by Jodi Picoult
Vanessa doesn’t even hesitate. “My office. Take as long as you need.”
I march Lucy into the main office—a place where she’s spent far too much time, being disciplined by the assistant principal—and into Vanessa’s cozy space. I close the door behind us. “Are you all right?”
She wipes her mouth on her sleeve. “I just wanted him to shut up,” Lucy murmurs.
She must know, by now, that I am the center of this storm. There have been articles in the papers about the trial. Last night when I was brushing my teeth, there was my face, on the local late-night news. And now, there’s picketing on the steps of the school. I may initially have tried to keep my private life from her because of our therapy relationship, but now, doing so would be like trying to sandbag the ocean.
It makes sense that Lucy’s heard about all this. That people at her church are bad-mouthing me, and that she feels torn.
Torn enough to tackle Clive Lincoln.
I pull out a chair so she can sit down. “Do you believe him?” she asks.
“Frankly, no,” I admit. “He’s like something out of a circus sideshow.”
“No.” Lucy shakes her head. “I mean . . . do you believe him?”
At first I am shocked. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone who can listen to Pastor Clive and not take his words as utter lies. But then again, Lucy is only a teenager. Lucy goes to an evangelical church. She’s been spoon-fed this rhetoric all her life.
“No, I don’t believe him,” I say softly. “Do you?”
Lucy picks at the unraveling black threads of her leggings. “There was this kid who went to school here last year. Jeremy. He was in my homeroom. We all knew he was gay even though he never said it. He didn’t have to. I mean, everyone else called him a faggot often enough.” She looks up at me. “He hanged himself in his basement just before Christmas. His stupid fucking parents blamed it on a D he got in Civics.” Lucy’s eyes glint, hard as diamonds. “I was so jealous of him. Because he got to check out of this place for good. He left, and no matter how many times I try, I can’t.”
I taste copper on my tongue; it takes a moment for me to realize this is fear. “Lucy, are you thinking of hurting yourself?” When she doesn’t answer, I stare at her forearms, to see if she’s cutting again, but even in this mild weather she’s wearing a long-sleeved thermal shirt.
“What I want to know is where the fuck is Jesus,” Lucy says. “Where is He when there’s so much hate it feels like concrete drying up around you? Well, fuck you, God. Fuck you for going when the going gets tough.”
“Lucy. Talk to me. Do you have a plan?” It is basic suicide counseling—get someone to talk about her intentions, and it’s possible to diffuse them. I need to know if she’s got pills in her purse, a rope in her closet, a gun under her mattress.
“Can someone stop loving you because you’re not who they want you to be?”
Her question stops me cold. I find myself thinking of Max. “I guess so,” I admit. Has Lucy had her heart broken? It could certainly account for her latest downslide; if I know anything about this girl, it’s that she expects people to leave her, and blames herself when they do. “Did something happen with a boy?”
She turns to me, her face as open as a wound. “Sing,” Lucy begs. “Make this all go away.”
I don’t have my guitar. I’ve left everything for music therapy in the car—the crowd that had gathered outside commanded my attention. The only instrument I have is my voice.
So I sing, slowly, a cappella. “Hallelujah,” the old Leonard Cohen song from before Lucy was born.
With my eyes closed, with every word a brushstroke, I do the kind of praying people do when they don’t know if there is a God. I hope, for Lucy. For me and Vanessa. For all the misfits in the world who don’t necessarily want to fit in. We just don’t want to always be blamed, either.
When I finish, I have tears in my eyes. But Lucy doesn’t. Her features might as well be stone.
“Again,” she commands.
I sing the song twice. Three times.
It is on the chorus, on the sixth round, that Lucy starts to sob. She buries her face in her hands. “It’s not a boy,” she confesses.
When I was small I got the strangest Christmas gift from a distant aunt: a twenty-dollar bill inside an acrylic puzzle. You had to pull knobs and twist levers in different machinations until you found the sequence that would release the catch and let you take the bounty. I was tempted to smash it open with a hammer, but my mother convinced me that the pieces would fall into place, and, once they started, it seemed I couldn’t make a wrong move. Boom boom boom, one door or latch opened after another as if they’d never been locked in the first place.
The same thing happens now—a curtain pulled back, a sentence turned on its edge to reveal a different meaning: the suicide attempts. Pastor Clive’s speech. Lucy’s angry tackle. Jeremy. Can someone stop loving you?
It’s not a boy, Lucy had said.
Maybe that’s because it’s a girl.
If there is one cardinal rule of music therapy, it’s that you come into a patient’s life at the place she needs you, and you leave her at a different place. You, as the therapist, are just a catalyst. A constant. You do not change as part of the equation. And you most certainly do not talk about yourself. You’re there solely for the patient.
It’s why, when Lucy asked me whether I was married, I didn’t answer.
It’s why she knew nothing about me and I know everything about her.
This isn’t a friendship—I’ve told Lucy that before. This is a professional relationship.
But that was before my future became a snack for public consumption. That was before I sat in a courtroom with the stares of strangers needling between my shoulder blades. Before I listened to a pastor I did not know or like tell me I was a reprobate. Before I went to the ladies’ room and had someone slip me a novena card underneath the stall wall with a message scribbled on the back: I am praying for you, dear.
If I have to run this gauntlet because I happen to love a woman, let it at least do someone else some good. Let me pay it forward.
“Lucy,” I say quietly. “You know I’m gay, right?”
Her head snaps up. “Why—why are you telling me this?”
“I don’t know what you’re thinking or feeling, but you need to understand that it’s completely normal.”
She stares at me, silent.
“You know how, when you go back into a preschool classroom, you sit down in the tiny chairs at the tiny tables and feel like Alice in Wonderland? You can’t imagine ever being small enough to fit the space? That’s what it feels like to come out. You look back and can’t imagine squeezing inside again. Even if Pastor Clive and his entire church are shoving as hard as they can.”
Lucy’s eyes are so wide I can see rims of white around the irises. She leans forward, her breath caught, as there is a knock on the door.
Vanessa pokes her head inside. “It’s eight-forty-five,” she tells me, and I jump out of my seat. We are going to have to fly if we want to get to the courthouse on time.
“Lucy, I have to go,” I say, but she is not looking at me. She’s looking at Vanessa, and thinking about what Pastor Clive said about her, and putting my life together as seamlessly as I just did hers.
Lucy grabs her backpack and, without a word, runs out of Vanessa’s office.
I didn’t realize how much of being a witness involves being an actor. Just as if I’m in a stage play, I’ve been well rehearsed for this moment—from learning the lines through the intonation of my voice to the costume which Angela herself picked out for me (a navy blue sheath dress with a white cardigan; so incredibly conservative that when Vanessa saw me she started laughing and called me Mother Baxter).
Yes, I have been prepared. Yes, I am technically ready. And yes, I’m certainly used to performing.
But then again, there’s a reason I play and sing music. Somehow, I get lost in the notes, adrift in the m
elodies, and forget where I am while I’m doing it. When I play for an audience, I can totally believe that the benefit sits squarely with me, instead of the people listening. On the other hand, the last time I was in a play, I was ten years old and cast as a cornstalk in The Wizard of Oz, and thirty seconds before I had to walk onto the stage, I threw up on the director’s shoes.
“My name is Zoe Baxter,” I say. “I live at six-eighty Garvin Street in Wilmington.”
Angela smiles brightly at me, as if I’ve solved a differential calculus problem, instead of just reciting my name and address. “How old are you, Zoe?”
“Forty-one.”
“Can you tell the court what you do for a living?”
“I’m a music therapist,” I say. “I use music in a clinical setting to help patients alleviate pain or change their moods or engage with the world. Sometimes I work in senior centers with patients with dementia; sometimes I work in a burn unit with children who are having dressings changed; sometimes I work in schools with autistic kids—there are dozens of different ways music therapy can be implemented.”
Immediately, I think of Lucy.
“How long have you been a music therapist?”
“For a decade.”
“And what’s your salary, Zoe?”
I smile a little. “About twenty-eight thousand dollars a year. You don’t go into music therapy because you have dreams of living the high life. You do it because you want to help people.”
“Is that your only income?”
“I also sing professionally. At restaurants, bars, coffeehouses. I write my own material. It’s not enough to make a living, but it’s a nice supplement.”
“Have you ever been married?” Angela asks.
I’ve known this question is coming. “Yes. I was married to the plaintiff, Max Baxter, for nine years, and I am currently married to Vanessa Shaw.”
There is a faint hum, like the buzz that sits over a bee colony, as the gallery digests this answer.
“Did you and Mr. Baxter have any children?”
“We had a lot of fertility problems, as a couple. We had two miscarriages and one stillborn son.”
Even now I can see him, blue and still as marble, his nails and eyebrows and eyelashes still missing. A work of art in progress.
“Can you describe for the court the nature of your infertility, and what steps you took as a couple to conceive?”
“I had polycystic ovary syndrome,” I begin. “I never had regular periods, and wouldn’t ovulate every month. I also had submucosal fibroids. Max had male pattern infertility—which is genetic. We started trying to get pregnant when I was thirty-one, and nothing happened for four years. So we started IVF when I was thirty-five.”
“How did that work?”
“I followed a medical protocol with various hormones and injections, and they were able to harvest fifteen eggs from me, which were injected with Max’s sperm. Three weren’t viable. Eight got fertilized, and of those eight, two were transferred to me, and three more were frozen.”
“Did you become pregnant?”
“Not that time. But when I was thirty-six, those three frozen embryos were thawed. Two were transferred and one was discarded.”
“Discarded? What does that mean?” Angela asks.
“The way the doctor explained it to me, they’re not pretty enough to be considered viable for pregnancy, so the clinic chooses not to save them.”
“I see. Did you become pregnant this time?”
“Yes,” I say. “And I miscarried a few weeks later.”
“Then what happened?”
“When I was thirty-seven we did another fresh cycle. This time I had twelve eggs harvested. Six were fertilized successfully. Two were transferred and two were frozen.”
“Did you get pregnant?”
“Yes, but I miscarried at eighteen weeks.”
“Did you continue to pursue IVF?”
I nod. “We used the two frozen embryos for another cycle. One was transferred, and one didn’t survive the thaw. I didn’t get pregnant.”
“How old were you at the time?”
“I was thirty-nine. I knew I didn’t have a lot of time left, so we scrambled to squeeze in one last fresh cycle. When I was forty, I had ten eggs harvested. Seven were fertilized. Of those seven, three were transferred, three were frozen, and one was discarded.” I look up. “I got pregnant.”
“And?”
“I was the happiest woman in the world,” I say softly.
“Did you know the gender of the baby?”
“No. We wanted it to be a surprise.”
“Did you feel the baby moving inside you?”
Even now, her words evoke that slow roll, that lazy aquatic somersault. “Yes.”
“Can you describe how you felt, being pregnant?”
“I loved every minute of it,” I say. “I’d waited my whole life for it.”
“How did Max react to the pregnancy?”
She has told me not to look at him, but magnetically, my gaze is pulled toward Max, who is sitting with his hands folded. Beside him, Wade Preston sporadically writes notes with a Montblanc fountain pen.
How did we get here? I wonder, looking at Max.
How could I not have seen this coming, when I looked into your eyes and vowed to be with you forever?
How could I have not known that one day I would love someone else?
How could you have not known that, one day, you would hate me for who I’ve become?
“He was excited, too,” I say. “He used to stick the earphones of my iPod into my belly button so that the baby could hear the music he liked the most.”
“Zoe, did you carry that baby to term?” Angela asks.
“No. At twenty-eight weeks, something went wrong.” I look up at her. “I was at my baby shower when I started having really bad cramps, and bleeding. A lot. I was rushed to the hospital and put on a monitor. The doctors couldn’t find a fetal heartbeat. They brought in an ultrasound machine and tried for five minutes—but it felt like five hours. Finally they told me that the placenta had sheared away from the uterus. The baby . . .” I swallow. “The baby was dead.”
“And then what?”
“I had to deliver it. They gave me drugs to start labor.”
“Was Max there?”
“Yes.”
“What was going through your mind at the time?”
“That this was a mistake,” I say, looking right at Max. “That I would have the baby and they’d see how wrong they were, when it came out kicking and crying.”
“What happened when the baby was delivered?”
“He wasn’t kicking. He wasn’t crying.” Max looks down at the table. “He was so tiny. He didn’t have any fat on him yet, not like you see on other newborns. And he didn’t have fingernails yet, or eyelashes, but he was perfect. He was so incredibly perfect, and so . . . so still.” I find that I am leaning forward on the witness chair, perched with my hands held in front of me, as if I’m waiting for something. I force myself to sit back. “We named him Daniel. We scattered his ashes into the ocean.”
Angela takes a step toward me. “What happened after your son died?”
“I had more medical complications. When I stood up to go to the bathroom, I got dizzy and short of breath. I started having chest pains. It turned out that I had a blood clot that had developed postpartum, which had settled in my lungs. I was put on heparin, and during blood tests, the doctors learned I had a genetic condition called an AT III deficiency—basically, it means I’m susceptible to blood clots, and the pregnancy probably made it worse. But the first question I asked was whether I’d still be able to have a baby.”
“What was the answer?”
“That this could happen again. There could be even more severe complications. But that ultimately if I wanted to try to conceive again—I could.”
“Did Max want to try to have another baby?” Angela asks.
“I thought so,” I admit. “He a
lways had been on the same page as me before. But after the visit at the doctor’s office, he told me that he couldn’t be with me because I wanted a baby more than anything in the world—and that wasn’t what he wanted.”
“What did he want?”
I look up. “A divorce,” I say.
“So you were still reeling from the death of your child, and dealing with all these medical complications, and then your husband told you he wanted a divorce. What was your reaction?”
“I really can’t remember. I think I went to bed for about a month. Everything was a blur. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t do anything, really.”
“What did Max do?”
“He moved out, and went to live with his brother.”
“Who represented you in your divorce?”
I shrug. “We represented ourselves. We didn’t have any money or property, so it didn’t seem as if it was going to be complicated. I was still so numb back then, I barely even remember going to court. I signed whatever papers came in the mail.”
“Did the three frozen embryos at the clinic ever cross your mind during the divorce proceedings?” Angela says.
“No.”
“Even though you still wanted a child?”
“At the time,” I explain, “I wanted a child with a spouse who loved me. I thought that was Max; I was wrong.”
“Are you married now?”
“Yes,” I say. “To Vanessa Shaw.” Just saying her name makes me feel like I can breathe easier. “She’s a school counselor at Wilmington High. I’d met her years earlier, when she asked me to do some music therapy with an autistic child. I ran into her again, and she asked me to work with another child—a suicidal teenage girl. Gradually, we began to hang out as friends.”
“Did something happen that brought you closer together?”
“She saved my life,” I say flatly. “I was hemorrhaging, and she was the one who found me and called an ambulance. I needed a D & C, and as a result of the procedure I learned that I had endometrial cancer and needed a hysterectomy. It was a very, very difficult time for me.”
I am not looking at Max, now. I’m not sure how much of this he even knows.
