Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

3. Since the final judgment the defendant has engaged in a meretricious, deviant, homosexual lifestyle.

4. The defendant has contacted the clinic for possession of the pre-born children for the purpose of having them transferred to her lesbian lover.

“Zoe?”

Vanessa sounds like she is a thousand miles away. I hear her, but I cannot move.

“Zoe?” she says again, and she grabs the paper out of my hand. I open my mouth, but nothing comes out. There is no language to describe a betrayal this big.

Vanessa starts flipping through the pages so quickly I expect them to burst into flame. “What is this garbage?”

Equilibrium is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. You can be punched without ever fielding a blow. “It’s from Max,” I say. “He’s trying to take away our baby.”

Just after Thanksgiving 2008, a woman on her deathbed confessed to killing two girls forty-two years earlier, who had bullied her for being a lesbian. Sharron Smith had gone into the ice cream shop in Staunton, Virginia, where they all were employed to say she couldn’t work the next day. According to the police transcript, one thing led to another, and she shot them.

I don’t know why she was packing a.25-caliber automatic handgun when she went into the ice cream store, but I understand her motivation. Especially while I am standing here, holding this ridiculous legal allegation from Zoe’s ex-husband.

One that calls me meretricious and deviant.

I am flooded with a feeling I thought I left behind in college, when I was called a freak by girls in the locker room, who would move away from my changing area because they were sure I was staring at them; when I was pinned into a dark corner at a dance and groped by some asshole on the football team, who had bet his friends he could turn me into a real girl. I was punished just because I was me, and what I wanted to say-what I never did say, until my throat was sore with the effort of silence-was Why do I matter to you? Why can’t you just worry about yourselves instead?

So although I don’t condone violence any more than I am truly meretricious and deviant, in that moment I sort of wish I had Sharron Smith’s balls.

“I’m calling that son of a bitch,” Zoe announces.

I don’t know if I’ve ever seen her this upset. Her face is flushed a dark red; she is crying and spitting mad all at once. She punches the buttons so hard on the telephone handset that it tumbles out of her hands. I pick it up, hit the speakerphone button, and set it on the counter so that we can both listen.

To be honest, I’m surprised Max even picks up.

“I can’t talk to you. My lawyer told me not to-”

“Why?” Zoe interrupts. “Why would you do this to me?”

There is a long pause-so long that I think Max may have disconnected the call. “I’m not doing this to you, Zoe. I’m doing it for our kids.”

When we hear the dial tone on the other end of the line, Zoe picks up the phone and throws it across the kitchen. “He doesn’t even want kids,” she cries. “What is he going to do with the embryos?”

“I don’t know.” But it’s clear to me that this might not be about the babies, to Max. That it’s about Zoe, and the lifestyle she’s living.

Or in other words, punishment for just being herself.

I have a sudden flashback of my mother bursting into tears, once, when she took me to the doctor’s office for vaccinations. I was five or so, and clearly I was terrified of needles. I’d practically been hyperventilating the whole morning in anticipation of how painful this would be, and, sure enough, I was twisting my tiny body into knots to get away from the nurse practitioner. The sound of my mother’s sobbing, though, immediately made me stop. It wasn’t as if she was getting the shot, after all.

It hurts me, she tried to explain, when you hurt.

I was too young and too literal to understand it at the time, and, until now, I hadn’t loved someone enough to know what she meant. But seeing Zoe like this, knowing that what she wants most in the world is being yanked out of her grasp-well, I can’t breathe. I can’t see anything but fire.

So I leave her standing in the kitchen, and I walk into the bedroom. I fall to my knees in front of my nightstand and start rummaging through past issues of unread School Counselor magazines and recipes I’ve clipped from the Wednesday newspaper that I keep meaning to cook and never quite get around to. Buried several layers down is an issue of the Options Newsletter, a publication for the transgender, lesbian, gay, bi, and questioning. In the back are all the classified ads.

GLAD. Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders. Winter Street, Boston.

I grab the newsletter and carry it back into the kitchen, where Zoe has wilted at the table. I pick up the telephone from where it’s landed beneath a windowsill and dial the number in the advertisement.

“Hi,” I say brusquely. “My name’s Vanessa Shaw. My wife has just been served with a lawsuit by her ex-husband. He’s trying to gain custody and control of frozen embryos we had hoped to use to start a family, and he’s making it into an evangelical, right-wing, gay-bashing, precedent-setting case. Can you help us?” The words come out in a furious flood, until Zoe has lifted her head from the table and is staring at me, wide-eyed. “Yes,” I tell the receptionist. “I’ll hold.”

Muzak fills my ear. Zoe was the one who told me that the company that invented all that awful elevator music went bankrupt in 2009. She called it musical karma.

She walks toward me, taking the newsletter out of my hand and glancing down at the ad for legal services.

“If Max wants a fight,” I tell her, “then that’s what he’s going to get.”

When I was twenty-four I broke my ankle playing pond hockey the day after Christmas. I snapped clear through the fibula, and a surgeon affixed a metal plate to my bone (the last time, I like to say, that a man will ever screw me). Although my teammates got me to the ER, my mother had to come stay in my apartment because I was completely incapacitated. I could hobble around on my crutches but couldn’t get on and off the toilet. I couldn’t hoist myself out of the bathtub. I couldn’t go anywhere at all, because my crutches slipped and skidded on the ice outside.

If not for my mother, I probably would have wasted away on saltines, tap water, and bad soap operas.

Instead, my mother stoically helped me in and out of the bathroom. She washed my hair in the tub so I wouldn’t lose my balance. She drove me to and from the doctor’s appointments and stocked my fridge and cleaned my house.

In return I bitched and moaned at her because I was really furious at myself. Finally, I hit a nerve. She threw down the plate of food she’d made me-it was a grilled cheese sandwich, I remember, because I complained about it being American cheese and not Swiss-and walked out the door.

Fine, I told myself. I don’t need her.

And I didn’t. Not for the first three hours, anyway. And then I really had to pee.

At first I hobbled on my crutches to the bathroom. But I couldn’t lever myself down off them onto the toilet without the fear of falling. I wound up balancing on one foot and urinating into an empty coffee mug, and then I collapsed back on the bed and called my mother.

I’m sorry, I sobbed. I’m helpless.

That’s where you’re wrong, she told me. You’re not helpless. You need help. There’s a big difference.

On Angela Moretti’s desk is a sealed glass jar, and swimming inside is what looks like a dried prune.