Free Larger Than Life (Novella) by Jodi Picoult Page A

trail to find our way back home. It is a truly beautiful day—warm without being too
     humid, the sky a startling electric blue. Walking toward the rangers’ village, I feel
     the way I did the first time I looked at a slide beneath a microscope—as if I had
     been blind, until now.
    I will find Neo and tell him that I have no regrets. That if it makes him more comfortable
     I will tell Grant I instigated this relationship. I will repeat to Neo the secrets
     he whispered against my throat and my belly last night, passwords in a language no
     one else can speak. I will slip my hand into his and I will not let go.
    But all of my plans scatter when I hear children playing in the courtyard. This isstartling, because it’s so rare. Then I realize it is Saturday, the day when the families
     of the rangers may come to visit. One of the boys—all angles and arms and legs—kicks
     a soccer ball that smacks me in the thigh.
“Tshwarelo,”
he says. Sorry.
    He looks terrified, as if he expects me to punish him. I smile instead.
“Dumêla,”
I say. Hello.
    I don’t know a lot of the Setswana language yet, but you have to pick up some words
     here and there when you spend all day with rangers. The boy’s little brother is staring
     at Lesego, his mouth a perfect O, the soccer game forgotten.
“O mang?”
I ask his name, crouching down to his level, as Lesego curls her trunk over my shoulder.
    “Leina la me ke Khumo,”
the toddler says. My name is Khumo.
    Suddenly there is a flurry of activity, and a woman comes out of one of the huts,
     balancing a baby on her hip. Like many other Tswana women, she is beautiful—tall and
     willowy, with bone structure usually found on the pages of fashion magazines. Her
     hair is wrapped in a colorful scarf that makes me think of a sunset. I wonder if she
     is the woman who left behind the coconut oil that saved Lesego from starving.
    She rattles off a stream of Tswana so fast and furious that I cannot follow along,
     but I can tell from the slope of the boys’ shoulders and the way they are drawn to
     her, as if to a magnetic pole, that they are being reprimanded for hitting the white
     woman with the soccer ball. “No,” I say, trying to make her understand that the boys
     have done nothing wrong.
“Go siame,”
I tell her. It’s fine. Then I point to the little girl she is holding.
“Bontle,”
I say, the only word I know in her language for
beautiful
.
    The little boys peek from behind their mother, chattering about Lesego—or so I assume
     from the way they are pantomiming her trunk and her ears. “Do you speak English?”
     I ask. “I am trying to find Neo.”
    Before she can respond, Neo steps through the doorway and freezes.
    I am trying to make sense of the picture in front of my eyes when the littlest boy
     wraps his arms around Neo’s leg, as if it is a tree to climb.
    It is family visiting day in the rangers’ village, and this is Neo’s family.
    My body feels like a block of ice. “I … I have to go,” I force out, and I run down
     the path that leads from the rangers’ village, with the calf hurrying behind me.
    Neo catches up to me when I can just see the open door of my cottage, the bedinside where we made love the night before, when I did not know that he was married.
     “Alice,” he calls out. “Stop.”
    I turn on him, shoving so hard at his shoulders that he stumbles backward. “You didn’t
     tell me,” I yell. I am angry at him for hiding this. I am angrier at myself for not
     asking.
    The truth is, I didn’t look closely enough. Neo had been there when I needed him;
     he had told me what I wanted to hear; he had touched me like a match strikes wood.
     I was the fool for burning.
    Sensing that something isn’t right, Lesego roars. Neo grasps me by the wrist, a shackle.
     “You don’t understand,” he says softly.
    But he is wrong. I hadn’t
wanted
to. There’s a difference.
    As I pull away from Neo, as I walk to my hut, I can feel his eyes