by Jodi Picoult
Which is why one Sunday, when the guys had taken you kids to Mad Martha’s for breakfast, Charlotte and I decided to try boogie boarding, even if it resulted in severe hypothermia. We shimmied into our wet suits (“They’re supposed to be tight,” I told Charlotte when she moaned about the size of her hips) and carried the boards down to the water’s edge. I dipped my foot into the line of surf and gasped. “There’s no way,” I said, jumping backward.
Charlotte smirked at me. “Getting cold feet?”
“Very funny,” I said, but to my shock, she’d already begun high-stepping over the waves, frigid as they were, and swimming out to a point where she could ride one in.
“How bad is it?” I yelled.
“Like an epidural—I don’t have feeling below my waist,” she shouted back, and then suddenly the ocean heaved, flexing one long muscle that lifted Charlotte on her board and sent her screaming through the surf to land at my feet on the sand.
She stood up, pushing her hair out of her face. “Chicken,” she accused, and to prove her wrong, I held my breath and started wading into the water.
My God, it was cold. I paddled out on my board, bobbing beside Charlotte. “We’re going to die,” I said. “We’re going to die out here and someone’s going to find our bodies on the shore, like Emma found that tennis shoe yesterday—”
“Here we go,” Charlotte shouted, and I looked over my shoulder to see an enormous wall of water looming down on us. “Paddle,” Charlotte yelled, and I did what she told me to do.
But I hadn’t caught the wave. Instead, it crashed over me, knocking the breath from my lungs and tumbling me end over end underwater. My boogie board, roped to my wrist, smacked me on the head twice, and then I felt sand being ground into my hair and my face, my fingers clawing at broken shells, as the ocean floor rose at an angle beneath me. Suddenly, a hand grabbed the back of my wet suit and dragged me forward. “Stand up,” Charlotte said, using all her weight to move me far enough onto the sand to keep from getting pulled back by the tide.
I had swallowed a quart of salt water; my eyes were burning, and there was blood on my cheek and my palms. “Jesus Christ,” I said, coughing and wiping my nose.
Charlotte pounded me on the back. “Just breathe.”
“Harder . . . than it sounds.”
Slowly feeling returned to my fingers and my feet, and that was worse, because I’d been beaten up badly by the wave. “Thanks . . . for being my lifeguard.”
“The heck with that,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t want to have to pay for the second half of the rental house.”
I laughed out loud. Charlotte helped me to my feet, and we began to trudge up the beach, dragging the boards behind us like puppies on leashes. “What should we tell the guys?” I asked.
“That Kelly Slater signed us for the world championships.”
“Yeah, that’ll explain why my cheek is bleeding.”
“He was overcome by the beauty of my butt in this wet suit, and when he made a pass at me you had to beat him off,” Charlotte suggested.
The reeds were whispering secrets. To the left was a swath of sand where Amelia and Emma had been playing yesterday, writing their names with sticks. They wanted to see if the writing would still be there today, or if the tide would have washed it away.
Amelia and Emma, it read.
BFFAA. Best friends forever and always.
I linked my arm with Charlotte’s, and together we started the long climb to the house.
It struck me, now, as I sat on the floor of Aubuchon Hardware, with a flamenco fan of color chips in my hand, that I had never been back to Newburyport since then. Charlotte and I had talked about it, but she hadn’t wanted to commit to renting a house not knowing if you’d be in a cast that following summer. Maybe Emma and Rob and I would go down there next summer.
But I wouldn’t go, I knew that. I really didn’t want to, without Charlotte.
I took a quart of paint off the shelf and walked to the mixing station at the end of the aisle. “Newburyport Blue, please,” I said, although I did not have a particular wall in mind to paint it on yet. I’d keep it in the basement, just in case.
• • •
It was dark by the time I left Aubuchon Hardware, and when I got back home, Rob was washing plates and putting them into the dishwasher. He didn’t even look at me when I walked into the kitchen, which is why I knew he was furious. “Just say it,” I said.
He turned off the faucet and slammed the door of the dishwasher into place. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I . . . I lost track of time. I was at the hardware store.”
“Again? What could you possibly need there?”
I sank down into a chair. “I don’t know, Rob. It’s just the place that makes me feel good right now.”
“You know what would make me feel good?” he said. “A wife.”
“Wow, Rob, I didn’t think you’d ever go all Ricky Ricardo on me—”
“Did you forget something today?”
I stared at him. “Not that I know of.”
“Emma was waiting for you to drive her to the rink.”
I closed my eyes. Skating. The new session had started; I was supposed to sign her up for private lessons so that she could compete this spring—something her last coach finally felt she was ready for. It was first come, first served; this might have blown her chance for the season. “I’ll make it up to her—”
“You don’t have to, because she called, hysterical, and I left the office to get her down there in time.” He sat down across from me, tilting his head. “What do you do all day, Piper?”
I wanted to point out to him the new tile floor in the mudroom, the fixture I’d rewired over this very table. But instead I looked down at my hands. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I really don’t know.”
“You have to get your life back. If you don’t, she’s already won.”
“You don’t know what this is like—”
“I don’t? I’m not a doctor, too? I don’t carry malpractice insurance?”
“That’s not what I mean and you—”
“I saw Amelia today.”
I stared at him. “Amelia?”
“She came to the office to get her braces off.”
“There’s no way Charlotte would have—”
“Hell hath no fury like a teenager who wants her orthodontia removed,” Rob said. “I’m ninety-nine percent sure Charlotte had no idea she was there.”
I felt heat rise to my face. “Don’t you think people might wonder why you’re treating the daughter of the woman who’s suing us?”
“You,” he corrected. “She’s suing you.”
I reeled backward. “I can’t believe you just said that.”
“And I can’t believe you’d expect me to throw Amelia out of the office.”
“Well, you know what, Rob? You should have. You’re my husband.”
Rob got to his feet. “And she’s a patient. And that’s my job. Something, unlike you, that I give a damn about.”
He stalked out of the kitchen, and I rubbed my temples. I felt like a plane in a holding pattern, making the turns with the airport in view and no clearance to land. In that moment, I resented Charlotte so much that it felt like a river stone in my belly, solid and cold. Rob was right—everything I was, everything I’d been—had been put on a shelf because of what Charlotte had done to me.
And in that instant I realized that Charlotte and I still had something in common: she felt exactly the same way about what I’d done to her.
• • •
The next morning, I was determined to change. I set my alarm, and instead of sleeping past the school bus pickup, I made Emma French toast and bacon for breakfast. I told a wary Rob to have a nice day. Instead of renovating the house, I cleaned it. I went grocery shopping—although I drove to a town thirty miles away, where I wouldn’t run into anyone familiar. I met Emma at school with her skating bag. “You’re taking me to the rink?�
�� she said when she saw me.
“Is that a problem?”
“I guess not,” Emma said, and after a moment’s hesitation, she launched into a diatribe about how unfair it was for the teacher to give an algebra test when he knew he was going to be absent that day and couldn’t answer last-minute questions.
I’ve missed this, I thought. I’ve missed Emma. I reached across the seat and smoothed my hand over her hair.
“What’s up with that?”
“I just really love you. That’s all.”
Emma raised a brow. “Okay, now you’re skeeving me out. You aren’t going to tell me you have cancer or something, are you?”
“No, I just know I haven’t exactly been . . . present . . . lately. And I’m sorry.”
We were at a red light, and she faced me. “Charlotte’s a bitch,” she said, and I didn’t even tell her to watch her language. “Everybody knows the whole Willow thing isn’t your fault.”
“Everybody?”
“Well,” she said. “Me.”
That’s good enough, I realized.
A few minutes later, we arrived at the skating rink. Red-cheeked boys dribbled out of the main glass doors, their enormous hockey bags turtled onto their backs. It always had seemed so funny to me, the dichotomy between the coltish figure skaters and the lupine hockey players.
The minute I walked inside I realized what I’d forgotten—no, not forgotten, just blocked entirely from my mind: Amelia would be here, too.
She looked so different from the last time I’d seen her—dressed in black, with fingerless gloves and tattered jeans and combat boots—and that blue hair. And she was arguing heatedly with Charlotte. “I don’t care who hears,” she said. “I told you I don’t want to skate anymore.”
Emma grabbed my arm. “Just go,” she said under her breath.
But it was too late. We were a small town and this was a big story; the entire room, girls and their mothers, was waiting to see what would happen. And you, sitting on the bench beside Amelia’s bag, noticed me, too.
You had a cast on your right arm. How had you broken it this time? Four months ago, I would have known all the details.
Well, unlike Charlotte, I had no intention of airing my dirty laundry in public. I drew in my breath and pulled Emma closer, dragging her into the locker room. “Okay,” I said, pushing my hair out of my eyes. “So, you do this private lesson thing for how long? An hour?”
“Mom.”
“I may just run out and pick up the dry cleaning, instead of hanging around to watch—”
“Mom.” Emma reached for my hand, as if she were still little. “You weren’t the one who started this.”
I nodded, not trusting myself to say anything else. Here is what I had expected from my best friend: honesty. If she had spent the past six years of your life harboring the belief that I’d done something grievously wrong during her pregnancy, why didn’t she ever bring it up? Why didn’t she ever say, Hey, how come you didn’t . . . ? Maybe I was naïve to think that silence was implicit complacence, instead of a festering question. Maybe I was silly to believe that friends owed each other anything. But I did. Like, for starters, an explanation.
Emma finished lacing up her skates and hurried onto the ice. I waited a moment, then pushed out the locker room door and stood in front of the curved Plexiglas barrier. At one end of the rink was a tangle of beginners—a centipede of children in their snow pants and bicycle helmets, their legs widening triangles. When one went down, so did the others: dominoes. It wasn’t so long ago that this had been Emma, and yet here she was on the other end of the rink, executing a sit-spin as her teacher skated around her, calling out corrections.
I couldn’t see Amelia—or you or Charlotte for that matter—anywhere.
My pulse was almost back to normal by the time I reached my car. I slid into the driver’s seat, turned on the engine. When I heard a sharp rap on the window, I nearly jumped out of my skin.
Charlotte stood there, a scarf wrapped around her nose and mouth, her eyes watering in the bite of the wind. I hesitated, then unrolled the window partway.
She looked as miserable as I felt. “I . . . I just had to tell you something,” she said, halting. “This was never about you and me.”
The effort of not speaking hurt; I was grinding my back teeth together.
“I was offered a chance to give Willow everything she’ll ever need.” Her breath formed a wreath around her face in the cold air. “I don’t blame you for hating me. But you can’t judge me, Piper. Because if Willow had been your child . . . I know you would have done the same thing.”
I let the words hang between us, caught on the guillotine of the window’s edge. “You don’t know me as well as you think you do, Charlotte,” I said coldly, and I pulled out of the parking spot and away from the rink without looking back.
• • •
Ten minutes later I burst into Rob’s office during a consultation. “Piper,” he said evenly, glancing down at the parents and preteen daughter, who were staring at my wild hair, my runny nose, the tears still streaking my face. “I’m in the middle of something.”
“Um,” the mother said quickly. “Maybe we should just let you two talk.”
“Mrs. Spifield—”
“No, really,” she said, getting up and summoning the rest of the family. “We can give you a minute.”
They hurried out of the office, expecting me to self-destruct at any moment, and maybe they weren’t that far off the mark. “Are you happy?” Rob exploded. “You probably just cost me a new patient.”
“How about Piper, what happened? Tell me what I can do to help you?”
“Well, pardon me if the sympathy card’s been played so often that the face has worn straight off. Jesus, I’m trying to run a practice here.”
“I just ran into Charlotte at the skating rink.”
Rob blinked at me. “So?”
“Are you joking?”
“You live in the same town. A small town. It’s a miracle you haven’t crossed paths before. What did she do? Come after you with a sword? Call you out on the playground? Grow up, Piper.”
I felt like the bull must when he is let out of his pen. Freedom, relief . . . and then comes the picador, lancing him. “I’m going to leave,” I said softly. “I’m going to pick up Emma, and before you come home tonight, I hope you’ll think about the way you treated me.”
“The way I treated you?” Rob said. “I have been nothing but supportive. I have not said a word, even though you’ve abandoned your whole OB practice and turned into some female Ty Pennington. We get a lumber bill for two thousand dollars? No problem. You forget Emma’s chorus recital because you’re talking plumbing at Aubuchon Hardware? Forgiven. I mean, how ironic is it that you’ve become the do-it-yourself queen? Because you don’t want our help. You want to wallow in self-pity instead.”
“It’s not self-pity.” My cheeks were burning. Could the Spifields hear us arguing in the waiting room? Could the hygienists?
“I know what you want from me, Piper. I’m just not sure I can do it anymore.” Rob walked to the window, looking out onto the parking lot. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Steven,” he said after a moment.
When Rob was twelve, his older brother had committed suicide. Rob had been the one to find him, hanging from the rod in his closet. I knew all this; I’d known it since before we were married. It had taken me a while to convince Rob to have children, because he worried that his brother’s mental illness was printed in his genes. What I hadn’t known was that, these past few months, being with me had dragged Rob back to that time in his childhood.
“Back then no one knew the name for bipolar disorder, or how to take care of it. So for seventeen years my parents went through hell. My whole childhood was colored by how Steven was feeling: if it was a good day or a bad day. And,” he said, “it’s how I got so good at taking care of a person who is completely self-absorbed.”
I felt a splinter of guilt we
dge into my heart. Charlotte had hurt me; in return, I’d hurt Rob. Maybe that’s what we do to the people we love: take shots in the dark and realize too late we’ve wounded the people we are trying to protect. “Ever since you got served, I’ve been thinking about it. What if my parents had known in advance?” Rob said. “What if they had been told, before Steven was born, that he was going to kill himself before his eighteenth birthday?”
I felt myself go very still.
“Would they have taken those seventeen years to get to know him? To have those good times that came between the crises? Or would they have spared themselves—and me—that emotional roller coaster?”
I imagined Rob, coming into his brother’s room to get him for dinner, and finding the older boy slumped to the side of the closet. The whole time I’d known my mother-in-law, I’d never seen a smile rise all the way to her eyes. Was this why?
“That’s not a fair comparison,” I said stiffly.
“Why not?”
“Bipolar illness can’t be diagnosed in utero. You’re missing the point.”
Rob raised his gaze to meet mine. “Am I?” he said.
Marin
February 2008
“Just be yourselves,” I coached. “We don’t want you to do anything special because of the camera. Pretend we’re not here.”
I gave a nervous little smile and glanced at the twenty-two moon faces staring up at me: Ms. Watkins’s kindergarten class. “Does anyone have any questions?”
