by Jodi Picoult
“I wouldn’t—”
“But it came to me pretty quick that you would still say good-bye. And when you didn’t come, not that day, or the next . . . I went into town. No one there had seen you, either. And then, with the camp . . .”
“What about it?”
He looks at me. “There is no camp, anymore. After I was in town overnight, I came back to a ghost town. Empty tents, laundry hanging, toys scattered on the ground—like everyone had left in a hurry, right in the middle of everything.”
“Why would they go without taking their things?”
“Because someone made them,” Gray Wolf says flatly.
I think about the old woman who smoked in front of her tent while weaving sweetgrass baskets. About the toddler who drew in the dirt with a stick, and cried when a puppy ruined her artwork. About the girls who giggled behind their hands at the smooth-chested boys. Had they been rounded up? Put into institutions and sterilized? Killed?
“When you went missing . . . and then so did everyone else . . .” He squeezes my hand. “Well, a person’s got to have a lot of anger in him to do that much harm.”
I realize what he is implying. “You’re wrong,” I tell Gray Wolf. “Spencer would never hurt anyone like that.”
“Not even if he found out the truth?”
We stare at each other, a stalemate, until a voice in the doorway breaks our concentration. “And what truth would that be?” Spencer asks softly.
He stands with the gun from the pantry, pointed straight at Gray Wolf. “You son of a bitch,” he says. “I saw you break into the house. I thought you were here to steal something, and I was going to catch you red-handed.” He looks at our joined hands. “But you didn’t have to steal a goddamn thing, did you? It was handed to you on a silver platter.”
“Spencer, stop!”
Before I can get to my feet Gray Wolf has lunged for Spencer, knocking the gun out of his hand. Spencer wrestles him onto the ground, pinning him. He has the advantage of youth and rage; his fist pounds into Gray Wolf’s face until blood runs from his nose and mouth and his eyes roll up in his head.
I pull at Spencer’s arm and he flings me away, so that I fall onto my side. A sharp pain runs beneath my belly and around my back; I wince. “Please! Let him go!”
Spencer hauls Gray Wolf to his feet by the collar of his shirt. “The only reason I won’t kill you is because that would bring me down to your level,” he pants, dragging my real father down the stairs. I follow them, slipping on the blood, trying to ignore the pain shooting up my spine. When Spencer opens the door to toss Gray Wolf out Ruby is on the other side of it. She takes one look at the battered face and screams, dropping her sack of groceries on the porch.
“Lia,” Gray Wolf twists in Spencer’s hold. “Come with me.”
The baby seizes inside me, reminding me of the answer I have to give. “I can’t.”
Spencer shoves him so that he flies off the porch, landing face-first on the ground. “If you are still in Comtosook tomorrow,” he vows, “I will make sure you spend the rest of your life at the State Prison. Say good-bye to your lover, Cissy.”
“He’s not my lover!” I cry, but my voice splits apart on the words. Spencer turns just in time to see me double over, to watch my water break like a lake on the floor.
The immediate need is to lessen the distress of body or mind in those about us. Common humanity calls for that. . . . [n]o hamlet is so small as to be exempt and every state and town has problems of its own concerning its unfortunate, its underprivileged, its handicapped. . . . How can a community, after caring to the best of its abilities for those who suffer from devastating ills, proceed to govern itself in such a way as to better its chances for the future?
—H. F. Perkins, “Eugenic Aspects,” Vermont Commission on Country Life, Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, 1931
So this is how my mother died: cracked wide as a hinged jaw, pressing a century between her legs, unable to breathe for fear of what might come next. Fire races from my back to my belly, and my insides wring tighter with every contraction. Ruby, just as scared as I am, whimpers at the foot of the bed, hoping to catch a miracle in her outstretched hand.
It is too early—for this baby to come, and for me to leave.
I have been in labor for eleven hours. All this time, Ruby has been by my side. And Spencer has been in his study, drinking. I do not know if he called Dr. DuBois. I am afraid to hear the answer, either way.
“Ruby,” I call out, and she comes to my side. “You listen to me. You promised me that you’d take care of this baby.”
“You’ll be able to—”
“I won’t.” I know it, too—my sight waffles gray at the edges; my arms are so weak I cannot move them. “Tell him about me. Tell him I loved—oh, God!” I break off as another contraction tightens its hold on my belly. Everything inside me spirals low, and I hike myself up to let it happen. “Ruby,” I whisper. “Now.”
My vision goes crimson and the ocean beats in my ears. My body is a tide, and I am swept away in pain, in rapture. I open my eyes and expect to see my mother, waiting for me now that I am on the other side, but instead I find myself looking into the face of my baby.
My baby daughter.
I have spent so long certain that giving birth will be the death of me; I have been sure that this child I carried was a boy. Yet neither of these things has come to pass. In one breathless second, my entire world has been turned inside out.
She cries, the sweetest sound I have ever heard. As Ruby delivers the placenta and cuts the cord, diapers and swaddles the baby, Spencer bursts into the room. His eyes are an unholy red; he reeks of whiskey. “You’re all right,” he says hoarsely. “Cissy, God, you’re all right.” Then he notices the tightly wrapped infant in Ruby’s arms.
“Mr. Pike,” she says. “Come see your little girl.”
“Girl?” He shakes his head; this cannot be.
I hold out my arms and Ruby gives her over. I think of my mother, who did not feel the bliss of this. Now that I have felt this baby, heard her, it seems impossible to think I would have willingly ended my life without watching her live her own. There will be the moment she smiles for me, the moment she strikes out on unsteady legs, the first haircut, the first school day, the first kiss. How could I miss any of that?
I tuck her into the crook of my arm. After eighteen years of struggling to find my place in this world, I realize that I’ve always belonged right here, holding fast to my daughter.
“Her name is Lily,” I announce.
Spencer comes closer and glances down at our baby. At her face—dark as a nut, round as the moon, with the flat features of her grandfather’s people.
When Spencer looks at me, I realize that he has been hoping this baby would be a fresh start, instead of fuel for the fire. “Lily,” he repeats, and swallows.
“Spencer, it’s not what you think. Gray Wolf—that man—he’s my father. You know how heredity works . . . you understand why she looks the way she does. But she’s yours, Spencer, you have to believe me.”
Spencer shakes his head. “Dr. DuBois said you might be irrational after giving birth . . . We should call him, to come look after you.” He lifts the baby out of my arms and turns to Ruby, his eyes flat, his voice even. “Why don’t you take the car and find him, Ruby?”
“Take the . . .?” She has never driven the Packard, but she knows better than to talk back to Spencer right now. “Yes, sir,” Ruby murmurs, and she sidles past him.
Spencer starts to follow her, still carrying the baby.
“No,” I call out. “Spencer, I want to hold her.”
He stares at me for so long that I imagine he is seeing our history like a movie, looped to lead up to this point. His eyes shine with tears. But then he pulls up a chair beside the bed and sits in it, holding Lily so that I can see her face. He smiles a little, and for just a moment I let myself believe that Spencer might come to understand it is not blood that connects a family
, but the love between its members. “You rest, Cissy,” he tells me. “I’ll take care of her.”
We pay full price for the virtues our culture develops at any particular period. . . . The very ethnic and religious prejudices which still live in the community may be forged into the tools by which a demagogue can further divide the population and stultify human development.
—Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937
In my mind’s eye, I am running. The rain sluices over my face and muddies my feet and yet I know I have to get away from whoever is chasing me. When I look over my shoulder I see him—the same man who has been in my other dreams, with the long brown hair and quiet eyes. He calls out my name, and I turn again, and a moment later he trips and sprawls across the ground. I stop to make sure he has not hurt himself and then I see it—the tombstone with my name on it, the tombstone that I have run right through.
Jerking awake, I feel something heavy on my thigh. Spencer is draped across my lap. At first I think he is asleep and then I realize he is sobbing. His eyes are so bloodshot it frightens me, and his skin gives off the steam of alcohol.
“Cissy,” he says, rising. “You’re awake.”
My body feels as if it has been beaten for days. My legs are too tender to shift on the mattress. Someone—Spencer?—has pressed cold compresses between my thighs to stanch the bleeding. “Lily,” I ask. “Where is she?”
Spencer takes my hand and raises it to his lips. “Cissy.”
“Where is my baby?” I push myself up in the bed.
“Cissy, the baby—she was too young. Her lungs . . .”
I go perfectly still.
“The baby died, Cissy.”
“Lily!” I scream. I try to get off the bed, but Spencer holds me down.
“You couldn’t have done anything. No one could have.”
“Dr. DuBois—”
“He’s doing a surgery in Vergennes. Ruby left word for him to come as soon as he gets home. But by the time she came back the baby was . . .”
“Don’t say it,” I threaten. “Don’t you dare say it.”
He is crying too. “She died in my arms. She died while I was holding her.”
All I want is my baby. “I have to see her.”
“You can’t.”
“I have to see her!”
“Cissy, she’s been buried. I did it.”
I throw myself out from beneath the covers and hit Spencer in the chest, the arms, the head. “You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t!”
He grabs my wrists hard, pulls me back, shakes me. “We couldn’t have baptized her. We couldn’t have buried her in consecrated ground.” A sob rounds from his throat. “I thought, if you saw her, you would try to follow her. I can’t lose you, too. Jesus, Cissy, what did you want me to do?”
It takes a moment for his words to sink it. We couldn’t have baptized her, we couldn’t have buried her in the church graveyard, because to Spencer she was illegitimate. Spencer gathers me into his arms while I am still stiff with shock. “Sweetheart,” he whispers, “no one has to know.”
My eyes burn, my throat aches. “How about the next time I have a baby, Spencer, and it looks the same way? How many Gypsies will you accuse me of sleeping with before you realize I’m telling you the truth? Before you send me off to an institution to be sterilized?” I shake my head. “My mother fell in love with an Indian. Blame her for that, not me. All I ever did wrong was fall in love with you.”
How does it feel, I want to ask, to find yourself at the bottom of one of your own genealogy charts? But instead I pick up the swaddling blanket at the foot of the bed. “Take me to the grave.”
“You’re too upset. You need to—”
“I need to see my daughter’s grave. Now.”
Spencer stands up. He picks up from a tray beside the bed the scissors Ruby used to cut the umbilical cord, a knife she had sterilized just in case. He tucks these into his breast pocket, for safekeeping. “Tomorrow,” he promises, and then he kisses my forehead. “Cissy. Let’s start over.”
I stare at him so long that everything inside me goes to stone. “All right, Spencer,” I answer, in a voice that sounds much like the woman I used to be. My hands are shaking in my lap, but I can play his game. I am already thinking of my next move.
In the voelkisch State the voelkisch view of life has finally to succeed in bringing about that nobler era when men see their care no longer in the better breeding of dogs, horses and cats, but rather in the uplifting of mankind itself, an era in which the one knowingly and silently renounces, and the other gladly gives and sacrifices.
—Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, from Volume II, written in prison in 1924 prior to the 1933 “Law for Protection Against Genetically Defective Offspring” passed as part of the Nazi Racial Hygiene Program
Lily isn’t dead. Now that I have thought about it, this is the only way it can be—why else would Spencer refuse to show me the body, the coffin, the grave? A hundred scenarios have run through my mind: he has hidden her until he has a chance to leave her on the steps of a church; he gave her to Ruby to bring to the orphanage; he is waiting for Dr. DuBois to come and spirit her away. Another reason I did not die in childbirth: it is my responsibility to find my baby.
I wait until I am certain Spencer has closeted himself in his study again and then I get dressed. It is slow going—my head is heavy with fever and my legs shaky. I slip Gray Wolf’s pipe into the pocket of my dress and double-knot my boots—above all, I have to be ready to run away. I turn the knob of the door with the care of a military spy and creep into the hall.
My first stop is the bathroom. Quietly I rummage through the clothing hamper; I check inside the tub. I even force myself to look in the tank of the toilet. When I cannot find her I go to Ruby’s room on the third floor, and empty the insides of the closet and drawers, mess the bed, toss the shelves. By the time I finish I need to sit down.
Think, I command. Think like Spencer.
On the ground level of the house I sneak from small cubby to cornerhole, peeking in places too small to fit anything but a sleeping newborn. I take care to tiptoe around Spencer’s study, where the clink of glasses places him at the sideboard. By the time I reach the kitchen I am on the verge of tears. She must be hungry by now; she must be cold. Cry, and I will find you.
I will carry her tight against my chest; I will keep her warm. On the way to Canada, I will tell her of the sights we pass—the cows marooned in fields, the violet fireweed exploding along the road, the mountains that curve like the line of a woman’s body. We will stand beside Gray Wolf at the settlement at Odonak when he is asked, “Who are you?” so that he can point to the two of us.
I walk into the dark kitchen, thinking of the wine cabinet, the flour bins, the root cellar. There are twenty places alone to hide in this room. I have just taken a step inside the cool, black pantry when someone bumps into me from behind.
I stifle a scream and pull the cord above me to flood the room with light. Then everything comes clear. “Ruby, what are you doing in here?”
She is shaking like an aspen leaf. “Getting some . . . sometimes I can’t sleep at night and I make myself a little cup of that fancy chocolate of yours. I’m sorry, Miz Pike. I know it’s stealing.”
I narrow my eyes. “Where is she?” My hands begin to run over the shelves, under stacks of clothes, pushing aside bins.
“Who?”
“The baby. You’re helping him hide the baby.”
“Oh, Miz Pike,” she says, her eyes wide and wet. “There is no more baby.”
“Ruby, you don’t understand. She’s fine, the baby is fine. I just have to find her. I have to find her, and I have to take her away from here.”
“But the professor, he said—”
I grab Ruby by the shoulders. “Did you see a body? Did you?”
“I saw—I saw—” Ruby’s teeth are chattering. She cannot cough out the answer I want.
“Dammit, Ruby, speak
up!” I shake her a little harder, and she wrenches away from me, her arm striking a shelf lined with canned beets and beans. One jar tumbles to the checkerboard floor and shatters. As the pungent stink of vinegar spreads, I push aside bins of oatmeal and biscuit mix, soap flakes and powdered milk.
Strong hands pull me away from the shelf, into the main room of the kitchen. “Let me go, Spencer,” I say, trying wildly to free myself.
He turns to Ruby. “Call Dr. DuBois’s service again. Tell him we need him here now.”
“Let go of me! Ruby, he’s lying. Let go of—Lily!” I scream. “Lily!”
It takes all Spencer’s might to wrestle me out of the kitchen. Frozen, Ruby watches him drag me, screaming, up the stairs by my wrists. “This is not any of your business, Ruby,” Spencer calls over my cries. “You can see that Mrs. Pike isn’t herself now, and I’m going to make sure she calms down.” He grunts as one of my kicks lands squarely in his shin. “Call the doctor. And then do what I asked you to do earlier.”
“Don’t listen to him, Ruby!”
She seems to shrink before my eyes. “Go,” Spencer bellows. “Now!” Suddenly I go limp in his arms. He catches me before I hit the floor and carries me the rest of the way. I do not open my eyes, not even when he modestly checks the pad between my legs to make sure I have not hemorrhaged, not when he sighs like a man who has given up hope. Then Spencer tucks me into bed and removes my boots and locks the door firmly behind himself.
I do not consider this a failure.
After all, now I know that Lily is hidden outside.
Why not drop the whole works? . . . We have carried on for several years and what have we accomplished? It was good fun as long as we could afford it, but now it is a different matter. If Hitler succeeds in his wholesale sterilization, it will be a demonstration that will carry eugenics farther than a hundred Eugenics Societies could. If he makes a fiasco of it, it will set the movement back where a hundred eugenic societies can never resurrect it.
