Second Glance

by Jodi Picoult

  “What does that mean?”

  “‘I have been there.’”

  I look into Gray Wolf’s face and I believe him. This man knows what it is like to be thrown into a place that might very well kill him, if he doesn’t do it himself. It is there in his eyes—black, the color that’s left when all the other color in the world is swallowed whole.

  “What’s the word for ‘thank you?’” I ask.

  “Wliwni.”

  “Wliwni, then.” I touch the beading on the pouch, an intricate turtle. “How did you know where to find me?”

  That, finally, makes him smile. “Everyone in Burlington knows where your husband lives.”

  “You left the moccasins on the porch for me.”

  “I left them for the baby.” He leans against the supporting beam of the icehouse porch. His hair spills over his shoulders.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” I say.

  “Why not?”

  “Spencer wouldn’t like it.”

  “I didn’t come for him, Lia,” Gray Wolf replies. “I came for you.”

  I do not know what to say, which is just as well, because something catches his eye—Ruby, who has ferried a tray filled with lemonade and scones onto the porch of the house. As we walk toward the refreshments, I feel the medicine pouch sway against me. Gray Wolf and I are the only two people in the world who know it is there. I wonder how and why he has twice now called me Lia, when I have never introduced myself to him that way.

  The social life of the Old Americans sets the social tone of the community. They are the charter members of society, and the rules that they make governing social intercourse are the rules that all others would follow.

  —Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937

  Forks ring against fine china, and the sound of crystal glasses singing makes me think there might be angels in the rafters. My father and Spencer and I have the best table at the Ethan Allen Club—the one uniformly agreed upon to be the choice location in the dining room for watching the sun set. Through the roses and nasturtium in the center of the table I watch my father flatter the wife of Allen Sizemore, Dean of Sciences. “So,” Allen asks, smiling. “When do you expect the big day?”

  I do not realize, at first, that he is talking about the baby. “Not soon enough, I bet,” his wife says. “I remember feeling fat as a tick on a hound by the end.”

  I like Mrs. Sizemore, who tells it as she sees it. She reaches across the table to pat my hand. “You hang in there, Cissy. It’ll be over before you know it.”

  “Over?” Allen laughs. “Just beginning, you mean. Why, Spencer will start nodding off in the middle of lectures, after changing diapers all night long. And Harry, maybe we’ll engrave Grandpa on your office door just for good measure.”

  “This baby will be absolutely perfect,” my father promises. “He’ll have his papa’s brain—which means he’ll be smart enough to sleep through the night. And he’ll have his mama’s beauty—which means if he does wake up, he’ll charm his exhausted nanny.”

  “Nanny?” I turn to Spencer.

  He glares at my father. “That was going to be a surprise.”

  “But I don’t want a nanny.”

  “Darling,” Spencer jokes, “she’s not for you.”

  Everyone at the table laughs. I look down at my lap, mortified. Hiking up my sleeve a little, I make sure the bandage is showing, and then I reach for my wineglass, my eyes on Spencer the whole time.

  “Mercy, Cecelia . . . did you hurt yourself?” As I have expected, Mrs. Sizemore has noticed right away.

  “As a matter of fact—” I begin, but Spencer interrupts.

  “She burned her arm on the stove.” He stares at me with a look that brooks no argument. “She really needs to be more careful.”

  “You didn’t tell me,” my father says, reaching for my wrist.

  “It was nothing,” I pull away and in the process, knock over my wineglass. The cabernet spills, bright as my blood, across my lap.

  It seems everyone in the room summons the waiter at once. He comes out of the woodwork with a stack of snowy napkins. His face, wide and brown, reminds me of Gray Wolf’s. He begins to dab at my thighs.

  “For God’s sake,” Spencer explodes. “Get your hands off her!”

  He takes over, mopping up the mess. “It’s only a dress, Spencer,” I say. And to the waiter, without thinking: “Wliwni.” Thank you.

  The waiter’s eyes fly to my face, as do everyone else’s at the table. “Well?” I demand of the waiter, pretending he has heard me wrong. “Who do you think you are?” I turn to the table at large. “Excuse me while I visit the ladies’ room.” As I sweep from the sumptuous dining room I can feel the Gypsy watching. I wish I could apologize to him. I wish I could tell him I understand: the higher you raise your hopes, the farther you have to fall.

  Draft statistics showed Vermont to be almost at the top of the list of physical and mental defectives. It has been suggested that this may be due to the large number of French Canadians in the population.

  —H. F. Perkins, Project #1, ESV archive, “Projects—Old,” 1926

  Somehow, Gray Wolf knows when to come. I find him on my porch when Spencer is lecturing and Ruby has gone into town to the butcher. He steps out from behind a tree when I take a walk at dusk in the woods. When he does not appear himself, I discover more gifts on the porch: a small sweetgrass basket, a miniature snowshoe, a sketch of a running horse. When we are together, I wonder where he has been all my life.

  I know better than to encourage this. He comes from the fraying edge of a society; he holds on by a thread. Me, I’ve grown up right at its woven center. He is dark and quiet and completely different from me, which is exactly why I should put distance between us. But it is also the reason I find him so fascinating.

  If you walk down the street in Burlington you can see all sorts of people—Irish, Italians, Gypsies, Jews—but you learn, growing up on the Hill, to wear blinders. You notice only the people who look like you—women with the same permanent waves in their hair and children with sailor collars and men who smell of bay rum. I have not asked Gray Wolf why he keeps seeking me out, but I imagine it is the same reason I wait for him—for the risk of it, for the sheer surprise of pressing one’s nose to the glass and finding someone staring back on the other side.

  What would Spencer say if he knew the person I most identify with is a Gypsy, who, like me, doesn’t fit into this world?

  Today I don’t expect to see Gray Wolf, and I am truly disappointed. I won’t be at home during the day—instead, I have come to attend the Klifa Club’s monthly meeting. It is the premier women’s social club in Burlington; my membership was a given, based on my social standing in the community.

  Spencer encouraged me to come to town today. Dressed in long sleeves, to cover my bandages, no one would be able to tell. “Besides,” he suggested over breakfast, “a little musical entertainment might be soothing.”

  So I spend two hours listening to a harpist, and another half-hour trying not to fall asleep as a botanist drones on about the gardens of Italy. I suffer through lemonade and finger sandwiches, as women discreetly pat the mound of my abdomen and tell me what I already know—that I am carrying a boy. I fan myself with the program and slip down the stairs when the ladies are discussing next month’s event.

  Gray Wolf is waiting for me beneath the green awning of the bank, smoking a cigarette, as if we have agreed to meet. There is just one moment of shock that he’s found me, even in town, but he only raises his dark eyebrows and offers me a cigarette too. We start walking. We don’t talk, at first. We don’t need to.

  “The Klifa Club,” he says finally.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Magnificent, of course. We eat on plates made of 14-karat gold, and hold audiences with kings of small European countries. Why else would it be so exclusive?”

  He laughs. “Beats me.” As we come
to a street corner, he takes my elbow, and I instantly freeze. Although we have met many times now, I can count on one hand the number of occasions Gray Wolf has touched me. This friendship, this easy conversation is one thing, but there are certain lines even I cannot cross. Noticing, he lets go of me and fills the fissure between us with words. “What’s a Klifa, anyway?”

  “A mistake. It was supposed to be Klifra, which is Icelandic for climber.”

  “As in ‘social?’”

  “No, these women don’t have to climb. They’ve already staked their claim at the top.” I shrug. “What’s in a name,” I quote, before I remember that Gray Wolf would not know Shakespeare.

  “Ask Juliet,” he answers dryly, fully aware of what I am thinking. “And to answer your question, a name can mean everything. Sometimes, it’s all you have.”

  “You call me Lia,” I say. “Why?”

  He pauses. “Because you don’t look like a Cissy.”

  “What would my name be in your language?”

  He shakes his head. “No one uses my language anymore.”

  “You do.”

  “That’s because I don’t have anything left to lose.” He glances at me, but I’m not giving up that easily. “There isn’t a literal translation. You can’t always take an English word and turn it into Alnôbak.” Gray Wolf nods at my brooch, a small clock pinned to my white blouse. “See, this is Papizwokwazik. But it doesn’t mean clock. It’s ‘the thing that ticks.’ A beaver might be called Tmakwa—a tree cutter—or abagôlo— flat tail—or awadnakwazid—the wood carrier . . . depending on how you see it.”

  I love the idea that a name might change based on who you are at a given moment in time. “Awadnakwazid,” I repeat, rolling the syllables on my tongue. Consonants stick to the roof of my mouth. “I wish I had a name like Gray Wolf.”

  “Then give yourself one. That’s what I did.” He shrugs. “My birth name, it’s John . . . Azo. But Gray Wolf describes me better. And I figured if the whole world saw me as an Indian, I ought to have a name that backs them up.”

  We have turned onto College Street now, which is busy and crowded. I know the mother walking with her daughter and the businessman leaning on an ivory cane and the two young soldiers are all wondering what someone like me is doing with someone like Gray Wolf. I wonder who else will see us. It is part of the excitement.

  “I used to stand on the roof of my father’s house and think about jumping,” I say.

  “Your father’s house,” he repeats.

  “Well, it’s ours now, but yes. Once, I even did it. I broke my arm.”

  “Why did you want to jump?”

  No one has ever asked me that question. Not my father, afterward; not the doctors at the hospital who set the bones. “Because I could.” I turn to him and make the traffic flow around us. “Give me a name.”

  He stares at my face for a long moment. “Sokoki,” he says. “One who has broken away.”

  Suddenly, behind me, I hear myself being called. “Cissy?” Spencer’s voice is carried on the shoulders of passersby. “Is that you?”

  Maybe I have wanted to be discovered all along; maybe I have been expecting this. But when Spencer stands in front of Gray Wolf, my insides go to water and my legs begin to shake. I would fall, if not for Spencer catching me. “Darling?”

  “I’m just a little light-headed, after the Klifa Club meeting.”

  Spencer looks dismissively at Gray Wolf. “Chief, you can move along.”

  “I’m not a chief.”

  With my heart in my throat I reach into my pocketbook and take out a dollar bill. “All right,” I interrupt, as if Gray Wolf and I have been in the middle of a business deal, “but this is all I’m willing to pay for it.”

  He plays along, but disappointment shadows his eyes. “Thank you, ma’am.” He hands me a small bundle wrapped in a handkerchief, the first thing he can find in his pocket for a sham transaction. Then he vanishes into the masses walking toward the university.

  “I’ve told you not to talk to beggars,” Spencer says, taking my arm. “Once they see you’re an easy target, they’ll never leave you alone.”

  “It’s Christian charity,” I murmur.

  “What on earth did he manage to sell you, anyway?”

  I peek inside the folds of the handkerchief, and go dizzy again. “A trinket,” I say, and stuff the miniature portrait into my purse before Spencer recognizes the face, a perfect twin to the one that sits on my dressing table to help me remember my mother.

  Within the ranks of the Old Americans are many individuals who transcend the group pattern, question the status quo, think creatively about community or social problems, and even consider the possibility of a different and perhaps even better Burlington. As long as they do not go too far with their questioning, the group will uphold them; and they seldom do go too far, knowing the price they would have to pay.

  —Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937

  In my dream I can even feel it, the square box of its body and the white face with a small scale of numbers and a quivering needle. There is writing on the handheld base: TriField Natural EM Meter. A man with hair as long as a woman’s explains the settings: Magnetic, sum, electric, radio/microwave, battery test. He wears a faded T-shirt and denims, like a field hand.

  What is a cell phone?

  I wake up, sweating. Even the fan blowing over the surface of the bed can’t make up for the fact that the windows are stuck shut. The other side of the bed is empty. Restless, I walk to the bathroom and splash water on my face. Padding downstairs, I try to find Spencer.

  He is in his study. The lights are all out, with the exception of a green accountant’s shade lamp on his desk. Several of his pedigree charts are unraveled on the hardwood floor like old roads, and through the open windows, bullfrogs are calling his name. When he lifts his head, I realize he has been drinking.

  “Cissy. What time is it?”

  “Past two.” I take a tentative step forward. “You should come up to bed.”

  He buries his face in his hands. “What woke you?”

  “The heat.”

  “Heat.” Spencer picks up his glass and drains it. An ant crawls across the desk, and in one smooth move he smacks the base of the tumbler down to crush it.

  “Spencer?”

  He wipes off the glass with his handkerchief and looks up at me. “Do you think,” he asks quietly, “that they feel it? Do you think they know it’s coming?”

  I shake my head, confused. “You need to go to sleep.”

  Before I realize what he is doing, Spencer has twisted me onto his lap. He holds my arm fast, and touches the spot where the bandage has been taped in the crook of my elbow. “Do you know how it would kill me to lose you?” he whispers, fierce. “Do you have any idea what you mean to me?”

  My lips barely move. “No.”

  “Oh, Cissy.” He buries his face between my breasts, his breath falling over our baby. “You’re the reason I do it.”

  The small Old American group has been helped to maintain its predominant position by the strength of its traditional feeling of the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxon.

  —Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937

  Ruby is the one who tells me he is waiting.

  “Spencer’s inside,” I say, panicking the minute I see Gray Wolf on our porch, with the morning sun slung over his shoulders like a matador’s cape.

  “Ask me,” he demands.

  I glance into the house. Spencer is in the tub. And I have so many questions. “Did you know my mother?” When he nods, it is no surprise. “What was she like?”

  His gaze softens. “You.”

  There are no words in the place where I have arrived. “More,” I manage.

  So he tells me what she looked like, standing on this very porch, in this home where she grew up before marrying my father. He paints the color of her hair, and it matches mine. He tel
ls me how she could whistle louder than any girl he’d ever known, and that her clothes always smelled of lemons. He had worked for her father as a seasonal field laborer—back when this property was a producing farm, before that parcel of land was sold off to the current neighbors.

  He tells me that once, on a dare, my mother drove a tractor onto the UVM green at midnight.

  He tells me that she wanted a daughter, more than anything, so that she could grow up all over again.

  I lean against the exterior wall of the house and close my eyes. I have waited my whole life for this moment. Will my child be as lucky? Will there be someone, years from now, to tell him about me?

  I blink at Gray Wolf. “I’m going to die.”

  “Lia,” he says, “we all are.”

  The door opens suddenly. Spencer’s hair is still wet, and there are small damp patches on his shirt where his skin pinks through the cotton. “I thought I heard you talking to someone,” he accuses, and I wonder if Gray Wolf hears how the edge of his words are as sharp as a razor.

  “This is Gray Wolf,” I announce. “I’m hiring him.”

  Spencer stares, trying to figure out why Gray Wolf’s face is so familiar . . . but he will not be able to. That day on the street, Spencer had wanted nothing more than to dismiss a Gypsy. For Gray Wolf to stand out in his mind, he would have had to be important enough to leave an impression in the first place.

  “The roof needs work. Both here, and the icehouse. You told me to hire a handyman to take care of it. Gray Wolf, this is my husband, Professor Pike.”

  Spencer looks one last time between Gray Wolf and myself. “There’s a ladder in the garage,” he says finally. “Go on, then. You can start with the drainpipes.”

  “Yes, sir.” Gray Wolf’s expression is blank. He strikes off toward the shed to start working a job he never asked for.

  Spencer watches him leave. “Where did you find him?”