by Jodi Picoult
She did not know what was going on in the courtroom across town, and at this moment, she truly did not care. In fact, she was not thinking of her father, seated behind Matt Houlihan like the dragon who guarded Gilly’s virtue. She was not thinking of Jack St. Bride. Sweet sage tickled the inside of her nose, and with all she had inside her, Gillian wished for her mother.
Just on the edge of the circle, she could see her, a translucent figure with a laugh that fell into the shell of Gilly’s ear. And this time, something happened. Instead of the candle sputtering out and her mother simply disappearing, she looked Gillian in the eye and sang her name, a series of bells. “You shouldn’t,” her mother said, and the flame on the candle roared so bright it was blinding.
By the time Gillian realized the rug was on fire, her mother had gone. She batted at the flames but didn’t manage to save the photograph. It was charred through, the only remaining fragment a piece of her mother’s hand, now curled and scorched with heat.
Gillian threw herself down beside the ashes, breathing in the smoke and sobbing. She would not learn until much later that she had burned her hands putting out the flames, that each broken blister would scar in the shape of a heart.
Matt Houlihan was tired. He wanted to go home and have Molly fall asleep on his chest while Syd rubbed his feet. He wanted to drink himself into oblivion, so that when he was tottering at the edge of consciousness, he wouldn’t have to see Gillian Duncan’s face.
He was almost done.
That, more than anything else, drew Matt to his feet. He slipped a piece of paper from a manila envelope and offered it to McAfee, who’d known ever since the motions hearing that it was coming. “Judge, the state has no more witnesses for its case in chief. However, at this time I’d like to offer a certified copy of the conviction of Jack St. Bride for sexual assault on a plea of guilty entered August 20, 1998, in Grafton County, New Hampshire. To wit, Mr. McBride admitted that he sexually assaulted a fifteen-year-old victim and received a sentence of eight months to serve in the Grafton County Correctional Facility.”
The jury gaped. They looked at Matt, they looked at the defendant, and they thought what any reasonable man or woman would think when presented with this evidence—if he’s done it before, he most likely has done it again.
Matt placed the conviction on the clerk’s desk, then looked directly at Jack St. Bride, hoping to hell the bastard was fully suffering the terror of being at someone else’s mercy, someone who held all the cards. “Your Honor,” Matt said. “The state rests.”
1969
New York City
That morning, while drinking her imported Sumatran coffee, Annalise St. Bride had read a story in the New York Times about a woman whose baby had been born in a tree. The woman lived in Mozambique, a country suffering from a flood, and had climbed to safety when her hut washed away. The baby was healthy, male, and rescued by helicopter a day later.
Surely that was worse than what was happening now.
She had been on Astor Place shopping for the most darling christening outfit when her water broke. Two weeks early. The ambulance told her she couldn’t get to Lenox Hill—the hospital where she’d planned to have her baby—because there was a parade blocking traffic one way, and a broken water main had locked up the conduit through Central Park. “I am not going to St. Vincent’s,” she insisted, as two paramedics hefted her into the back of the ambulance.
“Fine, lady,” one said. “Then drop the kid right here.”
A band of pain started at her groin, then radiated out to every nerve of her skin. “Do you know,” she gasped, “who my husband is?”
But the paramedics had already set the ambulance screaming crosstown.
Through the tiny window over her feet, Annalise watched the city roll past, a palette of gray angles and swerving pedestrians. In minutes, they arrived at the last hospital in New York City she could possibly wish to be.
Drug addicts and homeless people were splashed along the sides of the building like decorative puddles; Annalise had even heard of patients who had died in the halls simply waiting to be cared for. It was a far cry from Lenox Hill, with its lushly appointed exclusive birthing suites meant to offer a couple the feel of being at home.
St. Vincent’s? Being born in a tree was a better pedigree than this.
As the paramedics loaded the stretcher off the ambulance, she realized she had to fight in earnest. But the moment the wheels of the gurney slapped onto the pavement, she felt shock rocket through her. Her spine was shattering—she could feel the vertebrae at the base cracking, she was certain of it. In her womb, where she’d been carrying a baby, there was now a huge fist. It twisted like a puppeteer’s, pulled so hard and so long that she writhed, at odds in her own body.
I am going to die, she thought.
When she opened her mouth, all she could say was, “Get Joseph.”
She was admitted before the shifty-eyed drunks and the mothers with six sniffling children hanging like ornaments from their limbs. The curtained room smelled of alcohol and cleaning fluids, and Annalise’s gaily wrapped package stuck out awkwardly, a Meissen vase in a Woolworth’s living room. “She’s eight centimeters,” said the doctor, an Asian man with hair that stood straight, like a rooster’s comb.
“I want to wait for my husband,” Annalise gritted out. The contractions were slicing her in half, like the magician’s assistant.
“I don’t think your baby’s got the same idea,” a nurse murmured, coming up behind Annalise to brace her shoulders.
She and Joseph had toured the rooms at Lenox Hill, with their silk bedding and faux fireplaces. Just around the corner was their favorite Italian restaurant. Joseph had promised to bring her penne alla diavolo, the restaurant’s specialty, the night she delivered.
Suddenly, there was a crash as a new patient was wheeled into the cubicle beside Annalise’s. “Maria Velasquez. Thirty-year-old female, primip, twenty-seven weeks’ gestation,” the paramedic said. “BP one thirty over seventy, heart rate one-oh-five sinus rhythm. Beaten up one side and down the other by her husband.”
Annalise stared at the curtain that separated her from this woman. The nurse behind her gently turned her face away. “You concentrate on you,” she said.
“Are you having contractions?” The question came from the other side of the drape, the one Annalise was gazing at so fixedly she expected it to fly off its hangers at any moment in a feat of telekinesis.
“Sí, los tiene,” the woman moaned.
“Looks like she’s bleeding. Could be a placenta previa. Call OB.”
Annalise licked dry lips. “What’s . . . what’s the matter with the woman over there?”
Her doctor glanced up from a spot between her legs. “I need you to push,” he said. “Now, Annalise.”
She bore down with all her strength, squeezing her eyes so tight the room swam about her, and the words that filtered through the curtain came thin and quivering.
“No pueda!”
“It’s coming . . . get me a gown and gloves, for Christ’s sake.”
“BP’s falling. She’s ninety over palp.”
“Ah, damn. She’s bleeding out.”
“Respire, Mrs. Velasquez. No empuje.”
“Primero salvo mi bebé! Por favor, salvo mi bebé!”
Annalise felt herself being opened from the inside, a seal yawning and widening. She had a sudden vision of Joseph pulling on a weekend turtleneck sweater, the wool stretching taut as his head slowly emerged to show his smile, his tousled hair.
“Here we go,” the doctor said.
“Ringer’s lactate, wide open. Type and cross her. Where the hell is OB?”
“We’ve got to do this now. Ahora, Mrs. Velasquez. Empuje.”
“Pedi’s here.”
“About time. Take the baby.”
“Él se llamo Joaquim!”
“Yes, Mrs. Velasquez. That’s a lovely name.”
“One more push,” the nurse said to Annalise, �
��and you’re gonna have yourself a little one.”
“Suction the infant . . . I want him intubated and bagged with one hundred percent oxygen . . .”
“No quiera morir . . .”
“Pulse ox ninety-eight. Heart rate’s one-fifty.”
A high whine of machinery. “The mother’s bleeding out.”
“Massage her uterus. Hard. Harder!”
“Hang pitocin, and two units of O neg on the rapid infuser. IV fluids wide.”
“Where the hell is OB? Put in a central line.”
Annalise grabbed the nurse’s collar and pulled her close. “I don’t want to die.”
“You’re not going to,” the woman said.
“One more push, Annalise. One good one.”
She clenched her teeth, pressed down, and suddenly her son came into the world.
“The baby’s abdomen is filling with air.”
“You intubated the esophagus. Do it again.”
“Pulse ox sixty-three. Heart rate seventy.”
“Put in an umbilical line. Give him one cc of atropine, point three of epi, and three milliequivalents of bicarb.”
“Draw a blood gas.”
“She’s coding!”
“He’s in v-fib!”
Groggy, Annalise looked down at the healthy bundle in her arms and clutched him tightly.
On the other side of the curtain, two separate wars were being fought. One was to save the life of a woman who’d been beaten to near death by her husband. The other was to allow her child to have any kind of a life at all. From time to time, the curtain billowed in toward Annalise, the frenzy spilling into the limits of her own space.
She could identify two voices now, the doctor taking care of Mrs. Velasquez, and the doctor taking care of the woman’s newborn.
“Starting chest compressions.”
“Charge the paddles to three hundred fifty watts . . . intubate her!”
Thump, thump, thump—the sound of electricity jolting to jump-start a body.
“Give her another one mil of epi.”
“Give him another point three of epi.”
Thump.
“Asystole.”
And a moment later, “Asystole.”
Then the two doctors, speaking simultaneously. “Call it.”
Annalise should have been moved up to OB but had been forgotten because of the crisis next door. Now, the voices that had swelled the curtain a half hour before were silent.
The clock on the wall ticked, an animal grinding its teeth. Very slowly, Annalise slipped off the delivery table, walked to the bassinet, and gathered her son into the crook of her arm. She was sore and sagging, but she had never felt so strong. She pulled back the corner of the drape that separated her from the body of Maria Velasquez.
The woman lay on her back, a tube rising out of her throat like a periscope. Her face and neck were jeweled with cuts and bruises. Annalise slipped down the blue sheet covering her chest, saw the belt of purple welts along the still-swollen abdomen.
Two hours ago, the worst thing in the world she could imagine was coming to a place like St. Vincent’s to deliver a baby. She had cried because the labor room didn’t have wallpaper, because the doctor who’d been the first person to touch her son had not been raised in a family that had come over on the Mayflower. She had believed that her child needed to start his life in a certain manner, so that he could grow up to be just like Annalise.
God help him.
Maria Velasquez lived in a city Annalise did not know, one where women were raped and beaten, then left to sink in their own sorrow. Annalise’s friends worried about how to seat guests at dinner, how to turn down invitations politely; how to make sure the maid wasn’t drinking on the job. If they ever noticed the others struggling to survive, they quickly turned away . . . because what you did not see, you did not have to account for.
Annalise, on the other hand, had heard this woman die.
The baby’s body lay in a bassinet. He was the size of a half loaf of bread, his bones light as a bird’s and stretched with thin skin. Juggling the weight of her own son, Annalise lifted Maria Velasquez’s stillborn boy into her other arm.
What difference did it make if you were born in Lenox Hill, in St. Vincent’s, in a tree? She glanced at Maria Velasquez’s battered body and swallowed hard. What it came down to was simply that you had a chance to love and be loved.
She jumped when a nurse walked in. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“I . . . I just . . .” Annalise took a deep breath, and raised her chin. “I just thought someone should hold him, once.”
The nurse, who had been ready to castigate her, stilled. Without saying a word, she nodded at Annalise and then stepped away, closing the curtain behind her.
The nurse who had been Annalise’s labor coach came into her cubicle, accompanied by Joseph, who looked frantic and overwhelmed by his surroundings. She left them to their privacy, as Joseph approached Annalise and stared at the wonder of his son. The baby yawned and pushed a fist out of his blanket. “Oh, Annie,” he whispered. “I was too late.”
“No, you were just in time.”
“But you had to come here.” When Annalise didn’t answer, Joseph shook his head, mesmerized. “Isn’t he something.”
“I think he just might be,” Annalise answered.
Her husband sat down beside her. “We’ll get you out of here right away,” he assured her. “I already called Dr. Post at Lenox Hill, and he—”
“Actually, I’d like to stay at St. Vincent’s,” she said, interrupting. “Dr. Ho was quite good.”
Joseph opened his mouth to argue but took one look at the expression on his wife’s face and nodded. He stroked the infant’s head. “Does he . . . have a name?”
Él se llamo Joaquim.
“I think,” Annalise said, “I’d like to call him Jack.”
July 3, 2000
Carroll County Jail
Have you ever really held the hand of someone you love? Not just in passing, a loose link between you—but truly clasped, with the pulses of your wrists beating together and your fingers mapping the knuckles and nails like a cartographer learning a country by heart?
Addie reached for Jack as if she were drowning, their hands joined across the old table in the basement of the Carroll County Jail. She touched him with all the emotion she’d kept curtained inside her since her testimony. She touched him a thousand times, for every moment that she’d wanted to walk up to Jack at the defense table and lay a hand on his shoulder, press a kiss to his neck. She touched him and found that even something as innocent as the lacing of their fingers could raise all the hairs on the back of her neck and make her blood beat faster.
And she was so fascinated by the way they fit together—Jack’s palm big enough to swallow hers whole—that Addie did not realize the man she was clutching was someone who desperately wanted to get away.
It was when he gently pried her fingers from his that Addie looked up. “We have to talk,” Jack said softly.
Addie stared at his face. The stubborn jaw, the soft mouth, the fine golden stubble that covered his cheeks like glitter flung by a fairy—they were all still there. But his eyes—flat and blue-black—there was simply nothing behind them.
“I think it’s going pretty well, don’t you?” she said, smiling so hard her cheekbones hurt. She was lying, and they both knew it. Hanging over them like an impending storm was the unspoken memory of Matt Houlihan reading that former conviction. If that thundercloud had followed Jack and Addie home, every single one of the jurors was being dogged by it, too.
“Jack,” Addie said, rolling his name around her mouth like a butterscotch candy. “If this is about my testimony—I’m so sorry. I never wanted to be subpoenaed.” She closed her eyes. “I should have just lied for you when Charlie came that morning. That’s it, isn’t it? If I’d lied, you’d have an alibi. You’d be free now.”
“Addie,” Jack said, his voice painfully ev
en. “I’m not in love with you.”
You can be strapped to the most stable chair and still feel the world give way beneath you. Addie’s hands clutched the edge of the table. Where was the man who had told her she was the bright light getting him through this misery? At what ordinary moment between yesterday and now had everything changed?
Sometimes, when I think I’m going to lose it in here, I just imagine that I’m already out.
Tears arrowed at the backs of her eyes, small, hot darts. “But you said—”
“I say a lot of things,” Jack said, bitterly. “But you heard the prosecutor. They’re not always true.”
She turned her head toward the one window in the basement, a tiny square of dirty glass set nearly flush to the ceiling. She kept her eyes wide, so that she wouldn’t cry in front of Jack. And maybe because of that, she had a clear vision of her father, years ago, after her mother had died. She’d found him one day in his living room, sober for once, surrounded by papers and mementos. He’d handed her a box of knickknacks. “This is my will. And some . . . some stuff you ought to have. The first letter I ever wrote your mom, my medal from the Korean War.”
Addie had leafed through the box, her fingers going cold and stiff. These were the items you collected when someone died—as her father had done after they buried her mother, as Addie had only recently done with Chloe’s things. You pulled the loose threads of their lives free, so that you could move on. Addie watched her father place his fancy gold watch into the box and understood: He was putting his affairs in order, so that she wouldn’t have to.
“You’re not dying,” Addie had told him, thrusting the box back into his hands.
Roy had sighed. “But I might as well be.”
Now, Addie turned slowly toward Jack. He had no will to offer her, no medals, no memories. But he was giving her back her heart, so that when he left her life, there would be no strings attached.
