Leaving Home: Short Pieces by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page A

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