Authors: Jodi Picoult
Which is why we find ourselves in the grocery store on a Saturday afternoon in March, reading the labels on salad dressing, when Max walks up to me. I hug him, a reflexive habit—and try not to look at his black suit and skinny tie. He looks like the kid from high school who thought if he dressed like the cool guys he’d become one by default, except it never really works that way.
I can feel Vanessa, burning behind me, waiting for an introduction. But the words get stuck in my throat.
Max holds out his hand; Vanessa shakes it. This is hell, I think. The man I used to love and the woman I cannot live without. I know what Vanessa wants, what she expects. For all the protesting I’ve done to convince her that I’m not leaving her anytime soon, here is the perfect proof. All I have to do is tell Max that, now, Vanessa and I are a couple.
So why can’t I?
Vanessa stares at me, and then her mouth tightens. “I’m just going to grab the produce,” she says, but as she moves away, I feel something snap inside my chest, like a string too tightly wound.
Max’s friend appears, a clone in a similar suit, with an Adam’s apple that bobs like the plumb bubble in a level. I mumble through a hello, but I am trying to see over his shoulder to the root vegetable bins, where Vanessa stands with her back to me. Then I hear Max inviting me to his church.
Fat chance,
I think. I imagine showing up in front of that homophobic group and holding hands with Vanessa. We’d probably be tarred and feathered. I mumble a response and make a beeline for her.
“You’re pissed at me,” I say.
Vanessa is squeezing mangoes. “Not pissed. Just kind of disappointed.” She looks up. “Why didn’t you tell him?”
“Why did I
have
to? It’s nobody’s business but yours and mine. I just met Max’s friend, and he didn’t say,
Oh, by the way, I’m straight.”
She sets down the fruit. “I am the last person in the world who wants to wave a banner or march in a Pride parade,” Vanessa says. “And I get that it’s not easy to tell someone you used to love that you love someone else. But when you
don’t
say it out loud, that’s when people fill in the silence with their own stupid assumptions. Don’t you believe that, if Max knew you were in a same-sex relationship, he might think twice before he pickets against gays again? Because all of a sudden it’s not some faceless queer in a crowd, Zoe, it’s someone he
knows.”
She looks away. “And me. When I see you working overtime to
not
call me your girlfriend, it makes me think that, no matter what you say to me, you’re lying. That you’re still looking for that escape hatch.”
“That’s not why I—”
“Then why not? Are you ashamed of me?” Vanessa asks. “Or are you ashamed of
yourself?”
I am standing in front of the cartons of strawberries. I once had a client who, before she was in hospice with ovarian cancer, had been a botanist. She couldn’t eat solid food anymore but told me she missed strawberries the most. They were the only fruit in the world with seeds on the outside, and because of this, they weren’t even really berries. They were part of the rose family, not that you could tell by looking.
“Meet me outside,” I say to Vanessa.
It is raining by the time I catch up to Max at his truck. “That woman I’m with. Vanessa,” I say. “She’s my new partner.”
Max looks at me like I’m crazy. Why would I run out in the rain to tell him this? Then he starts talking about my work, and I realize Vanessa is right—he’s misunderstood, because I haven’t told him the simple truth. “Vanessa is my
partner,”
I repeat. “We’re
together.”
I can tell the moment that he understands what I am saying. Not because of the invisible shutters that close over his eyes but because something bursts inside me, sweet and free. I don’t know why I thought I needed Max’s approval in the first place. I may not be the woman he thought he knew, but that goes both ways.
Before I know it I am headed back to Vanessa, who’s waiting with the grocery cart under the dry overhang of the store. I find myself running. “What did you say to him?” Vanessa asks.
“That I kind of want to be with you forever. Except forever’s not long enough,” I tell her. “I may be paraphrasing a bit.”
The expression on her face makes me feel the way I do when, after months of winter, I see that first crocus.
Finally.
We duck our heads in the rain and hurry to Vanessa’s car to load the groceries. As she puts the bags into the trunk, I watch two children pass by. They are preteens, a boy with peach fuzz on his face and a girl who is smacking her bubble gum. Their arms are locked around each other, one hand in the other’s back jeans pocket.
They don’t look old enough to watch PG movies, much less date, but no one even blinks as they walk by. “Hey,” I say, and Vanessa turns, still holding a bag of groceries. I put my hands on either side of her face and I kiss her, long and lovely and slow. I hope Max is watching. I hope the whole world is.
When most people hear screaming, they run in the opposite direction. Me, I grab my guitar and run toward it.
“Hi,” I say, bursting into one of the pediatric rooms at the hospital. “Can I help?”
The nurse, who is valiantly trying to take an IV out of a little boy, sighs with relief. “Be my guest, Zoe.”
The boy’s mother, who’s been holding him down while he struggles, nods at me. “All he knows is that it hurt going in, so he thinks it’s going to hurt coming out, too.”
I make eye contact with her son. “Hi,” I say. “I’m Zoe. What’s your name?”
His lower lip trembles. “C-Carl.”
“Carl, do you like to sing?”
Adamantly, he shakes his head. I glance around the room and notice a pile of Power Ranger figurines on the nightstand. Pulling my guitar in front of me, I begin to play the chords for “The Wheels on the Bus,” except I change the words. “The Power Rangers . . . they kick kick kick,” I sing. “Kick kick kick . . . kick kick kick. The Power Rangers they kick kick kick . . . all day long.”
Somewhere in the middle of the verse, he stops fighting and looks at me. “They also jump,” he says.
So the next verse we sing together. He spends ten minutes telling me everything else the Power Rangers do—the red one, and the pink one, and the black one. Then he looks up at the nurse. “When are you going to start?” Carl asks.
She grins. “I already finished.”
Carl’s mother looks up at me with utter relief. “Thank you
so
much . . .”
“No problem,” I say. “Carl, thanks for singing with me.”
I have no sooner exited the room and turned the corner than another nurse runs up to me. “I’ve been looking all over for you. It’s Marisa.”
She doesn’t have to tell me what’s the matter. Marisa is a three-year-old who’s been in and out of the hospital for a year with leukemia. Her father, a bluegrass musician, loves the idea of music therapy for his daughter, because he knows how much music can transport a person. Sometimes I go in when she is alert and happy, and we’ll do a sing-along of her favorites—“Old MacDonald” and “I’m a Little Teapot” and “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt” and “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean.” Sometimes I’ll go in during her chemo treatments, which make her feel like her hands are burning, and I’ll create songs about dipping her hands in ice water, about building igloos. Lately, though, Marisa’s been so ill that it’s been her family and me just singing for her, while she sleeps through a drugged haze.
“Her doctor says within the hour,” the nurse murmurs to me.
I quietly open the door to her room. The lights are off, and the gray light of late afternoon is caught in the folds of the hospital blanket that covers the little girl. She is still and pale, a pink knit cap covering her bald head, glittery silver nail polish on her fingers. I was here last week when Marisa’s big sister applied it. We sang “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” even though Marisa slept through it. Even though Marisa wasn’t conscious to know that someone cared enough to make her look pretty.
Marisa’s mother is crying softly in her husband’s arms. “Michael, Louisa,” I say. “I’m so sorry.”
They don’t answer, but they don’t have to. Illness can make family of strangers.
A hospital worker sits beside the bed, making a plaster cast of Marisa’s handprint before she passes, something that is offered to the parents of any terminal pediatric patient. The air feels heavier, as if we are all breathing in lead.
I step back, beside Marisa’s sister, Anya. She looks at me, her eyes red and swollen. I squeeze her hand, and then, in keeping with the mood, I begin to improvise on my guitar, instrumental riffs that are somber and in minor keys. Suddenly Michael turns to me. “We don’t want you playing that in here.”
Heat rushes to my cheeks. “I-I’m sorry. I’ll go.”
Michael shakes his head. “No—we want you to play the songs you always play for her. The ones she loves.”
So I do. I play “Old MacDonald,” and one by one, her family join in. The hospital worker presses Marisa’s hand to the plaster, wipes it clean.
When the machines connected to Marisa begin to flatline, I keep singing.
My Bonnie lies over the ocean. My Bonnie lies over the sea.
I watch Michael kneel down at his daughter’s bedside. Louisa curls her hand over Marisa’s. Anya jackknifes at the waist, an origami of grief.
My Bonnie lies over the ocean. Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.
There is a high-pitched hum, and then a nurse comes in to turn off the monitor, to rest her hand gently on Marisa’s forehead as she offers her condolences.
Bring back.
Bring back.
Bring back my Bonnie to me.
When I finish, the only sound in the room is the absence of a little girl.
“I’m so sorry,” I say again.
Michael holds out his hand. I do not know what he wants, but my body seems to. I hand him the pick I’ve been using to strum the guitar. He presses it into the plaster, just above the spread of Marisa’s handprint.
I hold myself together until I walk out of the room. Then I lean against the wall and slide down until I am sitting, sobbing. I cradle my guitar in my arms, the way Louisa was cradling the body of her daughter.
And then.
I hear a baby crying—that high, hitched shriek that grows more and more hysterical. Heavily I get to my feet and trace the sound two doors down from Marisa’s room, where an infant is being held down by her tearful mother and a nurse while a phlebotomist attempts to draw blood. They all look up when I enter. “Maybe I can help,” I say.
It has been a hellish, busy day at the hospital, and my drive home is consumed by the thought of a large glass of wine and collapsing on the couch, which is why I almost don’t pick up my cell phone when I see Max’s name flash onto the screen. But then I sigh and answer, and he asks me for just a few moments of my time. He doesn’t say what it’s for, but I’m assuming it has to do with paperwork being signed. There is, even after a divorce, no shortage of paperwork.
So I am completely surprised when he arrives with a woman in tow. And I’m even more shocked when I realize that the reason he’s brought her is to save me from the newly degenerate life I’m living.
I’d laugh, if I didn’t feel like crying quite so much. Today I watched a three-year-old die, but my ex-husband thinks that
I
am what’s wrong with this world. Maybe if his God wasn’t so busy paying attention to the lives of people like Vanessa and me, he could have saved Marisa.
But life isn’t fair. It’s why little girls don’t make it to their fourth birthdays. It’s why I lost so many babies. It’s why people like Max and my governor seem to think they can tell me who to love. If life isn’t fair, I don’t have to be, either. And so I channel all the anger I’m feeling at things I cannot change or control, and direct it at the man and woman sitting on the couch across from me.
I wonder if Pastor Clive, who runs the largest gay-bashing fraternity in these parts, has ever considered what Jesus would think of his tactics. Something tells me that a progressive rabbi who ministered to lepers and prostitutes and everyone else society had marginalized—someone who recommended treating people the way you wanted to be treated—wouldn’t exactly admire the Eternal Glory Church’s position. But I have to give them this: they are smooth. They have circular rhetoric for everything. I find myself fascinated by Pauline, who won’t even call herself a former lesbian, because she sees herself as so blatantly heterosexual now. Is it really that easy to believe what you tell yourself? If I had said, in the middle of all those failed pregnancies and miscarriages, that I was happy,
would
I have been?
If only the world were as simple as Pauline seems to think.
I am trying to trap her in her own circular logic when Vanessa gets home. I give her a kiss hello. I would have anyway, but I’m particularly happy that Pauline and Max have to watch. “This is Pauline, and of course you know Max,” I say. “They’re here to keep us from going to Hell.”
Vanessa looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Zoe, can we talk for a minute?” she says, and drags me into the kitchen. “I’m not going to tell you you can’t invite someone into our house,” she says, “but what the hell are you thinking?”
“Did you know you’re not a lesbian?” I say. “You just have a lesbian
problem.
”
“The only problem I have right now is getting these two people out of my living room,” Vanessa replies, but she follows me back inside. I see her getting more and more tightly wound as Pauline tells us that everyone gay has been sexually abused and that femininity means wearing panty hose and makeup. Finally, Vanessa reaches her limit. She throws Max and Pauline out and closes the door behind them. “I love you,” she tells me, “but if you ever have your ex-husband over again with that poor man’s Anita Bryant, I’d like enough advance notice to get away first. Three thousand miles or so.”
“Max said he had to talk to me,” I explain. “I figured it was about the divorce. I didn’t know he was bringing backup.”