The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  For a while after the crash we took Rebecca to a local military airport that ran programs for people who were afraid to fly. Behavior modification, really: the patrons would become proficient at a small task and then work their way up to actually flying. The first step was to come to the airport, just to look at it. Then you gave your ticket into the reservations desk the next week. Then came sitting in the terminal, and then walking outside to look at the plane. After that achievements came very gradually: getting onto the stairs of the plane (two weeks’ time), walking onto the plane (two weeks’ time), sitting for an hour on the immobile plane (four weeks). Eventually the plane took off for a fifteen-minute flight around the Bay area.

  We took Rebecca although she was very young because the psychiatrist who had treated her recommended the program. She told us that events such as these are the most scarring to children, even though we may not be able to see it. The perfectly adjusted child might one day snap because of an unarticulated fear of flying. So Rebecca (the youngest by far) went to phobia classes. She was everyone’s darling, the other women would fight to hold her and make sure she was all right and that she understood the instructions. Rebecca herself did not mind the attention. After she left the hospital in Des Moines, she did not mention the accident and she did not give any indications of having been involved in such a catastrophe, and because of this we also shied away from the subject. We told her these classes were just a fun thing, like other little girls took ballet or piano lessons. Jane was the one who actually drove her there; I was usually away on business.

  I was away on business the time Rebecca temporarily lost control—during the second week of the plane-sitting excursion. The first week, Jane told me over a crackling Chilean phone connection, Rebecca had been fine. And then all of a sudden this Saturday she was uncontrollable, throwing herself across the seats and screaming and crying. The psychiatrist told us we should continue to bring her to the phobia class, in spite of her outburst. She said that the outburst was a manifestation of fear, and as a scientist I was inclined to agree. But Jane refused to take her, and since I was in South America, I hadn’t any leverage. Rebecca was four then, and she has yet to set foot on a plane since.

  Of course. They will go to Iowa.

  I float, staring up at the sun. How stupid of me. I should have realized this earlier. I was so busy concentrating on Jane that I neglected to see that Rebecca herself is one of Jane’s biggest clues. Where Rebecca goes Jane will follow. And at her age, Rebecca will want to see the site of the crash; to jog her memory, maybe, or to put it all behind her. Wherever else they choose to go en route to Massachusetts is incidental. Iowa will be the midpoint; Iowa is the sure thing.

  Suddenly I am overwhelmed with relief. I will meet them in What Cheer, Iowa; I will stake out the cornfield where the wreckage still sits, until I see them, and then we shall talk. I am one step ahead. I start to smile, and then grin wider, and before I can stop myself I am laughing aloud.

  28 JOLEY

  Dear Jane—

  Are you enjoying Fishtrap? It’s a great little place to get away from it all, particularly civilization. Montana is quite beautiful, and overlooked. Take your time getting across it. What matters isn’t when you get here, but how you get here.

  I have been doing a lot of thinking about your visit, and you, and me. In particular I have been remembering the night before your wedding to Oliver, when we were on the back porch in Newton. You were wearing the yellow dress you always thought made you look fat in the hips, and you had your hair pulled back in a ponytail. You had matching yellow shoes—I’ve never forgotten that, because it gave you this look of absolute completion. You came out on the porch, holding a bottle of Coke, and you offered it to me without even looking me in the eye. But we hadn’t been doing a lot of speaking those days, not since I told you I wasn’t going to come to the wedding.

  It had nothing to do with you, I suppose you understand that by now. But I was sixteen and nobody was listening to me, including you. I had these feelings about Oliver, I can’t be any more specific than that. Feelings that made me wake in the middle of the night, sweating, ripping the sheets on the bed. And dreams, which I have not told you or anyone.

  This is what you said: You’re just a kid, Joley. You don’t know what it’s like to be in love. When it’s right, you know it. Why, look at how long I’ve been dating Oliver. If it wasn’t meant to be, it would have ended a long time ago.

  You told me this months before the wedding, while you were cooking dinner—it was a fricassee, I remember because the oil kept spattering you in the face while you were speaking. You told me this after I begged you to give Oliver back his engagement ring. And I was a kid, and maybe I didn’t know anything about love, but I would hazard a guess that you knew just as little as I did. The difference being you thought you knew. Anyway, when you set the date, I announced that I wasn’t coming to the wedding, it being against my principles.

  Then you stopped eating entirely. I thought at first it was pre-wedding jitters but when you couldn’t fit into any of your clothes, or Mama’s, and when we had to belt your tightest pair of jeans just to hold them up, I knew that the cause had nothing to do with your marriage. Oh, Jane, I wanted to tell you that I didn’t mean it, that I’d go back on my word, but I was afraid you might take it as a blessing for your marriage, and I wasn’t about to give that.

  And that night, before the wedding, you came onto the porch. I was looking at the lawn, or what was left of it after all the striped pink tents had been set up. There were white ribbons and crêpe de chine festooned all over the yard. It looked like a circus was coming, not a bride, and I won’t make any jokes about that. You gave me a Coke. “Joley,” you said, “you’re going to have to get used to him.”

  And I turned to you, trying not to catch your eye. “I don’t have to get used to anything,” I said. You had always trusted me before, and I didn’t know why you wouldn’t trust me now. Even to this day I cannot put into words what it was about Oliver that set me off. Maybe it was the combination: Oliver and you.

  You began to reel off a list of all the things about Oliver that were kind and gentle and important. You told me that best of all, Oliver would get you out of this house. I nodded, and wondered to myself, at what price?

  That’s when the hawks came. They circled above us, rare in Massachusetts even then. Their talons stretched behind them, orange spears, and their beaks broke the blue of the sky. They alternated between beating the air and coasting, a foreign cursive alphabet.

  “Oh, Joley,” you said, squeezing my hand, “what do you think of that?”

  I thought it was an omen, and I decided that I would let whatever those hawks did determine my actions for the wedding. I have always prided myself on reading signs: the tickle in Mama’s voice that betrayed her composure; the showers you took at midnight and that nightgown you tore to shreds; Oliver; those hawks. We both watched as the birds flew together, connecting like acrobats. Four wings beat to block out the sun, and when the mating was over they ripped like a broken heart, one hawk flying east and one flying north. I turned to you and said, “Yes, I will come to your wedding.”

  So you might say that I have betrayed you because I knew all these years that your marriage would not last. I did not tell you because you had no reason to believe me, until now. I also did not tell you the dream that I had over and over every night until the wedding. In it, I saw you and Oliver making love—a very difficult thing for a brother to envision his sister doing, I might add. Your legs were wrapped around Oliver’s lower back, and then suddenly you cracked down the middle like a Russian doll and split into two halves. Inside was another you, a smaller you. Oliver did not seem to notice. He was still thrusting when again you cracked down the middle, splitting to reveal an even smaller person. And so on and so on until you were so tiny that I could barely make out your face. I was terrified to see what would happen, and because of this, maybe, I always woke up. But the night before the wedding the d