The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  She catches me so off guard that I don’t stop her in time from pulling the quilt back from her chest. When she sees her sores on her chest, arms and legs, she gasps. Her hands, trembling, reach out for something. They find me. “When Hadley fell, you tried to climb down after him. You wouldn’t stop.” I take a deep breath, feeling my voice catch. “You kept saying you were trying to tear your heart out.”

  Rebecca turns her face so that she is looking out the window. It is dark now, and all she will see is the reflection of her own pain. “I don’t know why I bothered,” she whispers. “You’d already done that.”

  I used to think, before this whole incident, that parental love was supposed to be unconditional. I believed that Rebecca would naturally be tied to me because I had been the one to bring her into the world. I didn’t connect this with my own experience. When I could not love my father, I assumed there was something wrong with me. But when they carried Rebecca in here from the stretcher of the ambulance, I came to see things differently. If you want to love a parent you have to understand the incredible investment he or she has in you. If you are a parent, and you want to be loved, you have to deserve it.

  Suddenly I am dizzy with guilt. “What do you want me to say, Rebecca?”

  Rebecca will not look at me. “Why do you want me to forgive you? What do you get out of it?”

  Absolution, I think, the first word that comes to my mind. I get to protect you from what I went through. “Why do I want you to forgive me? Because I never forgave my father, and I know what it will do to you. When I was growing up my father would hit me. He hit me and he hit my mother and I tried to keep him from hitting Joley. He broke my heart, and eventually he broke me. I never believed I could be anything important. Why else would my father hurt me?” I smile, wringing her hand. “Then I forgot about it. I married Oliver and three years later he hit me. That’s when I left the first time.”

  Rebecca pulls her hand away. “The plane crash,” she says.

  “I went back to him because of you. I knew that more than anything else I had to make sure you grew up feeling safe. And then I hit your father, and it all came back again.” I swallow, reliving that scene on the stairs in San Diego. The whale papers fluttering around my ankles. Oliver cursing at me. “This time it was part of me,” I say. “No matter how far I run. No matter how many states and countries I cross, I can’t get it out of myself. I never forgave him, because I thought that way I would have the last laugh. But he won. He’s in me.”

  When she tries to sit up gain, I don’t stop her. I start to tell her about Sam. I let her know what it was like to give the stars we saw from the bedroom window the names of our ancestors. How he could finish the very thoughts I was thinking. “I didn’t believe anyone else could feel the way I did. Including—especially my daughter.”

  I move to the edge of the bed, pulling the quilt back over her chest. I take her hand, counting her fingers. “I did this when you were a baby. Making sure there were ten. I wanted you to be healthy. I didn’t care if you were a boy or a girl. At least I said I didn’t. But it mattered. I used to hope I’d have a little girl, someone just like me. Someone I could go shopping with, and teach to wear makeup, and dress for the senior prom. But I wish now you hadn’t been a girl. Because we get hurt. It happens over and over.”

  We stare at each other for a long time, my daughter and me. In the dim light of a sixty-watt bulb, I start to notice things about her that I have never seen. Everyone has always told me she looks like Oliver. I even thought she looked like Oliver. But here, and now, she has my eyes. Not the color, not the shape, but the demeanor—and isn’t that the most remarkable feature? This is my child. There is no denying it.

  When I am looking at her, all of my decisions come clear. Love, I think, has very little to do with Sam, with Oliver, with Hadley. What it all boils down to is me. What it all boils down to is Rebecca. It is knowing that the memories I pass down to her will keep me from feeling pain the next time. It is knowing that she has stories of her own for me.

  “Sometimes I cannot believe you are only fifteen,” I say. I pull back the quilt from my daughter’s chest and peel off the strips of gauze. In some places she starts to bleed again. Maybe this is good. Maybe something needs to be let out. I hold my hands across her chest, over her breasts. Her blood slips between my fingers. I want so much to heal.

  68 OLIVER

  I have one strong lasting image of you, Jane. It was the morning after our wedding night, and you looked lost in the large, king-size bed at the Hotel Meridien in Boston. I awakened before the five o’clock wake-up call just for the chance to watch you with all your defenses down. You have always been so lovely when you stop resisting. It is your face that I remember the most: alabaster, honest, the face of a child. You were a child.

  You had never been abroad, do you remember? and you were so looking forward to Amsterdam, Copenhagen. But then came the phone call from Provincetown, about several beached whales that were stranded on the shores of Ogunquit. When the telephone rang, you rolled towards me. “Is it time?” you whispered, twining your arms around my hips, playing at this world of adults.

  I decided to simply tell you the truth. Perhaps in retrospect I see that I embellished the plight of these whales to be in more dire straits than could be considered strictly truthful. But you surprised me. You did not frown, or sigh, or show evidence of regret. You began to get dressed in an old pair of jeans and a sweatshirt—not at all the pretty pink suit of which you’d been so proud, your going-away outfit. “Come on, Oliver,” you said to me. “We’ve got to get there as soon as we can!”

  Driving to Maine I stole glances at you, checking once again for signs of self-pity. You exhibited none. You kept your hand covering mine for the entire trip, and you did not comment on our forgotten honeymoon or the missed flight. We reached Ogunquit the same time that our plane was scheduled to depart.

  You worked beside me that day, and the next, ferrying buckets of water up from the ocean, massaging the crusted fins of these whales. You and I were a team, united in purpose. I had never felt so close to you as I did on the beaches of Ogunquit, separated by the huge frame of a whale, and yet still able to hear the song of your voice.

  We told you to step aside when it came to moving the whales. You refused. You worked directly beside me, pushing where I told you it was necessary, stepping back delicately when common sense told you you were too small to do any good. You knew the clear danger of being so close to such a powerful mammal. You heard the stories of broken limbs, and worse, of bring crushed. We saw three whales swimming back out into the ocean that day—two females and a baby. The baby had to be redirected several times; it kept trying to swim back to shore. But we watched them go free. It took my breath away, seeing success right before my eyes. I wanted to tell you this but you were not there. I had to look around to find you in the cheering crowd. You were crouched near the one whale we could not save. Already the sun had cracked and bleached the skin on its back, and you were splashing bucket after bucket of water upon it. “It’s gone, Jane.” I tried to pull you away. You leaned against the still side of the whale near the hot and blistered eye, and you cried.

  I do not know how it happened; the way we drifted apart. I am happy to assume the blame for it if it can be left in the past. I woke up one morning, greying at the temples, engrossed in the pursuit of my research, and discovered that my family had disappeared. I must confess to you that even as I began to search for you and Rebecca, I did not have a clear goal in mind. The object was to stop the nonsense, to bring you back as quickly as possible and resume the life that had been interrupted. But when I saw you in Iowa—yes, I was in Iowa at the same time, just across the cornfield—when I saw you with Rebecca, I realized there was much more going on than I had allowed myself to recognize. Here was this amazing woman with whom I had constructed the fragile shape of fifteen years. Here was this child who came back from the edge of death for something.

  I understand