by Jodi Picoult
I walk back to the booth. Will they make us scrub the floors with a toothbrush? Wait tables? I tell my mother we are out of luck. “Wait,” she says. “There’s five dollars in the glove compartment.”
This gets me all excited—can you imagine, going crazy over five bucks? Then I realize I’ve been using that money for tolls. My mother glares at me and counts the change in her purse. We have one dollar and thirty-seven cents.
My mother closes her eyes and wrinkles up her nose, the way she does when she is creating A Big Plan. “I’ll go out first, and then you make an act out of coming to get me. That’ll look natural.”
Sure it will, I think. What kind of mother are you, to leave your kid behind when you are stupid enough to run out of cash? I scowl at her as she stands and peers into a compact mirror. “I’ve left my lipstick in the car,” she says in this bird-chirpy voice to all seventeen Elvises. “Diana?” She stomps on my right foot, just in case I haven’t picked up my cue.
“Yes, Aunt Lucille?”
“Wait here. I’ll be right back.”
She smiles at the waitresses on the way out. I drum my fingers on the formica. I slurp my empty Coke. I count the rows of glasses behind the counter (twenty-seven) and try to invent names for the waitresses. Irma and Florence. Delia and Babs. Eleanore, Winifred, Thelma.
Finally I sigh. “I don’t know what she’s doing but we’re going to be late for ballet class,” I say loudly, wondering if Idaho girls take ballet lessons. I approach the waitresses. “Could you just watch our stuff for a minute? I think my aunt’s gone and gotten lost!” I smirk a stupid teenage smirk and put my hands palms up, What can you do?
“Sure honey. No problem.” I walk out the door, blood pounding behind my knees. I wonder how you get a criminal record. I wait until I think I am out of sight from the diner door and then I run like hell.
My mom has the car pulled up and I jump in. She screeches out of the parking lot. For a few miles I lean forward in my seat, my eyes wide. Then I relax. My mother is still paralyzed with fear, panic, I don’t know what. I touch her hand where it rests on the radio dial, and all the air goes out of her like a deflating tire. “That was close,” she says.
My mother wipes her upper lip with the collar of her shirt. I don’t know if she’s laughing or crying. I unroll the window, wondering what comes next. I smile, but only because this keeps the wind from hurting my eyes.
61 JANE
That night I have my flying dream. I have had it often: when I was a very little girl, when I first married Oliver, days before I gave birth to Rebecca. The dream is always the same: I run as hard as I can, and then I jump up high with both feet, and I can fly. The higher I get the more scary it is, but I always make it just above the tree line. Below, people look tiny and cars seem like toys, and just at that point I start to lose control. I worry about how I am going to land and sure enough I crash through the trees at an astounding pace, hurtling towards the ground, and land a little too hard. But it is a wonderful dream. When I was little I hoped each night I would have it. I figured if I dreamed it often enough, eventually I would learn how to land.
“Hello,” Sam says as I’m waking, and it’s the most beautiful word I’ve ever heard. He comes into his room with a wicker tray, balanced with melon and cereal and fresh-picked raspberries. “I didn’t know if you like coffee.”
“I do,” I tell him. “Cream, no sugar.” He holds up a finger and disappears, then returns with a steaming mug and sits on the edge of the bed. He watches me while I am drinking, and under his gaze I wait for embarrassment, but nothing comes. In fact I’ve never felt better. I could climb a mountain today. I could hike forty miles. Or I could just follow Sam around, that would be fine.
“Did you sleep all right?”
“Fine,” I say, “and you?”
“Fine.” Sam looks up then, and catches my eye, and turns red. “Look, I wanted to say something about last night.”
“You’re not going to apologize, are you? You don’t think it was a mistake?”
“Don’t you?” Sam says, looking at me. I can’t concentrate when he does that; he takes my breath away.
Those eyes. My God. “I think,” I say, halting, “I think I love you.”
Sam stares at me. “I’m taking the day off.”
“You can’t. You’ve got an orchard to run.”
“I’ve noticed lately that when I’m near you—fighting or kissing, it doesn’t matter—I don’t give a damn.”
“Everyone will start talking. Rebecca can’t know.”
“She’ll find out. She isn’t stupid. Besides, I deserve a break. That’s what I’ve got Hadley for. What good is hiring someone to be second in command if you never leave the post?” He leans over me and kisses my forehead. “I’ll tell them we’re going back to bed.”
“Sam!” I call out, but to my surprise, I am not upset. I want the world to know I feel like this; that I am capable of it. I move the tray onto the floor, picking at the fruit. Then I stretch across the tangled sheets of the bed. My nightgown—that pretty silk from North Dakota—is on inside-out.
There is a knock at the door. I slide off the bed and open it. “Sam?” I say, and there is Rebecca, her voice chiming with mine, asking for him too. She does a double take, checking to see if she has the right bedroom. I pull the neck of my nightgown closed, feeling the telltale tag inside-out on the collar. “Sam’s not here,” I say quietly.
Rebecca keeps looking around the room like she is searching for evidence. Finally she meets my eyes. “I was looking for you, actually. I wanted to know if he knew where you were. Apparently,” she says, “he does.”
“This is not what you think,” I say too quickly.
“I bet it’s exactly what I think.” I feel a stab in my heart, and this makes me feel better—isn’t that what I have been waiting for? “I came to tell you Hadley and I were going into town this afternoon. I wanted to know if you’d like to come.” She peers over my shoulder again. “I guess you have better things to do.”
“You can’t go into town. Well, Hadley can’t. Sam was going to tell him he’s in charge of the place today.”
“Is that so?” Rebecca says, hands on her hips. “Straight from the boss’s mouth?”
“You’d better watch it,” I say quietly.
“I’d better watch it? Me? I don’t think I’m the one who’s got the problem. I’m not the one who is cheating on my husband.”
Instinct: I raise my hand to strike her. Then, shaking, I bring my arm down to my side. “We can discuss this later.”
“I think you’re disgusting!” Rebecca yells, her hands balled into fists at her sides. “I can’t believe you’d do this to Daddy! I can’t believe you’d do this to me! Whatever you think, he still loves you. He’s coming here, you know. And then what are you going to do?” She turns around and thunders down the stairs.
Sam finds me in the open doorway. “She came in here,” I say. “Rebecca. She hates me now.”
“She doesn’t hate you. Give her a little time.” But nothing he says can keep me from crying. He puts his arms around me, he rubs my shoulders—all of which worked wonders last night, but this is different. This is a rift between my daughter and me. This is something he could not possibly heal.
Eventually Sam leaves me alone for a while. He says he’s going to make sure Joley knows what’s getting sprayed with what today. He kisses me before he leaves, and tells me I’m beautiful. On his way out he turns around. “Your nightgown’s on wrong.”
I move to the window that looks out onto the brick patio in front of the house. When my cheek is pressed against the sill my face doesn’t feel half as hot. I’ve been so selfish. All right, Jane, I think. You’ve had your moment in the sun. Now just put it behind you. You have to work with your loose ends and see what you can make of them. When Sam comes back, I’ll tell him this. I will say that it might have worked in another time or another place. If I was ten years younger; if he worked behind a desk. And th
en I’ll go out and find my daughter. You see? I’ll say. You have to love me again. Don’t you see what I have given up for you?
Absentmindedly I watch Hadley walk up the hill. He’s wearing a blue flannel shirt that makes me think of the dark shade of Sam’s eyes. Suddenly the front door on the Big House opens and Rebecca flies out of it. She is still crying; I can tell from the way her shoulders quiver. She runs to Hadley and presses herself against him.
For just a minute, I remember that Hadley and Sam are the same age.
Hadley cranes his neck, taking a look around. When I see him surveying the upstairs windows I duck back. Then I peek over the edge of the sill. Hadley is kissing the tears off my daughter’s face.
It must be minutes that this goes on. I watch every move they make. She’s a baby. She’s just a baby. She doesn’t know any better—how could Hadley do something like this? The way she arches her neck and the curve of her eyebrows, and the way she moves her hands across Hadley’s back—there is something very familiar about this. Then it comes to me. Rebecca. When she is making love, she looks like me.
I think I am going to scream, or vomit; so I fall away from the window, out of sight. Sam comes into the room then; I wonder if he has seen them as well. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says. But by the time he crosses the room to look outside, Hadley has pushed Rebecca away to a safe distance. At least a foot of space separates them.
“What?” Sam says. “What’s the problem?”
“I can’t do this. It isn’t fair to you; it isn’t fair to my daughter. I can’t just think about myself. It’s been wonderful, Sam, but I think we should just go back to being friends.”
“You can’t go backward.” Sam moves away from me. “You don’t tell someone you love them, and send them flying, and then trash them the next time you see them.” He comes closer and puts his hand on my shoulder, but when I feel it starting to burn I shrug him away. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Have you seen them? Hadley and Rebecca? He’s the same age as you, Sam. And he was practically screwing my daughter.”
“Hadley wouldn’t do that. Maybe Rebecca egged him on.”
My jaw drops. “Whose side are you on?”
“I’m just saying you should look at this logically.”
“Let me put it to you this way,” I say. “If I see him near my daughter again I’ll kill him with my own two hands.”
“What does this have to do with us?”
“If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in you,” I say, “I might have noticed what was going on between Rebecca and Hadley.” Sam starts to kiss my neck. It strikes me that this was the exact pose in which I just spied my daughter and Sam’s best friend. “You’re distracting me.”
“I know. I planned to.” I start to protest but he holds his hand up to my mouth. “Just give me one more day. Promise me that.”
When we leave the orchard, I haven’t even seen Joley yet. Sam tells me he’s down spraying organic pesticides on a section of the commercial grove. I want to find Rebecca one more time before I go, but she is nowhere to be seen.
Sam drives the blue pickup truck to a nature sanctuary about thirty miles west of Stow. Run by an Audubon spin-off, it is a large penned-in area where there are deer, great horned owls, silver foxes, wild turkeys. The paths wind through natural habitats: ponds with fallen logs, tall gold grasses, antlered branches. We walk around holding hands; there is nobody here who knows us. In fact because it is a weekday there is almost nobody here. Just some elderly people, who watch us as much as they watch the wildlife. I hear one old woman whisper to her friend as we walk by. Newlyweds, she says.
Sam and I sit for three hours on the brink of the deer habitat. Inside, the sign says, are a doe and a buck. We can spot the buck easily because it is drinking in the lake, but the doe is indistinguishable from the mottled foliage. We try to find her for a half-hour, and then we give up for a while.
Instead, we sit facing each other on a low log bench and try to catch up on the rest of our lives. I tell Sam about the house in Newton, about Joley’s trek to Mexico, about cocktail parties at the Institute and about a little girl with a cleft palate who has been my favorite student now for three years. I tell him about the time Rebecca needed stitches in her chin, and about the plane crash, and finally, about how Oliver and I met. Sam, in return, tells me about his father in Florida, and about giving speeches at Minuteman Tech, about the almost extinct apple he’s been trying to recreate genetically, about all the places he has read about and wishes he could go. We say that we will travel together, and we make up a list as if it is truly going to happen.
“There are all these things I used to say I wanted to do that I never got to do,” I tell him.
“Why not?”
“I had Rebecca,” I say, matter-of-fact.
“She’s old enough to take care of herself.”
“Apparently not. You didn’t see her this morning. You can’t decide these things for yourself when you’re only fifteen.”
Sam grins. “Didn’t I hear right that you met old Oliver when you were fifteen?”
I start to say that was different, but I change my mind. “And look where that got me.”
“I think you’re overreacting.”
“I think you aren’t her mother,” I snap. I take a deep breath. “I want you to fire Hadley.”
“Hadley?” Sam says, incredulous. “I can’t do that. He’s my best friend.”
I stand up, searching for that doe. “It’s just wrong. I know he’s wrong for Rebecca as much as I’ve known anything. He’s ten years older than her, for God’s sake.” I pause, and then turn to Sam. “Don’t say it.”
Suddenly I see her, stepping through the trees with the grace of a ballerina. The doe lifts her legs high, sniffing with her head delicately bowed. Behind her is a caramel-colored fawn. Nobody said there was a fawn. “I’m not going to be here very long, Sam,” I say softly. “You know that and I know that.”
Sam stands up, his hands in his pockets. “You’re giving me an ultimatum.”
“No I’m not.”
“You are,” Sam insists. “If I want you, I’ve got to do something about Hadley. And even so, it would be a temporary victory.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Sam grabs my shoulders. “Tell me you’ll leave him. You and Rebecca can stay with me in Stow. We’ll get married and we’ll have a zillion kids.”
I smile sadly. “I’ve already got a kid. I’m too old to have babies.”
“That’s bullshit,” Sam says. “You know that. We’ll live in the Big House and it’ll be perfect.”
“It’ll be perfect,” I say, repeating his words. “It’s nice to think that.”
Sam wraps his arms around me. “I’ll talk to Hadley. I’ll work something out.” He leans his head on my shoulder. “Perfect,” he says.
• • •
Only Joley is in the Big House when we return. It is late afternoon, and he’s come in for a cold drink. As we walk into the house, Sam is grabbing at the waistband of my shorts. “Stop!” I laugh, swatting his hand away. That’s when I see my brother. “Oh,” I straighten up—we’ve been caught with our hands in the cookie jar.
“Where have you two been?” Joley says, amused. At least he’s not shocked, like Rebecca. Where is she?
“At the nature sanctuary,” Sam says. “Where is everyone?”
“Finishing up. Rebecca’s down there too.”
“Can I talk to you, Sam?” Joley asks, and Sam looks at me: We knew it was coming. He leads Sam into the kitchen and starts the faucet running, no doubt to keep me from listening.
I walk into the den, where the television is on. The five o’clock local news. I swing myself sideways in the armchair so that my feet dangle over the edge. The anchorwoman is reporting on a fire that killed three people in Dorchester. Then a familiar logo appears on the screen behind her. Why do I know it? “And now,” the anchorwoman says, “we take you to Joan Gallagher, r
eporting from Gloucester, where rescue efforts have been underway for the past three days to save a humpback whale tangled in a fishing boat’s gill net. Joan?”
“I don’t believe this,” I say out loud. “This stuff follows me.”
“Thanks, Anne,” the reporter says dutifully. “Behind me is Stellwagen Bank, a major East Coast feeding ground for several groups of humpback whales. Many people have been following the plight of Marble, a humpback who became tangled three days ago in a gill net left behind by a fishing vessel. Sighted once by the Coast Guard, it took forty-eight hours to find the exact location of Marble again. Today, Dr. Windy McGill, director of the Provincetown Center for Coastal Studies, undertook the rescue of the desperate humpback.”
The reporter cuts to footage of an inflatable boat being tossed about on the ocean. There are two people on board. “Dr. McGill was joined by a colleague, Dr. Oliver Jones, a prominent marine biologist whose research on humpbacks is world-renowned.” They zoom in on Oliver’s face, bent low as he untangles a nylon rope. I sit absolutely still. “Dr. Jones, who studies whales off the coast of California, just happened to be in the Boston area and offered his help when he heard of Marble’s dilemma. These two scientists bravely made the twenty-three mile trip in a Zodiac raft to the location of the whale.”
They show the boat being pitched up, regaining its balance, slapping back against the ocean. “Oliver,” I say, covering my mouth with my hand.
By now Sam and Joley have come out of the kitchen. They stand on either side of me, watching the footage. “Isn’t that . . .?” Joley says, but I hush him.
The camera refocuses on the reporter. “After three and a half hours of dedicated and dangerous work, Marble swam free. She was joined immediately by several other whales. And perhaps the most touching twist to this story was that the foremost rescuer, Dr. Oliver Jones, is in need of some help himself.”
“Jones?” Sam says.
The camera closes in on Oliver’s face, on his pale eyes, his Kahlua skin. “Jane.” His voice is shaking, hoarse. “I need you. I hope you can see this, and I hope you and Rebecca are all right. I want you to know something. I can’t stand being without you.”
