The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  Instead, she just marched along like a zombie. If I’d asked her what animals we passed, I bet she would have just turned to me and said Huh?

  I pushed you up close to the wall to see the orangutans, but you had to stand to see over it. You balanced yourself against the low concrete barrier, your eyes lighting when you saw the mother and her baby. The mother orangutan was cradling the teeniest little ape I’d ever seen, and another baby that was probably a few years old kept pestering her, pulling at her tail and swinging a foot in front of them and being a total pain in the butt. “It’s us,” you said, delighted. “Look, Amelia!”

  But I was busy glancing all around for Adam. It was six o’clock on the dot. What if he was blowing me off? What if I couldn’t even keep a guy interested in me when I was pretending to be someone else?

  Suddenly he was there, a fine sweat shining on his forehead. “Sorry,” he said. “The hill was killer.” He glanced at my mother and you, facing the orangutans. “Hey, that’s your family, right?”

  I should have introduced him. I should have told my mother what I was doing. But what if you said my name—my real name—and Adam realized I was a total liar? So instead I grabbed Adam’s hand and pulled him off to a side path that wound past a flock of red parrots and a cage where there was supposed to be a mongoose, but apparently it was an invisible one. “Let’s just go,” I said, and we ran down to the aquarium.

  Because of where it was tucked in the zoo, it wasn’t crowded. There was one family in there with a toddler in a spica cast—poor kid—looking at the penguins in their fake formal wear. “Do you think they know they’ve got a raw deal?” I asked. “That they’ve got wings, and can’t fly?”

  “As opposed to a skeleton that keeps falling apart?” Adam said. He tugged me into another room, a glass tunnel. The light was blue, eerie; all around us, sharks were swimming. I looked up at the soft white belly of a shark, the ridged diamond rows of its teeth. At the hammerheads, wriggling like Star Wars creatures as they passed us by.

  Adam leaned against the glass wall, staring up at the transparent ceiling. “I wouldn’t do that,” I said. “What if it breaks?”

  “Then the Omaha zoo has a huge problem.” Adam laughed.

  “Let’s see what else there is,” I said.

  “What’s your rush?”

  “I don’t like sharks,” I admitted. “They freak me out.”

  “I think they’re awesome,” Adam said. “Not a single bone in their body.”

  I stared at him, his face blue in the aquarium light. His eyes were the same color as the water, a deep, pure cobalt.

  “Did you know that they hardly ever find shark fossils, because they’re made of cartilage, and they decompose really fast? I’ve always kind of wondered if that’s true of people like us, too.”

  Because I am a moron, and destined to live alone my whole life with a dozen cats, at that very moment I burst into tears.

  “Hey,” Adam said, pulling me into his arms, which felt like home and totally strange all at once. “I’m sorry. That was a really stupid thing to say.” One of his hands was on my back, rubbing down each pearl of my spine. One was tangled in my hair. “Willow?” he said, tugging on my ponytail so that I’d look up at him. “Talk to me?”

  “I’m not Willow,” I burst out. “That’s my sister’s name. I don’t even have OI. I lied, because I wanted to sit in on that class. I wanted to sit next to you.”

  His fingers curled around the back of my neck. “I know.”

  “You . . . what?”

  “I Googled your family, during the break after the sex class. I read all about your mom and the lawsuit and your sister, who’s just as young as they said she was on the OI blogs.”

  “I’m a horrible person,” I admitted. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry I’m not the person you wanted me to be.”

  Adam stared at me soberly. “No, you’re not. You’re better. You’re healthy. Who wouldn’t want that for someone you really, really like?”

  And then, suddenly, his mouth was touching mine, and his tongue was touching mine, and even though I’d never done this and had only read about it in Seventeen, it wasn’t wet or gross or confusing. Somehow, I knew which way to turn and when to open and close my lips and how to breathe. His hands splayed on my shoulder blades, on the spot you’d once broken, on the place where I’d have wings if I had been born an angel.

  The room was closing in around us, just blue water and those boneless sharks. And I realized that Sarah had gotten part of her sex talk wrong: it wasn’t fractures you had to worry about, it was dissolving—losing yourself willingly, blissfully, in someone else. Adam’s fingers were warm on my waist, skirting the bottom of my shirt, but I was afraid to touch him, afraid that I would hold him too tightly and hurt him.

  “Don’t be scared,” he whispered, and he put my hand over his heart so that I could feel it beating.

  I leaned forward and kissed him. And again. As if I were passing him all those silent words I could not say, the ones that explained my biggest secret: that I might not have OI but I knew how he felt. That I was breaking apart, too, all the time.

  Charlotte

  On the flight home from the convention, I formulated a plan. When I landed, I would call Sean and ask him if he could come over to talk. I would tell him that I wanted to fight for what we had between us, just as hard as I wanted to fight for your future. I would say that I needed to finish what I had started but that I didn’t think I could do it without his understanding, if not his support.

  I’d tell him I loved him.

  It was a strange trip. You were exhausted after three days of interaction with other OI kids, and you fell asleep immediately, still clutching the piece of paper that listed the email addresses of your new friends. Amelia had been brooding ever since we had gone to the zoo—although I assumed it was a residual effect of my frantic reprimand there after she disappeared for two full hours. Once we had landed and collected our luggage, I told you girls to use the restroom, since it was a long ride back from Logan Airport to Bankton. I instructed Amelia to help you if you needed it, and I stood guard over our luggage cart outside. I watched a few families pass by, little kids wearing Mickey Mouse ears, mothers and daughters with matching cornrows and deep tans, fathers dragging car seats. Everyone in an airport is either excited to be going somewhere or relieved to be back home.

  I was neither.

  I took out my cell phone and dialed Sean. He didn’t pick up, but then again, he rarely did when he was at work. “Hi,” I said. “It’s me. I just wanted to tell you we landed. And . . . I’ve been doing some thinking. Do you think you might be able to come over tonight? To talk?” I hesitated, as if I expected an answer then and there, but this was a one-way conversation—not unlike all the others we’d had recently. “Well, anyway. I hope the answer’s yes. Bye,” I said, and I hung up the phone as you girls came out of the restroom, waiting for me to take the lead.

  • • •

  Mailboxes made the best breeding grounds: I was certain, sometimes, that in that dark, cozy tunnel bills multiplied exponentially. As soon as we got home, I sent you and Amelia up to your rooms to unpack your suitcases while I sorted through the mail.

  It had not been in the box but, instead, left neatly in a pile on the counter for me. There was fresh milk and juice and eggs in the fridge, and the ramp you used to wheel yourself up to the front door had been rebuilt. Sean had been here while we were gone, and that made me think that maybe he was trying to wave a white flag, too.

  There was a bill from the credit card company, with its astronomical finance charge. Another one from the hospital—copayments for a visit six months ago. There was an invoice for our insurance premium. A mortgage payment. A phone bill. A cable bill. I began to sort the stack into bills and nonbills, and you could probably guess which stack was taller.

  In the nonbill pile were a few catalogs, some junk mail, a belated birthday card for Amelia from an ancient aunt who lived in Seattle,