by Jodi Picoult
“All right. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to cut you off today in the office. But . . . it was an emergency.”
She stares at me. “What did you say the dog’s for?”
“I didn’t.” When she turns, Judge and I follow her deeper into the apartment, closing the door behind us. “So I went to see Anna Fitzgerald. You were right—before I took out a restraining order against her mother, I needed to talk to her.”
“And?”
I think back to the two of us, sitting on that striped couch, stretching a web of trust between us. “I think we’re on the same page.” Julia doesn’t respond, just picks up a glass of white wine on the kitchen counter. “Why yes, I’d love some,” I say.
She shrugs. “It’s in Smilla.”
The fridge, of course. For its sense of snow. When I walk there and take out the bottle, I can feel her trying not to smile. “You forget that I know you.”
“Knew,” she corrects.
“Then educate me. What have you been doing for fifteen years?” I nod down the hallway toward Izzy’s room. “I mean, other than cloning yourself.” A thought occurs to me, and before I can even voice it Julia answers.
“My brothers all became builders and chefs and plumbers. My parents wanted their girls to go to college, and figured attending Wheeler senior year might stack the odds. I had good enough grades to get a partial scholarship there; Izzy didn’t. My parents could only afford to send one of us to private school.”
“Did she go to college?”
“RISD,” Julia says. “She’s a jewelry designer.”
“A hostile jewelry designer.”
“Having your heart broken can do that.” Our eyes meet, and Julia realizes what she’s said. “She just moved in today.”
My eyes canvass the apartment, looking for a hockey stick, a Sports Illustrated magazine, a La-Z-Boy chair, anything telltale and male. “Is it hard getting used to a roommate?”
“I was living alone before, Campbell, if that’s what you’re asking.” She looks at me over the edge of her wine glass. “How about you?”
“I have six wives, fifteen children, and an assortment of sheep.”
Her lips curve. “People like you always make me feel like I’m underachieving.”
“Oh yeah, you’re a real waste of space on the planet. Harvard undergrad, Harvard Law, a bleeding heart guardian ad litem—”
“How’d you know where I went to law school?”
“Judge DeSalvo,” I lie, and she buys it.
I wonder if Julia feels like it has been moments, not years, since we’ve been together. If sitting at this counter with me feels as effortless for her as it does for me. It’s like picking up an unfamiliar piece of sheet music and starting to stumble through it, only to realize it is a melody you’d once learned by heart, one you can play without even trying.
“I didn’t think you’d become a guardian ad litem,” I admit.
“Neither did I.” Julia smiles. “I still have moments where I fantasize about standing on a soapbox in Boston Common, railing against a patriarchal society. Unfortunately, you can’t pay a landlord in dogma.” She glances at me. “Of course, I also mistakenly believed you’d be President of the United States by now.”
“I inhaled,” I confess. “Had to set my sights a little lower. And you—well, actually, I figured you’d be living in the suburbs, doing the soccer mom thing with a bunch of kids and some lucky guy.”
Julia shakes her head. “I think you’re confusing me with Muffy or Bitsie or Toto or whatever the hell the names of the girls in Wheeler were.”
“No. I just thought that . . . that I might be the guy.”
There is a thick, viscous silence. “You didn’t want to be that guy,” Julia says finally. “You made that pretty clear.”
That’s not true, I want to argue. But how else would it look to her, when afterward, I wanted nothing to do with her. When, afterward, I acted just like everyone else. “Do you remember—” I begin.
“I remember everything, Campbell,” she interrupts. “If I didn’t, this wouldn’t be so hard.”
My pulse jumps so high that Judge gets to his feet and pushes his snout into my hip, alarmed. I had believed back then that nothing could hurt Julia, who seemed to be so free. I had hoped that I could be as lucky.
I was mistaken on both counts.
ANNA
IN OUR LIVING ROOM we have a whole shelf devoted to the visual history of our family. Everyone’s baby pictures are there, and some school head shots, and then various photos from vacations and birthdays and holidays. They make me think of notches on a belt or scratches on a prison wall—proof that time’s passed, that we haven’t all just been swimming in limbo.
There are double frames, singles, 8 x 10s, 4 x 6s. They are made of blond wood and inlaid wood and one very fancy glass mosaic. I pick up one of Jesse—he’s about two, in a cowboy costume. Looking at it, you’d never know what was coming down the pike.
There is Kate with hair and Kate all bald; one of Kate as a baby sitting on Jesse’s lap; one of my mother holding each of them on the edge of a pool. There are pictures of me, too, but not many. I go from infant to about ten years old in one fell swoop.
Maybe it’s because I was the third child, and they were sick and tired of keeping a catalog of life. Maybe it’s because they forgot.
It’s nobody’s fault, and it’s not a big deal, but it’s a little depressing all the same. A photo says, You were happy, and I wanted to catch that. A photo says, You were so important to me that I put down everything else to come watch.
• • •
My father calls at eleven o’clock to ask if I want him to come get me. “Mom’s going to stay at the hospital,” he explains. “But if you don’t want to be alone in the house, you can sleep at the station.”
“No, it’s okay,” I tell him. “I can always get Jesse if I need something.”
“Right,” my father says. “Jesse.” We both pretend that this is a reliable backup plan.
“How’s Kate?” I ask.
“Still pretty out of it. They’ve got her drugged up.” I hear him drag in a breath. “You know, Anna,” he begins, but then there is a shrill bell in the background. “Honey, I’ve got to go.” He leaves me with an earful of dead air.
For a second I just hold the phone, picturing my dad stepping into his boots and pulling up the puddle of pants by their suspenders. I imagine the door of the station yawning like Aladdin’s cave, and the engine screaming out, my father in the front passenger seat. Every time he goes to work, he has to put out fires.
It’s just the encouragement I need. Grabbing a sweater, I leave the house and head for the garage.
• • •
There was this kid in my school, Jimmy Stredboe, who used to be a total loser. He got zits on top of his zits; he had a pet rat named Orphan Annie; and once in science class he puked into the fish tank. No one ever talked to him, in case dorkhood was contagious. But then one summer he was diagnosed with MS. After that, no one was mean to Jimmy anymore. If you passed him in the hall, you smiled. If he sat next to you at the lunch table, you nodded hello. It was as if being a walking tragedy canceled out ever having been a geek.
From the moment I was born, I have been the girl with the sick sister. All my life bank tellers have given me extra lollipops; principals have known me by name. No one is ever outright mean to me.
It makes me wonder how I’d be treated if I were like everyone else. Maybe I’m a pretty rotten person, not that anyone would ever have the guts to tell me this to my face. Maybe everyone thinks I’m rude or ugly or stupid but they have to be nice because it could be the circumstances of my life that make me that way.
It makes me wonder if what I’m doing now is just my true nature.
• • •
The headlights of another car bounce off the rearview mirror, lighting up like green goggles around Jesse’s eyes. He drives with one wrist on the wheel, lazy. He needs a haircut, in a big way
. “Your car smells like smoke,” I say.
“Yeah. But it covers the aroma of spilled whiskey.” His teeth flash in the dark. “Why? Is it bothering you?”
“Kind of.”
Jesse reaches across my body to the glove compartment. He takes out a pack of Merits and a Zippo, lights up, and blows smoke in my direction. “Sorry,” he says, though he isn’t.
“Can I have one?”
“One what?”
“A cigarette.” They are so white they seem to glow.
“You want a cigarette?” Jesse cracks up.
“I’m not joking,” I say.
Jesse raises one brow, and then turns the wheel so sharply I think he might roll the Jeep. We wind up in a huff of road dust on the shoulder. Jesse turns on the interior lights and shakes the pack so that one cigarette shimmies out.
It feels too delicate between my fingers, like the fine bone of a bird. I hold it the way I think a drama queen ought to, between the vise of my second and middle fingers. I put it up to my lips.
“You have to light it first.” Jesse laughs, and he sparks up the Zippo.
There is no freaking way I’m leaning into a flame; chances are I’ll set my hair on fire instead of the cigarette. “You do it for me,” I say.
“Nope. If you’re gonna learn, you’re gonna learn it all.” He flicks the lighter again.
I touch the cigarette to the burn, suck in hard the way I have seen Jesse do. It makes my chest explode, and I cough so forcefully that for a minute I actually believe I can taste my lung at the base of my throat, pink and spongy. Jesse goes to pieces and plucks the cigarette out of my hand before I drop it. He takes two long drags and then tosses it out the window.
“Nice try,” he says.
My voice is a sandpit. “It’s like licking a barbecue.”
While I work on remembering how to breathe, Jesse pulls into the road again. “What made you want to?”
I shrug. “I figured I might as well.”
“If you’d like a checklist of depravity, I can make one up for you.” When I don’t reply, he glances over at me. “Anna,” he says, “you’re not doing the wrong thing.”
By now he’s pulled into the hospital’s parking lot. “I’m not doing the right thing, either,” I point out.
He turns off the ignition but doesn’t make an attempt to leave the car. “Have you thought about the dragon guarding the cave?”
I narrow my eyes. “Speak English.”
“Well, I’m guessing Mom’s asleep about five feet away from Kate.”
Oh, shit. It is not that I think my mother would throw me out, but she certainly won’t leave me alone with Kate, and right now that’s what I want more than anything. Jesse looks at me. “Seeing Kate isn’t going to make you feel better.”
There’s really no way to explain why I need to know that she’s okay, at least now, even though I have taken steps that will put an end to that.
For once, though, someone seems to understand. Jesse stares out the window of the car. “Leave it to me,” he says.
• • •
We were eleven and fourteen, and we were training for the Guinness Book of World Records. Surely there had never been two sisters who did simultaneous headstands for so long that their cheeks went hard as plums and their eyes saw nothing but red. Kate had the shape of a pixie, all noodle arms and legs; and when she bent to the ground and kicked up her feet, it looked as delicate as a spider walking a wall. Me, I sort of defied gravity with a thud.
We balanced in silence for a few seconds. “I wish my head was flatter,” I said, as I felt my eyebrows scrunch down. “Do you think there’s a man who’ll come to the house to time us? Or do we just mail a videotape?”
“I guess they’ll let us know.” Kate folded her arms along the carpet.
“Do you think we’ll be famous?”
“We might get on the Today show. They had that eleven-year-old kid who could play the piano with his feet.” She thought for a second. “Mom knew someone who got killed by a piano falling out a window.”
“That’s not true. Why would anyone push a piano out a window?”
“It is true. You ask her. And they weren’t taking it out, they were putting it in.” She crossed her legs against the wall, so that it looked like she was just sitting upside down. “What do you think is the best way to die?”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said.
“Why? I’m dying. You’re dying.” When I frowned, she said, “Well, you are.” Then she grinned. “I just happen to be more gifted at it than you are.”
“This is a stupid conversation.” Already, it was making my skin itch in places I knew I would never be able to scratch.
“Maybe an airplane crash,” Kate mused. “It would suck, you know, when you realized you were going down . . . but then it happens and you’re just powder. How come people get vaporized, but they still manage to find clothes in trees, and those black boxes?”
By now my head was starting to pound. “Shut up, Kate.”
She crawled down the wall and sat up, flushed. “There’s just sleeping through it as you croak, but that’s kind of boring.”
“Shut up,” I repeated, angry that we had only lasted about twenty-two seconds, angry that now we were going to have to try for a record all over again. I tipped myself sunny-side up again and tried to clear the knot of hair out of my face. “You know, normal people don’t sit around thinking about dying.”
“Liar. Everyone thinks about dying.”
“Everyone thinks about you dying,” I said.
The room went so still that I wondered if we ought to go for a different record—how long can two sisters hold their breath?
Then a twitchy smile crossed her face. “Well,” Kate said. “At least now you’re telling the truth.”
• • •
Jesse gives me a twenty-dollar bill for cab fare home; because that’s the only hitch in his plan—once we go through with this, he isn’t going to be driving back. We take the stairs up to the eighth floor instead of the elevator, because they let us out behind the nurse’s station, not in front of it. Then he tucks me inside a linen closet filled with plastic pillows and sheets stamped with the hospital’s name. “Wait,” I blurt out, when he’s about to leave me. “How am I going to know when it’s time?”
He starts to laugh. “You’ll know, trust me.”
He takes a silver flask out of his pocket—it’s one my father got from the chief and thinks he lost three years ago—screws off the cap, and pours whiskey all over the front of his shirt. Then he starts to walk down the hall. Well, walk would be a loose approximation—Jesse slams like a billiard ball into the walls and knocks over an entire cleaning cart. “Ma?” he yells out. “Ma, where are you?”
He isn’t drunk, but he sure as hell can do a great imitation. It makes me wonder about the times I have looked out my bedroom window in the middle of the night and seen him puking into the rhododendrons—maybe that was all for show, too.
The nurses swarm out from their hive of a desk, trying to subdue a boy half their age and three times as strong, who at that very moment grabs the uppermost tier of a linen rack and pulls it forward, making a crash so loud it rings in my ears. Call buttons start ringing like an operator’s switchboard behind the nurse’s desk, but all three of the night-duty ladies are doing their best to hold Jesse down while he kicks and flails.
The door to Kate’s room opens, and bleary-eyed, my mother steps out. She takes a look at Jesse, and for a second her whole face is frozen with the realization that, in fact, things can get worse. Jesse swings his head toward her, a great big bull, and his features melt. “Hiya, Mom,” he greets, and he smiles loosely up at her.
“I am so sorry,” my mother says to the nurses. She closes her eyes as Jesse stumbles upright and throws his sloppy arms around her.
“There’s coffee in the cafeteria,” one nurse suggests, and my mother is too embarrassed to even answer her. She just moves toward the el
evator banks with Jesse attached to her like a mussel on a crusty hull, and pushes the down button over and over in the fruitless hope that it will actually make the doors open faster.
When they leave, it is almost too easy. Some of the nurses hurry off to check on the patients who’ve rung in; others settle back behind their desk, trading hushed commentary about Jesse and my poor mother like it’s some card game. They never look my way as I sneak out of the linen closet, tiptoe down the hall, and let myself into my sister’s hospital room.
• • •
One Thanksgiving when Kate was not in the hospital, we actually pretended to be a regular family. We watched the parade on TV, where a giant balloon fell prey to a freak wind and wound up wrapped around a NYC traffic light. We made our own gravy. My mother brought the turkey’s wishbone out to the table, and we fought over who would be granted the right to snap it. Kate and I were given the honors. Before I got a good grip, my mother leaned close and whispered into my ear, “You know what to wish for.” So I shut my eyes tight and thought hard of remission for Kate, even though I had been planning to ask for a personal CD player, and got a nasty satisfaction out of the fact that I did not win the tug-of-war.
After we ate, my father took us outside for a game of two-on-two touch football while my mother was washing the dishes. She came outside when Jesse and I had already scored twice. “Tell me,” she said, “that I am hallucinating.” She didn’t have to say anything else—we’d all seen Kate tumble like an ordinary kid and wind up bleeding uncontrollably like a sick one.
“Aw, Sara.” My dad turned up the wattage on his smile. “Kate’s on my team. I won’t let her get sacked.”
He swaggered over to my mother, and kissed her so long and slow that my own cheeks started to burn, because I was sure the neighbors would see. When he lifted his head, my mother’s eyes were a color I had never seen before and don’t think I have ever seen again. “Trust me,” he said, and then he threw the football to Kate.
What I remember about that day was the way the ground bit back when you sat on it—the first hint of winter. I remember being tackled by my father, who always braced himself in a push-up so that I got none of the weight and all of his heat. I remember my mother, cheering equally for both teams.
