The Jodi Picoult Collection #3 Read online

  Logan had told her to get rid of it. She’d scheduled an abortion, only to forget to write the date and time on her calendar. She rescheduled, but realized too late that her appointment conflicted with a final exam. After that, she’d gone to Logan. It’s a sign, she’d said.

  Maybe, he told her, but it doesn’t mean what you’re thinking. Be reasonable, Logan had said. A single mother will never make it as a trial attorney. She’d have to choose between her career and this baby.

  What he really meant was that she’d have to choose between having the baby and having him.

  * * *

  The woman looked familiar from behind, in that way that people sometimes do when you see them out of context: your grocery clerk standing in line at the bank, your postman sitting across the aisle of the movie theater. Alex stared for another second, and then realized it was the infant throwing her off. She strode across the hallway of the courthouse toward the town clerk, where Lacy Houghton stood paying a parking ticket.

  “Need a lawyer?” Alex asked.

  Lacy looked up, the baby carrier balanced in the crook of her arm. It took a moment to place the face—she hadn’t seen Alex since her initial visit nearly a month ago. “Oh, hello!” she said, smiling.

  “What brings you to my neck of the woods?”

  “Oh, I’m posting bail for my ex . . .” Lacy waited for Alex’s eyes to widen, and then laughed. “Just kidding. I got a parking ticket.”

  Alex found herself staring down at the face of Lacy’s son. He wore a blue cap that tied underneath his chin, and his cheeks spilled over the edges of the fleece. He had a runny nose, and when he noticed Alex looking at him, he offered her a cavernous smile.

  “Would you like to grab a cup of coffee?” Lacy said.

  She slapped ten dollars down on top of her parking ticket and fed it through the open mouth of the payment window, then hefted the baby bucket a little higher into the crook of her arm and walked out of the court building to a Dunkin’ Donuts across the street. Lacy stopped to give a ten-dollar bill to a bum sitting outside the courthouse, and Alex rolled her eyes—she’d actually seen this particular fellow heading over to the closest bar yesterday when she left work.

  In the coffee shop, Alex watched Lacy effortlessly unpeel layers of clothing from her baby and lift him out of his seat onto her lap. As she talked, she draped a blanket over her shoulder and started to nurse Peter. “Is it hard?” Alex blurted out.

  “Nursing?”

  “Not just that,” Alex said. “Everything.”

  “It’s definitely an acquired skill.” Lacy lifted the baby onto her shoulder. His booted feet kicked against her chest, as if he was already trying to put distance between them. “Compared to your day job, motherhood is probably a piece of cake.”

  It made Alex think, immediately, of Logan Rourke, who had laughed at her when she said she was taking a job with the public defender’s office. You won’t last a week, he’d told her. You’re too soft for that.

  She sometimes wondered if she was a good public defender because of skill or because she had been so determined to show Logan that he was wrong. In any case, Alex had cultivated a persona on the job, one that was there to give offenders an equal voice in the legal system, without letting clients get under her skin.

  She’d already made that mistake with Logan.

  “Did you get a chance to contact any of the adoption agencies?” Lacy asked.

  Alex had not even taken the pamphlets she’d been given. For all she knew, they were still sitting on the counter of the examination room.

  “I put in a few calls,” Alex lied. She had it on her To Do list at work. It was just that something else always got in the way.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” Lacy said, and Alex nodded slowly—she did not like personal questions. “What made you decide to give the baby up?”

  Had she ever really made that decision? Or had it been made for her?

  “This isn’t a good time,” Alex said.

  Lacy laughed. “I don’t know if it’s ever a good time to have a baby. Your life certainly gets turned upside down.”

  Alex stared at her. “I like my life right side up.”

  Lacy fussed with her baby’s shirt for a moment. “In a way, what you and I do isn’t really all that different.”

  “The recidivism rate is probably about the same,” Alex said.

  “No . . . I meant that we both see people when they’re at their most raw. That’s what I love about midwifery. You see how strong someone is, in the face of a really painful situation.” She glanced up at Alex. “Isn’t it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?”

  Alex thought of the defendants that had paraded through her professional life. They all blurred together in her mind. But was that because, as Lacy said, we were all similar? Or was it because Alex had become an expert at not looking too closely?

  She watched Lacy settle the baby on her knee. His hands smacked the table, and he made little gurgling noises. Suddenly Lacy stood up, thrusting the baby toward Alex so that she had to hold him or risk having him tumble onto the floor. “Here, hang on to Peter. I just have to run into the bathroom.”

  Alex panicked. Wait, she thought. I don’t know what I’m doing. The baby’s legs kicked, like a cartoon character who’d run off a cliff.

  Awkwardly, Alex sat him down on her lap. He was heavier than she would have imagined, and his skin felt like damp velvet. “Peter,” she said formally. “I’m Alex.”

  The baby reached for her coffee cup, and she lurched forward to push it out of reach. Peter’s face pinched tight as a lime, and he started to cry.

  The screams were shattering, decibel-rich, cataclysmic. “Stop,” Alex begged, as people around her started to stare. She stood up, patting Peter’s back the way Lacy had, wishing he would run out of steam or contract laryngitis or just simply have mercy on her utter inexperience. Alex—who always had the perfect witty comeback, who could be thrown into a hellish legal situation and land on her feet every time without even breaking a sweat—found herself completely at a loss.

  She sat down and held Peter beneath his armpits. By now, he’d turned tomato-red, his skin so angry and dark that his soft fuzz of hair glowed like platinum. “Listen,” she said. “I may not be what you want right now, but I’m all you’ve got.”

  On a final hiccup, the baby quieted. He stared into Alex’s eyes, as if he was trying to place her.

  Relieved, Alex settled him into the sling of her arm and sat a little taller. She glanced down at the top of the baby’s head, at the translucent pulse beneath his fontanelle.

  When she relaxed her grip on the baby, he relaxed, too. Was it that easy?

  Alex traced her finger over the soft spot on Peter’s head. She knew the biology behind it: the plates of the skull shifted enough to make giving birth easier; they fused together by the time the baby was a toddler. It was a vulnerability we were all born with, one that literally grew into an adult’s hardheadedness.

  “Sorry,” Lacy said, breezing back to the table. “Thanks for that.”

  Alex thrust the baby out toward her as if she were being burned.

  * * *

  The patient had been transferred from a thirty-hour home birth. A firm believer in natural medicine, she’d had limited prenatal care, no amnio, no sonograms, and yet newborns had a way of getting what they wanted and needed when it came time to arrive in the world. Lacy laid her hands on the woman’s trembling belly like a faith healer. Six pounds, she thought, bottom up here, head down here. A doctor poked his head through the door. “How’s it going in here?”

  “Tell the intensive-care nursery we’re at thirty-five weeks,” she said, “but everything seems to be fine.” As the doctor backed away, she settled herself between the woman’s legs. “I know this has been going on for what seems like forever,” she said. “But if you can work with me for just one more hour, you’ll have this baby.”

  As she directed the