Salem Falls

by Jodie Picoult

  Jack thought of what it would be like to go through life knowing that the last conversation you had with your wife involved throwing a cast-iron pot at her. “All it takes is a second and your whole life can get turned upside down,” he agreed.

  “Mighty profound from a dishwasher.” Delilah tilted her head. “Where’d you come from, anyway?”

  Jack’s hand slipped and the knife sliced across the tip of his finger. Blood welled at the seam, and he lifted his hand before he could contaminate the food.

  Delilah fussed over him, handing him a clean rag to stop the bleeding and insisting he hold the wound under running water. “It’s nothing,” Jack said. He brought his fingertip to his mouth, sucking. “Must’ve been hard on Addie.”

  “Huh? Oh, you mean her mom dying. Actually, it gave her something to throw herself into, after Chloe.” Delilah looked up. “You do know about Chloe?”

  Jack had heard Addie speaking to Chloe in the tender, idiomatic language of a mother. “Her daughter, right? I haven’t met her yet, but I figured she was around here somewhere.”

  “Chloe was Addie’s little girl. She died when she was ten. Just about ruined Addie-she spent two years holed up in her house, nothing but her own upset for company. Until her mom passed and it was up to her to take care of Roy and the diner.”

  Jack pressed the cloth against his cut so hard he could feel his pulse. He thought about the plate he’d stolen fries from today, heaped with food no one had touched. He thought of all the times he’d heard Addie talking to a girl who didn’t exist. “But-”

  Delilah held up a hand. “I know. Most people around here think Addie’s gone off the deep end.”

  “You don’t?”

  The cook chewed on her lower lip for a moment, staring at Jack’s bandaged hand. “I think,” she said finally, “that all of us have got our ghosts.”

  Before shutting off the grill and leaving with Darla, Delilah had made Jack a burger. He was sitting on the stool next to Chloe’s now, watching Addie close up. She moved from table to table like a bumblebee, refilling the sugar containers and the ketchup bottles, keeping time to the tune of a commercial on the overhead TV.

  She’d come back from her dinner engagement silent and disturbed-so much so that at first Jack was certain she knew about him. But as he watched her attack her job with a near frenzy, he realized that she was only being penitent, as if she had to work twice as hard to make up for taking a few hours off.

  Jack lifted the burger to his mouth and took a bite. Addie was now hard at work on the salt shakers, mixing the contents with rice so that the salt grains wouldn’t stick. On the television, the Jeopardy! theme music swelled through the speakers. Without intending to, Jack found himself sitting higher in his seat. Alex Trebek walked onto the stage in his natty suit and greeted the three contestants, then pointed to the board, where the computerized jingle heralded the first round’s categories.

  A method of working this metal was not mastered until 1500 B.C.

  “What is iron?” Jack said.

  A contestant on the television rang in. “What is iron?” the woman repeated.

  “That’s correct!” Alex Trebek answered.

  Addie looked up at Jack, then at the TV, and smiled. “Jeopardy! fan?”

  Jack shrugged. “I guess.”

  In the 1950s, this Modesto, CA, company became the first winery with its own bottle-making plant.

  “What is E. & J. Gallo?”

  Addie set down the salt container she’d been holding. “You’re more than just a fan,” she said, coming to stand beside him. “You’re really good.”

  Nine of the twelve chapters in this book of the Bible set in Babylon revolve around dreams and visions.

  “What is Isaiah?” Addie guessed.

  Jack shook his head. “What is Daniel?”

  In the original Hebrew of his Lamentations, each verse in three chapters begins with a new letter, from aleph on.

  “Who is Jeremiah?”

  “You know a lot about the Bible,” Addie said. “Are you a priest or something?”

  He had to laugh out loud at that. “No.”

  “Some kind of professor?”

  Jack blotted his mouth with a napkin. “I’m a dishwasher.”

  “What were you yesterday, then?”

  A prisoner, thought Jack, but he looked into his lap and said, “Just another guy doing something he didn’t really like doing.”

  She smiled, content to let it go. “Lucky for me.” Addie took the mop that Jack had brought from the kitchen and she began to swish it over the linoleum.

  “I’ll do it.”

  “You go ahead and eat,” Addie said. “I don’t mind.”

  It was these small kindnesses that would break him. Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he’d promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again. But here was Addie, taking him on faith, doing his work to boot-even though, according to Delilah, fate had screwed her over, too.

  He wanted to tell her he understood, but after almost a year of near silence, words did not come easily for him. So very slowly, he took a handful of French fries and set them on Chloe’s untouched plate. After a moment, he added his pickle. When he finished, he found Addie staring at him, her hands balanced on top of the mop, her body poised for flight.

  She believed he was mocking her; it was right there in the deepest part of her eyes, bruised and tender. Her fingers wrung the wooden handle.

  “I . . . I owed her, from this afternoon,” he said.

  “Who?” The word was less than a whisper.

  Jack’s eyes never left hers. “Chloe.”

  Addie didn’t respond. Instead, she picked up the mop and began to swab with a vengeance. She cleaned until the floor gleamed, until the lights of the ceiling bounced off the thin residue of Pine-Sol, until it hurt Jack to watch her acting fearless and indifferent because she reminded him so much of himself.

  By the time Addie pulled the door shut and locked it behind her, it was snowing outside. Fist-size flakes, the kind that hooked together in midair like trick skydivers. Inwardly, she groaned. It meant getting up early tomorrow to shovel the walkways.

  Jack stood a distance away, the lapels of his sports jacket pulled up to shield his neck from the cold. Addie was a firm believer that someone’s past deserved to stay in the past-she herself was surely a poster child for keeping secrets. She didn’t know what kind of man walked around in a New Hampshire winter without a coat; she’d never met someone who was bright enough to know the answers to every Jeopardy! question but willing to work for minimum wage in a menial job. If Jack wanted to lie low, she could offer him that.

  And she wouldn’t think about his unprecedented reaction to Chloe.

  “Well,” she said, “See you tomorrow morning.”

  Jack didn’t seem to hear. His back was turned, his arms stretched out in front of him. Addie realized, with some shock, that he was catching snowflakes on his tongue.

  When was the last time she’d thought of snow as anything but a hindrance?

  She opened the door of her car, turned the ignition and carefully pulled the car away. In retrospect, she did not know what made her look back into the rearview mirror. If not for the yellow eye of the streetlight in front of the diner, she might never have seen him sitting on the bare curb with his head bowed.

  With a curse, she took a hard left, curving around the green to the front of the diner again.“Do you need a ride?”

  “No. Thanks, though.”

  Addie’s fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “You haven’t got a place to stay, have you?” Before he could protest, she got out of the car. “It so happens I know of a room for rent. The bad news is you’re going to have a roommate whose disposition isn’t always very sunny. The good news is if you get hungry in the middle of the night, there’s a hell of a kitchen you can raid.” As Addie spoke, she unlocked the door of the diner again and stepped over the thres
hold. She found Jack holding back, haloed by the falling snow. “Look. My father could use the company. You’d actually be doing me a favor.”

  Jack didn’t move a muscle. “Why?”

  “Why? Well, because when he spends too much time alone he gets . . . upset.”

  “No. Why are you doing this for me?”

  Addie met his suspicion head-on. She was doing this because she knew what it was like to hit rock bottom and to need someone to give you a leg up. She was doing this because she understood how a world jammed with phones and e-mail and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone. But she also knew if she said either of these things, Jack’s pride would have him halfway down the street before she could take another breath.

  So Addie didn’t answer. Instead, she started across the checkerboard floor of the diner.

  Tonight, one of the Jeopardy! categories had been Greek mythology. This hero was given permission to bring his love Eurydice back from the underworld but lost her by turning back too quickly to see if she was following.

  Addie wouldn’t be like Orpheus. She kept walking with her eyes fixed ahead until she heard the faint jingle of bells on the door, proof that Jack had come in from the cold.

  September 1999

  North Haverhill,

  New Hampshire

  A ldo LeGrande had a four-by-four inch tattoo of a skull on his forehead, which was enough to make Jack take the bunk farthest away from him. He didn’t react when Jack set his things down, just continued to write in a purple composition notebook whose cover had been hand-decorated with scribbled swastikas and cobras.

  Jack began to set belongings in a small tub that sat at the foot of the bed. “Wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Aldo said. “Mountain uses that to piss in in the middle of the night.”

  Jack let the warning slide off his back. He had spent a month at Grafton County. Every new inmate started out in maximum security and was then allowed to petition for a move to medium security after two weeks of good behavior. Two weeks after that, the inmate could move to minimum security. Each time Jack had moved pods, he’d had to face some kind of test from the inmates already living there. In maximum, he’d been spat at. In medium, he’d been jabbed in the kidneys and gut in corners too dark for the security cameras to see.

  “Mountain will get over it,” Jack said tightly. He stacked his books from the prison library last and then shoved the plastic container under the lower bunk.

  “Like to read?” Aldo asked.

  “Yes.”

  “How come?”

  Jack glanced over his shoulder. “I’m a teacher.”

  Aldo grinned. “Yeah, well, I work for the state paving roads, but you don’t see me painting a dotted yellow line down the middle of the floor.”

  “It’s a little different,” Jack said. “I like knowing things.”

  “Can’t learn the world from a book, Teach.”

  But Jack knew the world did not make sense, anyway. He’d had four weeks to ruminate on that very topic. Why would someone like himself even bother listening to someone like Aldo LeGrande?

  “You keep your ass tight and prissy like that,” Aldo said, “and you’re gonna be candy for the other boys.”

  Jack tried not to feel his heart race at the other man’s words. It was what every man thought about when he conjured an image of jail. Would it be irony or biblical justice to be convicted of sexual assault and then find himself the victim of a prison rape?

  “What’re you in for?” Aldo asked, picking his teeth with his pen.

  “What are you in for?”

  “Rape,” Aldo said.

  Jack did not want to admit to Aldo that he had been charged with the same offense. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, either. “Well, I didn’t do what they say.”

  At that, Aldo tipped back his head and laughed. “None of us has, Teach,” he said. “Not a single one.”

  The minimum-security pod resembled a daisy: small groups of bunks sticking out like petals from the central common room. Unlike the floors downstairs, there were no cells, just one universal locked door and a guard’s booth in the middle. The bathrooms were separate from the sleeping area, and inmates had the freedom to go there as they pleased.

  Jack deliberately went to the bathroom a half hour before lights out, when everyone else was still watching TV. He glanced into the common room in passing. A big black man sat closest to the television, the remote control in his fist. He was the highest in the pecking order, the one who got to choose all the programming. Other inmates sat according to their association with him, closest buddies sitting just behind him, and so on, until you got to the row of stragglers far back, who simply did their best to stay out of his way.

  By the time Jack returned to his bunk, Aldo was gone. He quickly stripped down to his shorts and T-shirt and crawled into bed, facing into the wall. As he drifted off, he dreamed of autumn, with its crisp apple air and sword-edged blue sky. He pictured his team running drills through the muddy soil, cleats kicking up small tufts of earth so that by the end of the day’s practice, the girls had completely changed the lay of the land. He saw their ponytails streaming out behind them, ribbons on the wind.

  He woke up suddenly, sweating, as he always did when he thought of what had happened. But before he could even push the memory away, he was stunned to feel a hand at his throat, pinning him against the thin mattress. At first all Jack could see were the yellowed eggs of the man’s eyes. Then he spoke, his teeth gleaming in the darkness. “You’re breathing my fucking air.”

  The man was the one he’d seen earlier holding the television remote, the one Aldo had referred to as Mountain. Muscles rippled beneath the sleeves of his T-shirt, and at eye level with Jack in the upper bunk, he was easily six and a half feet tall. Jack reached for the hand pinning his windpipe. “There’s plenty of air,” he rasped.

  “There was plenty before you came, asshole. Now I have to share it with you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Jack choked. “I’ll stop.”

  Almost immediately, the big man’s hold eased. Without another word Mountain hefted himself into his own bed. Jack lay awake, trying not to breathe, trying not to recall how Mountain’s thick fingers had let go of his throat and begun to caress it gently instead.

  The cows surprised Jack. Chained individually to their milking stanchions, he had first thought this was some kind of cruel joke: prison animals being locked up. But a few days of the routine of the farm and he realized that they never got turned loose-not out of cruelty but because that was where they were comfortable. Jack would watch their languid, drowsy expressions and wonder if it would be like this for him, too-after so many months of being incarcerated, did you simply stop fighting it?

  The twin brothers who ran the farm had assigned him feed duty, which involved mixing grains from two different silos in an automatic overhead chute and then carrying the wheelbarrow load to the small troughs in front of the cows. Jack had done it early this morning before the milking; now, at just past 4:30, he was scheduled to do it again. He maneuvered the wheelbarrow to the far end of the huge barn. It was shrouded in cobwebs and poorly lit, and this morning Jack had had the scare of a lifetime when a bat dove out of the rafters and skittered onion-skin wings along his shoulder.

  The automatic mixing mechanism was powered by a toggle switch on one of the heavy upright wooden beams. Jack flipped it, then waited for the grain to fill the top of the chute. The noise made by the machine vibrating to life was deafening, sound pounding around like a hailstorm.

  The first punch, square in the kidney, drove him to his knees. Jack scrambled for purchase on the cement floor, twisting to see who had attacked him from behind.

  “Get up,” Mountain said. “I ain’t done.”

  It cost three dollars to go to the jail’s nurse. Mostly, this was because she was one of the few females on site and inmates would rather malinger and watch her breasts shifting beneath her white uniform than sit in a six-foot-by-six-foot cell,
or thresh grain. Inmates who paid the fee were granted twenty minutes on one of the two padded tables and a free sample of Tylenol.

  Jack was brought there by a security guard, who assured him that this visit was on the house. One of the twins who ran the farm had found Jack buried up to his neck in a heap of feed, blood spreading over his blue denim shirt in the shape of a valentine heart. Jack hadn’t been asked any questions, nor had he volunteered information.

  The nurse gathered her materials on a metal tray. “Want to tell me what happened?”

  Jack could barely speak past the blinding pain that came every time he moved his head. “Nosebleed,” he choked out.

  “First nosebleed I’ve ever seen that involved broken nasal cartilage. How about that contusion on your spine, and your ribs? Or should I guess . . . you were kicked by a cow?”

  “Sounds good,” Jack said.

  Shaking her head, she packed his nostrils with cotton and sent him back to the pod. There, in the common room, men sat playing board games. Jack made his way to an unoccupied table and began to play solitaire.

  Suddenly, two tables away, Aldo lunged across a Scrabble board and grabbed another inmate by the lapels. “You callin’ me a liar?”

  The man looked him in the eye. “Yeah, LeGrande. That’s exactly what I’m doing.”

  Jack averted his gaze and turned over the queen of spades. Put it there, on the column with the five of diamonds . . .

  “I’m telling you, it’s a word,” Aldo insisted.

  Hearing the commotion, the correctional officer on duty appeared. “What’s the matter, Aldo? Someone not want to share his toys with you?”

  Aldo jammed his finger at the game board. “Isn’t this a word?”

  The guard leaned closer. “O-C-H-E-R. I’ve never heard it.”

  “It’s a word,” Jack said quietly.

  Aldo turned with a smug grin. “You tell ’em, Teach. I read it in one of your books.”

  “Ocher,” Jack said. “It’s a color. Kind of orange.”