The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  Kelly had taken a step backward. “That’s you?”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I can’t believe any parent would think that way,” Kelly said. “We all have to scrape the bottoms of our bank accounts to make things work. But I never, ever would wish I hadn’t had my son.”

  I felt myself shaking uncontrollably. I wanted to be a mother, like Kelly, who took her son’s disability in stride. I wanted you to grow up like this other woman, forthright and confident. I just also wanted the resources for you to be able to do it.

  “Do you know what I’ve spent the past six months doing?” the woman with OI said. “Training for the Paralympics. I’m on the swim team. If your daughter came home with a gold medal one day, would that convince you her life wasn’t a waste?”

  “You don’t understand—”

  “Actually,” Kelly said, “you don’t.”

  She turned on her heel, walking out of the restroom with the other woman trailing behind. I turned the water on full blast and splashed some onto my face, which felt as if it had gone up in flames. Then, with my heart still hammering, I stepped into the hallway.

  The nine o’clock sessions were filling. My cover had been blown; I could feel the needles of a hundred eyes on me, and every whisper held my name. I kept my gaze trained on the patterned carpet as I pushed past a knot of wrestling boys and a toddler being carried by a girl with OI not much bigger than himself. A hundred steps to the elevators . . . fifty . . . twenty.

  The elevator doors opened, and I slipped inside and punched a button. Just as the doors were closing, a crutch jammed between them. The man who had signed us in yesterday was standing on the threshold, but instead of smiling at me in welcome, like he had twelve hours earlier, his eyes were dark as pitch. “Just so you know—it’s not my disability that makes my life a constant struggle,” he said. “It’s people like you.” Then, with a rasping of metal, he stepped back and let the elevator doors close.

  I made it to the room and slid the key card inside, only to remember that Amelia was probably still sleeping. But—thank God—she was gone, downstairs eating breakfast or AWOL, and right now I didn’t care which. I lay down on the bed and pulled the covers over my head. Then, finally, I let myself burst into tears.

  This was worse than being judged by a jury of my peers. This was being judged by a jury of your peers.

  I was, pure and simple, a failure. My husband had left me; my mothering skills had been warped to include the American legal system. I cried until my eyes had swollen and my cheeks hurt. I cried until there was nothing left inside me. Then I sat up and walked to the small desk near the window.

  It held a phone, a blotter, and a binder listing the services offered by the hotel. Inside this were two postcards and two blank fax cover sheets. I took them out and reached for the pen beside the telephone.

  Sean, I wrote. I miss you.

  Until he moved out, Sean and I had never spent any time apart from each other, unless you counted the week before our wedding. Although he’d moved into the house where Amelia and I lived, I had wanted to create at least the semblance of excitement, so he’d bunked on the couch of another police officer in the days leading up to the ceremony. He’d hated it. I’d find him driving by in his cruiser while I was at work at the restaurant, and we’d sneak into the cold room in the kitchen and kiss intensely. Or he’d stop by to tuck Amelia in at night and then pretend to fall asleep on the couch watching TV. I’m onto you, I told him. And this isn’t going to work. At the ceremony, Sean surprised me with vows he’d written himself: I’ll give you my heart and my soul, he said. I’ll protect you and serve you. I’ll give you a home, and I won’t let you kick me out of it ever again. Everyone laughed, including me—imagine, mousy little Charlotte being the kind of sultry seductress who’d have that much control over a man! But Sean made me feel like I could fell a giant with a single word or a gentle touch. It was powerful, and it was a me I had never imagined.

  Somewhere, in the deep creases of my mind—the folds where hope gets caught—I believed that whatever was wrong between Sean and me was reparable. It had to be, because when you love someone—when you create a child with him—you don’t just suddenly lose that bond. Like any other energy, it can’t be destroyed, just channeled into something else. And maybe right now I’d turned the full spotlight of my attention on you. But that was normal; the levels of love within a family shifted and flowed all the time. Next week, it could be Amelia; next month, Sean. Once this lawsuit was over, he’d move back home. We’d go back to the way we used to be.

  We had to, because I couldn’t really swallow the alternative: that I would be forced to choose between your future and my own.

  The second letter I had to write was harder. Dear Willow, I wrote.

  I don’t know when you’ll be reading this, or what will have happened by then. But I have to write it, because I owe you an explanation more than anyone else. You are the most beautiful thing that’s ever happened to me, and the most painful. Not because of your illness, but because I can’t fix it, and I hate seeing those moments when you realize that you might not be able to do what other kids do.

  I love you, and I always will. Maybe more than I should. That’s the only reason I can give for all this. I thought that if I loved you hard enough, I could move mountains for you; I could make you fly. It didn’t matter to me how that happened—just as long as it did. I wasn’t thinking of who I might hurt, only who I could rescue.

  The first time you broke in my arms, I couldn’t stop crying. I think I’ve spent all these years trying to make up for that moment. That’s why I can’t stop now, even though there are times I want to. I can’t stop, but there isn’t a moment I don’t worry about what you’ll remember in the long run. Will it be the arguments I had with your father? The way your sister turned into someone we didn’t recognize? Or will you remember the way you and I once spent an hour watching a snail cross our porch? Or how I cut your lunch-box sandwiches into your initials? Will you remember how, when I wrapped you in a towel after your bath, I held you a moment longer than it took to dry you?

  I have always had a dream of you living on your own. I see you as a doctor, and I wonder if that’s because I’ve seen you with so many. I imagine a man who will love you like crazy, maybe even a baby. I bet you’ll fight for her as fiercely as I tried to fight for you.

  What I could never puzzle out, however, was how you’d get from where you are to where you might one day be—until I was given the materials to make a bridge. Too late I learned that that bridge was made of thorns, that it might not be strong enough to hold us all.

  When it comes to memories, the good and the bad never balance. I am not sure how I came to measure your life by the moments when it’s fallen apart—surgeries, breaks, emergencies—instead of the moments in between. Maybe that makes me a pessimist, maybe it makes me a realist. Or maybe it just makes me a mother.

  You will hear people saying things about me. Some are lies, some are truth. There’s only one fact that matters: I don’t want you to ever suffer another break.

  Especially one between you and me, because that might never set properly.

  Sean

  I was hemorrhaging money.

  Not only was my paycheck being stretched to cover the mortgage and the car payment and the credit card finance charges but now any cash I might have been able to sock away was being poured, forty-nine dollars per night, into the Sleep Inn motel, where I’d been living since the day Charlotte came to ream me out at the highway construction detail.

  This is why, when Charlotte told me she was leaving one Friday to take the girls to an OI convention for the weekend, I checked out of the Sleep Inn and let myself into my own house.

  It’s a weird thing, coming back home as a stranger. You know how, when you go into someone else’s house, it smells—sometimes like fresh laundry, sometimes like pine needles, but distinct from any other? You don’t notice it where you live until you haven’t bee