The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  A house settles like a fat man falling asleep: first there are light twitches in the walls and floorboard, the ceiling sighs, finally there is a great rolling heave of the atmosphere, and then everything goes still. The bathroom is heavy with steam; I peel off my clothing and let the mist settle over me. My heart beats so fast I am sure that I can see it beneath the skin—but when I look, the mirror has fogged. Instead of swiping it clear, I press my hands to the glass, leaving a mark. With one finger, I scrawl a single word: H . . . E . . . L . . . P. I picture what will happen when I am found, still and white as a marble statue. I think of how everyone will say the nicest things about me; how they will look at me with nothing but regret and love.

  By one in the morning, the bathwater has gone cold. My legs are drawn up on either side of my domed stomach; my wrists are balanced on my knees.

  Spencer’s straightedge sits on the lip of the tub.

  I pick it up carefully, and press a line just below the elbow. Blood wells up and I touch it with my finger; rub it on my mouth like lipstick. It tastes sticky, salty, like a penny left on the tongue. It is no surprise to find out I’ve gone bitter to the core.

  When that raw cut stops aching, I press the razor down again, a half-inch lower.

  Two parallel lines. My life, and my son’s. They will save him from the shell of me, and it will be a better life. Otherwise, from the moment he leaves my body, he will belong to someone else—Spencer, and my father. And one day, he will look at me the way they do—like someone who cannot understand the science they create; someone naïve enough to believe that a quantity as immeasurable as love might have the same combustible power as dynamite.

  And if, by some miracle, this baby turns out to be a girl, I think it will be worse. I will have failed, because Spencer is expecting a boy. Not only will I have to watch him treat her the way he has treated me . . . I will have to watch her make all the same mistakes I have: fall in love with a man who loves her because of what she is, not who she is; marry for companionship, only to see it makes her more lonely; bear a child, only to realize that she will never live up to what it deserves.

  Another line, and another. Blood swirls in the water of the tub, dreamy and pink. I have a railroad track on my arm. I am finally going somewhere, because there is nothing left for me here.

  My last cut, on the wrist, is the deepest. The pattern for this gash is already there, a blue chalked line beneath the surface.

  There will be one more knife, slicing me down the middle to save this baby. Doctors will finish the work I started here, peeling me open. They will stop and scratch their heads, stunned to discover how empty I am inside.

  A beating buzzes in my ears. It takes too much now, to keep my head erect. My body, big as it is, sinks under the water.

  The door bursts open, then, and Ruby leans into the tub, screaming in my face for me to hang on. She holds me when I cannot hold onto her. She is slick with my blood but somehow manages to heave me over the lip of the tub, so that I collapse wet and naked and bleeding on the bathroom floor as she shouts for Spencer. He appears in the doorway and hurries toward me. “Cissy, God, no.” He wraps a towel around my wrist, and when it soaks through immediately, turns white and runs out of the room. “You stay with her, you hear?” he cries to Ruby, who is too terrified to move. In the distance I hear him yelling into the phone for the doctor.

  With the only strength I have left, I reach out for Ruby and draw her close by fisting my hand in her nightgown. “Save the baby,” I beg, hoarse, but she is sobbing too hard to hear me. So I curl my good hand around her neck. I kiss her on the lips, so that she can taste my pain. “Save my baby,” I whisper. “Promise!”

  Ruby nods, her eyes locked on mine. “Promise.”

  “All right then,” I say, and I let those waves close over my head.

  The rights of the individual cannot be fully safeguarded when he is being compelled to support in the midst of his community the lawless, the immoral, the degenerate, and the mentally defective.

  —H. F. Perkins, Lessons from a Eugenical Survey of Vermont: First Annual Report, 1927

  Everything is white. The ceiling, the light, the tattoos on the backs of my eyes. The bandages, which are laced so tight up my arm from shoulder to hand that I can feel my pulse under the skin, as if I need to be reminded that I am alive in spite of it all.

  The bedroom is too hot. For as long as I can remember the window has been stuck; we make do with an electric fan. But even that doesn’t help, and when I kick back the bedclothes I notice them—Spencer, and Dr. DuBois, standing in front of the door. “Joseph,” Spencer says, “I know this will stay within these walls.”

  Dr. DuBois is the most prominent physician in Burlington. He delivered me; he will no doubt deliver my baby. “Spencer . . .”

  “Please. I’m asking as a friend.”

  “There are places, you know, in the country, where she’d be looked after. All rolling meadows and wicker rocking chairs—we’re not talking Waterbury.”

  “No. I can’t do that to her.”

  “To Cissy? Or to yourself?” Dr. DuBois shakes his head. “It’s not about you this time, Spencer,” he says, and then he lets himself out.

  Spencer sits down on the edge of the bed and stares at me. “I’m sorry,” I manage.

  “Yes, you are,” he answers, and in spite of the brutal heat in this bedroom, a shiver runs down my spine. Once again, Spencer has found me lacking.

  Q. What is meant by negative eugenics?

  A. This deals with the elimination of the dysgenic elements from society. Sterilization, immigration, legislation, laws preventing the fertile unfit from marrying, etc., come under this head.

  —American Eugenics Society,

  A Eugenics Catechism, 1926

  It is a full week before Spencer leaves me in the house alone with Ruby, and then only because his undergraduate students have returned. “You can call me, you know, any time,” he says.

  I look up from the scone I am buttering. “All right.”

  “Maybe we could go out for ice cream tonight. If you’re feeling up to it.” This is Spencer’s way of telling me to be alive when he gets home. “Well, then.” He is so handsome in his lightweight suit, with his hair slicked back and his bow tie as level as the scales of justice. I know he is staring at the butter knife in my hands, wondering whether it can do damage. Before his eyes I lick the dull blade clean, just to watch his reaction.

  “I’ll send Ruby in,” he says, and he flees.

  Ruby, who has done her best to avoid me, drags herself into the kitchen as Spencer’s car mutters down the drive. “Miz Pike,” she says.

  “Miss Weber.”

  “If you were my friend,” Ruby bursts out, “you would have told me you were going to do that.” Her eyes fix on the bandages on my wrist.

  “But then, by definition, you wouldn’t have let me,” I answer quietly.

  I am saved from having to say anymore by a commotion outside. “Coons,” Ruby tells me, going for the shotgun we keep behind the pantry door for things such as this.

  “Then they’re rabid. It’s broad daylight.” I push past Ruby, gathering bullets from the sugar bowl in the cabinet. We step out the back door and look around, but the only motion comes from two dragonflies playing tag.

  Ruby thumps the butt of the shotgun onto the ground. “Whatever it was is gone now.”

  I am about to agree with her when I notice that the door to the icehouse is ajar. It is a small outbuilding left from my grandmother’s years in this home, before it was passed down to me through my mother’s will. Blocks of ice cut from Lake Champlain in the winter get delivered every few days, and sit packed in sawdust in the shed until we chip some off for the icebox in the kitchen. Spencer is meticulous about keeping the door shut tight. “If I want water with my scotch,” he says, “I can get that from the tap.”

  I pluck the shotgun from Ruby’s hand. “Stay here,” I say, so of course she follows. We climb onto the icehouse por