The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  I had sworn that, when I had my own family, all the cards would be on the table. We wouldn’t have hidden agendas and secrets and rose-colored glasses that kept us from seeing all the knots and snarls of an ordinary family’s affairs. I had forgotten one critical element, though: people who didn’t talk about their problems got to pretend they didn’t have any. People who discussed what was wrong, on the other hand, fought and ached and felt miserable.

  “Girls,” I shouted. “Dinner!”

  I heard the distant thunder of both your feet moving down the hallway upstairs. You were tentative—one foot on a step joined by another—whereas Amelia nearly skidded into the kitchen. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “Spaghetti again?”

  To be fair, it wasn’t like I’d just opened a box of Prince. I’d made the dough, rolled it, cut it into strands. “No, this time it’s fettuccine,” I said, unfazed. “You can set the table.”

  Amelia stuck her head in the fridge. “News flash, we don’t have any juice.”

  “We’re drinking water this week. It’s better for us.”

  “And conveniently cheaper. Tell you what. Take twenty bucks out of my college fund and splurge on chicken cutlets.”

  “Hmm, what is that sound?” I said, looking around with my brow furrowed. “Oh, right. The sound of me not laughing.”

  At that, Amelia cracked a smile. “Tomorrow, we’d better get some protein.”

  “Remind me to buy a little tofu.”

  “Gross.” She set a stack of dishes on the table. “Remind me to kill myself before dinner then.”

  You came into the kitchen and scooted into your high chair. We didn’t call it a high chair—you were nearly six, and you were quick to point out that you were a big girl—but you couldn’t reach the table without some sort of booster; you were just too tiny. “To cook a billion pounds of pasta, you’d need enough water to fill up seventy-five thousand swimming pools,” you said.

  Amelia slouched into the chair beside you. “To eat a billion pounds of pasta, you only have to be born into the O’Keefe family.”

  “Maybe if you all keep complaining, I’ll make something gourmet tomorrow night . . . like squid. Or haggis. Or calves’ brains. That’s protein, Amelia—”

  “A long time ago there was this guy, Sawney Beane, in Scotland, who ate people,” you said. “Like, a thousand of them.”

  “Well, luckily, we’re not that desperate.”

  “But if we were,” you said, your eyes lighting up, “I’d be boneless.”

  “Okay, enough.” I dumped a serving of steaming pasta on your plate. “Bon appétit.”

  I glanced up at the clock; it was 6:10. “What about Dad?” Amelia said, reading my thoughts.

  “We’ll wait for him. I’m sure he’ll be here any minute.”

  But five minutes later, Sean had not arrived. You were fidgeting in your seat, and Amelia was picking at the congealed mass of pasta on her plate. “The only thing more disgusting than pasta is ice-cold pasta,” she muttered.

  “Eat,” I said, and you and your sister dove into your dinners like hawks.

  I stared down at my meal, not hungry anymore. After a few minutes, you girls carried your plates to the sink. The plumber came back downstairs to say he was finished and left me a bill on the kitchen counter. The phone rang twice and was picked up by one of you.

  At seven thirty, I called Sean’s cell, and it immediately rolled over into the voice mail.

  At eight, I scraped the cold contents of my plate into the trash.

  At eight thirty, I tucked you into bed.

  At eight forty-five, I called the nonemergency line for dispatch. “This is Charlotte O’Keefe,” I said. “Do you know if Sean took on another shift tonight?”

  “He left around five forty-five,” the dispatcher said.

  “Oh, right, of course,” I replied lightly, as if I’d known that all along, because I didn’t want her to think I was the kind of wife who had no idea where her husband might be.

  At 11:06, I was sitting in the dark on a couch in the family room, wondering if it could still arguably be called a family room if one’s family was splintering apart, when the front door of the house opened gingerly. Sean tiptoed into the hallway, and I switched on the lamp beside me. “Wow,” I said. “Traffic must have been a bitch.”

  He froze. “You’re up.”

  “We waited for you for dinner. Your plate’s still on the table, if you’re in the mood for fossilized fettuccine.”

  “I went to O’Boys after my shift with some of the guys. I was going to call . . .”

  I finished his sentence for him. “But you didn’t want to talk to me.”

  He came closer, then, so that I could smell his aftershave. Licorice, and the faintest bit of smoke. You could blindfold me and I would be able to pick Sean out from a crowd with my other senses. But identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through—the man you fell in love with years ago might look the same and speak the same and smell the same yet be completely different.

  I supposed Sean could say that about me, too.

  He sat down on a chair across from me. “What do you want me to tell you, Charlotte? You want me to lie and say I look forward to coming home at night?”

  “No.” I swallowed. “I want . . . I just want things to go back to the way they were.”

  “Then stop,” he said quietly. “Just walk away from what you’ve started.”

  Choices are funny things—ask a native tribe that’s eaten grubs and roots forever if they’re unhappy, and they’ll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don’t know there’s an alternative, you can’t miss it. Marin Gates had offered me a brass ring that I never, in my wildest dreams, would have considered—but now that she had, how could I not try to grab it? With every future break, with every dollar we moved further into debt, I would be thinking about how I should have reached out.

  Sean shook his head. “That’s what I thought.”

  “I’m thinking of Willow’s future . . .”

  “Well, I’m thinking about here and now. She doesn’t give a shit about money. She cares about whether her parents love her. But that’s not the message she’s going to hear when you get up in that damn courtroom.”

  “Then you tell me, Sean, what’s the answer? Are we just supposed to sit around and hope Willow stops breaking? Or that you—” I broke off abruptly.

  “That I what? Get a better job? Win the fucking lottery? Why don’t you just say it, Charlotte? You think I can’t support all of you.”

  “I never said that—”

  “You didn’t have to. It came through loud and clear,” he said. “You know, you used to say that you felt like I’d rescued you and Amelia. But I guess in the long run, I let you down.”

  “This isn’t about you. It’s about our family.”

  “Which you’re ripping apart. My God, Charlotte, what do you think people see when they look at you now?”

  “A mother,” I said.

  “A martyr,” Sean corrected. “No one’s ever as good as you when it comes to taking care of Willow. You don’t trust anyone else to get it right. Don’t you see how fucked up that is?”

  I felt a tightening at the back of my throat. “Well, excuse me for not being perfect.”

  “No,” Sean said. “You just expect that of the rest of us.” With a sigh, he walked to the fireplace hearth, where a pillow and a quilt were neatly stacked. “If you don’t mind, you’re sitting on my bed.”

  I managed to hold in my sob until I was upstairs. I lay down on Sean’s side of the mattress, trying to find the spot where he used to sleep. I turned my face in to the pillow, which still smelled of his shampoo. Although I had changed the sheets since he’d moved to the couch, I hadn’t washed his pillowcase, on purpose—and now I wondered why. So I could pretend he was still here? So that I’d have something of him if he never c