by Jodi Picoult
"My car was ready two weeks ago."
"I have to tell you something, too." His teeth flashed in the darkness. "Your car would have been ready five weeks ago, but I paid the mechanic to say the part was delayed."
Selena came up on an elbow. "You'd go to all that trouble to keep from losing your best investigator?"
Jordan leaned forward and kissed her lightly. "No," he said. "I'd go to all that trouble to keep from losing you."
They held hands across a cafeteria table, surrounded by men who had murdered others in fights and beaten their wives and burned houses to the ground with people still inside. A correctional officer stood guard. When Addie had first embraced Jack, the CO had tapped her on the shoulder and politely explained that sort of touching was not allowed.
Addie looked at the couple beside them. The man had a snake tattooed around his neck. His visitor was a woman with spiked green hair, an eyebrow ring, and a dog collar.
In fifteen hours, the trial would begin.
"Are you nervous?" she asked.
"No. I figure the sooner we get this over with, the sooner I'll be with you."
Addie bent her head. "That," she said, "will be wonderful."
"I've been thinking about it, you know. We'll go to the Carribbean. June is the rainy season, but I figure we could both use a vacation. I want to be outside all day long. I want to sleep outside. Hell, maybe we won't even have to pay for a room."
Addie choked on a laugh, one that rounded neatly into a little sob. She looked up at Jack and tried to smile.
"If you're that upset, sweetheart, I'll get us a hotel." He spoke softly, stroking her palm with his thumb.
A deep, shuddering breath wracked Addie. "What if--"
"Ah, Addie, don't." Jack put his finger to her lips a moment before the guard frowned at the contact. "Sometimes, when I think I'm going to lose it in here, I just imagine that I'm already out. I think about what we're going to do for the weekend, and whether the diner's going to be busy that day, and how all I want is for it to be nighttime so that I can sleep holding onto you. I think about us, six months from now. Six years from now. Until I can remember what it's like to have a normal life back."
"A normal life," Addie repeated, with longing.
"We can even practice," Jack said earnestly. He cleared his throat. "Hi, honey. What did you do today?"
Addie stared into his eyes, those beautiful ocean eyes. She thought of Meg. And then she imagined a beach as wide as the world, a froth of waves that raced over her feet and Jack's as they watched the sun seal another absolutely ordinary day. "Nothing," she said, smiling hard from the bottom of her heart. "Nothing at all."
1979
New York City
Jack and J. T. and Ralph hunkered down in the crawl space beneath the staircase that led up to the second floor of the St. Bride penthouse, a spot usually reserved for the vacuum but that worked equally as well as a clandestine spot for ten-year-old boys trading baseball cards and secrets. "I'll give you Keith Hernandez for Luis Alvarado," J. T. said.
"You think I'm a moron?" Ralph scowled. "Hernandez is worth three White Sox."
"I've got Bruce Sutter," Jack said. "I'll trade him for Hernandez."
"Cool."
The boys swapped cards, turning them over to read the stats, a faint bubble-gum smell enveloping the deal.
"I've got a Don Baylor," J. T. said.
"California sucks this year."
Ralph snickered. "I wouldn't use a Baylor card to scrape dog shit off the street."
"He's an MVP, you jerk." But J. T. shuffled the card to the back of his shoebox all the same.
Suddenly, Ralph held up the crown jewel of baseball cards that summer, Willie Stargell from the Pittsburgh Pirates. "I'm willing to trade. For the right price."
Jack riffled through the heap of cards he'd collected. Ralph wouldn't take a Palmer or a Guidry, the two best players Jack had. There was only one other card he could even think of trading for equal value, although the player was just a really crappy outfielder for the Chicago White Sox who couldn't have hit a curveball if it were hanging dead still on a string in front of him. What made Jack's card the envy of every other young collector was the name on it.
"Holy shit," J. T. breathed. "Jack's got Rusty Kuntz."
The three boys dissolved into fits of laughter. "Man, you have Kuntz," Ralph said.
"I need Kuntz!" J. T. cried, and then rolled on the floor, giggling so hard he couldn't catch his breath.
Ralph held out his hand for the card. "Bet it's easy to give up Kuntz when you can get the real thing."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
Ralph pursed his lips, kissing at the air. "Oh, Jack," he said in a falsetto. "You are the awesomest boy in the whole school!"
J. T. snorted. "Rachel Covington might as well take out a billboard at Yankee Stadium, she's so in love with you."
"She is not," Jack scowled. "She's just a girl." Okay, so she hung around him a lot since he'd gotten an older kid to stop spreading the rumor that she'd gotten her period when she was only eight years old. So what if she had big boobs stuffed into a training bra? All the girls were gonna, one day, and as far as Jack could see, they were an incredible nuisance, probably slapping you under the chin when you were trying to run for speed or distance.
"Jack and Rachel sitting in a tree ..." Ralph sang out.
"Shut up!" Jack reached over and snatched his Kuntz card out of Ralph's hand.
"Hey!"
"I don't like Rachel Covington, okay?"
"Whatever," Ralph muttered.
Suddenly the small door to the alcove opened. Corazon, the cook and housekeeper, frowned at them, fists planted on her thick hips. "Out," she ordered. "I need to clean."
The boys scrambled from their hiding place with their boxes of baseball cards, J. T. and Ralph elbowing each other as they walked down the hall. "I don't have a girlfriend," Jack yelled after them, squeezing Rusty Kuntz's card so hard it folded down the middle.
It turned out that Corazon wasn't just doing her routine sweep and vacuum of the penthouse. Jack's mother had called and told her to get ready for a guest. Jack sat on a kitchen stool, watching the Mexican woman slap at a lump of dough on the butcher block. He kept looking at it and wishing it was Ralph's face.
"You want some bread so badly," Cora said, "you might try the loaf that's already been cooked."
"I don't want bread."
"No? Then how come you stare like a starving man?"
Jack set his elbows on the counter. "Just wishing I had something to beat up, too."
Cora pushed the dough across the table. "Be my guest." She wiped her palms on her apron, leaving behind daffodil handprints. "J. T. and Ralph left in some hurry today."
Jack shrugged. "They're losers."
"Oh, si? Just this morning you couldn't even sit through breakfast, waiting for them to show up." She covered Jack's hands and molded the dough along with him, giving him a rhythm. "You have a fight?"
"I don't like Rachel Covington. You know, I mean, I like her ... I just don't like her. I don't like any girl."
"They were teasing you about that?"
"All's I did was stick up for her because she was too scared to do it for herself."
"Then it's no wonder she's fallen for you, querido."
Jack leaned his cheek against his hand, heedless of the mark of flour he left behind. "Cora, what makes girls like that? Why can't they just say thanks and get out of your hair?"
Corazon smiled at him. "You know how your mother keeps her Christmas card list? How she sends to people who send her one, and that list gets longer and longer every year?"
"Yeah," Jack muttered. "I have to lick the damn stamps."
"Watch your mouth," Cora reprimanded. "See, love's like that. Once you give it, even by accident, you're on that list forever."
"What if I don't want to send Rachel a card back?"
The housekeeper laughed. "You never know. Maybe she'll keep them coming an
yway. But maybe one day she'll go through that list and cross you off."
"I don't want her to be in love with me," Jack muttered. "I'm gonna tell her to stop."
"You can tell her, but that doesn't mean it's gonna change anything."
Jack punched at the dough. "Why not?"
"Because it's her heart," she said, "and she gets to choose where it goes."
It was not unusual for Annalise St. Bride to come home with a mission in tow, one wearing spandex and high heels, who'd been stolen away from a pimp on Seventh Avenue. Often the woman would arrive at the penthouse sporting a split lip or a broken nose, gathering her shame as tightly around her as the cut-rate chenille coat she wore. She'd stay in the chrysalis of St. Bride House for a week or so, and then one day she would emerge from the guest room wearing Levi's and an oxford-cloth shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail away from her healing face, which was scrubbed free of makeup. Jack was always amazed at the transformation. They went in looking like old ladies; they came out as teenagers.
They were prostitutes. Jack wasn't supposed to know that, because he was only ten and his parents liked to pretend things like that didn't exist in New York City, along with muggings and rats in Central Park and a Democratic mayor. And he wasn't allowed into their rooms. His mother went in and out like Florence Nightingale, carrying soup and clothing and books by women like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, writers Jack's dad once described as chicks who wanted dicks. But even if Jack was supposed to pretend that the whore upstairs was no different than a visiting cousin, and even if his dad tended to simply look the other way when his mom went off on a tear like this, he knew the truth ... and somehow it always left him feeling a little sick to his stomach.
Like always, once the penthouse was clean and the bread in the oven, an air of anticipation spread until it filled every corner. Jack sat on the stairs, idly leafing through his baseball cards but really just waiting to see who it was this time around.
At three-forty-five, his mother came home. And the woman she brought with her wasn't a woman at all.
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 mud. 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.
