The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  * * *

  From up here, it’s different. There’s a flimsy railing between me and the rest of the courtroom—this witness stand—but that doesn’t keep their eyes from striking me like hammers. “It was the Saturday before Father’s Day,” I say, looking right at Eric. “Beth was excited, because she’d made me some card with a tie on it at nursery school. When I picked her up, she practically flew out to the car. We had a barbecue and went to the zoo. But then she remembered that she’d forgotten her blanket, the one she slept with. I told her we’d swing by the house and pick it up.”

  “When you got there, what did you see?”

  “There was no answer when I knocked. I went around to the side windows and saw Elise passed out in a puddle of her own vomit in the entryway. Dog feces and urine were all over the floor. And broken glass.”

  I see Emma Wasserstein lean back as Elise taps her on the shoulder. The two women whisper for a moment.

  “What did you do next?” Eric asks, bringing me back to focus.

  “I thought about going in, and cleaning her up, like I’d done a thousand times before. And like a thousand times before, Beth would watch me do it. And one day, she’d be the one taking care of her mother.” I shook my head. “I just couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “There had to have been an alternative,” Eric says, playing Devil’s Advocate.

  “I’d already given her an ultimatum. After our second baby was stillborn, she started drinking so heavily that I couldn’t make excuses for her anymore, and I got her to enroll in a treatment program. She dried out, for a month’s time, and then she was drinking more than ever. Eventually I filed for divorce, but that only took me out of the situation. Not my daughter.”

  “Why didn’t you contact the authorities?”

  “Back then no one believed a father could do as good a job raising a kid as a mother . . . even an alcoholic one. I was afraid if I asked the court for more time with Beth, I’d lose all visitation rights with her.” I look down at the ground. “They weren’t too sympathetic to fathers who had prior convictions; as it was, the only reason I’d gotten as much time with Beth as I had was because Elise hadn’t contested it.”

  “What was the prior conviction for?” Eric asks.

  “I had spent a night in jail after a fight, once.”

  “Who was the person you assaulted?”

  “Victor Vasquez,” I say. “The man Elise wound up marrying.”

  “Can you tell the court why you fought with Victor?”

  I run my thumbnail into a groove of the wood. Now that this moment is here, it’s harder than I thought to make the words come out. “I found out that he was having an affair with my wife,” I say bitterly. “I beat him up pretty badly and Elise called the police.”

  “In light of that incident, you were nervous about asking the authorities to revisit the custody agreement?”

  “Yes. I thought they’d look at the petition and think I was doing it to get back at Elise.”

  “So.” Eric faces the jury. “You’d already tried to get Elise to participate in her own rehabilitation, and it didn’t work. You saw obstacles lying in front of you if you took legal action. What did you do next?”

  “I had run out of options, the way I saw it. I couldn’t leave Bethany there, and I couldn’t let this keep happening. I wanted my daughter to have a normal life—no, a better than normal life. And I thought that maybe if I got her as far away from all of this as I could, we could both start over. I thought maybe she was even young enough to completely forget that this was the way she’d spent the first four years of her life.” I look up at you, watching me with haunted eyes from the gallery. “As it turned out, I was right.”

  “What did you do next?”

  “I took Beth and drove to my condo. I packed as much stuff as I could into the car, and then I started to drive east.”

  Eric guides me through a narrative of flight, a web of lies, an outline of how to reinvent oneself. I answer more of his questions—ones about life in Wexton, ones that dovetail with the spot where he began to overlap with our lives. And then he reaches the end of this act, the one we have practiced. “When you took your daughter, Andrew, did you know what you were doing was against the law?”

  I look at the jury. “Yes.”

  “Can you imagine what would have happened to Delia if you hadn’t taken her away?”

  It is a question Eric’s not expecting to get in, and sure enough, the prosecutor objects.

  “Sustained,” the judge says.

  He has told me that this will be the last question, that he wants to leave the jury thinking about the answer to the question I am not allowed to give. But as Eric heads toward the defense table again, he suddenly stops and pivots. “Andrew?” he asks, as if it is just the two of us, and something he’s wanted to know all along. “If you had the chance, would you change what you did?”

  We haven’t rehearsed this answer, and maybe it’s the only one that really matters. I turn, so that I am staring square at you; so that you know, all my life, anything I’ve ever said or buried beneath silence was just for you. “If I had the chance,” I reply, “I’d do it all over again.”

  IX

  But what do you keep of me?

  The memory of my bones flying up into your hands.

  —Anne Sexton, “The Surgeon”

  Eric

  Maybe I’m not going to lose this case, after all.

  It’s clear Andrew’s broken the law—he has admitted it, as well as a lack of remorse—but he’s got a few sympathetic jurors. One Hispanic woman, who started crying when he talked about Delia growing up, and one older lady with a tight silver perm, who was nodding along with pity. Two, count ’em, two—when it only takes one to hang a jury.

  But then again, Emma Wasserstein hasn’t attacked yet. I sit beside Chris, my nails digging into the armrests of the chair. He leans closer to me. “Fifty bucks says she goes for rage.”

  “Lying,” I murmur back. “She’s got that one in the bag already.”

  The prosecutor walks toward Andrew; I try to will him faith and composure. Do not fuck this up, I think. I can do that myself.

  “For twenty-eight years,” Emma says, “you’ve been lying to your daughter, haven’t you.”

  “Well, technically.”

  “You’ve been lying about who you are.”

  “Yes,” Andrew admits.

  “You’ve been lying about who she is.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve been lying about all aspects of your former life.”

  “Yes.”

  “In fact, Mr. Hopkins, there’s an excellent chance that you’re lying to all of us right now.”

  I feel Chris stuff something stiff into my hand; when I look down, it’s a fifty-dollar bill.

  “I’m not,” Andrew insists. “I have not lied in this courtroom.”

  “Really,” Emma says flatly.

  “Yes, really.”

  “What if I told you I could prove otherwise?”

  Andrew shakes his head. “I’d say you’re mistaken.”

  “You told this court, under oath, that you came home to get a security blanket for your daughter . . . and you found Elise Matthews drunk, lying amidst vomit and broken glass and dog feces. Is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would it surprise anyone in this courtroom to learn that Elise Vasquez is allergic to dogs? That she never owned one, either while you were living with her or anytime afterward?”

  Oh, shit.

  Andrew stares at her. “I never said it was her dog. I’m just telling you what I saw.”

  “Are you, Mr. Hopkins? Or are you telling this court what you want them to see? Are you painting this situation to be worse than it really was, to justify your own heinous actions?”

  “Objection,” I mumble.

  “Withdrawn,” Emma says. “Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt, then; let’s say your memory of the state of the house is flawless, even