Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

At 11:06, I was sitting in the dark on a couch in the family room, wondering if it could still arguably be called a family room if one’s family was splintering apart, when the front door of the house opened gingerly. Sean tiptoed into the hallway, and I switched on the lamp beside me. “Wow,” I said. “Traffic must have been a bitch.”

He froze. “You’re up.”

“We waited for you for dinner. Your plate’s still on the table, if you’re in the mood for fossilized fettuccine.”

“I went to O’Boys after my shift with some of the guys. I was going to call…”

I finished his sentence for him. “But you didn’t want to talk to me.”

He came closer, then, so that I could smell his aftershave. Licorice, and the faintest bit of smoke. You could blindfold me and I would be able to pick Sean out from a crowd with my other senses. But identification is not the same as knowing someone through and through-the man you fell in love with years ago might look the same and speak the same and smell the same yet be completely different.

I supposed Sean could say that about me, too.

He sat down on a chair across from me. “What do you want me to tell you, Charlotte? You want me to lie and say I look forward to coming home at night?”

“No.” I swallowed. “I want…I just want things to go back to the way they were.”

“Then stop,” he said quietly. “Just walk away from what you’ve started.”

Choices are funny things-ask a native tribe that’s eaten grubs and roots forever if they’re unhappy, and they’ll shrug. But give them filet mignon and truffle sauce and then ask them to go back to living off the land, and they will always be thinking of that gourmet meal. If you don’t know there’s an alternative, you can’t miss it. Marin Gates had offered me a brass ring that I never, in my wildest dreams, would have considered-but now that she had, how could I not try to grab it? With every future break, with every dollar we moved further into debt, I would be thinking about how I should have reached out.

Sean shook his head. “That’s what I thought.”

“I’m thinking of Willow’s future…”

“Well, I’m thinking about here and now. She doesn’t give a shit about money. She cares about whether her parents love her. But that’s not the message she’s going to hear when you get up in that damn courtroom.”

“Then you tell me, Sean, what’s the answer? Are we just supposed to sit around and hope Willow stops breaking? Or that you-” I broke off abruptly.

“That I what? Get a better job? Win the fucking lottery? Why don’t you just say it, Charlotte? You think I can’t support all of you.”

“I never said that-”

“You didn’t have to. It came through loud and clear,” he said. “You know, you used to say that you felt like I’d rescued you and Amelia. But I guess in the long run, I let you down.”

“This isn’t about you. It’s about our family.”

“Which you’re ripping apart. My God, Charlotte, what do you think people see when they look at you now?”

“A mother,” I said.

“A martyr, ” Sean corrected. “No one’s ever as good as you when it comes to taking care of Willow. You don’t trust anyone else to get it right. Don’t you see how fucked up that is?”

I felt a tightening at the back of my throat. “Well, excuse me for not being perfect.”

“No,” Sean said. “You just expect that of the rest of us.” With a sigh, he walked to the fireplace hearth, where a pillow and a quilt were neatly stacked. “If you don’t mind, you’re sitting on my bed.”

I managed to hold in my sob until I was upstairs. I lay down on Sean’s side of the mattress, trying to find the spot where he used to sleep. I turned my face in to the pillow, which still smelled of his shampoo. Although I had changed the sheets since he’d moved to the couch, I hadn’t washed his pillowcase, on purpose-and now I wondered why. So I could pretend he was still here? So that I’d have something of him if he never came back?

On our wedding day, Sean told me that he’d step in front of a bullet to save me. I knew he’d wanted me to confess the same thing, but I couldn’t. Amelia needed me to take care of her. On the other hand, if that bullet had been heading straight for Amelia, I wouldn’t have thought twice before diving forward.

Did that make me a very good mother, or a very bad wife?

But this wasn’t a bullet, and it hadn’t been fired at us. It was an on-coming train, and the cost of saving my daughter was throwing myself onto the tracks. There was only one catch: my best friend was tied to me.

It was one thing to sacrifice your own life for someone else’s. It was another thing entirely to bring into the mix a third party-a third party who knew you, who trusted you implicitly.

It had seemed so simple: a lawsuit that acknowledged how hard it was for us, and that would make things so much better. But in my haste to see the silver lining, I missed the storm clouds: the fact that accusing Piper and convincing Sean would sever those relationships. And now, it was too late. Even if I called Marin and told her to stop everything, it wouldn’t make Piper forgive me. It wouldn’t keep Sean from judging me.

You can tell yourself that you would be willing to lose everything you have in order to get something you want. But it’s a catch-22: all of those things you’re willing to lose are what make you recognizable. Lose them, and you’ve lost yourself.

For a moment I imagined tiptoeing down the stairs and kneeling in front of Sean and telling him I was sorry. I imagined asking him to start over. Then I looked up to find that the door had opened a crack, and your little white triangle of a face was poking through. “Mommy,” you said, coming closer with your awkward gait and climbing onto the bed, “did you have a nightmare?”

Your body tucked into mine, back to front. “Yeah, Wills. I did.”

“Do you need me to stay here with you?”

I wrapped my arms around you, a parenthesis. “Forever,” I said.

Christmas had been too warm this year, green instead of white, Mother Nature’s confirmation that life wasn’t as it should have been. After two weeks of temperatures in the forties, winter returned with a vengeance. That night, snow fell. We woke up with our throats dry and the heat humming from the radiators. Outside, the air smelled of chimney smoke.

Sean was already gone by the time I came downstairs at seven. He’d left behind a neatly folded stack of bedding in the laundry room and an empty coffee mug in the sink. You came downstairs rubbing your eyes. “My feet are cold,” you said.

“Then put on slippers. Where’s Amelia?”

“Still asleep.”

It was Saturday; there was no reason to wake her up early. I watched you rubbing your hip, probably not even aware of what you were doing. You needed exercise to strengthen the muscles around your pelvis, although it still hurt you to do it after your femur fractures. “Tell you what. If you go get the paper, we can make waffles for breakfast.”

I watched your mind work through the calculations-the mailbox was a quarter of a mile down the driveway; it was freezing out. “With ice cream?”

“Strawberries,” I bargained.

“Okay.”

You went into the mudroom to pull your coat over your pajamas, and I helped you strap on your braces before stuffing your feet into low boots that could accommodate them. “Be careful on the driveway.” You zipped up your jacket. “Willow? Did you hear me?”

“Yes, be careful,” you parroted, and you opened up the front door and headed outside.

I stood at the doorway and watched for a few moments, until you turned around on the driveway, planted your hands on your hips, and said, “I’m not going to fall! Stop watching!”