by Jodi Picoult
“Boo,” Eli said flatly.
“It’s the cops!”
“Damn!” There was a scuffle of sneakers, the ping of bottles clinking together as the teens scrambled to get away. Eli could have had them at any moment, of course; he chose to let them off this time. He turned the beam of his flashlight onto the last of the retreating figures, then swung it down toward the mess. They left behind a faint cloud of sweet smoke and two perfectly good unopened bottles of Rolling Rock that Eli could make use of when he went off duty.
Bending down, he pulled a dandelion from the base of Winnie’s headstone. As if the motion had dislodged it, a word rolled into his mind: chibaiak . . . ghosts. His grandmother’s language, which burned on Eli’s tongue like a peppermint. “No such thing,” he said aloud, and walked back to the car to see what else this night might hold in store.
Shelby Wakeman had awakened exhausted after a full day’s sleep. She’d been having that dream again, the one where Ethan was standing beside her in an airport, and then she turned around to find that he’d disappeared. Frantic, she’d run from terminal to terminal looking for him, until at last she flew out a door onto the tarmac and found her nine-year-old standing in the path of an incoming jet.
It terrified her, no matter how often Shelby told herself that this would never happen—she’d never be in an airport with Ethan in the middle of the day, much less lose sight of him. But what frightened her most was that image of her son standing with his arms outstretched, his buttermilk face lifted up to the sun.
“Earth to Mom . . . hello?”
“Sorry.” Shelby smiled. “Just daydreaming.”
Ethan finished rinsing his plate and setting it into the dishwasher. “Do you think it’s still daydreaming if you do it at night?” Before she could answer, he grabbed his skateboard, as much an appendage as any of his limbs. “Meet you out there?”
She nodded, and watched Ethan explode into the front yard. No matter how many times she told him to be quiet— at 4 A.M., most people were asleep, not racing around on skateboards— Ethan usually forgot, and Shelby usually didn’t have the heart to remind him.
Ethan had XP, xeroderma pigmentosum, an incredibly rare inherited disease that left him extremely sensitive to the sun’s ultraviolet rays. In the world, there were only a thousand known cases of XP. If you had it, you had it from birth, and you had it forever.
Shelby had first noticed something was wrong when Ethan was six weeks old, but it took a year of testing before he was diagnosed with XP. Ultraviolet light, the doctors explained, causes damage to human DNA. Most people can automatically repair that damage . . . but XP patients can’t. Eventually the damage affects cell division, which leads to cancer. Ethan, they said, might live to reach his teens.
But Shelby figured if sunlight was going to kill her son, all she needed to do was to make it infinitely dark. She stayed in days. She read Ethan bedtime books by candlelight. She covered the windows of her house with towels and curtains that her husband would rip down every night when he came home from work. “No one,” he’d said, “is allergic to the goddamned sun.”
By the time they were divorced, Shelby had learned about light. She knew that there was more to fear than just the outdoors. Grocery stores and doctors’ offices had fluorescent fixtures, which were ultraviolet. Sunblock became as common as hand cream, applied inside the house as well as out. Ethan had twenty-two hats, and he donned them with the same casual routine that other children put on their underwear.
Tonight he was wearing one that said I’M WITH STUPID. The brim was curled tight as a snail, a shape Ethan cultivated by hooking the lip of the hat beneath the adjustable band in the back. When Shelby saw the caps being stored that way, she thought of swans tucking their heads beneath a wing; of the tiny bound feet of the Chinese.
She finished cleaning up the kitchen and then settled herself with a book on the edge of the driveway. Her long, dark hair was braided into submission, thick as a fist, and she was still hot—how on earth could Ethan race around like that? He ran his skateboard up a homemade wooden ramp and did an Ollie kickflip. “Mom! Mom? Did you see that? It was just like Tony Hawk.”
“I know it,” Shelby agreed.
“So don’t you think that it would be totally sweet if we—”
“We are not going to build a half-pipe in the driveway, Ethan.”
“But—”
“Jeez. Whatever.” And he was gone again in a rumble of wheels.
Inside, Shelby smiled. She loved the attitude that seemed to be creeping into Ethan’s personality, like a puppeteer throwing words into his mouth. She loved the way he turned on Late Night with Conan O’Brien when he thought she was somewhere else in the house, to try to catch all the innuendoes. It made him . . . well, so normal. If not for the fact that the moon was riding shotgun overhead, and that Ethan’s face was so pale the veins beneath his skin glowed like roads she knew by heart—if not for these small things, Shelby could almost believe her world was just like any other single mother’s.
Ethan executed a shifty pivot, and then a Casper big spin. There was a time, Shelby realized, when she couldn’t have distinguished a helipop from a G-turn. There was also a time Shelby would have looked at Ethan and herself and felt pity. But Shelby could hardly remember what her existence had been like before this illness was flung over them like a fishing net; and truth be told, any life she’d lived before Ethan could not have been much of a life at all.
He skidded to a stop in front of her. “I’m starving.”
“You just ate!”
Ethan blinked at her, as if that were any kind of excuse. Shelby sighed. “You can go in and have a snack if you want, but it’s looking pink already.”
Ethan turned toward the sunrise, a claw hooked over the horizon. “Let me watch from out here,” he begged. “Just once.”
“Ethan—”
“I know.” His voice dipped down at the edges. “Three more hardflips.”
“One.”
“Two.” Without waiting for agreement—she would concede, and they both knew it—Ethan sped off again. Shelby cracked open her novel, the words registering like cars on a freight train—a stream without any individual characteristics. She had just turned the page when she realized Ethan’s skateboard was no longer moving.
He held it balanced against his leg, the graphic of the superhero Wolverine spotted white. “Mom?” he asked. “Is it snowing?”
It did, quite often, in Vermont. But not in August. A white swirl tipped toward her book and caught in the wedge of the spine; but it was not a snowflake after all. She lifted the petal to her nose, and sniffed. Roses.
Shelby had heard of strange weather patterns that caused frogs to evaporate and rain down over the seas; she’d once seen a hailstorm of locusts. But this . . . ?
The petals continued to fall, catching in her hair and Ethan’s. “Weird,” he breathed, and he sat down beside Shelby to witness a freak of nature.
“Pennies.” Curtis Warburton turned over the coin Ross had handed him. “Anything else?”
Ross shook his head. It had been three hours, and even with a raging storm outside providing a well of energy, the paranormal activity had been minimal at best. “I thought I saw a globule on the screen at one point, but it turned out to be a smoke alarm hung in the back of the attic.”
“Well, I haven’t felt a damn thing,” Curtis sighed. “We should have taken the case in Buffalo instead.”
Ross snapped some used film back into its canister and tucked it into his pocket. “The wife, Eve? She mentioned a little sister who died when she was seven.”
Curtis looked at him. “Interesting.”
The two men walked downstairs. Maylene sat on the living room couch in the dark with an infrared thermometer “You get anything?” Curtis asked.
“No. This house is about as active as a quadriplegic.”
“How is it going?” Eve O’Donnell interrupted. She stood at the doorway of the living room, her hand
clutching the collar of her robe.
“I think it’s safe to say that you’re not alone in this house. In fact,” Curtis held out the penny Ross had given him, “I just found this.”
“Yes . . . sometimes there are coins lying around. I told Ross that.”
“Did you?”
Ross turned, frowning. But before he could ask Curtis why he was playing dumb, his boss started speaking again. “Ghosts can be mischievous that way. Especially the ghost of a child, for example.”
Ross felt the charge of the air as Eve O’Donnell lay her trust at Curtis’s feet. “I have to tell you,” Curtis said. “I’m getting some very strong sensations here. There’s a presence, but it’s someone you know, someone who knows you.” Curtis tipped his head to one side and furrowed his brow. “It’s a girl . . . I’m getting the sense it’s a girl, and I’m feeling a number . . . seven. Did you by any chance have a younger sister who passed?”
Ross found himself rooted to the floor. He had been trained to consider the fact that 85 percent of the cases they investigated were hoaxes perpetrated by people who either wanted to waste their time, or get on national TV, or prove that paranormal investigation was anything but a science. He couldn’t count how many times they’d found a speaker hidden in the moaning wall; fishing line wrapped around a quaking chandelier. But he’d never considered that the Warburtons might be putting on a show, too.
“It would be an additional charge, of course,” Curtis was saying, “but I wouldn’t rule out holding a séance.”
Ross’s head throbbed. “Curtis, could I speak to you privately?”
They put on their coats and went out, standing under the overhang of the garage as the rain poured down. “This better be good,” Curtis said. “You interrupted me as I was hooking her.”
“You don’t think there’s a ghost here. The only reason you know about her sister is because I told you.”
Curtis lit a cigarette; the tip glowed like a slitted eye. “So?”
“So . . . you can’t lie to that woman just to make a few bucks and get her reaction on camera.”
“All I’m doing is telling the O’Donnells what they want to hear. These people believe there’s a ghost in this house. They want to believe there’s a ghost in this house. Even if we’re not getting much activity tonight, that doesn’t mean a spirit isn’t laying low with visitors around.”
“This isn’t just a ghost,” Ross said, his voice shaking. “This was someone to her.”
“I didn’t peg you for such a purist. I figured after all these months, you’d know the routine.”
Ross did not consider himself to be particularly gullible. He’d seen and done enough in his life to always be on the lookout for what was real, because he so often felt like he wasn’t. “I know the routine. I just didn’t know it was all fake.”
Curtis whipped the cigarette to the ground. “I’m not a fake. The ghost of my grandfather appeared to me, Ross. I took a goddamned photo of him standing at the foot of my bed. You draw your own conclusions. Hell, remember that shot you got of a face rising out of the lake? You think I set that up? I wasn’t even in the same state you were in at the time.” Curtis took a deep breath, calming himself. “Look, I’m not taking the O’Donnells for a ride. I’m a businessman, Ross, and I know my clients.”
Ross couldn’t answer. For all he knew, Curtis had managed to slip the penny he’d found beneath the tripod, too. For all he knew, the past nine months of his life had been wasted. He was no better than the O’Donnells—he’d seen only what he wanted to believe.
Maybe she was psychic, because at that moment Maylene stepped outside. “Curtis? What’s going on?”
“It’s Ross. He’s trying to decide what road to take home— I-81, or the Moral High Ground.”
Ross stepped into the driving rain and started walking. Let them think what they wanted; they’d certainly encouraged Ross to do the same. He didn’t bother to return for his digital camera or his knapsack; these were things he could replace, unlike his composure, which he was fast in danger of losing. In his car he turned the heater on full blast, trying to get rid of the chill that wouldn’t let go. He drove a mile before he realized that his headlights weren’t on. Then he pulled off to the side of the road and took great, gulping breaths, trying to start his heart again.
Ross knew how to scientifically record paranormal phenomena and how to interpret the results. He had filmed lights zipping over graveyards; he had taped voices in empty basements; he had felt cold in spots where there could be no draft. For nine months, Ross had thought he’d found an entrance to the world where Aimee was . . . and it turned out to be a painted door drawn on a wall.
Damn it, he was running out of ideas.
Az Thompson awoke with his mouth full of stones, small and smooth as olive pits. He spat fifteen into the corrugated leather of his palm before he trusted himself to breathe without choking. He swung his legs over the side of the army cot. He tried to shake the certainty that if buried in the packed earth beneath his bare feet, these rocks would grow into some cancerous black thicket, like the ones covering the castle in that White Man’s fairy tale about a girl who couldn’t wake up without being kissed.
He didn’t mind camping out; for as long as he could remember he’d had one foot in nature and one foot in the yanqui world. Az stuck his head out the flap of the tent, where some of the others had already gathered for breakfast. Their signs—placards to be worn around the neck, and picket posters tacked onto wood—lay in a heap like ventriloquist’s dummies, harmless without some spirit behind them. “Haw,” he grunted, and walked toward the small campfire, knowing that a space would be made for him.
The others treated him the way they would if Abe Lincoln got up and walked out of that tent—with humility, and no small amount of awe, to find him alive after all this time. Az wasn’t as old as Abe, but he wasn’t off by much. He was 102 or 103—he’d stopped counting a while ago. Because he knew the dying language of his people, he was respected as a teacher. Still, his age alone made him a tribal elder, which would have been something, had the Abenaki been a federally recognized tribe.
Az heard the creak of every joint in his spine as he settled himself on a folding chair. He grabbed a pair of binoculars from beside the fire pit and peered at the land, a parcel located at the northwesterly intersection of Montgomery Road and Otter Creek Pass. At its crest sat the big white house, now an eyesore. It would be the first thing to go, Az knew, just like he knew everything about this property, from the surveyor’s measurements to the recorded number of the deed plan. He knew the spots where the ground froze first in the winter and the section where no vegetation ever managed to grow. He knew which window in the abandoned house had been broken by kids running wild; which side of the porch had fallen first; which floorboards on the stairs were rotted through.
He also knew the license plate numbers of every vehicle the Redhook Group had parked on the perimeter. Rumor had it that Newton Redhook wanted to build himself Comtosook’s first strip mall. On one of their burial sites.
“I’m telling you,” said Fat Charlie, “it’s El Niño.”
Winks shook his head. “It’s screwed up, is what it is. Ain’t normal to rain roses. That’s like a clock running backward, or well water turning to blood.”
Fat Charlie laughed. “Winks, you gotta switch back to Letterman. Those horror flicks are getting to you, man.”
Az looked around, noticing the light dusting of flower petals all over the ground. He rolled his tongue across the cavern of his mouth, tasting those stones again. “What do you think, Az?” Winks asked.
What he thought was that trying to explain rose petals falling from the sky was not only useless, but also futile, since the things that were going to happen had already been set into motion. What he thought was that rose petals were going to be the least of their problems. Az focused the binoculars on a bulldozer chugging slowly up the road. “I think you can’t dig in the ground,” he said aloud, “withou
t unearthing something.”
This was how Ross had met Aimee: On the corner of Broadway and 112th, in the shadow of Columbia University, he had literally run into her, knocking all of her books into a murky brown puddle. She was a medical student studying for her anatomy final, and she nearly started hyperventilating at the sight of all her hard work being ruined. Sitting in the middle of the street in New York, she was also the most beautiful woman Ross had ever seen. “I’ll help you,” Ross promised, although he didn’t know a fibula from a phalanx. “Just give me a second chance.”
This was how Ross proposed to Aimee: A year later he paid a cab driver to take them past Broadway and 112th en route to dinner at a restaurant. As instructed, the man pulled to the curb, and Ross opened the door and got down on one knee on the filthy pavement. He popped open the small ring box and stared into her electric eyes. “Marry me,” he said, and then he lost his balance and the diamond fell down a sewer grate.
Aimee’s mouth fell open. “Tell me,” she managed finally, “that didn’t just happen.”
Ross looked down the black grate, and at the empty box. He tossed it into the sewer, too. Then he pulled another ring, the real ring, from his pocket. “Give me a second chance,” he said.
Now, in a deserted parking lot, he tipped the bottle up to drink. Sometimes Ross wanted to scratch himself out of his skin, to see what was on the other side. He wanted to jump off bridges into seas of concrete. He wanted to scream until his throat bled; to run until his soles split open. At times like this, when failure was a tidal wave, his life became a finite line—the end of which, through some cosmic joke, he could not seem to reach.
Ross contemplated suicide the way some people made out shopping lists—methodically, with great attention given to detail. There were days when he was fine. And then there were other days when he took census counts of people who seemed happy, and those who seemed in pain. There were days when it made perfect sense to drink boiling water, or suffocate in the refrigerator, or walk naked into the snow until he simply lay down to sleep.
