Jodi Picoult

“Who knew that when you cut a slit in the belly of the night sky, it bled color?”

“My mother walks forward. She's crying, but there's a smile on her face. For God's sake, is it any wonder I can't ever understand what you people are feeling?”

“You okay in there?""No, I'm hanging from a closet rod.”

“Following my mother's footsteps was the surest way out.”

“What I want, more than anything, is to turn back time a little. To become the kid I used to be, who believed whatever my mother said was one hundred percent true and right without looking hard enough to see the hairline crack.”

“There is nothing worse than silence, strung like heavy beads on too delicate a conversation.”

“It is so easy to presume that while your own world has ground to an absolute halt, so has everyone else's.”

“This is when I realize that Anna has already left the table, and more importantly, that nobody noticed.”

“In my family, we seem to have a tortured history of not saying what we ought to and not meaning what we do.”

“Her hair is longer now, and fine lines bracket her mouth, parentheses around a lifetime of words I was not around to hear.”

“It feels like we are sitting on the tight bench of a bus with a stranger between us, one that neither of us is willing to admit or mention, and so we find ourselves talking around him and through him and sneaking glances when the other one isn't looking.”

“I remember everything Campbell," she interrupts. "If I didn't, this wouldn't be so hard.”

“Is it because they are so comfortable, they already know what the other is thinking? Or is it because after a certain point, there is simply nothing left to say?”

“She'd take these random occurrences and elevate them to oracles; she'd pretend that they were enough to justify her actions.Or lack therof.”

“Love was supposed to move mountains, to make the world go round, to be all you need, but it fellapart at the details. It couldn’t save a single child-not the ones who’d gone to Sterling High that day,expecting the normal; not Josie Cormier; certainly not Peter. So what was the recipe? Was it love,mixed with something else for good measure? Luck? Hope? Forgiveness?”

“Lacy took the box she’d brought up from the basement and placed each item inside. Here was thecrime scene: look at what was left behind and try to re-create the boy.”

“What’s your name again?”“Peter. Peter Granford.”Lewis opened up his mouth to speak, but then just shook his head.“What?” The boy ducked his head. “You just, uh, looked like you were going to say somethingimportant.”Lewis looked at this namesake, at the way he stood with his shoulders rounded, as if he did notdeserve so much space in this world. He felt that familiar pain that fell like a hammer on hisbreastbone whenever he thought of Peter, of a life that would be lost to prison. He wished he’dtaken more time to look at Peter when Peter was right in front of his eyes, because now he would beforced to compensate with imperfect memories or-even worse-to find his son in the faces ofstrangers.Lewis reached deep inside and unraveled the smile that he saved for moments like this, when therewas absolutely nothing to be happy about. “It was important,” he said. “You remind me of someoneI used to know.”

“Peter tucked the glasses into the front pocket of Jordan’s jacket. “I kind of like knowing you’retaking care of them,” he said. “And there isn’t all that much I really want to see.”Jordan nodded. He walked out of the holding cell and said good-bye to the deputies. Then heheaded toward the lobby, where Selena was waiting.As he approached her, he put on Peter’s glasses. “What’s up with those?” she asked.“I kind of like them.”“You have perfect vision,” Selena pointed out.Jordan considered the way the lenses made the world curve in at the ends, so that he had to movemore gingerly through it. “Not always,” he said.”

“What if what you know isn’t what people want tohear?”

“I didn’t want to invade hisprivacy; I didn’t want to fight with him; I didn’t want anyone else to ever hurt him. I just wantedhim to be a child forever.” She glanced up, crying harder now. “But you can’t do that, if you’re aparent. Because part of your job is letting them grow up.”

“When you look into your baby’s eyes,” Lacy said softly, “you see everything you hope they can be… not everything you wish they won’t become.”

“Iknew that all the attributes he was teased for, at age five, were going to work in his favor by thetime he was thirty-five…but I couldn’t get him there overnight. You can’t fast-forward your child’slife, no matter how much you want to.”

“He felt, sometimes, like the keeper of memories-the onewho had to facilitate that invisible transition between the way it used to be and the way it would befrom now on.”

“Security was a mirage; beingtied down hardly counted when the other end of the rope had unraveled.”

“CanI tell you something? Off the record?”Alex nodded.“Before I took this job, I used to work in Maine. And I had a case that wasn’t just a case, if youknow what I mean.”Alex did. She found herself listening in his voice for a note she hadn’t heard before-a low one thatresonated with anguish, like a tuning fork that never stopped its vibration. “There was a womanthere who meant everything to me, and she had a little boy who meant everything to her. And whenhe was hurt, in a way a kid never should be, I moved heaven and earth to work that case, because Ithought no one could possibly do a better job than I could. No one could possibly care more aboutthe outcome.” He looked directly at Alex. “I was so sure I could separate how I felt about what hadhappened from how I had to do my job.”Alex swallowed, dry as dust. “And did you?”“No. Because when you love someone, no matter what you tell yourself, it stops being a job.”“What does it become?”Patrick thought for a moment. “Revenge.”

“You’re lying,” he said-not angry, not accusing. Just as ifhe was stating the facts, in a way that she wasn’t.“I am not-”“You can say it a million times, but that doesn’t make it any more true.” Peter smiled then, soguileless that Lacy felt it smart like a stripe from a whip. “You might be able to fool Dad, and thecops, and anyone else who’ll listen,” he said. “You just can’t fool another liar.”

“In reality, Lacy realized, this dividing line between her and Peter had beenthere for years. If you kept your chin up, you might even be able to convince yourself there wasnothing separating you. It was only when you tried to cross it, like now, that you understood howreal a barrier it could be.”

“She had smiled her way through the births andhad offered the new mothers the support and the medical care that they needed, but the momentshe’d sent them on their way, cutting that last umbilical cord between hospital and home, Lacyknew she was giving them the wrong advice. Instead of easy platitudes like Let them eat when theywant to eat and You can’t hold a baby too much, she should have been telling them the truth: Thischild you’ve been waiting for is not who you imagine him to be. You’re strangers now; you’ll bestrangers years from now.”

“Over her shoulder was Josie-and for the first time, Alex couldreally see a piece of herself in her daughter. It wasn’t so much the shape of the face but the shine ofit; not the color of the eyes but the dream caught like smoke in them. There was no amount ofexpensive makeup that would make her look the way her Josie did; that was simply what falling inlove did to a person.Could you be jealous of your own child?”

“What does it feel like?” he asked.“What does what feel like?”Peter thought for a moment. “Being at the top.”Josie reached across him for another packet of material and fed it into the stapler. She did three ofthese, and Peter was certain that she was going to ignore him, but then she spoke. “Like if you takeone wrong step,” she said, “you’re going to fall.”

“If only you could keep them that way: cast in amber, never growing up”

“Peter was, simply, what a person would look like if you boiled down the most raw emotions andfiltered them of any social contract. If you hurt, cry. If you rage, strike out.If you hope, get ready for a disappointment.”

“I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted toknow what made their heads turn, what it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first Icouldn’t tell. I mean, I was just me.Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hatedmyself, maybe as much as all of them did.That was the day I started to believe they might be right.”

“He wished he knew what to say to make her feel better, but the truth was, hedidn’t feel all that great himself and he didn’t know if there were even any words in the Englishlanguage to take away this kind of stunning shock, this understanding that the world isn’t the placeyou thought it was.”

“It never failed to amaze Alex how, with the brush of a hand, thetrack of someone’s life might veer in a completely different direction.”

“Everyone wants their kid to grow up and go to Harvard or be aquarterback for the Patriots. No one ever looks at their baby and thinks, Oh, I hope my kid grows upand becomes a freak. I hope he gets to school every day and prays he won’t catch anyone’sattention. But you know what? Kids grow up like that every single day.”

“They’re a-”“-band,” Patrick finished. “I know.”“They’re not just a band,” Orestes said with reverence, his fingers flying over the keyboard.“They’re the modern voice of the collective human conscience.”“Tell that to Tipper Gore.”“Who?”Patrick laughed. “She was before your time, I guess.”“What did you used to listen to when you were a kid?”“The cavemen, banging rocks together,” Patrick said dryly”

“Someone who was happywould have little need to hope for change. But, conversely, an optimistic person was that waybecause he wanted to believe in something better than his reality.He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if theunhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.”

“Why hadn’t he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided realityby expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation-expectationdivided by reality-you didn’t get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to createoptimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, afraction of diminishing returns. The human condition meant that this number approached zerowithout reaching it-you never really completely gave up hope; it might come flooding back at anyprovocation.”

“He knew that there was a difference between something that makes you happy and something thatdoesn’t make you unhappy. The trick was convincing yourself these were one and the same.”

“You stared at the stranger in front of you and decided,categorically, that this was no longer your son. Or you made the decision to find whatever scraps ofyour child you still could in what he had become.Was that even really a choice, if you were a mother?”

“He remembered learning in one of his social studies classesthat in the Old West, when Native Americans were thrown into jail, they sometimes dropped dead.The theory was that someone so used to the freedom of space couldn’t handle the confinement, butPeter had another interpretation. When the only company you had was yourself, and when youdidn’t want to socialize, there was only one way to leave the room.”

“Fumbling in the dark, Josie reached underneath the frame of her bed for the plastic bag she’dstashed-her supply of sleeping pills. She was no better than any of the other stupid people in thisworld who thought if they pretended hard enough, they could make it so. She’d thought that deathcould be an answer, because she was too immature to realize it was the biggest question of all.Yesterday, she hadn’t known what patterns blood could make when it sprayed on a whitewashedwall. She hadn’t understood that life left a person’s lungs first, and their eyes last. She had picturedsuicide as a final statement, a fuck you to the people who hadn’t understood how hard it was for herto be the Josie they wanted her to be. She’d somehow thought that if she killed herself, she’d beable to watch everyone else’s reaction; that she’d get the last laugh. Until yesterday, she hadn’treally understood. Dead was dead. When you died, you did not get to come back and see what youwere missing. You didn’t get to apologize. You didn’t get a second chance.Death wasn’t something you could control. In fact, it would always have the upper hand.”

“People had figured out all sorts of ways to makethings seem different than they truly were.”

“Since it had gotten so quiet in the room that you could hear the sound of your own doubts...”

“The problem isn’t with rock lyrics, it’swith the fabric of this society itself.”

“When you’re hurting deeply, you go inward.”

“Success would come only at the expense of losing her cool, at the risk of turning intosomeone she did not want to be.”

“She had tried to hide the discomfort behind the mask of competence that she usually wore, only to realize that in her hurry, she must have left it behind somewhere.”

“Bleeding heart, he’d called her.Well. He should know.He’d been the first to rip it to pieces.”