The Jodi Picoult Collection #2

by Jodi Picoult

  As he passed Shelby at the kitchen table, he touched her shoulder. “And that isn’t even the whole of it,” Eli said, sitting down across from her. “Spencer Pike died last night.”

  He kept talking, but Shelby did not hear a thing. She was concentrating on the way her shoulder felt when Eli’s hand had drifted away, as if there were something missing.

  In that moment a track switched in her mind, and Shelby could no longer imagine a time she had not known Eli Rochert. He had written himself onto every previous page of her life and only now in its edited version did she realize how great the ellipsis had been.

  Oh, shit, she thought, I love him.

  Shelby believed that love was like a solar eclipse—breathtakingly beautiful, absorbing, and capable of rendering you blind. She had not necessarily gone out of her way to avoid a relationship, but she hadn’t wanted one either. It was called falling in love for a reason—because, inevitably, you crashed at the bottom.

  She had been in love before, with her ex-husband—she knew what it was like to have your heart speed up at the sound of a man’s voice on the phone, and to feel the world stop spinning when you kissed. But that relationship—which she’d been so sure of at first—had been doomed, just like every other one she knew. Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom. But for Shelby, that man had run away before she landed. And frankly, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to leap again.

  “. . . and if you look at it that way . . . Shelby, hey, are you all right?” Eli squeezed her hand to get her attention, and she flinched. Immediately, he drew away. “What’s wrong?”

  A thousand answers to that question tangled in her mind. “If I were dying, would you give me a kidney?”

  Eli looked nonplussed. “You mean one of mine?”

  “How many others do you have access to?” She stared hard at him. “Well?”

  “I . . . I . . . yeah. I would.”

  Groaning, Shelby buried her face in her hands.

  “That wasn’t the right answer?” Eli asked, bewildered.

  She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I want to love you, Eli. But at the same time, I don’t want to. When I’m with you, I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything so right in my life. But if I admit to that, then it’s got nowhere to go but downhill. Look at what love did to my brother. Or to Gray Wolf. Or even to Lia Pike. Or . . . what’s so funny?”

  Across the table, Eli was grinning from ear to ear. He took her hand again, and this time when she would have pulled away he held her fast. “Love,” he repeated, all that he’d needed to hear. “You said love.”

  Lucy held the flashlight up to her palm so that it turned red. Ethan, balancing his own flashlight on his knees, could nearly see the tissue and bone. Their secret spot—beneath the plastic tarp that covered the outdoor furniture—was getting smoky, but it was worth it. This was Ethan’s first pact, and he was planning to make the most of it.

  He waved the blade of his Swiss Army knife through the candle flame. “Is it ready?” Lucy asked.

  It turned out that she was less than a year younger than him, but you’d never know it to talk to them both. Lucy jumped if a daddy-longlegs walked within a yard of her, and everyone knew that daddy-longlegs were about as scary as Puff the Magic Dragon. She was so quiet that sometimes Ethan forgot she was sitting right next to him. She couldn’t even stand on his skateboard without falling.

  On the other hand, however, she knew all the interesting body-part words in the dictionary without Ethan having to look them up, and said her mother had been the one to tell her about them. She smelled like sugar cookies. And because she’d been at day camp all summer, she had the most beautiful tan Ethan had ever seen.

  She told Ethan what it felt like to swim out to a dock in a lake, and to fall asleep under the sun so that you woke up hot and dizzy and not sure of what day it was or how you’d gotten there. He told her how the hair stood up on the back of his neck when the ghost had followed his uncle out of that old haunted house. She admitted that sometimes, she hid under her covers to pretend she wasn’t there when the spirits came. He told her how the liquid the dermatologist used to freeze a pre-cancerous growth off his skin actually burned like fire.

  “Come on already, Ethan,” Lucy said. “I’m choking to death.”

  That was another thing—she said things like I’m going to kill you, or I’ll die if you don’t hand over that bag of chips—all the things his mother was so careful not to say to him, just in case he was stupid enough to take it the wrong way.

  “All right.” Ethan held the flashlight over the knife, dropped the flashlight, and then the knife. “Jeez. You hold this.” He handed Lucy the flashlight and wiped off the blade—no need to contract the bubonic plague—before waving it through the candle flame again. When he glanced up, Lucy seemed uncharacteristically pale. “You’re not gonna faint on me, are you?”

  Scowling, she held out her wrist.

  Ethan placed his right alongside hers. “I’ll help you find a ghost before it finds you,” he said.

  She stared into his eyes. “I’ll take you to where the sun comes up.”

  “To courage,” Ethan said, and he slashed the blade fast as a gasp across his wrist and hers. He pressed the open wounds together.

  Lucy sucked in her breath. “To courage.” She wrapped a strip ripped from Ethan’s T-shirt around their arms as they both waited and hoped that bravery might be every bit as binding as blood.

  Az woke abruptly at the sound of birds. On his cot, he lay still for a moment, trying to pick apart the threads of a junco’s whine from the trill of a whippoorwill and the throaty contralto of the loon. It had been weeks since he’d heard this particular melody. It had stopped the same morning he had told the other Abenaki about the burial ground, and had helped carry a drum to the Pike property, to formally launch a protest.

  He sat up slowly, feeling the creak and snap of each vertebra. Swinging his feet over the side of the cot, he toed off his slippers and put the sole of his foot right down on the packed earth that formed the floor of his tent.

  It was warm, just like it should be in August. Not frozen, as it had been.

  Az pushed back the flap of his tent and stepped outside.

  The world seemed centered now, not off just a few degrees to the point where it would keep spinning just a little more lopsided each day until you could not help but notice. Az snapped a flower off the honeysuckle vine that grew beside his tent and watched the pearl of nectar bead at the base of its horn. He drew it onto his tongue and tasted sugar instead of tears.

  Overhead, a plane cut the sky in two, and it did not fall. Az stood very still but did not feel yesterday pressing at the base of his skull like a hammer. He closed his eyes and knew, instantaneously, which way was true north.

  Az poured water into his immersion heater for his coffee and measured out the grounds. He washed his hands and his face and dressed carefully, because one missed button on a shirt can change your fortune for months at a time. He did not do anything differently in his morning routine than when Comtosook had been under a spell. After all, you couldn’t mess with physics: just as Az had known what entropy was coming, he’d also known there would be a day when it all would fall to rights again.

  Had he been a wizard, Ross would have left his sister strength. Not he-man brute force, but endurance, because that was the way to get through anything, and as someone without a shred of it, he ought to know. Instead, though, Ross found himself sorting through the meager possessions in his duffel. This softest shirt of his, he’d give Shelby, because it smelled like Ross and he knew she’d want to save that memory any way she could. His watch, that would be for Ethan, in lieu of the time Ross really wanted to give him instead. The pennies from 1932 he would take with him to lay a trail across eternity like Gretel’s bread crumbs, so that Lia could find him, just in case.

  Quiz: What kind of man spent thirty-five years on earth and accumulated on
ly enough to fit in a single canvas bag?

  Answer: One who’d never planned to stay for very long.

  After seeing Lia’s ghost, he had taken Meredith home. He’d heard her on the phone to Ruby—waking her, at 5 A.M., explaining what she’d seen in words filigreed with wonder. She’d said she would return to Maryland in a couple of days, after taking care of a few things here. Like the land, Ross imagined, and Spencer Pike’s funeral. He didn’t know if Meredith believed what he’d said about ghosts, now, and frankly, he didn’t care. What mattered to him was Lia, and she wouldn’t be back. He knew this the same way he knew that every breath was like drinking in tar, that every subsequent day cut like a knife. He was tired, so very fucking tired, and all he wanted to do was sleep.

  Ross stuffed his hand into the duffel again. A razor that had been his father’s; that was for Shelby. His EMF meter—Ethan, naturally. He pulled out the old spirit photograph he’d taken with Curtis—globules over a lake—and smiled. Maybe he’d give this to Meredith.

  He wouldn’t leave a note, that was for sure. Look at how his sister had read into it the last time, and he hadn’t even been trying to leave one then. He deliberately shredded every last bit of paper in the desk into pieces and tossed them, confetti, into the trash.

  Then he noticed Lucy Oliver standing in the doorway of his room. “Hello,” he said. Truth be told, she made Ross uncomfortable. Her eyes were nearly silver, too light for the rest of her features, and she acted as if she’d known him for months instead of days. Tonight she was wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt that said MADAME PRESIDENT. She had a Shrek Band-Aid on her wrist. “You fall down skateboarding?” Ross asked amiably.

  “No,” Lucy answered, just no, and that was all. “I’m supposed to tell you we’re about to eat.”

  Ross tried to answer—something like All right, or I’ll be right there, but what came out instead surprised them both. “Did Lia talk to you about me?”

  Lucy nodded slowly. “Sometimes.”

  “What did she say?”

  But instead of responding, Lucy looked around his room at the careful piles. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m getting ready to go,” Ross replied.

  “Where?”

  When he looked at her, he had the sense that Lucy knew the answer wasn’t a place.

  “Not yet though,” Lucy said, a confirmation.

  He tilted his head. How much could she know? “Why not?”

  “Because it’s time for breakfast.” Lucy took a step closer and held out her hand, the one with the Band-Aid at its base. “So come on,” she said, and waited a long moment before Ross grabbed hold and put himself into her keeping.

  It was not that Meredith expected a huge outpouring of mourners at Spencer Pike’s funeral, but standing alone with Eli Rochert and a bloodhound as the Congregational minister did a hasty graveside service was a little embarrassing. Then again, considering how the Abenaki picketed the development of his land, she supposed she should be grateful that there wasn’t a drum banging on the other side of the fence. She hadn’t brought Lucy, because Lucy didn’t know the man from Adam, and the last place her impressionable daughter needed to be was a graveyard. Shelby would have come if Meredith had asked, but she needed someone to watch Lucy more than she needed moral support at the interment of a man she barely knew. And Ross, well, who knew where he was. Meredith hadn’t seen him since the night Lia had appeared, and didn’t want to. Then she would have to find the correct words to say, and I’m sorry and I’m here didn’t seem nearly as fitting as Don’t.

  “Would you?” the chaplain asked Meredith, although she’d missed the question the first time. She looked at Eli for help, and he nodded toward the earth on the ground.

  Meredith picked up a handful, which she sprinkled over Pike’s coffin. Eli discreetly slipped a check to the reverend, and Meredith flushed to think she hadn’t even considered this part of the ritual. From whose bank account had that money come . . . Eli’s? The town’s? Neither, she hoped. Spencer Pike had bled Comtosook dry enough already.

  The minister offered Meredith his condolences and walked solemnly to his VW Bug to drive off, leaving behind a faint trace of Simon and Garfunkel from the open windows. Eli’s big hand touched her shoulder. “You want a lift back?”

  Meredith shrugged. “I may just stay for a minute.”

  “Sure,” Eli said. He started off with his dog, and then came back and unclipped his cell phone from his belt. “Call me when you’re ready, okay?”

  Meredith thanked him and watched him drive off in his truck. She wondered if Shelby realized how lucky she was, to have a man like that who’d happened to cross into her life at just the right moment. A light breeze ruffled the bottom of the black dress she’d borrowed as she looked at the fresh grave. “Good-bye,” she said quietly, because she felt that someone should.

  “Good riddance,” she heard behind her.

  Az Thompson stood a few feet away, dressed in an ill-fitting black suit with a white shirt and string tie. “You’re the last person I expected to see here,” Meredith said.

  “I didn’t come for him.” Az looked down at the raw mouth in the ground where the coffin lay. “First time in a long time I’m happy to have outlived someone.” He glanced up at Meredith. “You care to walk a ways?”

  She slipped her heels off and padded along beside Az in her stockings. He climbed the hill, striding right across some of the graves. At some spots, she felt a tickling on the arches of her feet. He stopped at a weeping willow with a lopsided stone bench beside it. “This is a poor excuse for a thinking spot,” he said, frowning.

  “Where would you go instead?”

  “A waterfall,” Az said immediately. “Or flat on my back under the stars.” He looked at her, then stretched out on the ground. “See what I mean?”

  She only hesitated a second, and that was because this dress was not her own. Then she settled herself beside Az and stared up at the sky. “What do you see?” she asked, the game she played with Lucy.

  “Clouds,” Az answered, matter-of-fact.

  Meredith hugged her knees. In the crook of her arm was a small bruise from the blood that had been drawn days ago. Az had one too. “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s just . . . well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to call you. Mr. Thompson, or Az, or John.”

  “I’ve always fancied being called Ted Williams by a whole stadium of fans, but I guess I could settle for one skinny girl calling me N’mahom.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “My grandfather.” He looked directly at Meredith. “I suppose, then, you believe it all.”

  She nodded. “Not that it does anyone any good.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  Tears came to Meredith’s eyes. Surprised, she told herself that it was the day, the heat, the lack of sleep. “So much has already happened,” she said quietly. “So many people hurt.” She was thinking of people like Az, like Lia, like the faceless Abenaki of this town, yet Ross’s features came swimming up to the surface. “This wasn’t supposed to be about me, and somehow, it got that way.”

  “People work too hard to figure out the meaning of their lives. Why me, why now. The truth is, sometimes things don’t happen to you for a reason. Sometimes it’s just about being in the right place at the right time for someone else.”

  “That’s it?” she said.

  “That’s quite a lot.” He turned and smiled. “You going home today?”

  Meredith had been planning to fly to Baltimore that afternoon. But she’d postponed her trip till tomorrow. She just didn’t want to leave Comtosook with Pike’s funeral as her last memory. “Soon,” she hedged. “Will you write me?”

  “I’m not a big fan of the written word. Pike and his friends wrote down a lot of stuff that should never have been put to paper. And the Alnôbak prefer an oral history to a written one.”

  “With one great big chapter left out,” Meredi
th murmured.

  “Then that’s the one you have to tell.”

  When she realized he was serious, she shook her head. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Just start somewhere.”

  “To Lucy, you mean?”

  “To anyone,” Az said, “who will listen.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear. “About that . . . I’m going to the reading of the will this afternoon. Eli arranged for a judge to write something up so that the property will revert back to me, because I was my mother’s successor . . . and all these years, she was the one who really owned it. I’d like . . . I’d like you to have it.”

  He laughed. “What am I going to do with a great big piece of land like that?”

  “I thought you might want to share it.” Meredith split a blade of grass with her thumbnail. “Provided, of course, that Lucy and I have a place to stay when we come to see you. Will you take care of the details for me?”

  “Look up a man named Winks Champigny. He’s in the phone book. He’ll know what to do. I would help you, but I may not be around for a while.”

  “Story of my life. I meet a great guy, and find out he’s sailing on the next ship.” Meredith smiled at him. “You’ll be here, when I come back to visit?”

  “Count on it,” Az said.

  “You’re sure you don’t mind?” Shelby asked for the tenth time. She looked at Meredith’s reflection in the mirror as she fastened a locket around her neck.

  “Why would I mind? The kids watch each other. I’ll be sitting on the couch eating bonbons and watching soaps.”

  It was a novelty for Shelby—she was being taken out on a real date, at a real time, for dinner. “Well, I know you’ll want to pack up for your flight tomorrow. So consider yourself off duty the minute Ross gets back.”