by Jodi Picoult
They relied on agriculture, and their villages had been located on the floodplains of rivers. Hunting and fishing supplemented their diets. For most of the year, they lived in scattered bands of extended families, but during the summer they would gather. They had no central authority, which meant that in times of war, the Abenaki could abandon their villages, separate into smaller groups, and resurface somewhere far away to counterattack. Often during war, they retreated into Quebec, which led many colonials in New England to think of them as Canadian Indians, and gave them an excuse to take most of their land in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont without compensation.
There were, in 2001, approximately 2,500 Abenaki left in Vermont.
But whether any of them had ever lived on the Pike property was still a mystery to Ross, even though he’d tried six different Internet search engines and nearly every historical reference book the Comtosook Public Library had to offer.
He lay his head on the desk, frustrated. Shelby came up behind him and began to knead his shoulders. “Any luck?”
“You do this for a living?” Ross sighed.
“I’m going to assume that means you didn’t find anything.” She sat down on the chair beside him, glancing quickly at the reference desk to make sure Ethan was still occupied with his Game Boy. “Vermont isn’t exactly known for its record-keeping precision,” she said. “Most of the old documents are gathering mold on the floor of the town clerk’s office. And even those are pretty much the story of the English who settled the area. I don’t imagine that Native Americans saw the need for property deeds a thousand years ago.”
“Yeah, and look at where it got them.”
“You going to quit, then?”
“No.” He glanced at the screen, luminous and humming. “I’m going to try to read up on some of those Brits. See if their accounts mention any Indian settlements.”
“Suit yourself. I’m going to take Ethan home.”
Ross watched his sister from a distance, chatting with the new librarian who’d come in to take over the shift, slipping the strap of her purse over her shoulder, touching the crown of Ethan’s head when she spoke as if her hand had simply been drawn there, a magnet to its pole.
“Shel,” he called out, as she waved to him from the door. “You ever hear of anyone named Beaumont?”
“Is that one of those English settlers?”
“No.” Ross found his hands moving over the keyboard as if they had a mind of their own. The search engine he opened up had nothing to do with historical documents. It was the much more mundane White Pages for the town of Comtosook.
The librarian who’d just come on duty looked at him over her bifocals. “There’s a biology library on the UVM campus named after a Beaumont. Sometimes we do book loans with them.”
“Sorry, Ross,” Shelby said, shaking her head. “That doesn’t ring a bell.”
She pushed Ethan out the door as Ross typed the name into the computer.
BEAUMONT, ABEL. 33 Castleton Rd.
BEAUMONT, C. RR 2, Box 358.
BEAUMONT, W. 569 West Oren St.
He had not really expected to find Lia’s name listed; her husband didn’t seem the type to grant a woman equal billing. There was no way of finding the Beaumont on the Rural Route, but the other two were local. He signed off the computer and gathered his things.
“Success?” the librarian asked, smiling.
Ross found himself whistling. “You could say that.”
It frustrated Az to no end that he needed some pissant piece of paper to fish in waters that belonged to no one. Who was some game warden to tell him he needed a permit with a stamp on it in order to sit himself down on the shores of the lake and catch as many trout as he could fit into his belly for dinner?
But he had it, all the same, tucked into the pocket of his shirt just in case he attracted company at six in the morning. He sat back and threaded a shiner onto his hook, then cast toward a patch of water that seemed darker than the rest.
He left his bail open, so that the minnow could swim away. The fishing line was a neon equator, splitting the lake into two. Az closed his eyes and balanced his rod between his knees. Growing old was still a surprise to him; funny how he could not remember what he had for dinner last night but could tell you, in exquisite detail, about the constellation of speckles on the back of the first trout he ever caught. He could not always catch the name of a friend on his tongue but there were faces from the past that he knew as surely as if he’d sculpted them himself. His spine had curved in the past few years, to the point where Az wondered if he would literally come full circle before it was his time to go, but his mind was so clear he could sometimes feel its serrated edges in the moments before he let loose and sank to sleep.
Az grunted at the absolute lack of activity on his line. Patience, that’s what his father had taught him, along with which shallows netted the best bait and how to cast so softly a fish heard the splash of the hook only as a memory. But Az didn’t have much patience these days. Patience required time, and he was running out of that.
The sun, bloodshot eye, lit the lip of the lake. There was a sudden spray of fire overhead. Explosions rose like Roman candles, sliding the sky from night into day.
The ground trembled beneath Az as a second round of charges went off at Angel Quarry, dislodging more granite to be mined into kitchen countertops and grave markers. His fishing line began to spin out as a trout grabbed onto the shiner. Az counted once, twice, then closed the bail on the reel and began to pull in with a steady hand.
The fish thrashed into his basket, all the colors of the sunrise caught in its scales. Another detonation ripped across the lake, and this time, Az could see bass leaping in small surprised circles, desperate to escape this unplanned earthquake.
He baited his hook with another shiner. Sometimes, things just needed a little shaking up.
Meredith huddled over her microscope, examining a single cell from an embryo that had been recently conceived in a test tube. This one did not seem destined to inherit cystic fibrosis—a small miracle, given that the couple’s other four attempts to conceive a healthy child had failed. She arched her back and smiled: this one would make it. This one would be a survivor. And Meredith should know.
Lucy had been one of those against-the-odds babies. Not because of a genetic disorder, but simply by circumstance. Eight years ago Meredith had broken off a fading relationship with her mentor, a biomedical engineering professor who had been too busy to accompany her to her mother’s funeral in Maryland. Her mother had only been in her fifties—it had been a heart attack, unexpected and very fast. As devastated as Meredith had been, her grandmother had been even more upset, and it fell to Meredith, at twenty-six, to take care of the details of death. She could still recall the surreal trip to the funeral parlor, where she was asked to pick out the color of satin lining for her mother’s coffin; to choose from a catalog of Vermont-granite headstones. She remembered the graveside service, where Granny Ruby had listed against her, the old woman’s slight weight forcing Meredith to stand tall and solid.
She made the decision to go to Boston, defend her dissertation, and then come back to Silver Spring to live with Granny Ruby. But four sleepless nights had taken their toll; several hours into the journey north, she lost control of her Civic.
Meredith awakened in the hospital with a cast on her left leg, bruises on every inch of her body, and a nurse at her side who kept telling her that her baby was going to be fine. Baby? she had thought, or maybe said aloud. What baby? Answers were fed to her like pain pills—an ultrasound meant to check internal injuries had shown the eight-week pregnancy, the butterfly heartbeat.
She had not wanted to be a single mother. She hadn’t wanted to be a mother, period. All she wanted was her own mother, back. So she’d made an appointment for an abortion.
One that she hadn’t kept.
Meredith knew the science behind conception; she understood what parents could and could not pass along to
their children. But she could not help wondering if, somehow, the intangibles bled through by osmosis. If she’d wanted a baby from the moment she’d found out—instead of wishing, in the darkest part of the night, that she’d miscarry—would Lucy have been more secure? She loved her daughter now; she could not imagine a life without her in it. But if she was going to be brutally honest with herself, eight years ago, she could have easily gone the other way.
Life was all about being in a certain place, at a certain time.
Oh, Lucy, she thought, if I could do it over again. She would work less, and take her daughter mountain climbing instead. She would teach her a martial art. She would admit that she did not know all the answers, and what’s more, might not ever be able to find them.
With a sigh, Meredith turned back to the scope. Two days from now this embryo would be implanted in its mother’s womb. The irony didn’t escape her—she, who had not wanted a baby yet wound up with one, was often the last hope of parents who wanted a baby more than anything but couldn’t conceive. This child would not have cystic fibrosis, but that didn’t mean it might not contract meningitis. You never knew what you were going to get. Close a door, and you’d still feel a breeze through the window.
Neither Castleton Road nor West Oren Street turned out to be anywhere near the Pike property, but that didn’t keep Ross from plotting the routes on a map he’d bought at the gas station and finding the houses. However, Lia Beaumont did not live at either the sleepy Victorian whose picket fence badly needed painting, or the log home guarded by the German shepherd named Armageddon. It was possible that she lived at the unlisted address, but he would ask her that the next time he saw her.
If he saw her.
Ross had eaten all his meals at the town diner, and he’d been on a vigil at the property for the past two nights, but Lia Beaumont had not materialized. He’d seen Az Thompson skulking around again, two raccoons having sex, and several times, his video equipment had picked up the most remarkable globules—large as a basketball and pearly white, streaking across the screen.
He would have liked to show these to Lia.
Ross wanted to ask her if she thought her mother would wait to be found, no matter how many years it took. He wanted to ask her if she loved her husband the way he loved Aimee. He wanted to know what differences between them could seem just as irreconcilable as death.
He was worried, too, that maybe her husband had found out that she’d met Ross at the diner, and had punished her. He didn’t know what that would entail. Physical abuse? Psychological? It was possible, too, that the reason she’d disappeared was because Lia—who had admitted to cutting her arms to feel something, anything—had simply decided that the surest way to find her mother was to turn herself into a ghost.
Ross found himself reading the obituaries, and sighing with relief when she wasn’t mentioned. He began to make ridiculous bargains with himself: If I can hold my breath for three full minutes, she will come tonight. If I make this light before it turns red, she will be there.
Some nights at the Pike property were more active than others. There were wild temperature swings and tiny flashes of blue light between the branches of trees, and the smell of hemlock occasionally seemed thick enough to choke. Twice, Ross had heard the hinged cry of an infant.
The third night, he was sitting at the edge of the clearing where he’d targeted his investigation, the night wrapped as tight as a straitjacket, when the stone fell out of the sky. It was approximately the size of a dinner plate and nearly as flat, and dropped from a high enough velocity to crack against his shin. “Shit!” Ross yelped, jumping to his feet. Pain throbbed up his leg and a welt rose below his knee. Peering up the nearest tree with his flashlight, he could see nothing. He was in no shape to climb. So he took that same rock and slammed it hard enough against the trunk to make it shake. “Hey!” he shouted. “Who’s there?”
He expected an animal—a bear cub, or some kind of mutant squirrel—but there was nothing. He snapped off a branch and then used it to beat at the others. He kept at this for a while, not because he really thought he was going to find anything, but because he wanted some measure of revenge. It was only when he stopped, exhausted, that he heard the digging.
It was faint, like a woodchuck scratching a hole in a garden. Ross limped toward the far side of the clearing, the sound growing stronger. His flashlight illuminated about thirty small mounds, arranged in no particular order.
Different archaeological experts and excavation teams had razed parts of the property, yet this particular spot had been intact when Ross arrived at dusk that evening. Now, enough earth had been dug out of each hole to make a small pile, although when Ross bent down and tried to dig a little deeper with a stick, the ground was just as frigid and snowy as it had been for days.
Ross had never actually seen a primitive burial ground, but he imagined it looked something like this.
He drew his digital camera from his pocket and took pictures from several angles. Then he bent to the tiny LCD display to see what the photos looked like. But in every single picture, the ground was perfectly flat, covered with a layer of undisturbed ice. Confounded, Ross shined the flashlight down on the same patch of land. There were no mounds of dirt, where minutes ago there had been many.
“I know what I saw.” Ross stomped around the small space, but there was no give to the ground; it was still frozen solid.
Had he imagined all of it? He bent down and rolled up the leg of his pants—no, the welt was even bigger now, and a vivid shade of purple. That stone had fallen. That sound had been digging. Those heaps had been there.
Another reason to miss Lia: had she come tonight, and seen this, Ross would not have thought he was crazy.
That week the Winooski River slowed its flow, leaving fish swimming in circles and washing up on the banks in confusion. Families with satellite television systems found their programming now completely in Norwegian, the mouths of the actors not quite matching up to the words, like old Godzilla movies. At the Comtosook IGA, all four electronic cash registers—newly purchased from an industrial catalog and recently arrived—began to add wrong, so that grapes might ring up at $45 per bunch and cantaloupes cost a penny a pound, while mousetraps and fish sticks were perfectly free. The people who dared to talk of these things found they lost their train of thought right in the middle of a sentence, and would find instead the sweet taste of sugar on their tongue, or the bitter tang of chicory, depending on what they had been about to say.
It sucked going to the dermatologist.
Not only did it remind Ethan of what a freak he was, it also meant he had to stay up all day long, because the doctor’s office hours were during the time he usually slept. And after whatever procedure had been done, he had the added fun of seeing his mother’s smile crack like a hard-boiled egg; she was trying that desperately to look at him as if he were perfectly normal.
Today he’d had three precancerous growths removed from his face. The doctor had taken a cotton swab and stuck it into a cup of liquid nitrogen, then held it to Ethan’s forehead and nose. It stung enough to make tears come to his eyes, and it itched, now.
His mother pulled into the driveway. Uncle Ross was out—the car was gone. Ethan could have unfastened his own seat belt but he waited until his mother came around the passenger side and did it for him. “You okay?” she asked quietly, and he nodded and got out of the car. He slipped his hand into hers as they walked up the porch, something he had not done for months, because when you have less time than everyone else it means you have to make yourself grow up faster.
In his bedroom, he pulled off his clothes like taffy. He dragged his pajamas over his head and then glanced in the mirror. The blisters hadn’t formed yet—that would be tomorrow. But his face was already a globe, shifting blotchy continents where the growths had been frozen off.
Before he even realized what he was doing, he lifted his fist and smashed the mirror. Blood ran down his arm but the only thought spiking
through his mind was that he didn’t have to look at himself anymore.
“Ethan?” His mother’s voice. “Ethan!” She was behind him now, wrapping his fist in a sheet yanked from the bed. “What happened?”
“I’m sorry,” Ethan rocked back and forth. “I’m sorry.”
“Now you’re propitiating . . .”
“Pro-what?”
“It means being agreeable. Something you always are, after the fact.”
Ethan yanked his hand away. “Then why don’t you just say it?” he yelled. “Why do you use these stupid words all the time no one can understand anyway? Why doesn’t anyone ever just tell me, flat out, the truth?”
His mother stared at him. “What do you want to hear, Ethan?”
He was sobbing, and his nose was running. “That I’m a monster.” He held his splayed hands up to his face, streaking his chin and cheeks with smudges of blood. “Look at me, Ma. Look at me.”
His mother forced a smile. “Ethan, honey, you’re tired. It’s way past your bedtime.” Her voice kicked into soothing mode, the consistency of warm honey. It rolled over Ethan’s shoulders; he had to fight to keep from giving in. He felt his mother probe his hand, lead him into the bathroom to clean the cuts.
“I don’t think you’ll need stitches,” she said, and she wrapped his hand with gauze. Then she took him back into his bedroom. Ethan climbed into bed and stared at the frame on his wall where the mirror used to be.
“You’ll feel better after you take a nap,” his mother said, and Ethan did not know if she was talking to him or to herself. “We’ll do something really wonderful when you get up—take out the telescope, maybe, and try to find Venus . . . or watch all the Star Wars videos back to back . . . you’ve wanted to do that for a while now, haven’t you?” As she spoke she crouched on the floor, picking up the shards of the mirror. He wondered if she knew she was crying.
Although he was exhausted, Ethan didn’t fall asleep. His hand throbbed, and so did his face. He waited until he no longer heard his mother moving around downstairs, then crept out of bed to reach under his desk, where his mother had missed a triangle of mirror.
