The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  “There’s television people in my driveway,” Sophie announces.

  Amazingly, the teacher’s smile never wavers. “Isn’t that interesting!” she says. “Why don’t you join Mikayla and Ryan’s group?”

  As Sophie runs off, already focused on what’s next, the teacher draws us aside. “Ms. Hopkins, we read about your father’s arraignment in the paper. All of us here want you to know that if there’s anything we can do to help . . .”

  “I’d just like Sophie to stay busy,” Delia replies woodenly. “She doesn’t really know what’s going on with my father.”

  “Of course,” the teacher agrees, and she glances at me. “She’s lucky to have two supportive parents right now.”

  Too late, she realizes this is probably not the smartest comment, given the circumstances. She blushes a deep red, then an even deeper hue when both Delia and I hasten to explain that I’m not Sophie’s father.

  There have been times, I’ll admit, that I wished I was. Like when Delia put my hand on her belly so that I could feel Sophie kicking inside, and I thought: I should have been the one to make that happen. But for all the nights I lay in bed as a teenager, imagining what it would be like to be Eric, with the freedom to touch her whenever I wanted, or breathing in the smell of my pillow after she’d sprawled on my bed studying for a test on Hamlet, or even feeling my pulse jump when we were both patting Greta after a find and our hands brushed—for all those times, there were a thousand others that did not belong to me.

  By now, the teacher is so tangled up in the kite strings of her embarrassment that she couldn’t fly straight if she wanted to. “We have to go,” I say to Delia, and I drag her out of the classroom. “I thought I’d save the poor woman before she put both of her feet in her mouth at once,” I explain. “How old is she? Eleven? Twelve?”

  “I didn’t get to say good-bye to Sophie.”

  We stop for a moment at the plate-glass window, watching Sophie make a block pattern out of colored circles and squares.

  “She’ll never know.”

  “I bet the teacher noticed. She’ll probably tell the school guidance counselor that I just picked up and left. They’re all waiting to see how far the apple falls from the tree, you know.”

  “Since when do you care what anyone thinks about you?” I ask. “That’s the kind of crap I’d expect to hear from Bethany Matthews, not Delia Hopkins.”

  I hear Delia suck in her breath at the sound of that forbidden name.

  “Bethany Matthews,” I continue blithely, “is always the first one parked at the curb to pick up her daughter. Bethany Matthews thinks that the pinnacle of personal success is being president of the PTA for four consecutive years. Bethany Matthews never serves frozen pizza for dinner because she’s forgotten to defrost.”

  “Bethany Matthews would not have gotten pregnant before she was married,” Delia says. “Bethany Matthews wouldn’t even let her daughter play with a child who was the product of that kind of broken household.”

  “Bethany Matthews still wears velvet headbands,” I laugh. “And baggy granny underwear.”

  “Bethany Matthews throws like a girl.”

  “Bethany Matthews,” I say, “is no fun to be around.”

  “Thank God I’m nothing like her,” Delia replies, and then she turns to me and smiles.

  * * *

  I dated Delia first. We were in middle school and it didn’t mean anything at all—if you said you were going out with a girl, it basically meant that you walked her to her bus at the end of the school day. I did it because everyone else seemed to be asking girls out, and Delia was the only one I really talked to. I broke up with her because as cool as it had been to have a girlfriend the week before, it was uncool to have one the following week. I told her that maybe we should spend a little time hanging out with other people.

  I realized too late that the look on Delia’s face when I did it was one I had never seen before—and with good reason: It was the first time in our lives that any of us three wanted to ration the amount of time we spent in one another’s company. In a fit of conscience, I went to find Delia in the gym. I was going to tell her that I didn’t mean it, that words without thought behind them were like deflated balloons, unable to go anywhere, but instead I spied her dancing with Eric. He had his arms around her, with an easy confidence I didn’t have. He touched her as if parts of her belonged to him, and maybe, after all these years, they did.

  On Eric’s face I saw my own mistake. It brightened his eyes and narrowed his focus so much that I thought of yelling Fire to see if he’d even hear. He looked the way I felt around Delia: as if a second sun was growing underneath my breastbone, a secret I could barely conceal. The difference, though, was how Delia was looking back at him. Unlike the hours we’d spent as an alleged couple—when we’d argue who would be the starting pitcher for the Sox, or whether Spider-Man could kick Batman’s ass in an arm-wrestling competition—Delia had nothing to say when she was staring up at Eric. He took away all her words, and I had never been able to do that.

  There were times, when we were getting older, that I thought of telling her how I really felt. I convinced myself that even if I lost Eric’s friendship forever as a result, I’d still have Delia to make up for it. But then I’d remember that moment when she and Eric were swaying in the middle school gym, with streamers caught on the bottoms of their shoes and a DJ playing REO Speedwagon; and I’d realize that even if all three of us had grown up, Delia and Eric still looked at each other as if the rest of the world had fallen away, myself included. I could lose one of them, but I didn’t think I could stand to lose both.

  Once, I slipped—I kissed her when we were horsing around on the shore of the Connecticut River. But I made a joke of it, the way I did when anything came too close for comfort. If I’d said what I really wanted to when she was floating with me in the reeds, her hands tight on my shoulders and her mouth a flower beneath mine, I might have wound up with her staring speechless at me, too. But what if it wasn’t because I took her breath away? What if it was because she couldn’t say back to me the things I said to her?

  When you love someone, you want her to have everything she wants.

  In Delia’s case, that has always been Eric.

  * * *

  The Grafton County Correctional Facility hunches like a sleeping bear at the end of Route 10 in Haverhill, yoked at the neck to its sister building, the courthouse. As we drive up and park my car, I can feel Delia’s eyes go straight to the razor wire at the top of the fence.

  I get out of the car and open Delia’s door. She squares her shoulders and marches toward the entryway, a squat little addition with a heavy wooden door that makes me think of the ogre’s cottage in a fairy tale. The correctional officer at the desk looks up from the MAXIM he’s reading. “We’ve come to see an inmate,” I say.

  “You a lawyer?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then come back Tuesday night during visiting hours.” He turns his attention back to his magazine.

  “I don’t think you understand—”

  “Nope, I never do,” the CO answers dully.

  “My father was brought in here two days ago—”

  “Then you can’t see him, period. It’ll be a few weeks before he’s approved for visitation.”

  “My father won’t be here in a few weeks,” Delia says. “He’s being sent to Arizona.”

  This, finally, gets his attention. There just aren’t all that many people in the Grafton County Jail who are on the short list for extradition to another state. “Hopkins?” the CO says. “You couldn’t meet with him even if I let you. He left this morning for Phoenix.”

  “What?” Delia says, stunned. “My father’s not here? Does his lawyer know?”

  The CO turns as a door is slammed nearby, followed by the sound of Eric cursing. “He does now,” the guard answers.

  Eric sees us standing in front of the CO’s booth and does a double-take. “What are you doing here?�€