Second Glance

by Jodi Picoult

  A scream rolled inside her. Ross had just left her a suicide note.

  Ross sat in his car, looking at the neat line of Japanese maples and listening to the language of birds and thinking that it was fitting for everything to come to an end at a spot like this. He took a deep breath, aware that what he was about to do would change the lives of many people other than himself. But then, how couldn’t he do it?

  He’d driven around Comtosook for a few hours, until he’d come to a decision and had gotten everything he needed to make it happen. He could say he was doing this for Lia, but it wouldn’t be the truth. Ross was doing it for himself, to prove that there was something—at last—at which he could succeed.

  He reached along the passenger seat, picked up the piece of paper that had Ruby Weber’s address scrawled across it, and then got out of the car.

  The mailbox said WEBER/OLIVER, and Ross found himself wondering if this woman might have a male companion, or for that matter, a female one. He walked up the brick path to the front door and rang the bell.

  “They’re not home.”

  Ross turned to see a neighbor watering the adjacent lawn with a sprinkler. “Do you know where they went?” he asked. “I’m sort of dropping in unannounced . . .”

  “Are you family?”

  Ross thought of Lia. “Yes.”

  The neighbor came closer. “I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said sympathetically, “but Ruby’s in the hospital.”

  Ross wandered the hospital’s administrative floors until he reached an office that had a secretary absent on a coffee break and a doctor’s extra lab coat hanging on a coat hook just inside the door. Costumed, he moved with purpose to the cardiac care unit and asked for Ruby Weber’s chart, which he scrutinized for a few minutes, memorizing her age, her condition, and the room into which she’d been put. When he got there, however, a woman was sitting with Ruby on the edge of the bed.

  Not wishing for an audience, Ross busied himself in the hallway until the woman left the room, holding a little girl by the hand. As they headed away from him, Ross slipped inside. “Mrs. Weber,” he said, “I’d like to talk to you.”

  She had battleship-gray hair and eyes as blue as the center of a flame. Her skin, so finely wrinkled, reminded Ross of rice paper. “Well, that would be a novelty. Being that all your friends seem to want to poke and prod me and take my blood.”

  Ross tugged his arms from the sleeves of his coat, folded it, and set it on a chair. “That’s because I’m not a doctor.”

  He watched her face as she struggled with the decision to push the nurse’s call button and have him evicted . . . or to simply hear him out. After a very long moment, Ruby hiked herself up on her pillows. “Are you a patient? You look like you’re in pain.”

  “I am.”

  “What hurts?”

  Ross thought about how to answer this. “Everything.” He took a step forward. “I want to talk to you about 1932.”

  “I knew it was coming,” she murmured. “That heart attack was the warning.”

  “You were there. You know what happened to Lia.”

  She turned her head in profile, and Ross was struck by how noble she looked. This woman, whose ancestors had been prominently featured in one of Spencer Pike’s degenerate family genealogies, could have been the prototype for a queen, the face on the bow of a ship, the figurehead on a golden coin. “There are some things that shouldn’t be talked about,” Ruby said.

  Well, he couldn’t be blamed for trying. With a sigh, Ross picked up the borrowed lab coat and started to walk away.

  “Then there are some things that shouldn’t have been kept secret in the first place.” She looked at Ross. “Who wants to know?”

  He thought about explaining the development, and the Abenaki protest, and Eli’s investigation. But in the end, he simply said, “Me.”

  “I worked for Spencer Pike. I was fourteen. Cissy Pike was only eighteen, you know—her husband, he was eight years older than she was. That night they’d fought, and she started in having her baby, even though it was three weeks early. Tiniest little girl you ever saw. When the baby died, Miz Pike went a little crazy. Her husband locked her in her room, and I was so scared I just picked up what I could and left.” She pleated the blanket between her hands. “I heard afterward that she had been killed that night.”

  “Did you see her body?” Ross pressed. “Did you see the baby’s?”

  Ruby opened and closed her mouth, as if trying to reshape her words. Color rose to her face, and one of the monitors began to beep more fervently.

  The door swung open. “Granny? What’s that noise? Are you all right?”

  Ross turned, an explanation on his lips. And found himself staring into the face of Lia Beaumont Pike.

  ELEVEN

  “Who the hell are you?” Lia said to Ross, or not-Lia, or whoever she was. She didn’t wait for an answer, though, before she stuck her head back out of the door and screamed for a nurse. Suddenly the room was crowded with hospital personnel, jockeying for position in front of Ruby’s bed and assuring themselves that she was not going into cardiac arrest again. Lia turned her attention to the medical team, soaking up their technical jargon like a sponge. She stood rigidly until the monitor began to sway to its simple rhythm again, the crisis passed. Only then did she let her shoulders relax, her hands loosen from fists.

  Ross slid out of the room, unnoticed. It wasn’t Lia. He knew this, because she didn’t recognize him. There were subtler differences too—this woman’s hair was longer, and curlier, more honey-colored than wheat. She had a little girl with her; there were fine lines of age bracketing her mouth. But those remarkable brown eyes were the same, and the sorrow in them.

  She was too young to be Lia Pike’s daughter. But she was too much of a dead ringer for Lia to be anything but a direct relation.

  The whitewashed nurses and doctors began to file out, a string of pearls. Ross peeked back inside the room. “He’s an old friend,” Ross heard, before the door swung shut and cleaved the conversation in two.

  This much he knew: Ruby Weber was a liar. She was not an old friend of his.

  And she had not left the Pikes without taking that baby.

  Shelby learned that you cannot put out an APB on someone until they have been lost for twenty-four hours; that there are five major routes out of Burlington by car; that if you leave from the airport, you can get to Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York City, Boston, Cleveland, or Albany.

  And that 2,100 people are reported missing, daily.

  Her brother being one of them.

  She had not let go of his note, not since finding it five hours ago. The ink now tattooed the palm of her hand like hieroglyphs, a diary of loss. Eli had come at her call, and had promised to personally search every inch of Comtosook, and lean hard on the cops in Burlington. But Shelby knew that if Ross did not want to be found, he would simply make himself invisible.

  Once when they were in high school, a football jock had killed himself by jumping off the edge of a gorge. The news had been all over the papers; guidance counselors had set up shop in the hallways of school; memorials of flowers and teddy bears decorated the site. Ross had wanted to go see where it happened. “Jesus,” he’d said, over the raging water and the broken rocks. “If you’re going to do it that way, you’re pretty sure.”

  “How would you do it?” she had asked, with a morbid curiosity that, now, she could not believe they’d ever discussed. She also could not remember, although she’d tried so hard her head throbbed, how Ross had answered. Would he use pills, or a gun, or a knife? Would he lock himself in an anonymous motel room, jump from a train bridge, do it in his car?

  When Ross had been in the hospital after the last suicide attempt, she had gone to visit him. Since he was doped up on medication, Shelby was certain he did not remember their conversation. “Try living on dry land,” Ross had said, “when you are a fish.”

  The phone rang, and Shelby flew from Ross’s
bedroom down the hall to her own. “Shelby?”

  “Eli?” Her heart sank.

  “Has he called you yet?”

  “No.”

  “All right, well . . . leave the line free for when Ross calls.”

  She loved him, because he’d said when Ross calls, not if. “Okay,” she promised, and she hung up to find Ethan standing in the doorway of her bedroom, looking miserable.

  “I think it’s my fault,” he confessed.

  Shelby patted the bed so that he’d sit beside her. “It’s not, Ethan, believe me. I used to think that I was the one to blame, too, because I wasn’t doing something Ross needed me to do.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean.” His face twisted. “We were talking about it the other night—dying.”

  Shelby turned slowly. “What did he say to you?”

  “That he was a coward.” Ethan worried the seam of the quilt. “I asked him about his scars. Once I made him remember, maybe he couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

  She felt her shoulders relax. “Ethan, you didn’t give Uncle Ross any ideas. They were in his head long before he got here.”

  “Why would he do it?” Ethan exploded. “Why would he even want to die?”

  Shelby thought for a minute. “I don’t think he wants to die. I think it’s that he doesn’t want to live.”

  They sat in silence for a few seconds. “He also said he would bring me a girl.”

  “He what?”

  Ethan blushed. “To kiss. So, you know, I could see what it was like.”

  “Ah. And where was your uncle planning on finding this girl?”

  “I don’t know. Isn’t there someplace you can pay them to do that stuff?” He shrugged. “I guess there’s a chance that he’s off doing that, instead.”

  Shelby thought of Ross walking the theater district in New York City, soliciting whores in heels and snakeskin skirts to come and kiss a nine-year-old boy. It was a frightening image, but not nearly as terrifying as the mental picture of Ross dying alone. “Let’s hope,” she said.

  For two nights, Ross slept in the backseat of his car, parked in the Wal-Mart lot behind the pools and barbecues. During the days, he haunted the hospital, slipping in to see Ruby whenever her granddaughter—he’d learned that her name was Meredith—was not there. Ross did not press Ruby for information about the Pikes, and Ruby did not volunteer it; in fact, their conversations tiptoed around this by filling in instead all the details they did not yet know: where they lived, what they did, how they’d come to be at this point. Ross discovered that he liked Ruby—she was sharp and outspoken and had memorized the batting average of every player on the Orioles. He knew that they were both getting something out of these daily visits—Ruby was deciding whether or not to trust him with the history she carried like a stone beneath her breastbone, and Ross was meeting the woman who had raised Lia’s baby.

  She would not talk about Lia, or that baby, but she told him about Meredith, a single mother who worked too hard. About Lucy, scared of her own shadow. She laughed when Ross imitated the cardiologist who walked like he had a full diaper. And whenever Ross arrived, Ruby’s face lit up.

  Not unlike Lia’s.

  Meredith left the hospital at three to pick Lucy up at summer camp, and returned at around four-thirty, so Ross timed his visits accordingly. Today, he pushed through the swinging door to find Ruby sitting in a chair by the window.

  “Well, look at you,” Ross said.

  “I was hoping to run a marathon today, but the nurse suggested this instead.”

  “It suits you.” He dropped a small wrapped gift into her lap. “Open it.”

  “You didn’t have to bring me anything,” Ruby demurred. But Ross had brought her a present the last two times he’d seen her—a collection of wild purple loosestrife he’d picked from the side of the highway, a stack of magazines he’d found in someone’s recycling bin. Gifts that she could enjoy . . . but tell Meredith had come from a friendly candy striper.

  Her hands worked the ribbon on the package until she pulled free a deck of cards. “I used to be quite the poker champion in my day,” Ruby said. “I played it with the other girls who worked at the mill, on our cigarette breaks.”

  “I only just learned. My nephew taught me.”

  She began to shuffle, her knotted hands more nimble than he would have thought. “I’ll be gentle, then. What about the pot?”

  “I didn’t realize you indulged,” Ross joked. “Maybe I can find some for next time.”

  “Spoken like a man who’s afraid to put his money where his mouth is.”

  “The truth is, Ruby,” he admitted, “I have about forty dollars to my name.”

  Ruby didn’t react to this; she just kept ruffling the cards and frowning. “It isn’t five-card stud without a prize. I suppose we could play strip poker, but something tells me I’d have the better end of the deal there.”

  “There’s something else we could play for. Something free.”

  “If you’re thinking of sexual favors, I ought to tell you I’m not that kind of woman.”

  Ross caught her eye. “How about the truth?”

  The air stilled around them. Ruby tapped the deck around and around in a square, aligning the edges. “But then nobody wins,” she replied.

  “Ruby,” he said. “Please.”

  She looked at him for a long time. Then she shuffled the cards. “Ante up.”

  “I’ll give you the answer to one question,” Ross began.

  Ruby nodded in agreement, and dealt them each two cards, one facedown. Ross had a ten of jacks, Ruby a queen of hearts. She raised a brow, waiting for him to make an opening bet. “Two answers,” Ross said.

  “I’ll call.” She dealt two more cards faceup. Ross got a two of clubs, Ruby the queen of diamonds.

  “You’re winning,” Ross said.

  “I told you so.”

  He looked at his hand. “Three questions of your choice.”

  Ruby matched again, and continued to deal, until they each had two more cards—Ross a six and ace of clubs, Ruby a pair of kings.

  With the best hand showing, Ruby made the final bet. “I’ll tell you everything,” she said soberly, and Ross nodded. They flipped over the cards they’d had in the hole. Ross looked at her three of hearts. “Does that beat a two of clubs?”

  “Not by itself,” Ruby said. “But your flush beats my two pair.”

  “Even though you have people with crowns? And mine don’t even go in order?”

  “Even though. Beginner’s luck, I guess.” She reached for his cards, and Ross noticed that her hand was shaking. “So,” she said, looking up at him.

  “So,” he answered softly.

  One of the pumps on her IV began to beep, the Ringer’s solution having run low. A nurse would come in to fix it. And by the time she was finished, Meredith and Lucy would have returned. “I’m being discharged tomorrow morning,” Ruby said.

  “Then I’ll just have to come to your house to collect.”

  “I’ll be expecting you.” He stood up and started for the door as the nurse entered the room. “Ross,” Ruby called. “Thank you for the cards.”

  “My pleasure.”

  “Ross!” He turned, his hand on the panel of the door. “I threw that game,” Ruby said.

  Ross smiled. “I know.”

  Shelby was dreaming of blood, thick as molasses, flooding a city street, when the telephone woke her. “Aw, damn,” Ross said when she picked up the receiver. “It’s noon and you’re asleep. I’ve been keeping other hours, so I forgot.”

  She sat up instantly, the sheets pooling around her waist. “Ross? Are you all right? I thought you were dead!”

  “I’m not dead. I’m just in Maryland.” Ross seemed genuinely stunned. “What made you think that?”

  “Oh, gee, I don’t know—a whole catena of misinformation, apparently. The suicide note you left me? The fact that you’ve tried to kill yourself before?”

  “That wasn’t
a suicide note. It was sort of a quick goodbye.” When Shelby was silent, Ross added, chagrined. “Well, I see your point. Listen, by any chance is Eli there?”

  “Eli is out looking for your body,” Shelby said pointedly.

  “Ah. Maybe you could relay a message. Tell him I found Ruby Weber.”

  It took Shelby a moment to wade through the past three days and place the name. “The house girl? What did she tell you?”

  “Nothing,” Ross admitted. “Yet.”

  “When are you coming back?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Silence stretched between them, the thinnest filament. “But you are coming back?”

  Before he could answer, an operator got onto the line, announcing that Ross had run out of money.“Tell Eli,” he said, just before the line went dead.

  Shelby was left holding the phone. In her bedroom, the sun pushed at the backs of the rolled-down shades, threatening to burst through. Shelby threw back the covers and pulled open the curtains, letting the light spill over her bare feet.

  Her brother had not said he was coming back. But then, he hadn’t said he wasn’t, either.

  On the doorstep of Ruby’s house, Ross rang the bell and stuck his hands in his pockets, only to find them filled with rose petals. “I know,” he said aloud. “I’m anxious, too.”

  The woman who answered the door was a six-foot Amazon in scrubs with cornrowed hair that reached her behind. “We don’t want any,” she said, and started to slam the door.

  “I’m not selling anything. I’m here to see Ruby. Tell her it’s Ross.”

  “Ms. Weber is asleep now.”

  A voice, from the belly of the house: “No, I’m not!”

  The home health aide narrowed her eyes and then stepped aside to let Ross into the house. She muttered something under her breath in a language Ross didn’t understand, and was certain he didn’t want to. Ross followed her into a living room, where Ruby sat on a couch with a crocheted afghan covering her legs. “Welcome home,” he said.

  “Welcome to my home.” Ruby turned to the health aide. “Tajmalla, could you give us a minute?”