The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  “Because,” Shay replied, as wide awake as I, “then there wouldn’t be anything to look forward to.”

  Maggie

  There were many reasons I loved Oliver, but first and foremost was that my mother couldn’t stand him. He’s a mess, she said every time she came to visit. He’s destructive. Maggie, she said, if you got rid of him, you could find Someone.

  Someone was a doctor, like the anesthesiologist from Dartmouth-Hitchcock they’d set me up with once, who asked me if I thought laws against downloading child porn were an infringement on civil rights. Or the son of the cantor, who actually had been in a monogamous gay relationship for five years but hadn’t told his parents yet. Someone was the younger partner in the accounting firm that did my father’s taxes, who asked me on our first and only date if I’d always been a big girl.

  On the other hand, Oliver knew just what I needed, and when I needed it. Which is why, the minute I stepped on the scale that morning, he hopped out from underneath the bed, where he was diligently severing the cord of my alarm clock with his teeth, and settled himself squarely on top of my feet so that I couldn’t see the digital readout.

  “Nicely done,” I said, stepping off, trying not to notice the numbers that flashed red before they disappeared. Surely the reason there was a seven in there was because Oliver had been on the scale, too. Besides, if I were going to be writing a formal complaint about any of this, I’d have said that (a) size fourteen isn’t really all that big, (b) a size fourteen here was a size sixteen in London, so in a way I was thinner than I’d be if I had been born British, and (c) weight didn’t really matter, as long as you were healthy.

  All right, so maybe I didn’t exercise all that much either. But I would, one day, or so I told my mother the fitness queen, as soon as all the people on whose behalf I worked tirelessly were absolutely, unequivocally rescued. I told her (and anyone else who’d listen) that the whole reason the ACLU existed was to help people take a stand. Unfortunately, the only stands my mother recognized were pigeon pose, warrior two, and all the other staples of yoga.

  I pulled on my jeans, the ones that I admittedly didn’t wash very often because the dryer shrank them just enough that I had to suffer half a day before the denim stretched to the point of comfort again. I picked a sweater that didn’t show my bra roll and then turned to Oliver. “What do you think?”

  He lowered his left ear, which translated to, “Why do you even care, since you’re taking it all off to put on a spa robe?”

  As usual, he was right. It’s a little hard to hide your flaws when you’re wearing, well, nothing.

  He followed me into the kitchen, where I poured us both bowls of rabbit food (his literal, mine Special K). Then he hopped off to the litter box beside his cage, where he’d spend the day sleeping.

  I’d named my rabbit after Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., the famous Supreme Court Justice known as the Great Dissenter. He once said, “Even a dog knows the difference between being kicked and being tripped over.” So did rabbits. And my clients, for that matter.

  “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” I warned Oliver. “That includes chewing the legs of the kitchen stools.”

  I grabbed my keys and headed out to my Prius. I had used nearly all my savings last year on the hybrid—to be honest, I didn’t understand why car manufacturers charged a premium if you were a buyer with a modicum of social conscience. It didn’t have all-wheel drive, which was a real pain in the neck during a New Hampshire winter, but I figured that saving the ozone layer was worth sliding off the road occasionally.

  My parents had moved to Lynley—a town twenty-six miles east of Concord—seven years ago when my father took over as rabbi at Temple Beth Or. The catch was that there was no Temple Beth Or: his reform congregation held Friday night services in the cafeteria of the middle school, because the original temple had burned to the ground. The expectation had been to raise funds for a new temple, but my father had overestimated the size of his rural New Hampshire congregation, and although he assured me that they were closing in on buying land somewhere, I didn’t see it happening anytime soon. By now, anyway, his congregation had grown used to readings from the Torah that were routinely punctuated by the cheers of the crowd at the basketball game in the gymnasium down the hall.

  The biggest single annual contributor to my father’s temple fund was the ChutZpah, a wellness retreat for the mind, body, and soul in the heart of Lynley that was run by my mother. Although her clientele was nondenominational, she’d garnered a word-of-mouth reputation among temple sisterhoods, and patrons came from as far away as New York and Connecticut and even Maryland to relax and rejuvenate. My mother used salt from the Dead Sea for her scrubs. Her spa cuisine was kosher. She’d been written up in Boston magazine, the New York Times, and Luxury SpaFinder.

  The first Saturday of every month, I drove to the spa for a free massage or facial or pedicure. The catch was that afterward, I had to suffer through lunch with my mother. We had it down to a routine. By the time we were served our passion fruit iced tea, we’d already covered “Why Don’t You Call.” The salad course was “I’m Going to Be Dead Before You Make Me a Grandmother.” The entrée—fittingly—involved my weight. Needless to say, we never got around to dessert.

  The ChutZpah was white. Not just white, but scary, I’m-afraid-to-breathe white: white carpets, white tiles, white robes, white slippers. I have no idea how my mother kept the place so clean, given that when I was growing up, the house was always comfortably cluttered.

  My father says there’s a God, although for me the jury is still out on that one. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t appreciate a miracle as much as the next person—such as when I went up to the front desk and the receptionist told me my mother was going to have to miss our lunch because of a last-minute meeting with a wholesale orchid salesman. “But she said you should still have your treatment,” the receptionist said. “DeeDee’s going to be your aesthetician, and you’ve got locker number two twenty.”

  I took the robe and slippers she handed me. Locker 220 was in a bank with fifty others, and several toned middle-aged women were stripping out of their yoga clothes. I breezed into another section of lockers, one that was blissfully empty, and changed into my robe. If someone complained because I was using locker 664 instead, I didn’t think my mother would disown me. I punched in my key code—2358, for ACLU—took a bracing breath, and tried not to glance in the mirror as I walked by.

  There wasn’t very much that I liked about the outside of me. I had curves, but to me, they were in all the wrong places. My hair was an explosion of dark curls, which could have been sexy if I didn’t have to work so hard to keep them frizz-free. I’d read that stylists on the Oprah show would straighten the hair of guests with hair like mine, because curls added ten pounds to the camera—which meant that even my hair made objects like me look bigger than they appeared. My eyes were okay—they were mud-colored on an average day and green if I felt like embellishing—but most of all, they showed the part of me I was proud of: my intelligence. I might never be a cover girl, but I was a girl who could cover it all.

  The problem was, you never heard anyone say, “Wow, check out the brain on that babe.”

  My father had always made me feel special, but I couldn’t even look at my mother without wondering why I hadn’t inherited her tiny waist and sleek hair. As a kid I had only wanted to be just like her; as an adult, I’d stopped trying.

  Sighing, I entered the whirlpool area: a white oasis surrounded by white wicker benches where primarily white women waited for their white-coated therapists to call their name.

  DeeDee appeared in her immaculate jacket, smiling. “You must be Maggie,” she said. “You look just like your mother described you.”

  I wasn’t about to take that bait. “Nice to meet you.” I never quite figured out the protocol for this part of the experience—you said hello and then disrobed immediately so that a total stranger could lay their hands on you . . . and you paid fo