Authors: Jodi Picoult
Max sits down beside me. “We have to talk.”
I don’t face him. I don’t even sit up. I keep staring straight ahead, my eyes level with the radiators. Max forgot to take the safety plugs out of the outlets. They are all still covered with those flat disks of plastic, to make sure no one gets hurt.
Too fucking late.
“Not now,” I say.
You lose keys, your wallet, your glasses. You lose a job. You lose weight.
You lose money. You lose your mind.
You lose hope; you lose faith. You lose your sense of direction.
You lose track of friends.
You lose your head. You lose a tennis match. You lose a bet.
You lose a baby, or so they say.
Except I know exactly where he is.
The next day, I wake up and my breasts have become marble. I can’t even breathe without them aching. I have no newborn, but my body doesn’t seem to know that. The nurses at the hospital had warned me about this. There used to be an injection to dry up breast milk, but there were serious side effects, and so now they could only send me home with fair warning about what would come to pass.
The covers on Max’s side of the mattress are still tucked in. He did not come to bed last night; I don’t know where he slept. By now, he will have left for work.
“Mom,” I call out, but no one comes. I sit up, wincing, and see a note on my nightstand.
Gone grocery shopping,
my mother has written.
I shuffle through the discharge paperwork I was given at the hospital. But no one thinks to send the woman who’s delivered a stillborn home with the contact information for a lactation expert.
Feeling stupid, I dial the office number for Dr. Gelman. Her receptionist—a sweet girl I’ve seen monthly now for over half a year—picks up. “Hi,” I say. “This is Zoe Baxter—”
“Zoe!” she says enthusiastically. “I heard you were being admitted on Friday! So? Boy or girl?”
I can tell, from the bubbles in her voice, that she has no idea what happened over the weekend. The words in my throat rustle like leaves. “Boy,” I manage. I can’t say the rest.
Even the fabric of my T-shirt is causing me excruciating pain. “Can I speak to a nurse-midwife?”
“Sure, I’ll put you through . . . ,” the receptionist says, and I hold the line praying that the nurse-midwife, at least, knows what happened.
There is a click on the line. “Zoe,” the nurse says gently, “how are you doing?”
“My milk,” I choke out. “Is there anything I can do to dry it up?”
“Not really—you have to sort of ride it out,” she says. “But you can take some ibuprofen. Try putting refrigerated cabbage leaves inside your bra—we don’t know why, but there’s something in them that helps reduce inflammation. And sage—if you have any, cook with it. Or make a tea. Sage inhibits milk production.”
I thank her and hang up the phone. As I am putting down the handset again, it falls against the clock and inadvertently turns on the radio. I have it tuned to a classical station because it’s somehow easier for me to wake up at 6:00
A.M
. to orchestral strains rather than a rock beat.
The flute. The seesaw of the string section. The pumping grunt of the tuba and the horn. Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” wings from wall to ceiling to floor, filling the room with chaos and drive.
This track is on a CD still in a birthing bag I have not unpacked.
This track was never played during my delivery, although I had a baby.
In one quick move I grab the clock radio and yank it out of the electrical socket where it’s plugged in. I hold it high over my head and hurl it across the room so that it smashes onto the wooden floor in a crescendo that would have done Wagner proud.
When there is only silence, I can hear the tatter of my breath. I imagine explaining this to Max. Or my mother, showing up with a grocery bag and stumbling into this scene. “Okay,” I say to myself. “You can do this. You just have to pick up the pieces.”
In the kitchen I find a black trash bag and a dustpan and broom. I take the remnants of the radio and clean them up. I sweep all the tiny fragments and the innards into the dustpan.
Pick up the pieces.
It’s that simple, really. For the first time in forty-eight hours I feel a shift, a purpose. I dial Dr. Gelman’s office for the second time in ten minutes. “This is Zoe Baxter again,” I say. “I’d like to schedule an appointment.”
There are several reasons that I went home with Max the first night I met him:
1. He smelled like summer.
2. I was not the kind of girl who went home with guys she just met. Ever.
3. He was bleeding profusely.
Even though it was Max’s brother’s wedding, he spent all his time waiting for me to have my next band break. While the other guys went out for a smoke or to grab a glass of water from the bar, I’d look down and find Max waiting for me with a soft drink. At the time, I assumed that he wasn’t drinking alcohol out of solidarity: I was working, and not allowed to, so neither would Max. I remember thinking that was awfully sweet. Something most guys would not have done.
I didn’t know the happy couple, since I was a last-minute substitute singer, but it was hard to believe that Reid and Max were related. Not just in looks—Reid was tall and athletic in a golf-and-racquetball kind of way, whereas Max was sheer brute size and strength—but also in demeanor. Reid’s friends seemed all to be bankers and lawyers who liked to hear themselves talk; their girlfriends and wives had names like Muffy and Winks. Reid’s new wife, Liddy, came from Mississippi and seemed to thank Jesus a lot—for the weather, the wine, and the fact that her grammy Kate had lived long enough to see a ring on Liddy’s finger. Compared to the rest of the wedding party, Max was much more refreshing: what you saw was what you got. By midnight, when we were scheduled to stop playing, I knew that Max ran his own landscaping business, that he plowed snow in the winter, that his older brother was responsible for the silver scar on his cheek (line drive with a baseball), and that he was allergic to shellfish. He knew that I could sing the alphabet backward, that I could play ten instruments, and that I wanted a family. A big family.
From my spot on the podium, I turned to the band. According to the playlist, our final song was supposed to be Donna Summer’s “Last Dance.” But this didn’t seem like a disco crowd, so I turned to the guys behind me. “You know Etta James?” I asked, and the keyboard player launched into the beginning strains of “At Last.”
Sometimes when I sing, I close my eyes. There’s harmony in every breath I take; the drums become my pulse, the melody is the flow of my blood. This is what it means to lose yourself in music, to become a symphony of notes and rests and measures.
When I finished singing, there was a thunder of applause. I could hear Reid clapping loudly:
Brava!
And Liddy’s twittering girlfriends: . . .
best wedding band I’ve ever heard . . . must get their card from you.
“Thank you very much,” I murmured, and when I finally opened my eyes, Max was staring into them.
Suddenly, a man came crashing toward the stage, smacking his hand against the drum set as he stumbled forward. He was completely trashed and, from the sound of his Southern accent, one of Liddy’s relatives or family friends. “Hey, girlie,” he crowed, grabbing at the hem of my black dress. “You know what you are?”
The bass player took a step forward, shielding me, but Max was already coming to my rescue. “Sir,” he said politely, “I think you should leave . . .”
The drunk man shoved him and grabbed my hand. “You,” he slurred, “are a fucking nightingale!”
“You don’t swear in front of a lady,” Max said, and he punched the guy. The drunk collapsed against a shrieking cotillion of bridesmaids, their long gowns breaking his fall to the floor.
In an instant, a tuxedoed behemoth grabbed Max and spun him around. “This here’s for beatin’ on my daddy,” he said, and he knocked Max unconscious.
It was pandemonium—Hatfields versus McCoys, tables being overturned, old ladies tearing ribbons off each other’s hats. The band grabbed up their instruments, trying to keep the fray from destroying their equipment. I leaped off the stage and crouched over Max. He was bleeding from his mouth and nose, and also from a cut on his forehead where he’d struck the stage as he fell. I pulled his head onto my lap and huddled over him, shielding him from the rest of the commotion. “That,” I said, as soon as his eyes fluttered open, “was idiotic.”
He grinned. “I don’t know about that,” Max said. “It got your arms around me.”
He was bleeding so much that I insisted he go to the emergency room. He gave me the keys to his truck and let me drive while he pressed a napkin to his forehead. “Guess no one’s ever going to forget Reid’s wedding,” he mused.
I didn’t answer.
“You’re mad at me,” Max said.
“It was a compliment,” I said finally. “You punched a guy for giving me a compliment.”
He hesitated. “You’re right. I should have let him tear your dress off.”
“He wouldn’t have torn my dress off. The guys in the band would have stopped him before—”
“I wanted to be the one to save you,” Max said simply, and I stared at him in the green glow of the dashboard.
At the hospital, I waited with Max in a cubicle. “You’re going to need stitches,” I told him.
“I’m going to need a lot more than that,” he said. “For starters, I’m pretty sure my brother will never speak to me again.”
Before I could respond, a doctor pulled aside the curtain and entered, introducing himself. He snapped on a pair of rubber gloves and asked what had happened. “I ran into something,” Max said.
He winced as the doctor probed the scalp wound. “Into what?”
“A fist?”
The doctor took a penlight from his pocket and instructed Max to follow the tiny beam. I watched his eyes roll up, then from side to side. He caught my glance and winked at me.
“You’re going to need stitches,” the doctor echoed. “You don’t seem to have a concussion, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea to make sure someone stays with you tonight.” He pulled aside the curtains of the cubicle. “I’ll be back with the suture tray.”
Max looked up at me, a question in his eyes.
“Of course I’ll stay,” I said. “Doctor’s orders.”
One week later, I go back to work at the burn unit of the hospital. The first patient I see is Serena, a fourteen-year-old girl from the Dominican Republic who is one of my regulars. Burned severely in a house fire, she was treated locally and wound up disfigured and scarred. She hid in the dark in her family home for two years before coming to Rhode Island to have reconstructive skin grafts. I’ve met with her for an hour each time I am scheduled to be at the hospital, although at first, no one really understood what good music therapy could do for Serena. She was blind because of cataracts that developed when her scarred eyelids wouldn’t shut, and has limited movement in her hands. At first I just sang to her until she began to sing along with me. Eventually, I modified a guitar for her, tuning it to an open chord and then fitting it with a slide so that she could play. I put Velcro patches on the back of the neck of the guitar so that she could literally feel her way into the chords she was learning to play.
“Hi, Serena,” I say, as I knock on the door to her room.
“Hey, stranger,” she answers. I can hear the smile in her voice.
I am grateful, selfishly, for her blindness. For the fact that, unlike minutes ago, when I was talking to the nurses at their desk, I will not have to be responsible for putting her at ease when she doesn’t know how to offer condolences. Serena never knew I was pregnant; therefore, she has no reason to know the baby died.
“Where’ve you been?” she asks.
“Sick,” I say, pulling up a chair beside her and settling my guitar across my lap. I begin to tune it, and she reaches for her own instrument. “What have you been doing?”
“The usual,” Serena says. Her face is swathed in bandages, still healing from her most recent operation. Her words are slurred, but, after all this time, I know the patterns of her speech. “I have something for you.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. Listen. It’s called ‘The Third Life.’” I sit up, interested. This term grew out of therapy sessions we’d had over the past two months, where we’d talked about the difference between her first life—pre-fire—and her second, after the fire.
What about your third life?
I had asked Serena.
Where do you think of yourself, when all the surgeries are finished?
I listen to Serena’s reedy soprano, punctuated by the beeps and whirs of monitors attached to her body:
No hiding in the darkness
No anger and no pain
The outside may be different
But inside I’m the same
On the second verse, when I have her melody tangled in my mind, I begin to pick out harmony on my own guitar. I finish when she finishes singing, and as she slides her hand up the neck of the guitar, I clap.
“That,” I tell Serena, “was the best present ever.”
“Worth getting sick for?”
Once, during a session, Serena was playing with a rainstick, turning it over and over and getting progressively more agitated. When I asked her what it reminded her of, she told me about the last day she had been outside in the Dominican Republic. She was walking home from school and it started to pour. She knew, because she stepped in the puddles that were forming, and her hair was wet. But she couldn’t feel drops on her skin, because of the scar tissue. What she’d never understood was why she could not feel rain, but something as insubstantial as a classmate’s sneer about her Bride of Frankenstein face felt like a hot sword running through her.
That was the moment she decided not to leave her house again.
Music therapy is not supposed to be about the therapist, it’s supposed to be about the patient. And yet, a small splash on the belly of my guitar suggests I must be crying. Like Serena, I haven’t felt the tears on my cheeks at all.