The Storyteller

by Jodi Picoult

  I find myself thinking of Adam; of his daughter, coughing as a pediatrician listens to her lungs. "Maybe," I say, "you could teach me what you know."

  *

  Josef becomes a regular at Our Daily Bread, showing up shortly before closing, so that we can spend a half hour chatting before he leaves for the night and I start my workday. When Josef shows up, Rocco yells to me in the kitchen, referring to him as "my boyfriend." Mary brings him a cutting from the shrine--a daylily--and tells him how to plant it in his backyard. She starts assuming that even after she locks up, I will make sure Josef gets home. The dog biscuits I bake for Eva become a new staple of our menu.

  We talk about teachers that I had at the high school when Josef was still working there--Mr. Muchnick, whose toupee once went missing when he fell asleep proctoring an SAT test; Ms. Fiero, who would bring her toddler to school when her nanny got sick and would stick him in the computer lab to play Sesame Street games. We talk about a strudel recipe that his grandmother used to make. He tells me about Eva's predecessor, a schnauzer named Willie, who used to mummify himself in toilet paper if you left the bathroom door open by accident. Josef admits that it is hard to fill all the hours he has, now that he isn't working or volunteering regularly.

  And me: I find myself talking about things that I have long packed up, like a spinster's hope chest. I tell Josef about the time my mother and I went shopping together, and she got stuck in a sundress too small for her, and we had to buy it just so that we could rip it off. I tell him how, for years after that, even uttering the word sundress made us both collapse with laughter. I tell him how my father would read the Seder every year in a Donald Duck voice, not out of irreverence, but because it made his little girls laugh. I tell him how, on our birthdays, my mother let us eat our favorite dessert for breakfast and how she could touch your forehead if you were feverish and guess your temperature, within two-tenths of a degree. I tell him how, when I was little and convinced a monster lived in my closet, my father slept for a month sitting upright against the slatted pocket doors so that the beast couldn't break out in the middle of the night. I tell him how my mother taught me to make hospital corners on a bed; how my father taught me to spit a watermelon seed through my teeth. Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.

  I find myself canceling dates with Adam so that I can instead spend an hour at Josef's house, playing chess, before my eyelids droop and I have to drive back home and get some rest. He teaches me to control the center of the board. To not give up any pieces unless absolutely necessary, and how to assign arbitrary point values to each knight and bishop and rook and pawn so that I can make those decisions.

  As we play, Josef asks me questions. Was my mother a redhead, like me? Did my father ever miss the restaurant industry, once he went into industrial sales? Did either of them ever get a chance to taste some of my recipes? Even the answers that are hardest to give--like the fact that I never baked for either of them--don't burn my tongue as badly as they would have a year or two ago. It turns out that sharing the past with someone is different from reliving it when you're alone. It feels less like a wound, more like a poultice.

  Two weeks later, Josef and I carpool to our next grief group meeting. We sit beside each other, and it is as if we have a subtle telepathy between us as the other group members speak. Sometimes he catches my gaze and hides a smile, sometimes I roll my eyes at him. We are suddenly partners in crime.

  Today we are talking about what happens to us after we die. "Do we stick around?" Marge asks. "Watch over our loved ones?"

  "I think so. I can still feel Sheila sometimes," Stuart says. "It's like the air gets more humid."

  "Well, I think it's pretty self-serving to think that souls hang around with the rest of us," Shayla says immediately. "They go to Heaven."

  "Everyone?"

  "Everyone who's a believer," she qualifies.

  Shayla is born-again; this isn't a surprise. But it still makes me uncomfortable, as if she is specifically talking about my ineligibility.

  "When my mother was in the hospital," I say, "her rabbi told her a story. In Heaven and Hell, people sit at banquet tables filled with amazing food, but no one can bend their elbows. In Hell, everyone starves because they can't feed themselves. In Heaven, everyone's stuffed, because they don't have to bend their arms to feed each other."

  I can feel Josef staring at me.

  "Mr. Weber?" Marge prompts.

  I assume Josef will ignore her question, or shake his head, like usual. But to my surprise, he speaks. "When you die you die. And everything is over."

  His blunt words settle like a shroud over the rest of us. "Excuse me," he says, and he walks out of the meeting room.

  I find him waiting in the hallway of the church. "That story you told, about the banquet," Josef says. "Do you believe it?"

  "I guess I'd like to," I say. "For my mother's sake."

  "But your rabbi--"

  "Not my rabbi. My mother's." I start walking toward the door.

  "But you believe in an afterlife?" Josef says, curious.

  "And you don't."

  "I believe in Hell . . . but it's here on earth." He shakes his head. "Good people and bad people. As if it were this easy. Everyone is both of these at once."

  "Don't you think one outweighs the other?"

  Josef stops walking. "You tell me," he says.

  As if his words have heat behind them, my scar burns. "How come you've never asked me," I blurt out. "How it happened?"

  "How what happened?"

  I make a circular gesture in front of my face.

  "Ach. Well. A long time ago, someone once told me that a story will tell itself, when it's ready. I assumed that it wasn't ready."

  It is a strange idea, that what happened to me isn't my tale to tell, but something completely separate from me. I wonder if this has been my problem all along: not being able to dissect the two. "I was in a car accident," I say.

  Josef nods, waiting.

  "I wasn't the only one hurt," I manage, although the words choke me.

  "But you survived." Gently, he touches my shoulder. "Maybe that's all that matters."

  I shake my head. "I wish I could believe that."

  Josef looks at me. "Don't we all," he says.

  *

  The next day, Josef doesn't come to the bakery. He doesn't come the following day, either. I have reached the only viable conclusion: Josef is lying comatose in his bed. Or worse.

  In all the years I've worked at Our Daily Bread, I've never left the bakery unattended overnight. My evenings are ordered to military precision, with me working a mile a minute to divide dough and shape it into hundreds of loaves; to have them proofed and ready for baking when the oven is free. The bakery itself becomes a living, breathing thing; each station a new partner to dance with. Mess up on the timing, and you will find yourself standing alone while chaos whirls around you. I find myself compensating in a frenzy, trying to produce the same amount of product in less time. But I realize that I'm not going to be of any use until I go to Josef's house, and make sure he's still breathing.

  I drive there, and see a light on in the kitchen. Immediately, Eva starts barking. Josef opens the front door. "Sage," he says, surprised. He sneezes violently and wipes his nose with a white cloth handkerchief. "Is everything all right?"

  "You have a cold," I say, the obvious.

  "Did you come all this way to tell me what I already know?"

  "No. I thought--I mean, I wanted to check on you, since I hadn't seen you in a few days."

  "Ach. Well, as you can see, I am still standing." He gestures. "You will come in?"

  "I can't," I say. "I have to get back to work." But I make no move to leave. "I was worried when you didn't show up at the ba
kery."

  He hesitates, his hand on the doorknob. "So you came to make sure I was alive?"

  "I came to check on a friend."

  "Friends," Josef repeats, beaming. "We are friends, now?"

  A twenty-five-year-old disfigured girl and a nonagenarian? I suppose there have been stranger duos.

  "I would like that very much," Josef says formally. "I will see you tomorrow, Sage. Now you must go back to work so that I can have a roll with my coffee."

  Twenty minutes later, I am back in the kitchen, turning off a half dozen angry timers and assessing the damage caused by my hour AWOL. There are loaves that have proofed too much; the dough has lost its shape and sags to one side or the other. My output for the whole night will be affected; Mary will be devastated. Tomorrow's customers will leave empty-handed.

  I burst into tears.

  I'm not sure if I'm crying because of the disaster in the kitchen or because I didn't realize how upsetting it was to think that Josef might be taken away from me, when I've only just found him. I just don't know how much more I can stand to lose.

  I wish I could bake for my mother: boules and pain au chocolat and brioche, piled high on her table in Heaven. I wish I could be the one to feed her. But I can't. It's like Josef said--no matter what we survivors like to tell ourselves about the afterlife, when someone dies, everything is over.

  But this. I look around the bakery kitchen. This, I can reclaim, by working the dough very briefly and letting it rise again.

  So I knead. I knead, I knead.

  *

  The next day, a miracle occurs.

  Mary, who at first is tight-lipped and angry at my reduced nightly output, slices open a ciabatta. "What am I supposed to do, Sage?" she sighs. "Tell customers to just go down the street to Rudy's?"

  Rudy's is our competition. "You could give them a rain check."

  "Peanut butter and jelly tastes like crap on a rain check."

  When she asks what happened, I lie. I tell her that I got a migraine and fell asleep for two hours. "It won't happen again."

  Mary purses her lips, which tells me that she hasn't forgiven me yet. Then she picks up a slice of the bread, ready to spread it with strawberry jam.

  Except she doesn't.

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph," she gasps, dropping the slice as if it's burned her fingers. She points to the crumb.

  That's a fancy term for the holes inside bread. Artisanal bread is judged on its variegated crumb, other breads--like Wonder (which is barely even a bread, nutritionally) have uniform, tiny crumb.

  "Do you see Him?"

  If I squint, I can make out what looks like the shape of a face.

  Then it becomes more clear: A beard. A thorny crown.

  Apparently I've baked the face of God into my loaf.

  *

  The first visitors to our little miracle are the women who work in the shrine gift shop, who take a picture with the piece of bread between them. Then Father Dupree--the priest at the shrine--arrives. "Fascinating," he says, peering over the edge of his bifocals.

  By now, the bread has grown stale. The half of the loaf that Mary hasn't cut yet, of course, has a matching picture of Jesus. It strikes me that the thinner you cut the slices, the more incarnations of Jesus you would have.

  "The real question isn't that God appeared," Father Dupree tells Mary. "He's always here. It's why He chose to appear now."

  Rocco and I are watching this from a distance, leaning on the counter with our arms folded. "Good Lord," I murmur.

  He snorts. "Exactly. Looks like You baked the Father, the Son And the Holy Toast."

  The door flies open and a reporter with frizzy brown hair enters, trailed by a bear of a cameraman. "Is this where the Jesus Loaf is?"

  Mary steps forward. "Yes, I'm Mary DeAngelis. I own the bakery."

  "Great," the reporter says. "I'm Harriet Yarrow from WMUR. We'd like to talk to you and your employees. Last year we did a human-interest piece on a logger who saw the Virgin Mary in a tree stump and chained himself to it to keep his company from stripping the rest of that forest. It was the most watched piece of 2012. Are we rolling? Yes? Great."

  While she interviews Mary and Father Dupree, I hide behind Rocco, who rings up three baguettes, a hot chocolate, and a semolina loaf. Then Harriet sticks her microphone in my face. "Is this the baker?" she asks Mary.

  The camera has a red light above its cyclopean eye, which blinks awake while filming. I stare at it, stricken by the thought of the whole state seeing me on the midday news. I drop my chin to my chest, obliterating my face, even as my cheeks burn with embarrassment. How much has he already filmed? Just a glimpse of my scar before I ducked my head? Or enough to make children drop their spoons in their soup bowls; for their mothers to turn off the television for fear of giving birth to nightmares? "I have to go," I mutter, and I bolt into the bakery office, and out the back door.

  I take the Holy Stairs two at a time. Everyone comes to the shrine to see the giant rosary, but I like the little grotto at the top of the hill that Mary's planted to look like a Monet painting. It's an area nobody ever visits--which, of course, is exactly how I like it.

  This is why I'm surprised when I hear footsteps. When Josef appears, leaning heavily on the railing, I rush over to help him. "What is going on down there? Is someone famous having coffee?"

  "Sort of. Mary thinks she saw the face of Jesus in one of my loaves."

  I expect him to scoff, but instead Josef tilts his head, considering this. "I suppose God tends to show up in places we would not expect."

  "You believe in God?" I say, truly surprised. After our conversation about Heaven and Hell, I had assumed that he was an atheist, too.

  "Yes," Josef replies. "He judges us at the end. The Old Testament God. You must know about this, as a Jew."

  I feel that pang of isolation, of difference. "I never said I was Jewish."

  Now Josef looks surprised. "But your mother--"

  "Is not me."

  Emotions chase over his features in quick succession, as if he is wrestling with a dilemma. "The child of a Jewish mother is a Jew."

  "I suppose it depends on who you're asking. And I'm asking you why it matters."

  "I did not mean to offend," he says stiffly. "I came to ask a favor, and I just needed to be certain you were who I thought you were." Josef takes a deep breath, and when he exhales, the words he speaks hang between us. "I would like you to help me die."

  "What?" I say, truly shocked. "Why?"

  He is having a senile moment, I think. But Josef's eyes are bright and focused. "I know this is a surprising request . . ."

  "Surprising? How about insane--"

  "I have my reasons," Josef says, stubborn. "I ask you to trust me."

  I take a step backward. "Maybe you should just go."

  "Please," Josef begs. "It is like you said about chess. I am thinking five steps ahead."

  His words make me pause. "Are you sick?"

  "My doctor says I have the constitution of a much younger man. This is God's joke on me. He makes me so strong that I cannot die even when I want to. I have had cancer, twice. I survived a car crash and a broken hip. I have even, God forgive me, swallowed a bottle of pills. But I was found by a Jehovah's Witness who happened to be passing out leaflets and saw me through the window, lying on the floor."

  "Why would you try to kill yourself?"

  "Because I should be dead, Sage. It's what I deserve. And you can help me." He hesitates. "You showed me your scars. I only ask you to let me show you mine."

  It strikes me that I know nothing about this man, except for what he has chosen to share with me. And now, apparently, he's picked me to help him carry out his assisted suicide. "Look, Josef," I say gently. "You do need help, but not for the reason you think. I don't go around committing murder."

  "Perhaps not." He reaches into his coat pocket and pulls out a small photograph, its edges scalloped. He presses it into my palm.

  In the picture, I see
a man, much younger than Josef--with the same widow's peak, the same hooked nose, a ghosting of his features. He is dressed in the uniform of an SS guard, and he is smiling.

  "But I did," he says.

  Damian held his hand high, as his soldiers laughed behind him. I tried to leap to reach the coins, but I couldn't, and stumbled. Although it was only October, there was a hint of winter in the air, and my hands were numb with the cold. Damian's arm snaked around me, a vise, pressing me along the length of his body. I could feel the silver buttons of his uniform cutting into my skin. "Let me go," I said through my teeth.

  "Now, now," he said, grinning. "Is that any way to speak to a paying customer?" It was the last baguette. Once I got his money, I could go back home to my father.

  I looked around at the other merchants. Old Sal was stirring the dregs of herring left in her barrel; Farouk was folding his silks, studiously avoiding the confrontation. They knew better than to make an enemy of the captain of the guard.

  "Where are your manners, Ania?" Damian chided.

  "Please!"

  He tossed a glance at his soldiers. "It sounds good when she begs for me, doesn't it?"

  Other girls rhapsodized about his striking silver eyes, about whether his hair was as black as night or as black as the wing of a raven, about a smile so full of sorcery it could rob you of your thoughts and speech, but I did not see the attraction. Damian might have been one of the most eligible men in the village, but he reminded me of the pumpkins left too long on the porch after All Hallows' Eve--lovely to look at, until you touched one and realized it was rotten to the core.

  Unfortunately, Damian liked a challenge. And since I was the only woman between ten years and a hundred who wasn't swayed by his charm, he had targeted me.

  He brought down his hand, the one holding the coins, and curled it around my throat. I could feel the silver pressing into the pulse at my neck. He pinned me against the scrubwood of the vegetable seller's cart, as if he wanted to remind me how easy it would be to kill me, how much stronger he was. But then he leaned forward. Marry me, he whispered, and you'll never have to worry about taxes again. Still gripping me by the throat, he kissed me.

  I bit his lip so hard that he bled. As soon as he let go of me, I grabbed the empty basket I used to carry bread back and forth to the market, and I started to run.