Second Glance

by Jodi Picoult

  “Fine.” He smiled at her. “Totally.”

  “It’s just that I get worried, you know, when you don’t call. For six months.”

  Ross shrugged. “I’ve been moving around a lot, with the Warburtons.”

  “I didn’t know you’d stopped doing paranormal investigation.”

  “I didn’t either, until I said it. But I’m sick of not seeing what I want to see.”

  “There’s a difference between being a paleontologist and not finding what you’re after, and being a ghost hunter and not finding what you’re after,” Shelby said. “I mean, there are dinosaur bones out there, even if you aren’t lucky enough to dig them up. But ghosts . . . well, if they’re all over the place, how come no one’s proved it by now?”

  “I’ve been in a room where the temperature drops by twenty degrees within a few seconds. I’ve taped church choirs singing in empty, locked rooms. I’ve seen faucets turn themselves on. But I’ve never seen a spirit appear in front of my eyes. Hell, for all I know any of those things could be explained away. Maybe it’s God, maybe it’s elves, maybe it’s some technical genius three miles away making it happen by remote control.”

  Shelby grinned. “Is this the same kid who believed in Santa until he was fifteen?”

  “I was ten,” Ross corrected. “And you weren’t the one who set the trap on the roof and got proof.”

  “You got a shingle.”

  “With a hoof print on it.” Ross reached in his pocket for a cigarette, then looked at Ethan and changed his mind. “I should have quit a long time ago.”

  “Smoking?”

  “Ghost hunting.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  Ross thought of Curtis Warburton: Half this business is telling people what they want to hear. He thought of Aimee’s lost engagement ring, which had vanished overnight, although he’d torn his room apart trying to find it. “Because things happened that I didn’t understand . . . and I thought that if I looked hard enough, I might be able to figure out why.”

  “Maybe you should have gone into physics, then.”

  Ross shrugged. “Science can’t explain everything.”

  “You mean, like God?”

  “Nothing that profound. What makes you walk past thirty thousand people without a second glance, and then you look at the thirty-thousandth-and-first person and know you’ll never take your eyes off her again?”

  “Love may not be rational, Ross, but it isn’t paranormal.”

  Says who? Ross thought. “That’s not the point. It’s that even when you can’t see something right before your eyes, you can still feel it. And you’re willing to trust your senses in one case, so why not the other?” Getting to his feet, he brushed off his jeans. “You know, I’d go into these houses . . . and all I’d have to do is be willing to listen, and these people would just talk. Not just psychos, Shel . . . professors with Ph.D.s, and Fortune 500 CEOs. It’s like once you’ve seen a ghost, you’re part of the club, and you can’t wait to find someone else who doesn’t think you’re insane for admitting that what your parents told you wasn’t true.”

  It’s what Ross had wanted to believe. He had met some psychics who claimed that they could barely turn around without crashing into a spirit. That ghosts were constantly trying to catch their attention. But now, he had his doubts. Now, he was starting to think that once you died, that was that.

  “Even Ph.D.s and CEOs can be liars. Or crazy,” Shelby said.

  “How about four-year-olds?” Ross turned to his sister. “What about the kid who comes up to his mom in the middle of the night and says there’s an old man in his bedroom who told him they have to leave the workshop so he can make a table? And then you go to the library and find out the house is built on a carpentry studio from two hundred years back?”

  “That . . . happened?”

  The four-year-old boy had eventually started hitting himself in the head to stop hearing the ghost’s voice; he’d scratched at his eyes so that he wouldn’t see it. “Well. I guess kids can go crazy, too. Point is, I’m through with it.” But Ross wondered whether he was trying to convince his sister, or himself.

  Shelby patted his shoulder. “For what it’s worth, Ross, if anyone was going to be able to find concrete evidence of a ghost, I have no doubt it would have been you.”

  Hesitating, he looked at her, then dug into his pocket. He extracted his wallet and pulled a photo from the liner.

  “You’re going to tell me that looks like a mouth, and eyes.” She squinted. “And a hand.”

  “I didn’t tell you anything. You told me.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Curtis Warburton would call it ectoplasm. When I took this picture, there was nothing on that lake . . . no fog, no breath, nothing. But this is what made it onto the negative. Film is sensitive enough to pick up light, heat, and magnetic energy . . . which are the same sources of energy spirits use to materialize.” Ross slipped the photo back into his wallet. “Then again, it could have been some crap they spilled at the photo lab.”

  He did not say that at the time he took the photograph, the air suddenly grew so cold that all the hair on his arms and legs stood up. He did not say that for the rest of that day, his hands shook and his eyes could not seem to focus.

  “There was no mist there when you took the picture?” Shelby clarified.

  “Nope.”

  She frowned. “If I saw that in some newspaper, I’d think it was doctored. But—”

  “—but I’m your brother, so you have to trust me?”

  Ethan roared to a stop in front of them. “There’s this rock quarry in town where a guy got murdered a really long time ago. Everyone says it’s haunted. We could go and—”

  “No,” said Ross and Shelby, simultaneously.

  “Jesus H.,” Ethan muttered, loping away again.

  Ross looked over the horizon, the blue night starting to bleed. “Isn’t it time to go in?”

  Shelby nodded and began to gather the remains of their picnic. “So what will you do now?”

  “Track UFOs.” He looked at her. “Kidding.”

  “You could baby-sit for me while I work. Although taking care of Ethan might be even scarier than your last gig.”

  “Ghosts aren’t scary,” Ross said before he could remember to speak hypothetically. “They’re just people. Well, they used to be.”

  Shelby paused in the middle of folding the blanket. “But you’ve never seen one.”

  “No.”

  “Even though you wanted to.”

  Ross forced a smile. “Hey, I’ve never seen a ten-thousand-dollar bill, but I’ve always wanted to see one of those too.”

  Retirement made sense. It was simply a matter of convincing himself. The truth was, in nine months, he had not found what he was looking for. He had not witnessed an apparition because there was nothing there.

  But then again, he had a mind-boggling photograph burning a hole in his back pocket; a spirit that might have taken strength from heat or from light or even his camera batteries, so it could project itself and be seen. To Ross, that was perfectly logical. After all, Aimee had been the one who energized him. Without her, he was no better than a ghost himself, slipping through his own life, unseen.

  “I ain’t bulldozing over him!” shouted the foreman on the job, his face shiny and florid as a plum. He glared down at Eli from the vantage point of the truck’s cab, arms crossed over the shelf of his belly.

  “Mr. Champigny—”

  “Winks.” The guy lying supine on the ground smiled gamely at Eli. “That’s what everyone calls me.”

  Eli’s dog bounded out of nowhere and planted his front paws on Winks’s chest. “Down, Watson,” Eli ordered. “Mr. Champigny, I’m going to have to ask you to get up. The Redhook company has contractual permission to perform due diligence on this land.”

  “He speakin’ English?” Winks called out to a group of picketers nearby.

  “Can’t you arrest them?” Rod van Vlee
t asked.

  “They haven’t made any trouble yet. This is civil disobedience, is all.” At least that’s what Eli’s orders were from Chief Follensbee, who didn’t want to stir up what could quickly escalate into an angry racial disagreement. Eli knew that the Abenaki wouldn’t press the issue, if they weren’t pressed themselves. All the same, he wasn’t much in the mood for this. He’d had to pick up Abbott Thule, the town drunk, from the Gas & Grocery and set him in a lockup to dry out. He needed to get Watson something to eat. He did not want to be screwing around now with a bunch of Indians with enough hubris between them to fill the bowl of Lake Champlain.

  He rubbed the back of his neck. Times like this, he wondered why he hadn’t moved to Florida after his mother passed. He was thirty-six, and working way too hard. Hell, he could be out with his dad now, playing a round of golf. He could be sitting under a palm tree. At his side, Watson grinned up at him.

  “There are human remains on this land,” Winks insisted.

  “That true?” Eli asked.

  Rod’s face darkened. “There haven’t been any found. Just a tin locket, some pottery shards, and a 1932 penny.”

  “An arrowhead,” Az Thompson called out, although Eli would have thought the old man was too far away to hear their conversation. “Don’t forget the arrowhead.”

  The developer rolled his eyes. “Yes, all right, they found an arrowhead. Which is proof of absolutely nothing, except that some kid played Cowboys and Indians here.”

  Az Thompson came toward them. “We don’t care about arrowheads, either. Just our ancestors. Didn’t you see Poltergeist? You dig up their resting place, it stands to reason that whatever you build on here isn’t going to be at peace.”

  Eli wondered where the old man’s attachment to the property came from. As far as he knew, Az had moved to Comtosook from somewhere out west. Granted, he’d lived in town nearly as long as Eli had, but it wasn’t like Az had any special connection to this spot. Apparently his grievance with the development wasn’t personal as much as it was principle.

  “That’s a threat,” Rod said to Eli. “You heard him.”

  Az laughed. “What did I threaten you with?”

  “A curse. Some . . . hex.”

  The old Indian cupped his hands around a pipe and lit the leaves in the bowl. “Gotta believe in that kind of stuff before it can do its work on you.” He inhaled, his words slipping out on the smoke. “You believe in that kind of stuff, Mr. van Vleet?”

  “Look,” Eli sighed. “I know how you all feel about this development company, Az. But if you have a grievance, your best bet is to go through the courts.”

  “The last time the legal system said it knew what was best for the Abenaki, it did a damn good job of nearly wiping us out,” Az replied. “No, Detective Rochert, I don’t think we’ll go to your courts.”

  “His courts?” Winks, standing now, snorted as he dusted off his jeans. “Eli, who went and told you that fancy blue uniform of yours makes your skin look less red?”

  Eli didn’t think, he just lunged for Winks, grabbing the smaller man by the lapels and slamming him up against the side of the bulldozer. Watson was a moment behind, teeth bared. Eli heard the satisfying crack of Winks’s head against the metal frame, and then reason settled over him. He could feel Az Thompson watching; could feel the air caught in the bellows of his own lungs.

  As he turned away and called off his dog, Eli remembered going with his mother’s relatives to fish for a summer month along the banks of the lake. The kids, brown and barefoot, played so much tag they had flattened the tall grasses for nearly a mile square. Eli had been ten before he realized that the lake he knew as Pitawbagw—the water that lies between—was marked on a map as Lake Champlain.

  Nodding to the driver of the bulldozer, Eli gave the okay to start digging. Purposefully turning away from the Indians, he steeled himself to keep the peace.

  A week after his arrival in Comtosook, Ross wandered along the edge of the lake, ignoring the scratch of pebbles beneath the arches of his bare feet. The water was cold—too cold, for August—but this he did not mind. Feeling anything, even discomfort, was a nice change.

  Lake Champlain was so long that you could not see it from end to end, although the Adirondacks loomed like distant soldiers on the opposite shore. Aimee had been born on that other side, in upstate New York. They had been driving to her parents’ home the day the sky fell down.

  Once, at the bookstore in Manhattan where Ross had worked, an author came in to give a speech about death rituals. In Tibetan burials, a monk stripped the flesh from the bone of a corpse and cut the body into pieces, so vultures could devour the remains. In Bali, a body was buried during the years it took to plan the spectacular cremation ceremony. But before the interment, the deceased was spun and splashed and shaken in a colorful bamboo tower, so that the spirit couldn’t find its way back.

  Ross had been working that night, which meant setting up the chairs for the audience, arranging the books to be signed on a small table, getting the author bottled water at the podium. It was a good crowd—academic sociologists rubbing tweedy elbows with spiky-haired Goths in black overcoats. As the lecture went on, Ross stood in the back, amazed at how many ways there were to say good-bye.

  Aimee had stumbled in sometime in the middle. She was still wearing her scrubs, and Ross’s first thought was that she must be cold; she was always cold when she wore them as pajamas, yet here she was running through the streets of the city in December.

  His second thought was that something was terribly wrong.

  “Hey.” Ross caught her as she almost wandered past him into the stacks of the store.

  She threw herself into his arms and started sobbing. Several members of the audience turned around; the speaker himself glanced up, distracted.

  Ross pulled Aimee by the hand into the gardening section, where nobody in New York City ever bothered to browse. He framed her face in his hands, his heart pounding: she had cancer; she was pregnant; she did not love him anymore.

  “Martin died,” she choked out.

  Ross held her, trying to place the name. In fits and starts the story came out—Martin Birenbaum, fifty-three, had been the victim of a fire at a chemical plant. Third-degree burns covered 85 percent of his body. It had fallen to Aimee, as a third-year medical student in the ER, to try to make him as comfortable as possible by debriding his wounds, keeping them clean, and administering Silvadine. When he asked if he was going to die, she had looked him in the eye and said yes.

  He was the first patient she had ever lost, and because of this his face was scarred into her mind. “I stayed with him because I knew I couldn’t help,” Aimee confessed. “Maybe it gets easier, you know, every time it happens. But maybe it doesn’t, Ross. Maybe I shouldn’t be in medicine.” She suddenly stared at him. “When I die, you have to be there. Like I was, today.”

  “You’re not dying—”

  “Ross, Jesus Christ, I just had a profoundly upsetting experience . . . can’t you promise me this?”

  “No,” he said flatly. “Because I’m going first.”

  She was silent for a moment, and then a tiny laugh escaped. “Did you already book your ticket?”

  “Guei, or hungry ghosts,” the lecturer said just then, “are the souls of the Chinese who passed on unnaturally . . . as a result, they wander the earth making trouble for the living.”

  At that, Aimee looked up. “What the hell are we listening to, Ross?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “That’s close enough.”

  Afterward, they never spoke of Martin Birenbaum. Ross had accompanied Aimee to the funeral. Over the course of her residency, more patients died in her care. But he could not remember her ever breaking down over it. Eventually, like most doctors, she came to understand that death was just the tail end of life.

  He skipped a stone into Lake Champlain, which sank before the second rock he threw even skimmed the surface. Aimee had been cremated. Her ashes were somewhere on
the other side of this lake, with her parents. He did not know what they had done with them; after the first three years he had stopped returning their phone calls and letters, simply because it hurt too much.

  Ross picked up his shoes, intent on heading back to his car. As he slid into the driver’s seat he remembered one more story from the speaker at the bookstore. The Mexicans believed that for one day every year, the veil was lifted, and old souls could journey home to visit people they’d left behind.

  When I die, you have to be there.

  But he hadn’t been. Yet now, he couldn’t seem to leave.

  Meredith Oliver’s office at Generra Institute had a Washington, D.C., zipcode, and if you looked closely from the window, you could see the Jefferson Memorial. She found it fairly ironic, since most of the scientists at her place of business flouted the very concept of all men being created equal—in their opinion, only the strongest survived.

  Sitting across from her, nervously wringing each other’s hands, were Mr. and Mrs. De la Corria. “Good news,” Meredith said with a smile. In the decade she’d been doing preimplantation genetic diagnosis, she’d learned that the only thing more stressful for a couple than in vitro fertilization was waiting for the results of the tests that led up to it. “There are three viable embryos.”

  Carlos De la Corria was a hemophiliac. Terrified to pass the disease on through his offspring, he and his wife had opted for assisted reproduction, in which embryos were created from their own sperm and eggs and then genetically screened by Meredith. Before the embryo was put into the mother’s uterus, she would know that her baby did not possess the gene for hemophilia.

  “How many are boys?” asked Carlos.

  “Two.” Meredith looked him in the eye. The gene for hemophilia was carried on the X chromosome. That meant a male child born to the De la Corrias would not be able to pass on his father’s illness. In effect, if they had only boys, they’d stamp out hemophilia in future generations of their family.

  Carlos lifted his wife from the chair and whirled her around Meredith’s small office. All those ethicists who were terrified of what might come of gene modification—well, they need only witness a moment like this. Meredith kept two pictures on her desk—one of Lucy, and another of her first patient, a beaming woman with cystic fibrosis holding her son, who—thanks to Meredith—had been born without the disease.