Picture Perfect - Softcover

Picoult, Jodi

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0425185508 ISBN 13: 9780425185506

Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of My Sister's Keeper examines the fault lines of a troubled marriage in this “unfailingly intelligent…undeniably literary psychological drama”(Booklist).

To the outside world, they seem to have it all. Cassie Barrett, a renowned anthropologist, and Alex Rivers, one of Hollywood's hottest actors, met on the set of a motion picture in Africa. They shared childhood tales, toasted the future, and declared their love in a fairy-tale wedding. But when they return to California, something alters the picture of their perfect marriage. A frightening pattern is taking shape—a cycle of hurt, denial, and promises, thinly veiled by glamour. Torn between fear and something that resembles love, Cassie wrestles with questions she never dreamed she would face: How can she leave? Then again, how can she stay?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jodi Picoult is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of twenty-five novels, including Small Great Things, Leaving Time, The Storyteller, Lone Wolf, Sing You Home, House Rules, Handle with Care, Change of Heart, Nineteen Minutes, and My Sister’s Keeper. She is also the author, with daughter Samantha van Leer, of two young adult novels, Between the Lines and Off the Page. Picoult lives in New Hampshire with her husband and three children.

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CHAPTER ONE

The first thing the groundskeeper saw when he went to tend to the small cemetery behind St. Sebastian’s was the body that someone had forgotten to bury.

She was lying on top of a grave, her head pressed close to the headstone, her arms crossed over her stomach. She was almost as white as the seven faded granite markers that surrounded her. The groundskeeper took a deep breath, dropped his trowel, and crossed himself. He inched toward the body and leaned over, casting a shadow.

Somewhere overhead a gull screamed, and as the woman’s eyes flew open, the groundskeeper turned and ran through the iron gate into the dizzying streets of Los Angeles.

The woman looked into the sky. She did not know where she was, but it was quiet; and since her head was pounding, she was grateful. She tried to remember how she had gotten there in the first place.

Sitting up, she touched the gravestone and squinted as the letters dipped and blurred before her eyes. She pulled herself to her feet and balanced against the stone for support. Then she leaned over and retched, clutching her stomach and blinking back tears at the pain shooting through her temples.

“A church,” she said aloud, jumping at the pitch of her own voice. “This is a church.”

She walked to the gate and stared at the cars and buses going by. She had taken three steps away from the church before she realized she did not know where she was supposed to go. “Think,” she commanded herself. She put a hand to her forehead and felt the slip of her own blood.

“Jesus,” she said. Her hand was trembling. She felt for a tissue in the pocket of her jacket, a worn bomber jacket she couldn’t remember buying, and came up instead with a tube of Blistex and $2.24 in change. She stepped back toward the graveyard and looked behind the headstones for a pocketbook, a knapsack, a clue.

“I was mugged,” she said, wiping her brow with her sleeve. “I must have been mugged.” She ran to the door of the rectory and banged, but it was locked. She moved to the gate again, planning to go to the closest police station and tell them what had happened. She would give her address and she would call…

Who would she call?

She stared at a bus sighing at the corner stop. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t know the closest police station.

She didn’t even know her own name.

Chewing on a fingernail, she stepped back inside the gate, where she felt safer. She knelt beside the grave she’d been lying upon and rested her forehead against the cool headstone. Maybe the priest would be back soon, she thought. Maybe someone would come by and offer to help her. Maybe she’d just stay right there.

Her head began to throb, a drumbeat that threatened to split her in two. She sank to the ground and lay back against the gravestone again, pulling her jacket close to ward off the chill of the earth.

She would wait.

She opened her eyes, hoping for answers, but all she could see were clouds that covered the sky like a bruise.

THERE WASN’T ENOUGH LAND IN CALIFORNIA.

He could feel it, beating like a hammer at the base of his throat, this claustrophobia born of the hissing asphalt under his tires and the condos pressed so close they left no room to breathe. So he kept driving west to find the ocean, hopefully before it got dark. He had never seen it. There had only been pictures, and accounts from his mother and his father.

He remembered stories his father had told him, stories he hadn’t believed at the time, of Indians jailed in the 1800s who died overnight because they couldn’t stand the confinement.

He thought of the statistics from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which said that sixty-six percent of Indians who left the reservations returned, unable to live in the cities. Of course, he was not entirely Sioux. But he was not entirely white, either.

He smelled it before he saw it. The wind carried him the salt from the waves. He parked the rusted secondhand pickup on the shoulder of the road and ran down the sloping dune. He did not stop running until his sneakers were submerged, until water stained the thighs of his jeans like tears.

A gull screamed.

William Flying Horse stood with his arms outstretched, his eyes fixed on the Pacific Ocean but seeing, instead, the brindled plains and rolling Dakota hills that he would not call home.

ON THE PINE RIDGE RESERVATION IN SOUTH DAKOTA, ROUTE 18 took you into town, and if you wanted to get anywhere else you navigated by natural landmarks or long-abandoned vehicles, since there weren’t many other roads. But it had been three days since he’d moved to Los Angeles and Will had yet to get his bearings.

He was renting a little row house in Reseda, which was close enough to the LAPD to eliminate the need for a long commute, and far enough away for him to feel like he wasn’t attached to his job. He didn’t have to report to work until tomorrow—the paperwork for the position had been done through the mail—and he had planned to use this time to find his way around L.A.

Will slammed his fist onto the steering wheel. Where the hell was he? He groped along the front seat, looking for the map he’d tossed away minutes before. He squinted at the tiny red roads, but the overhead light in the pickup had been one of the first things to go, so he pulled to the curb underneath a streetlight. He peered at the map in the soft glow. “Shit,” he said. “Beverly Hills. I was here an hour ago.”

For the first time in decades, he wished he was more of an Indian.

He blamed his faulty sense of direction on his wasicun blood. All his life he’d heard stories of his grandfather’s father, who tracked the goddamned buffalo by the slightest rising of the wind. And when the woman his father loved had left without a word, hadn’t he ridden for miles using only his intuition to find her? Compared to that, how difficult could it be to find the San Diego Freeway?

Once, when Will was little, he’d followed his grandmother into the woods to collect roots and leaves for her medicines. He’d picked the ones she pointed to, cedar and sweet flag and wild licorice. He’d turned his back only for a moment, and his grandmother had disappeared. For a while Will had wandered in circles, trying to remember his father’s lessons about footprints left on broken leaves, snapped branches, the sense of movement in the heavy air. It was hours before his grandmother found him again, cold and curled beneath the burl of an oak. Wordlessly she pulled him by the hand in the direction of home. When the small log house came into view, she turned and cupped Will’s chin in her hand. “You,” she sighed. “So white.”

He had only been ten, but that was the moment he knew he would never be like his grandparents. To them, to everyone who lived around him, he would always be iyeska, a mixed-blood. He had spent the next twenty-five years acting as white as he could, figuring if he could not be like his father’s people, he would be like his mother’s. He threw himself into his schoolwork so that he’d be able to go to college. He spoke only English, even at his grandparents’ home where Lakota was the primary language. He nodded when his white bosses described the Sioux as lazy alcoholics and when the words ran cold through his blood; he wrapped his indifference around him like a cloak.

Well, he was white now. He was off the reservation and he was planning to stay, and as for finding his way out of Beverly Hills, he’d do what every other white man would do: he’d find a gas station and get...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0425185508
• ISBN 13: 9780425185506
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar