Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

My refuge of choice had become Aubuchon Hardware. No one I knew shopped at Aubuchon Hardware. Whereas I might run into former patients at the grocery store or the pharmacy, at Aubuchon I blissfully wandered the aisles in a state of complete anonymity. I went three or four times a week and gazed at the laser levels and the drill bits, the soldier rows of two-by-fours, the bloated tubes of PVC and their delicate cousins, copper piping. I sat on the floor with paint chips, whispering the names of the colors: Mulberry Wine, Riviera Azure, Cool Lava. They sounded like vacation photographs of places I’d always wanted to go.

Newburyport Blue was from Benjamin Moore’s Historical Colors collection. It was a dark, grayish blue, like the ocean when it rains. I’d actually been to Newburyport. One summer, Charlotte and I had rented a house on Plum Island for our families. You were still small enough to be toted, with all the gear, through the tall grass to the beach. In theory, it had seemed like the perfect vacation: the sand was soft enough to break your fall; Emma and Amelia could pretend to be mermaids, with seaweed hair that had washed up on the shore; and it was close enough for Sean and Rob to commute down on their days off. There was only one caveat we hadn’t anticipated: the water was so cold that even standing up to your ankles made you ache to the core of your privates. You kids spent your days splashing in tide pools, which were shallow enough to be heated by the sun, but Charlotte and I were too big for those.

Which is why one Sunday, when the guys had taken you kids to Mad Martha’s for breakfast, Charlotte and I decided to try boogie boarding, even if it resulted in severe hypothermia. We shimmied into our wet suits (“They’re supposed to be tight,” I told Charlotte when she moaned about the size of her hips) and carried the boards down to the water’s edge. I dipped my foot into the line of surf and gasped. “There’s no way,” I said, jumping backward.

Charlotte smirked at me. “Getting cold feet?”

“Very funny,” I said, but to my shock, she’d already begun high-stepping over the waves, frigid as they were, and swimming out to a point where she could ride one in.

“How bad is it?” I yelled.

“Like an epidural-I don’t have feeling below my waist,” she shouted back, and then suddenly the ocean heaved, flexing one long muscle that lifted Charlotte on her board and sent her screaming through the surf to land at my feet on the sand.

She stood up, pushing her hair out of her face. “Chicken,” she accused, and to prove her wrong, I held my breath and started wading into the water.

My God, it was cold. I paddled out on my board, bobbing beside Charlotte. “We’re going to die,” I said. “We’re going to die out here and someone’s going to find our bodies on the shore, like Emma found that tennis shoe yesterday-”

“Here we go,” Charlotte shouted, and I looked over my shoulder to see an enormous wall of water looming down on us. “Paddle,” Charlotte yelled, and I did what she told me to do.

But I hadn’t caught the wave. Instead, it crashed over me, knocking the breath from my lungs and tumbling me end over end underwater. My boogie board, roped to my wrist, smacked me on the head twice, and then I felt sand being ground into my hair and my face, my fingers clawing at broken shells, as the ocean floor rose at an angle beneath me. Suddenly, a hand grabbed the back of my wet suit and dragged me forward. “Stand up,” Charlotte said, using all her weight to move me far enough onto the sand to keep from getting pulled back by the tide.

I had swallowed a quart of salt water; my eyes were burning, and there was blood on my cheek and my palms. “Jesus Christ,” I said, coughing and wiping my nose.

Charlotte pounded me on the back. “Just breathe.”

“Harder…than it sounds.”

Slowly feeling returned to my fingers and my feet, and that was worse, because I’d been beaten up badly by the wave. “Thanks…for being my lifeguard.”

“The heck with that,” Charlotte said. “I didn’t want to have to pay for the second half of the rental house.”

I laughed out loud. Charlotte helped me to my feet, and we began to trudge up the beach, dragging the boards behind us like puppies on leashes. “What should we tell the guys?” I asked.

“That Kelly Slater signed us for the world championships.”

“Yeah, that’ll explain why my cheek is bleeding.”

“He was overcome by the beauty of my butt in this wet suit, and when he made a pass at me you had to beat him off,” Charlotte suggested.

The reeds were whispering secrets. To the left was a swath of sand where Amelia and Emma had been playing yesterday, writing their names with sticks. They wanted to see if the writing would still be there today, or if the tide would have washed it away.

Amelia and Emma, it read.

BFFAA. Best friends forever and always.

I linked my arm with Charlotte’s, and together we started the long climb to the house.

It struck me, now, as I sat on the floor of Aubuchon Hardware, with a flamenco fan of color chips in my hand, that I had never been back to Newburyport since then. Charlotte and I had talked about it, but she hadn’t wanted to commit to renting a house not knowing if you’d be in a cast that following summer. Maybe Emma and Rob and I would go down there next summer.

But I wouldn’t go, I knew that. I really didn’t want to, without Charlotte.

I took a quart of paint off the shelf and walked to the mixing station at the end of the aisle. “Newburyport Blue, please,” I said, although I did not have a particular wall in mind to paint it on yet. I’d keep it in the basement, just in case.

It was dark by the time I left Aubuchon Hardware, and when I got back home, Rob was washing plates and putting them into the dishwasher. He didn’t even look at me when I walked into the kitchen, which is why I knew he was furious. “Just say it,” I said.

He turned off the faucet and slammed the door of the dishwasher into place. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I…I lost track of time. I was at the hardware store.”

“Again? What could you possibly need there?”

I sank down into a chair. “I don’t know, Rob. It’s just the place that makes me feel good right now.”

“You know what would make me feel good?” he said. “A wife.”

“Wow, Rob, I didn’t think you’d ever go all Ricky Ricardo on me-”

“Did you forget something today?”

I stared at him. “Not that I know of.”

“Emma was waiting for you to drive her to the rink.”

I closed my eyes. Skating. The new session had started; I was supposed to sign her up for private lessons so that she could compete this spring-something her last coach finally felt she was ready for. It was first come, first served; this might have blown her chance for the season. “I’ll make it up to her-”

“You don’t have to, because she called, hysterical, and I left the office to get her down there in time.” He sat down across from me, tilting his head. “What do you do all day, Piper?”

I wanted to point out to him the new tile floor in the mudroom, the fixture I’d rewired over this very table. But instead I looked down at my hands. “I don’t know,” I whispered. “I really don’t know.”

“You have to get your life back. If you don’t, she’s already won.”

“You don’t know what this is like-”

“I don’t? I’m not a doctor, too? I don’t carry malpractice insurance?”

“That’s not what I mean and you-”

“I saw Amelia today.”

I stared at him. “Amelia?”

“She came to the office to get her braces off.”

“There’s no way Charlotte would have-”