The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  The last time my parents had been fighting—which was, like, yesterday—you and I were in our bedroom, and we could hear them loud and clear. Words slipped under the door, even though it was closed: wrongful birth . . . testimony . . . deposition. At one point I heard the mention of television: Don’t you think reporters would get wind of this? Is that what you really want? Dad said, and for a moment I thought how cool it would be to be on the news, until I remembered that being a poster child for dysfunctional family life wasn’t really how I wanted to spend my fifteen minutes of fame.

  They’re mad at me, you said.

  No. They’re mad at each other.

  Then we both heard Dad say, Do you really think Willow wouldn’t figure this out?

  You looked at me. Figure what out?

  I hesitated, and instead of answering, I reached for the book you had in your lap and told you I’d read out loud.

  Normally you didn’t like that—reading was just about the only thing you could do brilliantly, and you usually wanted to show it off, but you probably felt like I did at that moment: like there was a big Brillo pad in your stomach, and every time you moved, it grated your insides. I had friends whose parents had divorced. Wasn’t this the way it all started?

  I opened to a random page of facts and began to read out loud to you about unlikely and gruesome deaths. There was a Brink’s car guard who was killed when fifty thousand dollars’ worth of quarters fell out of a truck and crushed him. A gust of wind pushed a man’s car into a river near Naples, Italy, so he broke the window and climbed out and swam to shore, only to be killed by a tree that blew over and crushed him. A man who went over Niagara Falls in a barrel in 1911 and broke nearly every bone in his body later on slipped on a banana peel in New Zealand and died from the fall.

  You liked that last one best, and I’d gotten you to smile again, but inside, I was still miserable: how could anyone ever win when the world beat you down at every turn?

  That was when Mom came into the room and sat down on the edge of your bed. “Do you and Daddy hate each other?” you asked.

  “No, Wills,” she said, smiling, but in a way that made her skin look like it was stretched too tightly over the edges of her face. “Everything’s absolutely fine.”

  I stood up, my hands on my hips. “When are you going to tell her?” I demanded.

  My mother’s gaze could have cut me in half, I swear. “Amelia,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument, “there is nothing to tell.”

  Now, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, I realized what a total liar my mother was. I wondered if that was what I was destined for, if you could inherit that tendency the same way she had passed me the ability to double-joint my elbows, to tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue.

  I leaned over the toilet bowl, stuck my finger down my throat, and vomited, so that this time when I told myself I was empty and aching, I would finally be telling the truth.

  Blind Baking: the process of baking a pie crust without the filling.

  Sometimes, when you’re dealing with a fragile dough, it will collapse in spite of your best intentions. For this reason, some pie crusts and tart shells must be baked before the filling is added. The best method is to line the tart pan or pie plate with the rolled-out dough and place it in the fridge for at least 30 minutes. When you are ready to bake, prick the crust in several spots with a fork, line the pie plate or tart shell with foil or parchment paper, and fill it with rice or dried beans. Bake as directed, then carefully remove the foil and the beans—the shell will have retained its form because of them. I like seeing how a substance that weighs heavily can, in the end, be lifted; I like the feel of the beans, like trouble that slips through your fingers. Most of all, I like the proof in the pastry: it is the things we have to bear that shape us.

  SWEET PASTRY DOUGH

  11/3 cups all-purpose flour

  Pinch of salt

  1 tablespoon sugar

  1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces

  1 large egg yolk

  1 tablespoon ice water

  In a food processor, combine the flour, salt, sugar, and butter. Pulse until coarse. In a small bowl, whisk the egg yolk and ice water. With the processor running, add the yolk mixture to the flour and butter until a ball forms. Remove the dough, wrap it in plastic, flatten to a disk, and chill for 1 hour.

  Roll the dough out on a lightly floured surface and place it in a tart pan with a removable bottom. Chill before baking.

  Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F. Remove the tart pan from the fridge, prick the crust all over with a fork, line the shell with foil, and fill with dried beans. Bake for 17 minutes, remove the foil and beans, and continue baking for another 6 minutes. Cool completely before filling.

  APRICOT TART

  Sweet Pastry Dough tart shell—blind baked

  2–3 apricots

  2 egg yolks

  1 cup heavy cream

  3/4 cup sugar

  11/2 tablespoons flour

  1/4 cup chopped hazelnuts

  Peel the apricots, slice, and arrange in the bottom of a blind-baked tart shell.

  Combine the egg yolks, cream, sugar, and flour. Pour over the apricots and sprinkle with the hazelnuts. Bake in a preheated 350 degree F oven for 35 minutes.

  When you taste this one, you can still sense the heaviness left behind. It’s the shadow under the sweet, the question on the tip of your tongue.

  Marin

  June 2007

  Facebook is supposed to be a social network, but the truth is, most people I know who use it—me included—spend so much time online tweaking our profiles and writing graffiti on other people’s walls or poking them that we never leave our computers to actually socially interact. Perhaps it was bad form to check one’s Facebook in the middle of the workday, but once, I’d walked in on Bob Ramirez tooling around with his MySpace page and I realized that there was very little he could say to me without being a hypocrite.

  These days I used Facebook to join groups—Birth Mothers and Adoptees Searching, Adoption Search Registry. Some members actually found the people they were looking for. Even if that hadn’t happened to me, there was a nice comfort to logging on and reading the posts that proved I wasn’t the only one frustrated by this whole process.

  I logged in and checked my mini-feed. I’d been poked by a girl from high school who’d asked me to be her friend a week ago but whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years. I had been dared to take a quiz on Flixster by my cousin in Santa Barbara. I’d been voted by my other friends as the person you’d most prefer to be stuck in handcuffs with.

  I glanced at the information just above this, my profile.

  NAME: Marin Gates

  NETWORKS: Portsmouth, NH / UNH Alumni / NH Bar Association

  SEX: Female

  INTERESTED IN: Men

  RELATIONSHIP STATUS: Single

  Single?

  I reloaded the page. For the past four months on my Facebook page that line had read: In a relationship with Joe McIntyre. I clicked on the home page and scrolled through the news feed. There it was: a picture of his face and a status update: Joe McIntyre and Marin Gates have ended their relationship.

  My jaw dropped open; I felt like I’d been sucker-punched.

  I grabbed my coat and stormed into the reception area. “Wait!” Briony said. “Where are you going? You’ve got a conference call at—”

  “Reschedule it,” I snapped. “My boyfriend just dumped me via Facebook.”

  It was not like Joe McIntyre was the One. I’d met him at a Bruins game with clients; he passed me in the aisle and spilled his beer down the front of my shirt. Not an auspicious beginning, but he had indigo eyes and a smile that contributed to global warming, and before I knew it, I’d not only promised that he could pay my dry-cleaning bill but also given him my phone number. On our first date, we found out that we worked less than a block away from each other—he was an environmental lawyer—and that we’d both