by Jodi Picoult
“Yay,” Amelia’s voice drifted down, devoid of enthusiasm.
Maybe it wasn’t just you they were destroying.
Charlotte leaned down and kissed your forehead. “How you doing, sweet pea? You’re playing with the dollhouse. I haven’t seen you take that out in ages . . .”
“We have to talk,” I said, getting to my feet.
“Okay.” Charlotte bent to gather some of the grocery bags; I did the same and followed her into the kitchen. She began to unpack: orange juice, milk, broccoli. Macaroni and cheese, dishwashing detergent, Ziploc bags.
Bounty. Joy. Life: brands that were a recipe for existence.
“Guy Booker’s added a witness for the defense,” I said. “Your husband.”
Charlotte was holding a jar of pickles one moment, and the next, it had shattered all over the floor. “What did you say?”
“Sean’s testifying against you,” I said flatly.
“He can’t do that, can he?”
“Well, once he asked to be released from the lawsuit—”
“He did what?”
The smell of vinegar rose; brine pooled on the tile floor. “Charlotte,” I said, stunned. “He told me he talked to you first.”
“He hasn’t talked to me in weeks. How could he? How could he do this to us?”
You came into the kitchen then. “Did something break?”
Charlotte got down on her hands and knees and began to gather the pieces of glass. “Stay out of the kitchen, Willow.” I reached for the new roll of paper toweling just as Charlotte let out a sharp cry; a shard of glass had pierced her finger.
It was bleeding. Your eyes went wide, and I hustled you toward the living room again. “Go get your mom a Band-Aid,” I said.
By the time I got back to the kitchen, Charlotte was clutching her bloody hand against her shirt. “Marin,” she said, staring up at me. “What am I supposed to do?”
• • •
It was probably a new experience for you, going to the hospital when you weren’t the one who was hurt. But it became clear very quickly that your mother’s cut had gone too deep, that a Band-Aid alone wasn’t going to be the answer. I drove her to the ER, with you and Amelia sitting in the back of the car, your feet propped up on cardboard boxes full of legal folders. I waited while a doctor sewed two stitches into the tip of Charlotte’s ring finger, as you sat beside her and held her good hand tight. I offered to stop at the pharmacy to fill the prescription for Tylenol plus codeine, but Charlotte said they still had plenty of painkillers at home left from your last break.
“I’m fine,” she told me. “Really.” I almost believed her, too, and then I remembered the way she’d clutched your hand during the stitches, and what she still planned to say to a jury in a matter of weeks about you.
I went back to the office, although the day was shot to hell. I took Maisie’s guidelines for writing a letter to one’s birth mother out of my top desk drawer and read through them one last time.
Families were never what you wanted them to be. We all wanted what we couldn’t have: the perfect child, the doting husband, the mother who’d let us go. We lived in our grown-up dollhouses completely unaware that, at any moment, a hand might come in and change around everything we’d become accustomed to.
Hello, I scrawled.
I’ve probably written this letter a thousand times in my head, always reworking it to make sure it’s just right. It took me thirty-one years to start my search, although I’ve always wondered where I came from. I think I had to figure out first why I wanted to search—and I finally know the answer. I owe my birth parents a very big thank-you. And almost equally important, I feel like you’re owed the right to know that I’m alive, well, and happy.
I work for a law firm in Nashua. I attended college at UNH and then went to law school at the University of Maine. I volunteer monthly to give legal advice to those who can’t afford it. I’m not married, but I hope that one day I will be. I like to kayak, read, and eat anything that’s chocolate.
For many years I was reluctant to search for you, because I didn’t want to intrude or ruin anyone’s life. Then I had a health scare and realized I did not know enough about where I’d come from. To that end, I’d like to meet you and say thank you in person—for giving me the opportunity to become the woman I am now—but I will also respect your wishes if you aren’t ready to meet me now, or never will be.
I’ve written and rewritten this, read and reread it. It’s not perfect, and neither am I. But I’m finally brave, and I’d like to think that maybe I inherited that from you.
Sincerely, Marin Gates
Sean
The guys who were repaving this stretch of Route 4 had spent the last forty minutes debating who was hotter, Jessica Alba or Pamela Anderson. “Jessica’s one hundred percent real,” said one guy, who was wearing fingerless gloves and missing two-thirds of the teeth in his mouth. “No implants.”
“Like you know,” said the foreman of the road crew.
From down near the line of traffic, another worker held a Slow sign that might have been a warning for the cars and might equally have been a self-description. “Pam’s a thirty-six triple D—twenty-two—thirty-four,” he said. “You know who else got measurements like that? A freakin’ Barbie doll.”
I leaned against the hood of my cruiser, bundled up in my winter gear, trying to pretend I was stone-deaf. Construction details were my least favorite part of being a cop, and a necessary evil. Without my blues flashing, the odds of some idiot striking one of the workers increased dramatically. Another guy approached, his breath punctuating the air in white balloons. “Wouldn’t toss either of them out of bed,” he said. “Would be even better if they were both there at once.”
Here’s the funny thing: ask any of these guys, and they’d tell you I was a tough guy. That my badge and my Glock were enough to raise me a notch in their esteem. They’d do what I told them to do, and they expected drivers to do what I told them to do, too. What they didn’t know was that I was the worst kind of coward. At work, maybe, I could bark orders or collar criminals or throw my weight around; at home, I had taken to stealing out before anyone woke up; I had defected from Charlotte’s lawsuit without even having the guts to tell her I was going to do it.
I’d spent enough time lying awake at night attempting to convince myself that this was courageous—that I was trying to find a middle ground where you would know you were loved and wanted—but the truth was, I got something out of this, too. I became a hero again, instead of a guy who couldn’t manage to take care of his own family.
“Want to cast your vote, Sean?” the foreman asked.
“Wouldn’t want to steal any of your fun,” I said diplomatically.
“Oh, that’s right. You’re married. Not allowed to let that eye wander, not even onto Google . . .”
Ignoring him, I took a few steps forward as a car sped up through the intersection instead of slowing down. All I’d have to do was point at the driver and he’d take his foot off the gas. It was that simple: the fear that I’d actually write him a ticket would be enough to make him think twice about what he was doing. But this driver didn’t slow down, and as the car screamed to a stop in the center of the intersection, I realized two things simultaneously: (1) it was a woman driving, not a man; and (2) it was my wife’s car.
Charlotte got out of the van and slammed the door shut behind her. “You son of a bitch,” she said, striding over until she was close enough to start hitting me.
I grabbed her arms, acutely aware that she had stopped not only traffic but the work of the construction detail. I could feel their eyes on me. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. “I had to do it.”
“Did you think it could stay a secret until the trial?” Charlotte cried. “Maybe then everyone could have watched me when I found out my husband was a liar.”
“Which one of us is the liar?” I said, incredulous. “Excuse me if I’m not willing to whore myself for money.”
&nbs
p; A bright flush rose on Charlotte’s cheeks. “Excuse me if I’m not willing to let my daughter suffer because we’re broke.”
In that instant, I noticed a few things: that the right taillight on Charlotte’s van had burned out. That she had a bandage wrapped around one finger on her left hand. That it had started to snow again. “Where are the girls?” I asked, trying to peer into the dark windows of the van.
“You have no right to ask that,” she said. “You gave up that right when you went to the lawyer’s office.”
“Where are the girls, Charlotte?” I demanded.
“Home.” She stepped away from me, her eyes bright with tears. “Somewhere I don’t ever want to see you again.”
Wheeling around, she walked back to the car. Before she could open the door, though, I blocked her. “How can’t you see it?” I whispered. “Until you started all this, there was nothing wrong with our family. Nothing. We had a decent house—”
“With a roof that leaks—”
“I have a steady job—”
“That pays nothing—”
“And our children had a great life,” I finished.
“What would you know about that?” Charlotte said. “You’re not the one who’s with Willow when we walk past the playground at her school and she watches kids doing things she’s never going to do—easy things, like jumping off the swings or playing kickball. She threw out the DVD of The Wizard of Oz, did you know that? It was in the kitchen trash because some horrible little kid at school called her a Munchkin.”
Just like that, I wanted to punch the little shit’s lights out—never mind that he was six years old. “She didn’t tell me.”
“Because she didn’t want you to fight her battles for her,” Charlotte said.
“Then why,” I asked, “are you doing it?”
Charlotte hesitated, and I realized I’d struck a nerve. “You can fool yourself, Sean, but you can’t fool me. Go ahead and make me out to be the bitch, the villain. Pretend you’re some white knight, if it works for you. It looks good on the surface, and you can tell yourself that you know her favorite color and the name of her favorite stuffed animal and what kind of jelly she likes on her peanut butter sandwiches. But that’s not what makes her who she is. Do you know what she talks about on the way home from school? Or what she’s most proud of? What she worries about? Do you know why she burst into tears last night and why, a week ago, she hid under her bed for an hour? Face it, Sean. You think you’re her conquering hero, but you don’t really know anything about Willow’s life.”
I flinched. “I know it’s worth living.”
She shoved me out of the way and got into the car, slamming the door and peeling away. I heard the furious honks of cars that had been stockpiled behind Charlotte’s van and turned around to find the construction foreman still staring at me. “Tell you what,” he said, “you can have Jessica and Pam.”
• • •
That night I drove to Massachusetts. I didn’t have any destination in mind, but I pulled off at random exits and swung through neighborhoods that were buttoned up tight for the night. I turned off my headlights and trolled the streets like a shark in the deep of the ocean. There is so much you can tell about a family from the place they live: plastic toys give you the ages of their kids; a string of Christmas lights flag their religious affiliation; the kinds of cars in the driveway call out soccer mom or teenage driver or NASCAR fan. But even at the houses that were nondescript, I had no problem imagining the people inside. I would close my eyes and picture a father at the dinner table, making his daughters laugh. A mother who cleared the plates, but not before she touched the man’s shoulder in passing. I’d see a bookshelf full of bedtime stories, a stone paperweight crudely painted to look like a ladybug pinning down the day’s mail, a fresh stack of clean laundry. I’d hear the Patriots game on a Sunday afternoon, and Amelia’s iTunes playing through a speaker shaped like a donut, and your bare feet shuffling down the hallway.
I must have gone to fifty different houses like this. Occasionally, I’d find a light on—usually upstairs, usually a teenager’s head silhouetted against the blue cast of a computer screen. Or a couple that had fallen asleep with the television still crackling. A bathroom light, to keep monsters away from a child. It didn’t matter if I was in a white neighborhood or a black one, if the community was wealthy or dirt-poor—houses are cellular walls; they keep our problems from bleeding into everyone else’s.
The last neighborhood I visited that night was the one that drew my truck magnetically, my heart’s polar north. I parked at the base of my own driveway, headlights switched off, so that I would not give my presence away.
The truth was, Charlotte was right. The more times I picked up shifts to pay for your incidentals, the less time I spent with you. Once, I’d held you in my arms while you slept, and I’d watched dreams screening across your face; now, I loved you in theory if not in practice. I was too busy protecting and serving the rest of Bankton to focus on protecting and serving you; that had fallen to Charlotte instead. It was a treadmill, and I’d been knocked off it by this lawsuit, only to find that you were impossibly, undeniably, growing up.
That would change, I vowed. Carrying through with the step I’d taken when I went to Booker, Hood & Coates meant that I would actively spend more time with you. I’d get to fall for you all over again.
Just then, the wind whipped through the open window of the truck, wrinkling the wrappers of the baked goods and reminding me why I’d come back here tonight. Stacked in a wheelbarrow were the cookies and cakes and pastries that you and Amelia and Charlotte had been baking for the past few days.
I’d loaded them all—easily thirty wrapped packets, each one tagged with a green string and a construction paper heart—into my truck. You’d cut those out yourself; I could tell. Sweets from Syllabub, they read. I’d imagined your mother’s hands stroking pastry dough, the look on your face as you carefully cracked an egg, Amelia frustrating her way through an apron’s knot. I came here a couple times a week. I’d eat the first three or four; the rest I’d leave on the steps at the nearest homeless shelter.
I reached into my wallet and took out all my money, the cashed sum of the extra shifts I’d taken on at work to keep from having to go home. This I stuffed, bill by bill, into the shoe box, payment in kind for Charlotte. Before I could stop myself, I tore the paper heart off one packet of cookies. With a pencil, I wrote a customer’s message across the blank back: I love them.
Tomorrow, you’d read it. All three of you would be giddy, would assume the anonymous writer had been talking about the food, and not the bakers.
Amelia
On the way home from Boston one weekend, my mother reinvented herself as the new Martha Freaking Stewart. To that end, we had to detour totally out of the way to Norwich, Vermont, to King Arthur Flour, so that we could buy a crapload of industrial baking pans and specialty flours. You were already cranky about spending the morning at Children’s Hospital having new braces fitted—they were hot and stiff and left marks and bruises where the plastic rubbed into your skin, which the brace specialists tried to fix with a heat gun, but it never seemed to work. You wanted to go home and take them off, but instead, my mother bribed us with a trip to a restaurant—a reward neither one of us could turn down.
This may not seem like such a big deal, but it was, to us. We didn’t eat out very much. My mom always said that she could cook better than most chefs anyway, which was true, but that really just made us sound less like losers than the truth: we couldn’t afford it. It was the same reason that I didn’t tell my parents when my jeans were becoming highwaters, why I never bought lunch although the French fries in the caf looked so incredibly delicious; it was the same reason why that Disney World Trip to Hell was so much of a disappointment. I was too embarrassed to hear my parents tell me that we were too broke to afford what I needed or wanted; if I didn’t ask for anything, I didn’t have to hear them say no.
There was a par
t of me that was angry my mother was using the baking money to buy all those pans and tins when she could have been buying me a Juicy Couture cashmere hoodie that would make other girls in school look at me with envy, instead of like I was something stuck to the bottoms of their shoes. But no, it was critical that we have Mexican vanilla extract and dried Bing cherries from Michigan. We had to have silicone muffin pans and a shortbread form and edgeless cookie sheets. You were totally oblivious to the fact that every penny we spent on turbinado sugar and cake flour was one less cent spent on us, but then again, what did I expect: you still believed there was a Santa Claus, too.
So I have to admit it surprised me a little when you let me choose the restaurant where we’d eat lunch. “Amelia never gets to pick,” you said, and even though I hated myself for this, I felt like I was going to cry.
To make up for that, and because everyone expected me to be a jerk and why disappoint, I said, “McDonald’s.”
“Eww,” you said. “They make four hundred Quarter Pounders out of one cow.”
“Get back to me when you’re a vegetarian, hypocrite,” I answered.
“Amelia, stop. We’re not going to McDonald’s.”
So instead of picking a nice Italian place we probably all would have enjoyed, I made her stop at a totally skanky diner instead.
It looked like the kind of place that had bugs in the kitchen. “Well,” my mother said, looking around. “This is an interesting choice.”
“It’s nostalgic,” I said, and I glared at her. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing, as long as botulism isn’t one of your long-lost memories.” After glancing at a Seat Yourself sign, she walked toward an empty booth.
“I want to sit at the counter,” you said.
My mother and I both looked at the rickety stools, the long drop down. “No,” we said simultaneously.
