Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

So I do. I play “Old MacDonald,” and one by one, her family join in. The hospital worker presses Marisa’s hand to the plaster, wipes it clean.

When the machines connected to Marisa begin to flatline, I keep singing.

My Bonnie lies over the ocean. My Bonnie lies over the sea.

I watch Michael kneel down at his daughter’s bedside. Louisa curls her hand over Marisa’s. Anya jackknifes at the waist, an origami of grief.

My Bonnie lies over the ocean. Oh, bring back my Bonnie to me.

There is a high-pitched hum, and then a nurse comes in to turn off the monitor, to rest her hand gently on Marisa’s forehead as she offers her condolences.

Bring back.

Bring back.

Bring back my Bonnie to me.

When I finish, the only sound in the room is the absence of a little girl.

“I’m so sorry,” I say again.

Michael holds out his hand. I do not know what he wants, but my body seems to. I hand him the pick I’ve been using to strum the guitar. He presses it into the plaster, just above the spread of Marisa’s handprint.

I hold myself together until I walk out of the room. Then I lean against the wall and slide down until I am sitting, sobbing. I cradle my guitar in my arms, the way Louisa was cradling the body of her daughter.

And then.

I hear a baby crying-that high, hitched shriek that grows more and more hysterical. Heavily I get to my feet and trace the sound two doors down from Marisa’s room, where an infant is being held down by her tearful mother and a nurse while a phlebotomist attempts to draw blood. They all look up when I enter. “Maybe I can help,” I say.

It has been a hellish, busy day at the hospital, and my drive home is consumed by the thought of a large glass of wine and collapsing on the couch, which is why I almost don’t pick up my cell phone when I see Max’s name flash onto the screen. But then I sigh and answer, and he asks me for just a few moments of my time. He doesn’t say what it’s for, but I’m assuming it has to do with paperwork being signed. There is, even after a divorce, no shortage of paperwork.

So I am completely surprised when he arrives with a woman in tow. And I’m even more shocked when I realize that the reason he’s brought her is to save me from the newly degenerate life I’m living.

I’d laugh, if I didn’t feel like crying quite so much. Today I watched a three-year-old die, but my ex-husband thinks that I am what’s wrong with this world. Maybe if his God wasn’t so busy paying attention to the lives of people like Vanessa and me, he could have saved Marisa.

But life isn’t fair. It’s why little girls don’t make it to their fourth birthdays. It’s why I lost so many babies. It’s why people like Max and my governor seem to think they can tell me who to love. If life isn’t fair, I don’t have to be, either. And so I channel all the anger I’m feeling at things I cannot change or control, and direct it at the man and woman sitting on the couch across from me.

I wonder if Pastor Clive, who runs the largest gay-bashing fraternity in these parts, has ever considered what Jesus would think of his tactics. Something tells me that a progressive rabbi who ministered to lepers and prostitutes and everyone else society had marginalized-someone who recommended treating people the way you wanted to be treated-wouldn’t exactly admire the Eternal Glory Church’s position. But I have to give them this: they are smooth. They have circular rhetoric for everything. I find myself fascinated by Pauline, who won’t even call herself a former lesbian, because she sees herself as so blatantly heterosexual now. Is it really that easy to believe what you tell yourself? If I had said, in the middle of all those failed pregnancies and miscarriages, that I was happy, would I have been?

If only the world were as simple as Pauline seems to think.

I am trying to trap her in her own circular logic when Vanessa gets home. I give her a kiss hello. I would have anyway, but I’m particularly happy that Pauline and Max have to watch. “This is Pauline, and of course you know Max,” I say. “They’re here to keep us from going to Hell.”

Vanessa looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. “Zoe, can we talk for a minute?” she says, and drags me into the kitchen. “I’m not going to tell you you can’t invite someone into our house,” she says, “but what the hell are you thinking?”

“Did you know you’re not a lesbian?” I say. “You just have a lesbian problem. ”

“The only problem I have right now is getting these two people out of my living room,” Vanessa replies, but she follows me back inside. I see her getting more and more tightly wound as Pauline tells us that everyone gay has been sexually abused and that femininity means wearing panty hose and makeup. Finally, Vanessa reaches her limit. She throws Max and Pauline out and closes the door behind them. “I love you,” she tells me, “but if you ever have your ex-husband over again with that poor man’s Anita Bryant, I’d like enough advance notice to get away first. Three thousand miles or so.”

“Max said he had to talk to me,” I explain. “I figured it was about the divorce. I didn’t know he was bringing backup.”

Vanessa snorts. She steps out of her high heels. “I don’t even like the fact that they were on my couch, frankly. I feel like we ought to fumigate. Or hold an exorcism or something-”

“Vanessa!”

“I just didn’t expect to see him in my house. Especially tonight, when I…” Her voice trails off into silence.

“When you what?”

“Nothing.” She shakes her head.

“I guess you can’t blame them for wishing that, one day, we’ll wake up and realize how wrong we’ve been.”

“Can’t I?”

“No,” I say, “because that’s exactly what we wish about them.”

Vanessa offers me a half smile. “Leave it to you to find the only thing I have in common with Pastor Clive and his band of merry heterosexuals.”

She walks into the kitchen, and I assume she’s getting the wine out of the fridge. It is a tradition for us to unwind and tell each other about our days over a nice glass of Pinot Grigio. “I think we still have some of the Midlife Crisis,” I call out. It’s a wine from California that Vanessa and I bought just because of the name on the label. While I wait, I sit down on the couch, in the spot Max vacated. I flip through the channels on the television, pausing on Ellen.

Max and I sometimes watched her, when he got home from landscaping. He liked her Converse sneakers and her blue eyes. He used to say that he wouldn’t want to be stuck in a room with Oprah, because she was intimidating-but Ellen DeGeneres, she was someone you’d take out for a beer.

What I like about Ellen is that (yep) she’s gay, but that’s the least interesting thing about her. You remember her because she’s good at what she does on TV, not because she goes home to Portia de Rossi.

Vanessa walks into the living room, but instead of bringing a glass of wine, she is carrying two champagne flutes. “It’s Dom Pérignon,” she says. “Because you and I are celebrating.”

I look at the bubbles rising in the pale liquid. “I had a patient die today,” I blurt out. “She was only three.”

Vanessa sets both glasses on the floor and hugs me. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to.

You know someone’s right for you when the things they don’t have to say are even more important than the things they do.

Crying won’t bring Marisa back. It won’t stop people like Max and Pauline from judging me. But it makes me feel better, all the same. I stay this way for a while, with Vanessa stroking my hair, until I am dry-eyed and feeling only empty inside. Then I look up at her. “I’m sorry. You wanted to celebrate something…”