The Jodi Picoult Collection #4

by Jodi Picoult

  I let her embrace me, because it seemed to be what she wanted to do. Behind Theo’s door, I could hear him starting to stir.

  What my mother had said was not technically inaccurate. What those doctors and books all say about how Aspies like me cannot feel anything on behalf of others—that’s total bullshit. We understand when someone else is in pain; it just affects us differently than it affects other humans. I see it as the next step of evolution: I cannot take away your sadness, so why should I acknowledge it?

  In addition, I hadn’t slept in front of Theo’s door because I wanted to protect him. I’d slept in front of his door because I was exhausted after a week of midnight crying, and I only wanted to get a good night’s rest. I was looking out for my own best interests.

  You could say, actually, that this was the impetus behind what happened with Jess, too.

  Oliver

  Emma wants to call US Airways and make them stop the plane from departing, but the entire system is automated. When we finally do reach a human employee, he’s in Charlotte, North Carolina, and has no way of contacting the Burlington gate. “Here’s the thing,” I tell her. “You can beat him there by flying direct to San Francisco. It’s almost the same distance to Palo Alto from the San Jose airport.” She looks over my shoulder at the computer screen, which has the flight I’ve found. “With the layover in Chicago that Theo’s going to make, you’ll still get in an hour before he does.”

  She leans forward, and I can smell the shampoo in her hair. Her eyes flicker over the flight information, hopeful—and then land on the bottom, and the price. “$1,080? That’s ridiculous!”

  “Same-day fares aren’t cheap.”

  “Well, that’s not in my budget,” Emma says.

  I click on the button to purchase the ticket. “It’s in mine,” I lie.

  “What are you doing! You can’t pay for that—”

  “Too late.” I shrug. The truth is, financially, I’m a little shaky now. I have one client, and she can’t afford to pay me, and worse, I’m okay with that. Surely I missed the Bloodsucking Your Client class in law school, since all evidence points to me being the poster boy for Financially Ruined Defense Attorneys. But at the same time, I’m thinking that I can sell my saddle—I have a beautiful English one that’s in storage below the pizza place. No use having it when I don’t have a horse anyway.

  “I’ll add it to the bill,” I say, but we both know I probably won’t.

  Emma closes her eyes for a moment. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Then just be quiet.”

  “You shouldn’t have to get involved in this mess.”

  “Lucky for you the only other thing I had to do today was organize my sock drawer,” I joke, but she’s not laughing.

  “I’m sorry,” Emma replies. “It’s just . . . I don’t have anyone else.”

  Very slowly, very deliberately, so that she will not startle or pull away, I thread my fingers through hers and squeeze her hand. “You have me,” I say.

  * * *

  If I were a better man, I wouldn’t have eavesdropped on Emma’s conversation with her ex-husband. Henry, she said. It’s Emma.

  No, actually, I can’t really call back later. It’s about Theo.

  He’s fine. I mean, I think he’s fine. He’s run away from home.

  Well, of course I know that. He’s on his way to your place.

  Yes, California. Unless you’ve moved lately.

  No, I’m sorry. That wasn’t an insult . . .

  I don’t know why. He just took off.

  He used my credit card. Look, can we just talk about this when I get there?

  Oh. Did I forget to mention that?

  If all goes well, I’ll land before Theo.

  Meeting us at the airport would be great. We’re both on US Airways.

  Then there is a hesitation.

  Jacob? she replies. No, he won’t be joining me.

  * * *

  It is decided that I will camp out for the night to be the over-twenty-five-year-old adult watching Jacob while Emma hauls Theo’s ass back across the country. At first, after she leaves, it seems like a piece of cake—we can play the Wii. We can watch TV. And, thank God, it’s Brown Thursday, which is relatively easy: I can cook Jacob a burger for dinner. It isn’t until an hour after she leaves that I remember my hearing tomorrow—the one I had not yet told Emma about, the one I will have to take Jacob to by myself.

  “Jacob,” I say, while he is engrossed in a television show about how Milky Way bars are made. “I have to talk to you for a second.”

  He doesn’t respond. His eyes don’t even flicker from the screen, so I step in front of it and turn it off.

  “I just want to have a little chat.” When Jacob doesn’t answer, I keep speaking. “Your trial starts in a month, you know.”

  “A month and six days.”

  “Right. Well, I’ve been thinking about how . . . hard it might be for you to be in court all day long, and I figured we need to do something about it.”

  “Oh,” Jacob says, shaking his head. “I can’t be in court all day. I have schoolwork to do. And I have to be home by four-thirty so that I can watch CrimeBusters.”

  “I don’t think you get it. It’s not your call. You go to court when the judge says you go to court, and you get to come home when he’s ready to let you go.”

  Jacob chews on this information. “That’s not going to work for me.”

  “Which is why you and I are going back to court tomorrow.”

  “But my mother’s not here.”

  “I know that, Jacob. I didn’t plan for her to be away. But the fact of the matter is, the whole reason we’re going is something you said to me.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes. Do you remember what you told me when you decided I could run an insanity defense?”

  Jacob nods. “That the Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination by the state or local governments, including the courts,” he says, “and that some people consider autism to be a disability, even if I don’t happen to be one of them.”

  “Right. But if you do consider Asperger’s syndrome to be a developmental disability, then under the ADA you’re also entitled to provisions in court that will make the experience easier for you.” I let a slow smile loose, like a card that’s been played close to the chest. “Tomorrow, we’re going to make sure you get them.”

  Emma

  From Auntie Em’s column archives:

  Dear Auntie Em,

  Recently I have been dreaming about my ex. Should I consider this a sign from a higher power and call him to say hi?

  Sleepless in Strafford

  Dear Sleepless,

  Yes, but I wouldn’t tell him you are calling because he’s starring in your dreams. Unless he happens to say, “Gosh, it’s so strange that you called today, because I dreamed about you last night.”

  Auntie Em

  I asked Henry out on our first date, because he didn’t seem to be picking up on hints that I was his for the taking. We saw the movie Ghost and went out to dinner afterward, where Henry told me that, scientifically, ghosts could simply not exist. “It’s basic physics and math,” he said. “Patrick Swayze couldn’t walk through walls and tag along behind Demi Moore. If ghosts can follow someone, that means their feet apply force to the floor. If they go through walls, though, they don’t have any substance. They could either be material or be unmaterial, but they can’t be both at the same time. It violates Newton’s rule.”

  He was wearing a T-shirt that said FULL FRONTAL NERDITY, and his corn silk hair kept falling into his eyes. “But don’t you wish it could be true?” I asked him. “Don’t you wish love was so strong it could come back to haunt you?”

  I told him the story of my mother, who one night had woken up at 3:14 A.M. with a mouth full of violet petals and the scent of roses so thick in the air that she could not breathe. An hour later she was roused by a phone call: her own mother, a florist by trade, had die
d of a heart attack at 3:14 A.M. “Science can’t answer everything,” I told Henry. “It doesn’t explain love.”

  “Actually it does,” he told me. “There have been all kinds of studies done. People are more attracted to people with symmetrical features, for example. And symmetrical men smell better to women. Also, people who have similar genetic traits are attracted to each other. It probably has something to do with evolution.”

  I burst out laughing. “That is awful,” I said. “That is the most unromantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I don’t think so . . .”

  “Oh, really. Say something that will sweep me off my feet,” I demanded.

  Henry looked at me for a long moment, until I could feel my head growing lighter and dizzier. “I think you might be perfectly symmetrical,” he said.

  * * *

  On our second date, Henry took me to Boston. We had dinner at the Parker House, and then he hired a hansom cab to take us around the Boston Common. It was late November, and frost crouched in the bare branches of the trees; when we settled into the back of the carriage, the driver handed us a heavy wool blanket to put over our laps. The horse was spirited, stamping its feet and snorting.

  Henry was telling me riddles. “The ratio of an igloo’s circumference to its diameter?”

  “I give up.”

  “Eskimo pi,” he said. “How about half of a large intestine?”

  “I don’t know . . .”

  “A semicolon.”

  “That’s not a math or science joke,” I said.

  “I’m a Renaissance Guy.” Henry laughed. “Eight nickels?”

  I shook my head.

  “Two paradigms,” he said.

  The puns weren’t, by definition, funny. But on Henry’s lips, they were. Lips that were curved at the ends and that always seemed a little embarrassed to smile, lips that had kissed me good night on our first date with a surprising amount of force and intensity.

  I was staring at his lips when the horse dropped dead.

  Technically, it wasn’t dead. It had slipped on a patch of black ice, and its front legs had buckled. I had heard one snap.

  We rolled in slow motion out of the hansom cab, Henry twisting so that he would cushion my fall. “You all right?” he asked, and he helped me to my feet. He held the rough blanket around me while the police came, and then animal control. “Don’t watch,” Henry whispered, and he turned my face away when the officer pulled out a pistol.

  I tried to focus on the words on Henry’s T-shirt, where his coat was gaping open: DOES THIS PROTON MAKE MY MASS LOOK FAT? But the sound was like the world cracking in half, and the last thing I remember was wondering who wore a T-shirt in the winter, and if that meant his skin was always warm, and if I would ever get to lie against it.

  * * *

  I woke up in an unfamiliar bed. The walls were cream-colored, and there was a dresser made of dark wood with a television on it. It was very clean and . . . corporate. You fainted, I told myself. “The horse,” I said out loud.

  “Um,” a voice said quietly. “He’s in that big carousel in the sky?”

  I rolled over to find Henry pressed against the far wall, still wearing his coat. “You don’t believe in heaven,” I murmured.

  “No, but I figured you would. Are you . . . are you okay?”

  I nodded gingerly, testing. “What’s wrong? Don’t women swoon around you all the time?”

  He grinned. “It was a little Victorian of you.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I got a room at the Parker House. I thought you might need to lie down for a while.” His cheeks bloomed a bright red. “I, um, don’t want you to get the wrong idea, though.”

  I came up on an elbow. “You don’t?”

  “Well . . . n-not unless you want me to,” he stammered.

  “Well, that’s a little Gothic,” I said. “Henry, can I ask you something?”

  “Okay.”

  “What are you doing all the way over there?”

  I held out my hand and felt the mattress give under his weight as Henry crawled onto it. I felt his mouth come down against mine, and I realized that this relationship would not be what I’d imagined it to be: me, playing teacher to the shy young computer science geek. I should have known from watching Henry work at the office: programmers moved slowly and deliberately, and then waited to see the reaction. And if they did not succeed the first time, they would try over and over again, until they broke through that fifth dimension and got it right.

  Later, when I was wearing Henry’s T-shirt and his arms were wrapped around me, when we had turned on the television and were watching a show on primates in the Congo with the volume muted, when he had fed me chicken nuggets from the kids’ room service menu, I thought how clever I’d been to see past what other people saw in Henry. The silly T-shirts, the Star Wars canteen in which he stored his coffee, the way he could barely look a woman in the eye—beneath that exterior was a man who touched me as if I were made of glass, who focused with such intensity on me that sometimes I had to remind him to breathe when we were making love. I never imagined at the time that Henry wouldn’t be able to love anything other than me—not even a baby he’d made. I never imagined that all that passion between us would pool beneath the tangled threads of Jacob’s genetic code, waiting for just the perfect storm to dig in its roots, to burst and blossom into autism.

  * * *

  Henry is waiting for me when I get off my plane. I walk toward him, stopping an awkward foot away. I lean forward to embrace him just as he turns away toward the arrivals monitor, which means I close my arms around nothing but air. “He should be landing in twenty minutes,” Henry says.

  “Good,” I reply. “That’s good.” I look at him. “I’m really sorry about this.”

  Henry stares down the empty corridor past the security barrier. “You going to tell me what’s going on, Emma?”

  For five minutes, I tell him about Jess Ogilvy, about the murder charge. I tell him I’m sure Theo’s escape had something to do with all of this. When I’m finished, I listen to the call for a passenger about to miss his plane and then muster the courage to meet Henry’s gaze. “Jacob’s on trial for murder?” he says, his voice shaky. “And you didn’t mention it?”

  “What would you have done?” I challenge. “Fly back to Vermont to be our white knight? Somehow I doubt that, Henry.”

  “And when this hits the papers out here? How am I supposed to explain to my seven- and four-year-old that their half brother is a murderer?”

  I reel back as if he’s slapped me. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that,” I murmur. “And if you knew your son at all, if you had ever actually spent time with Jacob instead of just sending a check every month to ease your conscience, you’d know that he’s innocent.”

  A muscle tics in Henry’s jaw. “Do you remember what happened on our fifth anniversary?”

  That time of my life, when we were trying every intervention and therapy possible to get Jacob to connect with the world again, is a dark blur.

  “We were out at a movie—the first time we’d been alone in months. And suddenly this strange man walks down the aisle and crouches down and starts talking to you, and a minute later you walk out with him. I sat there thinking, Who the hell is this guy and where is my wife going with him? And I followed you into the lobby. Turned out that he was the father of our babysitter—and an EMT. Livvie had called him in a panic because Theo was bleeding like crazy. He went to the house, put a butterfly bandage on Theo, and came and got us.”

  I stare at Henry. “I don’t remember any of this.”

  “Theo wound up getting ten stitches in his eyebrow,” Henry says. “Because Jacob had gotten angry and knocked over his high chair when Livvie had her back turned.”

  Now it is coming back to me—the panic we came home to with Jacob in total meltdown mode and Theo hysterically crying, a knot the size of his tiny fist rising over his left eye. Henry making the hospita
l run while I was left behind to calm Jacob. I wonder how it is possible to put something so far out of one’s mind, to rewrite history. “I can’t believe I forgot that,” I say softly.

  Henry glances away from me. “You were always good at seeing what you wanted to see,” he answers.

  And then suddenly, we both notice our son.

  “What the hell?” Theo says.

  I fold my arms. “My thoughts exactly,” I reply.

  * * *

  It is a strange thing to be in an airport and to not be celebrating a reunion or a departure. It is even stranger to sit in the backseat of Henry’s car and listen to him making small talk with Theo as if Theo isn’t smart enough to know that, at some point, a colossal bomb is going to drop.

  When Theo went into the restroom at the airport, Henry came up with a plan. “Let me talk to him,” Henry said.

  “He won’t listen to you.”

  “Well, he ran away from you,” Henry pointed out.

  The freeways here are white as bone and clean. There’s no cracking from frost heaves, like in Vermont. Shiny and happy and new. No wonder Henry likes it. “Theo,” I say, “what were you thinking?”

  He twists in his seat. “I wanted to talk to Dad.”

  In the rearview mirror, Henry meets my gaze. I told you so.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of a phone?”

  But before he can answer, Henry pulls into a driveway. His house has Spanish tiles on its roof and a plastic, child-size princess castle on the front lawn. That makes my chest tighten.

  Meg, Henry’s new wife, bursts out the front door. “Oh, thank goodness,” she says, clasping her hands together when she sees Theo in the front seat. She is a tiny blonde with überwhite teeth and a shiny ponytail. Henry approaches her, leaving me to wrestle my own bag out of the trunk. Standing beside each other, with their blue eyes and golden hair, they look like a poster for the quintessential Aryan family. “Theo,” Henry says, all fatherly, too little too late, “let’s go into the library and talk a little.”