Jodie Picoult - Salem Falls

“Watch your mouth,” Cora reprimanded. “See, love’s like that. Once you give it, even by accident, you’re on that list forever.”

“What if I don’t want to send Rachel a card back?”

The housekeeper laughed. “You never know. Maybe she’ll keep them coming anyway. But maybe one day she’ll go through that list and cross you off.”

“I don’t want her to be in love with me,” Jack muttered. “I’m gonna tell her to stop.”

“You can tell her, but that doesn’t mean it’s gonna change anything.”

Jack punched at the dough. “Why not?”

“Because it’s her heart,” she said, “and she gets to choose where it goes.”

It was not unusual for Annalise St. Bride to come home with a mission in tow, one wearing spandex and high heels, who’d been stolen away from a pimp on Seventh Avenue. Often the woman would arrive at the penthouse sporting a split lip or a broken nose, gathering her shame as tightly around her as the cut-rate chenille coat she wore. She’d stay in the chrysalis of St. Bride House for a week or so, and then one day she would emerge from the guest room wearing Levi’s and an oxford-cloth shirt, her hair pulled back in a ponytail away from her healing face, which was scrubbed free of makeup. Jack was always amazed at the transformation. They went in looking like old ladies; they came out as teenagers.

They were prostitutes. Jack wasn’t supposed to know that, because he was only ten and his parents liked to pretend things like that didn’t exist in New York City, along with muggings and rats in Central Park and a Democratic mayor. And he wasn’t allowed into their rooms. His mother went in and out like Florence Nightingale, carrying soup and clothing and books by women like Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, writers Jack’s dad once described as chicks who wanted dicks. But even if Jack was supposed to pretend that the whore upstairs was no different than a visiting cousin, and even if his dad tended to simply look the other way when his mom went off on a tear like this, he knew the truth . . . and somehow it always left him feeling a little sick to his stomach.

Like always, once the penthouse was clean and the bread in the oven, an air of anticipation spread until it filled every corner. Jack sat on the stairs, idly leafing through his baseball cards but really just waiting to see who it was this time around.

At three-forty-five, his mother came home. And the woman she brought with her wasn’t a woman at all.

For one thing, she was smaller than Jack. Her eyes were so large and black they dominated her face, and her tiny white slash of a mouth was the saddest thing Jack had ever seen. Her hands twitched at her sides, as if they desperately needed something to hold.

“This is Emma,” his mother said, and the girl turned and ran right back into the elevator.

That was the second thing that was different about this one: She didn’t want to be here.

“Fine, then,” Annalise said. “I’ll go to jail.”

Joseph St. Bride sighed. “Annie, I know it kills you to see this stuff. But you can’t remove a child from her home without the permission of Child Protective Services.”

“Have you seen her? What did you expect me to do?” Her voice got so low that Jack had to work harder to eavesdrop from outside the library door. “She’s nine, Joseph. She’s nine years old and her forty-year-old uncle is raping her.”

Jack knew about rape; it was hard to live with his mother, the queen of crusaders against violence against women, and not know about it. Rape had to do with sex, and sex was something too gross to even think about. He tried to picture Emma, the girl who’d been carried kicking and screaming upstairs, doing that with a grown-up. It made him gag.

“Go see for yourself,” his mother yelled, and all of a sudden they burst out of the library, so intent on their fight that, thankfully, they never noticed Jack sitting there at all.

He crept up the stairs after them and hovered outside Emma’s room. They had locked her in. In all the years his mom had done this kind of thing, Jack couldn’t remember a single woman getting locked in.

His father knocked softly. “Hi, Emma,” he said gently. “I’m Annalise’s husband.”

Emma opened her mouth and began to scream. It echoed right through Jack’s head and, he figured, probably broke some crystal downstairs. “Just go outside,” Jack’s mother ordered. “She’s obviously afraid of you.”

Joseph walked into the hall again, closing the door. Then he looked down at Jack. “I’m sorry you had to hear that.”

From the spot where he was sitting, Jack shrugged. “I’m sorry for Emma,” he answered.

Annalise went to court and got temporary custody of Emma. A month passed, and the girl began eating and looking healthier. But every night, she tried to run away.

Once, they found her under the stairs, where Jack and his friends liked to hide. Once, she was in the trash chute. Another time she made it all the way to the lobby before Corazon managed to catch up with her.

His mother said that it was because Joseph reminded Emma too much of what had happened. “I’m not moving out of my own house,” Jack’s father had thundered, and that started a fight between them that still flared like a brush fire every now and then.

Jack didn’t say so, but he thought his mother ought to stop worrying what Emma was running away from. In his opinion, the big mystery was where she was heading.

He rigged up a burglar alarm. Jack stretched a length of nylon fishing line across the front of her door, and sure enough, he woke up to the sound of a soft thud against the carpet. He jumped out of bed to find Emma dressed and sprawled on the floor.

She looked up at him, evaluating whether she could take him down or whether he was someone she ought to be afraid of. “It’s okay,” Jack whispered. “I’m not going to tell.”

He had not known until that moment that he was going to keep her secret, maybe even let her steal away, without sounding a siren. Emma’s eyes narrowed. “Bullshit.”

It sounded wrong on the mouth of a little girl, like a horde of flies swimming out of her lips the moment they opened. Jack held out a hand to help Emma up, but she rose without touching him. “I’m getting out of here,” she said.

“Okay.”

“You can’t stop me.”

Jack shrugged. “I wasn’t going to.” He crossed his arms, hoping he looked as cool as he thought he might.

Emma walked past him. God, if his mother found out what he was doing, he’d never hear the end of it. He watched the girl pad softly down the oriental runner on the staircase. “Emma,” he whispered.

She turned.

“You like baseball?”

He had never in life wanted to spend any time with a girl, much less actually give something that could be construed as a gift, but he worked out a deal with Emma. Every night she didn’t try to leave, he’d give her two of his baseball cards. She had no idea that Steve Renko and Chuck Rainey sucked, which meant that at least Jack wasn’t losing any of his good stuff. They sat on the floor of his bedroom, and he taught her about batting averages and playing positions and the Cy Young Award.

She didn’t speak much. When she did, it was weird. She talked about hearing the bed knock against the wall when his mother and father were doing it, which was totally repulsive. She said Corazon had forgotten what it was like to have a man in her bed. It was as if she wanted to shock Jack. But every time Emma got going, he just stared as if those flies were swarming from her lips again and didn’t say a thing.

One night, he woke up to find Emma standing next to him. “You overslept.”

He looked at the clock; it was two in the morning. “Sorry,” Jack muttered, sitting up. Then he remembered that he didn’t have anything else to give her. “You’ve got half my baseball cards, Emma. I don’t have any more.”