by Jodi Picoult
Mrs. De la Corria sank down in her chair again, still breathless. “The girl?” she asked softly.
“The third embryo tested is, in fact, a carrier. I’m sorry,” Meredith replied.
Carlos squeezed his wife’s hand. “Well, then,” he said optimistically. “It looks like we’ll be having twin boys.”
There were plenty of obstacles still to overcome, and there was every chance that the embryos wouldn’t succeed—but Meredith had done her part of the job. From here, other doctors at Generra took over with the implantation. Meredith accepted the De la Corrias’ gratitude and then scanned her appointment sheet. Two more consultations, and then she had the afternoon to work in her lab.
She slipped on her reading glasses—she kept them in a pocket, too vain for overt display—and pulled the pen that anchored her curls into some semblance of a knot. Her honey-gold hair tumbled around her shoulders in a tangle, the mess it always was, as if it were God’s joke to give Meredith Oliver, the control freak, hair that had seemed to have a mind of its own. She scrubbed her hands down her face, rubbed bloodshot brown eyes. “Tonight,” she told herself out loud, “I will not let myself work. I will go home, and take a hot bath, and read Lucy something other than an article from the Journal of Theriogenology.”
She wondered if saying it, instead of just thinking it, made it any more likely to happen.
“Dr. Oliver?” A knock on the door, followed by her secretary. “The De la Corrias signed this release.”
Without looking, Meredith knew what it was—permission for Generra to discard their third, female embryo. “They should wait until after implantation. There’s a chance that the in vitro won’t take, and then . . .”
Her voice drifted off. And then, it would make no difference. The De la Corrias would rather be childless than utilize this damaged embryo. The baby would not be hemophiliac herself . . . in all likelihood she’d be a perfectly healthy girl with her mother’s shining hair and her father’s chestnut eyes. But she had the potential to pass the illness to her own male children one day, and given that, her parents would rather she never be born.
Meredith signed off on the release and set it to one side of her desk. “The Albertsons are here,” said the secretary.
“Give me a minute.”
As soon as the door closed, Meredith picked up the phone and dialed home. She imagined her daughter sitting at the kitchen table, two braids curling down her back like replicas of the human genome, as she practiced her Us and Vs for handwriting homework. Ula unrolled uneven umbrellas. Lucy lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
“Hey, Noodle.”
“Mom! Where are you?”
“On Jupiter. Where are you?”
“In the Calamari Desert.”
Meredith smiled. “That might be Kalahari.”
“When are you coming home?”
“Soon.”
There was a beat of silence. “Before it gets dark?”
Meredith closed her eyes. “I’ll be back for dinner,” she promised. “Tell Granny Ruby. And no more Oreos until I get home.”
Lucy sucked in a breath. “How did you know I was—”
“Because I’m the mom. Love you.” Meredith hung up, then twisted her hair onto the top of her head. She scrabbled through her drawer for a rubber band, but could only come up with a few paper clips, which worked about as well as bobby pins. Her glance fell on the release the De la Corrias had signed. On impulse, Meredith slipped the form into the lower drawer of her desk. She would lose it, temporarily. Just in case.
She pushed the button of her intercom and a moment later the door swung open, revealing the Albertsons. They looked beaten and drained, like most of the other couples who came through her office for the first time. Meredith held out her hand. “I’m Dr. Oliver. I’ve reviewed your case. And,” she said briskly, “I can help.”
Az knew that if push came to shove, he wouldn’t be able to chase a squirrel out of Angel Quarry, much less give full pursuit to an armed intruder. The owners kept him on as a security guard out of kindness, or pity, or maybe because he only bothered to pick up half his paychecks, not having much use for them in the long run. Luckily, there was only one access road into the quarry, not that Az paid much attention to it. He sat in the small illuminated booth at the quarry office, where three closed-circuit televisions monitored activity at different locations, and kept his eye instead on the fourth monitor, tuned to the Red Sox.
“Ha,” Az snorted at the batter. “They pay you eleven million bucks a year for that?”
The quarry was one of Vermont’s granite mines, veins of rock etched into the cliffs like the deep lines of Az’s face. A long time ago, they’d drilled the charges by hand, blasted, and milled the stone for export. These days, it was mostly computerized. Working alone at night, he never saw another soul . . . for all he knew, it was like that at peak hours too. Az sometimes wondered if he was the only human employed there.
In the thirty years he’d been working at the quarry, he had filed only two security reports. One involved an electrical storm that set off an explosion intended to detonate the following day. The second was about a suicidal man, who scaled the protective wall and tried to jump off one of the cliffs into the jagged rubble at the base. The fool broke both legs, recovered, and started a dot-com business.
Az liked working at night, and he liked working alone. If he was quiet when he made his rounds, he could hear buds burst; he could smell the turn of the seasons. On occasion he would lie on his back, his hands propping up his head, and watch the stars reconfigure themselves into the constellations of his life—an angry bull of frustration, the imbalanced scales of justice, the twin loves he’d lost ages ago.
He wondered what was going on at Otter Creek Pass. In the week Rod van Vleet had been on the site, the Abenaki protest had intensified, and the public had noticed. It helped that Thule Abbott, the town drunk, had awakened one morning with all his straight hair gone curly, and he’d spent a day in the church getting a dose of Jesus and blaming the ghosts for his misfortune. Rumors flew through Comtosook like the occasional dusting of rose petals, which fell like pollen on the cars parked at the Dairy Twirl and clogged the drains in the outdoor showers at the town pool.
If Rod van Vleet had half a brain, he’d roll his construction equipment in during the night, when most of the Indians were snoring in their tents a distance away. Good thing the frontman for the Redhook Group was a fool. Given the habitual disorganization of the Abenaki protest, it put them on equal footing.
A small firefly winked past Az’s left eye. Then he realized it wasn’t a June bug at all, but a small bobbing light on the pitch-dark screen of one of the satellite TVs, the one that viewed the mine’s northern wall and most active stripping site. A flush of heat ran down between Az’s shoulders—it took a moment for him to recognize excitement for what it was. Jamming his hat on his head, he struck off toward the spot where the light had been. The years fell away with each footstep, until he was once again straight and strong as an oak that punched the sky, until he was needed.
Ross didn’t know whom he blamed more: Ethan, for planting this seed in his mind; or himself, for bothering to listen. Angel Quarry is haunted, his nephew had said, everyone says so. He walked softly along the narrow path until he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. This, then, was where he would set up. He didn’t dare use his flashlight yet—something he’d learned early from the Warburtons. Authorities usually left ghost hunters alone, but trespassing was trespassing. If you were exploring a graveyard, you learned to back in with your headlights off, so that you could make a quick escape. Likewise, if you were creeping through private property in the middle of the night, you did everything possible to keep from calling attention to yourself.
Thinking of Aimee this afternoon had made him want to try, one last time, no matter that he’d told Shelby he’d hung up his paranormal shingle. So from Lake Champlain he’d gone to Burlington, to a discount electronics store, where
he bought a new infrared video camera. When Shelby put dinner on the table, he told her he had a date that night.
“Really?” She’d smiled so brightly it hurt Ross just to look. “Who is it?”
“None of your business.”
“Ross,” Shelby answered, “this is exactly what you need.”
He hated that he’d lied to his sister. He hated the way she had reached into the window of his car before he left to straighten the collar of his shirt, how she told him the door would be open whenever he got home.
Now, while his sister wondered which eligible female he was meeting, Ross balanced his flashlight on an outcropping of rock, so that he could set up the tripod for the video camera. “I am not going to see anything,” Ross murmured as he peered through the viewfinder. He hesitated, then swore.
He was retired.
He didn’t believe in ghosts, not anymore.
But what if this was the time that something materialized? What if he walked away now, without finding out for sure? If Ethan was right—if someone had been murdered at the quarry—there was an excellent chance that a restless spirit was hanging around. The ones who didn’t go on to heaven or whatever came next were the ones who had unfinished business left—people who had died violently, or committed suicide without communicating a message. Sometimes they stayed because they didn’t want to leave someone they loved.
Ross knew that if luck was on his side when he ran the camera, he might get some zipping lights, maybe a globule or two. He might catch some EVPs—electronic voice phenomena. And if there was any evidence at all that something paranormal existed in this quarry, there was a chance Aimee was somewhere, too.
Going by his senses, Ross pointed the video to a spot in the quarry that his eyes kept coming back to, although he had no idea if in fact that was where a murder had occurred. He loaded a fresh tape and checked the battery, then sat back to wait.
Suddenly he was blinded by a beacon. “I can explain,” he began.
Whatever Ross was going to say, however, died on his lips as he found himself face-to-face with an ancient man wearing a vintage security guard’s uniform; a man who held so much of the world in his eyes that Ross was certain he was looking at a ghost.
“Who are you?” the man whispered to Az. He was gawking like he’d never seen anyone native before, and frankly, that pissed Az off.
“You’re trespassing,” Az said.
“This used to be your land?”
Sweet Jesus, and they talked about Indians being hooked on peyote. Granted, Az was old, and he was rigged out in a security guard’s uniform he’d owned for twenty-five years now, but still . . . The guy looked normal enough—maybe even had a little Abenaki blood, what with that long, dark hair. It was enough to make Az feel pity for him, anyway. “Look, tell you what. You pack up whatever it is you’re doing and get out, and I won’t tell anyone I saw you.”
The man nodded, and then lunged forward in an attempt to touch him. Startled, Az drew away and pulled his billy club.
“Please! I just . . . I just want to ask you a few questions.”
Christ. Az was going to miss the whole seventh inning, at this rate.
“Do you live here?”
“No, and I don’t have a teepee either, if that’s next on the list.” Az grabbed his arm. “Now shut that thing off and—”
“You can touch me . . . ?”
“I can beat the crap out of you, too, if you keep this up,” Az said. “The Red Sox are tied with the Yankees, though, so it’s going to be fast.”
The intruder—well, he faded—that was the only word for it. It was the same thing Az had seen over and over sitting at the deathbed of a friend; that light that made a person what he was, suddenly snuffing out. “The Red Sox,” the man murmured. “Then you’re not a ghost.”
“I may be old, but I’m sure as hell not dead.”
“I thought you were . . .” He shook his head, then extended his hand. “I’m Ross Wakeman.”
“You’re crazy, is what you are.”
“That too, I guess.” Ross ran a hand through his hair. “I’m a paranormal researcher. Well, I was one, anyway.”
Az shrugged. “You ever find anything?”
Ross paused. “Is there something here to find?”
“Never seen nothing myself. Not here, anyway.”
“But you have, other places?”
Az avoided the question. “You can’t stay. Private property.”
Ross busied himself cleaning up his equipment, taking his sweet time, from the looks of it. “I heard there was a murder here years ago.”
“That’s what they say.”
“You know anything about it?”
Az looked into the pit of the quarry. “It happened before I was a security guard.”
“Right.” Ross lifted the camera bag and slung it over his shoulder. “Sorry about . . . the mistaken identity thing.”
“It’s nothing.” Az started to escort the younger man out. As Ross reached his car, Az curled his hand around the cast-iron gate. “Mr. Wakeman,” he called. “Those spirits you’re looking for? You aren’t far off.”
He went back to the security booth, leaving Ross to wonder if that was a promise or a threat.
Over the next few weeks, the residents of Comtosook came to believe in the unexpected. Mothers would awaken with their throats so full of tears they could not call out to their children. Businessmen catching their reflections in a pane of glass were suddenly unable to recognize their own faces. Young lovers, parked at the Point and twined together like the strands of a rope, whispered desperate vows of passion only to realize their words had come out as bubbles, and burst just as quickly.
Shelby Wakeman found ladybugs swarming all the north-facing windows of her house. Rod van Vleet could drive no more than a quarter of a mile in his company car before the scent of berries burst from the air-conditioning vents, making the interior of the Taurus as cloying and thick as jam. Spencer Pike slipped his hand beneath his pillow and discovered three sky-blue robin’s eggs.
Ethan, who knew better, found himself stealing glimpses of the sun.
Droves of cats escaped from their homes and walked down to the river to bathe. The level of water in Lake Champlain rose and fell twice a day, as if there were a tide. Roses burst free of their trellises to grow in wild, tangled thickets. Nothing at the dinner table tasted quite right.
And in spite of the temperate August climate, the disputed land on Otter Creek Pass froze solid, so that excavation became a physical impossibility as well as a philosophical one.
“What do you make of it?” Winks Smiling Fox asked, grunting as he moved the drum a few feet to the left. Where they’d been sitting, the ground beneath their feet was icy. Yet over here, there were dandelions growing.
There were documented cases of ground freezes occurring during a New England summer. In 1794, the Old Farmer’s Almanac predicted a frost in July as a result of a typographical error, which then unexpectedly came true when Mount Vesuvius erupted and the dust it sent into the atmosphere caused a miniature nuclear winter. Every few years, a blueberry frost would move through Vermont, dragging temperatures below freezing and drying the fruit on the bushes. And yet in all these instances, the damage was done town-wide, not just on one small patch of land.
“You remember the stories about Azeban?” Winks said. “The ones from when we were kids? That’s what I keep thinking of.”
“Azeban?” said Fat Charlie. “The trickster?”
“Uh-huh.” Winks nodded. “Remember how he’d set a trap for someone else as some big joke and get caught up in it himself? Like when he went to stamp out the fire Fox was sleeping near, and wound up watching his own tail get burned.”
“Wouldn’t mind a little fire here, actually, now . . .”
“No, Charlie,” said Az, coming up from behind. “Winks means that if you set out to do bad things to others, bad things are gonna come back to you.”
He watched his friends
take their seats again and pick up their drumsticks. This was how they passed the time, braiding their voices into one long, strong cord of sound. With the exception of the song they sang in their all-but-forgotten native tongue, there was no other way to know that this group of men was Abenaki. They’d learned well from the lessons of the past century, their ancestors intermarrying in the hopes of disappearing beneath white surnames and Caucasian traits. Winks had blond hair; Fat Charlie’s skin was pale as an Irishman’s.
“You think there’s something more to it than that?” Winks asked. “I mean, some strange stuff’s been going on.”
He did not have to explain; in addition to the frozen ground, the owner of a trucking company was using a shop vac to clear out the nooks and crannies of his excavators, which had become clogged with cicadas.
“In town, they’re saying if the Indians don’t drive Red-hook off the land, the ghosts will,” Fat Charlie added.
“If my grave was being rolled by a bulldozer, I’d be pretty pissed off. Come back and rattle some chains, henh.” Winks snorted. “You see that state archaeologist guy? He says an ‘Our Father’ under his breath every time he thinks no one’s listening. Even if there’s no such thing as ghosts, it’s scaring the crap out of them.”
“No such thing? The spirit of my great-great-uncle came to me during a sweat last year,” Fat Charlie said. “You’ve seen ’em too, right, Az?”
“There’s a difference between the spirits that have gone on, and the ones that can’t leave,” Az said. He picked up a knife and began to whittle a branch to a point. “Where I used to live, there was a girl whose parents told her she couldn’t marry the boy she loved. So she hanged herself from a beech tree on top of a hill. Her boyfriend went up to the same tree after she was buried, and hanged himself too. And if an Indian gets hanged, his spirit can’t go to the sky—it gets trapped behind, in the body.” He tested the point of his spear. “After they died, two blue lights used to come over the hill at night.”
