Jodie Picoult - Salem Falls

The woman lay on her back, a tube rising out of her throat like a periscope. Her face and neck were jeweled with cuts and bruises. Annalise slipped down the blue sheet covering her chest, saw the belt of purple welts along the still-swollen abdomen.

Two hours ago, the worst thing in the world she could imagine was coming to a place like St. Vincent’s to deliver a baby. She had cried because the labor room didn’t have wallpaper, because the doctor who’d been the first person to touch her son had not been raised in a family that had come over on the Mayflower. She had believed that her child needed to start his life in a certain manner, so that he could grow up to be just like Annalise.

God help him.

Maria Velasquez lived in a city Annalise did not know, one where women were raped and beaten, then left to sink in their own sorrow. Annalise’s friends worried about how to seat guests at dinner, how to turn down invitations politely; how to make sure the maid wasn’t drinking on the job. If they ever noticed the others struggling to survive, they quickly turned away . . . because what you did not see, you did not have to account for.

Annalise, on the other hand, had heard this woman die.

The baby’s body lay in a bassinet. He was the size of a half loaf of bread, his bones light as a bird’s and stretched with thin skin. Juggling the weight of her own son, Annalise lifted Maria Velasquez’s stillborn boy into her other arm.

What difference did it make if you were born in Lenox Hill, in St. Vincent’s, in a tree? She glanced at Maria Velasquez’s battered body and swallowed hard. What it came down to was simply that you had a chance to love and be loved.

She jumped when a nurse walked in. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“I . . . I just . . .” Annalise took a deep breath, and raised her chin. “I just thought someone should hold him, once.”

The nurse, who had been ready to castigate her, stilled. Without saying a word, she nodded at Annalise and then stepped away, closing the curtain behind her.

The nurse who had been Annalise’s labor coach came into her cubicle, accompanied by Joseph, who looked frantic and overwhelmed by his surroundings. She left them to their privacy, as Joseph approached Annalise and stared at the wonder of his son. The baby yawned and pushed a fist out of his blanket. “Oh, Annie,” he whispered. “I was too late.”

“No, you were just in time.”

“But you had to come here.” When Annalise didn’t answer, Joseph shook his head, mesmerized. “Isn’t he something.”

“I think he just might be,” Annalise answered.

Her husband sat down beside her. “We’ll get you out of here right away,” he assured her. “I already called Dr. Post at Lenox Hill, and he-”

“Actually, I’d like to stay at St. Vincent’s,” she said, interrupting. “Dr. Ho was quite good.”

Joseph opened his mouth to argue but took one look at the expression on his wife’s face and nodded. He stroked the infant’s head. “Does he . . . have a name?”

Él se llamo Joaquim.

“I think,” Annalise said, “I’d like to call him Jack.”

July 3, 2000

Carroll County Jail

Have you ever really held the hand of someone you love? Not just in passing, a loose link between you-but truly clasped, with the pulses of your wrists beating together and your fingers mapping the knuckles and nails like a cartographer learning a country by heart?

Addie reached for Jack as if she were drowning, their hands joined across the old table in the basement of the Carroll County Jail. She touched him with all the emotion she’d kept curtained inside her since her testimony. She touched him a thousand times, for every moment that she’d wanted to walk up to Jack at the defense table and lay a hand on his shoulder, press a kiss to his neck. She touched him and found that even something as innocent as the lacing of their fingers could raise all the hairs on the back of her neck and make her blood beat faster.

And she was so fascinated by the way they fit together-Jack’s palm big enough to swallow hers whole-that Addie did not realize the man she was clutching was someone who desperately wanted to get away.

It was when he gently pried her fingers from his that Addie looked up. “We have to talk,” Jack said softly.

Addie stared at his face. The stubborn jaw, the soft mouth, the fine golden stubble that covered his cheeks like glitter flung by a fairy-they were all still there. But his eyes-flat and blue-black-there was simply nothing behind them.

“I think it’s going pretty well, don’t you?” she said, smiling so hard her cheekbones hurt. She was lying, and they both knew it. Hanging over them like an impending storm was the unspoken memory of Matt Houlihan reading that former conviction. If that thundercloud had followed Jack and Addie home, every single one of the jurors was being dogged by it, too.

“Jack,” Addie said, rolling his name around her mouth like a butterscotch candy. “If this is about my testimony-I’m so sorry. I never wanted to be subpoenaed.” She closed her eyes. “I should have just lied for you when Charlie came that morning. That’s it, isn’t it? If I’d lied, you’d have an alibi. You’d be free now.”

“Addie,” Jack said, his voice painfully even. “I’m not in love with you.”

You can be strapped to the most stable chair and still feel the world give way beneath you. Addie’s hands clutched the edge of the table. Where was the man who had told her she was the bright light getting him through this misery? At what ordinary moment between yesterday and now had everything changed?

Sometimes, when I think I’m going to lose it in here, I just imagine that I’m already out.

Tears arrowed at the backs of her eyes, small, hot darts. “But you said-”

“I say a lot of things,” Jack said, bitterly. “But you heard the prosecutor. They’re not always true.”

She turned her head toward the one window in the basement, a tiny square of dirty glass set nearly flush to the ceiling. She kept her eyes wide, so that she wouldn’t cry in front of Jack. And maybe because of that, she had a clear vision of her father, years ago, after her mother had died. She’d found him one day in his living room, sober for once, surrounded by papers and mementos. He’d handed her a box of knick-knacks. “This is my will. And some . . . some stuff you ought to have. The first letter I ever wrote your mom, my medal from the Korean War.”

Addie had leafed through the box, her fingers going cold and stiff. These were the items you collected when someone died-as her father had done after they buried her mother, as Addie had only recently done with Chloe’s things. You pulled the loose threads of their lives free, so that you could move on. Addie watched her father place his fancy gold watch into the box and understood: He was putting his affairs in order, so that she wouldn’t have to.

“You’re not dying,” Addie had told him, thrusting the box back into his hands.

Roy had sighed. “But I might as well be.”

Now, Addie turned slowly toward Jack. He had no will to offer her, no medals, no memories. But he was giving her back her heart, so that when he left her life, there would be no strings attached.

“No,” she said firmly.

Jack blinked at her. “I’m sorry?”

“You should be. Lying to me, like that. For God’s sake, Jack, if you really wanted to end things between us, you should have used an excuse I might actually have believed. Like . . . you aren’t good enough for me. Or that you didn’t want me to suffer along with you. But to tell me you aren’t in love with me . . . well, that’s just something I don’t buy.”

She leaned forward, her words aimed right at his heart. “You love me. You do. And goddammit, I’m tired of having the people who love me leave before I’m ready for them to go. It is not going to happen again.” She stood up, anger and determination hanging from her shoulders like the mantle of a queen. Then she walked toward the door where a guard stood posted, leaving Jack to suffer the sucker punch of being abandoned.