by Jodi Picoult
I cannot take a nap, because then I won’t be able to meet Gray Wolf as I am supposed to this afternoon. Of course, now that Dr. DuBois has come to visit, I will have to concoct some new excuse. Maybe I will say I’m going to the stationer for vellum, to write invitations to our dinner party. What they do not understand is that I don’t need pills, and I don’t need rest. What I need is someone who does not want me to sleep through my own life.
The bed sinks as Spencer sits down beside me. I roll toward him, my eyelids half-lowered. “I’m already getting tired.”
“You aren’t the only one,” Spencer answers, and his voice is full of edges.
In that moment I forget how to breathe.
“Why is it that Dr. DuBois—the physician you’ve gone to see six times in the past two weeks, for various aches and pains—has no recollection of these visits?” His face is stained crimson, which makes the blond roots of his hair stand out like platinum. “What on earth could my wife be doing that would make her lie to me?” He has my shoulders in his hands, and shakes me. “Not just once, but over and over?”
My head snaps back on the stalk of my neck. “Spencer, it’s not what you think . . .”
“Do not tell me what I think!” he roars, and then suddenly collapses into himself. “Cissy, God, what have you done to me?”
Seeing him fall apart, I push myself into a sitting position and cradle his head in my lap. “Spencer. I was going out for walks. By myself. I just wanted to be by myself.”
“Yourself?” Spencer murmurs against my skin. “You were by yourself?”
I stare square into his eyes. “Yes.”
Stealing, lying . . . I wouldn’t be surprised to find unreliability an inherited trait.
“Look at me,” I say wryly, gesturing at the swell of my belly.
“I do,” Spencer answers. “I am.” He cups my face in his hands and kisses me lightly. When he pulls away, he is holding an apology between his teeth. “I’m sorry, Cissy.” I squeeze his hand as he gets to his feet. It is not until he takes the key to the bedroom door from his dresser that I realize he has not been asking forgiveness for what he has done, but for what he is about to do. “Dr. DuBois agrees with me—you can’t be left alone. Especially not now, when your emotions are running so high with the pregnancy. He says that you’re at risk to . . . to hurt yourself again.”
“And God forbid I do it where someone else could see. What would people say if they knew Spencer Pike was married to a woman who belonged with the rest of the feebleminded in Waterbury!”
Spencer’s hand strikes my cheek with a sound like thunder, and shocks me into submission. He stares at his palm, as surprised by his actions as I am. I touch the pads of my fingers to my face, feeling the print of him rising like a second skin. “I’m doing this,” Spencer says stiffly, “because I love you.”
The minute the door closes behind him and the lock turns into place, I get out of bed. I try the windows, which are stuck as always. I bang on the door. “Ruby!” I yell. “Ruby, you get me out of here this instant!”
I hear her scratching on the other side of the door. “I can’t, Miz Pike. The professor, he says so.”
I beat my fist one last time against the panels. Thrashing around has only made the close room even hotter; my hair sticks to the back of my neck and my shirt is damp. A princess in an ivory tower, that’s what I am. But if the prince knew, at heart, that I am a toad, would he fight so hard to keep me?
Crawling around on my hands and knees I plug in the electric fan and hold my face close. Immediately I am cooler. I wonder if this is what the air in Canada is like. I wonder if Gray Wolf will worry, when I do not come.
As the fan spins I speak into it, a child’s trick, so that my voice sounds like someone else’s. “Nia Lia,” I say. I am Lia. “N’kadi waji nikônawakwanawak.” I want to go home.
Henceforth it shall be the policy of the state to prevent procreation of idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded or insane persons, when the public welfare, and the welfare of idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded or insane persons likely to procreate, can be improved by voluntary sterilization as herein provided.
—“An Act for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization,” Laws of Vermont, 31st Biennial Session (1931), No. 174, p. 194
“I’m thinking about caramelized onions,” Ruby says.
She sits on a chair beside my bed, my only visitor. Outside, on one of the trees in the backyard, a bird is making a nest. A red thread unwinds from its beak, like a magician doing sleight-of-hand with a handkerchief. “Fine.”
There is nothing sharp in my bedroom. Nothing I could swallow or use to string myself up. I know, because Spencer has had Ruby canvass the space. What he doesn’t understand is that I will not try to kill myself, not yet. Just in case, just in case . . . oh, I cannot finish the sentence, and jinx it.
Ruby flips through another cookbook. “Or else, a pepper crust.”
“Yes,” I say. “Wonderful.”
Ruby frowns. “Miz Pike, I can’t put them both on the roast.”
Spencer is not a tyrant. When he comes home from work, he takes me out for a walk on the edge of our property. He buys me books. He brings me dinner himself, and holds bits of chicken and potato up to my lips as if we are on a picnic. He brushes my hair for me, long lean strokes that make me forget where we are and who I am. But in the morning, when he leaves, he turns the key in the bedroom door. And the only person I see, until he comes home again, is Ruby.
I drag my attention toward her. “You said you need two roasts, for that many guests. Do one of each.” Or serve it raw. I don’t care.
“We don’t have room in the icebox for two roasts, plus a dessert. Some of it, I’ll have to store in the icehouse.” Ruby makes a note to her checklist. “What do you think about a seven-layer cake? Or baked Alaska?”
Her words blend together at the edges. I turn away. The robin has woven the thread through the rest of his nest. It looks like a line of blood.
Why go to all that trouble, when soon he will be flying south for the winter?
“Miz Pike.” Ruby sighs. “Miz Pike?”
The robin is no more than ten feet away from where I am. I have no idea how to get from here to there.
Ruby touches my hand. “Cissy?”
“Go away,” I tell her, and pull the covers over my head.
When a Doctor wants a boat
On the broad highway to float
He will find a place where sapheads congregate
He will chase them to a shed
And at fifty bucks a head
He will freeze his conscience out and mutilate.
—E. F. Johnstone’s “Authority to Mutilate,” from newspaper clippings on sterilization, Henry F. Perkins Faculty File, UVM archives
By the third day of my imprisonment, I have stopped bothering to dress myself. I lay on the bed with my hair a rat’s nest, my nightgown hiked high. Ruby has gone to the butcher’s, Spencer is at the university. The radio warbles band music that beats like my baby’s heart.
When I hear the lock turn at first, I wonder how Ruby has made it back from town so quickly. But even the way Gray Wolf moves through a room is different from anyone else. I sit up, unable to speak as he kneels beside the bed and embraces me. “You told him?”
“No.” He smells of the outdoors. I drink him in.
“He locked you in for something else?” Gray Wolf says, shocked.
Before I can explain, he starts speaking, his words tumbling like avalanche stones to land at our feet. “When you didn’t show up, I thought maybe you had listened to me after all about staying away.”
“I wouldn’t—”
“But it came to me pretty quick that you would still say good-bye. And when you didn’t come, not that day, or the next . . . I went into town. No one there had seen you, either. And then, with the camp . . .”
“What about it?”
He looks at me. “There is no camp, anymore. After I was in town overnight, I
came back to a ghost town. Empty tents, laundry hanging, toys scattered on the ground—like everyone had left in a hurry, right in the middle of everything.”
“Why would they go without taking their things?”
“Because someone made them,” Gray Wolf says flatly.
I think about the old woman who smoked in front of her tent while weaving sweetgrass baskets. About the toddler who drew in the dirt with a stick, and cried when a puppy ruined her artwork. About the girls who giggled behind their hands at the smooth-chested boys. Had they been rounded up? Put into institutions and sterilized? Killed?
“When you went missing . . . and then so did everyone else . . .” He squeezes my hand. “Well, a person’s got to have a lot of anger in him to do that much harm.”
I realize what he is implying. “You’re wrong,” I tell Gray Wolf. “Spencer would never hurt anyone like that.”
“Not even if he found out the truth?”
We stare at each other, a stalemate, until a voice in the doorway breaks our concentration. “And what truth would that be?” Spencer asks softly.
He stands with the gun from the pantry, pointed straight at Gray Wolf. “You son of a bitch,” he says. “I saw you break into the house. I thought you were here to steal something, and I was going to catch you red-handed.” He looks at our joined hands. “But you didn’t have to steal a goddamn thing, did you? It was handed to you on a silver platter.”
“Spencer, stop!”
Before I can get to my feet Gray Wolf has lunged for Spencer, knocking the gun out of his hand. Spencer wrestles him onto the ground, pinning him. He has the advantage of youth and rage; his fist pounds into Gray Wolf’s face until blood runs from his nose and mouth and his eyes roll up in his head.
I pull at Spencer’s arm and he flings me away, so that I fall onto my side. A sharp pain runs beneath my belly and around my back; I wince. “Please! Let him go!”
Spencer hauls Gray Wolf to his feet by the collar of his shirt. “The only reason I won’t kill you is because that would bring me down to your level,” he pants, dragging my real father down the stairs. I follow them, slipping on the blood, trying to ignore the pain shooting up my spine. When Spencer opens the door to toss Gray Wolf out Ruby is on the other side of it. She takes one look at the battered face and screams, dropping her sack of groceries on the porch.
“Lia,” Gray Wolf twists in Spencer’s hold. “Come with me.”
The baby seizes inside me, reminding me of the answer I have to give. “I can’t.”
Spencer shoves him so that he flies off the porch, landing face-first on the ground. “If you are still in Comtosook tomorrow,” he vows, “I will make sure you spend the rest of your life at the State Prison. Say good-bye to your lover, Cissy.”
“He’s not my lover!” I cry, but my voice splits apart on the words. Spencer turns just in time to see me double over, to watch my water break like a lake on the floor.
The immediate need is to lessen the distress of body or mind in those about us. Common humanity calls for that. . . . [n]o hamlet is so small as to be exempt and every state and town has problems of its own concerning its unfortunate, its underprivileged, its handicapped. . . . How can a community, after caring to the best of its abilities for those who suffer from devastating ills, proceed to govern itself in such a way as to better its chances for the future?
—H. F. Perkins, “Eugenic Aspects,” Vermont Commission on Country Life, Rural Vermont: A Program for the Future, 1931
So this is how my mother died: cracked wide as a hinged jaw, pressing a century between her legs, unable to breathe for fear of what might come next. Fire races from my back to my belly, and my insides wring tighter with every contraction. Ruby, just as scared as I am, whimpers at the foot of the bed, hoping to catch a miracle in her outstretched hand.
It is too early—for this baby to come, and for me to leave.
I have been in labor for eleven hours. All this time, Ruby has been by my side. And Spencer has been in his study, drinking. I do not know if he called Dr. DuBois. I am afraid to hear the answer, either way.
“Ruby,” I call out, and she comes to my side. “You listen to me. You promised me that you’d take care of this baby.”
“You’ll be able to—”
“I won’t.” I know it, too—my sight waffles gray at the edges; my arms are so weak I cannot move them. “Tell him about me. Tell him I loved—oh, God!” I break off as another contraction tightens its hold on my belly. Everything inside me spirals low, and I hike myself up to let it happen. “Ruby,” I whisper. “Now.”
My vision goes crimson and the ocean beats in my ears. My body is a tide, and I am swept away in pain, in rapture. I open my eyes and expect to see my mother, waiting for me now that I am on the other side, but instead I find myself looking into the face of my baby.
My baby daughter.
I have spent so long certain that giving birth will be the death of me; I have been sure that this child I carried was a boy. Yet neither of these things has come to pass. In one breathless second, my entire world has been turned inside out.
She cries, the sweetest sound I have ever heard. As Ruby delivers the placenta and cuts the cord, diapers and swaddles the baby, Spencer bursts into the room. His eyes are an unholy red; he reeks of whiskey. “You’re all right,” he says hoarsely. “Cissy, God, you’re all right.” Then he notices the tightly wrapped infant in Ruby’s arms.
“Mr. Pike,” she says. “Come see your little girl.”
“Girl?” He shakes his head; this cannot be.
I hold out my arms and Ruby gives her over. I think of my mother, who did not feel the bliss of this. Now that I have felt this baby, heard her, it seems impossible to think I would have willingly ended my life without watching her live her own. There will be the moment she smiles for me, the moment she strikes out on unsteady legs, the first haircut, the first school day, the first kiss. How could I miss any of that?
I tuck her into the crook of my arm. After eighteen years of struggling to find my place in this world, I realize that I’ve always belonged right here, holding fast to my daughter.
“Her name is Lily,” I announce.
Spencer comes closer and glances down at our baby. At her face—dark as a nut, round as the moon, with the flat features of her grandfather’s people.
When Spencer looks at me, I realize that he has been hoping this baby would be a fresh start, instead of fuel for the fire. “Lily,” he repeats, and swallows.
“Spencer, it’s not what you think. Gray Wolf—that man—he’s my father. You know how heredity works . . . you understand why she looks the way she does. But she’s yours, Spencer, you have to believe me.”
Spencer shakes his head. “Dr. DuBois said you might be irrational after giving birth . . . We should call him, to come look after you.” He lifts the baby out of my arms and turns to Ruby, his eyes flat, his voice even. “Why don’t you take the car and find him, Ruby?”
“Take the . . . ?” She has never driven the Packard, but she knows better than to talk back to Spencer right now. “Yes, sir,” Ruby murmurs, and she sidles past him.
Spencer starts to follow her, still carrying the baby.
“No,” I call out. “Spencer, I want to hold her.”
He stares at me for so long that I imagine he is seeing our history like a movie, looped to lead up to this point. His eyes shine with tears. But then he pulls up a chair beside the bed and sits in it, holding Lily so that I can see her face. He smiles a little, and for just a moment I let myself believe that Spencer might come to understand it is not blood that connects a family, but the love between its members. “You rest, Cissy,” he tells me. “I’ll take care of her.”
We pay full price for the virtues our culture develops at any particular period. . . . The very ethnic and religious prejudices which still live in the community may be forged into the tools by which a demagogue can further divide the population and stultify human development.
&
nbsp; —Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937
In my mind’s eye, I am running. The rain sluices over my face and muddies my feet and yet I know I have to get away from whoever is chasing me. When I look over my shoulder I see him—the same man who has been in my other dreams, with the long brown hair and quiet eyes. He calls out my name, and I turn again, and a moment later he trips and sprawls across the ground. I stop to make sure he has not hurt himself and then I see it—the tombstone with my name on it, the tombstone that I have run right through.
Jerking awake, I feel something heavy on my thigh. Spencer is draped across my lap. At first I think he is asleep and then I realize he is sobbing. His eyes are so bloodshot it frightens me, and his skin gives off the steam of alcohol.
“Cissy,” he says, rising. “You’re awake.”
My body feels as if it has been beaten for days. My legs are too tender to shift on the mattress. Someone—Spencer?—has pressed cold compresses between my thighs to stanch the bleeding. “Lily,” I ask. “Where is she?”
Spencer takes my hand and raises it to his lips. “Cissy.”
“Where is my baby?” I push myself up in the bed.
“Cissy, the baby—she was too young. Her lungs . . .”
I go perfectly still.
“The baby died, Cissy.”
“Lily!” I scream. I try to get off the bed, but Spencer holds me down.
“You couldn’t have done anything. No one could have.”
“Dr. DuBois—”
“He’s doing a surgery in Vergennes. Ruby left word for him to come as soon as he gets home. But by the time she came back the baby was . . .”
“Don’t say it,” I threaten. “Don’t you dare say it.”
He is crying too. “She died in my arms. She died while I was holding her.”
All I want is my baby. “I have to see her.”
“You can’t.”
“I have to see her!”
