Jodi Picoult - Sing You Home

On the way back to campus, I put my hand on the stick shift of my boyfriend’s old Dodge Dart. I just wanted his palm to cover mine. Instead, he untangled my fingers. “Zoe,” he said. “Just let me drive.”

Although it was only two in the afternoon when I got back to my dorm room, I put on my pajamas. I watched General Hospital, honing my focus on the characters of Frisco and Felicia, as if I would have to pass a test on them later on. I ate an entire jar of Jif peanut butter.

I still felt empty.

I had nightmares for weeks, that I could hear the fetus crying. That I followed the sound to the courtyard outside my dorm window and crouched down in my pajama bottoms and torn tank to dig with my bare hands in the ragged ground. I pulled up hunks of sod, chipped my fingernails on stones, and finally uncovered it:

Sweet Cindy, the baby doll I’d buried the day my father died.

I can’t unwind that night. I hear Vanessa moving around above me, in the bedroom, and then when it gets quiet I assume she’s fallen asleep. So instead, I sit down at my digital keyboard and I start playing. I let the music bind me like a bandage. I sew myself together note by note.

I play for so long that my wrists begin to cramp. I sing until my voice frays, until I feel like I’m breathing through a straw. When I stop, I lean my forehead so that it rests on the keys. The silence in the room becomes a thick cotton batting.

Then I hear clapping.

I turn around to find Vanessa standing in the doorway. “How long have you been there?”

“Long enough.” She sits down beside me on the piano bench. “This is what he wants, you know.”

“Who?”

“Wade Preston. To break us apart.”

“I don’t want that,” I admit.

“Me neither.” She hesitates. “I’ve been upstairs doing math.”

“No wonder you’ve been gone so long,” I murmur. “You suck at math.”

“The way I figure it, you were with Max for nine years. I plan to be with you for the next forty-nine years.”

“Just forty-nine?”

“Stick with me, here. It’s a nice round number.” Vanessa looks at me. “So by the time you’re ninety, you’ll have spent over half your life with me, as opposed to ten percent of your life with Max. Don’t get me wrong-I’m still wicked jealous of those nine years, because I can’t ever have them with you, no matter what I do. But if you hadn’t lived them back then with Max, maybe you wouldn’t be here with me now.”

“I wasn’t trying to keep a secret from you,” I tell her.

“But you should be able to. I love you so much that there’s nothing you could possibly tell me that would change that.”

“I used to be a guy,” I say, straight-faced.

“Deal breaker.” Vanessa laughs, and she leans forward and kisses me. She puts her hands on either side of my face. “I know you’re strong enough to do this alone, but you don’t have to. I promise not to be an idiot anymore.”

I settle closer to her, rest my head on her shoulder. “I’m sorry, too,” I say, an apology as wide as the night sky, with no limits.

My mother used to say that a woman without lipstick was like a cake without icing. I never knew her to go without her signature color, Forever After. Every time we went to a drugstore to get aspirin or tampons or asthma medication, she picked up a couple more tubes and stashed them in one of her dresser drawers-one that was completely filled with the small silver tubes. “I don’t think the company’s gonna run out,” I used to tell her, but she, of course, knew better. In 1982, they stopped making Forever After. Luckily my mother had stockpiled enough to carry her forward a decade. When she was in the hospital, so drugged for the pain that she couldn’t remember her own mantra, I made sure she was always made up. When she took her last breath, she was wearing Forever After.

She would have found it incredibly ironic that I had turned out to be her cosmetic guardian angel, since I had been running away from her mascara wand since I could walk. Whereas other little girls liked to sit on their mothers’ bathroom counters and watch them transform themselves into works of art, I couldn’t stand the feel of anything other than soap on my face. The one time I let my mother come near me with eyeliner, it was to pencil in a Gomez Addams mustache on my upper lip for a school play.

I mention all this to duly underscore the fact that at 7:00 A.M. I am poking my eye out with Zoe’s eyeliner applicator. I am grimacing in the mirror so that I can roll Hot Tamale lipstick over my mouth. If Wade Preston and Judge O’Neill want to see the traditional woman who stays at home and does her nails and cooks roasts for dinner, I’ll become one for the next eight hours.

(Unless I have to wear a skirt. That is just not happening.)

I lean back with spots dancing before my eyes (it is really hard to not go cross-eyed while you’re putting on liquid liner) and scrutinize my handiwork in the mirror. Just then, Zoe stumbles into the bathroom, still half asleep. She sits down on the closed toilet seat and blinks up at me.

Then she gasps, horrified. “Why do you look like a scary clown?”

“Really?” I say, rubbing my hands over my cheeks. “Too much blush?” I frown into the mirror again. “I was going for that nineteen fifties pinup look. Like Katy Perry.”

“Well, you got Frank-N-Furter from Rocky Horror,” Zoe says. She stands and pushes me down on the seat instead. Then she takes makeup remover, squirts it on a cotton ball, and wipes my face clean. “You want to tell me why you’ve suddenly decided to use makeup?”

“Just trying to look more… feminine,” I answer.

“You mean less like a dyke,” Zoe corrects. She puts her hands on her hips. “You know you look fine without a drop of anything on your face, Ness.”

“See, this is why I’m married to you instead of Wade Preston.”

She leans forward, sweeping blush along my cheekbone. “And here I thought it was because I had-”

“An eyelash curler,” I interrupt, grinning. “I married you for your Shu Uemura.”

“Stop,” Zoe says. “You’re making me feel so cheap.” She tilts up my chin. “Close your eyes.”

She brushes and dabs at me. I even let her use the eyelash curler, although I nearly wind up blind in the process. She finishes by telling me to let my mouth hang open, and she swipes it over with lipstick.

“Ta da,” Zoe says.

I am expecting a drag queen. Instead, I see something entirely different. “Oh, my God. I’ve turned into my mother.”

Zoe peers over my shoulder, so that we are both looking at our reflections. “From what I hear,” she says, “it happens to the best of us.”

Angela pays a janitor twenty bucks to let us into the courthouse through the delivery door in the back. We walk in spy-novel silence past the boiler room and a supply closet stocked with paper towels and toilet tissue before he leads us into a rickety, grimy service elevator that will take us up to the main floor. He turns the key and pushes a button and then looks at me. “I got a cousin who’s gay,” he says, this man who hasn’t spoken more than four words to us the whole time he’s been with us.

Because I don’t know what he thinks of that cousin, I don’t say anything.

“How did you know who we are?” Zoe asks.

He shrugs. “I’m the custodian. I know everything.”

The elevator belches us out into a corridor near the clerk’s office. Angela winds her way through the maze of hallways until we are at the door of our courtroom. There is literally a wall of human media facing away from us, toward the door, waiting for our entrance up the front steps of the courthouse.