by Jodi Picoult
“Do you know his name?” I ask, pressing him for more details. What was he wearing? How many people in his party? What type of car did he drive?
“Hey, that’s it!” the young man says. “A blue pickup, really nice new truck, which is how come I noticed. And it said Hansen’s on the door.”
• • •
Hansen. Hansen. Hansen. None of the mailboxes on this road have that name; doesn’t the man have any relatives in the town? Anything to appease my gnawing excitement? I have already plotted what I will do. It is barely five in the morning, and even a farm will still be asleep. So I will jimmy the lock and creep inside, and try to find Jane’s bedroom. It should be easy; she sleeps with the door ajar because she is claustrophobic. And then I will sit on the edge of the bed, and touch her hair. I have forgotten its texture. I’ll wait until she stirs and then I’ll kiss her. Oh, will I kiss her.
Hansen’s. I slam the brakes, sending the Lincoln spinning. I have always preferred big cars, but they fishtail at times like this. I right myself, and pull into the long, winding driveway. If I drive the entire way, they might hear me. So I park midway on the rutted gravel and walk to the large white house.
The porch creaks beneath me. I try the door—open—does anyone in the country lock their doors? Inside, I have to feel my way in the dark, but I do not mind. This is a good sign: no one is awake.
I became very good at cracking doors just a hair when Rebecca was a baby. If she heard the slightest sound, she’d wake and begin to cry, and God knows it was difficult enough to get her to sleep through the night. It’s all in the wrist.
The farthest door on the right yields an empty room decorated with antiques and patchwork quilts. Jane’s purse is in here, which leads me to deduce that this is indeed her room and she is probably sleeping with Rebecca out of fear or discomfort or loneliness. My heart is pounding when I open the next door, expecting to find my wife and my child together. But it is just Joley, snoring loud enough to blast granite.
When I open the next bedroom door, it too is empty, but the sheets are messed on the bed. Strewn around the room are Rebecca’s clothes—I recognize her GUARD suit, the one she was wearing the day she left. A half-full glass of juice sits at the bedside, as if the room was left in a hurry. As if the occupant is coming right back. This worries me; I don’t want her to see me before I have a chance to see and speak to Jane. So I duck into the hallway, and make my way to the last door.
It falls open without a sound. Jane is in the bed, curled onto her side. She is not wearing anything. She is smiling in her sleep. She is in the arms of another man.
I stagger forward, creating a loud noise that coincides with the crash of the door against the wall. They both jump up, blinking. Jane sees me first. “Oliver,” she gasps.
I lunge for him, hauling him out of the bed. Jane is screaming for me to stop. I think she is probably crying. “Get the fuck away from her!” I shout, throwing the man onto the floor. I don’t even know who he is. I’m ready to kill him, and I don’t even known his name.
I kick him in the gut and in the balls and send him reeling backward. Jane jumps out of bed, wailing, naked, and throws herself across him. I have poison running through my veins. I want blood.
She cradles his head in her lap. “I’m all right,” he says to her. “I’m okay now.” He tries to get to his feet, to come after me.
“Come on,” I say, beckoning. “I’ll kill you. I mean it, I’ll kill you.” Suddenly Jane is in between us, and she throws herself into my arms, and it is so remarkably distracting that I lose my sense of purpose. She has wrapped herself in a sheet. She is so soft.
“Don’t do this,” she pleads. “For me. Don’t do this, please.”
“Let’s get Rebecca. We’re leaving.”
Jane will not make eye contact with me. “No.”
“We’re leaving, Jane,” I say authoritatively.
She stands directly between us, her hands knotted into fists, her eyes pressed shut. “No!”
And this is when Joley chooses to enter the room. “What the hell is going on?” He sees me, he takes note of Jane and this other asshole, leaning on the bedpost for support. “Sam, what happened?”
“Sam Hansen? You’re the one who’s been screwing my wife?” It all balls up inside my throat then, my shoulders. I grab for Sam’s neck. I can break it in one swift move. I know human anatomy.
Joley pushes Jane out of the way. He grabs me by the collar of my shirt and wraps his arms around mine so that I am pinned. I struggle but he is too strong for me, and eventually I relax. “Where’s Rebecca? I want to see Rebecca.”
“She’s next door,” Jane says.
“There’s no one next door.”
“Of course there is,” Joley says. “Where should she go at five in the morning?”
Jane’s hands start to tremble, and she turns to Sam. Sam. “I told Hadley to leave,” he says. “I told him last night. She must have found out. She must have gone after him.”
Jane nods very slowly, and then she bursts into tears. “She knows it was me. She knows I told you.”
Joley, for once in his goddamned life the voice of reason, walks towards Sam and practically shouts in his face. “Do you know where his mom lives now?”
“I know the town. It won’t be hard to find.”
“I can’t believe this,” I say. “I travel across the country to find my child has run away and my wife is in another man’s bed.” Sam and Joley continue to talk about some area of New Hampshire. I come closer to Jane and I take her hand. “I had so much to tell you,” I say sadly. Her cheeks are red and swollen with the tracks of tears.
“Oliver,” she whispers, hoarse. “I can’t lose her. I can’t lose her.” She looks up at me. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
I know they are watching, from across the room. I know they are watching and that is what makes it even sweeter. This has not been easy. I came across an entire continent to tell this woman I am in love with her. I came to tell her my life is nothing unless she’s by my side. And I’m not about to throw that away, in spite of it all. I know how to forgive, now. I know how to forget, I imagine, too. It is up to me to put my family back together. I squeeze Jane gently. Then I close my eyes, and press my lips against hers. Her mouth is quivering. But she is kissing me back. This much I know: she is kissing me back.
65 JOLEY
When Oliver hugs Jane like that, Sam stirs next to me. I brace my arm, so he doesn’t step forward and do anything stupid. He takes three slow measured breaths that rock his whole frame. Then he pushes past me. “Let’s go,” he says.
We’ve decided that since we know where Hadley’s gone, we have a good chance of finding Rebecca there. If we get a start this early, we’ll be there by lunch time. “I’m going with you,” Oliver says. He lets go of Jane and she sags against the post of the bed. I think she might pass out, from the looks of things.
“Oliver.” You have to feel bad for the guy. This isn’t what he expected to find in Massachusetts, after all. “It won’t do you any good to come with us. Someone has to stay here with Jane, anyway.”
“This is not a question. I am telling you: I’m going with you to New Hampshire.”
Sam takes a step forward. I can see Oliver’s face change as he drinks in the tone of Sam’s voice. “You know where Hadley’s mom lives. You two go. I’ll wait here in case she comes home.”
“Like hell you will,” Oliver says. It’s about to come to blows again, so I step in between them. “I’m not leaving you here with my wife.”
“You can’t go by yourself,” Sam says. “Half the roads there aren’t marked.”
Oliver leans towards Sam. “I can find places that are totally unmarked, you asshole. I do it for a living.”
“This isn’t the ocean.”
Jane puts her hand on Oliver’s arm. “He’s right, Oliver. You can’t go up there alone.”
“Okay,” Oliver says, pacing. He wheels around and points to
Sam. “You. You go with me. Joley stays here with Jane.”
“What a goddamned pleasure,” Sam mutters.
“What did you say?” Oliver grabs the collar of his shirt, but Sam, now awake and probably ten times stronger than Oliver, shoves him with such force Oliver crashes into the door.
“I said it would be my pleasure.” Sam walks over to Jane, who is crying again. He leans his forehead against hers, and puts his hand on her shoulder. He whispers something only she can hear, and she starts to smile a little.
“We can check the grounds but I don’t think we’ll find her. We’ll take my truck,” Sam says, and Oliver shakes his head.
“We’ll take my car,” Oliver says.
After we hear the car drive away, Jane sinks down to the floor and pulls her knees up to her chest. “You win, Joley. You were right.”
“Nobody’s won anything. They’re going to find her.”
Jane shakes her head. “I should have said something to her. I should have told her about Sam, and above all else I should have tried to understand what was going on with Hadley.” She pulls herself upright, and walks into Rebecca’s empty room.
I hear all the air rush out of her, like she’s been punched hard. She touches Rebecca’s bathing suit, her hairbrush. “The room smells like her, doesn’t it?”
She picks up Rebecca’s bra. “We bought this in North Dakota,” she says, smiling. “She was so excited because it had a cup size.” She winds the bra around her waist, snapping the elastic. “I have been so selfish.”
“You didn’t know this would happen.” I sit next to her on Rebecca’s bed.
“If she’s hurt, “Jane says, “I’ll die. I’ll never be able to forgive myself. If she’s hurt, it will kill me.”
Jane lies down on the bed. I rub her back. “She’s fine. She’s going to be fine.”
“You don’t know that,” Jane says. “You don’t understand how I feel. I’m her mother. I’m supposed to protect her. I should be with her now. I should be with her. “Jane rolls over and stares at the ceiling. There is a water mark that has spread in the shape of a lamb, and another in the form of a zinnia. She sits up. “Drive after them. I want to be there when they find her.”
“We can’t do that. What if she comes back home? Someone has to be here. You have to be here.”
Jane sinks back down on the bed. She crawls under the covers, and turns onto her side. “She sleeps like this,” Jane says. “With her mouth open and her hand curled up on the side. She even slept like this as a baby, when all the other infants in the hospital were on their stomachs with their rear ends sticking in the air. You know when they brought her to me, after I had her, I was terrified. I didn’t think I’d know how to hold a baby. But she was the one who let me off the hook. She was this little wiggling mess of arms and legs,” Jane says, smiling. “But Rebecca looked up at me, and she seemed to be saying, Relax. We’ve got a long way to go.”
I do my best to listen, because I know that’s what she needs.
Jane suddenly sits up very straight. “Rebecca was my tradeoff,” she says. “I didn’t meet Sam earlier, or marry him, even though I was meant to. Don’t you see? It was one or the other.”
“I’m not following you.”
“She’s my daughter. As much as I say Sam is a part of me, so is she. She knows me just as well. She loves me just as much, in a different way.” She shakes her head. “I didn’t have Sam my whole life. Instead, I was given Rebecca.”
I am going to hate myself for saying this, I know. I look out the window, to where the field hands are gathering near the barn. Someone has to tell them what to do today. “If you didn’t have Oliver,” I point out, “you wouldn’t have had Rebecca. She’s part of him, too.”
Jane follows my gaze out the window. In the distance the lambs are bleating. There are all these things to do. “Oliver,” she says. “That’s true.”
66 SAM
We come to a quiet understanding, Oliver and me. We don’t talk too much in the car on the way to the White Mountains. Oliver drives, and I fidget with the cigarette lighter button and the power window controls. I keep my space, and he keeps his.
From time to time I get to study his face. I do it in a curious, kind of jealous way. You know: What has he got that I don’t have? He’s very dark, tanned, I guess, but I work outside as much as he does and I don’t look like that. Maybe it’s the salt water. It’s cut lines in his face, around his eyes and mouth, that make him look so tired. Or determined. It depends on the angle. He’s got hair like Rebecca’s and vacant blue eyes with tiny little pinpoint black pupils. I try, really, I do-but I cannot picture Jane with him. I can’t even think of him standing next to her, without the picture looking all funny. She wasn’t meant to be with someone like him; someone so stuffy, with his head up in the clouds. She was meant to be with someone like me.
I’ve got my eye on him when the car starts to choke. We’re on 93. I think I remember passing Manchester, but I can’t be sure. About all I know for certain is that we’re running out of gas.
“Shit,” Oliver says, maneuvering the car onto the shoulder of the road. “I didn’t even notice I was low.”
I fold my arms across my chest. “Don’t suppose you have a gas can?”
Oliver turns to me and smirks. “As a matter of fact I do. And we’re both going for a walk down the highway with it.”
“Someone should stay with the car. You don’t want to come back and find it towed. This isn’t even really a shoulder, here. You can’t just leave it.”
“You’re not staying here,” Oliver says. “I don’t trust you.”
“You don’t trust me. What am I going to do with a car like this?” But Oliver isn’t listening. He’s popped the trunk, and he takes a blue plastic gas can out. He sticks his head inside my window and tells me to get a move on.
We walk along the highway. It’s hot, and there are bugs everywhere. “So,” I say, as friendly as I can, “how’s work?”
“Shut up. I don’t want to carry on a conversation with you. I don’t even want to believe that you exist.”
“Believe me,” I say, “hanging around with you isn’t up there on my list of things to do.”
Oliver mutters something I can’t hear, what with an eighteen-wheeler zooming by. It ends with:” . . . you should tell me what exactly prompted my daughter to leave.”
So I tell him about Hadley, and about what Jane said. He takes this all very well, kind of weighing the information before he comes to any early conclusions. I finish the story about three miles down the road, when we reach the exit. Then I look at Oliver to see his expression.
He looks up at me. “Are they sleeping together?”
“How the hell should I know? I doubt it.”
“I thought you’d know everything that goes on under your roof,” Oliver says.
“He’s a good person.” I point up the road at a Texaco. “He’s a lot like me, actually.”
The second after I say it I realize it was the wrong thing to say. Oliver looks at me with disgust. “I’ll bet.”
At the service station Oliver fills up the gas can while I buy a Mountain Dew from a vending machine. Next to Jolt cola, it’s got the most caffeine out of any soft drink and I figure I’m going to need it. I sit on the curb at the edge of the road and count the cars that go by. When I close my eyes, I get this picture of Jane: last night, when I came to her, and she was a blue silhouette against the white curtains in the window. She was wearing that slinky silky thing with thin straps, you know what I mean. Those sexy nightgowns. I don’t know where she got it; God knows my mother didn’t leave any behind in her bedroom. But Jesus was she something. When I touched her the fabric spilled through my fingers, and to my surprise, her own skin was even softer.
I open my eyes and jump up about a foot. Oliver’s face is inches from mine, purple and angry. “You’re thinking about her,” he shouts. “I don’t want you doing that.”
Like he could possibly stop me. I
could pommel this guy to a pulp in a matter of minutes; I’m restraining myself because Jane would fall apart, and besides, he may be instrumental in getting Rebecca away from Hadley. “Did it ever occur to you that this didn’t develop just because of me? Did it ever occur to you that Jane wanted to be with me too?”
Oliver raises his free hand, probably to punch me, but I stand up. I’m a good four inches taller than him, and both of us know that now I’m awake I could kill him. He puts his hand down. “Shut up,” he says between his teeth. “Just shut up.” He walks a few feet in front of me all three and a half miles back towards the car. He won’t speak to me, and frankly I don’t care. The sooner he’s out of here, the sooner Jane and I are alone again, the better.
• • •
It costs Oliver sixty-five bucks to get his car released from the garage where it’s been towed. We’ve had to walk another five miles because of this, in the other direction. It sets us back about another two hours. It is after three when we leave, having cleared the ticket with the police station in Goffstown. The attendant is an old guy with white hair that sticks up in tufts all over his head. He rubs his palm up against the windshield, which is filmy with dust. “Looks like you’re outta gas,” he says. “I’d do something about that if I were you.”
Oliver pushes past the man. He empties the can he’s been hauling around most of the day into the gas tank. It chugs, like it’s gulping down a good imported beer. When he finishes he throws the can into the back seat and stares at me. “What are you looking at? Are you going to get in or what?”
“I’ve been thinking,” I say. “You ought to let me drive.”
Oliver leans across the hood of the car. “Give me one good reason.”
