by Jodi Picoult
—Excerpt from a letter dated February 1, 1934, from Henry H. Goddard to H. F. Perkins, in response to financial assistance requests, ESV papers, Public Records Office, Middlesex, VT
The hardest part is breaking the glass. To do it soundlessly is nearly impossible; I have to wrap the chair in the blanket from the bed and hope that the fabric will muffle some of the sound. I pick the window closest to the ladder that Gray Wolf, and then Spencer, used to fix the roof. After that, it is almost too easy. To shimmy down to the ground level, to sneak beneath the light in Spencer’s study window, to see by the midnight moon.
We have so many acres, and she could be anywhere.
I check beneath the shrubs that line the front porch, under the porch itself, around the pile of firewood to the east. In back of the house, I move through the forest, walking in circles, in patterns, until finally I sit down on the ground and let myself cry.
It’s devastating, Spencer will tell Dr. DuBois when he gets here. I found her digging in the dirt. No, it’s not the first time she sleepwalked . . . but this is the first time she could not snap out of it. I wonder if, at private mental institutions, they tie patients to benches or drown them, like they did at Waterbury.
But is it crazy to search when you know there is something to find?
I look back at the house. There is no light in Ruby’s bedroom, no silhouette in Spencer’s study. I close my eyes and think of whales and dolphins, bouncing sound off the bottom of the ocean.
When I blink again, the wall of the icehouse rises out of the black of the night. One sliver seems darker than the others—someone has left the door ajar again. I stand up, reeled by an invisible line into the chilled belly of the shed.
The soles of my boots slip on the sawdust. Luminous blocks of ice sit shoulder to shoulder, a glowing row of giant’s teeth. There are Ruby’s roasts, for the dinner party we will not have. And on a cutting block sits an old apple crate, with the top set off to the side.
Inside is the smallest, stillest doll I have ever seen.
“No. No. Oh, no.” I grip the rough edge of the crate, tiny coffin, and look down at the face of my baby.
Her eyelashes are as long as my pinky nail. Her cheeks are a pale, milky blue. Her fist, impossibly small, is curled tight as a snail. With one finger I touch her dimpled jaw, her embryo ear. “Lily,” I whisper. “Lily Delacour Pike.”
In this frozen nursery, I lift my daughter from her cradle. I wrap her blanket tighter, to keep her warm. I rock her against my breast, so that she can hear my heart break.
Spencer cannot take her away from me. To do that, I would have to agree to let go.
Awani Kia, I think. In this other world, they will ask her who she is. “You tell them about your grandma, and your grandpa, who built a bridge out of love,” I say against her skin. “You tell them about your father, who thought he was doing the right thing. And you tell them about me.” I kiss her, letting my lips rest for a moment. “You tell them I’m coming.”
Then I put my daughter back in her crib and press my fist against my mouth to hold in all the sorrow. I will spend forever wondering if Spencer told me the truth, or only half. If Lily stopped breathing in his arms, or if he made sure of it. Maybe one day he will explain: I only did it because I loved you.
“Me too,” I say aloud.
Soon Spencer will wake and come looking for me. And I will make him pay for this. There are ways to show the authorities what really happened. I will do what it takes, even if it kills me.
There isn’t much time. So I reach into the crate again, where my baby’s face fits in the palm of my hand. Her nose and her chin push up against it, a memory to carry. “Sleep well,” I tell her, and I move to the doorway of the icehouse.
I think of Madame Soliat at the Fourth of July, with her wolf dog and her tent. I think of her shaking out her many-colored coat on the banks of the lake where she lived for a summer. Don’t be afraid, she told me. Among other things.
I do not need a fortune-teller anymore. I know what comes next.
PART THREE
2001
The dead continue to converse with the living.
—THOMAS HARDY
EIGHT
On nights that Az Thompson didn’t work at the quarry, he spent hours cleaving through the barnacled facts that cluttered his head. Live a century, and you know a lot of things: how to navigate by starlight, what to say to a grieving widow, where bear hide in the winter. Under all this flotsam you could scrape down to the barest truths—that, for example, it was not blood you passed down to your children, but courage. That you might find love in the most unlikely places—under stones in the shallows of the river, at the bottom of a bowl of shelled peas. That even when you least expected it, you could go on.
Doctors called it insomnia, but Az knew better. He didn’t go to sleep because then he didn’t have to wake up and wonder why he hadn’t died overnight. He’d read of Egyptian kings and Ponce de León and Tithonus, who had tried so hard to live forever. But what good was eternity, when you outlived everyone you loved? When you watched your body fall apart piece by piece, like a rusting automobile, even though your mind could snap like lightning? These fools with their elixirs and their golden tombs . . . he would shake his head and think, Be careful what you wish for.
Az was tired at the cellular level, but he didn’t lie down on his cot. Instead he watched the raindrops charge the roof of his tent like an old-time picture show. In another four hours, the sun would rise, and he would still be here.
Suddenly, he heard a cry. It seemed to come simultaneously from both the distant forest and inside Az himself, an ache more than a sound. He wondered if it were possible to throw one’s emotion so that it spoke back to you, a ventriloquism of pain.
There—the sound, again.
It wasn’t thunder. It was too deep for a child, too guttural for a woman. No, this was the requiem of a man who had lost so much he could no longer find himself. Someone like . . . well, himself.
Az sighed. He didn’t believe in a lot of mystical bullshit—that was the province of New Age wanna-be Indians, in his opinion—but he also knew that your past could return in a number of disguises, from the shrill whistle of an owl to the eyes of a stranger that followed you down the street. And he knew better than anyone that turning your back on your own history only made it that much easier to be blindsided.
Then again, it could just be some guy who’d tripped in the dark and hurt himself.
Either way, Az thought wearily, he was going to have to go see.
Ross sat on the floor of the tent with Az Thompson’s Hudson Bay blanket wrapped around his shoulders. His pants and shirt were thick with mud. His wet hair dripped into his eyes as he sipped the instant coffee the old man had made with a battery-powered immersion heater. He could not seem to stop shaking, although this had nothing to do with the dampness that soaked through to his core. No, that was due to a woman who smelled of roses. A woman who—say it, he demanded silently—he had fallen in love with. A woman who was not alive.
“You all right?” Az asked.
You look like you’ve seen a ghost.
Ross couldn’t answer. He bent his head to the mug and took a swallow of coffee that burned his throat. It brought tears to his eyes.
He had watched as her skin went translucent, as the trees grew more solid than Lia herself. He had seen the shock on her face when she looked down at the gravestone and saw her own name. She hadn’t been aware, any more than Ross had. Ross, who had studied the paranormal, who understood that a demon carried a rotten stench and that a poltergeist drew its energy from a teenage girl, had not known the simple fact that a ghost could kiss you back.
Ghosts were not the norm. They were the ones who, for one reason or another, still had one foot in this world and could not seem to shake it free. Ross had heard Curtis Warburton speak of ghosts who return to avenge their own demise, and ghosts who came back because they’d forgotten to pay the electric bill. Ross reme
mbered Curtis telling stories about ghosts who’d returned for a love they’d left behind.
Could a ghost return for a love she had not yet met?
The cot creaked as Az sank down onto it. He folded his hands on his lap and stared at Ross, his black eyes burning. “You want to talk about it?” Az asked quietly.
Ross shook his head. He couldn’t. The words, the memory: that was all he had left of her.
Eli waited on the couch while Shelby Wakeman was upstairs dressing. He sat on the left-hand side, but then worried he might look too comfortable slung over the arm when she got back, and moved into the middle, twirling his uniform hat in his hands until she stepped into the room and took all the air away just like that.
“I’m sorry; I don’t usually answer the door without a chance to titivate.”
“I beg your pardon?” Eli swallowed. “Titi-what?”
“Spruce up.” Shelby smiled uncomfortably and sat down across from Eli, tucking her hair behind her ears. “You’re sure Ross isn’t . . . in trouble?”
“Not with me,” Eli assured her. Like everyone else who received a police visit in the dead of night, she’d assumed the worst. If Eli had been thinking clearly, he might even have waited until morning. But he’d been so intent on the puzzle he’d unraveled with Frankie’s DNA report that he needed someone who might be able to help him put the pieces together. Gray Wolf’s DNA was not on that rope, but it did not necessarily exonerate him from a murder charge. Spencer Pike’s DNA might be on the rope, but that didn’t necessarily incriminate him. The question was, who had actually killed Cissy Pike? And was she the only victim that night?
Eli tried to remind himself of this, and that the reason he had come to this house had nothing to do with the fact that, against all reason, Shelby Wakeman had slipped into his subconscious for the past three weeks. She smelled of apples, just like his bedroom did in the mornings after he dreamed of her. She looked even more lovely in person. He found himself reaching out a hand toward hers before he remembered to stop himself.
Eli cleared his throat. “I, um, I believe your brother might have some useful information about a case.”
She shook her head. “I doubt it. Ross doesn’t get out very much, and lately when he has, he’s been working.”
“Ghost hunting,” Eli stated.
“Yes.” Shelby lifted her face. “You must think he’s crazy.”
Eli started to nod, to tell her that yes, he could not in his wildest imagination picture spending your life looking for something that seemed only to exist previously in your mind. But then he stared at her sea green eyes and the place where her chin came to too sharp a point, and he felt every inch of skin on his body tighten. “I don’t know what I think,” he managed.
Heat rushed Shelby’s face, and she stood abruptly, muttering something that sounded like xerothermic as she struggled to raise a window that was stuck. “Here,” Eli said, and he went to help her. They stood side by side at the sash, their shoulders touching. Eli yanked the window up with too much force, and a cool draft fell like a guillotine between them.
“Thank you.”
Eli stared at her. “My pleasure.”
Whatever else Eli was going to say—and at that moment he truly could not have formed words, much less the letters of his own name—was lost in a hail of footsteps bounding down the stairs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was asleep upstairs.”
“Ethan wasn’t asleep,” Shelby said, as the boy came into the room. He was a small kid, skinny, wearing far too many damn clothes for this time of year. A hat shaded his eyes, but even with his face half-covered Eli could see how the boy’s skin was as milky as chinA. One hand was bandaged, and the other was blistered in spots, as if it had been plunged into boiling water. He had his mother’s skittish smile.
“Ethan, you can go out,” Shelby ordered.
“But it’s raining—”
“Not anymore. Go.” She waited until the door closed and the throaty roll of skateboard wheels scraped the driveway. Then she turned to Eli and crossed her arms, a completely different woman from the one he’d seen moments ago. “That’s my son.”
Eli watched her fingers bite into the skin of her own arms. Her posture was so rigid he thought she might snap in half.
“You’re thinking there’s something wrong with him,” she accused.
He wanted to run his hand down her spine. He wanted to hold her between his palms until she went soft again. “Actually,” Eli said, “I was thinking he looked like you.”
The sound was as round as a nut, as tiny as a pebble, but it rang in Spencer Pike’s skull. No matter how many pillows he piled over his head, he could hear the cry of that baby. Spencer writhed, scratching at his ears until blood ran into the collar of his pajamas.
“Mr. Pike! Oh, sweet Jesus. I need some help in here!” the nurse screamed into the intercom.
It took two orderlies to pull Spencer’s arms down to his sides and secure them to the bed with straps, like they did with Joe Gigapoulopous, the delusional man two doors down from Spencer who tried to eat his own fingers every now and then. “The baby,” Spencer gasped, as the nurse dabbed at the deep furrows around his ears. “Get rid of the goddamned baby.”
“There is no baby here. You must have been having a nightmare.”
By now, tears were streaming down his face. That sound, it was splitting his head in two. Why couldn’t they hear it? “The baby,” he sobbed.
The nurse injected him with a tranquilizer. “This will help.”
But it wouldn’t. It would put him to sleep, where that baby would be waiting for him. He lay very still, staring at the ceiling, as the drug slid through his system. He felt his hands relax, and then his legs, and finally his jaw fell slack. “When will I die?” Spencer thought, but it turned out he had spoken aloud.
The nurse stared at him, her brown eyes steady. Cissy had had brown eyes. “Soon,” she said gently.
Spencer sighed. Her answer was more powerful than this sedative; it eased him like no medication ever could. Truth could do that to a man.
Men, Meredith figured, were an accessory, like a belt or purse or shoes. You didn’t necessarily need one to complete your look. Granted, if you walked around barefoot you got a few odd stares every now and then, but the important parts of you were covered. And after a string of meeting men she really didn’t want, and wanting men she couldn’t seem to meet, the scientist in Meredith had simply said to cut her losses.
She was driving home, now, at nearly 11 P.M. The commute from the office—forty-five minutes, without traffic—was the only time of her day when she let the gates free in her mind and allowed herself to reflect on anything but the task at hand. Tonight, by studying cells from four viable blastospheres belonging to a family carrying sickle-cell anemia, Meredith had avoided accompanying a colleague to a dinner honoring cutting-edge scientific companies. Martin was definitely her type—tall and cerebral, with the long fingers of a researcher. In her first year of working at Generra, Meredith’s crush on Martin was so severe that sometimes after speaking to him at the copy machine she’d have to hide in the bathroom until her cheeks stopped flaming. Her prayers were answered a year ago, or so she thought, when her boss sent her to a funding dinner with Martin, who drank enough champagne to float a horse and introduced both her and her breasts to the master of ceremonies.
It was raining up and down the whole East Coast, or at least that was Meredith’s guess from the ache in her leg. Her left one—the one she’d been having set in an ER when she was told the news about Lucy’s existence—was as good a barometer as any meteorologist’s tool. As she got off at her exit, she drew her thoughts away from her nonexistent love life and focused instead on Lucy, who had been taken off the Risperdal but hadn’t shown any signs of improvement. If anything, her daughter had gotten more fanciful—speaking at the breakfast table to people who were not there, buckling the seat belt beside her around nothing at all. Meredith was an aficionado of scientific fa
ct, but told herself that her daughter was genetically predisposed to fiction. She, who had made a living out of defining “normal,” had broadened the category so that it would include Lucy.
She pulled into the driveway. The only light on in the house was in the parlor; everyone had already gone to sleep. Meredith got out of the car stiffly and put her weight on her good leg. For a moment she stopped breathing, struck by the sheer beauty of a night littered with stars. She spent so much time looking at the most minute elements of humanity that she sometimes forgot how simple the world could be.
Meredith let herself in with her key and found Lucy on the stairs, fully dressed and staring straight ahead, a suitcase at her feet. “Luce?” she said, but her daughter didn’t respond.
“She can’t hear you.”
Ruby was descending the steps. Her long white hair was a cloud behind her; her hands clutched the banister for support. “She’s sleepwalking.”
Sleepwalking? Lucy’s eyes were open. “Are you sure?” Meredith asked her grandmother. “Did you ever sleepwalk?”
Ruby bent toward Lucy and helped her to her feet. “I used to know someone who did.”
Lucy followed Ruby upstairs, docile as a lamb. Meredith went after them, and tripped over the forgotten suitcase. It fell open at her feet, spilling its contents. Inside were dozens of dolls—dolls that ate or cried or swam, dolls Lucy had not played with for a few years, dolls that stared up at Meredith with their glassy eyes like so many broken babies.
There is a feeling that runs like a current through the heart when you pull up to the house that holds people you love and see a police cruiser sitting outside. Ross barely slammed his car into park before racing up the driveway and throwing open the door, shouting Shelby’s name.
She stood up immediately. “Ross!” He looked at her and at Ethan, who’d come up from behind Ross, on his skateboard, and then he looked at the cop standing in the living room.
