Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

My mother looks at me. “What you need,” she says, waving her hand dismissively at the bridal salon behind us, “is none of this. What you need is elegant and understated. Just like you and Vanessa.”

We try three stores before we find it-a simple ivory, knee-length sheath that doesn’t make me look like Cinderella. “I fell in love with your father during a fire drill,” my mother says idly, as she fastens the buttons on the back. “We were both working at a law firm-he was an accountant and I was a secretary-and they evacuated the building. We met next to a chain-link fence, and he offered me half a Twinkie. When the building got the all clear, we didn’t go back inside.” She shrugs. “At his funeral, a lot of my friends said it was just bad luck that I fell for a guy who died in his forties, but you know, I never saw it that way. I thought it was good luck. I mean, what if there hadn’t been a fire drill? Then we never would have met. And I’d much rather have had a few great years with him than none at all.” She turns me so that I am facing her. “Don’t let anyone tell you who you should and shouldn’t love, Zoe. Yes, it’s a gay wedding… but it’s your wedding.”

She turns me again so that I can see myself in the mirror. From the front, this could be any pretty, simple dress. But from the back, everything is different. A row of satin buttons gives way, at the waist, to a fan of pleats. It’s as if the dress is opening like a rose.

As if someone watching me walk away might think, That’s not what I expected.

I stare at myself. “What do you think?”

Maybe my mother is talking about the dress, and maybe she’s talking about my future. “I think,” she says, “you’ve found the perfect one.”

When Lucy walks into our conference room, I am already picking out a melody on my guitar and humming along. “Hey there,” I say, glancing up at her. Today her red hair is matted and twisted. “Trying for dreadlocks?”

She shrugs.

“I had a roommate in college who wanted dreads. She chickened out at the last minute because the only way to get rid of dreadlocks is to cut them all off.”

“Well, maybe I’ll just shave my head,” Lucy says.

“You could do that,” I agree, delighted that we are having what could almost be called a conversation. “You could be the next Sinéad O’Connor.”

“Who?”

I realize that, when the bald musician ripped up a picture of the Pope on Saturday Night Live in 1992, Lucy wasn’t even alive yet. “Or Melissa Etheridge. Did you see her perform at the Grammys when she was bald from chemo? She sang Janis Joplin.”

I take out my pick and begin the chord progressions for “Piece of My Heart.” From the corner of my eye, I watch Lucy staring at my fingers as they move up and down the frets. “I remember hearing that performance and thinking how brave she was, as a cancer survivor… and how it was the perfect song. Suddenly it wasn’t about a woman standing up to a guy-it was about beating anything that thought it could take you down.” I play a thread of melody and then sing the next line: “I’m gonna show you, baby, that a woman can be tough.”

With a strong chord I finish. “You know,” I say, as if this thought has just occurred to me, instead of being a lesson I’ve planned all along, “the thing about lyrics is that they work really well when they connect personally to the musician-or the listener.” I start playing the same melody again, but this time I improvise the words:

Didn’t you ever feel like you were all alone, well yeah,

And didn’t you ever feel that you were on your own.

Honey, you know you do.

Each time you tell yourself that you’re out of luck

You wonder how you ever, ever got so stuck.

I want you to listen, listen, listen, listen already

Gotta know that I am ready to help you, Lucy.

Gonna show you I am ready to help you, Lucy-

Just as I am beginning to really rock out, Lucy snorts. “That is the lamest crap I’ve ever heard,” she murmurs.

“Maybe you want to take a stab at it,” I suggest, and I put the guitar down and reach for a pad and a pen instead. I write out the lyrics mad lib style, leaving gaps and spaces where Lucy can instead substitute her own thoughts and feelings.

Sometimes you make me feel like.____________________

Don’t you know that I____________________?

I do a fill-in-the-blank pattern like this for the entire song, and then set it on the table between us. For a few minutes Lucy just ignores it, focusing instead on a tangled strand of her hair. And then, slowly, her hand reaches out and pulls the paper closer.

I try not to get too excited about the fact that she’s taken an active step toward participation. Instead, I pick up my guitar and pretend to tune it, even though I did this before Lucy arrived today.

When she writes, she hunches over the paper, as if she’s protecting a secret. She’s a lefty; I wonder why I haven’t noticed that before. Her hair falls over her face like a curtain. Each of her fingernails is painted a different color.

At one point, her sleeve inches up and I see the scars on her wrist.

Finally, she shoves the paper in my direction. “Great,” I say brightly. “Let’s take a look!”

In every blank, Lucy has written a string of expletives. She waits for me to look at her, and she raises her eyebrows and smirks.

“Well.” I pick up my guitar. “All right, then.” I put the paper on the table where I can see it, and I begin to sing, certain that if anyone would understand anger and anguish it would be Janis Joplin, and that she won’t be rolling over in her grave. “Sometimes you make me feel like a motherfucking asshole,” I sing, as loud as I can. “Don’t you know that I… cocksucker -” I break off, pointing to the page. “I can’t quite read that…”

Lucy blushes. “Uh… fucktard.”

“Don’t you know that I… cocksucker fucktard,” I sing.

The door to the hallway is wide open. A teacher walks by and does a double take.

“Come on, come on, come on, come on and take it… Take a motherfucking shithole asswipe…”

I sing as if this is any song, as if the swear words mean nothing to me. I sing my heart out. And eventually, by the time I finish the chorus, Lucy is staring at me with the ghost of a smile playing over her lips.

Unfortunately, there is also a small crowd of students standing in the open doorway, caught on the tightrope between shocked and delighted. When I finish, they start clapping and hollering, and then the bell rings.

“Guess that’s all the time we have,” I say. Lucy slings her backpack over her shoulder and, like usual, makes a beeline to get as far away from me as possible. I reach for my guitar case, resigned.

But at the threshold of the door, she turns around. “See you next week,” Lucy says, the first time she’s acknowledged to me that she has any plan to return.

I know it’s supposed to be good luck if it rains on your wedding, but I’m not sure what it means when there’s a blizzard. It is the day of my wedding to Vanessa, and the freak April snowstorm the weathermen have predicted has taken a turn for the worse. The Department of Transportation has even closed patches of the highway.

We came to Fall River the night before, to get everything sorted out, but the majority of our guests were driving up today for the evening ceremony. After all, Massachusetts is less than an hour away. But today, even that seems too far.

And now, if a weather disaster isn’t enough, there’s a plumbing snafu, too. The pipes burst at the restaurant where we were planning to hold our reception. I watch Vanessa try to calm down her friend Joel-a wedding planner who took on our nuptials as his gift to us. “They’ve got three inches of standing water,” Joel wails, sinking his head into his hands. “I think I’m hyperventilating.”