The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  I thought of the foam pad we had once used to line your car bed and your crib, how sometimes, when I lifted you out of it, I could still see the impression you’d made, like a memory, or a ghost. And then, like magic, it would disappear. The indelible mark I’d left on Piper, the indelible mark she’d left on me—well, maybe they weren’t permanent. For years, I’d believed Piper when she said tests wouldn’t have told us any earlier that you had OI, but she had been talking about blood tests. She’d never even alluded to the fact that other prenatal testing—like ultrasounds—might have picked up your OI. Had she been making excuses for me, or for herself?

  It won’t affect her, a voice in my head murmured. That’s what malpractice insurance is for. But it would affect us. In order to make sure you could rely on me, I would lose the friend I’d relied on since before you were born.

  Last year, when Emma and Amelia were in sixth grade, the gym teacher had come up behind Emma and squeezed her shoulders while she waited on the sidelines of a softball game. Innocuous, most likely, but Emma had come home saying that it creeped her out. What do I do? Piper had asked me. Give him the benefit of the doubt, or be a helicopter parent? Before I could even offer her my opinion, she’d made up her mind. It’s my daughter, she said. If I don’t go in and open up my mouth, I may live to regret it.

  I loved Piper Reece. But I would always love you more.

  With my heart pounding, I took a business card out of my back pocket and dialed the number before I could lose my nerve.

  “Marin Gates,” said a voice on the other end.

  “Oh,” I stumbled, surprised. I had been anticipating an answering machine this late at night. “I wasn’t expecting you to be there . . .”

  “Who is this?”

  “Charlotte O’Keefe. I was in your office a couple of weeks ago with my husband about—”

  “Yes, I remember,” Marin said.

  I twisted the metal snake of the phone cord around my arm, imagined the words I would funnel into it, send into the world, make real.

  “Mrs. O’Keefe?”

  “I’m interested in . . . taking legal action.”

  There was a brief silence. “Why don’t we schedule a time for you to come in and meet with me? I can have my secretary call you tomorrow.”

  “No,” I said, and then shook my head. “I mean, that’s fine, but I won’t be home tomorrow. I’m in the hospital with Willow.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “No, she’s fine. Well, she’s not fine, but this is routine. We’ll be home Thursday.”

  “I’ll make a note.”

  “Good,” I said, my breath coming in a rush. “Good.”

  “Give my best to your family,” Marin replied.

  “I’ve just got one question,” I said, but she had already hung up the phone. I pressed the mouthpiece against my lips, tasted the bitter metal. “Would you do this?” I whispered out loud. “Would you do this, if you were me?”

  If you’d like to make a call, said the mechanical voice of an operator, please hang up and try again.

  What would Sean say?

  Nothing, I realized, because I wouldn’t tell him what I’d done.

  I walked back down the hall toward your room. On the bed, you were snoring softly. The video you’d been watching when you fell asleep cast a reflection over your bed in reds and greens and golds, an early rush of autumn. I lay down on the narrow cot that had been converted from one of the guest chairs by a helpful nurse; she’d left me a threadbare blanket and a pillow that crackled like polar ice.

  The mural on the far wall was an ancient map, with a pirate ship sailing off its borders. Not long ago, sailors believed that the seas were precipitous, that compasses could point out the spots where, beyond, there’d be dragons. I wondered about the explorers who’d sailed their ships to the end of the world. How terrified they must have been when they risked falling over the edge; how amazed to discover, instead, places they had seen only in their dreams.

  Piper

  I met Charlotte eight years ago, in one of the coldest rinks in New Hampshire, when we were dressing our four-year-old daughters as shooting stars for a forty-five-second performance in the club’s winter skating show. I was waiting for Emma to finish lacing up her skates while other mothers effortlessly yanked their daughters’ hair into buns and tied the ribbons of the shimmering costumes around their wrists and ankles. They chatted about the Christmas wrapping paper sale the skating club was doing for fund-raising and complained about their husbands, who hadn’t charged the video camera batteries long enough. In contrast to this offhanded competence, Charlotte sat alone, off to one side, trying to coax a very stubborn Amelia into tying back her long hair. “Amelia,” she said, “your teacher won’t let you onto the ice like that. Everyone has to match.”

  She looked familiar, although I didn’t remember meeting her. I thrust a few bobby pins at Charlotte and smiled. “If you need them,” I said, “I also have superglue and marine varnish. This isn’t our first year with the Nazi Skating Club.”

  Charlotte burst out laughing and took the pins. “They’re four years old!”

  “Apparently, if you don’t start young, they’ll have nothing to talk about in therapy,” I joked. “I’m Piper, by the way. Proudly defiant skating parent.”

  She held out a hand. “Charlotte.”

  “Mom,” Emma said, “that’s Amelia. I told you about her last week. She just moved here.”

  “We came because of work,” Charlotte said.

  “For you or your husband?”

  “I’m not married,” she said. “I’m the new pastry chef over at Capers.”

  “That’s where I know you from. I read about you in that magazine article.”

  Charlotte blushed. “Don’t believe everything in print . . .”

  “You ought to be proud! Me, I can’t even bake a Betty Crocker mix without screwing it up. Luckily, that’s not part of my job description.”

  “What do you do?”

  “I’m an obstetrician.”

  “Well, that beats what I do, hands down,” Charlotte said. “When I deliver, people gain weight. When you deliver, they lose it.”

  Emma poked a finger into a hole in her costume. “Mine’s going to fall off because you don’t know how to sew,” she accused.

  “It won’t fall off,” I sighed, then turned to Charlotte. “I was too busy suturing to sew a costume, so I hot-glued the seams.”

  “Next time,” Charlotte told Emma, “I’ll sew yours when I do Amelia’s.”

  I liked that—the idea that she was already counting on us being friends. We were destined to be partners in crime, subversive parents who didn’t care what the establishment thought. Just then, the teacher stuck her head inside the locker room door. “Amelia? Emma?” she snapped. “We’re all waiting for you out here!”

  “Girls, you’d better hurry. You heard what Eva Braun said.”

  Emma scowled. “Mommy, her name’s Miss Helen.”

  Charlotte laughed. “Break a leg!” she said as they hurried into the rink. “Or does that only work if the stage isn’t made of ice?”

  I don’t know whether you can look at your past and find, woven like the hidden symbols on a treasure map, the path that will point to your final destination, but I have thought back to that moment, to Charlotte’s good-luck phrase, many times. Do I remember it because of the way you were born? Or were you born because of the way I remember it?

  Rob was braced over me, his leg moving between mine as he kissed me. “We can’t,” I whispered. “Emma’s still awake.”

  “She won’t come in here . . .”

  “You don’t know that—”

  Rob buried his face in my neck. “She knows we have sex. If we didn’t, she wouldn’t be here.”

  “Do you like to imagine your parents having sex?”

  Grimacing, Rob rolled away from me. “Okay, that effectively killed the mood.”

  I laughed. “Give her ten minutes to