The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  The only way I am able to stand it is to think about you. This time, the memory that spreads across my mind is of the autumn weekend we drove to Killington and took a chairlift up to the top. It was October, and you were only five. When we got to the peak, the ring of Killington’s mountains rose to our left and right; the valley below was a lavish tapestry of reds and golds and emeralds, studded with church spires that looked like fallen stars caught in the folds of the landscape. The Ottauquechee River scalloped a blue seam down the center, and the air already smelled of snow.

  It looked just about as different from Arizona as humanly possible. And I began to understand what New Englanders say, what I had learned long before I took refuge in New Hampshire: You never forget your first fall.

  * * *

  When you’re a parent you find yourself looking at the unknown that is your child, trying to find a piece of yourself inside her, because sometimes that is what it takes to stake a claim. I remember watching you making muddy mixtures in the sandbox, and wondering if a love of chemistry was something you might be born with. I remember listening to your tearful recollection of the monster in your nightmare, trying to see whether it resembled me.

  What I saw most in you, though, was your mother.

  You had an uncanny ability to find things: the diamond earring Eric’s mother lost somewhere in her driveway; the old stash of comic books hidden behind a loose panel of wood in the basement; a buffalo-head nickel caught between the cracks of the sidewalk. Unlike Elise, who could discover parts of a person they didn’t even know were absent, you specialized in the tangible, but that, I feared, was only a matter of time.

  When you were seven, you found a chickadee’s egg that had fallen out of a nest. The egg was cracked and the bird, still embryonic and developing, was pink-skinned and pale, oddly humanistic. You and I lined a matchbox with tissues and held a private burial. “Wilbur,” you intoned, “lived a short life, full of danger.”

  Not unlike your own.

  You cried for a week over that damn bird—the first time that finding something, for you, became equated to loss. That was when I realized that I could take you to the far ends of the earth, but I couldn’t keep your mother from surfacing. Elise was in your blood; Elise was printed upon you. And, like Elise, I was terrified that if you grew up able to find whatever it was that hollowed out a person’s heart, you would wind up feeling just as empty as she had.

  God forbid, maybe you’d try to fill yourself the same way.

  I made a few phone calls and took you to meet a policeman who happened to be the son of one of the seniors who played mah-jongg every Tuesday at the center. Art was a state trooper who had a German shepherd named Jerry Lee, known for his search-and-rescue ability. He let you play hide and seek with Jerry Lee, who always won. By the time we drove home that day, you knew what you wanted to be when you grew up.

  There is a fine line between seeing something that’s lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found. The way I figured, it was my job to make sure that you were focused correctly. In high school, I got you an apprenticeship with a local vet. In college, you adopted a hound from a shelter, and trained it for search and rescue. As a senior, you made your first big rescue: a little boy who had wandered off at a county fair. You began to get a reputation for hard work and diligence; you were called in to work with K-9 units all over New Hampshire and Vermont. I have heard you tell the story of how you got started in this business over and over to reporters and to grateful victims; you always say it began when you found a bird.

  I’m not even sure you remember anymore that it was dead.

  Sometimes parents don’t find what they’re looking for in their child, so they plant seeds for what they’d like to grow there instead. I’ve witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter’s hair into a bun and watches from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you’d expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We’re hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we’ve already lived.

  * * *

  Last night, before my arraignment, I started shaking. Not shivering, but the palsied kind of seizure that even made the guards bring me to the infirmary for a free nurse’s check, not that she could find anything wrong. It was the sort of tremor that astronauts get when they come back to earth, that a hiker suffers after coming back down from the crest of Kilimanjaro—a bone-deep chill that has nothing to do with cold and everything with being moved from one world to another. It continued the whole time the guards snapped on handcuffs and led me underground to the court building next door; it continued while I waited in the sheriff’s department cell there; it continued until the moment I saw you in the courtroom and called your name.

  You couldn’t look me in the eye, and that was the first time I ever had doubts about what I did.

  * * *

  “Hey,” my cellmate says. “You gonna eat your bread?”

  A twenty-year-old awaiting trial for armed robbery, my cellmate’s name is Monteverde Jones. I toss him my bread, which is stale enough to be classified as a weapon. We are fed in our cells, given an unappetizing array of blots on a plastic tray that blend together like Venn diagrams.

  Because Monte has been here longer than I have, he gets to eat on the bunk. Me, I have to sit on the toilet or the floor. Everything is based on hierarchy and privilege; in this, jail’s a lot like the real world. “So,” he says, “what do you do on the outside?”

  I look up over my fork. “I run a senior citizens’ center.”

  “Like a nursing home?”

  “The opposite,” I explain. “A place for active seniors to come and socialize. We had league sports and chess tournaments and season tickets to the Red Sox.”

  “No shit,” Monte says. “My grandma, she’s in one of those places where they just give her oxygen and wait for her to die.” He takes out a pen that he has whittled to a sharp point, a makeshift knife, and begins to run it under his nails. “How long you been doing that?”

  “Since I moved to Wexton,” I tell him. “Almost thirty years.”

  “Thirty years?” Monte shakes his head. “That’s, like, forever.”

  I look down at my tray. “Not really,” I say.

  * * *

  If I had been allowed to make my phone call to you, this is what I would have said:

  How are you? How’s Sophie?

  I’m fine. I’m stronger than you’d think.

  I wish it hadn’t happened this way.

  I will see you in Arizona, and explain.

  I know.

  I’m not sorry, either.

  Fitz

  I’m not prepared for what I see when I turn the corner onto the street where I grew up. Two news vans from the Boston area are parked in the driveway of what used to be Eric’s childhood home. In front of Andrew Hopkins’s little red Cape is a lineup of television reporters, each facing a cameraman whose job it is to carve out a small square of background and make it look as if no other journalist has stumbled onto this grand story. This is a plum assignment, and under any other circumstance I might find myself sitting alongside the others, bumming cigarettes and thermoses of coffee while we wait for the Victim to peek out the front door.

  I park the car and circle around the media into my former backyard. A gay couple lives here now, with their adopted daughter—the gardens are far more manicured than anything my parents were ever able to pull off. But there’s still a corner of the chain-link fence behind the rhododendrons that’s bent up, just high enough for you to squeeze underneath into Delia’s yard—a secret passage where we’d leave each other notes and treasures. I walk up the back door and let myself inside. “Dee?” I call out. “It’s me.”

  When there’s no answer, I wand