by Jodi Picoult
By the time the baby is three months, you can really start to see that it is a baby. An oversized head, transparent, carries thin blood vessels to the black hooded eye. Stick-figure arms and webbed fingers and Indian-crossed legs stick out from the body, which is little more than a spine. “When do you start to look pregnant?” Rebecca asks.
“It depends on the person,” I tell her, “and I think it depends on whether you are having a boy or a girl. I didn’t show until about three months.”
“But it’s so tiny. There’s nothing to see.”
“Babies seem to carry a lot of extra baggage. When I was pregnant with you, I had been doing a practicum towards a masters as a speech pathologist at an elementary school. And back then you weren’t allowed to teach and be pregnant. Well, you were allowed, but it wasn’t common practice, and you’d certainly be out of a job when you gave birth. So I kept getting bigger and bigger and to hide the pregnancy I wore these hideous tie-dyed caftans. All the faculty kept telling me, ‘Jane, you know, you’re putting on a little weight,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I don’t know what I can do about it.’ I’d run out of faculty meetings and student consultations to throw up. I told everyone I kept contracting different strains of the flu.”
Rebecca turns around, fascinated with this story of herself. “And then what?”
“School ended,” I shrug. “I had you in July, two weeks after school was finished. I still had six months of student teaching to do in the fall, so your father took care of you. And then, when I finished, I stayed home with you till you went to nursery school, when I continued my course work and graduated.”
“Daddy stayed home with me for six months?” she says. “Alone?” I nod. “I didn’t know that.”
“Actually, I’d forgotten.”
“Did we get along? I mean, like, did he know how to change diapers and stuff?”
I laugh. “Yes. He knew how to change diapers. He also burped you and bathed you and held you over his back upside-down from your ankles.”
“You let him do that?”
“It was the only way you’d stop crying.”
Rebecca smiles shyly. “Really?”
“Really.”
She points to the seven-month fetus, complete with tiny toes and a nose and a bud of a penis. “Now that’s a baby,” she says. “That’s the way they are supposed to look.”
“They get bigger. You’d think natural selection would have found an easier way of reproduction. Childbirth is like trying to get a piano through your nostril.”
“Is that why I don’t have a brother or sister?” Rebecca asks.
We’ve never talked about this. She’s never asked, and we didn’t volunteer. There’s no real reason we didn’t have any other children. Maybe because the plane crash scared us. Maybe because we were a little too busy. “We didn’t need any other kids,” I say. “We got it perfect the first time.”
Rebecca smiles again, looking like Oliver in this dismal light. “You’re just saying that.”
“Yeah, in fact, your father and I have already willed you to this exhibit. For the extra cash. Three weeks—three months—seven months—fifteen years!”
Rebecca throws her arms around me. As she speaks I can feel her chin, shaped exactly like mine, pressing into my shoulder. “I love you,” she says, plain and simple.
The first time Rebecca said she loved me I burst into tears. She was four and I had just rubbed her dry with a towel after a romp in the snow. She was very matter-of-fact about it. I am sure she does not remember but I could tell you that she was wearing red Oshkosh overalls, that there were hexagonal snowflakes caught in her eyelashes, that her socks had come off, bunched and burrowing in the toes of her boots.
This is why I became a mother, isn’t it? No matter how long you have to wait for her to understand where you come from, no matter how many bouts of appendicitis or stitches you have to suffer through, no matter how many times you feel you are losing her, this makes it all worth it. Over Rebecca’s shoulder there are brains of monkeys and eyes of goats. There is a thick brown liver curled inside a glass cylinder. And there is a line of hearts, arranged in order of size: mouse, guinea pig, cat, sheep, Saint Bernard, cow. The human, I think, rests somewhere in the middle.
48 OLIVER
They have two tapes at the Blue Diner in Boston—the Meat Puppets and Don Henley, and they alternate them over and over, the entire twenty-four hours that they remain open. I know because I have been here at least that long, having noticed the same waitresses repeating their shifts. I can sing most of the words from each tape. I have to confess I had never heard of either, and I’ve been wondering if Rebecca knows them.
“Don Henley,” Rasheen—the waitress—says, refilling my coffee cup. “You know. From the Eagles. Ring a bell?”
I shrug, singing along with the tape. “You’ve got that down,” Rasheen says, laughing. From the greasy grill, Hugo, the short-order cook who is missing a thumb, cheers. “You got a nice voice, Oliver, you know?”
“Well.” I stir in a packet of sugar. “I’m known for my songs.”
“No shit,” Rasheen says. “Wait, let me guess. I got it. Blues. You’re one of those white-bread trumpet players who thinks he’s Wynton Marsalis.”
“You got me. I can’t keep anything from you.”
I have been on this stool, at the Blue Diner on Kneeland, for so long now that I am not certain I could use my legs to stand. I could certainly have taken a room at the Four Seasons or the Park Plaza Hotel, but I haven’t been overcome with the desire to sleep. In fact I haven’t slept since I left Iowa, three and a half days ago, and drove continuously through to Boston. I would have gone straight to Stow, but in all truth, I’m terrified. She is a supernatural force with which I have to reckon. No, scratch that. She isn’t the problem at all. I am the problem. But it is easier to blame Jane. I have been doing it for so long that it is the first explanation to spring to mind.
The Blue Diner management has been kind to me, neglecting to report me to the authorities for loitering. Perhaps they can see I am a distressed man by my rumpled suit jacket, or the circles beneath my eyes. Perhaps they can tell by the way I eat my food—three meals a day, the specials, reassembled in geometrical patterns on my plate until Rasheen or Lola or pretty Tallulah decides it is cold enough to take back to the kitchen. When anyone will listen, I talk about Jane. Sometimes when no one is listening I talk anyway, hoping my words will find an audience.
It is almost time for Rasheen to go home, which means Mica (short for Monica) comes on. I have begun to tell the time by the arrivals and departures of the Blue Diner staff. Mica is the late-night waitress; a dental hygiene student by day. She is the only one who has actually asked me questions. When I told her the story of Jane’s exodus, she propped her elbows against the speckled white countertop and rested her cheeks in her hands.
“I got to go now, Oliver,” Rasheen says, pulling on an army-surplus jacket. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Just as she is walking out the door Mica blows in in a flurry of paper, pink uniform, and leatherette coat. “Oliver!” she says, surprised to see me. “I was hoping you’d be gone by now. Couldn’t sleep last night?”
I shake my head. “I didn’t even try.”
Mica waves to Hugo, who, oddly enough, doesn’t seem to sleep either. He has been here the same length of time as I. She pulls up a stool beside me and grabs a Danish from beneath a scratched plastic dome. “You know, I was thinking about you during lecture today, and I think Jane would be very impressed. From what you’ve said, I think you’re a changed man.”
“I’d like to believe that,” I say. “Unfortunately, I haven’t the same conviction as you.”
“Don’t you just love the way he talks.” Mica says this to nobody in particular. “It’s like you’re British or something.”
“Or something,” I say. Although she’s asked, I’ve refused to tell her anything about my life with the exception of the fact that I come from Sa
n Diego. Somehow I think that finding out I am a Harvard man, that I lived on the Cape as a child, would crush the mystique.
“No wonder Jane fell for you.” Mica reaches over the counter to pour herself some coffee. “You’re such a kidder.”
After our wedding ceremony, the reverend led us into the library at Jane’s parents’ house. He told us we could probably use a few moments alone; it would be all the peace and quiet we’d have that day. It was a nice gesture but I had no pressing information I had to share with Jane; it seemed to be a waste of time. Don’t misunderstand me: I loved Jane, but I did not care much about the wedding. To me, marriage was a means to an end. To Jane, marriage was a fresh beginning.
When Jane said her vows, she had given a great deal of thought to the ideas behind the words, which I cannot say I’d done at all. And so for those few moments in the study, she was the one who did the talking. She said she was the luckiest girl in the world. Who would imagine that of all the women around, I would pick her to spend forever with?
She said it easily but I think it took her a few months to understand what she meant. Jane settled easily into a routine: taking shirts to the dry cleaners, registering for courses at San Diego State, grocery shopping, paying the telephone bill. I must admit, she was well suited to marriage, making my own experience much better than I had imagined. Every morning she’d kiss me goodbye and hand me a brown-bagged lunch. Every night when I came home from the Institute she’d have supper waiting, and she’d ask me how my day had been. She liked the role so much she won me over. I started to act like a husband. I would tiptoe into the shower when she was washing her hair and grab her from behind. I checked her when she got into the car to make sure she was wearing her seat belt.
We were dirt-poor, but Jane didn’t seem to notice or care. One night over dinner she clattered her fork and knife against the side of her china plate and smiled, her mouth full of cheap spaghetti. “Isn’t life wonderful?” she said. “Don’t we just have it all?”
That night she woke up screaming. I sat up, temporarily blind in the dark, and felt my way across the bed for her. “I dreamed that you died,” she said. “You drowned because of a problem with an oxygen tank in your diving gear. And I was left alone.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I said the first thing to come to mind. “We check all our gear.”
“That’s not it, Oliver. What if one of us dies? What happens then?”
I reached around and turned on the light to see the clock: 3:20 A.M. “I suppose we’d remarry.”
“Just like that!” Jane exploded. She sat up in bed, facing away from me. “You can’t just pick a wife off a shelf.”
“Of course not. I just meant that if I happened to die young I’d want you to be happy.”
“How could I be happy without you? When you get married, you make the biggest decision of your life; you say you’re going to spend eternity with one person. So what do you do if that person leaves? What do you do once you’ve already committed yourself?”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
And Jane looked at me and said, “I want you to live forever.”
I know now that I should have said, “I want you to live forever too,” or at least I should have thought it. But instead I retreated back to the security blanket of scientific discovery. I said, “Oh, Jane, ‘forever’ depends on gradients of time. It’s a relative term.”
She slept on the couch that night, wrapped in an extra sheet.
At this point, Mica interrupts me. “My uncle was hospitalized for a broken heart. Swear to God. After my Aunt Noreen was hit by a truck. Two days later, my uncle went into spasms.”
“Technically it was cardiac arrest,” I say.
“Like I said,” Mica insists, “a broken heart.” She arches her eyebrows, as if to say, I told you so. “What happened after that?”
“Nothing,” I tell her. Jane got up and made me lunch and kissed me goodbye like nothing had happened. And since neither of us died, we never had to test the theory.
“Look,” Mica says, “do you think you can fall in love more than once?”
“Of course.” Love has always seemed to me such an ethereal issue one cannot pin it down to singular circumstances.
“Do you think you fall in love more than one way?”
“Of course,” I say again. “I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t like talking about things like this.”
“There’s your problem right there, Oliver,” Mica insists. “If you’d given yourself a little more time to think about it, you wouldn’t be sitting in this stupid diner crying into your coffee.”
What does she know, I think. She’s a goddamned waitress. She watches soap operas. Mica walks around to the other side of the counter so that she is facing me. “Tell me what it was like in the house after she left.”
“It was nice, actually. I had a lot of free time, and I didn’t have to worry about letting my work get in the way of other things.”
“What other things?”
“Family things. Like Rebecca’s birthday, for instance.” I take a sip of coffee. “No, I really didn’t miss them much at all.” Of course I couldn’t get any work done, either, because I was crazed with anxiety. I couldn’t stop picturing Jane. I picked up and left an important research excursion just to get them back home.
Mica leans forward so that her lips are inches from mine. “You lie.” Then she pulls on her apron, and heads in the direction of Hugo. “I don’t listen to liars.”
But I’ve been waiting for her all day. I’ve been waiting for Mica to listen. “You can’t leave me.”
She turns around on her heel. “Can’t stand to be deserted twice, can you?”
“Do you want to know what it was really like without her there? I could still feel her in the house. I can now. The reason I won’t go to sleep is because sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and I can sense her, if that means anything. Sometimes when I’m alone I think she’s standing behind me, watching me. It’s like she never left. It’s like it always was.” Oh Jane. I lean my cheek against the cool counter. “For fifteen years I kissed her hello and goodbye and I didn’t make anything of it. It was a habit. I didn’t even notice when I was doing it. I couldn’t tell you what her skin feels like, if you asked. I couldn’t even tell you what it’s like to hold her hand.” All of a sudden I’m crying, something I haven’t done since I was a child. “I don’t have any memories of the important things.”
When my eyes focus again Mica is talking to Hugo, and pulling on her faux leather coat. “Come on,” she says, “I’m taking you back to my place. It’s in Southey, and it’s a hike, but you can make it.” She puts her arm around me, almost as tall as I am, and I lean on her to get off the stool. It takes us fifteen minutes to walk there and the whole way, as idiotic as I imagine I look, I can’t keep myself from crying.
Mica opens the door to the apartment and apologizes for the mess. Strewn across the floor are empty pizza cartons and textbooks. She leads me into a sideroom barely large enough to be a walk-in closet, which holds a white futon and a floor lamp. She loosens my tie. “Don’t get the wrong idea,” she says.
I let her take off shoes and my belt and then I practically collapse onto the low futon. Mica gets a washcloth and a bowl of water and leans my head in her lap, sponging my temples. “Just relax. You need to get some sleep.”
“Don’t leave me.”
“Oliver,” Mica says, “I have to go to work. But I’ll be back. I promise you that.” She leans close to my face. “I have a good feeling about this.”
She waits until she thinks I am asleep, and then she edges my head off her lap and creeps out of the room. I’m pretending because I know she needs to go back to the diner. She needs the money. She turns off the lights and closes the front door behind her. I have every intention of getting up and walking around, but suddenly my body has become so heavy it is a hardship. I close my eyes and when I do I can perceive her there. “Jane?” I whi
sper.
Maybe this is the way it would be if you had died. Maybe I would be crying, wishing there had been one extra minute. Maybe I would spend my time and money contacting mediums, reading up on the spiritual world, in hopes of finding you so that I’d have the chance to tell you things I hadn’t. Maybe I would look twice in the reflection of mirrors and store windows, hoping to see your face again. Maybe I would lie in bed like I am now, with my fists clenched so hard, trying to convince myself you are standing, flesh and blood, before me. But in all likelihood, if you were dead, I wouldn’t have any chance at all. I would not get to tell you what I should have been telling you every day: that I love you.
49 JANE
With the moves of a practiced dancer, the man twists the ram onto its side, catching its haunch in the crook of his leg and rolling it, a cross between a pas de deux and a half-nelson. With the ram breathing evenly, he peels away the fleece. It falls away in one continuous piece. It’s white and clean, the underside.
When he finishes he tosses the shears on the ground. Pulling the ram to its feet, he leads it by the neck out of the fenced gate. He slaps its behind and it runs off, naked.
“Excuse me,” I say, “do you work here?”
The man smiles. “I suppose you could say that.”
I take a few steps closer, watching the wet hay to see that it doesn’t stick on my still-white sneakers. “Do you know someone named Joley Lipton?” I ask, looking up. “He works here too.”
The man nods. “I’ll take you to him in a minute, if you’d like. I’ve got one more to shear.”
“Oh,” I say. “All right.” He asks me to help, to make it go faster. He points to the door of the barn. I turn to Rebecca, mouthing, I don’t believe this. I follow him into the barn.
