The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “I do not say your mother’s name like it’s covered in blankets. And I don’t always give her my french fries, because you’re right, she doesn’t share.”

  “But you still don’t yell at her when she’s not being fair,” Sophie points out. “Because you don’t want to hurt her feelings.” She slips her hand into mine and repeats, “You love her.”

  She runs toward the playground without me. It has been so long since I was Sophie’s age that I’ve forgotten there are building blocks of love, and that the very bottom layer is comfort. When I was little, who was I most myself with? Who could I trust with my mistakes, my dreams, my history? My parents, my nursery school teacher. Delia, Eric. These were the first people I fell for.

  Could it still really be that simple? Could romantic love and platonic love and parental love all be different facets of the same diamond—brilliant, no matter which face is turned up to the sun?

  No, because I am not Sophie’s age. No, because I know what it is to hear a woman sigh off the cloak of this world the moment she drifts asleep; no, because I have fallen into the meadow of her body. No, because puzzling through my sixth-grade math homework one day I realized that what Delia felt for Eric was not what Delia felt for me, and that this equation was not an equal sign, but a greater than.

  I wonder if maybe Sophie knows me better than I know myself. I do hold the word Delia balanced lightly on my tongue, as if it is made up of butterflies. I would give her every last one of my french fries. I have kissed her, whenever the opportunity was socially acceptable. And even though it isn’t fair, I haven’t blamed her for not loving me. But here’s where Sophie is wrong: It’s not because I don’t want to hurt Delia’s feelings.

  It’s because when she is bruised, I’m the one who aches.

  * * *

  I’m dragging my proverbial feet, or at least the brake of the rental car, the whole way back to Delia’s trailer. It is ridiculous to think I can avoid her forever. Maybe she’ll want to pretend that kiss never happened. Maybe I can just apologize and we can go on making believe.

  But when I pull up, her car is missing. Sophie gets out of the backseat and hurries up the steps to the trailer. I hesitate for a moment, but before I can make a clean getaway, Eric walks outside and holds up a hand in greeting.

  He looks like hell. His eyes are ringed with dark circles; his clothes appear to have been slept in. “Listen, Fitz,” he says, “about the other day . . .”

  I stand, poleaxed. Did Delia tell him?

  He sighs. “It wasn’t my place to tell Delia you were writing a newspaper story about her father’s trial.”

  By comparison, that transgression seems a thousand light-years away, and far less damning. “I’m sorry, too,” I say, speaking of a different mistake. I fumble with the latch of the car door.

  “Do you forgive me for being a dick?”

  “Already have.”

  “Then why are you running out of here faster than Jesse Helms at a Gay Pride parade?”

  “It isn’t you,” I admit.

  “Ah.” Eric walks toward the car. “Then it must have something to do with the way Delia ran out of here with Greta.”

  “Faster than Jesse Helms?”

  “Faster than Trent Lott at an Ebony magazine get-together.” Eric grins. “What are you two fighting about?”

  You, I think. When you think about the way the three of us have woven our lives together, Eric is the knot at the center. I’m terrified to work it free; I just might discover I’ve unraveled everything else.

  I can still see him looking down at me from the crest of the oak in his backyard, crowing because he’d made it to the top first. I can hear his voice over the matchstick strike of rain on the roof of our clubhouse, swearing that the homeless guy who lived in the culvert near the Wilder Dam turned into the Devil at night. I can feel the strength of him, clapping me on the back the first time we saw each other on break from college. I can see the way his eyes shine, when Delia’s face is what’s reflected back in them.

  I would never ask Delia to choose between Eric and me, because I could never choose between the two of them.

  “I’m just tired,” I say finally. “Headache.”

  Eric heads back to the trailer. “Come on in. I’ll find you some aspirin.”

  Sighing, I follow him into the trailer. Sophie is in the bedroom, playing ventriloquist for a batch of Barbies and Kens. The small table in the kitchen is piled high with paperwork. “I don’t know how I’m going to be ready in time for tomorrow morning,” Eric murmurs. “Some Wexton Farms seniors are flying in today, they’re character witnesses. I’m supposed to pick them up at the airport.” He looks at me. “Rock, paper, scissors?”

  With a sigh, I nod, and ball my hand into a fist. “Rock, paper, scissors, shoot,” we say simultaneously, and I throw paper while Eric throws scissors.

  “You always throw scissors,” I complain.

  “Then why the hell do you always throw paper?” He offers a grateful smile. “It’s USAir, and it lands at three. And you’re going to need six wheelchairs.”

  “You owe me,” I say.

  “Yeah, what’s my tally up to . . . seventy-five billion and six?”

  “Give or take.” I walk around the table, trailing my hand over the paperwork. Words jump out at me: hostile witness, assailant, provocation. Two definitions are scrawled in marker across a legal pad: Lie: to deceive. Lie: to be in a helpless or defenseless state.

  “Andrew’s in pretty bad shape,” Eric confides.

  I glance up. “So’s Delia.”

  “Yeah.” He meets my gaze. “Did she tell you why she left for the Hopi reservation in the first place?”

  I draw in a breath. “It didn’t come up.”

  “She got angry, because I hadn’t told her something her father told me in confidence. And the thing is, Fitz, it’s just going to get worse during the trial. I’m going to have to do stuff and say things that she’s not going to want to hear.”

  “She’ll forgive you, when it’s all over,” I say woodenly.

  “If Andrew’s acquitted,” Eric qualifies. “I’ve spent my whole life thinking that one of these days, my luck is going to run out. That one of these days Delia is going to open her eyes and realize that I’m not the guy she thinks, but just some loser who can’t get his act together. What if today’s that day?”

  I try to draw an answer out of the heart of me, but can’t. “I’m going to look for that aspirin,” I manage, and I walk into the bathroom.

  I close the door behind me and sit down on the lid of the toilet. If I didn’t have a headache to begin with, I’m certainly developing one now. I stand up and rummage through the medicine cabinet, which is a whole different kind of pain: Here are Delia’s antiperspirant, her toothbrush, her birth control pills. Here is a layer of intimacy I haven’t been granted.

  There are no bottles of aspirin, so I find myself kneeling down under the sink and tearing apart the cabinet beneath it. Shampoo, Sophie’s rubber duck, witch hazel. Pine Sol and Vaseline and suntan lotion. A soft stacked fortress of toilet paper rolls.

  That’s when I see the whiskey. I reach deep into the cabinet and pull out the half-empty bottle that has been wedged into the corner. I carry it out of the bathroom in the crook of my elbow. Eric sits at the table, his back to me. “You find it?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I did.” I lean over his shoulder and set the bottle down on top of a file folder.

  Eric freezes. “It’s not what you think.”

  I sit down across from him. “No? Then what’s it for? Lighting the barbecue? Stripping wallpaper?”

  He gets up and closes the bedroom door, where Sophie is playing. “You have no idea what trying this case is like. And when Delia left . . . I just couldn’t handle it anymore. I’m terrified of screwing up, Fitz.” He spears the fingers of one hand through his hair. “Andrew nearly got killed while I was off on my little bender,” he says. “Believe me, that was enough to sober me up fast. It