The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  At that moment, everything comes clear. It’s like having someone walk up to a chalky window that you’ve been trying to see through for days, and wiping it clean. Some people have a detailed history, others don’t. There are plenty of adopted children who grow up without knowing an ounce of information about their birth parents; there are criminals who walk out of jail and become pillars of the community. At any moment, a person can start over. And that’s not half a life, but simply a real one.

  It is also a terrifying prospect: that the relationships we use as the cornerstones of our personalities are not given by default but are a choice; that it’s all right to feel closer to a friend than we do to a parent; that someone who’s betrayed us in the past might be the same person with whom we build a future. I lean back against the wall of the car, dizzy. “You make it sound so easy.”

  “And you make it more complicated than it has to be,” Fitz counters. “Bottom line: Do you love your father?”

  “Yes,” I say quickly.

  “Do you love your mother?”

  “He wouldn’t let me.”

  Fitz shakes his head. “Delia,” he corrects. “He couldn’t stop you.”

  I watch Greta’s breathing even out in sleep. “Maybe I’ll stay a little longer,” I say.

  Fitz

  It takes only a week in Arizona to turn me into a professional liar. When my editor calls, asking me for something about the Hopkins trial, I let my voice mail pick up until my mailbox is full. When she finally wises up and calls me in the middle of the night on my hotel phone to say that I have six hours to produce a story or lose my assignment, I tell her that I’ll have it on her desk. Then I e-mail her and say that motions were filed in the case that kept me in court all day, and beg an extension. When a second week goes by and I have produced absolutely nothing, Marge tells me to come back home to New Hampshire and earn my paycheck. She assigns me a piece about army engineers who have discovered a composite compound to prevent frost heaves, a topic that lets me clearly know I have been demoted in her mind. I tell her I’ll be on the first flight out.

  I don’t leave Phoenix.

  Instead, I sit down and fabricate a piece about the Army Corps of Engineers, and asphalt and spring thaw and water tables. I decide that since it will be buried in the middle of the paper, fudging it a bit—okay, completely—isn’t awful.

  Before I know it, this lying jag of mine has spread like maple syrup into all other venues of my life, sticky and somehow impossible to clean up. I call the owners of the pizza place I live above and say there has been a death in my family, would they be kind enough to give an extension on my rent check? I phone the office and explain that I can’t make the Monday meeting because I have a respiratory virus—something SARS-like and highly contagious. I let Sophie weave me a crown of Indian paintbrush, and when she asks when we are going home, I tell her soon.

  When Delia leans on me, I tell myself I’d do the same for any old friend.

  That’s the crazy thing about lies. You start to fall for them, yourself.

  * * *

  Every journalist wants a “death row” exclusive. You want to be the voice of truth that is heard; you want to be the megaphone through which the penitent’s words are carried. You want the reader to listen to the inmate and think, Maybe we are not all that different. But not every journalist knows that his exposé will break the heart of the woman he loves.

  When Andrew walks in—thinner than I remember him being, and with a badly shaved head—everything stops for me. Seeing him in his stripes is a little embarrassing, like catching your grandfather in his boxer shorts, a vision that you wish, the very moment you see it, that you never had. He seems so completely different from the man I used to know, as if this is a distant cousin, with similar features arranged in an entirely new way. I wonder which came first: this Andrew, or the other?

  I am surprised that he’s agreed to see me, if you want to know the truth. In spite of the fact that I practically grew up in his living room, Andrew knows that I write for the Gazette.

  He picks up the handset, I do the same. What I want to ask Andrew, as he stares at me through this sheer wall, is why he did it. What I say instead is, “I hope you didn’t have to pay a lot for the haircut.”

  When he starts to laugh, I can see it for just a glimmer of a second—the man I used to know.

  My defining memory of Andrew involves communicating. Delia and Eric and I had been poking around an old dump site in the woods for pottery shards and Indian arrowheads and elixir bottles when we stumbled upon an ancient suitcase. Opening it, we discovered what seemed to be spy equipment—headphones and a switchboard and a frequency meter—with the wires torn out of the back and the speakers falling off the seams. It was too big for us to carry home, but we desperately wanted it, and a fast vote decided that of all of our parents, the only one who seemed remotely likely to help us with it was Andrew. “That’s a ham radio,” he told us, when he cracked open the suitcase. “Let’s see if we can get it to work.”

  Andrew asked around at the senior center—some of the old-timers remembered that particular brand, and what knobs and buttons controlled volume and frequency. He took us with him to the library to get electronics books, to the hardware store to get wire and clamps, and to the basement while he tinkered.

  One day, with the three of us clustered beside him, he turned on the radio. A high, dizzy whine came out of the speakers while he fiddled and spoke into the microphone. He had to repeat his message twice, but then, to our shock and delight, someone answered. Someone in England. The thing about a ham radio, he told us, is that you could always find someone to talk to. But you had to be careful, he warned, about giving away too much information about yourself. People were not always who they seemed to be.

  “Andrew,” I say to him now, “did you really think you’d get away with it?”

  He rubs his palms over the knees of his pants. “Is this on or off the record?”

  “You tell me,” I say.

  Andrew bows his head. “Fitz,” he confesses, “I wasn’t thinking at all.”

  * * *

  While I am trapped in the desert, waiting for Delia and her wonderdog to find me underneath a paloverde tree, I look at the parched throat of this cracked earth and imagine all the ways a man might die.

  Naturally, the first one to come to mind is thirst. Having finished my token bottle of water an hour ago, and finding myself in the beating heat of this dry desert, I imagine dehydrating to the point of delirium. The tongue would swell like cotton batting, the lids of the eyes would stick. More preferable—now, anyway—would be drowning. Must be a nasty fight at first, all that fluid going where it shouldn’t. But at present, the thought of water—extra water—is really just too enticing. I wonder what it would be like at the end; if mermaids come to string your neck with shells and give you openmouthed kisses. If you just lie down on the sand and watch the sun shimmy a million leagues away.

  Suffocation, hanging, a gunshot wound—all of these are too damn painful. But cold . . . I’ve heard that’s sort of a nice way to go. To lie down in snow and go numb, at this moment, would be nothing short of a miracle. And then, of course, there is martyrdom, which I’m approaching at a damn fast rate. I’m burning, after all, even if it’s not for my convictions. Does flesh charring off at the bone hurt less when you know you are right, even though everyone thinks you are wrong?

  That line of reasoning leads me right to Andrew.

  And then it’s a fast beeline to thinking of Delia.

  I don’t think anyone has ever died of unrequited love. I wonder if I’ll be the first.

  * * *

  After we ring the doorbell, I squeeze Delia’s hand. “Are you sure you’re ready for this?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. Delia smooths Sophie’s hair and adjusts the collar on her shirt until she twists around, shrugging off her mother’s touch. “Does this lady have kids?” Sophie asks.

  Delia hesitates. “No,” she says.