Jodi Picoult - Small Great Things

I should go home. I should make sure Edison is all right. But that will spark a conversation about why I’m not at work, and I’m not sure I can cope with that right now. If the union lawyer does his job, maybe I can even be reinstated before I’m supposed to work tomorrow night.

Then my phone rings. “Ruth?” Corinne says. “What the fuck is going on?”

I lean back against the driver’s seat, closing my eyes. “I don’t know,” I admit.

“Hang on,” she says, and I hear muffled noises. “I’m in the goddamned supply closet for privacy. I called you as soon as I heard.”

“Heard what? I don’t know anything, except that my license is apparently being suspended.”

“Well, that bitchy hospital lawyer said something to Marie about professional misconduct-”

“Carla Luongo?”

“Who’s she?”

“The bitchy hospital lawyer. She threw me under the bus,” I say, bitter. Carla and I had each gotten a glimpse of the other’s cards, and I’d thought that was enough for us to implicitly agree we both had aces. I just never expected her to play her hand so quickly. “That racist father must have threatened a lawsuit, and she sacrificed me to save the hospital.”

There’s a pause. It’s so small that maybe if I wasn’t listening for it, I might not have heard it. And then Corinne-my colleague, my friend-says, “I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.”

At Dalton, there was one table at lunch where all the Black kids sat, except me. Once, another scholarship student of color invited me to join them for lunch. I said thanks, but I usually spent that time tutoring a white friend who didn’t understand trig. This was not the truth. The truth was that the Black table made my white friends nervous, because even if they’d sat down there with me, they would have been tolerated but not welcomed. In a world where they always fit in, the one place they didn’t chafed hard.

The other truth was that if I sat with the other kids of color, I couldn’t pretend I was different from them. When Mr. Adamson, my history teacher, started talking about Martin Luther King and kept looking at me, my white friends shrugged it off: He didn’t mean it that way . At the Black table, if one student talked about Mr. Adamson staring at her during that same lesson, another African American student would validate the experience: That totally happened to me, too.

I so badly wanted to blend in in high school that I surrounded myself with people who could convince me that if I felt like I was being singled out because of the color of my skin, I was making things up, overthinking, being ridiculous.

There was no Black table in the cafeteria at the hospital. There were a handful of janitors of color, and one or two doctors, and me.

I want to ask Corinne when she was last Black, because then and only then would she have the right to tell me if Carla Luongo’s actions were intentional or accidental. But instead I tell her I have to go, and I hang up while she is still responding. Then I drive out of the hospital where I’ve been hiding for two decades, underneath the highway that pulses with New York-bound traffic, like an artery. I pass a small tent city of homeless vets and a drug deal going down and park outside the projects where my sister lives. She answers the door with a toddler on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand and an expression on her face that suggests she has been expecting me for years.

–

“WHY ARE YOU surprised?” Adisa asks. “What did you think was going to happen, moving into Whiteville?”

“East End,” I correct, and she just gives me a look.

We are sitting at her kitchen table. Given the sheer number of children she lives with, the apartment is remarkably clean. Pages from coloring books are taped to the wall, and there is a macaroni casserole in the oven. In the kitchen, Adisa’s oldest, Tyana, is feeding the baby at her high chair. Two of the boys are playing Nintendo in the living room. Her other child is MIA.

“I hate to say I told you so…”

“No, you don’t,” I mutter. “You’ve been waiting to tell me that forever.”

She shrugs, agreeing. “You’re the one who kept saying, Adisa, you don’t know what you talking about. My skin color isn’t even a factor. And go figure, you’re not just like one of them, are you?”

“You know, if I wanted to be a punching bag, I could have just stayed at the hospital.” I bury my face in my hands. “What am I supposed to tell Edison?”

“The truth?” Adisa suggests. “There’s no shame in it. It’s not like you did anything wrong. It’s better he learn earlier than his mama that he can run with the white crowd but it don’t make him any less Black.”

When Edison was younger, Adisa used to babysit him after school if I pulled an afternoon shift, until he begged to stay home alone. His cousins ribbed him for not being able to understand their slang, and when he did start to master it, his white friends in school looked at him like he had grown a second head. Even I was having trouble understanding my nephews, elbowing each other on the couch and laughing until Tyana whacked them both with a dish towel so that she could put the baby to sleep. ( Oh, we out chea, I heard one of the boys say, and it took me a few minutes to realize that translated to We’re out here, and that Tabari was teasing his brother for thinking he was all that because he won a round of the game.) Edison might not have fit in with the white kids in his school, but that at least he could blame on his skin. He didn’t fit in with his cousins, either, and they looked like him.

Adisa folds her arms. “You need to find a lawyer and sue that damn hospital right back.”

“That costs money,” I groan. “I just want this all to go away.”

My heart starts to hammer. I can’t lose our home. I can’t take my savings-all of which is Edison’s college fund-and liquidate it just so that we can eat and pay the mortgage and buy gas. I can’t ruin my son’s opportunities just because mine blew up in my face.

Adisa must see that I’m on the verge of a total breakdown because she reaches for my hand. “Ruth,” she says softly. “Your friends may have turned on you. But you know what the good thing is about having a sister? It’s forever.”

She locks her eyes on mine-hers are so dark that you can barely see the edge between iris and pupil. But they’re steady, and she doesn’t let go of me, and slowly, slowly, I let myself breathe.

–

WHEN I RETURN to my house at seven o’clock, Edison comes running to the front door. “What are you doing home?” he asks. “Is everything okay?”

I paste a smile onto my face. “I’m fine, baby. There was just a mix-up with the shifts, so Corinne and I went out to dinner at Olive Garden.”

“Are there leftovers?”

God bless the teenage boy, who can’t see past his own hunger pangs. “No,” I tell him. “We shared an entrée.”

“Well, that seems like a missed opportunity,” he grumbles.

“Did you wind up writing about Latimer?”

He shakes his head. “No. I think I’m going to pick Anthony Johnson. First Black landowner,” he says. “Way back in 1651.”

“Wow,” I reply. “That’s impressive.”

“Yeah, but there’s kind of a hitch. See, he was a slave that came over to Virginia from England and worked on a tobacco plantation until it was attacked by Native Americans and everyone but five people there died. He and his wife, Mary, moved and claimed two hundred and fifty acres of land. The thing is, he owned slaves. And I don’t know if I feel like being the one to tell that to the rest of my class, you know? Like it’s something they can use against me someday in an argument.” He shakes his head, lost in thought. “I mean, how could you do that, if you knew what it was like to be a slave yourself once?”