Leaving Home

-Short Pieces-

By Jodi Picoult

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Hi readers,

Very often, I'll get an email that says, "I've read all your books.  NOW what do I read?"  I can't write my novels any faster -- but now that Kindle's created a space for short pieces, I'm happy to tide you over with some stories that have been published previously in different venues around the globe.  The pieces are quite different - one a short story about the greatest loss imaginable; one a non-fiction letter I wrote my son as he went off to college, and one a story about a mother who finally takes the vacation all of us mothers deserve.  The thread that connects them?  They are all variations of leaving home.  I hope you enjoy them!

Jodi Picoult

Weights and Measures

The loudest sound in the world is the absence of a child.  Sarah found herself waiting for it, the moment she opened her eyes in the morning:  that satin ribbon of a giggle, or the thump of a jump off the bed – but instead all she heard was the hiss of the coffeemaker that Abe must have preset in the kitchen last night, spitting angry as it finished its brewing.  She glanced at the clock over the landscape of Abe’s sleeping body.  For a moment, she thought about touching that golden shoulder or running her hand through his dark curls, but like most moments, it was gone before she remembered to act on it.  “We have to get up,” she said.

Abe didn’t move, did not turn toward her.  “Right,” he said, and from the pitch of his voice she knew that he hadn’t been asleep, either.

She rolled onto her back.  “Abe.”

“Right,” he repeated.  He pushed off the bed in one motion and closeted himself in the bathroom, where he ran the shower long before he stepped inside, incorrectly assuming the background noise would keep anyone outside from hearing him cry.

The worst day of Abe’s life had not been the one you’d imagine, but the one after that, when he went to choose his daughter’s coffin.  Sarah begged him to go; said she could not sit and talk about what to do with their daughter, as if she was a box of outgrown clothing that had to be stored somewhere safe and dry.  The funeral director was a man with a bad comb-over and kind, gray eyes, and his first question to Abe was whether he’d seen his daughter…afterward.  Abe had – once the doctors and nurses had given up and the tubes had been removed and the crash carts pulled away, he and Sarah were given a moment to say goodbye.  Sarah had run out of the hospital room, screaming.  Abe had sat down on the edge of the bed with the plastic mattress that crinkled beneath his weight, and had threaded his fingers with his daughter’s.  For a brief, heart-stopping moment, he thought he’d felt her move, but it turned out to be his own sobbing, jarring the bed.  He’d sat like that for a while, and then somehow, managed to pull her onto his lap and crawl onto the cot himself, as if he were the patient.

What he remembered was not how still she was, or how her skin grew ashen under his touch, but how she had weighed just the tiniest bit less than she had that morning, when he’d carried her through the double doors of the emergency room. It wasn’t remarkable to think that he – a man who lived by weights and measures – would be sensitive to this even at a moment as overwhelming at that one.  Abe recalled hearing medical examiners say a person who died lost twenty-one grams of weight – the measure of a human soul.  He realized, though, holding his daughter in his arms, that the scale was all wrong.  Loss should have been measured in leagues: the linear timeline he would not spend with her as she lost her first tooth, lost her heart over a boy, lost the graduation cap she tossed into a silvered sky.  Loss should have been measured circularly, like angles:  the minutes between the two of them, the degrees of separation.

We suggest that you dress your daughter the way she would have wanted, the funeral director had said.  Did she have a favorite party dress, or a pair of overalls she always wore to climb trees?  A soccer uniform?  A t-shirt from a favorite vacation?

There were other questions, and decisions to be made, and finally, the funeral director took Abe into another room to choose a coffin.  The samples were stacked against the wall, jet and mahogany sarcophagi gleaming at such high polish he could see his own ravaged features in their reflections.  The funeral director led Abe to the far end of the room, where three stunted coffins were propped like brave soldiers.  They ranged from some that came up as high as his hip to one that was barely bigger than a breadbox.

Abe picked one painted a glossy white, with gold piping, because it reminded him of his daughter’s bedroom furniture.  He kept staring at it.  Although the funeral director assured him that it was the right size, it did not seem large enough to Abe to hold a girl as full of life as his daughter.  It was certainly not large enough, he knew, to pack inside the turtle-shell of grief that he’d armored himself in this past day.  Which meant, of course, that even after his daughter was gone, the sorrow would remain behind.

The funeral was held at a church neither Abe nor Sarah attended, a service arranged by Sarah’s mother, who in spite of this still managed to believe in God.  At first, Sarah had fought it – how many idealistic discussions had she and Abe had about religion being akin to brainwashing; about letting their child choose her own rainbow of beliefs? – but Sarah’s mother put her foot down, and Sarah – still reeling – was weak enough to be toppled.  What kind of parent, Felicity had said tearfully, doesn’t want a man of God to say a few words over her daughter?  Now, Sarah sat in the front pew as this pastor spoke, words that flowed over the crowd like an anesthetic breeze.  In her hand was a small teal-green Beanie Baby, a dog that had gone everywhere with her child, to the point where it was hairless and frayed and barely even recognizable in its animalhood.  Sarah squeezed it in her fist, so tight that she could feel its seeded stuffing start to push at the seams.

Try to remember, as we celebrate her short and glorious life, that sadness comes out of love.  Sadness is a kind of terrible privilege.

Sarah wondered why the pastor hadn’t mentioned the truly important things:  like the fact that her daughter could take a toilet paper roll and turn it into a pretend video camera that occupied her imagination for hours.  Or that the only songs that made her stop crying when she had colic as an infant were tracks from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  She wondered why he hadn’t told the people who’d come here that her daughter had only just learned how to do a roundoff in gymnastics and that she could pick the Big Dipper out of any night sky?

Oh, Lord, receive this child of Yours into the arms of Your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the company of angels.

At that, Sarah lifted her head.  Not Your child, she thought.  Mine.

Ten minutes later, it was over.  She remained stone-still while everyone else left to get into their cars and drive to the cemetery.  But she had worked out something special with Abe; the one request, really, she’d had for this funeral.  She felt Abe’s hand come onto her shoulder and his lips move against her ear.  “Do you still –“

“Yes,” she interrupted, and then he was gone too.

She walked up to the coffin, surrounded by an embarrassment of flowers.  Fall flowers, like the ones she’d had in her wedding bouquet.  She forced herself to glance down at her daughter – who looked, well, perfectly normal, which was the great irony here.

“Hey, baby,” Sarah said softly, and she tucked the small green dog underneath her daughter’s arm.  Then she opened up the large purse she’d brought with her to the funeral service.

It had been critical for her to be the last one to see her daughter, before that casket was closed.  She wanted to be the last one to lay eyes on her girl, the same way – seven years ago – she had been the first.

The book she pulled out of her purse was so dog-eared and worn that its spine had cracked and some of its pages were only filed in between others, instead of glued into place.  “In a great green room,” she began to read, “there was a fireplace, and a red balloon, and picture of…”

She hesitated.  This was the part where her daughter would have chimed in:  The cow jumping over the moon.  But now, Sarah had to say the words for her.  She read through to the end, going by heart when the tears came so furiously that she could not see the words on the page.  “Goodnight stars,” she whispered.  “Goodnight air.  Goodnight noises everywhere.”  Then she drew in a ragged breath and touched her finger to her daughter’s lips.  “Sleep tight,” Sarah said.

In the gathering hall at the church, Abe noticed there were obscene amounts of food, as if pastries and deviled eggs and casseroles could make up for the fact that nobody really knew what to say to him.  He stood holding a plate piled high that someone had brought him, although he hadn’t taken a single bite.  From time to time, a friend or a relative would come up to him and say something stupid:  How are you doing?  Are you holding up okay?  It won’t hurt as much, in time.  Things like that only made him want to put down his plate and punch the speaker until his hand bled, because that kind of pain he could understand better than the empty ache in his chest that wouldn’t go away.  No one said what they all were truly thinking, when they furtively glanced over at Abe with his bad-fitting black suit and his Styrofoam plate:  I’m so glad it happened to you, and not me.

“Excuse me.”

Abe turned around to find a woman he’d never met before – middle-aged, with wrinkles around her eyes that made him think she had smiled, often, in her youth.  Maybe one of Felicity’s church ladies, he thought.  She was holding a box of daffodil bulbs.  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said, and she held out the box.

He set down the plate on a chair beside him so that he could take the bulbs.  “Plant these now,” she said, “and when they come up in the Spring, think of her.”

She touched his arm and walked off, leaving Abe holding onto this hope.

Sarah had met Abe when she was new to Los Angeles, and some friends had taken her to a cigar club that was so exclusive you had to enter through a corporate office building and give the doorman the password to be let into the correct elevator bank.  The club was on the roof of the building, and Sarah’s friends had tried to cure her east-coast homesickness by showing off Mel Gibson’s humidor.  It was a dark place, one where actors who fancied themselves to be musicians were likely to pick up a guitar and jam with the band; one that only made Sarah even more aware of how much she hated this city, this new job, this departure from where she really wanted to be.

They sat at the bar, pulling up stools beside a good-looking guy with hair as dark as ink and a smile that made Sarah feel like she was caught in a whirlpool.  Sarah’s friends ordered Cosmos and tried to outflirt each other – getting him to reveal that he was the drummer in the band, and that his name was Abe.   When one of the girls came back from the bathroom and exclaimed, Have you seen all the stars?, Abe leaned over and asked Sarah to dance.  They moved like smoke over the empty dance floor, to a canned jazz track.  “Why me?” Sarah asked simply.

His hand, resting on the small of her back, pulled her just that much closer.  “Because,” Abe said.  “When your friend started talking about stars, you were the only one in this whole fucking place who looked up at the sky.”

Three months later, they moved to Massachusetts together.  Six months later, they got married, amidst many toasts and jokes about Abraham and Sarah and their destiny to create a tribe.  But like their Biblical counterparts, it took years for them to have a child – eight, to be exact.  Just long enough for Sarah to believe it was time to give up trying.  Just short enough for her to be overwhelmed with the news of her pregnancy; to never give a second thought to the fact that this might not be the end of the struggle, but instead, the beginning.

On the way home from the church, Sarah turned to Abe and told him to stop at the grocery store.  “There’s nothing in the house,” she said, as if this wasn’t obvious on so many levels.  They were too numb to think about how they looked, at one in the afternoon, moving through the frozen foods aisle in coat and tie and pearls and heels.  They wandered through the store, picking out the items that seemed to scream normal: eggs and bread and cheese and milk; things any family could use.  In the cereal aisle, Abe started to automatically reach for the Berry Kix, her favorite, until he realized that they didn’t need it anymore; and he covered gracefully by taking instead the cereal box beside it, some godawful bran thing that looked like straw and that he knew he’d never eat.

They went to the line with their favorite checkout girl, the one who didn’t mind when their daughter helped scan the bar codes on the soup cans and the frozen peas.  She smiled when she saw them.  “Wow, look at you two!” she said, glancing at their clothes and winking.  “Don’t tell me food shopping is what passes for a date without the kids, nowadays…”

Abe and Sarah froze.  This woman wouldn’t know – how could she? She thought, as would any other stranger, that their daughter was home with a babysitter, watching The Princess Diaries for the six hundredth time or pretending the Tupperware was a drum set.  As Abe signed the credit card receipt, the checkout clerk reached beneath her cash register and pulled out a lollipop.  “She likes blue, right?  Tell her I missed her.”

“Yes,” Abe said, grasping it so tightly that the stick curved.  “Yes, I will.”

He followed Sarah as she pushed the cart outside, where the sun was so bright it brought tears to his eyes.  Sarah turned to him, speechless and staring.  “What?” Abe said, his voice raw.  “What did I do wrong?”

Three days later, Sarah woke up and pulled on her favorite sweater only to realize that her arms now stretched a good three inches past the ends of the sleeves.  Annoyed – did Abe shrink it in the wash? – she pulled out another only to realize that she’d outgrown that one, too.  She stared at herself in the mirror for a moment and then pushed the sleeves up to her elbows, where she could not see anything wrong.

She tried to pretend that she didn’t notice when she unloaded the dishwasher and could, for the first time in her life, reach the top shelves of the cabinets without having to stand on a stool or ask Abe for his help.

On his last day of paid Bereavement Leave, Abe remembered sitting in the hospital with his daughter.  There were starfish painted on the window glass, and while they waited for the doctor and Sarah read a waiting-room magazine from the turn of the century, his daughter had wanted to play I-Spy.  It had gotten to the point, in the past seven years, where Abe could almost do this semi-conscious – since his daughter had a habit of changing mid-stream what her target object was, anyway, the game didn’t make any linear sense.  He guessed the Exit sign over the door, the bathroom knob, the starfish on the far right; getting more and more impatient, and wishing the doctor would just come in already so that he didn’t have to play one more damn round.

It had only been a sore throat.  Her fever wasn’t more than 101.  That was the criteria – you weren’t supposed to worry about a fever until it spiked past 102; something Sarah had learned the hard way when she’d call the pediatrician early on freaking out over everything from hangnails to cradle cap.  But over the course of their daughter’s life, they’d weaned themselves into health care confidence.  They didn’t rush her into the office at the sign of the first cough; they made her sleep overnight on an earache to make sure it was present the next morning before they went to get it checked.  And this time, Sarah had kept her home from school waiting to see if it was a virus, or strep throat.  They’d done what they were supposed to do as parents; they’d listened to the doctors; they’d played by the rules – and by dinnertime, the rules didn’t apply.  Children weren’t supposed to die of strep throat, but then again, you did not have to look far for the shouldn’ts.  All over this world there were tsunamis sweeping entire countries out to sea; there were Eskimo women with breast milk full of mercury; there were wars being fought that had been started for the wrong reasons.  All over this world impossible things were happening, that never should have.

Abe realized he would play I-Spy for a thousand years, if he could.

The next day, when Abe left for work, Sarah cleaned. Not just a cursory vacuum and floor-mop, mind you, but toilets scrubbed by hand and radiator registers being dusted and the washing of the walls. She went into her drawers and bagged all the sweaters that did not fit, and the new pile of pants that ended above her ankles.  She got rid of the travel coffee mugs and gravy boats and cherry pitters she never used, weeding through the kitchen drawers.  She organized Abe’s clothes by color grouping; she threw out all the medicine bottles past their expiration date.  She wiped down the shelves of the refrigerator and tossed the capers and the mustard and the horseradish that hadn’t been used except for that one recipe months ago.

She began to organize the closets in the house – the front one, with the winter coats still in hibernation and the boots tossed like gauntlets into a Rubbermaid bin on the floor – and then the hall closet with its piles of snowy towels and heady potpourri.  It was in that one that she found herself reaching to the rear of the top shelf – the hiding spot she’d never been able to reach herself without a struggle, before, and that therefore became her cache of Christmas gifts bought and saved all year for her daughter.    One by one, Sarah pulled out a remote control robot, an art set to make flower fairies, a dress-up kit – treasures she’d found in January or March or May and had known, in that instant, that her daughter would love.  She stood immobile for a long moment, holding this bounty in her elongated arms, paralyzed by the most concrete evidence she’d found yet that her daughter was Not. Coming. Home.

Sarah sat down in the middle of the hall.  She opened up the plastic shrink-wrapped robot, installed its batteries, and sent him careening into the bathroom.  She opened the dress-up kit and wrapped a pink boa around her own neck; peered into the tiny heart-shaped mirror to apply the fuchsia lipstick and glittery blue eyeshadow, a whore’s version of happiness.

When the phone rang, she ran into the bedroom to pick up an extension.  “How are you doing?” Abe asked.

“Fine,” Sarah said.  In the bedroom mirror, she could still see the clown-red cheeks, the garish mouth.  “I’m fine.”

She hung up the phone and went into the kitchen for a large black trash bag, big enough to hold a yard’s worth of leaves, or a closet full of the future.  She scooped all the unused toys for her daughter into the trash bag and carried it over her shoulder out to the garage.  Because it was not Trash Day, Sarah drove all the way to the municipal dump, where she let the attendant punch her ticket once for the privilege of hauling the sack over the ravine’s edge.  She waited, until this bag full of what she lost nestled itself between other bags stuffed with the things people actually chose to give away.

Pharmacists live in minutiae, which is why Abe had learned a whole system of measurement in college that most educated folks don’t even know exists.  Ask anyone who has ever filled the innards of a tiny gelatin capsule with a drug, and they will know that twenty grains equals one scruple.  Three scruples equal one dram apothecaries.  Eight drams apothecaries equal one ounce apothecaries, which equals four hundred eighty grains, or twenty-four scruples.

Abe was trying to count the twenty-four scruples, but they had nothing to do with the pills he had spilled before him on the little rubber mat from Pfizer, a freebee he’d gotten at some conference in Santa Fe.  It was funny – a scruple, by itself, was a misgiving; make it plural and it suddenly was a set of principles, of ethics.  It was that simple, he understood now.  You only had to survive one of your regrets, and it was enough to make you realize you’d been living your life all wrong.

He regretted telling his daughter to clean up her room the day before she died.  He regretted the fact that he hadn’t hugged her in front of her friends after her Fall Concert at school, because he thought her embarrassment was more important than his pride.  He regretted not taking his family to Australia, when they were still a family.  He regretted not having been given the chance to meet a grandchild. He regretted having seven years, instead of seventy-seven.

Abe pushed aside these thoughts and began to recount the pills.  But he had to keep hiking up his pants – they were riding that low on his hips.  Finally, ducking behind a wall of meds, he unbuttoned his white coat and notched his belt tighter.  It would make sense that he was losing weight – he hadn’t been eating, really – but the belt suddenly didn’t fit at all.  There simply wasn’t a notch where he needed it to be; he’d grown that thin, that fast.

Frustrated, he unwound some twine in the back room used for shipments and took off his belt, looping the rope in its place.  He thought of going back inside and finishing the order, but instead he walked out through the back receiving door of the pharmacy and kept walking – around the block, and then down three more, and through the traffic light, until he came to a bar he passed every day when he drove home.  Olaf’s, it was called, and it was open, even though it was only eleven A.M.

He was aware, as he walked through the door, that he looked like a poor man’s Charlie Chaplin, with a rope holding up his pants.  He was aware that he hadn’t been to a bar during the day since he’d been a drummer a lifetime ago.  There were five people at the bar, even in the morning, and they weren’t the sort of folks you found in bars at night.  These were the hard-luck cases, the ones who needed whiskey (a dram!) to get through another few hours of an ordinary workday; or the call girls who needed to forget before they went home to sleep off last night’s memories; or the old men who only wanted to find their youth in the bottom of a bottle of gin.

Abe climbed onto a stool – and climbed was the word; he must have been more exhausted than he thought, for all the effort that it took to get onto it.  “Have you got Jameson’s?” he asked the bartender, and the guy looked at him with a smile as crooked as lightning.

“Nice try, kid,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

The bartender shook his head.  “You got any I.D.?”

Abe was forty-two years old, he could not remember the last time he’d been carded.  He had grey hair at the temples, for God’s sake.  But he reached for his wallet, only to realize that it was back at work, in his locker, like usual.  “I don’t,” he said.

“Well, then,” the bartender said.  “I ain’t got Jameson’s.  Come on back when you turn twenty-one.”

Abe stared at him, confounded.  He jumped off the stool, landing hard.  The whole way back to work, he searched for his reflection in the shiny hoods of Buicks, in plate glass windows of bakeries, in puddles.  When you lost a child, did you lose the years you’d spent with her, too?

A week after their daughter’s death, Sarah could not stop thinking about her.  She would taste the skin of the little girl, a kiss, the moment before the chicory of the coffee kicked in, or the sweetness of the muffin blossomed on her tongue.  She would pick up a newspaper and feel instead the rubbery band of small socks between her fingers, as she folded them over after doing the wash.  She’d be in one room and hear the music of her daughter’s voice, the way grammar leaped through her sentences like a frog.

Abe, on the other hand, was starting to lose her.  He would close his eyes and try to conjure his daughter’s face, and he still could, but it was unraveled at the edges a little more each day.  He found himself spending hours in her bedroom, inhaling the smell of her strawberry-mango shampoo still trapped in the fibers of the pillowcase, or poring through the books on her shelves and trying to see them through her eyes.  He went so far as to open her fingerpaints, stand stripped to the waist in front of her tiny mirror, draw her heart on his chest.

Although Sarah’s M.O. was usually to do the opposite of whatever her mother told her to do, this time, she took her advice.  She showed up at the church, shuddering as she remembered the hymns that had been played at her daughter’s funeral; steeling herself for the absence of the coffin at the altar.  She knocked on the pastor’s office door, and he ushered her inside and gave her a cup of tea.  “So,” the pastor said, “your mother’s worried about you.”

Sarah opened up her mouth to say something snippy and typically awful, but she caught herself in time.  Of course her mother was worried.  That was the job description, wasn’t it?  That was why she had come.

“Can I ask you something?” Sarah said.  “Why her?”

“I don’t understand…”

“I get the whole God thing.  I get the Kingdom of Heaven.  But there are millions of seven year olds out there.  Why did God take mine?”

The pastor hesitated.  “God didn’t take your daughter, Sarah,” he said.  “Illness did.”

Sarah snorted.  “Sure.  Pass the buck when it’s convenient.”  She could feel herself dangerously at the edge of breaking down, and wondered why on earth she’d thought it was a good idea to come here.

The pastor reached for her hand.  His were warm and papery, familiar.  “Heaven’s an amazing place,” he said softly.  “She’s up there, and she’s looking down on us, right now, you know.”

Sarah felt her throat tighten.  “My daughter,” she said, “can’t ride a ski lift without hyperventilating.  She panics in elevators.  She doesn’t even like bunk beds.  She’s terrified of heights.”

“Not anymore.”

“How do you know that?” Sarah exploded. “How do you know that there’s anything afterward?  How do you know it doesn’t just…end?”

“I don’t know,” the pastor said.  “But I can hope.  And I truly believe that your daughter is in Heaven, and even if she does still get scared, Jesus will be there to keep her safe.”

She turned away as a tear streaked down her cheek.  “She doesn’t know Jesus,” Sarah said.  “She knows me.”

Abe found himself defying gravity.  He’d be standing in the kitchen, getting a glass of water, and he’d find himself rising to the balls of his feet.  He could not walk fast down the street without starting to float between strides.  He started to put stones in the pockets of his pants, which were all too long for him now.

He was sitting on his daughter’s bed one Saturday, remembering a conversation they’d had.  Can I still live here when I get married? she’d asked, and he’d grinned and said that would be perfectly fine.

But what about your husband? he’d asked.

His daughter had considered this carefully.  Well, we could set up the cot, like when I have a sleepover.

The doorbell rang, and when Abe went downstairs, he found the little girl his daughter had considered her best friend – the last one who’d used that cot, actually – standing red-eyed beside her mother.  “Hi, Abe,” the woman said.  “I hope this isn’t too much of an imposition.”

“No!” he said, too brightly.  “No!  Not at all!”

“It’s just that Emily’s having some trouble, with, well, you know.  She drew a picture, and wanted to bring it here.  She thought maybe you could hang it up.”  The little girl thrust out a piece of paper toward Abe:  a crayoned drawing of two little girls – one dark haired, like his daughter, one fair, like Emily.  They were holding hands.  There was a melting sun overhead, and grass beneath their feet.

Abe realized he was nearly at a level with Emily; he barely had to crouch down to look her in the eye.  “This is beautiful, honey,” he said.  “I’m going to put it up right over her bed.”  He reached out as if to touch the crown of her hair, but realized that this might hurt him more than it would offer comfort, and at the last minute pulled his arm back to his side.

“Are you all right?” Emily’s mother whispered.  “You look…” Her voice trailed off, as she tried to find the right word, and then she just gave up and shook her head.  “Well.  Of course you’re not all right.  I’m so sorry, Abe.  I truly am.”  With one last look, she took Emily’s hand and started to walk down the driveway.

Abe held the crayon picture in his hand so tightly that it crumpled.  He watched Emily kick the unraked leaves along the sidewalk, setting up small tornadoes; as her mother looked straight ahead, not even aware that she was missing this one small, wonderful thing.

Sarah and Abe did not really speak to each other, not until Abe walked into their daughter’s room and found Sarah taking the books off the shelves and putting them into boxes.  “What are you doing?” he asked, stricken.

“I can’t move past this,” Sarah said, “knowing it’s all right down the hall.”

“No,” Abe answered.

Sarah hesitated. “What do you mean, no?”

Abe reached into one of the boxes and took out a fistful of picture books, jammed them back into the shelf.  “Just because you’re ready to give her up,” he said, “doesn’t mean I am.”

Sarah’s face bloomed with color.  “Give her up?” she whispered.  “Is that what you think I’m doing?  For God’s sake, Abe, all I want to do is function like a normal human being again.”

“But you’re not normal.  We’re not normal.”  His eyes filled with tears.  “She died, Sarah.”

Sarah winced, as if she had taken a blow.  Then she turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

Abe sank onto the floor, his fingers speared through his hair.  After a half hour, he stood up and walked down the hall to their bedroom.  He found Sarah lying on her side, staring at the sun as it shamefully scuttled off the horizon.  Abe lay down on the bed, curling his body around hers.  “I lost her,” he whispered.  “Please don’t tell me I’ve lost you.”

Sarah turned to him, and rested her palm on his cheek.  She kissed him, all the words she could not say.  They began to comfort each other – a touch here, a brush of lips there, a kindness.  But when their clothes had dissolved into pools on the floor; when Abe braced himself over his wife and took hold of her body and tried to settle her curves against his canyons; they did not come together seamlessly, the way they used to.  They were off, just enough to make it uncomfortable; just enough for her to say Let me try this; and for him to say, Maybe this way.

Afterward, when Sarah had fallen asleep, Abe sat up and stared down at the end of the bed; at his wife’s feet hanging long and white over its edge.

The next morning, Abe and Sarah lay in the dark.  “Maybe I need to be alone for a while,” Sarah said, although it wasn’t what she’d hoped to say.

“Maybe you do,” Abe replied, although it was the opposite of what he meant.  It was as if, in this new world, where the impossible had actually happened, nothing fit anymore:  not language, not reason, not even the two of them.

When Sarah got out of bed, she took the sheet with her – a modesty she hadn’t needed for fifteen years of marriage.  It prevented Abe from seeing what he would have noticed, in an instant:  that the growth Sarah had experienced was exactly the same amount Abe himself had diminished; and that, if you could measure anything as insubstantial as that, it would have been exactly the same size and scope as the daughter they’d lost.

Sarah reached the suitcase, even though it was stored in the top rafters of the attic.  Abe watched her pack.  At the door, they made promises they both knew they would not keep.  “I’ll call,” Sarah said, and Abe nodded.  “Be well,” he answered.

She was going to stay with her mother – something that, in all the years of their marriage, Abe never would have imagined coming to pass; and yet he considered this a positive sign.  If Sarah was choosing Felicity, in spite of their rocky relationship, maybe there was hope for all children to return to their parents, regardless of how impossible the journey seemed to be.

He had to pull a chair over to the window, because he was no longer tall enough to see over its sill.  He stood on the cushion and watched her put her suitcase into the car.  She looked enormous to him, a giantess – and he considered that this is what motherhood does to a woman: make her larger than life.  He waited until he could not see her car anymore, and then he climbed down from the chair.

He could not work anymore; he was too short to reach the counter.  He could not drive anywhere, the pedals were too far from his feet.  There was nothing for Abe to do, so he wandered through the house, even emptier than it was.  He found himself, of course, in his daughter’s room.  Here, he spent hours:  drawing with her art kit; playing with her pretend food and cash register; sifting through the drawers of her clothing and playing a game with himself:  can you remember the last time she wore this?  He put on a Radio Disney CD and forced himself to listen to the whole of it.  He lined up her stuffed animals, like witnesses.

Then he crawled into her dollhouse, one he’d built for her last Christmas.  He closed the door behind himself.  He glanced around at the carefully pasted wallpaper, the rich red velvet loveseat; the kitchen sink.  He climbed the stairs to the bedroom, where he could stare out the window to his heart’s content.  The view, it was perfect.

An Open Letter to My Oldest Son, As He Leaves for College

You were in such a hurry to arrive.  There I was, in the middle of a class IV hurricane a month before my due date, packing a bag for the hospital between contractions, as gusts of rain rattled the house.  There was your father, videotaping through the windshield as he drove; the eerie bank of tollbooths on the highway unmanned and free for all.  And then, suddenly, there you were:  long and skinny and undercooked, still missing your eyelashes and fingernails.  In all my life, I had never seen anything as remarkable as your life.  As the doctors and nurses wandered the halls of the hospital, quarantined by the storm; as reporters on the grainy television overhead talked about waves breaking over the sea wall and coastal flooding; I held you tight.  You, I thought, already have a story to tell the world.

You were in such a hurry to arrive, and now, eighteen years later, I’m having a hard time letting you go.  I know that the whole point of parenting is getting your child to the point where he can forge his own path.  I know that a hatchling who is six feet tall and sports size twelve shoes is not really a hatchling anymore.  And I know that the preparations for this moment have been ongoing – from packing up your clothes to selecting the desk lamp for your dorm room, from writing out directions to help you do your own laundry to opening up a bank account in your name – all these tiny hallmarks that let a stranger see, at close range, you are no longer a child but an adult.  Yet now that we’re actually in the moment – driving to the school that will serve as a bridge to your future – I feel like there’s something I’ve forgotten.  Did I tell you that you have to change the bag inside the vacuum every now and then?  Do you have any idea how to sew on a button?

I have equipped you with extra long sheets and a television set and a credit card with your name emblazoned across the bottom.  Boxes are piled high in the back of the car, full of your softest tees and your broken-in jeans, your favorite books and your iPod speakers, everything you assume you will need to recreate home.  In a few hours, after we have unloaded and unpacked and made the bed and hung your posters on the walls, I am going to hold you tight and tell you for the thousandth time how proud I am of you.  I’m going to paste a smile on my face and I’m going to say, Work hard!  Have fun!

There’s so much, though, that I won’t be saying to you today.  It’s the lump sum of the twenty-five year lead I’ve got on you – a quarter century of mistakes and triumphs.  But unlike the litmus test for when you take a Tylenol versus when you call the doctor – something we discussed this past summer – these lectures aren’t quickly memorized.  They can’t be tucked like notes between the folds of your comforter and the chapters of your paperbacks, inside the jewel cases of your CDs. Lessons of the heart are different that way; they have to be learned on your own.

So although I am thinking it, you won’t hear me tell you:  Do what you love.  Have you ever heard a five-year-old say that when he grows up, he wants to be an advertising executive?  I didn’t think so.  A crazy thing happens at university – kids who once wanted to be astronauts and ballerinas and firemen somehow morph into bankers and public relations specialists and sales managers.  Practicality – such as paying the bills for the first time in your life – is a heavy-duty abrasive that wears the sharp edges of a dream to fit into the round hole of reality.  Remember me – with my one-in-a-million career path – the writer I hoped to be, instead of the teacher I assumed I’d be.  Don’t listen to people who ask you what on earth one does with a degree in Egyptology.  If it’s what you fall asleep thinking about, and wake up excited about, it’s what you should pursue.  The rest (including a paycheck) will somehow sort itself out.

You won’t hear me tell you:  See the world through your own eyes. When you were ten, you stood up in class and blurted out, I love math!  It was an outburst of sheer enthusiasm, followed by a chorus of snickers from the rest of the class.  I remember cringing, because I knew how much you’d be teased.  But you know what?  You did love math.  You still do.  And you knew even at that age that your voice had just as much right to be heard as anyone else’s.  That’s still true – whether you are talking about religion, politics, or sexual orientation. You’re smarter than I ever was.  You’re self-motivated.  You have the persuasive ability to talk a polar bear into moving to the Bahamas.  Sure, it’s easier to be a lemming, to agree with what the majority says and does.  But it’s more meaningful to be the dissenting vote, because – who knows? – you just might make someone else think twice.

And, a codicil:  This planet is smaller than you think.  I don’t just mean that environmentally – an arena where you’ve taught me, instead of the other way around.  I mean that there will be plenty of people who do not think the way you do – whether that’s in a class at college, in the workplace, in your country.  Don’t judge someone just because their opinions are different – lest they do the same to you.  Instead, ask them if they want to grab a cup of coffee.  Start a conversation.  Listen.  Open their minds – and your own.   Focus on what’s good, instead of carping about what’s lousy.  Is your waitress particularly attentive?  Tell her how much you appreciate it.  Write a letter to the editor of the local paper, praising someone who’s done a great job.  For some reason, discontent spreads virally, and edges out kindness.  Make some room for it.

Expect to cry.  Real life isn’t fair.  People get promoted who don’t deserve it.  Politicians get elected when they’re not the wisest choice.  You finally get the courage to ask someone out – and you get rejected.  Baseball players make millions and teachers can barely pay their mortgages.  Here’s a bona fide fact:  You’re not going to get straight A’s in college; you’re going to have professors who play favorites.  So be it.  One of the best lessons you’ll ever learn is how to pick yourself up again, and in order to do that, you have to stumble.

Fall in love.  Once, you and I had a conversation about whether or not love was a miracle.  You said no – that there are natural phenomena that can’t always be explained by science.  I said yes – that in a world of six billion people, finding someone who gets you is pretty miraculous.  I hope I get to prove you wrong.  I hope you find a partner who makes you a better version of yourself, simply by association.  I hope you find a person who loves you not because you’re perfect, but in spite of the fact that you’re not.

There are so many other things I won’t say to you:  Be history, instead of just watching it happen from the sidelines.  Try something new, even if it scares you to death.  Learn because you love to learn, not because you’re being tested.  Don’t whine – there is always someone who’s having a worse day than you are.  Be honest with yourself, and you’ll never have anything to hide.    But all of these things you will discover, in due course.

Growing up isn’t about age, and it isn’t about experience.  It’s a very real threshold, much like the one we’re standing on now at your dorm room, between two schools of thought.  One minute, it’s all about you – and the next, it’s all about the people that surround you.  As soon as their well-being is more important to you than your own, you have crossed that threshold; you can call yourself an adult.

I have always loved you, but I can very distinctly remember the moment I realized how much I liked you as well – not just as my child, but also as a fellow human; as someone I would pick as a friend, even if you had not been placed strategically in my life’s path.  I was on a book tour in Rome and I had brought you along.  After an hour of walking in circles, due to my geographical incompetence, you ripped the little map out of my hands.  You, you said firmly, are not allowed to use this anymore.  And just like that, you became the grownup, and I followed you like a child to our destination.

It was not the first time we had been on an unknown road together.  Eighteen years ago, you were the one who showed me how to be a mother – a baptism by fire.  You loved me, even during the times I wasn’t sure I was doing it right or well, simply because I was yours.  During that hurricane in 1991, when I held you for the very first time, I could never have imagined that this is where we would both end up.

Now, as you bend down to embrace me, as you say goodbye, I think of all the things I’ve taken for granted:  The ability to hug you whenever I feel like it.  The pitch of your voice.  The mess on the floor of your room.  A standing invitation in front of the television, to watch a new episode of Project Runway.   Your incredible photographic memory.  The seat height in your car, which I always have to readjust.  Your sarcasm.  The beauty of you doing a one-and-a-half off the diving board.  The way you roll your eyes, but ultimately share your chocolate with me.

So, here is my brave smile, the one that will crumble as soon as I am safely in the car, where you can no longer see me.

Work hard!  Have fun!

And maybe there is one last thing I will say: Eighteen years ago, when I saw you for the first time, I was wrong.  The story you’ll tell the world, Kyle, is not the one about how you arrived…but instead the one about where you are headed.

I can’t wait to hear every word.

Ritz

The note is inside the refrigerator, propped against a carton of orange juice. I’m taking a break, my mother has written. Don’t worry about me.

“What’s she taking a break from?” I ask out loud.

“Sanity,” my brother Devon answers. “People don’t leave notes in refrigerators.”

Devon, who is eighteen and apparently knows everything, is looking at this the wrong way, in my opinion. Granted, I’m three years younger than he is, but I think Mom has shown a peculiar genius in leaving the note between the leftovers from yesterday’s lasagna and the bottle of canola oil: she knew that a message on the kitchen counter could easily be overlooked; but no matter what direction we were pulled in after school; no matter how much French verb conjugation I had to slog through or how many hours Devon spent making a racket with his garage band -- eventually, we will give into our growling hunger and find something to eat.

“Maybe we should call Dad,” I suggest.

Pretty much, a bomb would have to detonate inside our living room to warrant a phone call to my father during business hours. He works on Wall Street, trading futures.

He leaves at 4:30 AM to beat the traffic going into the city from White Plains, and he gets home after seven. The irony doesn’t escape me: he is so busy tracking what might happen that he’s hardly around to enjoy the here and now.

Devon shrugs. “She probably went out to…do whatever she does. You know.”

But the truth is, I have no idea what my mother does with her spare time. I mean, I guess maybe she likes to jog every now and then, or hit a good sale at a mall. I think sometimes she goes out and has lunch with one of her friends. But mostly, my vision of her is firmly planted in our house, like a vine too twined to be transplanted. Just like I used to believe that my kindergarten teacher slept underneath her desk, it is hard to picture my mother existing outside the boundaries of my home, of my life.

“She’ll be back in time to make dinner,” Devon says, and then he reaches out and messes up my hair. It is totally out of character for him – Devon is more likely to accidentally drop my toothbrush in the toilet than show me any sisterly affection – and somehow this compassion makes me feel worse, as if he is being nice to me in the way that people are nice to cancer patients or mentally challenged kids or anyone else who’s had such bad luck that you want to compensate with kindness. I go soft inside, like the egg that my mother cooks for us when we are sick. She serves it in a little half-cup with a daisy painted on the side. I always wondered what would happen if Devon and I both got sick at once; since there is only one egg cup.

I realize, with a little shiver, that I have never seen my mother sick. I mean, sure, she gets colds and allergies, but how can someone survive over a decade without being so sick she just crawls into bed and has someone else wait on her hand and foot? Then again, who would fill that role for my mother? I consider what it might be like to feel lousy, but have to cook yourself your own egg and put it in the daisy cup.

And that’s how I realize my mother will not be home for dinner, for breakfast, maybe not forever.

Just so you know, I’m not stupid. I may only be in ninth grade but I get straight A’s; I score off the charts on the standardized tests we have to take at school. In this, I am the polar opposite of my brother, for whom school is not a journey, but a condition you outgrow.

I am, however, invisible. Devon’s surly enough to take up all the parenting time allotted to both of us. I hardly ever talk to my father, because he’s so busy that it seems ridiculous to think he’d care about what grade I got on my science project. And my mother’s usually running in a thousand directions at once. I’ll listen in a minute, she says, but then she never quite gets around to it.

A little while after we find the note, I track Devon down in the garage, wailing on his bass while two of his friends play the drums and the guitar. This week they are calling themselves Goths in Thongs. Last week, it was the Undead Puppies.

Devon sees me and stops playing. “What,” he says, an accusation.

“She’s still not back.”

He rolls his eyes. “Jenna, it’s only been an hour.”

I cross my arms. “I called her cell phone and she didn’t answer.”

“So what? Maybe she turned it off. Maybe she’s at a movie.”

“Dude,” says Yak, who plays the drums. That’s not his real name, by the way. I think it’s Absalom or Alistair or something like that. “Is there a problem?”

“Our mother’s gone missing.”

“Sweet,” Yak says. “Could she take mine with her?”

I leave them alone in the garage and sit on the edge of the porch. There are flowers all along the edge of it – a net of purple and cobalt; a startling orange tiger lily, its open mouth raw and pink.

The portable phone I’m holding (just in case) rings, startling me. “Hi,” I say breathlessly, but it is only my father. He calls every day from the station, to let my mother know which train he’s catching. I think it’s less about her peace of mind and more about making sure his dinner is hot when he gets home.

“Pumpkin,” he says. “Mom around?”

“No,” I tell him. “She left us a note –“

“Well, tell her I caught the 5:58,” he says.

“Look, Dad –“

“Gotta run, honey, if I want to make this train…”

He hangs up, and I let the phone fall into my lap, where it rings again almost immediately. “Dad?” I say, picking it up.

“No,” my mother answers, “it’s me.”

“Mom? Where are you?”

In the silence, I can hear other people talking – loudspeakers, announcements I can’t quite make out. “Jenna, listen, there’s meatloaf for supper,” she says. “It’s in the tinfoil on the second shelf of the fridge. You can open up a bag of salad, too.”

“You mean you won’t be here for dinner?”

“Did you talk to your father?” she asks.

“He said he’s catching the 5:58.” My throat closes like a fist. “Mom, what’s going on?”

For a moment, she’s quiet. Then she says, “I’ll call you when I get there.”

“Get where?” I demand, but an electric eel of static crackles in my ear.

“Jenna,” my mother says. “I’m losing you.” And as the line goes dead I think, No, it’s the other way around.

#

By nine o’clock at night, we are all sitting at the kitchen table, waiting for the phone to ring. My father is still wearing his dress shirt, but it’s creased like a map and the sleeves are rolled up past his elbows. In front of him is the bowl of Life cereal he didn’t really eat for dinner, solidifying into cement. “Jenna,” he says, for the bazillionth time, “you have to remember something.”

It figures, the one time anyone wants to listen to me, I can’t remember anything important. I have already told them everything Mom said; the problem is, we really need to know what she didn’t.

“Could it have been an airport?” Devon asks. “Is that what the announcements sounded like?”

“I don’t know.”

My father has already called the police, but they told him that you can’t file a missing persons report for twenty-four hours. And besides, it’s not really a missing person if the person herself chose to go missing. That, the sergeant said, is just bad luck.

He scrubs his hands over his face. “Okay,” he says, as if telling himself this might make it come true.

I have been tugging at a thread on the placemat in front of me. “Do you think it’s something we did?” I ask, my voice so tiny that it rolls like a pebble to the center of the table.

At first, I assume that nobody’s heard me, or that they’ve ignored me, which is par for the course. But then Devon looks up. “I forgot to fold my wash. She asked me, like, ten times, but I never got around to it. And I kind of didn’t take out the trash either.”

His face pinkens. “It was pouring, and I knew she’d do it if I didn’t, anyway.”

“I told her it was practically child abuse to make me take the late bus home after soccer practice, when she was just sitting here anyway and could come pick me up,” I admit. “And remember when you wouldn’t stop playing your stupid guitar and she was trying to balance the checkbook?”

“Maybe it wasn’t just us,” Devon says, and he turns to my father. “Did you guys have a fight?”

My father scowls. “Of course not. We barely had time to talk last week, much less fight. I was busy working on that Hashomoto deal.”

I rub a crease into the placement with my thumb. “Maybe it’s not something we did. Maybe it’s something we didn’t.”

The phone rings, and my dad answers it on speaker phone so that we all can hear.

“Ian,” my mother says. “Hi.”

Although we’ve all talked about how we’re going to tiptoe around conversation when the moment actually arrives, my father completely blows it. “Charlotte, where the hell are you?”

“San Francisco!” I can hear the smile in her voice, bright as gold. “Can you believe it?”

“Mom?” Devon interrupts. “Is this because of my laundry?”

My brother can be such an idiot. “Mom,” I pipe in, only because I want her to know I’m here, too, listening. “Is the weather nice out there?”

My father and Devon look at me like I’m crazy. “Charlotte,” my father says evenly. “You’ve made your point. You can come back now.”

“I’m not making a point, Ian. I’m just…taking a vacation.”

A vacation. My mother is taking a vacation. From all of us.

“I don’t understand,” my father says.

“Well, you should,” my mother replies. “I’m doing what you do, every day: trading futures.” As soon as she hangs up, Devon dials *69.

“Good evening, the Ritz-Carlton,” a honeyed voice says. “How may I direct your call?”

My father pushes a button, disconnects us. “Mom’s staying at the Ritz-Carlton?” I ask.

“You could cut off her credit cards,” Devon suggests. “I saw that on Law & Order, once.”

“I’m not cutting off your mother’s credit cards,” my father replies. “This is just her way of going on strike.”

“Maybe we should cross the picket line, then,” Devon suggests.

“We,” my father announces, “will hardly even notice she’s gone.”

#

That night, we make a plan. I will be in charge of dishwashing; Devon – in spite of his lousy track record – will do the laundry. Dad will take over vacuuming and mopping of all floors. When we go to bed, the house is sparkling, perfect. Mom will come home, I think, and will be absolutely stunned.

Assuming we can keep it up.

My father comes in to tuck me in, even though he usually doesn’t do that anymore. He sits down on the edge of my bed. “Dad,” I ask. “What do you do, for real?”

“I’m a trader, honey. You know that.”

“Yeah, but what do you do?”

“Say I want to buy oil for the house for next winter. I can commit now to buy it at a certain price arranged by the oil company. But maybe I have a different view about what the price of oil is going to be. Maybe I think that war will break out again, and the price of oil will rise. Maybe I think that after the election, the price will drop. My job’s about hunches…if I think the price will be lower in the future, I can agree to sell oil a year from now that I don’t own yet. If I’m right, I can buy that oil in the future and immediately resell it to the company I contracted with and make a profit. Of course, if the price of oil actually goes higher, I lose big time. Basically, I’m betting on the future. And I can bet it’s going to get better, or I can bet it’s going to get worse.”

I wonder what commodity my mother thinks she is trading in. Love? Respect? Self-confidence?

My father leans over and kisses my forehead. “You look so much like her.”

I have heard that all my life. “Do you really think she’s just taking a vacation?”

“How could it be anything else?” my father says, but I get the feeling he’s asking me, not giving me the answer.

#

Before you could see the hairline cracks in our family – when Dad was actually home for dinner; before Devon hit puberty and became the slouched, hairy, sarcastic beast that he is now; back when my mother seemed happy – we used to play a game at dinner. Each night we’d take turns asking a question for which there was no easy answer: If you had a million dollars, what would you do with it? If you could change one event in history, what would it be? What would the title of your biography be, and who would you want to write it?

I can’t remember all the answers, but there were definitely some that surprised me. Like when Devon said that if he had to choose one person to have dinner with, it would be Nelson Mandela, when I would have bet my entire state quarter collection that he hadn’t even known who Nelson Mandela was. Or when my father said that the one thing he’d take to a desert island – the only thing he needed – was not his Blackberry, but my mother. The one that sticks in my mind, though, was a question my mother had asked: If you had to have amnesia for the rest of your life, and you could only keep one memory, what would it be?

We all had a different one. My father talked about the time we all went to a Mexican restaurant and stole the balloons reserved for little kids, then sucked out the helium and sang like the munchkins from the Wizard of Oz. Devon picked the time he gave me a haircut the day before my birthday – and clipped off my bangs right at the scalp. For me, it was the school play where I was the buttercup fairy. My mother had stood up in the audience the whole thirty seconds I was on that stage and whistled through her teeth so loud it was hard to hear the other kids with bigger parts speaking their lines.

At the time, I’d thought my mother’s memory was a cop-out – not detailed enough, not specific. “The last best one of the four of us,” she’d said.

#

The morning after my mother leaves us, I am the Queen of Energy. I set bowls on the table, and spoons, and a variety of cereal. I feel so helpful I can barely stand it; usually I sit down and wait for everything to be brought to me while I yawn my way into consciousness. Devon clatters into the kitchen, his hair still wet from his shower. “I’m starving,” he says, pouring himself a mountain of Special K.

“What do you think they serve for breakfast at the Ritz?” I ask.

“It’s the Ritz,” he mutters. “They probably serve you whatever you want.”

“Waffles?”

“With whipped cream and strawberries.”

“Omelettes,” I say. “Made to order.”

Devon snorts. “Special K. Except it’s more special there.” He reaches for the milk and shakes it. “Is there any more in the fridge?”

“No.”

“Well, this is empty.”

“It’s not my fault,” I shoot back.

“What else is there to eat?”

“How am I supposed to know?”

We both stop arguing; this is usually the moment where Mom turns around at the stove and tells us to do that very same thing. Devon reaches across the table for the carton of orange juice and pours it over his cereal. “What?” he accuses, when I stare at him. “It’s orange juice plus calcium. That’s practically milk.”

Last week, during dinner, Devon had announced he doesn’t want to go to college. He wants to travel the world with his band, go build huts on a tropical island, find himself. My father had hit the ceiling at this announcement. You couldn’t find yourself with both hands free, he said. You want to find yourself? Do it with a good, liberal arts education. Devon had lashed out like a bear caught in a trap he hadn’t seen coming.

How could Dad know anything about the world when he hadn’t seen anything but the inside of the New York Mercantile Exchange for the past twenty years?

By now, my father’s come downstairs. He smells like the weekend: shampoo and fresh cut grass and aftershave on his cheeks. “So!” he says, too brightly. “What’s for breakfast?”

I picture Mom eating her Belgian waffle in bed.

After the fight with Devon, my father had turned to my mother: Charlotte, tell him I’m right.

I try, but I can’t remember what she said.

#

Three days after my mother leaves us, we realize that the vacuum cleaner is missing. What’s really unfortunate about this is that we make the discovery after Devon has knocked over a spider plant – and all its soil – onto the living room rug. Four days after she leaves us, we give up trying to cook a meal and get all its bits and pieces – meat, potatoes, vegetables – on the table at once; instead, we order in pizza.

At school, I’ve had to make excuses – the reason my mother can’t come to the Art Open House is because she’s visiting her sister; she didn’t sign my independent reading sheet because she’s gone to a conference on Sanibel Island. The only person who knows the truth is my best friend, Nuala. I can trust her implicitly; I swear I could tell her I’m a hermaphrodite and she wouldn’t even blink. When I said that my mother had left, she asked if it was an affair, something that I hadn’t even thought of.

One day Nuala comes into homeroom with an article she’s printed off the Internet. “Check this out,” she says. “Someone did a study on stay-at-home moms and figured out what their salary would be if they had one.”

I scan the article. Basically, the salary was a compilation of real jobs, pro-rated:

22 hours of housekeeper, 15 hours of day care center teacher, 13.6 hours of chef, right on down to van driver (4.7 hours) and psychologist (3.9 hours). They figured in overtime pay, because it was a 91-hour week. If my mom was working for a company, instead of us, she’d be making $134,121.

“That’s a lot,” I say.

Nuala folds the paper and sticks it in her backpack again. “It’s only a lot if you actually get paid,” she said.

#

That night, I can’t sleep. I pad downstairs in my bare feet to the kitchen. It is now Devon’s job to wash the dishes, but he’s been playing with his band after school and so there’s a stack of bowls in the sink that’s precariously curved, like a clock tower in a Dr. Seuss book. A round of melon on the cutting board has flies crawling across its belly.

Someone’s left the milk out. Again.

It isn’t until my father speaks, in a hushed whisper, that I even realize he’s sitting at the kitchen table with the phone pressed up to his ear. “It will be different,” he says.

“I promise.”

I hear phrases snipped from their sentences: taken for granted, because, without you. I try not to listen. Instead, I think of all the things that fall apart when you remove their core: a head of lettuce; a solar system; a household like ours.

There is a muffled beep; my father hanging up the phone. I am just about to back out of the kitchen when he says, “How much of that did you hear?”

“Nothing,” I lie.

I sit down across from him at the table. “She left once before,” my father says.

He couldn’t have surprised me more if he’d announced that my mother used to be a trapeze artist in the circus. “I don’t remember that.”

“That’s because you and Devon were babies.” My father looks up at me. “She was gone for three months.”

Three months?

I can feel the question that I’ve wanted to ask all this time, filling me like a hot-air balloon, so that I burst at the seams. “Didn’t she love us?”

“So much,” my father says. “So much that she started to forget who she used to be.”

My eyes start to burn. What I haven’t told anyone – not Nuala, not Devon, not my dad – is what I think about when it’s just me and the stoic moon alone in my room at night. That if I’d been a better daughter – prettier, smarter, funnier – she might have had reason to stay. “Can’t you go get her?” I beg. “Can’t you just bring her back?”

My father puts his hand over mine. “That’s what I did the first time, when she’d been gone a week. And she ran away again.” He shakes his head. “You can’t force a wind to blow the way you want it to, Jenna. You have to hope it gets there on its own.”

He leaves me sitting in the dark, and I guess I fall asleep there, because I dream about my mother. She is in the circus, wearing a sparkly bodysuit, her hair pulled back into a ballerina’s bun. I see the cloud of chalk rising from her palms as she climbs a ladder hung on the rungs of real stars. I think of what it must feel like to fly.

And then, I can see the rest of us. We’re all miles below, looking up. We’re connected to her by the thinnest of strings – spider-silk, gossamer – nearly invisible, unless you happen to be the ones tethering her to the ground.

#

The second week after my mother leaves us, I start missing appointments. My father is at work, and although Devon is supposed to drive me to my orthodontist appointment, he forgets and stays late at Yak’s house writing a heavy metal ballad.

Instead of relying on Devon to pick me up after soccer practice, I take my bike and ride home five miles every night. I have never been so strong, or in such good shape. I imagine my mother looking at me when she comes home, and being impressed. It’s all because of you, I will say.

Don’t think she’s neglecting us. Every night at seven o’clock, she calls. We talk like ordinary mothers and daughters, as if it is perfectly normal for her to be living in a hotel thousands of miles away. She tells us all about San Francisco. She talks about the hotel: slippers left beside the bed during turndown service; about the exercise room staffed with people who bring you cups of cold water while you’re on the treadmill; about how, when you call the front desk, they say, Yes, Mrs. Hamilton, what can we do for you, as if you are the only guest in the entire hotel.

“Wow,” I say. “It sounds amazing.”

“Tell me about your day,” she’ll say. “How was your French test? Did you win your soccer game?”

I answer, and then I ask her when she’s coming home.

On the sixteenth day, she says, “Why don’t you come get me?”

#

It really shouldn’t be this easy to slip away. Flying is out of the question, of course – even if I had the money or means to get to an airport, I couldn’t get on a plane as an unaccompanied minor. But here’s an interesting fact – you only have to be fifteen to travel alone on a bus. And I can get to San Francisco in twenty-two hours.

I know where my father keeps his spare cash – Devon let me in on that secret two years ago. It’s in the left dress shoe he wears when he puts on his tuxedo, which is never, which is why it’s a good place to store money. I feel guilty taking it all ($546.93) so I conservatively borrow two hundred dollars. The Greyhound ticket only costs $88.50. No matter how expensive the cabs are in San Francisco, I’ll still have enough to get to the Ritz.

On the bus I sit next to an old woman who seems convinced I’m a teenage runaway. If only you knew, I think. I make up this story about how my mother and father are divorced; how my mom is sick and needs my help and I have a crippling fear of planes and have to travel this way. There is so much garbage coming out of my mouth that I might as well be littering the whole bus. But, amazingly, the woman buys it. She even gives me the potholder she’s crocheted on the journey, as a special gift to boost my mother’s spirits.

I’m tired when I arrive – number one, it’s 4:30 in the morning; number two, I’ve had to transfer buses twice – and I’m sure I look worse than I did when I had the stomach flu for a whole week, but the doorman still opens the door of the taxi as if I am royalty.

“Checking in, Miss?” he asks, and he directs me up the elevators to reception.

The lobby is a marble palace; an arrangement of flowers I have never even seen in books before rises like a fountain spray from a table in the center. Somewhere, there’s a fountain; the water rushes like a river. It smells like jasmine, like peace.

With my knapsack hiked on my shoulders I walk up to the front desk. I am almost expecting them to greet me by name, like my mother says they do when she calls downstairs, but then again, why would they know me yet? “I’m here to see my mother,” I say. “Mrs. Hamilton?”

The woman behind the desk has olive skin and a smile as neat and even as a string of pearls. “Is she expecting you?”

“Sort of,” I mumble, but by then the woman is calling my mother’s room.

I can’t really remember the next few minutes. All I know is that almost as soon as the phone is hung back up again, the elevator behind me chimes and then there’s something I’ve almost forgotten – the vanilla tones of her perfume, mixed with the sweet scent of the miracle you’ve been waiting for. My face fits into the curve of her neck, just like it did when I was little, and her arms close around me like a safety net. I can’t even speak; as it turns out, there aren’t words for when you’re so full of light you think you might explode or faint or scream, or maybe all three.

“Oh, Jenna. I missed you so much,” my mother cries. She glances over my head at the lobby around us. “Where’s Devon? And your dad?”

I blink. “In White Plains.”

She draws away, her face flushed. “Are you telling me,” she says, and then she swallows, as if the words rose too quickly in her throat. “Are you telling me you came here from New York all by yourself?”

“Well,” I point out, “you told me to come get you.”

“I meant all of you!” my mother cries. “Including an adult! Don’t tell me your father let you---“

“He doesn’t know I’m here.”

She takes a step backward, as if I’ve slapped her. “For God’s sake, Jenna, what were you thinking? You could have gotten lost, or hurt, or –“

“So could you!” I shout. “You, of all people, have no right to tell me what to do!”

We are both shocked; I don’t think I’ve ever heard myself yell so loud. I’m supposed to be the quiet one, the one who never speaks, or at least the one who never makes herself heard.

My mother’s cheeks bloom, there’s a color for shame. “I’m your mother.”

“Oh, really? What kind of mother leaves her family to go live at a Ritz-Carlton? You don’t get to be a mother part-time, when you feel like it. It’s all or nothing.” By now, my face is flushed, too; my eyes are stinging. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

The way I’d planned it in my mind, my mother would be so overjoyed to have me here that she wouldn’t be able to let me out of her sight, much less her arms. The way I’d planned it, there was no screaming involved.

My mother stares at me for a long moment, and then she reaches for my hand.

She draws me toward the elevator, and only when we’re inside, alone, does she start talking again. “I just wanted to know what it could have been like,” she says softly.

“What?”

The elevator doors open, and she faces me. “Someone else’s life,” she answers.

#

As soon as we reach her room, she calls my father. There’s no answer, but it’s early – he and Devon could easily sleep through the ringing of the phone. “We’ll try again a little later,” she says, but I am too busy looking around.

The bed, wide as an ocean, is dressed in white. An overstuffed chair sits across from the mahogany desk. In the bathroom I can just make out the jutting lip of a marble tub the color of sandstone. “I don’t make the bed,” my mother says. “I don’t clean the bathroom. I don’t have to cook. I don’t have do anything, and it magically gets done.”

It is, I realize, the way I’ve lived my whole life.

After I take a shower, I wrap a thick white robe around myself and towel dry my hair. My mother is propped up in bed, watching CNN. “Do you always watch the news?” I ask.

She turns to me. “Sometimes. Why?”

I shrug. “I guess I just wanted to know what you do when I leave for school.”

My mother grins. “I curl up near the door like a puppy, Jenna, and wait until you come home.”

“Yeah, right.” I hesitate. “Did you ever want to be anything else?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, I don’t know, join the circus. Or work in an office, like Dad. Anything.”

“I majored in zoology in college,” she says. “I had this vision of going to track elephant migration in Africa.”

My mother? In Africa? “You don’t even like camping.”

“Yeah, well, the dreams are always different from the reality, aren’t they?” She laughs. “Anyway, I met your father, and suddenly Africa seemed very far away.”

Suddenly, I remember what my mother said after the fight about Devon not going to college. When my father asked her to talk sense at my brother, she stood up and asked if anyone wanted more broccoli. “You think Devon should travel,” I say.

My mother sighs. “Maybe. Or go work for the Peace Corps or fall in love with a woman from Somalia or play at the Cavern Club in Liverpool. I don’t know what he should do. I just know what he shouldn’t.” She glances up. “He shouldn’t wake up one day when he’s forty-three and wonder what it looks like in Bangledesh or Bali, or if the toilets really flush in the opposite direction in Australia. I guess I just wish…I wish I had spent a little more time in the world.”

It occurs to me that there are Ritz-Carltons in every corner of the planet. That this might not be a break for my mother, but a beginning. What if it turns out I didn’t come here to bring her back, but to say goodbye?

“You must be exhausted,” my mother says. “Why don’t you go to sleep?”

I want to tell her that I’m fine; that I don’t have to sleep at all, but suddenly I am so tired that I can’t even form the words. I fit my curves against hers, as if we are carved from the same stone.

When Devon and I were little we used to put on gymnastics shows on the front lawn. Sometimes, when a somersault came out wobbly or a cartwheel landed wrong, we’d shout out Do over! This was the cue for Mom, who was the audience, to pretend that the first one had never happened. “If you could,” I ask, “would you start over?”

Not only does my mother listen; she understands what I’m asking. She reaches across me to turn out the light; it feels like an embrace. “No,” she answers. “I wouldn’t have missed you for the world.”

#

For a moment when I wake up, I think I’ve died. I have a cloud drawn up to my chin; the world is washed in the watercolors of early morning. Then I remember where I am, where we are, and I focus on the insistent knocking on the door. My mother wraps the terrycloth robe around herself; pulls open the door and falls into my father’s arms.

Then she lets go so that she can gather Devon beneath her wing; and from the way he clutches her, it’s hard to believe this is the same brother who barely acknowledges her when his friends are around, because it’s uncool to have a mother, I guess. Instead, he grabs onto her – awkward, because he’s bigger than she is by now – and if I am not mistaken, he might be crying.

Meanwhile, my father’s spied me. He stumbles in an effort to get closer and crawls onto the bed to wrap me in his arms. “If you ever run away again,” he threatens, the words muffled into my hair, “I will kill you.” But he’s holding me so tight, I know he couldn’t possibly mean it.

I wonder if this is why people run away – not because they want to get anywhere, but because they need to remember what they’d miss if they left for good.

#

Devon eats a waffle with strawberries and whipped cream; I have oatmeal and raisin toast and tea poured out of a little pot just for me. It would be great to get a little china teapot like this, even just to use in our boring old house. Maybe then it wouldn’t be quite so boring.

“We don’t have to go home just yet,” my father says. “The only times I’ve been to San Francisco, I’ve been stuck in business meetings. I haven’t really seen anything.”

He has apologized to my mother, and my mother has apologized to him. Or something like that. They spent a long time with their arms around each other, their whispered words a screen. It reminded me of the wild animals you see on HD television channels, the ones who find a long lost pack member and nuzzle and circle and huddle close for days, lest the other one disappear again.

There is quiet music in the restaurant; and women stroll across the lobby, their high heels kissing the marble. Businessmen hold folded newspapers beneath their arms and talk in languages I don’t understand. A waiter comes by with a fresh glass of orange juice for my father, before he’s even finished his first. “Maybe we should all move in here,” he jokes.

I listen to my family talk about how to spend the day, all the possibilities. And I cannot remember the last time we did this: made choices as a unit, instead of individuals.

I set my spoon on the edge of my oatmeal bowl. “What person,” I ask quietly, “would you most want to trade places with?”

At first, everyone keeps talking, and I figure they haven’t heard me. But then, one by one, they stop speaking. I bet they’re all going to laugh – it was one thing to play games at the table when we were younger, but now? I might as well have IDIOT written on my forehead.

“Bill Gates,” my father says. “For all the obvious reasons.”

Devon is next. “Brad Pitt. Helloooo, Angelina.”

We look at my mother, it’s her turn. “No one,” she says, smiling. “There isn’t a single person who’s got it better than me right now.”

I almost want to let her know, at that moment, that she was wrong all those years ago about the memory you’d keep. It isn’t the last best one you want to save; it’s the one you haven’t had yet. But I’ll have years to explain that. And I’ll have a lifetime to prove that even if an exotic destination has dazzling culture, stunning scenery, spectacular hotels, there’s something it can never be: your home.

My mother and father and brother, they’re all looking at me. I can’t remember the last time anyone was hanging on my words. I recall what I thought last night, when I first saw my mother: what if it turns out this isn’t about going back, but starting over?

What if?

I open my mouth, and I tell them what they’re waiting to hear.

Books by Jodi Picoult

Songs of the Humpback Whale

Harvesting the Heart

Picture Perfect

Mercy

The Pact

Keeping Faith

Plain Truth

Salem Falls

Perfect Match

Second Glance

My Sister's Keeper

Vanishing Acts

The Tenth Circle

Nineteen Minutes

Change of Heart

Handle With Care

House Rules

Sing You Home (Coming March, 2011)