The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  I realize, suddenly, that everyone is a liar. Memories are like a still life painted by ten different student artists: some will be blue-based; others red; some will be as stark as Picasso and others as rich as Rembrandt; some will be foreshortened and others distant. Recollections are in the eye of the beholder; no two held up side by side will ever quite match.

  In that moment, I want to be with Sophie. I want to take off our shoes and run through the red sand; I want to hang upside down from the monkey bars with her. I want to listen to the jokes she makes without punch lines; I want to feel her sidle closer to me when we come to a street crossing. I want to make new memories instead of search for old ones.

  “I have to go home,” I say abruptly. My mother gets to her feet, but I say I will let myself out. She hesitates, unsure, and then leans forward to kiss me good-bye on the cheek. We don’t quite connect.

  I head through the side gate and walk along the crushed stone path toward my car. I have just unlocked the door when a truck drives up. Victor steps out, and we stare at each other, palpably uncomfortable. “Delia,” he says. “I didn’t do what he said.”

  I look at him, then open my car door.

  “Wait.” He pulls off his baseball cap and holds it in front of him. “I never would have hurt you,” he says earnestly. “Elise couldn’t have children—I knew that—and it was a blessing that she already had one I could share. I know you can’t remember, but I can.”

  He is looking right at me with his solemn, dark eyes; his mouth trembles with his conviction. I try to imagine following him around as he plants, dropping small white stones in mounds around the cacti. I begin to hear, in my mind, the names of some of the flora and fauna in Spanish: el pito, el mapache, el cardo, la garra del Diablo—woodpecker, raccoon, thistle, Devil’s Claw.

  “You were like my daughter, grilla,” he says, uneasy in the silence. “And I loved you like a father, nothing more.”

  Grilla.

  I am watching him plant the lemon tree. I’ve gotten tired of dancing around it. I want to make lemonade, already. How long will it take? I ask him. A while, he answers. I sit 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. He swings me up onto his shoulders. He clasps the backs of my legs, to steady me. His hands are butterflies on the insides of my thighs.

  With trembling fingers, I fumble for the latch of the car door. “Delia?” Victor asks. “Are you all right?”

  “That word: grilla,” I say, my voice coming out a faint whistle. “What does it mean?”

  “Grilla?” Victor repeats. “Cricket. It’s a . . . how do you say . . . term of endearment.”

  From a distance, I feel myself nod.

  * * *

  It’s not a surprise to find Eric asleep; it is only nine in the morning. I find him on the bed inside the trailer, with the empty bottle beside him. He is naked, wrapped partly in a sheet.

  I reach down and pull it off him. He scrambles upright, wincing when the light falls into his bloodshot eyes. “Jesus Christ,” he murmurs. “What are you doing?”

  For a moment, it is three years ago, and this is one of the hundred times that I came into a room to find Eric after a night of drinking. Back then, I would have put on a pot of coffee and dragged him into the shower. Three years ago, I had a whole host of techniques for immediate sobriety. And yet none of them ever got him to react as quickly as the method I employ today. “Eric,” I announce, “I remember.”

  X

  “Memory is the only way home.”

  —Terry Tempest Williams, as quoted in Listen to Their Voices, Chapter 10, by Mickey Pearlman (1993)

  Eric

  Memory has had a spotty record in the United States court system. For a while, recovered memory was all the rage—adults went to therapists, who planted seeds for trauma that didn’t really exist. Hundreds of people came out of the woodwork to accuse child-care workers of abuse and Satanism, and their recollections were allowed as evidence and treated as fact. In the mid-nineties, however, the tide began to turn. Judges steered clear of recovered memories, saying they weren’t valid unless they were supported by independent evidence.

  We happen to be twenty-eight years late for that.

  Still, it’s new evidence, and I’ll be damned if I’m not getting it in. Delia has given me a list of the memories, the ones that are coming fast and furious now that the wire has seemingly been tripped: the lemon tree, in its entirety. A pair of boxers Victor used to own with blue fish printed all over them. Having him sit on the edge of her bed and lift her nightgown to rub her back. Victor asking her to pull down her underwear and touch herself.

  I have to treat it the way I would any other evidence. If I think too hard about it, I want to kill someone.

  I send Emma flowers at the birthing center of the hospital. The card reads “Delia has started to remember the abuse. Consider this notice of my intention to bring these memories into the trial.” Two days later, she moves for a 702 hearing, to address the scientific reliability of the evidence.

  We are in the courtroom, but it’s a closed hearing, just the judge and the attorneys; no media or jury. Emma wears a maternity dress, but it’s pouchy and bunched at the stomach.

  Alison Rebbard, Emma’s expert witness, is a memory expert affiliated with a string of Ivy League universities. She has a thin face accented by pink, wire-rimmed glasses, and she’s used to sitting in a witness box. “Dr. Rebbard,” Emma asks, “how does memory work?”

  “The brain can’t remember everything,” she says. “It just doesn’t have the storage capacity. We forget most of what occurs, including events that were probably significant at the time. Now, the things that do stick . . . well, they aren’t like images on a videotape. Only minimal bits of information are recorded, and when we recall it, our mind automatically fleshes out the recollection by inventing details based on previous similar experiences. Memory is a reconstruction; it’s contaminated by mood and circumstance and a hundred other factors.”

  “So, a memory might change over time?”

  “It most likely will. But interestingly, it seems to retain its mutations. Distortions become part of the memory in subsequent recalls.”

  “Are some memories true, then, while some are false?” Emma asks.

  “Yes. And some are a mixture of books we’ve read or movies we’ve seen. One of my studies, for example, focused on children at a school that was attacked by a sniper. Even the kids who weren’t on school grounds at the time had a recollection of being there during the attack . . . a false memory that was probably inspired by the stories they heard from their friends and on the news.”

  “Dr. Rebbard,” Emma asks, “is there a general agreement about when a child is capable of retaining traumatic memories?”

  “Overall, we say that events that happen before age two won’t be remembered past childhood; and memories before the age of three are rare and unreliable. Most researchers believe that serious abuse after the age of four will be remembered into adulthood.”

  “Delia Hopkins has not been seeing a therapist, but has been experiencing recovered memories,” Emma explains. “Would that surprise you?”

  “Not given what you’ve told me about this case,” Dr. Rebbard says. “The preparation for this trial and the testimony itself would force her to relive hypothetical scenarios. She’s wondering why her father might have taken her; she’s wondering if there was something in her past that might have precipitated it. It’s impossible to tell whether she’s actually remembering these things or if she only wants to remember them. Either way would explain a period of her life she doesn’t understand, and would most likely vindicate her father’s behavior.”

  “I’d like to address the particular memories that Ms. Hopkins claims to have recovered,” Emma says, and I jump up.

  “Objection,” I say, “this hearing is only about admissibility, Your Honor. It would be pr