Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

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.”