by Jodi Picoult
Eli started to nod, to tell her that yes, he could not in his wildest imagination picture spending your life looking for something that seemed only to exist previously in your mind. But then he stared at her sea green eyes and the place where her chin came to too sharp a point, and he felt every inch of skin on his body tighten. “I don’t know what I think,” he managed.
Heat rushed Shelby’s face, and she stood abruptly, muttering something that sounded like xerothermic as she struggled to raise a window that was stuck. “Here,” Eli said, and he went to help her. They stood side by side at the sash, their shoulders touching. Eli yanked the window up with too much force, and a cool draft fell like a guillotine between them.
“Thank you.”
Eli stared at her. “My pleasure.”
Whatever else Eli was going to say—and at that moment he truly could not have formed words, much less the letters of his own name—was lost in a hail of footsteps bounding down the stairs. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know anyone was asleep upstairs.”
“Ethan wasn’t asleep,” Shelby said, as the boy came into the room. He was a small kid, skinny, wearing far too many damn clothes for this time of year. A hat shaded his eyes, but even with his face half-covered Eli could see how the boy’s skin was as milky as china. One hand was bandaged, and the other was blistered in spots, as if it had been plunged into boiling water. He had his mother’s skittish smile.
“Ethan, you can go out,” Shelby ordered.
“But it’s raining—”
“Not anymore. Go.” She waited until the door closed and the throaty roll of skateboard wheels scraped the driveway. Then she turned to Eli and crossed her arms, a completely different woman from the one he’d seen moments ago. “That’s my son.”
Eli watched her fingers bite into the skin of her own arms. Her posture was so rigid he thought she might snap in half.
“You’re thinking there’s something wrong with him,” she accused.
He wanted to run his hand down her spine. He wanted to hold her between his palms until she went soft again. “Actually,” Eli said, “I was thinking he looked like you.”
The sound was as round as a nut, as tiny as a pebble, but it rang in Spencer Pike’s skull. No matter how many pillows he piled over his head, he could hear the cry of that baby. Spencer writhed, scratching at his ears until blood ran into the collar of his pajamas.
“Mr. Pike! Oh, sweet Jesus. I need some help in here!” the nurse screamed into the intercom.
It took two orderlies to pull Spencer’s arms down to his sides and secure them to the bed with straps, like they did with Joe Gigapoulopous, the delusional man two doors down from Spencer who tried to eat his own fingers every now and then. “The baby,” Spencer gasped, as the nurse dabbed at the deep furrows around his ears. “Get rid of the goddamned baby.”
“There is no baby here. You must have been having a nightmare.”
By now, tears were streaming down his face. That sound, it was splitting his head in two. Why couldn’t they hear it? “The baby,” he sobbed.
The nurse injected him with a tranquilizer. “This will help.”
But it wouldn’t. It would put him to sleep, where that baby would be waiting for him. He lay very still, staring at the ceiling, as the drug slid through his system. He felt his hands relax, and then his legs, and finally his jaw fell slack. “When will I die?” Spencer thought, but it turned out he had spoken aloud.
The nurse stared at him, her brown eyes steady. Cissy had had brown eyes. “Soon,” she said gently.
Spencer sighed. Her answer was more powerful than this sedative; it eased him like no medication ever could. Truth could do that to a man.
Men, Meredith figured, were an accessory, like a belt or purse or shoes. You didn’t necessarily need one to complete your look. Granted, if you walked around barefoot you got a few odd stares every now and then, but the important parts of you were covered. And after a string of meeting men she really didn’t want, and wanting men she couldn’t seem to meet, the scientist in Meredith had simply said to cut her losses.
She was driving home, now, at nearly 11 P.M. The commute from the office—forty-five minutes, without traffic—was the only time of her day when she let the gates free in her mind and allowed herself to reflect on anything but the task at hand. Tonight, by studying cells from four viable blastospheres belonging to a family carrying sickle-cell anemia, Meredith had avoided accompanying a colleague to a dinner honoring cutting-edge scientific companies. Martin was definitely her type—tall and cerebral, with the long fingers of a researcher. In her first year of working at Generra, Meredith’s crush on Martin was so severe that sometimes after speaking to him at the copy machine she’d have to hide in the bathroom until her cheeks stopped flaming. Her prayers were answered a year ago, or so she thought, when her boss sent her to a funding dinner with Martin, who drank enough champagne to float a horse and introduced both her and her breasts to the master of ceremonies.
It was raining up and down the whole East Coast, or at least that was Meredith’s guess from the ache in her leg. Her left one—the one she’d been having set in an ER when she was told the news about Lucy’s existence—was as good a barometer as any meteorologist’s tool. As she got off at her exit, she drew her thoughts away from her nonexistent love life and focused instead on Lucy, who had been taken off the Risperdal but hadn’t shown any signs of improvement. If anything, her daughter had gotten more fanciful—speaking at the breakfast table to people who were not there, buckling the seat belt beside her around nothing at all. Meredith was an aficionado of scientific fact, but told herself that her daughter was genetically predisposed to fiction. She, who had made a living out of defining “normal,” had broadened the category so that it would include Lucy.
She pulled into the driveway. The only light on in the house was in the parlor; everyone had already gone to sleep. Meredith got out of the car stiffly and put her weight on her good leg. For a moment she stopped breathing, struck by the sheer beauty of a night littered with stars. She spent so much time looking at the most minute elements of humanity that she sometimes forgot how simple the world could be.
Meredith let herself in with her key and found Lucy on the stairs, fully dressed and staring straight ahead, a suitcase at her feet. “Luce?” she said, but her daughter didn’t respond.
“She can’t hear you.”
Ruby was descending the steps. Her long white hair was a cloud behind her; her hands clutched the banister for support. “She’s sleepwalking.”
Sleepwalking? Lucy’s eyes were open. “Are you sure?” Meredith asked her grandmother. “Did you ever sleepwalk?”
Ruby bent toward Lucy and helped her to her feet. “I used to know someone who did.”
Lucy followed Ruby upstairs, docile as a lamb. Meredith went after them, and tripped over the forgotten suitcase. It fell open at her feet, spilling its contents. Inside were dozens of dolls—dolls that ate or cried or swam, dolls Lucy had not played with for a few years, dolls that stared up at Meredith with their glassy eyes like so many broken babies.
There is a feeling that runs like a current through the heart when you pull up to the house that holds people you love and see a police cruiser sitting outside. Ross barely slammed his car into park before racing up the driveway and throwing open the door, shouting Shelby’s name.
She stood up immediately. “Ross!” He looked at her and at Ethan, who’d come up from behind Ross, on his skateboard, and then he looked at the cop standing in the living room.
Belatedly, he became aware of Shelby taking in his ruined clothes and wet hair. She must have called the police because she was worried about him—something his sister would definitely do. “It looks worse than it is,” Ross said, thinking that if she could see how scarred he was on the inside she’d be horrified. “But I’m fine. You can call off the search party.”
At that, Eli Rochert stepped forward. “Actually,” he said, “I came here asking you to join it.”
Ross wanted to be in his bedroom at Shelby’s place, with the lights off and a bottle of Jameson’s at his side, as he carved Lia’s name into his arm with the tongue of a knife. Maybe he would bleed, maybe it would hurt—although Ross would bet on neither of these. He knew what no one else seemed to be able to figure out—he was already dead; his body just hadn’t caught up to the rest of him.
Sitting in the interrogation room at the Comtosook Police Department with Eli Rochert and his behemoth dog, he supposed, offered torture of a different sort. Scattered across the conference table were evidentiary pictures of Lia’s body after the hanging, boots she had worn, even the dress that she’d been wearing when she appeared to him. Seeing each of these was a cut deeper than any Ross could have made himself.
“You, uh, said when we last met that you had started to investigate the history of Cecelia Pike’s death,” Eli said.
“Lia,” Ross murmured. “She likes to be called Lia.”
The cop resisted rolling his eyes, but just barely. Well, fuck him, Ross thought. I don’t want to be here either.
“You . . . saw her, then?” Eli asked.
“You’re not going to believe me if I say I did, so why are you even asking?”
“Look. I’m not crazy about consulting a psychic—”
“I’m not a psychic,” Ross interrupted. “Sensitive, maybe.”
“Jeez, no matter what you’re doing in this state, it always comes back to Civil Unions.”
“Not that kind of sensitive.” Ross couldn’t stand it anymore; he turned over one gruesome autopsy photo of Lia so that it was no longer visible. “The kind of person who’s receptive to spirits. This one, in particular.”
Eli hesitated before speaking. “Mr. Wakeman, a week ago, you begged me to reopen a seventy-year-old case. Against my better judgment, I did. And I’m interested enough to keep digging, even though it’s something I have to do on my own time, instead of the department’s.” He flattened his hands on the table. “You indicated there might be foul play involving Spencer Pike. What made you say that?”
“The Abenaki claim to the land. Pike’s absolute fit when I brought it up. And the fact that there was a ghost at all— from everything I’ve been taught, ghosts only come back for a reason. I assumed that if there was a ghost on the property, it was a Native American—maybe even the one accused of murder. But the one I found turned out to be Lia.” He turned away. “I’m sorry you wasted your time.”
“It may not have been a waste,” Eli said. “According to what you just told me, if Lia Pike came back as a ghost, then something about her death probably didn’t sit right.”
Her face flashed in front of Ross’s eyes, and he got to his feet, intent on leaving before he fell apart in front of this cop. “Being murdered when you’re eighteen usually doesn’t sit right. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Officer Rochert . . .”
“Can I show you something, before you go?” Eli handed Ross a piece of paper, one he recognized as a crime-scene report dated from the 1930s. “Pike says Gray Wolf hanged her. According to the officers on the scene, there was sign of a struggle. There are photos of the porch where the body was found hanging, photos of footprints, photos of a broken window in the master bedroom. I’ve got DNA matching the victim’s blood, plus DNA from two different males who were also placed at the scene.”
Ross swallowed around the brick in his throat. “Sounds like you’re well on your way to proving Pike right.”
Eli continued as if Ross had not spoken at all. “But there’s also evidence that doesn’t add up. Things that make me wonder if you aren’t right about Spencer Pike getting rid of Gray Wolf. And possibly his own wife.”
“Listen.” The room was swimming in front of Ross. “I can’t talk about this right now.”
“I don’t want you to talk. I want you to help.”
Ross looked up. “I’m not a detective.”
“No,” Eli agreed quietly. “But you apparently know how to find things the rest of us can’t see.”
SEARCH INVENTORY: Pike Homicide, Sept. 19, 1932
SEIZED FROM THE ICEHOUSE PORCH:
Noose, cut
Leather pouch
Pipe
Photographs: sawdust on porch w/footprints, body cut down
SEIZED FROM VICTIM:
Boots
Dress
Underwear/sanitary napkin
Photographs: autopsy
SEIZED FROM MASTER BEDROOM:
Photographs: broken glass window
Photographs: interior of house—ransacked
List of names—dinner party following week
Sheets, pillows, coverlet, nightgown—stained
Swaddling blankets
Metal basin
By the time Ross got home, it was daybreak. He walked inside, thanking a God he no longer believed in that Shelby did not seem to be around. Making a beeline upstairs, he shut the door of his room behind him, crawled into bed fully clothed, and finally let himself go to pieces.
Most of the time when Ross thought about his life, he imagined living it alone. The very concept of a family did not appear to be in the cards for him. He was not commitment-shy, or unattractive, or too free-spirited to settle; but whenever he tried to give his heart away, he found himself holding it out to a person who was no longer there.
There were women. The waitress in Duluth who took him home with the extra beef stew one night; the soccer mom who had never been told by her businessman husband that she was worthy of more than that life; the scarred breast-cancer survivor who had to be reminded how beautiful she still was. But these were women who needed him for a night or two, who dropped him the moment they saw how much Ross needed them. After all, who could love someone like him—a man who sometimes could not get out of bed even though he had not slept for weeks, a man who had tried to kill himself so many times that he believed he was invincible, a man who could not even love himself?
Ross pulled a pillow over his head. He wanted a woman who would feel about him the way he felt about her—as if she’d been missing something until they met, willing to give up everything to follow him from one world to another, certain that every disastrous second she’d spent alone had only been leading up to this moment.
He wanted a woman who did not exist.
There was a knock on his door, which Ross ignored. Maybe Shelby would think he was asleep. He ducked further beneath the covers.
“Hey.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, her hand resting gently on the blanket covering his shoulder. “I know you’re not asleep.”
He tugged down the blanket. “How?”
“Because you never sleep.”
“There’s always a first time,” Ross said.
He watched Shelby pleat the edge of the sheet into a fan, then let it fall apart. “What did the police want?”
“Nothing.”
“He came all the way here, and took you all the way to the station, for nothing?”
“Leave me alone, Shelby. If you want to be a mother, go practice on your son.”
“My son isn’t the one who’s crying.”
Ross touched his fingers to his cheeks—Christ, he hadn’t even noticed. “I can’t do this now.”
“Ross, talk to me . . .”
He fell onto his back, his arm covering his eyes. “Shel, look. I haven’t found out that I have six weeks to live, unfortunately. I didn’t commit a felony. I just had a really shitty night that made me remember why it’s no use falling in love. So go back to your room or the library or wherever and let me lick my wounds, all right?”
“You got dumped by that woman you’ve been seeing?”
“I haven’t been seeing anyone.” But he had. Just not in that way.
“Who is she?”
Ross came up on an elbow. “She,” he said, “is the ghost of a woman who was killed seventy years ago.” He had the satisfaction of watching Shelby’s jaw drop, and he sank back onto the pillows. “Exactly.”
&n
bsp; “You saw a ghost?”
“I saw a ghost. I touched a ghost. I kissed a ghost.”
“You kissed a ghost?”
“I fell so hard for a ghost that everything inside me is still black and blue.”
“Ross, come on—”
“Don’t, Shelby. Just don’t. I’m absolutely, a hundred percent, totally aware of what did and did not happen to me out there.”
His voice was riding high, his eyes wild. “Ross,” she said gently, “there’s no such thing as ghosts.”
He turned on her. “How do you know? Maybe if you can’t see something, it doesn’t mean it’s not out there. It only means your eyes aren’t tuned quite right, or it’s too well camouflaged, or you just haven’t been lucky enough to find it yet.”
He was speaking of himself, but to Shelby, he might as well have been speaking of Ethan, and what the future might hold for the scientists searching for a cure to XP. She suddenly understood that whether or not Ross’s ghost was real, right now, it was what he needed to believe. What he needed her to believe.
She had been there, herself.
Ross pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “God, maybe I am crazy. Maybe I should have myself locked up.”
“You’re no crazier than anyone else. We all do it.”
“See ghosts?”
“Fall for someone who doesn’t exist.” Shelby stroked his hair. “Infatuation’s just another word for not seeing clearly. When you start to love a person—that’s when they become real.”
Ross turned toward his sister on a sob. “She left,” he choked out. “She left me.”
Shelby bent low, kissed him on the crown of his head. “Then find her,” she said.
Date: September 21, 1932
Time: 1:15 PM
Interview of: Mrs. Wilmetta Sizemore
Interview by: Officer Duley Wiggs
Location: Comtosook Police Department
Q. When did you last see Cissy Pike?
A. At the Ethan Allen Club, a week ago, when we were having dinner with our spouses and her father, Harry Beaumont. I’ve known Cissy for years; she was the perfect wife, so enamored of Professor Pike and so clearly anticipating the birth of her baby.
