The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  I hoisted you into my arms—my left hip, since it was your right shoulder that had broken—and walked out of the examination room. The doctor’s card was burning a hole in my back pocket. I was so distracted, in fact, that I nearly ran over a little girl who was walking in the door of the hospital just as we were walking out. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” I said, and backed up. She was about your age, and she held on to her mother’s hand. She wore a pink tutu and mud boots with frog faces on the toes. Her head was completely bald.

  You did the one thing you hated most when it happened to you: you stared.

  The little girl stared back.

  You’d learned early on that strangers would stare at a girl in a wheelchair. I’d taught you to smile at them, to say hello, so that they’d realize you were a person and not just some curiosity of nature. Amelia was your fiercest protector—if she saw a kid gawking at you, she’d walk right up and tell him that was what would happen if he didn’t clean his room or eat his vegetables. Once or twice, she’d made a child burst into tears, and I almost didn’t reprimand her because it made you smile and sit up straighter in your wheelchair, instead of trying to be invisible.

  But this was different; this was an equal match.

  I squeezed your waist. “Willow,” I chided.

  The girl’s mother looked up at me. A thousand words passed between us, although neither of us spoke. She nodded at me, and I nodded back.

  You and I walked out of the hospital into a late spring day that smelled of cinnamon and asphalt. You squinted, tried to raise your arm to shield your eyes, and remembered that it was bound tight against your body. “That girl, Mommy,” you said. “Why did she look like that?”

  “Because she’s sick, and that’s what happens when she takes her medicine.”

  You considered this for a moment. “I’m so lucky . . . my medicine lets me have hair.”

  I was careful not to cry around you, but this time I could not help it. Here you were, with three out of four extremities broken. Here you were, with a healing fracture I hadn’t even known occurred. Here you were, period. “Yes, we’re lucky,” I said.

  You put your hand against my cheek. “It’s okay, Mom,” you said. And just as I’d done for you in the ER, you patted my back, the very same spot you’d broken in your own body.

  Sean

  “Stop, goddammit!” I yelled as I sprinted across the empty park, holding the can of spray paint. The kid still had a lead on me, not to mention the benefit of being thirty years younger, but I wasn’t going to let him get away. Not even if it killed me, which, judging from the stitch in my side, it just might.

  It had been one of those unseasonably warm spring days that made me remember what it felt like to be a kid, listening to the slap of girls’ flip-flops as they walked past you at the town pool. I admit, during my lunch break, I’d put on some running shorts and taken a quick dip. We wouldn’t be swimming for a while—out of solidarity with you, since you couldn’t go into a pool until you were out of your spica cast. There was nothing you wanted to do more than swim—something you’d never really learned to do because of various breaks. Even after Charlotte had discovered fiberglass casts—which were waterproof and wicked expensive—you somehow managed to miss the swim-lesson season for one reason or another. When Amelia was being a particularly nasty preadolescent, she’d lord over you the fact that she was headed to a pool party or out to the beach. Then you’d spend the whole day sulking or, in one memorable case, getting on the Internet and submitting a bid request for an inground pool—something we had neither the land nor the money for. Sometimes I thought you were obsessed with water—frozen in the winter or chlorinated in the summer; all you wanted was exactly what you couldn’t have.

  Sort of like the rest of us, I guess.

  Now, my hair was still wet; I smelled of chlorine—and I was trying to figure out how I could mask that from you when I got home. The car windows were rolled down as I cruised by the local park, where a Little League game had recently broken up. And then I noticed a kid spray-painting graffiti on the dugout in broad daylight.

  I don’t know what frustrated me more—the fact that this boy was defacing public property or the fact that he was doing it right under my nose, without even the pretense of hiding. I parked far away and sneaked up behind him. “Hey,” I called. “You want to tell me what you’re doing?”

  He turned around, caught in the act. He was tall and whip-thin, with stringy yellow hair and a sad attempt at a mustache crawling over his upper lip. His gaze met mine, clear and defiant, and then he dropped the spray can and started running.

  I took off, too. The boy darted away from the park’s borders and crossed beneath an overpass, where his sneaker slipped in a puddle of mud. He stumbled, which gave me just enough time to throw my weight into him and shove him up against the concrete wall, with my arm pushing into his throat. “I asked you a question,” I grunted. “What the fuck were you doing?”

  He clawed at my arm, choking, and suddenly I saw myself through his eyes.

  I wasn’t one of those cops who liked to use my position to bully people. So what had set me off so quickly? As I fell back, I figured it out: it wasn’t the fact that the boy had been spray-painting the dugout, or that he hadn’t shown remorse when I first arrived on the scene. It was that he’d run. That he could run.

  I was angry at him because you, in this situation, couldn’t have escaped.

  The kid was bent over, coughing. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he gasped.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Really sorry.”

  He stared at me like an animal that had been cornered. “Get it over with, already. Arrest me.”

  I turned away. “Just go. Before I change my mind.”

  There was a beat of silence and then, again, the sound of running footsteps.

  I leaned against the wall of the overpass and closed my eyes. These days, it felt like anger was a geyser inside of me, destined to explode at regular intervals. Sometimes that meant a kid like this one was on the receiving end. Sometimes it was my own child—I’d find myself yelling at Amelia for something inconsequential, like leaving her cereal bowl on top of the television, when it was an infraction I was just as likely to commit myself. And sometimes it was Charlotte I complained to—for cooking meat loaf when I’d wanted chicken cutlets, for not keeping the kids quiet when I was sleeping after a late-night shift, for not knowing where I’d left my keys, for making me think there might be someone to be angry with in the first place.

  I was no stranger to lawsuits. I’d sued Ford, once, after riding around in a cruiser gave me a herniated disk. And okay, maybe it was their fault and maybe it wasn’t, but they settled and I used the money to buy a van so we could move your wheelchairs and adaptive equipment around—and I’m quite sure that Ford Motor Company never even blinked when they cut the check for twenty thousand dollars in damages. But this was different; this wasn’t a lawsuit that blamed something that had happened to you—it was a lawsuit to blame the fact that you were here. Although I could easily earmark what we could do for you with a big settlement, I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that, in order to get it, I’d have to lie.

  For Charlotte, this didn’t seem to be a problem. And that got me thinking: What else was she lying about, even now, that I didn’t realize? Was she happy? Did she wish she could have started over, without me, without you? Did she love me?

  What kind of father did it make me if I refused to file a lawsuit that might net you enough money to live comfortably for the rest of your life, instead of scraping money here and there and taking on extra shifts at high school basketball games and proms so that we’d have enough to buy you a memory-foam mattress, an electric wheelchair, an adapted car to drive? Then again, what kind of father did it make me if the only way to net those rewards was to pretend I didn’t want you here?

  I leaned my head back against the concrete, my eyes closed. If you had been born without OI, and wound up in a car crash that lef