The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

When he rounds on me, angry, it is so unlike the Fitz I know that I find myself shrinking back against the passenger seat. “For God’s sake, Delia, I just drove six hundred miles for you, and you weren’t even technically speaking to me.”

  Heat rises to my cheeks. “I’m sorry. I thought . . .”

  “What? That I have nothing better to do? That I don’t have a life? That I might not spend all that time with you wishing I was doing this?” His hands lock on each side of my face and he pulls me forward, like gravity. When his mouth seals over mine it is brutal, bitter. The stubble of beard on his face leaves a mark on my skin, raw and shaped like regret.

  He isn’t Eric, and so our lips don’t move in a familiar rhythm. He isn’t Eric, and so our teeth grit against each other. He holds the back of my head, as if he is afraid I will break away. My heart beats so hard I begin to feel it in forgotten places: behind my eyes, at the base of my throat, between my legs.

  “Mommy?”

  Fitz immediately releases me, and we both turn around to see Sophie watching us curiously from her car seat. “Oh, Jesus,” he murmurs.

  “Sophie, honey,” I say quickly, “you’re having a dream.” I fumble for the door latch and step out of the car, then reach into the back and haul my daughter into my arms. “Isn’t it funny, the things we think we see when we’re sleeping?”

  She sinks into my shoulder, boneless, as Greta bounds out of the car. By now, Fitz is standing outside, too. “Delia—”

  A light goes on in the trailer, and the door opens. Eric, bare-chested and wearing boxers, comes down the aluminum stairs. He takes Sophie out of my arms, a transaction of commerce.

  Before we can say anything to each other, the sound of Fitz’s car engine slices the night in half. He peels away, leaving a cloud of dust and grit in his wake.

  “Ruthann’s sister called to see if you got home,” Eric says quietly, so that he doesn’t wake Sophie. “She told me what happened.” I follow him up the steps, wait to answer until he has laid Sophie down in our bed and pulled up the covers. He closes the door to the tiny bedroom and then puts his hands on my shoulders. “You all right?”

  I would like to tell him about the Hopi reservation, where the very ground you are standing on might crumble beneath your feet. I’d like to tell him that an owl can spell out the future. I’d like to explain what it looks like to watch someone fall twenty stories and to see, at the same time, a storm in the shape of her body begin to climb into the sky.

  I’d like to apologize.

  But instead I find myself going to pieces. Eric sits down on the floor of the trailer with me in his arms. He lets me keep all my words to myself.

  “Dee,” he says after a while, “will you promise me something?”

  I draw away, wondering if he, like Sophie, saw what had happened in the car. “What?”

  He swallows hard. “That I won’t wind up like your mother.”

  My heart cinches. “You won’t start drinking again, Eric.”

  “I wasn’t talking about alcoholism,” he says. “I was talking about losing you.”

  Eric kisses me so tenderly that it unravels me. I kiss him back, trying to find the same depth of faith. I kiss him back, although I can still taste Fitz, like a stolen candy tucked high against my cheek, sweet when I least expect it.

  VII

  “I have done it,” says my memory.

  “I cannot have done it,” says my pride,

  refusing to budge. In the end—my

  memory yields.

  —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, “Fourth Part: Maxims and Interludes”

  Andrew

  “Drink this,” Concise says, and he holds up a bottle of shampoo.

  I look at him as if he is crazy. “No way. It’ll make me sick.”

  “Well, sure it will, fool. Everyone wants to know where that bullet went. You ain’t gonna wait for it to come out the other end.”

  In the wake of the fight in the rec yard, Sticks has been sent to the hospital for ophthalmological surgery, the blow dart embedded deep in his eye. He’ll be sequestered for a disciplinary stint, but eventually he’ll be back, and we will pick up where we left off.

  Taking the shampoo bottle out of Concise’s hand, I swallow half the contents. A moment later I charge for the toilet in the cell, bracing my hands on the bowl.

  “No, it’ll go down the sewer!” Concise grabs my shoulders and pivots me so that I vomit into the stainless-steel bowl of the sink. The bullet hits the drain with a ping.

  “That,” Concise says, grinning, “is fuh sheezy.” He reaches under the bunks and tosses me a towel.

  It is when I turn around to catch it that I notice Fetch lurking outside our cell. A gangly stickbug of a kid, with White Pride tattoos curled around his biceps like asps, he’s one of Sticks’s posse. And he’s been watching every move we’ve made.

  “Yo, cracker,” Concise calls out. “You want to squeal to Sticks, we got a message for him.” He points his finger at Fetch, a makeshift gun. “Bang,” he says.

  * * *

  In this jail, the whites control the inflow of hard drugs, and in our pod, the contact for goods is Sticks. Concise and his hooch are small-time runners by comparison. The drugs get smuggled in off the streets. They’re offered to the members of the Aryan Brotherhood upstairs in close custody first, then whites in general populations, and finally to other races. Money is exchanged by acquaintances on the outside—any massive transfer of funds in jail accounts would immediately trigger suspicion from the DOs.

  Sticks, now wearing a patch over his left eye, has just come in from an AA meeting, a prime place to make deals. It has been two weeks since the incident in the rec yard, but that might as well be yesterday in jail. He walks toward my stool and kicks it. “You’re in my way,” he says.

  “I’m not in your way.”

  Sticks shoves me three feet forward. “You’re in my way,” he repeats.

  Concise and Blue Loc are a sudden, implacable wall. They stand with their arms crossed, their muscles dark and flexed. Outnumbered, Sticks backs off.

  Concise and I walk up the stairs side by side. We don’t speak until we have turned the corner on the landing. “What he say to you?” Concise asks.

  “Nothing.”

  We both stop dead in the entryway to our cell. The entire space has been tossed—towels flung into the toilet, food stores emptied, bottles of Concise’s hooch opened and spilled in puddles across the floor. One of our mattresses has been ripped in half, small tumbleweeds of yellowed foam are all over the floor.

  “Sticks and his peckerwood buddies did this,” Concise says. “You know what they were lookin’ for,” he adds, and it isn’t a question.

  For the first time that day, I stop doubting Concise—who has insisted that the bullet cannot be left hidden in our cell, who would not listen to my protests when I told him I absolutely, positively, was not going to do what he suggested I do. For the first time that day I am fully aware of the small metal missile I pushed deep inside of me that morning, a suppository full of vengeance.

  * * *

  To become a member of a prison gang, you might as well start in jail. Prospective members of the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mau Mau, and the Mexican Mafia—or EME, as they call themselves—are recommended by made members. A yes vote, taken among other members, lets you in on probation. Probates are subject to a background check—no crimes against children, no being a source for anyone in law enforcement—and you are given a sponsor, a member who takes you under his wing.

  For the Aryan Brotherhood, a probate has to prove himself for two years. You will be expected to keep weapons hidden with you. You will be asked to fight. You will be expected to ferry drugs from one place to another. If you have drug connections, you will be expected to supply the members. If you make money from any of this, you have to share it with everyone.

  At the end of two years, you will be assigned a hit—a murder sanctioned by the governing force of your gang. For the Ary