The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  IV

  Sometimes it is necessary

  To reteach a thing its loveliness.

  —Galway Kinnell, “St. Francis and the Sow”

  Eric

  When I was thirteen years old I met the perfect girl. She was nearly as tall as I was, with cornsilk hair and eyes the color of thunderstorms. Her name was Sondra. She smelled like lazy summer Sundays—mowed grass and sprinklers—and I found myself edging closer to her whenever I could, just to breathe in deeply.

  I imagined things in Sondra’s company that I’d never bothered to imagine before: what it would feel like to walk barefoot on a volcano; how to find the patience to count all the stars; whether it physically hurt to grow old. I wondered about kissing: which way to turn my head, if her lips would save the impression of mine, the way my pillow always knew how to come back to the curve of my head night after night.

  I didn’t talk to her, because this was all so much bigger than words.

  I was walking beside Sondra when she suddenly turned into a rabbit and hopped away, disappearing underneath the hedge in the front of my house.

  The next morning when I woke up from my dream, it didn’t matter that this girl had never existed, that I had been unconscious when I had conjured her. I found myself crying when I took the milk out of the refrigerator for my cereal; it was all I could do to get from one minute to the next. I spent hours sitting on the lawn, trying to find a rabbit in our shrubbery.

  Sometimes we don’t know we’re dreaming; we can’t even fathom that we’re asleep.

  I still think of her, every now and then.

  * * *

  Our first week in Arizona passes slowly. I immerse myself in state case law; I wade through the prosecution’s discovery. The environment seems to stir something up in Delia, who starts remembering more and more about her childhood—snippets that usually make her cry. She summons the courage to go visit her father a couple more times; she takes long walks with Sophie and Greta.

  One morning I wake up to find Ruthann’s trailer on fire. Smoke rolls over the roof in a thick gray cloud as I burst through the front door, yelling for my daughter, who spends more time over there than she does with us these days. But there are no flames inside, not even any smoke. And Sophie and Ruthann are nowhere to be found.

  I run around to the yard behind the trailer. Ruthann sits on a stump; Sophie’s at her feet. The plume of gray smoke I saw in the front of the house comes from a small campfire. Set in its center are two cinder blocks with a thin, flat stone balanced on top. A bead of water on the hot stone spits and dances. Ruthann does not look up at me, but takes a bowl filled with blue batter and ladles a spoonful onto the stone. She uses the flat of her hand to spread the batter as thin as it will go, pressing her palm down on the searing surface.

  As the batter solidifies into a circle, Ruthann takes an onion-skin-thin tortilla from a plate beside her and settles it on top of the one still cooking on the stone. She folds in the sides and then rolls from the bottom up, making a hollow tube that she passes over to me. “An Egg McMuffin it’s not,” she says.

  It looks, and tastes, like pale blue tracing paper. It sticks to the roof of my mouth. “What’s in it?”

  “Blue corn, rabbit-ear sage, water. Oh, and ashes,” Ruthann adds. “Piki is an acquired taste.”

  But my daughter—the one who will eat macaroni and cheese only if the noodles are straight, not curly, who insists that I cut the crusts off her peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and slice on the diagonal, instead of the half—is stuffing this piki in her mouth as if it’s candy.

  “Siwa helped me grind the cornmeal yesterday,” Ruthann says.

  “Siwa means Sophie,” Sophie adds.

  “It means youngest sister,” Ruthann corrects, “but that’s still you.” She spreads another circle of batter on the burning stone with her bare hand, lets it set, and flips it over in a seamless motion.

  “Finish telling me the story, Ruthann.” Sophie looks over her shoulder at me. “You interrupted.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s about a rabbit who got too hot.”

  Sondra, I think.

  Ruthann folds up another piece of piki and rolls it in a paper towel, handing it to Sophie. “Where did I leave off?”

  “In the Great Heat,” Sophie says, settling down cross-legged in front of Ruthann. “The animals were all droopy.”

  “Yes, and Sikyátavo, Rabbit, was worst of all. His fur was matted with red dirt from the desert. His eyes were so dry they burned. He wanted to teach the sun a lesson.”

  She folds another cone of piki. “So Rabbit ran off to the edge of the world where every morning, Sun came up. He practiced with his bow and arrow the whole way. But when he got there, Sun had left the sky. Rabbit thought that was cowardly, but he decided to wait for Sun to return the next day. Sun, though, had seen Rabbit practicing and decided to have a little fun with him. Back in those days, you see, Sun didn’t come up slowly like he does now. He’d burst into the sky with one leap. So the next day, Sun rolled far away from where he usually jumped into the sky and then leaped up. By the time Rabbit got his bow and arrow together, Sun was already so high he couldn’t be touched. Rabbit stamped his foot and shouted, but Sun only laughed.

  “One morning,” Ruthann continues, “Sun got careless. He jumped more slowly than usual, and Rabbit’s arrow plunged into his side. Rabbit was delighted! He’d shot the Sun! But when he looked up again he saw how flames bled from the wound. Suddenly the whole world seemed to be on fire.”

  She stands up. “Rabbit ran to a cottonwood, and a greasewood tree, but neither one would hide him—they were too afraid of being burned to a crisp. Suddenly he heard a voice calling to him: ‘Sikyátavo! Under me! Hurry!’ It was a small green bush with flowers like cotton. Rabbit ducked beneath it, just as the flames leaped over the bush. Everything crackled and hissed, and then went quiet.” Ruthann looks at Sophie. “The earth all around was black and burnt, but the fire was gone. And the little bush that had saved Rabbit wasn’t green anymore, but a deep yellow. Even today, that kind of bush grows green, and then turns yellow when it feels the sun.”

  “What happened to Rabbit?” Sophie asks.

  “He was never the same. He has brown spots on his fur, from where the fire burned him. And he’s not so tough anymore, you know. He runs away and hides, instead of putting up a fight. Sun isn’t the same, either,” Ruthann says. “He makes himself so bright that no one can look at him long enough to shoot straight.”

  Ruthann cracks her knuckles; silver and turquoise rings wink like fireflies. “Let’s clean up,” she says to Sophie, “and then if your dad says it’s okay, you can come with me to the garage sale around the corner and scope out inventory.”

  Sophie runs into the house, leaving me alone with Ruthann. “You don’t have to keep her with you.”

  “It’s good to have a child to tell a story to.”

  “Do you have any of your own?”

  The lines of Ruth’s face carve deeper. “I had a daughter once.”

  Maybe we can all be divided along this rift: Those who have been lucky enough to keep our children, and those who have had them taken away from us. Before I can find the appropriate response, Sophie comes out of the house, dragging a bucket of sand behind her. She pours it onto the fire, banking the embers, a small cloud of soot sighing up around her knees.

  “Soph,” I say, “if you can be a good girl, you can stay with Ruthann a little longer.”

  “Of course she can be good,” Ruthann says. “Where I come from, on Second Mesa, our grandmothers give us our names, and our grandfathers give us our manners. The ones who aren’t good don’t have grandfathers to tell them how to behave. And you have a grandfather, don’t you, Siwa?” She hands Sophie the bowl of leftover batter. “Kitchen sink,” she instructs.

  The sun has risen high enough to gnaw on the back of my neck. I think of Rabbit, and his arrow. “Thanks, Ruthann.”

  She gives me a half smile. �€