by Jodi Picoult
Winks leaned forward, elbows balanced on his knees. “Anyone ever get close to them?”
The old man ran the knife down the branch again. Behind him, he could sense Rod van Vleet, doing everything in his power to pretend he was not listening. “Nobody,” Az said, “was stupid enough to try.”
“Ethan?”
From his vantage point beneath the blackout shades, Ethan froze at the sound of his mother’s voice. He whipped his body back so that it wasn’t pressed against the warm glass windowpane and slid his sunglasses between the crack where his bed met the wall. “Hey,” he said, as she opened the bedroom door.
Her hawk’s eyes took in the rumpled comforter, the hat on Ethan’s head, the drawn curtains. She approached him, narrowed her gaze, and tugged down the sleeve of his shirt where a quarter-inch strip of skin showed above his wrist. “I’m going to work,” his mother said. “You ought to be asleep by now.”
“I’m not tired,” Ethan complained. It struck him, though, that his mother must be exhausted. To stay up with him all night, and to work part-time during the day at the library? “Mom,” he asked, “are you tired?”
“All the time,” she answered, and kissed him good-bye.
He waited until he heard her footsteps echoing on the tile floor of the kitchen. Words were traded like playing cards between his mother and Uncle Ross about how late Ethan should be allowed to stay up and what to do in case of emergency. Ethan dug along the side of his bed until he found the silver wraparound sunglasses. He settled his cap more firmly on his brow. Then he lifted the edge of the blackout shade and curled like a kitten on the windowsill. Within minutes, burns rose beneath the chalk of his skin, small spots dotted his face, but Ethan didn’t care. He’d scar, if that’s what it took to prove he’d been a part of this world.
The scientists from CRREL, the Army Corps of Engineers, who had taken a van from Hanover, New Hampshire, to Comtosook and spent the day extracting soil samples with drills made to delve through ground frozen solid as stone, spoke to Rod van Vleet only peripherally. They had come out of academic curiosity and talked of the impact of thaw distribution on vehicle mobility . . . but did not explain how or why this had occurred here and now.
The fellow who arrived from the Scott Polar Research Institute said it looked like permafrost, a climate-dependent phenomenon that occurred when the ground temperature remained below freezing for two or more years—which was not the case on Otter Creek Pass. He spoke of pore ice, segregated ice, and pingos, and reminded Rod that at one point, Burlington and its environs had been glacial.
A Danish team phoned to ask if sudden freezing of the property had affected the chemistry of the atmosphere, and would Rod consider selling in the name of research?
Yet for all of the combined wisdom that these scientists brought to the table, none could explain the odd cravings they developed the moment they crossed into Comtosook— for banana chips and candied violets and the soft skin of homemade puddings. They could not comment on the way loneliness perched on the telephone lines like a crow, except to point out that this was normal in regions where cold seeped so deep it was physically impossible to reach out to anyone else.
By the time they returned to their labs and academic towers, took out their samples, and dusted away the layer of flower petals from the test tubes and Cold Paks, these quirks had been forgotten. They already knew what the residents of Comtosook were just now learning: that the world is a place where the extraordinary can sit just beside the ordinary with the thinnest of boundaries; that even in environments inhospitable to man, all sorts of entities might thrive.
The Comtosook Public Library did not get many visitors, which was a blessing given the size of the building. Tiny rooms were strung together like pearls, far more suited to a small country inn than a repository for literature. The most crowded it got was Thursday mornings, when up to thirty preschoolers would sprawl on their bellies in the two small enclaves that made up the juvenile section, for story time. The children’s librarian had to run back and forth between the rooms with an open book, so that all the kids could see.
There were bookshelves at angles, bookshelves stuck in the middle of the floor, bookshelves turned on their sides if necessary—whatever it took to accommodate a large number of volumes in an inadequate run of space. The reference librarian— Shelby, on weekday mornings—needed to know the Dewey Decimal system and various computer search engines, as well as how to navigate the library to find the fruits of these labors. But for the most part, Shelby was free to do whatever she liked during her work hours, and what she liked to do was chew words.
Shelby loved them the way epicureans loved food—each syllable was something to be rolled on the tongue, swallowed, and wholly appreciated. Sometimes she would sit with the dictionary cracked open and read with all the breathless impatience another patron might save for a thriller. Griseous: mottled. Kloof: a ravine. Nidicolous: reared for a time in a nest.
She imagined receiving a phone call one day—Meredith Vieira, on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, or a radio disc jockey offering a fortune if she only knew the definition of one bizarre word. “Pilose?” she would repeat, and then pretend she did not know it, for the sheer suspense. “Covered with soft hair.”
She was smart enough, after four years of college and another two of graduate school, to know that she used language like shore dwellers used sandbags: to create a buffer zone between herself and the rest of the world. She also knew that she could learn every last word in the dictionary and still not be able to explain why her life had turned out the way it had.
She was worried about Ethan; she was worried about Ross. She was so busy, in fact, taking care of the immediate world that it kept her from dwelling on the fact that there never seemed to be anyone around who bothered to worry about her.
The library was empty, a result of regular patrons being too uneasy these days to venture out into a town that changed before their very eyes. To Shelby, the recent eccentricities amounted to sweeping petals off the steps of the library; she wasn’t worried about an impending Armageddon or global warming or the coming of phantoms, as conversation at the town diner suggested. To a woman who had built a home on a footing of abnormality, recent events were nothing to get excited about.
When the door creaked open, Shelby glanced up. A man she had never seen before entered, dressed in a suit too expensive to have come from any store within a fifty-mile radius. However, there was something . . . off. His tie listed to the left and his skin was nearly as white as Ethan’s. He glanced from the oddly sloped floor to the jutting angles of the wall to the stacks of encyclopedias kittering up the wall. “This is the library?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
His gaze circled like a bird, finally coming to rest on Shelby. “Can you even find anything in here?”
Rhabdomancy, Shelby thought. Divination by wands. “That depends. What are you looking for?”
“Indian burial grounds. What happened to them, in the past, when someone built over them. Legal precedent. That sort of thing.”
“You must be one of the developers,” Shelby said. She led him to a spot at the rear of the library, where a microfiche was tucked behind a low shelf of cookbooks. “There was a dispute just a year ago in Swanton. You might want to try there first.”
“You wouldn’t happen to remember the outcome, would you?”
“The state bought the property.”
“Oh, great. Terrific.” He exhaled heavily and sprawled backward in the chair. “Was that Swanton land cursed too?”
“Excuse me?”
For a moment, he seemed too frustrated to speak. “Those Indians, what do they do . . . conjure up all their dead ancestors whenever they need them? Whatever it takes, right, to get us Massholes out of town?”
Shelby worried her nail between her teeth.
“We’re just trying to build a strip mall, for God’s sake. I’ve got the owner’s signature, all nice and legal on a piece of paper. I’v
e forked over fifty thousand dollars, to start. I do everything by the book, and in return, I’ve got temperatures dropping below zero for no reason whatsoever; I’ve got voices screaming in the middle of the night. I’ve got my labor force quitting. Jesus . . . this morning, I got shoved, and there was no one behind me!” He looked directly at Shelby. “I am not going crazy. I’m not.”
“Of course you aren’t,” she murmured.
The man ran a hand down his face. “I don’t know why I bothered to come here. You can’t help me.”
“No, I can’t,” Shelby said. “But I think I know someone who can.”
Ross sprawled in Shelby’s living room, the volume on the television cranked up as loud as he felt he could make it without waking his nephew. Wires linked his video camera to the screen, as the short tape he’d made at the quarry ran. He paused the image with the remote control, rewound it, and leaned forward to scrutinize it again. But no, the flickering at the corner of the screen was just a reflection—nothing paranormal at all.
He shut off the television and leaned back, eyes closed. “Waste of time.”
“That bad, huh?” Shelby walked in and slung her pocketbook onto the couch.
“Ethan was fine.”
“I was talking about your date. Are you going to tell me who she was now, or is that a state secret?”
“Nobody you know.”
“How can I be sure until you tell me?” Shelby sat down. “What’s with the video camera?”
Ross set out to change the subject as quickly as possible. “How was work?”
“Actually, I think I got you a job today.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think library work is for me. I gave up alphabetizing for Lent.”
“A. It’s not Lent, and B. It’s not library work—”
“You’re alphabetizing,” Ross pointed out, grinning.
Shelby tucked one foot beneath her. “A man came in today, Rod van Vleet. He’s working for the development company that bought a piece of land on Otter Creek Pass—”
“Where?”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. What’s important is that he’s all freaked out because he thinks the property is haunted.” Shelby smiled, triumphant. “Guess where you come in.”
His jaw tightened. “Is this about money? Because if you want me to pay rent—”
“Ross, stop. I said something to him because I thought it might get you excited. You’ve been moping around since you got here. You’ve barely even left the house in weeks.”
“You hardly ever leave the house.”
“That’s different and you know it.”
Ross got out of the chair and yanked the wires out of the TV, packing up his video camera in its padded bag. “I didn’t realize you had expectations,” he said bitterly. “I didn’t know that it wasn’t all right to just take a breather.”
“A breather? Are you sure that’s why you came here?” By now she was standing toe-to-toe with him. “Or were you looking for someplace to stop breathing?”
Ross held her gaze for a minute. “Shel. It was only that once, just after she died.”
Shelby’s hands came up to Ross’s wrists, pulled them down between them. Her thumbs edged up the sleeves of his sweater, traced the history there. “Once. I go to ask you if you want soup for lunch, soup, Ross, and you’re bleeding out.”
“You should have let me,” Ross said, gently breaking away.
“Fuck you.” Tears glittered in Shelby’s eyes. “When you close the bathroom door now, I wonder if you’re taking pills. When you go out driving, I wonder if you’re wrapped around a tree. Did it ever occur to you that you’re not the only person who’s ever lost someone? Aimee died. People die. You’re alive, and you have to start acting like it.”
His gaze was glacial. “Will you feel that way in a few years, when it’s Ethan?”
A small sound made them turn toward the doorway, but by then the boy who had heard every word had run off.
He was wearing a sweatshirt and long pants, and of course a baseball hat, but his face and his hands were uncovered. By the time Ethan reached the quarry—the highest spot in town, with cliffs that pierced the sky—his fingers were swollen like sausages, and so red they ached with every heartbeat.
Maybe a truck would hit him on the way. Maybe he would burn to a crisp, go up in flames like the pictures of that guy he saw in the Guinness Book of World Records. If he died now, what difference would it make?
What he knew of the town of Comtosook he had learned from maps, from the Internet. Certainly, he’d been out before—but things looked different in the daylight. He could not tear his eyes away from streets that were full of cars, from the sheer number of people on the sidewalks. He could not know that normally, this town was twice as crowded—by comparison, to Ethan, this sunny world was so busy it took his breath away.
Ethan knew he was going to die. He’d been to psychologists and doctors and social workers to help him come to terms with the prognosis of an XP patient. He might make it to fifty, but there was every chance he’d only live until fifteen. It all depended on how much damage had been done to his cells before he was diagnosed.
The way he figured it, this was one of the few things he could point to that made him just like anyone else. At some point or another, all people were going to kick the bucket. The difference was, if he wanted that day to come later rather than sooner, he wasn’t really allowed to live.
It was only a few more blocks to the quarry; Ethan could tell because the cliffs were looming larger and larger. He did not know what he would do when he got there. Take off his shirt, maybe, until the pain got so bad he passed out. Lie on his back and stare up at the sun until his corneas burned.
He turned into the entrance of the quarry and stopped abruptly. Leaning against the hood of his battered car, arms crossed, was his Uncle Ross. “How did you find me?”
“Find you? I was here first.” Ross took a look at Ethan’s sunburned fingers and face but didn’t comment, only handed Ethan one of his own shirts to put on, the sleeves falling down over his hands to protect them from the ultraviolet light. Then he squinted up at the sky. “I figured a kid who had a bone to pick with the sun would try to get right in its face. This is the highest place in town.” He turned to Ethan. “Your mother is frantic.”
“Where is she?”
“At home. In case you showed up there, first.” Standing, he opened the passenger door. “Can we finish this conversation inside?”
After a moment, Ethan nodded. He ducked into the car, pulled off his baseball cap, and scrubbed at his scalp. “Is it true, about you trying to kill yourself?”
“Yeah.”
Ethan felt his throat narrow. His uncle—well, he was one of the only males Ethan had any contact with, and he was certainly the coolest one. He’d done totally sketchy things, like skydiving and ice climbing. Ethan wanted to be just like him, if he ever got the chance to grow up. But he couldn’t fathom how the man he idolized most in the world would not just want to live on the edge, but to die there. “How come you did it?”
Ross reached across Ethan’s body to rap hard on the glass. Then, with a flick of a finger on a console button, the window automatically rolled down; Ethan could smell the bitter fireweed that grew along the road in brilliant regiments. “To get to the other side,” his uncle explained.
“Oh my God,” Shelby cried, and then she was running down the driveway to yank Ethan out of the car. Ross watched them hold this moment between them, the small grain of calamity now reforming itself into a pearl of relief. They tottered back toward the house, Shelby folded around her son, as if he were still an extension of her own body.
Ross leaned against the hood, thanking God he’d had the hunch to look for Ethan where he had. He didn’t want to think about what might have happened, had he come home alone, or if Ethan had stayed outside too long.
He started for the front door and realized that a stranger was standing on the porch beside his sister. “This is
Rod van Vleet,” she said, in a tone that let Ross know their argument was far from resolved. “He stopped by to speak to you.”
Ross shot his sister the blackest glance he could, given the circumstances. The man was shorter than Ross, his balding head the unfortunate shape of a peanut. He wore a fancy suit, a starched shirt, a banker’s tie. “Mr. Wakeman,” he said, with a hesitant smile. “I hear you hunt ghosts.”
THREE
Just this once, it was cool that everyone was staring. .
Ethan was carrying the video camera, which was heavy, but he wasn’t about to complain to his uncle. Anyway, Ross was hauling everything else—from the sleeping bags to the junk food (a stakeout, his uncle said, was a stakeout, even if the people you were trying to catch in the act were already dead). They walked from the car past the drummers and the bulldozer and the construction crew, and Ethan noticed that each person they passed seemed to freeze in the middle of whatever they were doing. One old Indian guy stared so hard at Ethan he thought it might leave a mark on the back of his head. But he wasn’t staring at Ethan because he was a freak— just because he was curious about the man and the kid who walked across the property like they owned it.
Ethan stopped for a moment, arrested by the sight of a college kid sifting sand. The boy was stripped down to his shorts, his shoulders and back butternut brown. Ethan looked down at his own long sleeves and thick pants. He sucked in the mesh of the facemask his mother made him wear when he went out while the sun was still in the sky.
“Hey, move it,” Ross called over his shoulder, and Ethan scrambled to catch up.
The developer, Mr. van Vleet, hurried over as soon as he saw them. He wore fancy businessman shoes and kept slipping on the ice that had spread over the land like frosting on a cake. “Mr. Wakeman,” he greeted quietly. “You remember what I said about keeping this . . . discreet?”
“You remember what I said about letting me run my own investigation?” Ross answered, turning his back on the man. He trudged up the steps of the old house; one of which broke right in the middle while his foot was on it. “Be careful,” he warned Ethan.
