Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

My first instinct is to panic-I’ve run out of air, after all. But then my pulse starts beating under my fingernails, in my throat, between my legs. It’s as if my heart has swelled to fill up all the space beneath my skin.

I could see why, for someone who’s lost so much, feeling this full could be a comfort.

When I can’t stand it anymore, I kick to the surface. Zoe splashes up beside me and treads water. “When I was little, I wanted to be a mermaid when I grew up,” she says. “I used to practice by tying my ankles together and swimming in the town pool.”

“What happened?”

“Well, obviously I didn’t become a mermaid.”

“Classic underachiever…”

“It’s never too late, right?” Zoe pulls herself out of the pool and sits on the edge.

“I just don’t know what the job market’s like these days for sirens at sea,” I say. “Now, on the other hand, vampires are absolutely to die for. There’s a huge demand for the undead.”

“It figures.” Zoe sighs. “Just when I’ve rejoined the world of the living.”

I stand up, and hold out a hand to pull Zoe to her feet. “Welcome back,” I say.

Because it is a YMCA, there’s no fancy juice bar, so instead we get coffee at a Dunkin’ Donuts, which are scattered so frequently through Wilmington that you can stand in the doorway of one and spit into the doorway of another. Zoe follows me in her car and parks in the spot beside me. “Quite the license plate,” she says, as I get out of the car.

Mine reads VS-66. It’s a Rhode Island thing to have a low-numbered license plate. There are people who bequeath two- and three-digit plates to relatives in their wills; at one point a former governor made fighting plate-number corruption part of his electoral platform. If you have your initials and a low number-like me-you’re probably a mob boss. I’m not a mob boss, but I know how to get things done. The day I had to register my new car, I brought each of the clerks a six-pack and asked them what they could do for me.

“Friends in high places,” I reply, as we go into the coffee shop. We both order vanilla lattes and sit at a table in the back of the store.

“What time do you have to be at work?” Zoe asks.

“Eight. You?”

“Same.” She takes a sip of her drink. “I’m at the hospital today.”

The mention of that place feels like a net thrown over us, a memory of her being whisked away by ambulance from her own party. I fiddle with the lid of my cup. Even though I counsel kids every day, I am uncomfortable here with her. I’m not sure why I asked her to grab a cup of coffee, in fact. It’s not like we know each other very well.

I had hired Zoe to work with an autistic boy several months ago. He had been in our school district for six years and had never, as far as I knew, said a word to a single teacher. It was his mother who’d heard about music therapy, and asked me to try to find someone local who could work with her son. I am the first to admit I wasn’t expecting much when I met Zoe. She looked a little misplaced, a seventies child who’d been dropped into the new millennium. But within a month, Zoe had the boy playing improvised symphonies with her. The parents thought Zoe was a genius, and my principal thought I was brilliant for finding her.

“Look,” I begin, after a long, weird silence, “I don’t really know what to say about the baby.”

Zoe looks up at me. “No one does.” She traces the edge of her fingertip around the plastic lid of the coffee cup. I think that is just going to be that, and I’m about to look at my wristwatch and exclaim over the time when she speaks again. “There was a death coordinator at the hospital,” she says. “She came into the room-afterward-and asked Max and me about where we wanted the body to go. If we wanted an autopsy. If we knew what kind of coffin we wanted. If we were going with cremation instead. She said we could take him home, too. Bury him, I don’t know, in the backyard.” Zoe looks up at me. “Sometimes I still have nightmares about that. About burying him, and then the snow melting in March, and I’d walk outside and find bones sitting there.” She blots her eyes with a napkin. “I’m sorry. I don’t talk about this. I’ve never talked about this.”

I know why she is opening up to me. It’s the same reason kids come into my office and confess that, after every meal, they make themselves throw up; or cut themselves in the privacy of the shower with a straight-edge razor blade. Sometimes it’s easier to speak to a stranger. The problem is that, once you turn your heart inside out for someone to see, the other person loses her anonymity.

Once, when Zoe was working with the autistic student, I’d observed their session. You have to come into music therapy at the place where the patient is, she explained, and when he arrived she didn’t make eye contact with him or force an interaction. Instead she took out her guitar and started playing and singing to herself. The boy sat down at the piano and began racing his hands over the keys in angry arpeggios. Gradually, every time he paused, she would play an equally forceful chord on her guitar. At first, he didn’t connect what she was doing, and then he began to pause more frequently, waiting for her to musically interact. I realized they were having a conversation: first his sentence, then hers. They just were speaking a different language.

Maybe that was all Zoe Baxter needed-a new method of communication. So she’d stop sinking to the bottoms of pools. So she’d smile.

Full disclosure here: I am the person who buys the broken piece of furniture, sure I can repair it. I used to have a rescued greyhound. I am a pathological fixer, which accounts for my career as a school counselor, since God knows it’s not about the money or job satisfaction. So it’s not really a surprise to me that my immediate instinct, with Zoe Baxter, is to put her back together again.

“Death coordinator,” I say, shaking my head. “And I thought my job sucked.”

Zoe glances up, and then a snort bubbles out of her. She covers her mouth with her hand.

“It’s okay to laugh,” I say gently.

“I feel like it’s not. Like it means none of this mattered to me.” She shakes her head, and suddenly her eyes are full of tears. “I’m sorry. You didn’t come to the Y this morning to listen to this. Some date I am.”

Immediately, I freeze. What does she know? What has she heard?

Why does it matter?

You’d think that by now, at age thirty-four, I’d be less worried about what people think. I suppose it’s just that when you’ve been burned before, you’re less likely to dip a toe into the lake of fire.

“It’s a good thing we ran into each other,” I hear myself say. “I was thinking of calling you.”

Really? I think, wondering where I’m going with this.

“Really?” Zoe replies.

“There’s a kid who’s been suffering from depression,” I say. “She’s been in and out of hospitals, and she’s failing school. I was going to ask you to come in and work with her.” In truth, I haven’t really been thinking of Zoe and her music therapy, at least not in conjunction with Lucy DuBois. But now that I’ve said it, it makes sense. Nothing else has worked for the girl, who’s attempted suicide twice. Her parents-so conservative that they wouldn’t let Lucy talk to a shrink-would just need to be convinced that music therapy isn’t modern voodoo.

Zoe hesitates, but I can tell she’s considering the offer. “Vanessa, I already told you that I don’t need to be rescued.”

“I’m not saving you,” I say. “I’m asking you to save someone else.”

At the time, I think I mean Lucy. I don’t realize I’m talking about me.