The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

It wasn’t what you didn’t know about the people you loved that would shock you; it was what you didn’t want to admit about yourself.

  When the door opened, Laura jumped, her thoughts scattering like a flock of crows. Charles stood on the steps, smoking a pipe. “You know what it means if you go outside and there are no Yupiit around?”

  “No.”

  “That it’s too damn cold to be standing here.” He took the basketball from Laura’s hands and sank a neat basket; together they watched it roll into a neighbor’s yard.

  Laura dug her hands into her pockets. “It’s so quiet,” she said. How ironic, she thought, to make conversation about the lack of it.

  Charles nodded. “Every now and again someone will move to Bethel, and then come back because it’s too loud. Down there, there’s too much going on.”

  It was hard to imagine this: Bethel was the last place Laura would ever have considered a metropolis. “New York City would probably make their heads explode.”

  “I was there once,” Charles said, surprising her. “Oh, I been lots of places you wouldn’t think: to California, and to Georgia, when I was in the army. And to Oregon, when I went to school.”

  “College?”

  Charles shook his head. “Boarding school. Back before they made it a law to have education in every village, the government used to ship us off to learn the same things the whites did. You could pick your school—there was one in Oklahoma, but I went to Chemawa in Oregon because my cousins were already there. I got sick like you can’t imagine, eating all that white food . . . melting in that heat. One time I even got in trouble for trying to snare a rabbit with one of my shoelaces.”

  Laura tried to imagine what it would be like to be sent away from the only home you’d ever known, just because somebody else thought it was best for you. “You must have hated it.”

  “Back then, I did,” Charles said. He dumped the contents of his pipe and kicked snow over the embers. “Now, I’m not so sure. Most of us came back home, but we got to see what else was out there and how those folks lived. Now some kids don’t ever leave the village. The only kass’aqs they meet are teachers, and the only teachers who come up here either can’t get hired in their own towns or are running away from something—not exactly role models. The kids today, they all talk about getting out of the village, but then when they do, it’s like Bethel—only a hundred times worse. People move too fast and talk too much, and before you know it, they come back to a place they don’t want to be—except now they know there’s nowhere left to run.” Charles glanced at Laura, then tucked the pipe into his coat pocket. “That’s how it was for my son.”

  She nodded. “Daniel told me about him.”

  “He wasn’t the first. The year before him, a girl took pills. And earlier still, two ball players hanged themselves.”

  “I’m sorry,” Laura said.

  “I knew all along that Wass wasn’t the one who killed Cane. Cane would have done that, no matter what, all by himself. Some people, they get down in a hole so deep they can’t figure out what to hold on to.”

  And some people, Laura thought, make the choice to let go.

  Although it was only two o’clock, the sun was already sagging against the horizon. Charles headed back up the steps. “I know this place must seem like Mars to you. And that you and me, we’re about as different as different could be. But I also know what it feels like to lose a child.” He turned at the top landing. “Don’t freeze to death. Wassilie’d never forgive me.”

  He left Laura outside, watching the night sky bloom. She found herself lulled by the lack of sound. It was easier than you’d think to grow accustomed to silence.

  • • •

  When the Jesuit Volunteers tried to raise Kingurauten Joseph’s body temperature by cutting off his frozen clothes and covering him with blankets, they found a dove fashioned delicately out of bone, a carving knife, and three hundred dollars in his boot. This was a cash economy, Carl told Trixie. That was Joseph’s health insurance, wadded up in his sock.

  Trixie had just come in from her rotation on the riverbank, and she was still frozen to the core. “Why don’t you two warm up together?” Carl suggested, and he left her watching over the old man.

  She didn’t mind, actually. While the mushers raced from Tuluksak to Kalskag and Aniak and back, the volunteers were mostly catching some sleep. But Trixie was wide awake; she’d slept on the trail with Willie, and her body was all mixed up with jet lag. She remembered how every year when it was time to turn the clocks back, her father would insist that he was going to stay on daylight saving time and keep the extra hour, so that he’d get more work done. The problem was, when he took the additional minutes every morning, he’d conk out in front of the television earlier at night. Finally he’d give in and live on the same schedule as the rest of the world.

  She wished her father was here right now.

  “I’ve missed you,” he answered, and Trixie whirled around in the dark classroom. Her heart was pounding, but she couldn’t see anyone there.

  She looked down at Joseph. He had the broad, chiseled features of a Yup’ik and white hair that was matted down in whorls. His beard stubble glinted silver in the moonlight. His hands were folded over his chest, and Trixie thought they couldn’t have looked more different from her father’s—Joseph’s were blunt and calloused, the tools of a laborer; her father’s were smooth and long fingered and ink stained, an artist’s.

  “Aw, Nettie,” he murmured, opening his eyes. “I came back.”

  “I’m not Nettie,” Trixie said, moving away.

  Joseph blinked. “Where am I?”

  “Tuluksak. You nearly froze to death.” Trixie hesitated. “You got really drunk and passed out on the K300 trail, and a musher quit the race to bring you in here. He saved your life.”

  “Shouldn’t have bothered,” Joseph muttered.

  There was something about Joseph that seemed familiar to Trixie, something that made her want to take a second look at the lines around his eyes and the way his eyebrows arched. “You one of those juveniles for Jesus?”

  “They’re Jesuit Volunteers,” Trixie corrected. “And no. I’m not.”

  “Then who are you?”

  Well, wasn’t that the $64,000 question. Trixie couldn’t have answered that if Joseph had held a gun to her head. It wasn’t even a matter of giving her name, because that didn’t explain anything. She could remember who she used to be—that picture was like an image sealed into a snow globe, one that went fuzzy when she shook it too hard but then, if she held her breath, might see clearly. She could look down at herself now and tell you how surprised she was that she had come this distance, how strange it was to discover that lying came as easily as breathing. What she couldn’t put into words was what had happened in between to change her from one person into the other.

  Her father used to tell her the story of how, when she was eight, she’d awakened in the middle of the night with her arms and legs burning, as if they’d been tugged from their sockets. It’s growing pains, he’d told her sympathetically, and she’d burst into tears, certain that when she woke up in the morning, she’d be as big as him.

  The amazing thing was, it did happen that quickly. All those mornings in middle school she’d spent scrutinizing her chest to see if it had budded the slightest bit, all the practice kisses she’d given her bathroom mirror to make sure her nose didn’t get in the way on D-day; all the waiting for a boy to notice her—and as it turned out, growing up was just as she’d feared. One day when your alarm clock rang, you got up and realized you had someone else’s thoughts in your head . . . or maybe just your old ones, minus the hope.

  “Are you sure you’re not Nettie?” Joseph said when Trixie didn’t answer.

  It was the name he’d called her before. “Who is she?”

  “Well.” He turned his face to the wall. “She’s dead.”

  “Then chances are pretty good I’m not her.”

  Joseph seemed su