Jodi Picoult - House Rules

Henry is waiting for me when I get off my plane. I walk toward him, stopping an awkward foot away. I lean forward to embrace him just as he turns away toward the arrivals monitor, which means I close my arms around nothing but air. “He should be landing in twenty minutes,” Henry says.

“Good,” I reply. “That’s good.” I look at him. “I’m really sorry about this.”

Henry stares down the empty corridor past the security barrier. “You going to tell me what’s going on, Emma?”

For five minutes, I tell him about Jess Ogilvy, about the murder charge. I tell him I’m sure Theo’s escape had something to do with all of this. When I’m finished, I listen to the call for a passenger about to miss his plane and then muster the courage to meet Henry’s gaze. “Jacob’s on trial for murder ?” he says, his voice shaky. “And you didn’t mention it?”

“What would you have done?” I challenge. “Fly back to Vermont to be our white knight? Somehow I doubt that, Henry.”

“And when this hits the papers out here? How am I supposed to explain to my seven- and four-year-old that their half brother is a murderer?”

I reel back as if he’s slapped me. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t just say that,” I murmur. “And if you knew your son at all, if you had ever actually spent time with Jacob instead of just sending a check every month to ease your conscience, you’d know that he’s innocent.”

A muscle tics in Henry’s jaw. “Do you remember what happened on our fifth anniversary?”

That time of my life, when we were trying every intervention and therapy possible to get Jacob to connect with the world again, is a dark blur.

“We were out at a movie-the first time we’d been alone in months. And suddenly this strange man walks down the aisle and crouches down and starts talking to you, and a minute later you walk out with him. I sat there thinking, Who the hell is this guy and where is my wife going with him? And I followed you into the lobby. Turned out that he was the father of our babysitter-and an EMT. Livvie had called him in a panic because Theo was bleeding like crazy. He went to the house, put a butterfly bandage on Theo, and came and got us.”

I stare at Henry. “I don’t remember any of this.”

“Theo wound up getting ten stitches in his eyebrow,” Henry says. “Because Jacob had gotten angry and knocked over his high chair when Livvie had her back turned.”

Now it is coming back to me-the panic we came home to with Jacob in total meltdown mode and Theo hysterically crying, a knot the size of his tiny fist rising over his left eye. Henry making the hospital run while I was left behind to calm Jacob. I wonder how it is possible to put something so far out of one’s mind, to rewrite history. “I can’t believe I forgot that,” I say softly.

Henry glances away from me. “You were always good at seeing what you wanted to see,” he answers.

And then suddenly, we both notice our son.

“What the hell?” Theo says.

I fold my arms. “My thoughts exactly,” I reply.

It is a strange thing to be in an airport and to not be celebrating a reunion or a departure. It is even stranger to sit in the backseat of Henry’s car and listen to him making small talk with Theo as if Theo isn’t smart enough to know that, at some point, a colossal bomb is going to drop.

When Theo went into the restroom at the airport, Henry came up with a plan. “Let me talk to him,” Henry said.

“He won’t listen to you.”

“Well, he ran away from you, ” Henry pointed out.

The freeways here are white as bone and clean. There’s no cracking from frost heaves, like in Vermont. Shiny and happy and new. No wonder Henry likes it. “Theo,” I say, “what were you thinking ?”

He twists in his seat. “I wanted to talk to Dad.”

In the rearview mirror, Henry meets my gaze. I told you so.

“Haven’t you ever heard of a phone?”

But before he can answer, Henry pulls into a driveway. His house has Spanish tiles on its roof and a plastic, child-size princess castle on the front lawn. That makes my chest tighten.

Meg, Henry’s new wife, bursts out the front door. “Oh, thank goodness,” she says, clasping her hands together when she sees Theo in the front seat. She is a tiny blonde with überwhite teeth and a shiny ponytail. Henry approaches her, leaving me to wrestle my own bag out of the trunk. Standing beside each other, with their blue eyes and golden hair, they look like a poster for the quintessential Aryan family. “Theo,” Henry says, all fatherly, too little too late, “let’s go into the library and talk a little.”

I want to hate Meg, but I can’t. She immediately surprises me by linking her arm through mine and leading me into the house. “You must have been worried sick,” she says. “I know I would have been.”

She offers me coffee and a slice of lemon-poppy seed cake while Theo and Henry vanish deeper into the house. I wonder if the cake was just lying around, if she is the sort of mother who makes sure there is a homemade baked good at all times on the kitchen counter, or if she’d popped it in the oven after Henry told her I was coming. I’m not quite sure which image upsets me more.

Her daughters (well, Henry’s, too) dart across the living room threshold to get a peek at me. They are sprites, little towheaded fairies. One of them wears a pink sequined tutu. “Girls,” Meg says. “Come on in here and meet Ms. Hunt.”

“Emma,” I say automatically. I wonder what these little girls make of a stranger who has the same last name they do. I wonder if Henry has ever explained me to them.

“This is Isabella,” Meg says, lightly touching the taller girl on the crown of her head. “And this is Grace.”

“Hello,” they chime, and Grace pops her thumb in her mouth.

“Hi,” I answer, and then I don’t know what to say.

Did Henry feel there was some balance to his second life, having two girls instead of two boys? Grace tugs on her mother’s shirt and whispers in her ear. “She wants to show you what she does in ballet,” Meg says apologetically.

“Oh, I love ballet,” I say.

Grace puts her arms in the air and touches her fingertips together. She begins to turn in a circle, wobbling only a little. I clap for her.

Jacob used to spin. It was one of his stims, when he was little. He’d go faster and faster until he crashed into something, usually a vase or another breakable item.

I already know it’s not true by looking at her, but if little Grace turned out to be autistic, would Henry run away again?

As if I’ve conjured him, Henry ducks into the room. “You were right,” he says to me. “He won’t talk without you there.” Whatever small satisfaction this gives me vanishes as Grace sees her father. She stops spinning and hurls herself at him with the force of a tropical storm. He lifts her into his arms and then tousles Isabella’s hair. There is an ease to Henry that I have not seen in him before, a quiet confidence that this is where he belongs. I can see it etched on his face, in the tiny lines that now fan out from his eyes, lines that were not there when I loved him.

Meg takes Grace on her hip and grasps Isabella’s hand. “Let’s give Daddy a chance to talk to his friends,” she says.

Friends. I loved him; I created children with him, and this is what we have been demoted to.

I follow Henry down a corridor to the room where Theo is waiting. “Your family,” I say. “They’re perfect.” But what I’m really saying is, Why didn’t I deserve this with you?

“Well, Mr. Bond,” the judge says. “Here you are again.”