Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

I find myself wondering, though. Who’s Jane? Alice? Are they friends of hers from college, or professional colleagues? Has she ever mentioned them to me?

Has she ever mentioned me to them?

Max is still listed. I wonder if I should call him. I wonder if Zoe would want me to.

Well, that’s not what she asked. Scrolling up, I find Dara listed, predictably, under MOM.

I dial, but it rolls right into voice mail, and I hang up. I just don’t think it’s right to leave an alarmist message on someone’s phone when she’s three thousand miles away and can’t really do anything to help Zoe right now. I’ll keep trying.

An hour and a half after Zoe is wheeled into surgery, she is brought back to the room. “She’ll be groggy for a while,” the nurse tells me. “But she’s going to be fine.”

I nod and watch the nurse close the door behind her. “Zoe?” I whisper.

She’s fast asleep, drugged, with her eyelashes casting blue shadows on her cheeks. Her hand lies uncurled on top of the cotton blanket, as if she is offering me something I cannot see. Another pint of blood hangs on an IV pole to her left, its contents snaking through the crazy straw tubing into the crook of her elbow.

The last time I was in a hospital, my mother was dying by degrees. Pancreatic cancer was the diagnosis, but it was no secret that her morphine doses grew higher and higher, until the sleep permanently outdistanced the pain. I know Zoe is not my mother, does not have the same illness, and yet there’s something about the way she is lying so still and silent in this bed that makes me feel like I’m living my life over again, reading a chapter that I wish had never been printed.

“Vanessa,” Zoe says, and I jump. She licks her lips, dry and white.

I reach for her hand. It’s the first time I’ve held Zoe’s hand, which feels small, birdlike. There are calluses on the tips of her fingers, from her guitar strings. “I tried your mother. I haven’t been able to reach her. I can leave a message, but I thought maybe-”

“I can’t…,” Zoe murmurs, interrupting.

“You can’t what?” I whisper, leaning closer, straining to hear.

“I can’t believe…”

There are so many things I can’t believe. That people deserve what they get, both bad and good. That one day I’ll live in a world where people are judged by what they do instead of who they are. That happy endings don’t have contingencies and conditions.

“I can’t believe,” Zoe repeats, her voice small enough to slip into my pocket, “that we wasted money on a hotel room…”

I look down at her, to see if she is kidding, but Zoe has already drifted back to sleep.

We’ve come a long way from the days when being gay and being an educator were incompatible, but there’s still a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy in place at my high school. I don’t actively hide my sexual orientation from my colleagues, but I don’t go out of my way to broadcast it, either. I am one of the two adult advisers for the students’ Rainbow Alliance, but the other one-Jack Kumanis-is as straight as they come. He’s got five kids, competes in triathlons, is prone to quoting Fight Club-and he happened to be raised by two moms.

Still, I’m careful. Although most school counselors would think nothing of closing their office doors for a private session with a student, I never do. My door is always just the tiniest bit ajar, so that there can’t be any doubt that whatever is happening is completely legitimate and interruptible.

My job runs the gamut from listening to students who just need to be heard through networking with admissions counselors at colleges so that they put our school on their virtual maps and supporting the kid too shy to find her own voice to logistically juggling the schedules of three hundred students who all want their first-choice English electives. Today I have on my couch Michaela Berrywick’s mother-parent of a ninth grader who just received a B plus in her social studies class. “Mrs. Berrywick,” I say, “this isn’t the end of the world.”

“I don’t think you understand, Ms. Shaw. Michaela has been dying to go to Harvard since she was tiny.”

Somehow I doubt that. No child comes out of the womb planning her high school résumé; that comes courtesy of zealous parenting. When I was in school, the term helicopter parent didn’t even exist. Now parents hover so much that their kids forget how to be kids.

“She can’t let a history teacher with a grudge against her make a permanent blot on her record,” Mrs. Berrywick stresses. “Michaela is more than willing to do any extra credit necessary to get Mr. Levine to reconsider his grading policy…”

“Harvard doesn’t care if Michaela got a B plus in social studies. Harvard wants to know that she spent her freshman year learning more about who she really is. Finding something that she liked doing.”

“Exactly,” Mrs. Berrywick says. “Which is why she joined the SAT study prep class.”

Michaela will not be taking the SATs for another two years. I sigh. “I’ll talk to Mr. Levine,” I say, “but I can’t make any promises.”

Mrs. Berrywick opens her purse and takes out a fifty-dollar bill. “I appreciate you seeing my side of things.”

“I can’t take your money. You can’t buy a better grade for Michaela-”

“I’m not,” the woman interrupts, smiling tightly. “Michaela earned the grade. I’m just… offering my gratitude.”

“Thanks,” I say, pressing the bill back at her. “But I truly can’t accept this.”

She looks me up and down. “No offense,” she whispers, conspiratorial, “but you could use a little wardrobe update.”

I’m thinking of going to Alec Levine and asking him to lower Michaela Berrywick’s grade when I hear someone crying in the outer office. “Excuse me,” I say, certain that it’s the tenth grader I saw an hour ago who was twelve days late for her period, and whose boyfriend had dumped her after they had sex. I grab my box of tissues-school counselors ought to do product endorsements for Kleenex-and walk out.

It’s not the tenth grader, though. It’s Zoe.

“Hey,” she says, and she tries to smile but fails miserably.

It’s been three days since our disastrous trip to Boston. After Zoe’s D & C, I finally got in touch with her mother, who flew home from her conference and met me at Zoe’s place. I’d called Zoe multiple times since then to see how she was feeling, until she finally told me that if I called again and asked her how she was feeling she’d hang up on me. In fact, today she was supposed to go back to work.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, as I lead her into my office.

And close the door.

She wipes her eyes with a tissue. “I don’t get it. I’m not a bad person,” Zoe says, her mouth twisting. “I try to be nice and I compost and I give money to homeless people. I say please and thank you and I floss every day and I volunteer in a soup kitchen at Thanksgiving. I work with people who have Alzheimer’s and depression and who are scarred and I try to give them something good in their day, one little thing to take with them.” She looks up at me. “And what do I get? Infertility. Miscarriages. A stillborn. A goddamned embolism. A divorce.”

“It’s not fair,” I say simply.

“Well, neither’s the phone call I got today. The doctor-the one from Brigham and Women’s? She said they did some tests.” Zoe shakes her head. “I have cancer. Endometrial cancer. And wait-I’m not finished yet-it’s a good thing. They caught it early enough, so I can have a little hysterectomy, and I’ll be just fine and dandy. Isn’t that just fabulous? Shouldn’t I be thanking my lucky stars? I mean, what’s next? An anvil falling on my head from the second story? My landlord evicting me?” She stands up, whirling in a circle. “You can come out now,” she shouts to the walls, the floor, the ceiling. “Whatever shitty version of Candid Camera this is; whoever decided I was this year’s Job-I’m done. I’m done. I’m-”