Read Online Vanishing Acts by Jodi Picoult - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Jodi Picoult
Tags: Fiction, Psychological, Family Life, Fathers and daughters, Arizona, Young Women, New Hampshire, Parental kidnapping, Adult children of divorced parents, Divorced fathers
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and I lined a matchbox with tissues and held a private burial. “Wilbur,” you intoned, “lived a short life, full of danger.” Not unlike your own.
You cried for a week over that damn bird–the first time that finding something, for you, became equated to loss. That was when I realized that I could take you to the far ends of the earth, but! couldn't keep your mother from surfacing. Elise was in your blood; Elise was printed upon you. And, like Elise, I was terrified that if you grew up able to find whatever it was that hollowed out a person's heart, you would wind up feeling just as empty as she had.
God forbid, maybe you'd try to fill yourself the same way.
I made a few phone calls and took you to meet a policeman who happened to be the son of one of the seniors who played mah-jongg every Tuesday at the center. Art was a state trooper who had a German shepherd named Jerry Lee, known for his search-and-rescue ability. He let you play hide and seek with Jerry Lee, who always won. By the time we drove home that day, you knew what you wanted to be when you grew up.
There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found. The way I figured, it was my job to make sure that you were focused correctly. In high school, I got you an apprenticeship with a local vet. In college, you adopted a hound from a shelter, and trained it for search and rescue. As a senior, you made your first big rescue: a little boy who had wandered off at a county fair. You began to get a reputation for hard work and diligence; you were called in to work with K-9 units all over New Hampshire and Vermont. I have heard you tell the story of how you got started in this business over and over to reporters and to grateful victims; you always say it began when you found a bird.
I'm not even sure you remember anymore that it was dead.
Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for in their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watches from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We're hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.
Last night, before my arraignment, I started shaking. Not shivering, but the palsied kind of seizure that even made the guards bring me to the infirmary for a free nurse's check, not that she could find anything wrong. It was the sort of tremor that astronauts get when they come back to earth, that a hiker suffers after coming back down from the crest of Kilimanjaro–a bone-deep chill that has nothing to do with cold and everything with being moved from one world to another. It continued the whole time the guards snapped on handcuffs and led me underground to the court building next door; it continued while I waited in the sheriff's department cell there; it continued until the moment I saw you in the courtroom and called your name.
You couldn't look me in the eye, and that was the first time I ever had doubts about what I did.
“Hey,” my cellmate says. “You gonna eat your bread?” A twenty-year-old awaiting trial for armed robbery, my cellmate's name is Monteverde Jones. I toss him my bread, which is stale enough to be classified as a weapon. We are fed in our cells, given an unappetizing array of blots on a plastic tray that blend together like Venn diagrams.
Because Monte has been here longer than I have, he gets to eat on the bunk. Me, I have to sit on the toilet or the floor. Everything is based on hierarchy and privilege; in this, jail's a lot like the real world. “So,” he says, “what do
You cried for a week over that damn bird–the first time that finding something, for you, became equated to loss. That was when I realized that I could take you to the far ends of the earth, but! couldn't keep your mother from surfacing. Elise was in your blood; Elise was printed upon you. And, like Elise, I was terrified that if you grew up able to find whatever it was that hollowed out a person's heart, you would wind up feeling just as empty as she had.
God forbid, maybe you'd try to fill yourself the same way.
I made a few phone calls and took you to meet a policeman who happened to be the son of one of the seniors who played mah-jongg every Tuesday at the center. Art was a state trooper who had a German shepherd named Jerry Lee, known for his search-and-rescue ability. He let you play hide and seek with Jerry Lee, who always won. By the time we drove home that day, you knew what you wanted to be when you grew up.
There is a fine line between seeing something that's lost as missing, and seeing it as something that might be found. The way I figured, it was my job to make sure that you were focused correctly. In high school, I got you an apprenticeship with a local vet. In college, you adopted a hound from a shelter, and trained it for search and rescue. As a senior, you made your first big rescue: a little boy who had wandered off at a county fair. You began to get a reputation for hard work and diligence; you were called in to work with K-9 units all over New Hampshire and Vermont. I have heard you tell the story of how you got started in this business over and over to reporters and to grateful victims; you always say it began when you found a bird.
I'm not even sure you remember anymore that it was dead.
Sometimes parents don't find what they're looking for in their child, so they plant seeds for what they'd like to grow there instead. I've witnessed this with the former hockey player who takes his son out to skate before he can even walk. Or in the mother who gave up her ballet dreams when she married, but now scrapes her daughter's hair into a bun and watches from the wings of the stage. We are not, as you'd expect, orchestrating their lives; we are not even trying for a second chance. We're hoping that if this one thing takes root, it might take up enough light and space to keep something else from developing in our children: the disappointment we've already lived.
Last night, before my arraignment, I started shaking. Not shivering, but the palsied kind of seizure that even made the guards bring me to the infirmary for a free nurse's check, not that she could find anything wrong. It was the sort of tremor that astronauts get when they come back to earth, that a hiker suffers after coming back down from the crest of Kilimanjaro–a bone-deep chill that has nothing to do with cold and everything with being moved from one world to another. It continued the whole time the guards snapped on handcuffs and led me underground to the court building next door; it continued while I waited in the sheriff's department cell there; it continued until the moment I saw you in the courtroom and called your name.
You couldn't look me in the eye, and that was the first time I ever had doubts about what I did.
“Hey,” my cellmate says. “You gonna eat your bread?” A twenty-year-old awaiting trial for armed robbery, my cellmate's name is Monteverde Jones. I toss him my bread, which is stale enough to be classified as a weapon. We are fed in our cells, given an unappetizing array of blots on a plastic tray that blend together like Venn diagrams.
Because Monte has been here longer than I have, he gets to eat on the bunk. Me, I have to sit on the toilet or the floor. Everything is based on hierarchy and privilege; in this, jail's a lot like the real world. “So,” he says, “what do
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