by Jodi Picoult
I was quite sure she was dead.
I took a step forward. Lila was incredibly still, and faintly blue in the eerie light. I thought of my father, and how he collapsed on the lawn. I was gathering the loose threads of a scream in my throat, when suddenly Lila rolled over in one languid move, scaring the hell out of me. “Get lost, you little shit,” she said, her words as round and thin as bubbles, popping as soon as they hit the air.
I do not remember the rest of that night. Except that I ran home, even though it was three in the morning.
And that, after what happened, Ellie and I were never really friends anymore.
When I was in high school, my mother used to make up alternate names for the kids I invited over to our house. Robin became Bonnie, Alice became Elise, Suzy became Julie. No matter how many times I corrected her, she preferred to call these girls by names that felt comfortable to her, instead of what was accurate. After a while, my friends even started answering to whatever she called them.
Which is why it’s so extraordinary to me that my mother has never—not once—messed up Vanessa’s name. The two of them hit it off the moment they first met. There is no end to the things they have in common; and they seem to think it’s funny that it drives me crazy.
It’s been two months since Vanessa and I bumped into each other at the Y, and she has slipped seamlessly into the role of my closest friend at a time when I desperately needed it—since my former closest friend happened to have recently divorced me. So much of a friendship is like a love affair—the novelty and sparkle wearing down at the edges to become something comfortable and predictable, like the cardigan you take out of your drawer on a rainy Sunday because you need to surround yourself with something cozy and familiar. Vanessa is the one I call when I am procrastinating on organizing my taxes; when I am channel surfing and find Dirty Dancing on TNT and cannot stop watching; when the homeless guy in front of Dunkin’ Donuts looks at the five-dollar bill I’ve given him and asks if he can have it in ones. She’s the one I call when I’m bored in traffic on I-95, and when I’m crying because a two-year-old patient with burns over eighty percent of his body dies in the middle of the night. I’ve programmed her cell number into my phone, on the speed-dial key that used to belong to Max.
It is easy, with twenty-twenty hindsight, to see how I got to a point where I didn’t really have any friends. There’s that necessary shift that comes with marriage, when your best confidant is now the one you’re sleeping with at night. But then the other women I knew all started having babies, and I distanced myself from them out of self-preservation and jealousy. Max was the only one who understood what I so badly wanted and needed. Or so I’d told myself.
Here’s what girlfriends do for you: they provide the reality check. They are the ones who tell you when you have spinach between your teeth or when your ass looks fat in a pair of jeans or when you’re being a bitch. They tell you, and there’s no drama or agenda, like there would be if the message had come from your husband. They tell you the truth because you need to hear it, but it doesn’t alter the bond between you. I don’t think I realized how much I missed that, until now.
Right now, Vanessa and I are about to be late to a movie because my mother is talking about a breakthrough with one of her clients. “So, I bought two dozen bricks and loaded them in the back of my car,” my mother is saying. “And then, when we got to the cliff, I had Deanna write on each of the bricks with a Sharpie marker—keywords, you know, that signified her emotional baggage.”
“Brilliant,” Vanessa says.
“You think? So she writes My Ex on one. And Never made peace with my sister on another. And Didn’t lose last 20 pounds after having kids, and so on. I’m telling you, Vanessa, she went through three markers alone. And then I got her on the edge of the cliff and had her hurl the bricks, one at a time. I told her that the minute they hit the water, that weight was going to be off her shoulders for good.”
“Sure hope there wasn’t a humpback migration going on below the cliff,” I murmur, tapping my foot impatiently. “Look, I hate to break up the professional development session, but we’re about to miss the early showing—”
Vanessa stands up. “I think it’s a terrific idea, Dara,” she says. “You ought to write it up and submit it to a professional journal.”
My mother’s cheeks pinken. “Honestly?”
I grab my purse and my jacket. “Are you going to let yourself out?” I ask my mother.
“No, no,” she says, getting to her feet. “I’ll just go home.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to come along?” Vanessa asks.
“I’m sure my mother’s got better things to do,” I say quickly, and give her a quick hug. “I’ll call you in the morning,” I say, and I drag Vanessa out of the apartment.
Halfway to the car, Vanessa turns around. “I forgot something,” she says, tossing me the keys. “I’ll be right back.” So I let myself into the convertible and turn the ignition. I am surfing the channels of her radio when she slips into the driver’s seat. “Okay,” Vanessa says, backing out of the driveway. “Who spit in your Cheerios?”
“Well, what were you thinking, inviting my mom to come with us?”
“That she’s all alone on a Saturday night?”
“I’m forty, Vanessa—I don’t want to hang out with my mother!”
“You would if you couldn’t,” Vanessa says.
I look at her. In the dark, the reflection from the rearview mirror casts a yellow mask around her eyes. “If you miss your mother so much, you can have mine,” I say.
“I’m just saying you don’t have to be so mean.”
“Well, you don’t have to enable her, either. Did you seriously think her brick exercise was a good one?”
“Sure. I’d use it myself, except the kids would probably write the names of their teachers on the bricks they’re tossing, and that wouldn’t be very constructive.” She pulls up to a stop sign and turns to me. “You know, Zoe, my mother used to tell me the same story five times. Without fail. I was constantly saying, Ma, yes, I know, and rolling my eyes. And now—I can’t even really remember her voice. I think sometimes I’ve got it, in my head, but then it fades before I can ever really hear it. Sometimes, I put on old videotapes just so I don’t completely forget how she sounds, and I listen to her telling me to get a serving spoon for the potatoes, or singing ‘Happy Birthday.’ Right now, I’d kill to have her tell me a story five times. I’d settle for even once.”
I know, halfway through her story, that I am going to cave in. “Is this what you do with the kids in school?” I sigh. “Make them see themselves for the petty, nasty people they really are?”
“If I think it’s going to work,” she says, smiling.
I turn on my cell phone. “I’ll tell my mother to meet us at the theater.”
“She’s already coming. That’s why I ran back into the house—to invite her.”
“Were you really so sure I’d change my mind?”
“Give me a break.” Vanessa laughs. “I even know what you’re going to order at the concession counter.”
She probably does. Vanessa is like that—if you say or do something once, it sticks in her memory so that she will be able to reference it the next time it’s necessary. Like how I once mentioned I don’t like olives, and then, a month later at a restaurant when we were given a basket of olive bread, she asked for crackers instead before I could even make a comment.
“Just for the record,” I say, “there’s still a lot about me you don’t know.”
“Popcorn, no butter,” Vanessa says. “Sprite.” She purses her lips. “And Goobers, because this is a romantic comedy and those are never quite as good without chocolate.”
She’s right. Down to the candy.
I think, not for the first time, that if Max had been even half as observant and attentive as Vanessa, I’d probably still be married.
When we pull up to the theater, I’m amazed to find a crowd. The movie
has been out for a few weeks now—it’s a silly, fizzy romantic comedy. The other movie playing is an independent film called July that’s gotten a lot of press, because a very popular preteen singing sensation is starring in it, and because of the subject matter: instead of being a Romeo and Juliet tragedy . . . the love story is about Juliet and Juliet.
Vanessa spots my mother on the other side of the throng and waves her over. “Can you believe this?” she says, looking around.
I’ve seen a few articles written about the film and the controversy surrounding it. I begin to wonder if we should go see that movie instead, just based on its popular appeal. But as we get closer to the theater, I realize that the people milling around are not in the ticket line. They’re flanking it, and they’re carrying signs:
GOD HATES FAGS
GAY: GOD ABHORS YOU
ADAM AND EVE, NOT ADAM AND STEVE
They are not militant, crazy people. The protesters are calm and organized, and wearing black suits with skinny ties, or modest floral print dresses. They look like your neighbor, your grandmother, your history teacher. In this, I suppose, they have something in common with the people they are slandering.
Beside me, I feel Vanessa’s spine go rigid. “We can leave,” I murmur. “Let’s just rent a video and watch it at home.”
But before I can pull away, I hear my name being called. “Zoe?”
At first, I don’t recognize Max. The last time I saw him, after all, he was drunk and disheveled, and trying to explain to a judge why we should be granted a divorce. I’d heard that he started going to Reid and Liddy’s church, but I hadn’t quite expected a transformation this . . . radical.
Max is wearing a fitted dark suit with a charcoal tie. His hair has been trimmed neatly, and he’s clean-shaven. On the lapel of his suit is a pin: a small gold cross.
“Wow,” I say. “You look great, Max.”
We do an awkward dance, where we move toward each other for a kiss on the cheek, but then I pull away, and he pulls away, and we both look down at the ground.
“So do you,” he says.
He is wearing a walking cast. “What happened?” I ask. It seems crazy that I wouldn’t know. That Max would have gotten hurt, and no one relayed the message to me.
“It’s nothing. An accident,” Max says.
I wonder who took care of him, when he was first hurt.
Behind me, I am incredibly conscious of my mother and Vanessa. I can feel their presence like heat thrown from a fireplace. Someone in the front of the line buys a ticket to July, and the protest starts up in earnest, with chanting and yelling and sign waving. “I heard you were part of Eternal Glory, now,” I say.
“Actually, it’s a part of me,” Max replies. “I let Jesus into my heart.”
He says this with a brilliant white smile, the same way he’d say, I got my car waxed this afternoon or I think I’ll have Chinese food for dinner—as if this is part of normal everyday conversation instead of a statement that might give you pause. I wait for Max to snicker—we used to make fun of Reid and Liddy sometimes for the glory-be snippets that fell out of their mouths—but he doesn’t.
“Have you been drinking again?” I ask, the only explanation I can come up with to reconcile the man I know with the one standing in front of me.
“No,” Max says. “Not a drop.”
Maybe not of alcohol, but it’s pretty clear to me that Max has been chugging whatever Kool-Aid the Eternal Glory Church is offering. There’s something just off about him—something Stepford-like. I preferred Max with all his complicated imperfections. I preferred Max when we used to make fun of Liddy for saying “Jeezum Crow” when she was frustrated, for being gullible enough to believe him when he told her that Rick Warren was mounting a presidential campaign.
Full disclosure: I’m not a religious person. I don’t begrudge people the right to believe in whatever they believe, but I don’t like having those same beliefs forced on me. So when Max says, “I’ve been praying for you, Zoe,” I have absolutely no idea what to say. I mean, it’s nice to be prayed for, I suppose, even if I’ve never asked for it.
But do I really want to be prayed for by a bunch of people who are using God to camouflage a message of hate? There are beautiful, wholesome teenage girls standing in front of the ticket booth handing out flyers that say: I WAS BORN BLOND. YOU CHOOSE TO BE GAY. Their clean-cut attentiveness, their claim of being “Good Christians” are the icing, I realize, on a cake that’s laced with arsenic. “Why would you want to do this kind of thing?” I ask Max. “Why does a movie even matter to you?”
“Perhaps I can answer that,” a man says. He has a cascade of white hair and stands nearly six inches taller than Max; I think I recognize him from news clips as the pastor of this church. “We wouldn’t be here if the homosexuals weren’t promoting their own agenda, their own activism. If we sit back, who’s going to speak for the rights of the traditional family? If we sit back, who’s going to make sure our great country doesn’t become a place where Johnny has two mommies and where marriage is as God intended it to be—between a man and woman?” His voice has escalated. “Brothers and sisters—we are here because Christians have become the minority! Homosexuals claim they have a right to be heard? Well, so do Christians!”
There is a roar from his congregants, who push their placards higher in the air.
“Max,” the pastor says, tossing him a set of keys, “we need another box of pamphlets from the van.”
Max nods and then turns to me. “I’m really glad you’re doing well,” he says, and for the first time since we’ve started talking I believe him.
“I’m glad you’re doing well, too.” I mean it, even if he’s on a road I’d never walk myself. But in a way, this is the ultimate vindication for me, the proof that our relationship could never have been mended. If this is where Max was headed, it was not somewhere I’d ever have wanted to go.
“You’re not going to see July, I hope?” Max says, and he offers up that half smile that made me fall in love with him.
“No. The Sandra Bullock movie.”
“Wise choice,” Max replies. Impulsively, he leans forward and kisses me on the cheek. I breathe in the scent of his shampoo and am viscerally hit with an image of the bottle in the shower, with its blue cap and its little sticker about tea tree oil and its health properties. “I think about you every day . . . ,” Max says.
Drawing back, I am suddenly dizzy; I wonder if this is the ghost of old love.
“. . . I think of how much happier you could be, if you let the Lord in,” Max finishes.
And just like that, I am firmly rooted in reality again. “Who are you?” I murmur, but Max has already turned his back, headed to the parking lot to do his pastor’s bidding.
The bar is called Atlantis and is tragically hip, set in a new boutique hotel in Providence. On the walls a projector ripples color, to simulate being under the sea. The drinks are all served in cobalt glassware, and the booths are carved out of fake coral, with cushions fashioned to look like bright sea anemone. The centerpiece of the room is a huge water tank, where tropical fish swim with a woman squeezed into a silicone mermaid tail and shell bra.
Fortunately, my mother has decided to go home after the movie, leaving Vanessa and me to have a drink by ourselves. I am fascinated by the woman in the tank. “How does she breathe?” I ask out loud, and then see her surreptitiously sneak a gulp of oxygen from a scubalike device that she’s concealing in her hand, which is attached to an apparatus at the top of the tank.
“I stand corrected,” Vanessa says. “There is a career path for women who dreamed of being mermaids when they were girls.”
A waitress brings us our drinks and nuts served, predictably, in a large shell. “I could see where this would get old very fast,” I say.
“I don’t know. I was reading about how, in China, theme restaurants are all the rage right now. There’s one that serves only TV dinners. And another that only has medieval food, plus you ha
ve to eat with your hands.” She looks up at me. “The one I’m itching to go to, though, is the prehistoric restaurant. They serve raw meat.”
“Do you have to kill it yourself?”
Vanessa laughs. “Maybe. Imagine being the hostess: ‘Uh, miss, we reserved a table with the hunters, but we were seated with the gatherers instead.’” She lifts her drink—a dirty martini, which tastes like paint thinner to me (when I told Vanessa this, she said, “When did you last drink paint thinner?”), and toasts. “To Eternal Glory. May they one day succeed in separating Church and Hate.”
I lift my glass, too, but I don’t drink from it. I’m thinking about Max.
“I don’t understand people who complain about the mysterious ‘homosexual agenda,’” Vanessa muses. “You know what’s on that agenda, for my gay friends? To spend time with family, to pay their bills, and to buy milk on the way home from work.”
“Max was an alcoholic,” I say abruptly. “He had to drop out of college because of his drinking. He used to surf whenever the conditions were right. We’d fight because he was supposed to be running a business, and then I’d find out that he ditched his clients for the day because of some ten-foot swells.”
Vanessa sets down her drink and looks at me.
“My point is,” I continue, “that he wasn’t always like this. Even that suit . . . I don’t think he owned more than a sports jacket the entire time we were married.”
“He looked a little like a CIA operative,” Vanessa says.
My lips twitch. “All he needs is an earpiece.”
