The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  By the time the baby is three months, you can really start to see that it is a baby. An oversized head, transparent, carries thin blood vessels to the black hooded eye. Stick-figure arms and webbed fingers and Indian-crossed legs stick out from the body, which is little more than a spine. “When do you start to look pregnant?” Rebecca asks.

  “It depends on the person,” I tell her, “and I think it depends on whether you are having a boy or a girl. I didn’t show until about three months.”

  “But it’s so tiny. There’s nothing to see.”

  “Babies seem to carry a lot of extra baggage. When I was pregnant with you, I had been doing a practicum towards a masters as a speech pathologist at an elementary school. And back then you weren’t allowed to teach and be pregnant. Well, you were allowed, but it wasn’t common practice, and you’d certainly be out of a job when you gave birth. So I kept getting bigger and bigger and to hide the pregnancy I wore these hideous tie-dyed caftans. All the faculty kept telling me, ‘Jane, you know, you’re putting on a little weight,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I don’t know what I can do about it.’ I’d run out of faculty meetings and student consultations to throw up. I told everyone I kept contracting different strains of the flu.”

  Rebecca turns around, fascinated with this story of herself. “And then what?”

  “School ended,” I shrug. “I had you in July, two weeks after school was finished. I still had six months of student teaching to do in the fall, so your father took care of you. And then, when I finished, I stayed home with you till you went to nursery school, when I continued my course work and graduated.”

  “Daddy stayed home with me for six months?” she says. “Alone?” I nod. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Actually, I’d forgotten.”

  “Did we get along? I mean, like, did he know how to change diapers and stuff?”

  I laugh. “Yes. He knew how to change diapers. He also burped you and bathed you and held you over his back upside-down from your ankles.”

  “You let him do that?”

  “It was the only way you’d stop crying.”

  Rebecca smiles shyly. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She points to the seven-month fetus, complete with tiny toes and a nose and a bud of a penis. “Now that’s a baby,” she says. “That’s the way they are supposed to look.”

  “They get bigger. You’d think natural selection would have found an easier way of reproduction. Childbirth is like trying to get a piano through your nostril.”

  “Is that why I don’t have a brother or sister?” Rebecca asks.

  We’ve never talked about this. She’s never asked, and we didn’t volunteer. There’s no real reason we didn’t have any other children. Maybe because the plane crash scared us. Maybe because we were a little too busy. “We didn’t need any other kids,” I say. “We got it perfect the first time.”

  Rebecca smiles again, looking like Oliver in this dismal light. “You’re just saying that.”

  “Yeah, in fact, your father and I have already willed you to this exhibit. For the extra cash. Three weeks—three months—seven months—fifteen years!”

  Rebecca throws her arms around me. As she speaks I can feel her chin, shaped exactly like mine, pressing into my shoulder. “I love you,” she says, plain and simple.

  The first time Rebecca said she loved me I burst into tears. She was four and I had just rubbed her dry with a towel after a romp in the snow. She was very matter-of-fact about it. I am sure she does not remember but I could tell you that she was wearing red Oshkosh overalls, that there were hexagonal snowflakes caught in her eyelashes, that her socks had come off, bunched and burrowing in the toes of her boots.

  This is why I became a mother, isn’t it? No matter how long you have to wait for her to understand where you come from, no matter how many bouts of appendicitis or stitches you have to suffer through, no matter how many times you feel you are losing her, this makes it all worth it. Over Rebecca’s shoulder there are brains of monkeys and eyes of goats. There is a thick brown liver curled inside a glass cylinder. And there is a line of hearts, arranged in order of size: mouse, guinea pig, cat, sheep, Saint Bernard, cow. The human, I think, rests somewhere in the middle.

  48 OLIVER

  They have two tapes at the Blue Diner in Boston—the Meat Puppets and Don Henley, and they alternate them over and over, the entire twenty-four hours that they remain open. I know because I have been here at least that long, having noticed the same waitresses repeating their shifts. I can sing most of the words from each tape. I have to confess I had never heard of either, and I’ve been wondering if Rebecca knows them.

  “Don Henley,” Rasheen—the waitress—says, refilling my coffee cup. “You know. From the Eagles. Ring a bell?”

  I shrug, singing along with the tape. “You’ve got that down,” Rasheen says, laughing. From the greasy grill, Hugo, the short-order cook who is missing a thumb, cheers. “You got a nice voice, Oliver, you know?”

  “Well.” I stir in a packet of sugar. “I’m known for my songs.”

  “No shit,” Rasheen says. “Wait, let me guess. I got it. Blues. You’re one of those white-bread trumpet players who thinks he’s Wynton Marsalis.”

  “You got me. I can’t keep anything from you.”

  I have been on this stool, at the Blue Diner on Kneeland, for so long now that I am not certain I could use my legs to stand. I could certainly have taken a room at the Four Seasons or the Park Plaza Hotel, but I haven’t been overcome with the desire to sleep. In fact I haven’t slept since I left Iowa, three and a half days ago, and drove continuously through to Boston. I would have gone straight to Stow, but in all truth, I’m terrified. She is a supernatural force with which I have to reckon. No, scratch that. She isn’t the problem at all. I am the problem. But it is easier to blame Jane. I have been doing it for so long that it is the first explanation to spring to mind.

  The Blue Diner management has been kind to me, neglecting to report me to the authorities for loitering. Perhaps they can see I am a distressed man by my rumpled suit jacket, or the circles beneath my eyes. Perhaps they can tell by the way I eat my food—three meals a day, the specials, reassembled in geometrical patterns on my plate until Rasheen or Lola or pretty Tallulah decides it is cold enough to take back to the kitchen. When anyone will listen, I talk about Jane. Sometimes when no one is listening I talk anyway, hoping my words will find an audience.

  It is almost time for Rasheen to go home, which means Mica (short for Monica) comes on. I have begun to tell the time by the arrivals and departures of the Blue Diner staff. Mica is the late-night waitress; a dental hygiene student by day. She is the only one who has actually asked me questions. When I told her the story of Jane’s exodus, she propped her elbows against the speckled white countertop and rested her cheeks in her hands.

  “I got to go now, Oliver,” Rasheen says, pulling on an army-surplus jacket. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Just as she is walking out the door Mica blows in in a flurry of paper, pink uniform, and leatherette coat. “Oliver!” she says, surprised to see me. “I was hoping you’d be gone by now. Couldn’t sleep last night?”

  I shake my head. “I didn’t even try.”

  Mica waves to Hugo, who, oddly enough, doesn’t seem to sleep either. He has been here the same length of time as I. She pulls up a stool beside me and grabs a Danish from beneath a scratched plastic dome. “You know, I was thinking about you during lecture today, and I think Jane would be very impressed. From what you’ve said, I think you’re a changed man.”

  “I’d like to believe that,” I say. “Unfortunately, I haven’t the same conviction as you.”

  “Don’t you just love the way he talks.” Mica says this to nobody in particular. “It’s like you’re British or something.”

  “Or something,” I say. Although she’s asked, I’ve refused to tell her anything about my life with the exception of the fact that I come from Sa