The Jodi Picoult Collection #2

by Jodi Picoult

  Gray Wolf is waiting for me beneath the green awning of the bank, smoking a cigarette, as if we have agreed to meet. There is just one moment of shock that he’s found me, even in town, but he only raises his dark eyebrows and offers me a cigarette too. We start walking. We don’t talk, at first. We don’t need to.

  “The Klifa Club,” he says finally.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Magnificent, of course. We eat on plates made of 14-karat gold, and hold audiences with kings of small European countries. Why else would it be so exclusive?”

  He laughs. “Beats me.” As we come to a street corner, he takes my elbow, and I instantly freeze. Although we have met many times now, I can count on one hand the number of occasions Gray Wolf has touched me. This friendship, this easy conversation is one thing, but there are certain lines even I cannot cross. Noticing, he lets go of me and fills the fissure between us with words. “What’s a Klifa, anyway?”

  “A mistake. It was supposed to be Klifra, which is Icelandic for climber.”

  “As in ‘social’?”

  “No, these women don’t have to climb. They’ve already staked their claim at the top.” I shrug. “What’s in a name,” I quote, before I remember that Gray Wolf would not know Shakespeare.

  “Ask Juliet,” he answers dryly, fully aware of what I am thinking. “And to answer your question, a name can mean everything. Sometimes, it’s all you have.”

  “You call me Lia,” I say. “Why?”

  He pauses. “Because you don’t look like a Cissy.”

  “What would my name be in your language?”

  He shakes his head. “No one uses my language anymore.”

  “You do.”

  “That’s because I don’t have anything left to lose.” He glances at me, but I’m not giving up that easily. “There isn’t a literal translation. You can’t always take an English word and turn it into Alnôbak.” Gray Wolf nods at my brooch, a small clock pinned to my white blouse. “See, this is Papizwokwazik. But it doesn’t mean clock. It’s ‘the thing that ticks.’ A beaver might be called Tmakwa—a tree cutter—or abagôlo—flat tail—or awadnakwazid—the wood carrier . . . depending on how you see it.”

  I love the idea that a name might change based on who you are at a given moment in time. “Awadnakwazid,” I repeat, rolling the syllables on my tongue. Consonants stick to the roof of my mouth. “I wish I had a name like Gray Wolf.”

  “Then give yourself one. That’s what I did.” He shrugs. “My birth name, it’s John . . . Azo. But Gray Wolf describes me better. And I figured if the whole world saw me as an Indian, I ought to have a name that backs them up.”

  We have turned onto College Street now, which is busy and crowded. I know the mother walking with her daughter and the businessman leaning on an ivory cane and the two young soldiers are all wondering what someone like me is doing with someone like Gray Wolf. I wonder who else will see us. It is part of the excitement.

  “I used to stand on the roof of my father’s house and think about jumping,” I say.

  “Your father’s house,” he repeats.

  “Well, it’s ours now, but yes. Once, I even did it. I broke my arm.”

  “Why did you want to jump?”

  No one has ever asked me that question. Not my father, afterward; not the doctors at the hospital who set the bones. “Because I could.” I turn to him and make the traffic flow around us. “Give me a name.”

  He stares at my face for a long moment. “Sokoki,” he says. “One who has broken away.”

  Suddenly, behind me, I hear myself being called. “Cissy?” Spencer’s voice is carried on the shoulders of passersby. “Is that you?”

  Maybe I have wanted to be discovered all along; maybe I have been expecting this. But when Spencer stands in front of Gray Wolf, my insides go to water and my legs begin to shake. I would fall, if not for Spencer catching me. “Darling?”

  “I’m just a little light-headed, after the Klifa Club meeting.”

  Spencer looks dismissively at Gray Wolf. “Chief, you can move along.”

  “I’m not a chief.”

  With my heart in my throat I reach into my pocketbook and take out a dollar bill. “All right,” I interrupt, as if Gray Wolf and I have been in the middle of a business deal, “but this is all I’m willing to pay for it.”

  He plays along, but disappointment shadows his eyes. “Thank you, ma’am.” He hands me a small bundle wrapped in a handkerchief, the first thing he can find in his pocket for a sham transaction. Then he vanishes into the masses walking toward the university.

  “I’ve told you not to talk to beggars,” Spencer says, taking my arm. “Once they see you’re an easy target, they’ll never leave you alone.”

  “It’s Christian charity,” I murmur.

  “What on earth did he manage to sell you, anyway?”

  I peek inside the folds of the handkerchief, and go dizzy again. “A trinket,” I say, and stuff the miniature portrait into my purse before Spencer recognizes the face, a perfect twin to the one that sits on my dressing table to help me remember my mother.

  Within the ranks of the Old Americans are many individuals who transcend the group pattern, question the status quo, think creatively about community or social problems, and even consider the possibility of a different and perhaps even better Burlington. As long as they do not go too far with their questioning, the group will uphold them; and they seldom do go too far, knowing the price they would have to pay.

  —Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937

  In my dream I can even feel it, the square box of its body and the white face with a small scale of numbers and a quivering needle. There is writing on the handheld base: Tri-Field Natural EM Meter. A man with hair as long as a woman’s explains the settings: Magnetic, sum, electric, radio/microwave, battery test. He wears a faded T-shirt and denims, like a field hand.

  What is a cell phone?

  I wake up, sweating. Even the fan blowing over the surface of the bed can’t make up for the fact that the windows are stuck shut. The other side of the bed is empty. Restless, I walk to the bathroom and splash water on my face. Padding downstairs, I try to find Spencer.

  He is in his study. The lights are all out, with the exception of a green accountant’s shade lamp on his desk. Several of his pedigree charts are unraveled on the hardwood floor like old roads, and through the open windows, bullfrogs are calling his name. When he lifts his head, I realize he has been drinking.

  “Cissy. What time is it?”

  “Past two.” I take a tentative step forward. “You should come up to bed.”

  He buries his face in his hands. “What woke you?”

  “The heat.”

  “Heat.” Spencer picks up his glass and drains it. An ant crawls across the desk, and in one smooth move he smacks the base of the tumbler down to crush it.

  “Spencer?”

  He wipes off the glass with his handkerchief and looks up at me. “Do you think,” he asks quietly, “that they feel it? Do you think they know it’s coming?”

  I shake my head, confused. “You need to go to sleep.”

  Before I realize what he is doing, Spencer has twisted me onto his lap. He holds my arm fast, and touches the spot where the bandage has been taped in the crook of my elbow. “Do you know how it would kill me to lose you?” he whispers, fierce. “Do you have any idea what you mean to me?”

  My lips barely move. “No.”

  “Oh, Cissy.” He buries his face between my breasts, his breath falling over our baby. “You’re the reason I do it.”

  The small Old American group has been helped to maintain its predominant position by the strength of its traditional feeling of the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxon.

  —Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937

  Ruby is the one who tells me he is waiting.

  “Spencer’s insid
e,” I say, panicking the minute I see Gray Wolf on our porch, with the morning sun slung over his shoulders like a matador’s cape.

  “Ask me,” he demands.

  I glance into the house. Spencer is in the tub. And I have so many questions. “Did you know my mother?” When he nods, it is no surprise. “What was she like?”

  His gaze softens. “You.”

  There are no words in the place where I have arrived. “More,” I manage.

  So he tells me what she looked like, standing on this very porch, in this home where she grew up before marrying my father. He paints the color of her hair, and it matches mine. He tells me how she could whistle louder than any girl he’d ever known, and that her clothes always smelled of lemons. He had worked for her father as a seasonal field laborer—back when this property was a producing farm, before that parcel of land was sold off to the current neighbors.

  He tells me that once, on a dare, my mother drove a tractor onto the UVM green at midnight.

  He tells me that she wanted a daughter, more than anything, so that she could grow up all over again.

  I lean against the exterior wall of the house and close my eyes. I have waited my whole life for this moment. Will my child be as lucky? Will there be someone, years from now, to tell him about me?

  I blink at Gray Wolf. “I’m going to die.”

  “Lia,” he says, “we all are.”

  The door opens suddenly. Spencer’s hair is still wet, and there are small damp patches on his shirt where his skin pinks through the cotton. “I thought I heard you talking to someone,” he accuses, and I wonder if Gray Wolf hears how the edge of his words are as sharp as a razor.

  “This is Gray Wolf,” I announce. “I’m hiring him.”

  Spencer stares, trying to figure out why Gray Wolf’s face is so familiar . . . but he will not be able to. That day on the street, Spencer had wanted nothing more than to dismiss a Gypsy. For Gray Wolf to stand out in his mind, he would have had to be important enough to leave an impression in the first place.

  “The roof needs work. Both here, and the icehouse. You told me to hire a handyman to take care of it. Gray Wolf, this is my husband, Professor Pike.”

  Spencer looks one last time between Gray Wolf and myself. “There’s a ladder in the garage,” he says finally. “Go on, then. You can start with the drainpipes.”

  “Yes, sir.” Gray Wolf’s expression is blank. He strikes off toward the shed to start working a job he never asked for.

  Spencer watches him leave. “Where did you find him?”

  “The Hardings,” I lie.

  “Cal Harding?” This will impress Spencer; our neighbor is a stickler for detail. “Did they check his references?”

  “Spencer, he’s patching a roof, not signing on as the nanny.”

  From a distance comes the clatter of things being moved in too small a space. “I don’t like him,” Spencer says.

  “Well,” I answer. “I do.”

  Eugenics is the scientific projection of our sense of self-preservation and our parental instincts.

  —O. F. Cook, “Quenching Life on the Farm: How the Neglect of Eugenics Subverts Agriculture and Destroys Civilization,” from a review by E. R. Eastman in the Journal of Heredity, 1928

  As a child, I used to go to my father’s office at the university and pretend his big leather desk chair was a throne, and I was the Queen of Everything. My subjects—pencils, paperweights—lined up at attention on the desk to hear me speak and watch me twirl in circles. My court jester, a typewriter carriage with a bell at each return, sat at my elbow. I was only three-and-a-half feet tall, and I pretended I could fill this space with as much command as my father.

  He is sitting at the desk, laboring over a legal pad, when I let myself inside. Seeing me, he puts down his work. “Cissy! This is a nice surprise. What brings you to town?”

  For the past few days, my belly has been stretched to breaking, my skin on the verge of splitting. “Your grandson wanted to pay a visit.”

  He sees me looking at his chair, and he smiles slowly. “Did you want to take a spin, for old time’s sake?”

  Ruefully, I shake my head. “I wouldn’t fit.”

  “Of course you would. I’ve seen Allen Sizemore stuff his considerable, er, assets into that seat.” When I don’t laugh along with him, he stands and reaches for my hand. “Tell me what’s the matter.”

  Oh, God, where would I even start? With the way I look at a blade as a silver opportunity? With the nightmares I have of my own father and Spencer, pulling this baby out from between my legs? Or should I appeal to him as a scientist: Hypothesis—fear is a room six feet by six feet, without any windows or doors.

  What comes out of my mouth instead is a single word. “Mama,” I whisper.

  “She would have been so proud of you. She would have loved to see this baby.” He pauses. “It’s perfectly natural to worry. But Cissy, you’re a different woman from your mother, God rest her soul. You’re stronger.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because part of you came from me.” Suddenly he tugs me into his leather chair. He spins it slowly, a carousel.

  “Daddy!”

  “What? Who’s here to see?”

  So I lean my head back and try to find the eye at the center of the cyclone. My feet fly out in front of me, my hands rest heavy on the armrests. “That’s my girl,” my father says, and he brings me to a stop. “I might come out to your place this afternoon. I hear you’re having some work done by a Gypsy.”

  “Yes.” I wonder what else Spencer has told him.

  “Never hired one, myself.” My father leans against the desk. “There was an Indian in grade school with me. Linwood . . . good God, I can’t believe I remember his name. This kid was as Indian as the Indian on a buffalo head nickel. Braids and all. Of course, every boy back then played cowboys and Indians. The highlight of the summer was heading up to South Hero, where there would be Indians at camp to teach us to make trails in the woods and such . . . but that was all for play, you know. Linwood, though . . . he lived it. He could actually trap and hunt and shoot a bow. Hell, he could make a bow.” There is a strange tone of admiration in my father’s voice. “He wore moccasins to school,” he says faintly. “He did all sorts of things the rest of us couldn’t do.”

  I wonder if something as simple as this could have been the raw splinter that stuck in my father’s mind, the one that brought him to eugenics in the first place. A chance meeting that means nothing at the time might bloom into an event of enormous importance. You don’t think twice about an Indian boy’s coveted leather shoes, but you may never forget them. You ignore the man staring at you across the stage of a July 4th historical pageant, until it seems he was fated to be there.

  I study his face. “What about Mama? Did she know any Indians?”

  The light leaves my father’s eyes. “No,” he answers. “They scared her to death.”

  June 13, 1933

  Miss Martha E. Leighton

  Agricultural Extension Building

  City

  Dear Miss Leighton:

  I think I shall choose “Registered Human Stock” as the topic for discussion with the 4-H older boys the last of the month.

  Sincerely yours,

  Henry F. Perkins

  —Correspondence from H. F. Perkins, ESV and VCCL papers, Public Records Office, Middlesex, VT

  The town diner looks the same, a squat clapboard eyesore sitting like a blister on the lip of the town. What makes no sense, though, are the odd things surrounding it. There are more cars than I have ever seen in all of Burlington, in the sleekest of shapes. A boy with wheels on his feet rattles past me. When I turn the corner, the long-haired man stands up, and he hands me his heart.

  Waking abruptly, I stir in Spencer’s arms. “What is it?” he murmurs.

  “A dream.”

  “What were you dreaming?”

  I have to think about this for a moment. “The future, I think.”


  Spencer’s hand splays over our son. “That’s a start,” he says.

  Styla Nestor, a cousin by marriage to Gray Wolf Delacour, relates his heavy periodic drinking and sex immorality to his Gypsy-like travel, due most likely to the fact that overseers and townspeople wanted to get rid of him. The only semi-permanent address she could recall for her cousin, in fact, was the State Prison.

  —From the files of Abigail Alcott, social worker

  The afternoon sun is a cat, tickling me beneath the chin. Bolting upright in bed, I check the clock, and then check it again. I am shocked to have slept so late; I wonder why Ruby has not come in to wake me.

  I wash and dress and run a comb through my hair, in a hurry to get outside. The steady beat of the hammer overhead tells me Gray Wolf is already working on the roof, and there is so much I want to ask him.

  “Coffee?” Ruby asks, as I come into the kitchen.

  “Not now.”

  “Miz Pike—” she says, when I am already halfway out the back door.

  I shade my eyes with a hand, heading in the direction of the noise. “Gray Wolf?” I call, and nearly lose my footing when my husband’s face peers over the edge of the roof instead. “Spencer, what are you doing here?”

  “Finishing what I should have done myself. I don’t have to teach until this afternoon.” He tucks the hammer in the back loop of his belt and begins a careful climb down to the porch, leaving the ladder propped against the house near the sealed bedroom window. “I fired him,” he says, when we are facing each other.

  “What . . . what did he do?”

  “What didn’t he do, Cissy?” Spencer hands me a paper from his pocket. It is a carbon copy of a court conviction from nearly two decades years ago, in which John “Gray Wolf” Delacour was sentenced to twenty-five years in jail for murder. Stapled to it is a second page—the paroled release of Gray Wolf from the Vermont State Prison, dated July 4th of this year.

  “He was here alone with you and Ruby, for God’s sake!”

  “He isn’t like that,” I blurt out.

  “Cissy. Did he tell you he’d served time in prison?”

  My gaze slides away. “I didn’t ask.”