The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  “Tomato juice. No ice.”

  The man sitting beside Patrick folds his newspaper. “Tomato juice and vodka,” he says, grinning through his thick Texan drawl. “Yes, ice.”

  They both take a sip of their drinks as the flight attendant moves on. The man glances down at his newspaper and shakes his head. “Ought to fry the sumbitch,” he mutters.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Oh, it’s this murder case. Y’all must have heard about it . . . there’s some fool who wants an eleventh hour pardon from death row because she’s found Jesus. Truth is, the governor’s afraid to give her the cocktail because she’s a woman.”

  Patrick has always been in favor of capital punishment. But he hears himself say, “Seems reasonable.”

  “Guess you’re one of those Yankee left-wingers,” the man scoffs. “Me, I think it don’t matter if you’ve got a pecker or not. You shoot someone in the back of the head at a convenience store, you pay the price. You know?” He shrugs, then finishes his drink. “You flying out on business or pleasure?”

  “Business.”

  “Me, too. I’m in sales. Hav-A-Heart traps,” he confides, as if this is privileged information.

  “I’m a lawyer with the ACLU,” Patrick lies. “I’m flying down to plead that woman’s case to the governor.”

  The salesman goes red in the face. “Well. I didn’t mean no disrespect—”

  “Like hell you didn’t.”

  He folds his newspaper again, and stuffs it into the seat pocket in front of him. “Even you bleeding hearts can’t save them all.”

  “One,” Patrick answers. “That’s all I’m hoping for.”

  • • •

  There is a woman wearing my clothes and my skin and my smell but it isn’t me. Sin is like ink, it bleeds into a person, coloring, making you someone other than you used to be. And it’s indelible. Try as much as you want, you cannot get yourself back.

  Words can’t pull me back from the edge. Neither can daylight. This isn’t something to get over, it is an atmosphere I need to learn to breathe. Grow gills for transgression, take it into my lungs with every gasp.

  It is a startling thing. I wonder who this person is, going through the motions of my life. I want to take her hand.

  And then I want to push her, hard, off a cliff.

  • • •

  Patrick finds himself peeling off layers of clothing as he walks through the streets of Belle Chasse, Louisiana, past wrought-iron gates and ivy-trellised courtyards. Christmas looks wrong in this climate; the decorations seem to be sweating in the humid heat. He wonders how a Louisiana boy like Glen Szyszynski ever survived so far north.

  But he already knows the answer. Growing up among Cajuns and the Creoles wasn’t all that far a stretch from tending to the Acadians in his parish. The proof of that rests in his breast pocket, public records copied by a clerk at the Louisiana Vital Records Registry in New Orleans. Arthur Gwynne, born 10/23/43 to Cecilia Marquette Gwynne and her husband, Alexander Gwynne. Four years later, the marriage of Cecelia Marquette Gwynne, widowed, to Teodor Szyszynski. And in 1951, the birth of Glen.

  Half-brothers.

  Szyszynski’s will was last revised in 1994; it is entirely possible that Arthur Gwynne is no longer a member of the Belle Chasse community. But it is a starting point. Priests don’t go unnoticed in a predominantly Catholic town; if Gwynne had any contact at all with his neighbors, Patrick knows he can pick up a paper trail and track his whereabouts from there. To this end, there is another clue in his pocket, one ripped from the rear of a phone book. Churches. The largest one is Our Lady of Mercy.

  He doesn’t let himself think what he will do with the information, once he gets it.

  Patrick turns the corner, and the cathedral comes into view. He jogs up the stone steps and enters the nave. Immediately in front of him is a pool of Holy Water. Flickering candles cast waves on the walls, and the reflection from a stained-glass window bleeds a brilliant puddle on the mosaic floor. Above the altar, a cypress carving of Jesus on the cross looms like an omen.

  It smells of Catholicism: beeswax and starch and darkness and peace, all of which bring Patrick back to his youth. He finds himself unconsciously making the sign of the cross as he slides into a pew at the rear of the building.

  Four women nod their heads in prayer, their faith settling softly around them, like the skirts of Confederate belles. Another sobs quietly into her hands while a priest comforts her in whispers. Patrick waits patiently, running his hands along the bright, polished wood and whistling under his breath.

  Suddenly the hair stands up on the back of his neck. Walking along the lip of the pew behind him is a cat. Its tail strokes Patrick on the nape again, and he lets out his breath in a rush. “You scared the hell out of me,” he murmurs, and then glances at the carving of Jesus. “The heck,” he amends.

  The cat blinks at him, then leaps with grace into the arms of the priest who has come up beside Patrick. “You know better,” the priest scolds.

  It takes Patrick a moment to realize the cleric is speaking to his kitten. “Excuse me. I’m trying to locate a Father Arthur Gwynne.”

  “Well.” The man smiles. “You found me.”

  • • •

  Every time Nathaniel tries to see his mother, she’s sleeping. Even when it’s light outside; even when it’s time for Franklin on Nickelodeon. Leave her alone, his father says. It’s what she wants. But Nathaniel doesn’t think that’s what his mother wants at all. He thinks about how sometimes in the middle of the night he wakes up dreaming of spiders under his skin and screams that don’t go away, and the only thing that keeps him from running out of the room is how dark it is and how far it seems from his bed to the door.

  “We have to do something,” Nathaniel tells his father, after it has been three days, and his mother is still asleep.

  But his father’s face squeezes up at the top, like it does when Nathaniel is yelling too loud while he’s having his hair washed and the sound bounces around the bathroom. “There’s nothing we can do,” he tells Nathaniel.

  It’s not true. Nathaniel knows this. So when his father goes outside to put the trash cans at the end of the driveway (Two minutes, Nathaniel . . . you can sit here and be good for two minutes, can’t you?) Nathaniel waits until he can no longer hear the scratch-drag on the gravel and then bolts upstairs to his bedroom. He overturns his garbage can to use as a stool and takes what he needs from his dresser. He twists the knob to his parents’ room quietly, tiptoes inside as if the floor is made of cotton.

  It takes two tries to turn on the reading lamp near his mother’s side of the bed, and then Nathaniel crawls on top of the covers. His mother isn’t there at all, just the great swollen shape under the blankets that doesn’t even move when he calls her name. He pokes at it, frowns. Then he pulls away the sheet.

  The Thing That Isn’t His Mother moans and squints in the sudden light.

  Her hair is wild and matted, like the brown sheep at the petting zoo. Her eyes look like they’ve fallen too deep in her face, and grooves run the length of her mouth. She smells of sadness. She blinks once at Nathaniel, as if he might be something she remembers but can’t quite fish to the front of her mind. Then she pulls the blankets over her head again and rolls away from him.

  “Mommy?” Nathaniel whispers, because this place cries for quiet. “Mommy, I know what you need.”

  Nathaniel has been thinking about it, and he remembers what it felt like to be stuck in a dark, dark place and not be able to explain it. And he also remembers what she did, back then, for him. So he takes the sign-language binder he got from Dr. Robichaud and slips it under the blankets, into his mother’s hands.

  He holds his breath while her hands trace the edges and rifle through the pages. There is a sound Nathaniel has never heard before—like the world opening up at the start of an earthquake, or maybe a heart breaking—and the binder slips from beneath the sheets, cracking open onto the floor. Suddenly the comforter r