Second Glance

by Jodi Picoult

  Ross tilted his head. “You love her?”

  Eli nodded. “Yeah. I think so.”

  “If she moved to Burlington, would you move?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How about if she moved to Seattle?”

  Eli hesitated, and then felt something loosen in his chest. “You know, I would.”

  “How about if she moved somewhere even harder to get to?”

  “Like New Zealand? Yeah,” Eli said. “When someone loves you up one side and down the other like that, you make every effort to stick around.”

  “Well, what if the place she moved to was even harder to get to than New Zealand? A place you couldn’t get to by boat or by plane or even by fucking rocketship? What if she went somewhere and the only way you could follow was to put a bullet through your head or hang yourself from your closet rack or run your car in a closed garage? I did it because I loved someone up one side and down the other like that,” Ross said. “Not in spite of it.”

  He stood suddenly, and in the splash of sunlight Eli was temporarily blinded. “I’m going to see what the hell is keeping her,” Ross muttered, and went inside.

  Eli rested his head on his knees. Trained as a cop, he’d always thought of suicide as an escape—not something you might run toward. He thought of Shelby, and the way she’d stared at the autopsy photo of Lia Pike. Is that what happens when you hang yourself?

  Eli’s mouth went dry. He scrambled to his feet just as Ross burst through the doors. “Meredith,” he said. “She’s gone.”

  On the bus from Montpelier to Comtosook, Meredith had made up lives for the passengers. The teenager sleeping on the camel-hump of his backpack was a runaway setting off to find adventure in the veins of the mountains along the Appalachian Trail. The old man with a white handlebar mustache and a wrinkled seersucker suit was an alchemist who’d spent years seeing gold in everything his eyes lit upon. The twitchy young mother with an infant in her arms was not a mother at all, but a maid who’d stolen the baby out of her crib, and was spiriting her to Maryland.

  Ruby was not her grandmother; her grandmother had died in 1932. Meredith’s ancestors did not come from Acadia and France; they had been here all along. And her grandfather had not been some boy who’d broken Ruby’s heart and left her pregnant—the lie she’d been told all these years. Her grandfather had been a scientist, studying the way substandard traits passed from generation to generation, and trying to prevent it.

  The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  From the bus station in Comtosook, Meredith walked to Shelby’s house. And there, Shelby had told her the truth— from the horrifying results of her grandfather’s eugenics movement to the fact that Spencer Pike was alive, if not well, in a nursing home ten miles away. She gave Meredith all the details that her brother had conveniently left out: Cecelia Pike’s brutal death, Gray Wolf’s disappearance, Az’s confession just a week before. She knew now why the Abenaki were fighting so hard for that ragged piece of land. It was not about ancestry, and it was not about property. It was about trying to get back the essence of something that was irretrievably lost.

  Once, a heartbroken couple had come to Meredith’s office, asking her to help them conceive a daughter. They had three boys, but their baby daughter had died recently of SIDS. They wanted to know, before they went through with a pregnancy, that they’d be getting another little girl.

  Meredith had refused to accept them as patients. Not because she wouldn’t have been able to do what they asked, but because she didn’t think they’d be satisfied with the results. They wanted a replica of the child who had died, and science couldn’t offer that kind of miracle.

  Yet.

  Would her grandfather, in the same circumstance, have taken their case? Science was at the mercy of the people who created it. She was suddenly reminded of her conversation at the Starbucks with Ross. For all the greater good that genetic diagnosis and replacement therapy could do, there was still a line that had to be drawn—one which hadn’t been, yet, by the government or any ethics organization: who got to choose which traits were worth keeping, and which should be eliminated from the human genome? A scientist, of course. But a scientist like Meredith . . . or one like Spencer Pike?

  She looked down at the directions to the nursing home that Shelby had given her, along with the leave to borrow her car. Left at the light, another right, and she would be there. If Pike was alive, she didn’t understand why Ross and his detective friend hadn’t taken his blood for a paternity test— which, by definition, would have been scientifically simpler. Was it because they had wanted her to meet Az Thompson, whose sacrifice had been far greater than Meredith’s could ever be? Or was it because no one even wanted to lay eyes on a man who’d done as much damage as Spencer Pike?

  The nursing home was stately, an old winged Colonial flanked by oak trees and brick paths. Meredith walked up the stairs and into the lobby. Although the décor was pleasant and sunny, there was a stench in the room that seemed to seep from the cracks between the floor tiles. It was not the smell of death, but regret—sweeter, more pungent. It caught in the folds of Meredith’s clothes, and weeks from now, even after several washings, she would put on this blouse and pair of khakis and breathe it in.

  A nurse wearing a stethoscope with a dinosaur clinging to its thick rubber vein sat at a desk. “Can I help you?”

  “I’m here to see someone.”

  She smiled. “You looked a little young to be checking in. Who is it?”

  “Spencer Pike.”

  The nurse furrowed her brow. “He’s not doing very well today . . .”

  “I’m . . . I’m a relative,” Meredith said.

  Nodding, the nurse gave her a pass to clip to her shirt and gave her directions down the hall. Spencer Pike’s room looked no different from anyone else’s—a row of hospital doors with cheery smile stickers pasted around the name of the resident inside. It reminded Meredith of nursery school, and for a moment she was grateful that her mother had not had to go through this regression before sliding into death. She pushed open the door.

  The shades were drawn, the lights off. A respirator rasped somewhere to her left, and all she could see were the most amorphous shapes. Stepping gingerly around the largest one, which must have been the bed, Meredith walked to the other side of the room and opened the curtains just a slit.

  Spencer Pike was frail and hairless, embryonic. A white sheet covering him only emphasized the bones of his spine. She walked toward the bed, expecting to feel resentment or outright hatred or even some sad kinship—but there was absolutely nothing. This man could have been a stranger.

  What made a family wasn’t blood, or genes, or what was passed down through either of them. You only had to look at Meredith and her mother and Ruby to see. You only had to look at Spencer Pike, dying alone, to know.

  He rolled in his morphine sleep, catching his arm on some of the clear tubing that connected to his upper torso and face. He’ll strangle himself, Meredith thought, and immediately on the heels of this: Would that be a bad thing? But she found herself reaching to untangle the lines.

  His hand came up slowly, grabbing her wrist. When Meredith looked down, she realized that he was awake and crying. He tried to speak, but the oxygen feed over his mouth made it impossible to understand what he was trying to say. She hesitated, and then pulled the clear funnel away from his face.

  “I’m sorry,” Spencer Pike said. “I am so sorry.”

  Meredith froze. “It’s all right,” she murmured, attempting to pull away.

  “Don’t go. Please don’t go yet.”

  She swallowed, then nodded. Drawing a chair closer to the bed, she sat down beside her grandfather.

  His breathing grew more erratic, and a wash of pain crossed his face. “Cissy,” Spencer Pike said, “will you wait for me?”

  Cissy. Cecelia. You look like someone I used to know. Meredith had forgotten the obvious—if she truly did look like her deceased grandmother, then
this man would be the person most inclined to take notice.

  “Yes, Spencer,” she replied evenly. “For as long as it takes.”

  He lay back after that, falling into an uneasy sleep. Meredith kept her promise. She sat with her grandfather as his lungs rattled and pumped. She sat until the symphony of machines that had been playing a swan song became a single note in her head. She sat until the nurses came to give Spencer Pike his next dose of morphine; until they convinced Meredith that it was all right for her to leave him now, because he’d passed away.

  Tuck Boorhies was cranky, and deservedly so. He’d been paged from a golf game by Eli, and told to be at the Montpelier lab in an hour and a half. If he didn’t show up, Eli promised to arrive with a warrant for his arrest for the obstruction of justice.

  He was all bluster, Tuck knew that, but something in Eli’s voice—as though he were on the edge of the cliff and about to look over the rim—made him even more curious to know what was up than to find out if he’d finish his game under par. Eli had been pacing at the door when he arrived, and herded Tuck into his photography lab to enlarge another one of those prints from the murder. This one, though, zoomed in on the feet. Tuck had pumped up the contrast on Adobe Photoshop, and damn if there weren’t footprints on the damp sawdust that seemed to match some of the other prints, a woman’s. But even more interesting was the long drag mark through the shavings.

  He looked up from the lab stool where he was sitting, at the ready with an instant camera. “What are we doing again?” he asked Eli, who was rigging a Hefty trash bag to a hook in the ceiling of the borrowed room. Inside the bag was about three-quarters of a pint of water. On the ground was a load of sawdust Eli had secured from the nearest horse barn.

  “According to Wesley Sneap, a human urinary tract system can hold about four hundred millileters of fluid, max,” Eli said.

  “Which is important because . . .” Tuck raised one eyebrow.

  “Just give me a hand here, will you?” He climbed onto a free stool, motioning to Tuck to shoulder the weight of the waterbag while he made a sturdy knot at the hook above. “He said that at the moment of death, there’s a loss of nerve stimulation to the anal and ureteral sphincters, causing incontinence.”

  “Good to know.”

  Eli kicked some of the shavings around under the garbage bag, then stepped back to observe. “Okay, Tuck,” he said. “Pop my bladder.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “My bladder.” Eli pointed overhead.

  Tuck had learned that you didn’t upset guys who got to carry a gun as part of their paycheck. “Whatever,” he murmured, and he pierced the Hefty bag with his pen.

  They both watched the trickle and stream of water, matting down the sawdust. It covered their footprints, blurring the edges. When the bag was empty, the sawdust that had been stained wet beneath it was about the size of a manhole cover. “Shoot that for me, will you, Tuck?” Eli asked, as he walked out the door of the lab.

  Tuck glanced at Eli’s holster, lying on its side on one of the examination tables, and then down at his Polaroid camera. Shrugging, he took a few photos.

  As they rainbowed up, Eli came inside again, hauling a wooden crate. “So?”

  “So it looks like a puddle. What did you expect?”

  Eli took the photograph out of Tuck’s hand and stared at it, then placed it beside the print Tuck had just enlarged. “Is it just me, or do those puddles not match?”

  They didn’t. The darkened spot of wet sawdust in the new Polaroid was nearly twice as small as the one in the black-and-white enhancement. Before Tuck could respond, however, Eli cracked open the wooden crate and grunted as he hoisted out a two-foot by one-foot block of ice. He carried this to the sawdust, tipped it so that it was vertical, and shoved it into the center of the puddle, creating a long, familiar drag mark in the sawdust. Then he pulled up a stool beside Tuck’s, and took a folded New York Times crossword puzzle out of his back pocket.

  “What are you doing?” Tuck asked.

  “Four across.”

  “No.” He waved at the setup in the middle of the room. “Over there.”

  Eli followed his gaze. “I’m waiting,” he replied.

  Ethan was tying his sneakers when he heard the scream. He ran down the hall, to the room where Lucy and her mother were staying, and pushed open the door.

  She was sitting up on the cot, shaking like crazy. “Lucy?” Ethan said, creeping closer. “You okay?” He looked around the room. Her mother was nowhere to be found. Well, it was only midnight. Maybe she hadn’t gone to bed yet. “Can you breathe?”

  She nodded, and hands relaxed their death grip on the blanket. “Did I wake you?”

  “Nah, I was getting up anyway.” Ethan scuffed his sneaker on the carpet. “Where’s your mom?”

  She looked around, as if just noticing that her mother wasn’t there. “I don’t know. Your mother tucked me in.”

  Ethan grinned. “You see one mother, you’ve seen them all.”

  She smiled, but just a little. Ethan tried to remember what his mom did for him when he had nightmares. “Milk,” he announced. “You want me to get you some?”

  “Why would I want milk?”

  “I don’t know. If you stick it in the microwave it’s supposed to make you go back to sleep. That’s what my mother says if I freak out when I’m sleeping.”

  “I bet you never freak out.”

  “Sure I do. Everyone has nightmares.”

  “What are yours about?”

  “Getting stuck in the sun,” Ethan said flatly. “How about yours?”

  “Ghosts,” Lucy whispered.

  They stood in the still of the house for a moment, which suddenly seemed cavernous. All in all, Ethan knew, it felt better just then to be standing there with someone. “Well, I’m not scared of ghosts.”

  “I’m not scared of the sun,” Lucy answered.

  He should have told her more. Ross beat himself up mentally once again, certain that he was responsible for Meredith’s disappearance. She’d been gone now for hours, not even putting a call in to make sure Lucy was all right. Maybe she just needed time to think.

  Maybe she didn’t want to think at all.

  He smacked his head lightly against the trunk of the tree on which he was leaning. What he would have liked, now, was five minutes in the past. Five minutes to talk to Meredith Oliver and make her see that he understood what it was like to wake up and realize your life had turned out different from the one you once imagined you’d be living.

  Regret hung from the hem of everyone’s lives, a rip cord reminder that what you want is not always what you get. Look at himself, outliving Aimee. Or Az, trying to find his daughter, only to have her wind up dead. Look at Shelby, with a child who was dying by degrees. Ethan, born into a body nobody deserves. At some time or another, everyone was failed by this world. Disappointment was the one thing humans had in common.

  Taken this way, Ross didn’t feel quite so alone. Trapped in the whirlpool of what might have been, you might not be able to drag yourself out—but you could be saved by someone else who reached in.

  Maybe that was why he’d gone to find Meredith in Maryland.

  Heroes didn’t leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn’t wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else’s. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.

  When Ross lifted his face, he was not surprised to find rose petals drifting down from the night sky. He closed his eyes, smiling, but became distracted by the cry of a baby. Maybe it was a bobcat in the hills, or an animal mating. But it came again: thin, wild, more human. Walking into the clearing, he found Meredith crouched down on the ground.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked, and when she stood—her hands and nails dark with d
irt—Ross realized that it was not Meredith at all.

  Who’s calling me? I look up, and around, worried that I have already been found out. But there is no one, only my own suspicion, which seems broad and barrel-armed as these old oaks. I bend down and pull aside more tangles and thicket, looking. Where has he hidden her; where can she be?

  I heard a cry, I know I did. Once, the Klifa Club held a lecture with an African jungle zoologist, someone who had come to meet Spencer. The zoologist said that in nature, mothers know the sounds of their offspring. Put a clot of hippos in a wading pool, and a mama and baby will find each other. Stick a giraffe across a savannah and it will find its way home. The fetus hears a voice in the womb, and comes out able to pick its mother from a host of others.

  My hands are bleeding. I have searched beneath every stone, behind every tree. Then I hear her again, silently calling to me.

  This time all my senses narrow, and I find myself standing, turning, walking toward the icehouse. I push open the door, shuffle through the sawdust. And see her.

  Her eyelashes are as long as my pinky nail. Her cheeks are milky blue.

  Lily. Lily Delacour Pike.

  Even after I put her back inside her crate, I can feel the still weight of her in my arms. There will always be something missing.

  He will never listen to me; he will never understand. The only way to show him what he’s done is to do the same to him. To take away what he wants most in this world.

  There’s one block of ice that’s thinner than the others. I can tip it upright, I can drag it out. I tie the knot around my neck first. Then I balance on this makeshift stepstool, and I fix the other end to the beam. Wait for me, I think, and I jump after my baby.

  It hurts more than I thought, the heaviness of my own life pulling me down along with gravity. My lungs reach the bursting point, the world begins to go black.

  But then she cries. And cries. Through the window of the icehouse, as I turn on this rope like a crystal ornament, I see her tiny fist wave back and forth. She has come back to me, when I am already gone.

  Lily, I scream in my head, and I try to claw at the rope, to pull it free from the beam. But I have done too good a job. Lily. I kick with my feet at the posts, at anything. I scratch but only reach my chest; my arms can’t seem to make it any higher.