Free Leaving Home: Short Pieces by Jodi Picoult Page B

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