Salem Falls

by Jodie Picoult

  Who is Charlotte?

  He dropped the mop and wedged between Addie and Wes, pinning the policeman to the wall. “She doesn’t want to go with you.”

  “Jack, don’t!”

  Wes shoved, sending Jack sprawling. “I could throw your ass in jail for that.”

  Jack did not move from where he’d fallen. Wes jammed his hat on his head and stormed out of the diner, furious. Addie, Jack thought. I did this for Addie.

  “Are you crazy?” She leaned down so that her face was level with his, her eyes hard and cold. “He’s a policeman, Jack. He can make a small-business owner’s life miserable. And if that isn’t bad enough, this is only going to make him try twice as hard to come after me next time.”

  Jack hauled himself to his feet, yanked on his jacket, and for the second time that day left without telling Addie where he was going, or why.

  Addie’s strongest memory of Chloe took place underwater. Chloe had been seven the year Addie managed to scrape together enough money to take the two of them to the Caribbean. They stayed in a tiny rental house that was sixteen giant Mother-May-I steps from the beach. Palm fronds batted against the peeling pink shutters, and every morning on the sand there would be a new coconut.

  One afternoon, Addie watched Chloe streaking back and forth beneath the water, as if she were logging mileage. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m a mermaid. Come and watch.”

  And so Addie had waded in with her daughter’s scuba mask. Underwater, Chloe wriggled: legs tight, hips undulating, as her bright blond hair streamed out behind her. Through the ripples of the water Addie could see the sun quivering like the yolk of an egg. Suddenly Chloe turned to face her, eyes wide, hair snaking soft about her face, arms blued by the shadows of the sea.

  Addie could remember being a kid in the pool at the Y, pretending that she was a mermaid, too. There were moments she was certain it had happened-that her legs had turned into a scaled tail, that her lungs could take in water, that the wide thighs of women in the water aerobics class had thickened into pillars of coral. Beneath the water, the world was a different place, and you could be anything you wanted to be. Beneath the water, you moved slowly, so slowly you might never have to grow up.

  On the day that Chloe died, the nurses had let Addie sit with her body for an hour, alone in the hospital room. Addie had tucked the sheets tight around Chloe’s still legs. She had witnessed those thin limbs going blue from lack of oxygen; she had seen Chloe’s cheeks and temples glisten wet from the spots where her own tears had fallen-and she’d thought, You are a mermaid, baby.

  She’d thought, Wait for me.

  The neurologists at the hospital had never seen anything quite like it-a man with significant damage in the aftermath of a stroke suddenly get up and start the day as if nothing had happened. But the nurses had been standing right there: Stuart Hollings, who could not speak or move an entire side of his body, had awakened asking for breakfast . . . and then threatened to leave when it didn’t arrive fast enough.

  Three hours after finishing his bacon, eggs, wheat toast, and neurological exams, Stuart’s doctors pronounced him well enough to recuperate at home.

  It was standard procedure at the SFPD to alert all duty officers about potential problems . . . including felons who had recently moved to town, although in the past this had never been an issue.

  There was a small piece of Charlie-the piece that would probably have gotten him tossed out of law school, had he decided to attend-that hated this part of his job. It seemed to him that if you planted the seed of doubt in people’s minds, they were more likely to take a look at new growth and yank it out by its roots as a potential weed, when it could very well have turned into something as harmless as a daisy.

  On the other hand, St. Bride just might drag off a local high school girl and assault her, in which case Charlie would wish he’d set up a frigging billboard.

  He began to type a memo on his laptop, one that would be distributed that same day through internal mail. He’d barely gotten through the header when his secretary opened the door. “Dispatch just got a call. You supposed to be at the district court?”

  “Ah, shoot.” He’d completely forgotten an arraignment. Hurrying to the door, he decided he’d get the St. Bride memo out when he came back; it would be there along with the other 200 things on his to-do list.

  Unfortunately, his secretary didn’t know that. So when she came in later to lay a fax on Charlie’s desk and saw the computer still on, she shut it off. And when Charlie returned to the courthouse, he had completely forgotten about Jack St. Bride.

  Hailey McCourt could not read the words in her textbook because they were tap-dancing on the page. She slid her ponytail holder out of her hair and tied it up a little less tightly. Her mom got migraines . . . maybe she was predisposed to inheriting them. But God, of all days to find that out! As long as it waited until after soccer tryouts, then Hailey didn’t care if she dropped dead in the locker room.

  Mr. O’Donnell asked her to put last night’s homework on the board, some horrendous trigonometry proof. Hailey swallowed and stood up, trying to find her center before she walked to the front of the room. But she stumbled on a desk, collapsing on top of the kid sitting in it.

  There were a few titters, and the girl she’d fallen on gave her a dirty look. Finally, Hailey reached a spot just behind Mr. O’Donnell, who was busy collecting papers. She tried to pick up the chalk, but every time she did, it slipped out of her fingers. This time, the whole class snickered.

  “Ms. McCourt,” the teacher said, “we don’t have time for this today.”

  She swiped for the chalk, holding it primitively, as if her hand was no better than a paw. Then she looked up.

  The classroom was upside down.

  She was standing, all right, and the blackboard was in front of her. But her feet rested on the ceiling, and the kids in the class, behind her, were suspended, feet first from their seats.

  She must have made a sound, because Mr. O’Donnell approached. “Hailey,” he said quietly, “do you need to see the nurse?”

  The hell with soccer. The hell with everything. Hailey felt tears spring to her eyes. “Yes,” she whispered.

  She turned and fled, forgetting about her books and her knapsack. She suddenly didn’t fit into this world, and she had no idea how to move in it with grace. That was Hailey McCourt’s last thought before she walked directly into the door frame and knocked herself unconscious.

  Unlike many of the houses in Salem Falls, which were close together, Addie’s sat all by itself in the woods up a long, winding driveway. Tiny and neat with weathered shingles and a green roof, the little cape seemed to suit her. Smoke rose from the chimney to cut a signature across the night sky. Set off in the yard, in a moonlit mud puddle, was a rusty swing set.

  Jack sat on a curved rubber seat. The racket that came when he swung back and forth was painful, like old bones being brought to life. Surely, inside, Addie was listening.

  When the door opened, Jack watched feelings chase across her face-hope, as she turned to the swing set; disappointment, as she realized he was not her daughter; curiosity, as she wondered what had brought him here.

  As she approached, Jack saw a final emotion: relief. “Where have you been?”

  Jack shrugged. “I’m sorry about not showing up for work today.”

  Even in the dim light, Jack saw Addie blush. “Well, I asked for it. I should never have treated you the way I did the other night. I know you were only doing what you thought was right.”

  Jack sucked in a deep breath, using it to force out the explanation lodged in his chest. “There’s something I need to tell you, Addie.”

  “No . . . I think I ought to talk first.” She stood in front of him, trailing the toes of her boots in the mud. “That day at Stuart’s . . . you asked me what happened to Chloe.”

  Jack went very still, the way he would have if a rare butterfly suddenly landed a foot in front of him. “I k
now she’s dead,” Addie confessed. “I may say or do differently, but I know.” She set her swing rocking slightly. “She woke up one morning and she had a sore throat. That’s it-just a sore throat, the same thing a hundred other kids get. Her fever wasn’t even past ninety-nine. And I . . . I had to work that day. So I stuck her upstairs at my dad’s on the couch, with cartoons on TV, while I waitressed. I figured if it was a virus, it would go away. If it was strep, I’d make a doctor’s appointment after the lunch crunch.” Addie lowered her face, her profile edged in silver. “I should have taken her in right away. I just didn’t think . . . she was that sick.”

  “Bacterial meningitis,” Jack murmured.

  “She died at 5:07. I remember, because the news was coming on TV, and I thought, What could they possibly tell me about the world gone bad that is more awful than this?” Finally, she met Jack’s eyes. “I go a little crazy sometimes when it comes to Chloe. I know she’s never going to eat the sandwich I set out for her at the diner, not anymore. But I need to put it there. And I know she’s never going to get in my way again when I’m serving plates, but I wish she would . . . so I pretend that she does.”

  “Addie-”

  “Even when I try my hardest, I can’t remember exactly what her smile looked like. Or if the color of her hair was more gold or more yellow. It gets worse . . . harder . . . every year. I lost her once,” Addie said brokenly. “I can’t stand to lose her all over again.”

  “A doctor might not have caught it in time, Addie. Not even if you’d brought Chloe in that morning.”

  “I was her mother. It was my job to make it better.”

  Jack repeated what she’d said to him. “You were only doing what you thought was right.”

  But she didn’t answer. She stared, instead, at the ridge of burned skin on his palm that would turn into a scar. Slowly, giving him time to pull away, Addie kneeled and bent over Jack’s hand. Kissed it. He couldn’t help it; he flinched.

  Immediately, she drew back. “It still hurts.”

  Jack nodded. “A little.”

  “Where?”

  He touched his heart, unable to speak.

  When Addie brushed her lips over his chest, Jack felt his body sing. He closed his eyes, terrified to let himself wrap his arms around her, even more terrified that she would pull away. In the end, he did nothing but let her lean against him while his arms remained at his sides. “Better?” Addie murmured, the word burning into his sweater.

  “Yes,” Jack answered. “Perfect.”

  April 2000

  Salem Falls,

  New Hampshire

  A s Gillian watched her father schmooze on his office phone, words dripping from his lips like oil, she wondered what it would be like to shoot him in the head.

  His brains would splatter the white carpet. His secretary, an older woman who always looked like she was choking on a plum, would probably have a heart attack. Well, that was all too violent, too obvious, Gilly thought. More like she’d poison him slowly, mixing one of his precious drugs into his food, until one day he simply didn’t wake up.

  Gilly grinned at this, and her father caught her eye and smiled back. He cupped his hand over the phone. “One more minute,” he whispered, and winked.

  It came over Gilly so quick, sometimes: the feeling that she was going to explode, that she was too big for her own skin, as if anger had swelled so far and fast inside her that it choked the back of her throat. Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river. It was not something she could talk about with her friends, because what if she was the only freak who felt this way? Maybe she could have confided in her mother . . . but then, she had not had a mother for years and years.

  “There!” her father said triumphantly, hanging up the phone. He slung an arm around her shoulders, and Gillian was enveloped by the scents she would always associate with her childhood: wood smoke and cinnamon and thin Cuban cigars. She turned in to the smell, eyes closing in comfort. “What do you say we swing through the plant? You know how everyone likes to see you.”

  What he meant was that he liked to show off his daughter. Gilly always felt self-conscious walking through the line, nodding at the gap-toothed workers who smiled politely at her but all the while were thinking, correctly, that they made less in a week than Gillian got for allowance money.

  They entered the manufacturing part of the operation. Noise ricocheted around her, huge pistons calibrated meticulously, so that mixtures would be infallible. “We’re making Preventa today,” her father yelled in her ear. “Emergency contraception.”

  He led her to a man wearing protective headphones and circulating around the floor. “Hello, Jimmy. You remember my little girl?”

  “Sure. Hey, Gillian.”

  “Give me a second, honey,” Amos said, and then he began to ask Jimmy questions about stockpiling and shipments.

  Gillian watched the bump and grind of the machines measuring out the active ingredients: levonorgestrel and ethinyl estradiol. The device she was standing beside funneled newly formed pills through a narrow slot at its neck, counting them into batches that would be sealed dose by dose into childproof packaging.

  It took only a few seconds to dart her hand into the sorting tray and grab some.

  Her hand was still in her pocket, buried deep with her secret, when Amos turned. “Have I bored you to tears?”

  Gilly smiled at her father. “No,” she assured him. “Not yet.”

  In retrospect, Addie realized that the whole event should have been much more terrifying: breaking into a cemetery near midnight, on an evening when the moon was a great bloodshot eye in the sky. But suddenly it did not matter that she was trying to gain access to a graveyard in the darkest part of the night, that she was going to see her daughter’s grave for the first time in seven years. All she knew at that moment was that someone would be with her when she took this monumental step.

  Heat swam from the ground, old souls snaking between Addie’s legs. “When I was in college,” Jack said, “I used to study in the cemetery.”

  She did not know what she was more surprised by: the nature of the revelation or the fact that Jack had made it at all. “Didn’t you have a library?”

  “Yeah. But in the graveyard it was quieter. I’d bring my books, and sometimes a picnic lunch, and-”

  “A lunch? That’s sick. That’s-”

  “Is this it?” Jack asked, and Addie realized that they stood in front of Chloe’s grave.

  The last time she had seen it, it was bare earth, covered with roses and funeral baskets from well-wishers who could not offer explanations and so instead gave flowers. There was a headstone, now, too; white marble: CHLOE PEABODY, 1979-1989. Addie turned her face up to Jack’s. “What do you think happens . . . you know . . . after you die?”

  Jack stuffed his hands in the pockets of his coat and shrugged, silent.

  “I used to hope that if we had to give up our old life, we’d get a new one.”

  A huff of breath fell in the air between them, Jack’s answer.

  “Then . . . after . . . I didn’t hope that at all. I didn’t want Chloe to be anybody else’s little girl.” Addie gently stepped off a rectangle around the grave. “But she has to be somewhere, doesn’t she?”

  Jack cleared his throat. “The Inuit say that the stars are holes in heaven. And every time we see the people we loved shining through, we know they’re happy.”

  She watched Jack pull two unlikely blossoms from his pocket to lay on the grave. The bright heads of the chives that Delilah grew on the windowsill were a brilliant splash of purple against the headstone.

  This time of night, the sky was flung wide open, stars spread like a story across the horizon. “Those Inuit,” Addie said, tears running down her cheeks. “I hope they’re right.”

  Addie’s hands shook as she walked Jack to the apartment he shared with her father. Did he feel it, too, every time their shoulders bumped up against each other? W
hen he came into a room Addie was already in, did he notice the air squeezing more tightly around them? This was new to her, this sense that her bones were sized all wrong in the confines of her body. This feeling that you could be in the company of a man and not want to turn tail and run.

  They reached the top of the stairs. “Well,” Jack said, “see you in the morning.” His hand moved to the doorknob.

  “Wait,” Addie blurted out, and covered his fingers with her own. As she expected, he stilled. “Thanks. For coming tonight.”

  Jack nodded, then turned to the door again.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “If it’s about fixing the insulation on the receiving door, I meant to-”

  “Not that,” Addie said. “I wanted to know if you’d kiss me.”

  She saw the surprise in his eyes. Apprehension rose from her skin like perfume.

  “No,” Jack gently answered.

  Addie could not breathe, she’d made such a fool of herself. Cheeks burning, she took a step backward, and came up against an unforgiving wall.

  “I won’t kiss you,” Jack added, “but you can kiss me.”

  “I-I can?” She had the odd sense that Jack was as uncertain about this as she was.

  “Do you want to?”

  “No,” Addie said, as she came up on her toes so that her lips could touch his.

  It was all Jack could do to not embrace her. To let her trace the seam of his mouth, to open and feel her tongue press against his. He did not touch her, not when her hands lighted on his chest, not when her hair tickled his neck, not when he realized she tasted of coffee and loneliness.

  This is the worst thing you could do, he told himself. This is going to get you in trouble. Again.

  But he let Addie play the Fates, spinning out the length of the kiss and cutting it when she saw t. Then he let himself into Roy’s apartment, intent on crawling into bed and forgetting the last ten minutes of his life. He had just begun to cross the darkened living room when a light snapped on. Roy sat on the couch, in his robe and pajamas. “You hurt my daughter,” he said, “and I will kill you in your sleep.”