The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  I waited the longest time that night, but my father did not come up to spank me. Maybe that was the worst part: imagining what terrible thing he was thinking up downstairs. A belt? A brush? When I heard him, heavy, coming up the stairs, I dove beneath the covers. I pulled my nightgown tight around my ankles, a drawstring. I counted to one hundred.

  At seventy-seven my father turned my doorknob. He sat down on the edge of the bed and waited for me to pull away the covers from my face.

  “I’m not going to punish you tonight,” my father said, “and do you know why? Because you were such a good little cook. That’s why.”

  “Really?” I asked, amazed.

  “Really.” He took off his shoes and asked if I would like to hear a story.

  “Yes,” I said, thinking this might not be so bad after all. My father started to tell me a story—a fairy tale—about an evil woman who kept her daughter locked in a closet with mice and bats. The gir?’s father tried to get to this closet but the woman had huge guard dogs protecting it and he had to kill her, and then the dogs, before he could rescue his daughter.

  “And then what?” I asked, waiting to see what would happen.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t come up with the ending.”

  “You can’t just leave a story hanging,” I protested, and he said we should try to think of one together. But he was getting tired, so could he lie down next to me?

  I moved over on the bed and we talked about the ways the girl’s father might kill the evil woman. Stakes through the heart, I suggested, but my father was leaning towards poisoned tea. We came up with other things that might be lurking in the closet: ghosts and tarantulas and man-eating piranhas. Maybe the girl should try to get out by herself, I suggested, but my father insisted that was not the way it would happen.

  When he got cold he crawled under the covers, so close that when he spoke my hair fluttered. “What do you think will happen to that girl, Jane?” he said, and as he did that he put his hand on my chest.

  It wasn’t right, I knew that, because every muscle in my body tensed at once. It wasn’t right, but then again he was my father, wasn’t he? And he had been so nice. He could have hit me tonight, but he didn’t.

  “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I don’t know what should happen.”

  “Well, what about this? The father drives stakes through the heart of the evil woman and drugs the Dobermans with poisoned tea. That way both of our ideas come into play.” Without hesitation, like he was proud of it, he slipped his hand between my legs, coming to rest like a weight on my vagina.

  “Daddy.”

  “Do you like it, Jane?” my father whispered. “Do you like the ending?”

  I did not move. I pretended that this was some other little girl, someone else’s quivering body, and then when I heard my father’s breathing come deep and even, I slid away. I got out of bed without creaking the mattress and turned the doorknob like a whisper. I started to run as fast as I could. At the bottom of the stairs, I tripped and hit my head. Blood was running down my face when I flung open the front door and ran into the night, barefoot, no longer sure about anything, including who or what I was supposed to be.

  A policeman found me in a neighbor’s yard early the next morning, and brought me back to the house. He held my hand and rang the doorbell and my father came to answer the door. Daddy was wearing his best suit and even Joley had on a nice Sunday shirt and a button-on tie. “We just called the station,” my father said, beaming. “Damn quick service.” He joked with the policeman and invited him in for coffee. He looked at the cut on my forehead and tried to rub over the dried blood with his finger but I pulled away. “Suit yourself, Jane,” he said. “You can take care of it upstairs.” As I crawled up the steps, with Joley behind me, I heard my father talking to that policeman. “We don’t know what the problem is,” he was saying. “It’s those nightmares.”

  “What did he do, Jane?” Joley asked when I had locked the bathroom door behind us. I wouldn’t tell him, but I let him watch as I cleaned my cut with Bactine. He stripped the Band-Aid for me. It did not surprise me that the cut was the shape of a cross.

  I told Joley I had to pee and pushed him outside. Then I locked the door again and pulled my nightgown over my head. I ripped it into shreds and threw it in the garbage pail. On the back of the door was the full-length mirror Mama used when she got all dressed up to go out. I could hear my father downstairs, laughing. I gazed into the mirror, expecting to find outlined the very parts that I could say I hated—but I was standing tall, thin, arms at my sides. I knew from this alien rhythm in my heart that I had become a different person. I did not understand how, under the circumstances, I could possibly look the same.

  43 JANE

  I’ve told Rebecca she can plan whatever she’d like for our day in Chicago. Me, I don’t much feel in the mood. I didn’t get much sleep last night, and because I screamed through the nightmare, neither did Rebecca. When I woke up she had her arms around me. “Wake up, wake up,” she said over and over. When I came around I did not tell her what my nightmare was about. I said it had to do with the plane crash. And then, in the morning when she was showering, I called Joley.

  After speaking to him I was inclined to drive straight through to Massachusetts. To hell with Joley and his letters; to hell with my problems charting direction. We could be in Massachusetts by tomorrow morning, according to the legend of the U.S. map. In the car, I asked Rebecca what she thought about this. I expected her to jump at the chance: I’d seen her counting the states left to cover when she thought I wasn’t looking. But Rebecca looked at me and her mouth dropped. “After all this, you can’t just quit halfway!”

  “What’s the big deal?” I said. “The point all along was to get to Massachusetts.”

  Rebecca looked at me and her eyes clouded. She settled into her seat, and she crossed her arms over her chest. “Do whatever you want.”

  What could I do? I drove to Chicago. Even if we decided to drive straight through, we still had to go to Chicago.

  My first choice would have been the Art Institute or the Sears Tower Skydeck, but Rebecca opts for the Shedd Aquarium, an octagon of white marble on the edge of Lake Michigan. The brochure Rebecca picks up on the way inside boasts that it is the largest indoor aquarium in the world.

  Rebecca runs ahead to the huge tank in the center of the aquarium, the Caribbean coral reef complete with rays and sharks and sea turtles and eels. She jumps back as a sand shark lunges at a piece of fish in the hand of a diver. “Look at its belly. I bet they always keep it full. Why bother to eat when you aren’t hungry?”

  The shark rips its teeth into the fish, biting it in half. As it takes the second part, it is more gentle. The diver strokes the shark on its nose. It seems to be made of grey rubber.

  Rebecca and I walk through the saltwater exhibits, where fish congregate in bright splashes like kites against an open sky. They come in the most incredible colors; I have always been amazed by this. What is the point of being fuchsia, or lemon, or violet, when you are stuck under the water where no one can see you?

  We pass polka-dotted clownfish and blowfish that puff up like porcupines when the other fish come too close. There are fish here from the Mediterranean and the Arctic Ocean. There are fish here that have traveled the world.

  I am stuck in front of a magenta starfish. I have never seen anything so vivid in my life. “Come look at this,” I tell Rebecca. She stands beside me and mouths, Wow. “Why do you think that leg is shorter?” I ask.

  A passing woman in a white lab coat (marine biologist?) hears me and leans over the small tank. Her breath fogs the window. “Starfish have the power of regeneration. Which means if a leg gets cut off or ripped in some way, they can grow a new one back.”

  “Like newts,” Rebecca says, and the woman nods.

  “I knew that,” I say, primarily to myself. “It has to do with their habitat, tide pools. In a tide pool, waves come and destroy the marine equilibrium every