The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  The thing is, I do have a choice. Which is exactly why I have to be the one to do this.

  My mother stands over me. “You went to a lawyer and made him think this is all about you—and it’s not. It’s about us. All of us—”

  My father’s hands curl around her shoulders and squeeze. As he crouches down in front of me, I smell smoke. He’s come from someone else’s fire right into the middle of this one, and for this and nothing else, I’m embarrassed. “Anna, honey, we know you think you were doing something you needed to do—”

  “I don’t think that,” my mother interrupts.

  My father closes his eyes. “Sara. Dammit, shut up.” Then he looks at me again. “Can we talk, just us three, without a lawyer having to do it for us?”

  What he says makes my eyes fill up. But I knew this was coming. So I lift my chin and let the tears go at the same time. “Daddy, I can’t.”

  “For God’s sake, Anna,” my mother says. “Do you even realize what the consequences would be?”

  My throat closes like the shutter of a camera, so that any air or excuses must move through a tunnel as thin as a pin. I’m invisible, I think, and realize too late I have spoken out loud.

  My mother moves so fast I do not even see it coming. But she slaps my face hard enough to make my head snap backward. She leaves a print that stains me long after it’s faded. Just so you know: shame is five-fingered.

  • • •

  Once, when Kate was eight and I was five, we had a fight and decided we no longer wanted to share a room. Given the size of our house, though, and the fact that Jesse lived in the other spare bedroom, we didn’t have anywhere else to go. So Kate, being older and wiser, decided to split our space in half. “Which side do you want?” she asked diplomatically. “I’ll even let you pick.”

  Well, I wanted the part with my bed in it. Besides, if you divided the room in two, the half with my bed would also, by default, have the box that held all our Barbie dolls and the shelves where we kept our arts and crafts supplies. Kate went to reach for a marker there, but I stopped her. “That’s on my side,” I pointed out.

  “Then give me one,” she demanded, so I handed her the red. She climbed up onto the desk, reaching as high as she could toward the ceiling. “Once we do this,” she said, “you stay on your side, and I stay on my side, right?” I nodded, just as committed to keeping up this bargain as she was. After all, I had all the good toys. Kate would be begging me for a visit long before I’d be begging her.

  “Swear it?” she asked, and we made a pinky promise.

  She drew a jagged line from the ceiling, over the desk, across the tan carpet, and back up over the nightstand up the opposite wall. Then she handed me the marker. “Don’t forget,” she said. “Only cheats go back on a promise.”

  I sat on the floor on my side of the room, removing every single Barbie we owned, dressing and undressing them, making a big fuss out of the fact that I had them and Kate didn’t. She perched on her bed with her knees drawn up, watching me. She didn’t react at all. Until, that is, my mother called us down for lunch.

  Then Kate smiled at me, and walked out the door of the bedroom—which was on her side.

  I went up to the line she had drawn on the carpet, kicking at it with my toes. I didn’t want to be a cheat. But I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in my room, either.

  I do not know how long it took my mother to wonder why I wasn’t coming to the kitchen for lunch, but when you are five, even a second can last forever. She stood in the doorway, staring at the line of marker on the walls and carpet, and closed her eyes for patience. She walked into our room and picked me up, which was when I started fighting her. “Don’t,” I cried. “I won’t ever get back in!”

  A minute later she left, and returned with pot holders, dishtowels, and throw pillows. She placed these at odd distances, all along Kate’s side of the room. “Come on,” she urged, but I did not move. So she came and sat down beside me on my bed. “It may be Kate’s pond,” she said, “but these are my lily pads.” Standing, she jumped onto a dishtowel, and from there, onto a pillow. She glanced over her shoulder, until I climbed onto the dishtowel. From the dishtowel, to the pillow, to a pot holder Jesse had made in first grade, all the way across Kate’s side of the room. Following my mother’s footsteps was the surest way out.

  • • •

  I am taking a shower when Kate jimmies the lock and comes into the bathroom. “I want to talk to you,” she says.

  I poke my head out from the side of the plastic curtain. “When I’m finished,” I say, trying to buy time for the conversation I don’t really want to have.

  “No, now.” She sits down on the lid of the toilet and sighs. “Anna . . . what you’re doing—”

  “It’s already done,” I say.

  “You can undo it, you know, if you want.”

  I am grateful for all the steam between us, because I couldn’t bear the thought of her being able to see my face right now. “I know,” I whisper.

  For a long time, Kate is silent. Her mind is running in circles, like a gerbil on a wheel, the same way mine is. Chase every rung of possibility, and you still get absolutely nowhere.

  After a while, I peek my head out again. Kate wipes her eyes and looks up at me. “You do realize,” she says, “that you’re the only friend I’ve got?”

  “That’s not true,” I immediately reply, but we both know I’m lying. Kate has spent too much time out of organized school to find a group she fits into. Most of the friends she has made during her long stretch of remission have disappeared—a mutual thing. It turned out to be too hard for an average kid to know how to act around someone on the verge of dying; and it was equally as difficult for Kate to get honestly excited about things like homecoming and SATs, when there was no guarantee she’d be around to experience them. She’s got a few acquaintances, sure, but mostly when they come over they look like they’re serving out a sentence, and sit on the edge of Kate’s bed counting down the minutes until they can leave and thank God this didn’t happen to them.

  A real friend isn’t capable of feeling sorry for you.

  “I’m not your friend,” I say, yanking the curtain back into place. “I’m your sister.” And doing a damn lousy job at that, I think. I push my face into the shower spray, so that she cannot tell I’m crying, too.

  Suddenly, the curtain whips aside, leaving me totally bare. “That’s what I wanted to talk about,” Kate says. “If you don’t want to be my sister anymore, that’s one thing. But I don’t think I could stand to lose you as a friend.”

  She pulls the curtain back into place, and the steam rises around me. A moment later I hear the door open and close, and the knife-slice of cold air that comes on its heels.

  I can’t stand the thought of losing her, either.

  • • •

  That night, once Kate falls asleep, I crawl out of my bed and stand beside hers. When I hold my palm up under her nose to see if she’s breathing, a mouthful of air presses against my hand. I could push down, now, over that nose and mouth, hold her when she fights. How would that really be any different than what I am already doing?

  The sound of footsteps in the hallway has me diving underneath the cave of my covers. I turn onto my side, away from the door, just in case my eyelids are still flickering by the time my parents enter the room. “I can’t believe this,” my mother whispers. “I just can’t believe she’s done this.”

  My father is so quiet that I wonder if maybe I have been mistaken, if maybe he isn’t here at all.

  “This is Jesse, all over again,” my mother adds. “She’s doing it for the attention.” I can feel her looking down at me, like I’m some kind of creature she’s never seen before. “Maybe we need to take her somewhere, alone. Go to a movie, or shopping, so she doesn’t feel left out. Make her see that she doesn’t have to do something crazy to get us to notice her. What do you think?”

  My father takes his time answering. “Well,” he say