The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  Mrs. Ward smiled sadly. “I can’t say, Amelia.”

  “Are my parents . . . are they in a foster home, too?”

  She hesitated. “Something like that.”

  “I want to see Willow.”

  “First thing tomorrow,” Mrs. Ward said. “We’ll go up to the hospital. How’s that?”

  I nodded. I wanted to believe her, so bad. With this promise tucked into my arms like my stuffed moose at home, I could sleep through the night. I could convince myself that everything was bound to get better.

  I lay down, and tried to remember the useless bits of information you’d rattle off before we went to sleep, when I was always telling you to just shut up already: Frogs have to close their eyes to swallow. One pencil can draw a line thirty-five miles long. Cleveland, spelled backward, is DNA level C.

  I was starting to see why you carried those stupid facts like other kids dragged around security blankets—if I repeated them over and over, it almost made me feel better. I just wasn’t sure if that was because it helped to know something, when the rest of my life seemed to be a big question mark, or because it reminded me of you.

  I was still hungry, or empty, I couldn’t tell which. After Mrs. Ward had gone to her own bedroom, I tiptoed out of bed. I turned the light on in the hallway and went down to the kitchen. There, I opened up the refrigerator and let the light and cold fall over my bare feet. I stared at lunch meat, sealed into plastic packages; at a jumble of apples and peaches in a bin; at cartons of orange juice and milk lined up like soldiers. When I thought I heard a creak upstairs, I grabbed whatever I could: a loaf of bread, a Tupperware of cooked spaghetti, a handful of those Oreos. I ran back to my room and closed the door, spread my treasure out on the sheets in front of me.

  At first, it was just the Oreos. But then my stomach rumbled and I ate all the spaghetti—with my fingers, because I had no fork. I had a piece of bread and another and then another, and before I knew it only the plastic wrapper was left. What is wrong with me? I thought, catching my reflection in the mirror. Who eats a whole loaf of bread? The outside of me was disgusting enough—boring brown hair that frizzed with crummy weather, eyes too far apart, that crooked front tooth, enough fat to muffin-top my jeans—but the inside of me was even worse. I pictured it as a big black hole, like the kind we learned about in science last year, that sucks everything into its center. A vacuum of nothingness, my teacher had called it.

  Everything that had ever been good and kind in me, everything people imagined me to be, had been poisoned by the part of me that had wished, in the darkest crack of the night, that I could have a different family. The real me was a disgusting person who imagined a life where you had never been born. The real me had watched you being loaded into an ambulance and had let myself wish, for a half a second, that I could stay behind at Disney World. The real me was a bottomless soul who could eat a whole loaf of bread in ten minutes and still have room for more.

  I hated myself.

  I could not tell you what made me go into the bathroom that was attached to my room—wallpaper spotted with pink roses, shaped soaps curled in dishes next to the sink—and stick my finger down my throat. Maybe it was because I could feel the toxic stuff seeping into my bloodstream, and I wanted it out. Maybe it was punishment. Maybe it was because I wanted to control one part of me that had been uncontrollable, so the rest of me would fall into line. Rats can’t throw up, you’d told me once; it popped into my head now. With one hand holding up my hair, I vomited into the toilet until I was flushed and sweating and empty and relieved to learn that, yes, I could do this one thing right, even if it made me feel worse than I had before. With my stomach cinching and bile bitter on the back of my tongue, I felt horrible—but this time there was a physical reason I could point to.

  Weak and wobbly, I stumbled back to my borrowed bed and reached for the television remote. My eyes felt like sandpaper and my throat ached, but I could not fall asleep. Instead I flipped through the cable channels, through home decorating shows and cartoons and late-night talk shows and Iron Chef cooking contests. It was on Nick at Nite, twenty-two minutes into The Dick Van Dyke Show, that the old Disney World commercial came on—like a joke, a tease, a warning. It felt like a punch in the gut: there was Tinker Bell, there were the happy people; there was the family that could have been us on the teacup ride.

  What if my parents never came back?

  What if you didn’t get better?

  What if I had to stay here forever?

  When I started to sob, I stuffed the corner of the pillow deep into my mouth so Mrs. Ward wouldn’t hear. I hit the mute button on the television remote, and I watched the family at Disney World going round in circles.

  Sean

  It’s funny, isn’t it, how you can be 100 percent sure of your opinion on something until it happens to you. Like arresting someone—people who aren’t in law enforcement think it’s appalling to know that, even with probable cause, mistakes are made. If that’s the case, you unarrest the person and tell him you were just doing what you had to. Better that than take the risk of letting a criminal walk free, I’ve always said, and to hell with civil libertarians who wouldn’t know a perp if he spit in their faces. This was what I believed, heart and soul, until I was carted down to the Lake Buena Vista PD on suspicion of child abuse. One look at your X-rays, at the dozens of healing fractures, at the curvature of your lower right arm where it should have been straight—and the doctors went ballistic and called DCF. Dr. Rosenblad had given us a note years ago that should have served as a Get Out of Jail Free card, because lots of parents with OI kids are accused of child abuse when the case history isn’t known—and Charlotte’s always carried it around in the minivan, just in case. But today, with everything we had to remember to pack for the trip, the letter was forgotten, and what we got instead was a trip to the police station for interrogation.

  “This is bullshit,” I yelled. “My daughter fell down in public. There were at least ten witnesses. Why aren’t you dragging them in? Don’t you guys have real cases to keep you busy around here?”

  I’d been alternating between playing good cop and bad cop, but as it turned out, neither worked when you were up against another officer from an unfamiliar jurisdiction. It was nearly midnight on Saturday—which meant that it could be Monday before this was sorted out with Dr. Rosenblad. I hadn’t seen Charlotte since they’d brought us to the station to be questioned—in cases like this, we’d separate the parents so that they had less of a chance to fabricate a story. The problem was, even the truth sounded crazy. A kid slips on a napkin and winds up with compound fractures in both femurs? You don’t need nineteen years on the job, like I have, to be suspicious of that one.

  I imagined Charlotte was falling apart at the seams—being away from you while you were hurting would rip her to pieces, and then knowing that Amelia was God knows where was even more devastating. I kept thinking of how Amelia used to hate to sleep with the lights off, how I’d have to creep into her room in the middle of the night and turn them off when she’d fallen asleep. Are you scared? I’d asked her once, and she’d said she wasn’t. I just don’t want to miss anything. We lived in Bankton, New Hampshire—a small town where you could actually drive down the street and have people honk when they recognized your car; a place where if you forgot your credit card at the grocery store, the checkout girl would just let you take your food and come back to pay later. That’s not to say that we didn’t have our share of the seedy underbelly of life—cops get to see behind the white picket fences and polished doors, where there are all kinds of hidden nightmares: esteemed local bigwigs who beat their wives, honors students with drug addictions, schoolteachers with kiddie porn on their computers. But part of my goal, as a police officer, was to leave all that crap at the station and make sure you and Amelia grew up blissfully naïve. And what happens instead? You watch the Florida police come into the emergency room to take your parents away. Amelia gets carted off to a foster-care facility. Ho