by Jodi Picoult
With a bearing that made him think of African priestesses wearing kente headwraps, she glided from the room. “The agency sent her,” Ruby said, watching her go. “She’s been teaching me Swahili. Gorgeous language. It feels like a river running over your brain.”
Ross sat down across from Ruby. “Go ahead. Impress me.”
She concentrated. “Miya . . . no wait, that’s Liya . . .”
Lia?
“Liya na tabia yako usilaumu wenzako,”Ruby said in a rush.
“That means hello?”
“No. It means, ‘Do not blame others for problems you have created yourself.’”
Ross shook his head. “I think I would have started with ‘Hi, my name is Ross.’”
“Actually,” Ruby said, “I asked her to translate that particular sentence.” She reached for the remote control, and turned off the soap opera on the television. “I thought it might help, you know, to have it in my head.” Before I tell you the rest. “You need to explain something first. Why would you want to bring this up, now?”
Ross thought of Lia, haunting the property; of Shelby unrolling those genealogy charts; of the rose petals that filled his pockets. “Because I need to know what happened to someone I love,” he said.
Ruby pulled the afghan higher. “He told me to bury the baby.”
“Spencer Pike?”
She nodded. “You need to understand, the professor— well, I’ve never met anyone like him, since then. He had a way of talking to you and before you knew it you were nodding right along with him without knowing how you’d even come to agree. I always figured that was what made Cissy Pike marry him.” Ruby looked at Ross. “She made herself a friend, an Indian, and they kept sneaking off to see each other.
The professor, he knew something was going on between them. He found the Indian up in her bedroom one day, threw him out, and knocked around Miz Pike . . . which made her go into labor.”
“Was the baby born alive?”
Ruby seemed surprised by the question. “Oh, yes. I’d never attended a birthing before, I was only fourteen. And after all that work, to hear that baby cry . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Professor Pike took the baby, so his wife could get her rest. I was cleaning up inside when he came back and said that the baby had died. He’d left her in the icehouse, and he wanted me to bury her in an old apple crate before his wife woke up.”
“Did he tell you how the baby died?”
Ruby shook her head. “He didn’t tell, and I didn’t ask. I think I knew the answer, already. I went out to the icehouse, and found her there, just like a doll wrapped in her blankets. There was something about putting her in the ground, when she still looked like an angel, that I just couldn’t do. So I put her in the apple crate, but left the lid off. I figured that he could bury that baby himself if he felt a need to.
“By the time I got inside, he was drinking in his study. I went up to bed. And in the middle of the night I heard a baby crying. I got up and went outside, following that noise.” She shivered. “Sometimes, I still hear it, just before I fall asleep at night. I went out to the icehouse, toward that sound. But when I stepped up onto the porch, I bumped into Cissy Pike’s legs.” Ruby’s voice dropped to a whisper. “She was tied to a rafter, her eyes wide open and bright red . . . I screamed. I thought that the professor had killed her—and that I was going to be next. I decided to run away, right then and there— and then I heard it again. That cry. The baby I’d seen dead with my own two eyes was just inside the icehouse, in the apple crate, kicking and screaming.”
“You took her.”
Ruby glanced up at Ross. “I had made a promise to care for that baby, if anything happened. So I took a roast we’d been saving for a dinner party, and put it in the crate instead, and nailed the lid shut, like Professor Pike wanted me to do in the first place. Then I grabbed the baby and ran.”
“Where is she now?” Ross asked.
Ruby glanced away. “The baby was young and sickly. She died on the way to Baltimore.”
Ross thought of Lia, of Lily, of Meredith. And suddenly he understood why Ruby was lying. “You haven’t told her,” he said quietly.
Ruby’s eyes met his, in that small cramped space where no words can fit. After years of keeping this secret, big as Atlas’s burden, Ross had come to offer a shoulder. But just because she’d told him did not mean she was going to be willing to tell anyone else.
Suddenly there was a thunder of footsteps, and the little girl Ross had seen days earlier in her mother’s company rounded the corner. “Granny Ruby, we’re back!”
A moment later, Meredith stood in the doorway, trailed by Tajmalla. “How are you feeling?” she asked Ruby, before her eyes homed in on Ross. “You.”
Ross stood up. He would have introduced himself, but again he was struck by this woman’s uncanny resemblance to Lia Pike. He wondered what she would do if he reached out his hand and touched her cheek to make certain she was real.
“I don’t know who you are, and what business you have with my grandmother,” Meredith said, “but I don’t think—”
“His name is Ross, dear,” Ruby interrupted. “He’s come to take you out to dinner.”
“What?” Ross and Meredith spoke at the same time.
“I’m sure I mentioned it. Last week.”
“Last week you were in the hospital, talking to people who weren’t in the room.”
Ruby smiled tightly at her. “Ross is an old friend . . . of a friend. And I’ve told him so much about you.”
Ross felt Meredith size him up, and find him sorely lacking. Then she looked at the woman she believed to be her grandmother—a woman who’d almost died—and her eyes softened. Was this Ruby’s way of getting rid of Ross? Of pushing him to tell Meredith the truth? Or was this Ruby’s way of making him understand why she hadn’t?
Either way, Ross knew, he would go out with this woman in a heartbeat. If only so that he could sit across the table and stare at a face that he could not forget.
“Will you, um, excuse me?” Meredith said politely, and she turned to Ruby, lowering her voice—but not enough that Ross could not hear. “Ruby, he’s not my type . . .”
“Merry, you have to actually date to have a type.” Ruby smiled. “I have Lucy and Tajmalla to keep me company.”
“Coffee,” Ross heard himself say. “Just a cup.”
Meredith turned to Ruby again. “When you’re all better again, remind me to kill you,” she murmured, and then she turned to Ross. “Just a cup.”
She moved stiffly to his side. Ruby stared at Ross, but she had on her poker face. And as he walked with Meredith out of the living room, two strangers who each thought they knew the other better than they truly did, Ross realized that her perfume smelled faintly of roses.
The only reason she was doing this, Meredith told herself, was because she didn’t want Ruby getting all worked up again. She watched with distaste as Ross swiped empty coffee cups, cassette cases, and cigarette packs off the passenger seat of his ancient rattletrap and tossed them into the backseat. “Sorry,” he said, and he held the door open for her.
It smelled of smoke. Meredith watched him walk to the driver’s side. His hair was long—all one length, nearly to his shoulders; he wore a short-sleeved bowling shirt open over a man’s tank-style T-shirt; his jeans had a hole on the left thigh. He looked like the kind of guy you’d find strumming a guitar for tips in a subway hollow, or writing bad poetry in the rear of a rundown café. The kind of guy who scribbled notes to himself on gum wrappers and stuck them in the pocket of his jacket, only to forget what they were about in the first place. The kind of guy who drove taxis while people like her were busy getting their doctorates. The kind of guy she would never have given a second glance.
The car started right up, a small miracle. “So,” he said, smiling. “Where to?”
“Somewhere close.” Meredith gave him directions to the first Starbucks that came to mind, and when he turned away she told herself that she
had imagined the flash of disappointment in his eyes.
Those eyes. She’d give him that. They made her think of the sort of pool you’d stumble across in a rain forest, so jewel green and rich that once you fell in, you’d be immediately over your head and unable—unwilling—to drag yourself out.
He held up a pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind?”
She did, greatly, but this was his car. She unrolled the window as he lit a cancer stick and drew deeply. It hollowed out his cheekbones even more, casting the planes of his face in stark relief. “Just so you know,” Meredith announced, “I am not in the habit of being fixed up by my grandmother.”
“Of course not.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ross blew a stream of smoke out his window. “That someone like you can get her own dates.”
In spite of herself, Meredith felt heat rise up from her neck. “Like me,” she repeated, immediately putting up her guard. “How do you know anything about me?”
“I don’t,” Ross admitted.
“Then why don’t you just stop making assumptions.” And yet, Meredith thought, hadn’t she been doing the very same thing about him?
He drove with his right hand, the cigarette in his left. The end glowed like a game-show buzzer, an evil eye. “It’s only that you remind me of someone I used to know. She was just as beautiful as you are.”
In her lifetime, Meredith could count on one hand the number of times she had been complimented on her looks. Accomplished, intelligent, groundbreaking—those were all adjectives that had often been tethered to her name. But she’d set her physical attributes on a back burner, choosing instead to play up her mental acuity, and the world had followed her lead. Beautiful, she thought again.
She wondered what had happened to this woman he used to know, if she had died or gotten into a fight with him or walked out of his life. Meredith looked at Ross again across the front seat of the car and this time, instead of seeing a loser, she saw someone who had a story to tell.
To her great surprise, she wanted to hear it.
“So?” Ross asked, and she thought maybe he could read minds, too.
“So what?”
“So . . . are we going in?” He glanced out the window, and she realized that they had pulled into the parking lot of Starbucks. He had a dimple in his left cheek when he smiled.
“Yes. Right.” Ross came around to her side of the car and opened the door for her. They walked into the café to find several people in line in front of them. “Do you know what you’d like?” he asked.
For the first time in years, Meredith didn’t have a ready answer.
Bruno Davidovich had been a pro linebacker, a bouncer, and, in one career aberration, a television chef, before getting into lie detection work. The trick, he’d told Eli, was to never take your eyes off your subject. He kept time with Swiss precision, and always arrived at the exact scheduled hour to perform his tests, which was one reason Eli liked to employ him. The other was that Bruno’s sheer size often scared people into telling the truth.
“Try to relax,” Bruno said to Spencer Pike, as the old man sat trussed up to the polygraph. Pike had agreed to the test when Eli asked, saying he wanted this over and done with, already. Now two pneumograph tubes were attached to his chest and abdomen, two metal plates hooked onto his ring and index finger, a blood pressure cuff around his thin upper arm. “Is today Wednesday?” Bruno asked.
Pike rolled his eyes. “Yes.”
“Is your name Spencer Pike?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a healthy man?”
A pause. “No.”
“Have you ever told a lie?” Bruno asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever told a lie about something serious?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever lied to get out of trouble?”
“Yes.”
Eli listened to Bruno continue through the questions, working his way up to the relevant ones. It was not as if this polygraph test would be used in court, nor was it considered accurate enough to acquit or condemn Pike. But Eli needed to know for his own peace of mind why Spencer Pike seemed to think that he was responsible for the death of a child that hadn’t been killed, yet innocent of the murder of his wife.
“Was the baby born dead?” Bruno was asking.
“No.”
“Did you hold the baby after it was born?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill the baby after it was born?”
Pike’s breath left his body in a thin stream. “Yes,” he said.
“Did you have a fight with your wife before the baby was born?”
“Yes.”
“Did you fight with your wife after the baby was born?”
“No.”
“Did you harm your wife?”
Pike bowed his head. “Yes.”
Bruno stared at Pike. “Did you hang your wife?”
“No,” he answered.
“Thanks,” Bruno said. He pulled the printout from the polygraph and walked into the hallway, Eli following.
While Eli waited, Bruno scored the charts. “So?”
“Look here. When I asked him if he hurt his wife, and he replied affirmatively . . . that was the control question. Then I asked him if he killed his wife, and his physiological response wasn’t as strong as it was to the previous question.”
“He didn’t do it,” Eli said softly.
“Seems that way.” Bruno hesitated. “You want me to scare him up a little bit, see if we get something different?”
Eli glanced through the door. Pike’s watery eyes were fixed on something outside the window. His hands flexed on the arms of his wheelchair. “No,” Eli said. “He’s done.”
It was not until the clerk from behind the Starbucks counter took off his apron and began to swish a mop around the table where Ross and Meredith had settled that she realized they had been sitting there for five hours. “Designer babies are the norm in nature,” she argued. “Look at gorillas, okay? Grayback males are the ones all the ladies go for, because they’ve lived long enough to go gray. So when it comes time to picking your mate, you choose someone who’s going to give your offspring the best chance for longevity.” Meredith felt her brain snapping with the challenge of defending her work, and she knew it wasn’t only because this was her fourth caramel macchiato. “All we’re doing in the lab is making nature run a little more smoothly.”
“But how big a leap is it from discarding embryos because they carry cystic fibrosis,” Ross countered, “to getting rid of anything that doesn’t have blue eyes?”
Meredith thought for a moment. “Well, technically, blue eyes are a one-gene defect, so that would be possible. But most traits that parents would consider undesirable involve hundreds of genes acting in tandem. That was where Hitler was categorically wrong. You can’t pinpoint stupidity or frailty or ugliness at one place on the DNA strand.”
“Not yet,” Ross qualified. “But once you figure that out, it’s only a matter of time before stem cell therapy is used to get rid of those . . . undesirable traits. And suddenly you’ve got a whole world full of Stepford people.”
“First off, there’s a difference between curing someone who is already sick, versus engineering someone who can’t get sick. Second, 99.9 percent of the scientists doing this kind of research are in it for the right reasons—not because they’re megalomaniacs set on creating a master race. Third, you can’t criticize me until you talk to a woman whose three babies have died of leukemia, a woman who’s come to beg for a baby that won’t die this time around.” Meredith shook her head. “I have this sign on my office door that says The Last Resort. I put it there because that’s what the parents who meet with me think they’ve come to. And to have those same parents show up with a healthy baby months later—well, no parent should have to suffer through having a sick child.”
“And who gets to define sick?” Ross swirled a stirrer in his coffee mug. “My
nephew has XP. You ever heard of that?”
“Sure.”
“He’s just the sort of child PGD would have recommended discarding. But Ethan’s the smartest, sharpest, bravest kid I’ve ever met. And even if he can only be smart and sharp and brave for ten years or thirteen years or thirty, who’s to say that time isn’t better than none at all?”
“Not me,” Meredith agreed. “That would be up to the parents.”
“But there are plenty of parents out there who would have gotten rid of Ethan—”
“—Who was not Ethan at the time,” Meredith argued. “Barely a clot of cells.”
“Whatever. The point is, parents draw the line at all different places. What if PGD diagnoses a disease that won’t come out until a person’s thirties or forties? Or if it screens a predisposition to heart disease or cancer . . . which still might never develop in the course of a lifetime? What if you find a way to tell that a child will grow up to be suicidal?” Ross’s gaze slipped away from hers. “Do people have the right to get rid of those embryos too?”
Meredith raised her brows. “And what if deaf parents used PGD to be able to have a child with the same inherited condition? That would be endorsing a disability.”
“You can’t tell me that’s what most of your clients do.”
“No,” she admitted. “But it does happen. And it’s exactly why my job is not evil incarnate. Is it so wrong for a parent to know what her child will be like in advance?”
“How about when a kid finds out that the circumstances of her birth aren’t what she thought they were?” Ross asked, looking at her carefully.
“It’s up to the parents to tell her, or not. If things go well, either way, she’s happy . . . because she’s got parents who love her for the way she turned out.”
“Love has nothing to do with science,” Ross said. “Love’s not a because, it’s a no matter what.”
“But why take the chance?” Meredith argued. “Can you honestly say that there’s one thing about yourself you don’t wish could have been changed for the better before you were born?”
For a moment Ross did not respond. Then he asked, “Have you found the gene for happiness yet?”
