The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “They stay lost in this world,” Ruthann says.

  I hold up my palm. I try to convince myself that I feel a drop of rain.

  * * *

  “Ruthann,” I ask, as we drive back from the Heard, “how come you live in Mesa?”

  “Because the Phoenician just isn’t swanky enough for me.”

  “No, really.” I glance in the rearview mirror to make sure Sophie is still sleeping. “I didn’t realize you had family in the area.”

  “Why does anyone move to a place like where we live?” she asks, shrugging. “Because there’s nowhere left to go.”

  “Do you ever go back?”

  Ruthann nods. “When I need to remember where I came from, or where I’m headed.”

  Maybe I should go, I think. “You haven’t asked me why I came to Arizona.”

  “I figured if you wanted to tell me, you would,” Ruthann says.

  I keep my eyes on the highway. “My father kidnapped me when I was a baby. He told me my mother had died in a car accident, and he took me from Arizona to New Hampshire. He’s in jail now, in Phoenix. I didn’t know any of this until a week ago. I didn’t know my mother’s been alive the whole time. I didn’t even know my real name.”

  Ruthann looks over her shoulder, where Sophie is curled up like a mollusk against Greta’s back. “How did you come to call her Sophie?”

  “I . . . I guess I just liked it.”

  “On the morning of my daughter’s naming, it was up to each of her aunties to suggest a name for her. Her father was Póvolnyam, Butterfly Clan, so each of the names had something to do with that: There was Pólikwaptiwa, which means Butterfly Sitting on Flower. And Tuwahóima, which means Butterflies Hatching. And Talásveniuma, Butterfly Carrying Pollen on Wings. But the one Grandmother picked was Kuwányauma, Butterfly Showing Beautiful Wings. She waited until dawn, and then took Kuwányauma and introduced her to the spirits for the first time.”

  “You have a daughter?” I say, amazed.

  “She was named for her father’s clan, but she belonged to mine,” Ruthann says, and then she shrugs. “When she got initiated, she got a new name. And in school, she was called Louise by the teachers. What I’m saying is that what you’re called is hardly ever who you are.”

  “What does your daughter do?” I ask. “Where does she live?”

  “She’s been gone a long time. Louise never figured out that Hopi isn’t a word to describe a person, but a destination.” Ruthann sighs. “I miss her.”

  I look through the windshield at the clouds, stretched across the horizon. I think about Ruthann’s brother-in-law, raining on his family’s fortune. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to get you upset.”

  “I’m not upset,” she answers. “If you want to know someone’s story, they have to tell it out loud. But every time, the telling is a little bit different. It’s new, even to me.”

  As I listen to Ruthann, I start to think that maybe the math is not reciprocal; maybe depriving a mother of a child is greater than depriving the child of the mother. Maybe knowing where you belong is not equal to knowing who you are.

  “Have you seen your mother since you’ve been here?” Ruthann asks me.

  “It didn’t go so well,” I say after a moment.

  “How come?”

  I am not ready to tell her about my mother’s drinking. “She’s not what I expected her to be.”

  Ruthann turns her head, looks out the window. “No one ever is,” she says.

  * * *

  My favorite museum, as a child, was the New England Aquarium, and my favorite exhibit was the tide pool where you got to play God. There were sea stars, which could spit out their own stomachs and grow back limbs that were damaged. There were anemones, which might spend all their lives in one place. There were hermit crabs and limpets and algae. And there was a red button for me to push, which created a wave in the tank and spun all the sea life like the clothes inside a washing machine, before letting them settle again.

  I loved being the agent of change, at the touch of a finger. I’d wait until it seemed the hermit crab had just settled, and then I would push the button again. It was amazing to think of a society where the status quo meant having no status quo at all.

  There was a second exhibit at the aquarium that I liked, too. A strobe, spitting over the flow of an oversized faucet. I knew it was just an optical illusion, but I used to think that in this one corner of the world, water might be able to run backward.

  * * *

  Ruthann puts me to work, creating her butchered dolls. One day when we are sitting around her kitchen table making Divorced Barbie—she comes with Ken’s boat, Ken’s car, and the deed to Ken’s house—she asks, “What did you do in New Hampshire?”

  I bend closer with the hot glue gun, trying to attach a button. Instead, I wind up affixing Barbie’s purse to her forehead. “Greta and I found people.”

  Ruthann’s brows lift. “Like K-nine stuff?”

  “Yeah, except we worked with a whole bunch of police stations.”

  “So why aren’t you doing it here?”

  I look up at her. Because my father is in jail. Because I am embarrassed to have done this for a living, without knowing that I was missing. “Greta isn’t trained for desert work,” I say, the first excuse that comes to mind.

  “So train her.”

  “Ruthann,” I say, “it’s just not the right time for us.”

  “You don’t get to decide that.”

  “Oh, really. And who does?”

  “The kúskuska. The ones who are lost.” She bends down over her work again.

  Is there a little girl, somewhere, being driven across a border right now? A man with a razor poised over his wrist? A child with one leg over the fence meant to keep him safe from the rest of the world? The desperate usually succeed because they have nothing to lose. But what if that isn’t the case? If someone like me had worked in the Phoenix area twenty-eight years ago, would my father have gotten away with it?

  “I suppose I could put out flyers,” I tell Ruthann.

  She reaches for the hot glue gun. “Good,” she says. “Because you suck at dollmaking.”

  * * *

  On the way to the desert, Fitz tells me remarkable stories about a heart transplant patient who woke up with a love of the French Riviera, although he’d never left Kansas in his life; of a teetotaling kidney recipient who, postsurgery, began to drink the same martini her donor favored.

  “By that logic,” I argue, “then the memory of seeing you for the first time gets stored in my eyeballs.”

  Fitz shrugs. “Maybe it does.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I’m just telling you what I read . . .”

  “What about the guy in the 1900s who had a steel pike driven through his brain by accident?” I challenge. “He woke up speaking Kyrgyzstani—”

  “Well, I highly doubt that,” Fitz interrupts, “since Kyrgyzstan wasn’t a country until five years ago.”

  “You’re missing the point,” I say. “What if memories get stored in the brain, and they aren’t even necessarily ones we’ve had? What if we’re hardwired with a whole iceberg of experiences, and our minds use only a tip of them?”

  “That’s a pretty cool thought . . . that you and I would have the same memories, just because it’s how we’re made.”

  “You and I do have the same memories,” I point out.

  “Yeah, but my seeing-Eric-naked recollection has a whole different causal effect on my system,” Fitz laughs.

  “Maybe I’m not really remembering that stupid lemon tree. Maybe everyone has a lemon stuck in their mind.”

  “Yes,” Fitz agrees. “Mine, however, is a ’seventy-eight Pacer.”

  “Very funny—”

  “It wasn’t, if you were the guy driving it. God, do you remember the time it broke down on the way to the senior prom?”

  “I remember the oil on your date’s dress. What wa