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?”

  “That you’re an alcoholic?”

  The smile dries on my mother’s face, paint peeling. She glances around the street to see who might have heard, and ushers me inside. There is a part of me dying to be told that this, like so many other things, is just another fabrication of my father’s. This is another step in his scheme to make me hate my mother, too.

  But she pushes her hair back from her face, tucks it behind her ears. “Yes,” she says bravely. “I am.” She folds her arms across her chest. “And I haven’t had a drink in twenty-six years.”

  An honest confession can slice the hardest heart in two. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “You didn’t ask,” my mother says quietly.

  But it is a lie, even if you don’t say it. It is a lie when you force a connection, because you so desperately want there to be one. It is a lie when you tell yourself that you will have lunches together and pass down secret recipes and do all the hundred other things that I have fantasized daughters do with their mothers, as if that might actually make us any less foreign to each other. No one gets to start where they left off; it just doesn’t work that way.

  She reaches for me, and when I back away, her eyes fill with tears. “You came here, and you were so happy to see me,” she says. “I thought if I told you, I’d lose you all over again.”

  “You let me think you were a victim,” I accuse.

  “I was,” my mother says. “I may not have been a perfect mother, but I was your mother, Beth. And I loved you.”

  Past tense.

  “That isn’t my name,” I say tightly, and this time, it is my decision to leave.

  * * *

  Greta and I were once called during a blizzard to find a teenage girl who had left a suicide note and disappeared, leaving her single father in an absolute state of panic. It was down in Meredith, the Lakes Region. The local police had begun to search on a footprint trail, but the snow was falling so fast that her tracks vanished almost the moment they were located.

  Locals had been warned off the roads that night; the only vehicles I passed on my way there were plows and sanding trucks. When I arrived, I was taken to the girl’s father. He was rocking back and forth in an armchair, fist pressed to his mouth, as if he were afraid of the grief that might spill out. “Mr. Damato,” I asked, “does Maria have a special place? A spot she goes to when she wants to be alone?”

  He shook his head. “Nowhere I know.”

  “Can you show me her room?”

  He led me to the back of the house. The girl’s room was typical—twin bed, milk-crate bookshelves, laptop, lava lamp. But unlike most teenagers’ bedrooms, this one was spotless. The bed had been made, the papers cleared from the top of the desk. The clothes were all neatly hanging in the closet. The trash can had been dumped.

  Because Maria Damato had already done her wash, too, I scented Greta off a pair of shoes I found in her closet. Outside, the snow whistled and spun around us. Greta started out west, toward the road, and then veered into the woods. At points she had to leap snowdrifts; at other times I fell on my hands and knees in them. Every time I opened my mouth, I tasted ice.

  Two hours later Greta broke through the trees and began to tiptoe across the frozen flat of the lake. With all this snow, it did not look like a body of water, but instead a wide-open field. Snowflakes the size of quarters clotted on my lashes and lips, and gave Greta Groucho Marx eyebrows. The powder made the ice even more hazardous; we both went sprawling a few times. But finally Greta stopped and put her front paws on a mound that didn’t sink. She turned a small circle; did it again.

  I saw the girl’s hair first, frozen into jagged spikes. I rolled her over and immediately began to do artificial respiration, but she came up scratching like a cat. “Get off me, get off me!” she shrieked, and then she opened her eyes and started to sob.

  The EMT workers who met us at the lake said that the snow had acted as an insulator, keeping Maria alive longer than she might have been otherwise. Her father, who had been called with the good news, was waiting at the front door when we returned. Holding my arm for support, Maria took a tentative step toward her father. Suddenly, Greta stepped between them and growled low in her throat.

  “Greta,” I said, calling the dog off. But in that instant, I’d felt Maria relax. As if she’d been vindicated.

  Believe me, I have seen it all: from delicate boys with the faces of sprites who run from the teasing of bullies; to teens who climb to the top of water towers, intent on dying closer to Heaven; to the willow-thin girls who hide in the night from their mother’s boyfriends. My job, though, is to bring them home, not to judge the motives that made them run away. So that night, I returned Maria Damato to the custody of her grateful parent. I did what I was expected to do.

  A month later the detective on the case called to tell me that Maria had shot her father and then killed herself. I gave Greta an extra serving of Dog Chow that day, for understanding more than any human had. It just goes to show you: Sometimes knowing what’s right isn’t a rational decision, or even what works on paper. Sometimes leaving is the best course of action after all.

  * * *

  When Sophie was two, Eric and I took her fishing. It was a lazy Sunday, and we were sitting on a dock on Goose Pond. Eric would thread a worm onto the hook and cast, then cup his hands around Sophie’s on the fishing rod. She had just learned the word fish, and when we pulled a trout or a bass out of the water, she’d clap her hands and say it over and over.

  To this day, I’m not sure how it happened. Eric had let go of Sophie to bait the hook, and I was pointing to the rainbow scales of the trout that we’d just released back int