The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Fitz had listened to me speak a truth we’d taken great pains never to utter out loud, plus a newer, magnificent, frightening one. I can’t do this alone, I told him.

  He had looked at my belly, still flat. You aren’t.

  There was no denying Eric’s magnetism, but that afternoon I realized that, united, Fitz and I were a force to be reckoned with as well. And when I left his apartment armed with the knowledge of what I was going to have to say to Eric, I remembered what I had written down during that backlit summer when I was trying to guess the rest of my life. I’d been embarrassed setting the words to paper, had folded it three times so Fitz and Eric wouldn’t see. Me—a tomboy who spent hours in the company of boys pretending to be a swashbuckling privateer, or an archaeologist searching for relics, a girl who had been the damsel in distress only once, and even then had rescued herself—I had written only a single wild wish. One day, I’d written, I will be a mother.

  * * *

  As one of Wexton’s three attorneys, Eric does real estate transfers and wills and the occasional divorce, but he’s done a little trial work, too—representing defendants charged with DUI and petty thefts. He usually wins, which is no surprise to me. After all, more than once I have been a jury of one, and I’ve always managed to be persuaded.

  Case in point: my wedding. I was perfectly happy to sign a marriage certificate at the courthouse. But then Eric suggested that a big party wasn’t such a bad idea, and before I knew what had happened, I was buried in a pile of brochures for reception venues, and band tapes, and price lists from florists.

  I’m sitting on the living room floor after dinner, swatches of fabric covering my legs like a patchwork quilt. “Who cares whether the napkins are blue or teal?” I complain. “Isn’t teal really just blue on steroids, anyway?”

  I hand him a stack of photo albums; we are supposed to find ten of Eric and ten of me as an introductory montage to the wedding video. He cracks the first one open, and there’s a picture of Eric and Fitz and me rolled fat as sausages in our snowsuits, peeking out from the entrance of a homemade igloo. I’m between the two boys; it’s like that in most of the photos.

  “Look at my hair,” Eric laughs. “I look like Dorothy Hamill.”

  “No, I look like Dorothy Hamill. You look like a portobello mushroom.”

  In the next two albums I pick up, I am older. There are fewer pictures of us as a trio, and more of Eric and me, with Fitz sprinkled in. Our senior prom picture: Eric and I, and then Fitz in his own snapshot with a girl whose name I can’t recall.

  One night when we were fifteen we told our parents we were going on a school-sponsored overnight and instead climbed to the top of Dartmouth’s Baker Library bell tower to watch a meteor shower. We drank peach schnapps stolen from Eric’s parents’ liquor cabinet and watched the stars play tag with the moon. Fitz fell asleep holding the bottle and Eric and I waited for the cursive of comets. Did you see that one? Eric asked. When I couldn’t find the falling star, he took my hand and guided my finger. And then he just kept holding on.

  By the time we climbed down at 4:30 A.M., I had had my first kiss, and it wasn’t the three of us anymore.

  Just then my father comes into the room. “I’m headed upstairs to watch Leno,” he says. “Lock up, okay?”

  I glance up. “Where are my baby pictures?”

  “In the albums.”

  “No . . . these only go back to when I’m four or five.” I sit up. “It would be nice to have your wedding picture, too, for the video.”

  I have the only photo of my mother that is on display in this house. She is on the cusp of smiling, and you cannot look at it without wondering who made her happy just then, and how.

  My father looks down at the ground, and shakes his head a little. “Well, I knew it was going to happen sometime. Come on, then.”

  Eric and I follow him to his bedroom and sit down on the double bed, on the side where he doesn’t sleep. From the closet, my father takes down a tin with a Pepsi-Cola logo stamped onto the front. He dumps the contents onto the covers between Eric and me—dozens of photographs of my mother, draped in peasant skirts and gauze blouses, her black hair hanging down her back like a river. A wedding portrait: my mother in a belled white dress; my father trussed in his tuxedo, looking like he might bolt at any second. Photos of me, wrapped tight as a croissant, awkwardly balanced in my mother’s arms. And one of my mother and father on an ugly green couch with me between them, a bridge made of dimpled flesh, of blended blood.

  It is like visiting another planet when you only have one roll of film to record it, like coming to a banquet after a hunger strike—there is so much here that I have to consciously keep myself from racing through, before it all disappears. My face gets hot, as if I’ve been slapped. “Why were you hiding these?”

  He takes one photograph out of my hand and stares at it long enough for me to believe he has completely forgotten that Eric and I are in the room. “I tried keeping a few of the pictures out,” my father explains, “but you kept asking when she was coming home. And I’d pass them, and stop, and lose ten minutes or a half hour or a half day. I didn’t hide them because I didn’t want to look at them, Delia. I hid them because that was all I wanted to do.” He puts the wedding picture back in the tin and scatters the rest on top. “You can have them,” my father tells me. “You can have them all.”

  He leaves us sitting in the near dark in his bedroom. Eric touches the photograph on the top as if it is as delicate as milkweed. “That,” he says quietly. “That’s what I want with you.”

  * * *

  It’s the ones I don’t find that stay with me. The teenage boy who jumped off the Fairlee-Orford train bridge into the Connecticut River one frigid March; the mother from North Conway who vanished with a pot still boiling on the stove and a toddler in the playpen; the baby snatched out of a car in the Strafford post office parking lot while her sitter was inside dropping off a large package. Sometimes they stand behind me while I’m brushing my teeth; sometimes they’re the last thing I see before I go to sleep; sometimes, like now, they leave me restless in the middle of the night.

  There is a thick fog tonight, but Greta and I have trained enough in this patch of land to know our way by heart. I sit down on a mossy log while Greta sniffs around the periphery. Above me, something dangles from a branch, full and round and yellow.

  I am little, and he has just finished planting a lemon tree in our backyard. I am dancing around it. I want to make lemonade, but there isn’t any fruit because the tree is just a baby. How long will it take to grow one? I ask. A while, he tells me. I sit myself down in front of it to watch. I’ll wait. He comes over and takes my hand. Come on, grilla, he says. If we’re going to sit here that long, we’d better get something to eat.

  There are some dreams that get stuck between your teeth when you sleep, so that when you open your mouth to yawn awake they fly right out of you. But this feels too real. This feels like it has actually happened.

  I’ve lived in New Hampshire my whole life. No citrus tree could bear a climate like ours, where we have not only White Christmases but also White Halloweens. I pull down the yellow ball: a crumbling sphere made of birdseed and suet.

  What does grilla mean?

  * * *

  I am still thinking about this the next morning after taking Sophie to school, and spend an extra ten minutes walking around, from the painting easel to the blocks to the bubble station, to make up for my shoddy behavior yesterday. I’ve planned on doing a training run with Greta that morning, but I’m sidetracked by the sight of my father’s wallet on the floor of my Expedition. He’d taken it out a few nights ago to fill the tank with gas; the least I can do is swing by the senior center to give it back.

  I pull into the parking lot and open the back hatch. “Stay,” I tell Greta, who whumps her tail twice. She has to share her seat with emergency rescue equipment, a large cooler of water, and several different harnesses and leashes.

  Suddenly I