by Jodi Picoult
For one thing, she was smaller than Jack. Her eyes were so large and black they dominated her face, and her tiny white slash of a mouth was the saddest thing Jack had ever seen. Her hands twitched at her sides, as if they desperately needed something to hold.
“This is Emma,” his mother said, and the girl turned and ran right back into the elevator.
That was the second thing that was different about this one: She didn’t want to be here.
“Fine, then,” Annalise said. “I’ll go to jail.”
Joseph St. Bride sighed. “Annie, I know it kills you to see this stuff. But you can’t remove a child from her home without the permission of Child Protective Services.”
“Have you seen her? What did you expect me to do?” Her voice got so low that Jack had to work harder to eavesdrop from outside the library door. “She’s nine, Joseph. She’s nine years old and her forty-year-old uncle is raping her.”
Jack knew about rape; it was hard to live with his mother, the queen of crusaders against violence against women, and not know about it. Rape had to do with sex, and sex was something too gross to even think about. He tried to picture Emma, the girl who’d been carried kicking and screaming upstairs, doing that with a grown-up. It made him gag.
“Go see for yourself,” his mother yelled, and all of a sudden they burst out of the library, so intent on their fight that, thankfully, they never noticed Jack sitting there at all.
He crept up the stairs after them and hovered outside Emma’s room. They had locked her in. In all the years his mom had done this kind of thing, Jack couldn’t remember a single woman getting locked in.
His father knocked softly. “Hi, Emma,” he said gently. “I’m Annalise’s husband.”
Emma opened her mouth and began to scream. It echoed right through Jack’s head and, he figured, probably broke some crystal downstairs. “Just go outside,” Jack’s mother ordered. “She’s obviously afraid of you.”
Joseph walked into the hall again, closing the door. Then he looked down at Jack. “I’m sorry you had to hear that.”
From the spot where he was sitting, Jack shrugged. “I’m sorry for Emma,” he answered.
Annalise went to court and got temporary custody of Emma. A month passed, and the girl began eating and looking healthier. But every night, she tried to run away.
Once, they found her under the stairs, where Jack and his friends liked to hide. Once, she was in the trash chute. Another time she made it all the way to the lobby before Corazon managed to catch up with her.
His mother said that it was because Joseph reminded Emma too much of what had happened. “I’m not moving out of my own house,” Jack’s father had thundered, and that started a fight between them that still flared like a brush fire every now and then.
Jack didn’t say so, but he thought his mother ought to stop worrying what Emma was running away from. In his opinion, the big mystery was where she was heading.
He rigged up a burglar alarm. Jack stretched a length of nylon fishing line across the front of her door, and sure enough, he woke up to the sound of a soft thud against the carpet. He jumped out of bed to find Emma dressed and sprawled on the floor.
She looked up at him, evaluating whether she could take him down or whether he was someone she ought to be afraid of. “It’s okay,” Jack whispered. “I’m not going to tell.”
He had not known until that moment that he was going to keep her secret, maybe even let her steal away, without sounding a siren. Emma’s eyes narrowed. “Bullshit.”
It sounded wrong on the mouth of a little girl, like a horde of flies swimming out of her lips the moment they opened. Jack held out a hand to help Emma up, but she rose without touching him. “I’m getting out of here,” she said.
“Okay.”
“You can’t stop me.”
Jack shrugged. “I wasn’t going to.” He crossed his arms, hoping he looked as cool as he thought he might.
Emma walked past him. God, if his mother found out what he was doing, he’d never hear the end of it. He watched the girl pad softly down the oriental runner on the staircase. “Emma,” he whispered.
She turned.
“You like baseball?”
He had never in life wanted to spend any time with a girl, much less actually give something that could be construed as a gift, but he worked out a deal with Emma. Every night she didn’t try to leave, he’d give her two of his baseball cards. She had no idea that Steve Renko and Chuck Rainey sucked, which meant that at least Jack wasn’t losing any of his good stuff. They sat on the floor of his bedroom, and he taught her about batting averages and playing positions and the Cy Young Award.
She didn’t speak much. When she did, it was weird. She talked about hearing the bed knock against the wall when his mother and father were doing it, which was totally repulsive. She said Corazon had forgotten what it was like to have a man in her bed. It was as if she wanted to shock Jack. But every time Emma got going, he just stared as if those flies were swarming from her lips again and didn’t say a thing.
One night, he woke up to find Emma standing next to him. “You overslept.”
He looked at the clock; it was two in the morning. “Sorry,” Jack muttered, sitting up. Then he remembered that he didn’t have anything else to give her. “You’ve got half my baseball cards, Emma. I don’t have any more.”
“Oh.” She looked very small in her nightgown and robe. The sash of the robe went around her waist twice. It was one of his; his mother had filched it from the closet.
Jack swung his legs over the side of the bed. “So I guess if you’re going to go, you’d just better go ahead.”
Emma looked down at the floor. She was a strange kid, always staring hard at the tiniest things. She knew how many freckles were on Jack’s ear, and that the third stair riser had a crack in it that was shaped like a W. “Maybe tomorrow night,” she said.
A week later, they lay side by side on his bed, not touching. Emma kept a buffer of a few inches between herself and everyone else she came in contact with; Jack had noticed that early on. “Do you have a girlfriend?” Emma asked.
“No.”
“How come?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t like girls.”
“You like me.”
Well, yeah. He did. He looked down at her. The question he’d wanted to ask forever swelled inside his stomach like a balloon. “Where would you go?”
She didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. “Home. Where else?”
Of all the answers she could have given, that was the one Jack least expected. “But . . . you can’t,” he stammered. “You just got away.”
Emma blinked at him. “Your mother took me away. What makes you think I wanted to leave?”
Jack felt heat creeping up the neck of his pajama top. “You weren’t safe there. Your uncle—”
“Loves me,” Emma said fiercely. “He loves me.”
Jack would have bet every single baseball card left in his possession that Emma didn’t even know she was crying.
Jack found Corazon in the laundry room, separating colors from whites. “You know,” she said, “if I tell you another seven hundred times, maybe one of these days you might turn your clothes right side out when you put them in the hamper, eh?”
He hopped on top of the dryer, swinging his legs. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“How do you know if you love someone?”
Corazon looked up, her hands stilling for a minute. “Well, that’s quite a question,” she said. “And usually it’s something you figure out for yourself.”
“If you love someone, you want to take care of them, right?”
She smiled slyly. “Someone’s had a change of mind about Rachel Covington?”
“And if you love someone, you’re not supposed to hurt them.”
“No,” Cora answered, “but you usually do at some point, anyway.”
Well, that made the whole thing about as clear as m
ud. Jack thanked Cora and scrambled out of the laundry room, up the stairs. Emma’s door was shut, as usual. But she’d managed to sneak out when no one was looking, because a stack of neatly banded baseball cards were set just inside the threshold of his own bedroom door.
That was how he knew she was planning to leave.
Eyelids, Jack thought, must weigh something like forty pounds each, or why would it be so hard to keep them up after midnight? He got down on the floor and did another fifty sit-ups, then paced around his room. He couldn’t risk falling asleep, not yet. And his parents had only just gone to bed. He knew Emma would make sure they were sound asleep before she sneaked away.
At 1:20, Jack swallowed hard and walked to Emma’s room. It was the first time he’d ever gone to her space instead of letting her come to his. And although he only had a vague impression of what must have happened between Emma and her uncle, he guessed it probably happened in her own bed.
Either this was going to work, Jack thought, or she was going to scream loud enough to bring down the whole building.
He turned the key in the lock she knew how to pick anyway and slipped inside on the slice of light from the hallway. One second Emma was facing the wall, and the next she was staring at him, her eyes huge in her face, her whole body going rigid.
“Shh,” Jack said. “It’s just me.”
That didn’t seem to make it any better. Emma was dead silent, just as still.
“Can I sit down?”
She didn’t answer, and with a slight pang in his stomach Jack realized that no one had ever asked for her permission. His weight tilted the mattress, and Emma rolled against his bent knee like a cylinder of wood. “I wanted to show you something,” he whispered. “I wanted to show you that someone who loves you doesn’t always have to hurt you.” And taking a deep breath, he reached down and held her hand.
She froze. It was the first time they had ever touched, beyond accidental brushing when they passed baseball cards back and forth. She was waiting for him to do something else, something disgusting Jack didn’t really want to picture in his head. But he just sat there, his fingers tangled with hers, until Emma’s other hand came up to cover his, until she crawled into his arms like the child she’d forgotten how to be.
June 29, 2000
Carroll County Jail
New Hampshire
Jack threaded his tie into a Windsor knot, pulled it tight, and tried his best not to think of a lynching. He smoothed the fabric down, never taking his eyes off the stranger in the mirror. Blue blazer, khaki pants, loafers, tie—this had become his trial uniform. And the man staring back at him was someone who understood that the legal system didn’t work.
There was a sharp rap on the other side of the bathroom wall. “Get moving,” a CO called out. “You’re gonna be late.”
Jack blinked twice, the man in the mirror blinked twice. He raised his hand to his forehead, where his hair was beginning to curl in the damp humidity of the shower room. He told himself it was time to go.
But Jack’s feet didn’t move. They might as well have been nailed to the cement floor. He grabbed the edge of the sink and tried to force one leg back but was literally paralyzed by the fear of what was yet to come.
The CO stuck his head into the bathroom. Humiliated, Jack met his eyes in the mirror, only to find that he could not force out a single word.
The guard wrapped his hand around Jack’s upper arm gently and pulled until Jack fell into step beside him.
“I’m sorry,” Jack murmured.
The CO shrugged. “You ain’t the first one.”
“And don’t forget to tell Darla the blue-plate special, when you decide,” Addie said.
Roy slipped his arm around his daughter’s waist. “We can do fine without you.” He faced her, so proud of his girl in this pale peach suit, with low heels on her feet and her brown hair pulled back from her face with a simple gold clip. Christ, she looked like a professional business-woman, not some two-bit waitress. “You are beautiful,” Roy said quietly. “Jack won’t be able to take his eyes off you.”
“Jack won’t be able to see me. I have to sit outside, sequestered, because I’m a witness.” Suddenly, Addie stripped off the fitted jacket of her suit. “Who am I kidding?” she muttered, reaching behind the counter for her apron. “I’m just going to drive myself crazy sitting there all day. At least here I’ll be able to focus—”
“—on what’s going on at court,” Roy said, interrupting. “You have to go, Addie. There’s something about you . . . like you’re a lighthouse, and other people see the beam. Or an anchor, with the rest of us just hanging on to you for dear life. You ground us. And right now, I figure, Jack needs something to grab on to.” He held out her suit jacket, so that she could shrug it on. “Go on, get down to that courthouse.”
“It’s only six-thirty, Daddy. Court doesn’t convene until nine.”
“Then drive slow.”
When he went back into the kitchen, Addie stood alone in the early light of the diner, watching the sun leapfrog over shadows on the linoleum floor. Maybe if she arrived early, she could find the entrance where the deputy sheriffs brought the inmates from the jail. Maybe she could be there when Jack was brought in, could catch his eye.
Then something beneath the counter stool where she liked to imagine Chloe sitting drew her attention. Shriveled and brittle, more brown than red—it took a moment for Addie to recognize it as the little bouquet she had once confiscated from Gillian Duncan, tucked into her apron and forgotten.
It was the craziest thing, but when she lifted the dead flowers to her nose, she could swear they were as fragrant as new blossoms.
Amos Duncan flattened his tie against his abdomen as he hurried downstairs to the kitchen. “Gillian,” he called over his shoulder. “We’re going to be late!”
He headed toward the kitchen, intent on swilling at least one cup of coffee to settle his stomach before he began the grim hell of this trial. Houlihan would put Gillian on the stand first. The thought of his daughter sitting up there with a thousand eyes on her, television cameras rolling, and twelve men and women bearing witness—well, it was enough to make him want to kill someone. Jack St. Bride, in particular.
He would have given anything to take the stand in her stead, to make their life private again. But instead, all he would be able to do was watch, like everyone else, and see how it played out at the end.
The smell of coffee grew stronger as Amos entered the kitchen. Gillian sat at the kitchen table, dressed in the virginal white outfit Houlihan had hand-picked for her. She was shoveling cornflakes into her mouth behind a barricade of brightly colored cereal boxes.
Amos looked at her, nearly hidden from his view by the cartons. He fixed his coffee, black, the way he liked it. Then he slid into the chair across from his daughter.
There were three boxes blocking her from his view. He pushed the Life cereal box away. When he moved a second box, Lucky Charms, his daughter stopped chewing.
Finally, Amos shifted the cornflakes, so that he could see her unobstructed. Bright color stained her cheeks. “Gilly,” he said softly, offering up a whole story in that one word.
Gillian reached for the Lucky Charms and set it up again, a wall. She took the cornflakes and the Life cereal and made barriers on either side of the first box. Then she lifted her spoon and began to eat in silence, as if her father were not there at all.
“Sydney!” Matt hollered at the top of his lungs, holding his squealing daughter at arm’s length as she fought to hand him the arrowroot biscuit she’d been gumming. “Don’t you do this to me, you little monster. This is my last clean suit.”
His wife rounded the corner, carrying a stack of clean laundry. “Where’s the fire?”
“Here,” Matt said, thrusting the baby into her free arm. “And it’s raging out of control. I can’t have her mess me up, Syd. I’m on my way to court.”
Sydney brushed her lips over the baby’s head. “She just wants to give
you her good luck charm, isn’t that right, honey?”
“I’m not taking her cookie, dammit.”
His wife shrugged. “Well, someone’s going to be awfully sorry when the jury comes back with an acquittal.”
Matt gathered up his files and stuffed them into his briefcase. “I’m just not a rabbit’s foot kind of fellow.” He leaned down to kiss Sydney good-bye, then ran a light hand over the soft fuzz of his daughter’s head.
Sydney followed him to the front door, bouncing the baby in her arms. “Wave good-bye,” she told Molly. “Daddy’s going to go lock up the bad guys.”
Charlie took a deep breath and knocked on the bathroom door. A moment later, it opened, steam spilling into the hallway, his daughter’s face hovering in the mist left in the wake of her shower. “What?” she said belligerently. “Did you come to strip-search me?”
She threw open the door and spread her arms, the towel she’d wrapped around her damp body riding low. He didn’t know what to say to her. He didn’t know who this girl was, because she no longer acted like his daughter. So he opted for the practical, the functional, as if pretending that the wall of mistrust between them was invisible would keep it from hurting every time he slammed up against it. “Have you seen my badge?” Charlie asked. He needed it to complete his dress blues, before heading to court.
Meg turned away. “You didn’t leave it in here.”
Still, Charlie looked over her shoulder, at the edge of the sink, checking.
“What’s the matter, Daddy?” she said. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t believe me.”
“Meg . . .” He did believe her, and that was the problem. All he had to do was look at her and he saw her, again, sobbing at the station as she recounted a memory of being sexually assaulted. What Charlie wanted to do, more than anything, was turn back time. He wanted to go through Meg’s closet and never find that thermos. He wanted to keep her under lock and key, so nothing bad would ever happen to her.
