by Jodi Picoult
He had left to collect equipment he’d left at the Pike property. Why he’d chosen to do this in the dark, at 8:30 P.M., was beyond Meredith. “Do you know where Eli’s taking you?”
“Some five-star place in Burlington.” She fell backward onto the bed beside Meredith, smiling so hard that her face actually hurt. “I’ve been out with him a dozen times,” Shelby murmured. “To the store, to his place, for a drive. So why do I feel like this?”
“Because you’re crazy about him,” Meredith said. “Blame it on the dopamine being secreted by your brain.”
“Leave it to a geneticist to reduce love to a scientific reaction.”
“Those of us who don’t have it readily available prefer to think of it that way.”
Shelby rolled onto her stomach. “Who’s Lucy’s father?”
“A guy who shouldn’t have been,” Meredith replied. “How about Ethan’s?”
“That guy’s brother, apparently.” Shelby propped her chin on her hand. “Did you love him?”
“To pieces.”
“Me too.” She looked at Meredith. “Sometimes I pretend that I haven’t met Eli. Or that he isn’t the last thing I think about before I fall asleep. It’s like a superstition, you know—if I don’t put that much value on a relationship, maybe it won’t get ripped out from under my feet.”
“No one’s going to rip this out from under your feet,” Meredith said. “Relationships succeed and fail because of the people in them . . . not some karmic plan.”
“You think? Don’t you ever wonder if there’s one person you’re meant to be with?”
“God, no! To say that you’ve got one soul mate in the world, out of six billion people . . . well, mathematically that’s setting yourself up for failure. What are the odds?”
Shelby shook her head. “That’s where fate comes in. If I hadn’t had Ethan, I wouldn’t have gotten divorced from Thomas. If Ethan hadn’t had XP, I wouldn’t have moved to a town like this one, where the houses are far apart so he can play at night. If Ross hadn’t come to the end of his rope he wouldn’t have been here to investigate the Pike property. All these things, which were awful at the time . . . maybe they were just leading up to my meeting Eli.”
“Did you think that you were destined to marry Thomas?”
“Well, sure, at first—”
“There you go. Fate,” Meredith argued, “is what people invent to explain what they can’t understand. If you think Eli’s the one, you tell yourself it was meant to happen. And if he breaks your heart, you’ll tell yourself it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve spent ten years trying to find a man who knows where I am in a room the moment he steps inside, without even having to look. But it hasn’t happened. I can admit the truth to myself—that I’ve got lousy luck at finding love—or I can tell myself that I haven’t crossed paths with my soul mate yet. And it’s always easier to be a victim than a failure.”
Shelby sat up. “Then what’s that something that draws you to one guy out of a crowd? Or that first strike of lightning between you? Or the realization that you’ve connected so deeply when you’ve only just met?”
“Love,” Meredith said. “Love defies explanation. Destiny doesn’t.” She thought of Lia, materializing in the clearing. “There are things you can’t explain, that happen anyway. Like the guy who takes a bullet meant for his wife, even though survival’s a basic instinct. Or the little girl who writes in a diary a secret sentence that her true love will say to her, when they meet—and lo and behold, one day, he does.”
“That happened?”
“Well, no,” Meredith said quietly. “But I haven’t entirely given up hope. The thing is, if it does, it’ll be because I went looking for him, and I found him. Not because it was meant to be.”
“Why, Meredith! You’re a closet romantic!” Downstairs, the doorbell rang. Shelby leaped off the bed and shoved her feet into two different shoes. “Which ones, the flats or the FMPs?”
“If it’s destiny,” Meredith said, smiling, “it shouldn’t make a difference.”
Shelby grinned, and picked the heels. After one final look in the mirror, she hurried downstairs with Meredith trailing and opened the front door.
Eli stood holding a pink rose with a forked stem and a smaller rose growing from it. Like a mother and child. He was dressed in a dark gray suit with a crisp white shirt and cranberry tie. “Well,” Shelby said. “Don’t you clean up well.”
“You look . . . you look . . .” Eli shook his head. “I had all these words that I looked up for you, and I can’t remember a single one.”
“It’s the dopamine,” Shelby said sympathetically.
“Radiant?” Meredith offered. “Resplendent? Bewitching?”
“No,” Eli said finally. “Mine.”
Az took another sip of the whiskey Ross had brought to the quarry. They sat side by side on folding chairs that Az had pilfered from a storeroom, drinking and watching the sky fall, a cauldron spilled of its stars. “You know I’m supposed to tell you to leave,” he said.
“So tell me.”
“Leave,” Az said.
“You know I won’t,” Ross pointed out.
Az shrugged. “It’s the dynamite. There are charges all over the quarry. The computers are gonna set them off in the morning, at dawn.” He glanced sidelong at Ross. “Don’t do anything stupid, all right?”
“Stupid,” Ross repeated, rolling the word around. “Stupid. What would constitute stupid? Would that include pining after not one, but two dead women?”
“Hey,” Az pointed. “Pass the whiskey, will you?”
Ross hefted the alcohol toward him, only to have Az toss the bottle into the quarry, where it shattered on broken rocks. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“Your own good.” Az got up slowly from his folding chair, tucked it beneath his arm. “Do me a favor, and keep an eye on this place for a few minutes, will you?”
“Where are you going?”
“Cigarette break,” Az said.
Ross watched him walk off along the perimeter of the quarry. “You don’t smoke!” he yelled after the old man, but by then Az couldn’t hear, or didn’t want to. He stood up, hands in his pockets, and looked down at the remains of his bottle of Bushmill’s. The glass sparkled like mica. “Shit,” Ross said, and he kicked at a rock, sending it caroming over the lip into the canyon. Because it felt good, he did it again. He glanced over his shoulder, saw Az was still missing, and then lit a cigarette. He tossed it into the quarry, where it landed six inches away from a dynamite plug and fizzled black.
He was tired of reliving his life, when he hadn’t been so fond of it the first time around. Like Lia, he was trapped by his own past. The moment Aimee had died, so had Ross. And then when he found someone else to live for, it turned out she’d been dead for seventy years.
He imagined that cigarette landing on the dynamite, the bursting explosion that would shake the earth and send him tumbling into the quarry. He pictured his body being consumed by fire, flames that ate at his clothes and peeled away the pain. Why me? Why was he connected to the deaths of not one, but two women? Was he some kind of supernatural link? A cosmic pawn? A lightning rod for lost souls? Or maybe he was being punished. In the aftermath of Aimee’s death, he’d been hailed as a hero, when Ross knew all along he was exactly the opposite.
As a child he’d read comic books, dazzled by the strength and the daring on pages cut into squares like a sidewalk, as if these superheroes were already walking a path toward greatness simply by appearing on the page. He had told Meredith he was invincible, but he was no Superman, no Captain Marvel. He was not even the sort of man that good things happened to. Meeting the girl of one’s dreams, winning a scratch ticket, finding a ten-dollar bill on the street—these were experiences in someone else’s daily existence. There was a point where the bad luck ended, and the bad choices began, and Ross could not see the fine distinction. He couldn’t live a life worth saving, and he couldn’t save a life worth living.
Ross climbed onto the safety railing. He stood with his arms akimbo, his legs spread, a messiah or a target or both. He was swallowing glass with every breath; he was running on nails with every step. Jump, he thought, and you get to start over.
He slipped, caught himself, and then laughed at his own caution. He balanced like a chair on the nose of a circus clown—something far too heavy and gravity-laden to defy the laws of nature for very long.
Pitching forward, Ross managed to stop himself from falling over the fence. His Bogeyman Nights baseball cap went spinning, and landed on a stick of dynamite.
The clown might drop that chair, but he’d always snatch it just before it smashed on the floor. After all, he had to come back and do the same act night after night. Ross stepped away from the fence, then took the prop that was his body and slouched toward home.
Rod van Vleet had cashed his last paycheck at the only bar in Comtosook, a place that had taken pity on him in spite of his former association with the development property that had caused so much unquiet. Oliver Redhook himself had called to terminate his employment and to inform him that he expected the company car and the company cell phone back at their Massachusetts headquarters by Monday. “I could have sent a trained monkey to Vermont,” Redhook had said on speakerphone. “But I made the grave mistake of sending you.”
In a truly Machiavellian twist of fate, the bartender was one of the Indians who had been banging a drum outside his company trailer for three weeks. Gracious winner, he’d given Rod three shots on the house before he started taking his money. Now on his eighth, Rod could barely get the nerve endings in his hand firing well enough to lift the drink, which seemed so small and slippery that he was about to ask the bartender for a magnifying glass to help locate it.
“One more,” he said, or he thought he said, he didn’t quite think it was English.
The bartender shook his head. “Can’t, Mr. van Vleet. Not unless you call yourself a taxi.”
“I’m a taxi,” Rod said.
The bartender exchanged a glance with a woman beside Rod. She had long black hair and the shoulders of a linebacker, and at closer glance turned out to be a man. Rod downed the last of his drink. “Fine, then,” he slurred. “I’ll just take myself up and over to Burlington. Crash a frat party.”
“You do that,” the bartender said. “But you might just crash your car first.”
Rod fished in his pocket and held up a set of keys on the first try. He stumbled and landed hard against the polished bar. “Would serve ’em right.”
The police lights whipped across the truck’s windshield, casting Shelby’s skin with a faint blue tinge. She pulled Eli’s jacket closer around her shoulders, shivering although she wasn’t cold. He’d taken care to park off to the side, so that she would not have to stare at the wreckage and the body that had been tossed onto the street, but her head kept turning and her eyes kept straining to make out the details of the catastrophe.
“I’m sorry,” he had said to her, when the radio went off in his truck en route to the restaurant. “I have to go.”
She understood, which was why she got out of the passenger door, now, her high heels slipping on the damp pavement. Outside the cocoon of the truck there was a rally of noise, from sirens to shouting cops to the subtle clicks of the crime-scene photographer. She edged closer to the circle of activity, fully expecting to look down and see Ross.
She had not been present at his car accident, the one in which Aimee had been killed. But he had been the mission of rescuers like these; there had been a car overturned like that; the EMTs had strapped him to a gurney like the one whining over the pavement toward the victim right now.
When the phone call came about her brother, she’d been breastfeeding Ethan. She’d almost let the machine pick it up, because it was so much trouble to juggle a drowsy baby and a telephone. Even now, she could not remember whether the officer who told her had been male or female. Only a few words remained, stuck like cement in her memory, blocks that she still tripped over every now and then: Ross, accident, serious, passenger, dead.
Time stopped, and Ethan had rolled from her lap onto the cushions of the couch. Shelby had tried to picture Ross, battered and bleeding, but could only see him as a skinny fifth-grader with fire in his eyes, taking it upon himself to beat up the eleventh-grade soccer star who had broken Shelby’s heart.
Now, she pushed two uniformed policemen out of the way so that she could see better. The clothes were ripped, the face mangled, but Shelby could still make out the features of the businessman who’d been trying to develop the Pike property.
A hand tugged at her elbow and yanked her backward. Eli stared at her, upset. “What are you doing out here?”
“I . . . I had to see.”
“No one should have to see this. Rod van Vleet totaled his car. The only mystery is whether it burst into flames on impact, or if it was the alcohol fumes coming from the driver.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“Yeah, but he’s got some bad breaks and burns.” Eli had led her to the truck without Shelby even realizing it. He opened the door and tucked her inside. “Stay.”
“I’m not Watson.”
His eyes softened. “I know. Watson’s used to this. You’re not.”
As he turned to finish whatever it was he had to do, Shelby blurted out his name. Immediately, he turned. Even with the sentence on her lips, she did not know why she felt the need to tell Eli what was tunneling through her mind. “Ross almost died in a car crash,” she said finally.
Eli looked over his shoulder at the debris, the rising smoke. “Almost doesn’t count,” he said.
Ethan had stolen his uncle’s EMF meter from his bedroom and after some thought had chosen a short-sleeved T-shirt—one he was only allowed to wear inside the house—as the uniform for his escape. A soft knock on his door told him Lucy was ready. She slipped inside his room, her eyes so big and nervous that it made Ethan laugh. “We haven’t even left yet. Chill out.”
“Right.” Lucy started talking to herself under her breath. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
For Lucy, the worst was that she’d get scared. Uncle Ross had said that a human spirit couldn’t actually hurt you. For Ethan, the worst was, well, a lot worse. He had told Lucy that he got sick if he stayed out in the sun, but he hadn’t explained the ultimate cost—the skin cancers, the lesions, death. She never would have agreed to this plan, then. But Ethan had thought this through, and if he was going to die young, he wanted to do it on his own terms. He didn’t want to get stuck in some Pedi ward, with stupid purple dinosaurs painted on the windows as if that was supposed to make any kid think he was anywhere but there.
Maybe hoping hard enough could redirect fate—it was possible that the blood vow he and Lucy had made the night before had changed them a little, so that Lucy was a little bit braver and he was a little bit stronger. “Okay,” Ethan said, tucking the EMF into the loop of his jeans and opening his bedroom window. “We’ll slide off the gable onto the roof of the porch, and then jump.”
“We will?”
“Well, it’s that or walk right past your mother in the living room.” He set one foot over the sill. “I’ll go first.”
“Wait.”
Ethan turned. “Lucy. We talked about this, remember? You were born a chicken, and I have this weirdo disease. So what? Only losers would stay that way forever.”
“What if it’s how we’re supposed to be, and that’s why we’re like this?”
“That’s crap,” Ethan said. “I’ll tell you what it was—it was God taking a coffee break and some dumbhead filling in for him when it came to handing out all the cool genes.” He stared at her. “If you couldn’t change things, ever, what would be the point of growing up?”
She nodded, convincing herself. “Where are we going, exactly?”
“To the only place in Comtosook where you can find a ghost and watch the sun come up,” he answered. “Trust me.” H
e held out his hand, milky and white, and waited until Lucy put hers into it, a sealed deal. Then they scrambled through the window and into the darkness, determined to turn themselves into what they were not.
On the banks of Lake Champlain, Az Thompson thought back to the moment his daughter, Lia, had visited with a social worker and he had given her a language to speak. He’d been too scared at that moment to tell her who he was, or that he knew her. Instead he’d fed her words, Abenaki; let her swallow them whole so that they took root in her belly, a bashful garden for the grandbaby she was carrying.
Words, for all they were flimsy and invisible, had great strength. They could be as fortified as a castle wall and as sharp as a foil. They could bite, slap, shock, wound. But unlike deeds, words couldn’t really help you. No promise ever rescued a person; it was the carrying-through of it that brought about salvation.
It seemed fitting to Az, after all that had happened, that it all still came down to what was written and what had been said. He looked at the box of files and pedigree charts that sat on the banks of the river where his bucket of muskies once had been. It hadn’t been difficult to get into the municipal building’s basement—did anyone in Vermont think to lock cellar windows?—and to haul out the remaining evidence of the Vermont eugenics project, which Ross Wakeman’s sister had brought back to the town’s keeping.
Az knew that the only way to strip words of their power was to erase them. Of course, once one had been released into the world you couldn’t call it back, but you could certainly keep it from being sent out again and listened to and digested. He picked up the roll of duct tape he’d gotten at the Gas & Grocery and unraveled the end, taping it to his shirt just beneath the armpit. Picking up the first of Spencer Pike’s extensive files, he held it to his chest and ran the adhesive around his body to secure it.
As he continued to fasten the files and papers and unwieldy genealogy charts to his thin body, Az remembered his daughter: the way her eyes lit up when she saw him coming, the movement of her hands across her abdomen, the way she stood out at the Gypsy camp like an orchid in a field of daisies. But you could transplant an orchid to that soil, and get it to grow. You just needed someone with the time and hunger to make it survive.
