by Jodi Picoult
Oh, God, I cannot lose her twice.
She will hear my voice, even though I cannot speak aloud. She will find me across a savannah; she will swim to me in the deepest pool.
I make my baby the promise my own father made to me, before he had a chance to know me: I will find you.
As she disappeared before his eyes again, Ross realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a long, silent rush. Curtis Warburton would have said that what he’d witnessed was a residual haunting, a repetition of a significant event played over and over like a video loop. Curtis would have said that the spirit wasn’t even there, just the energy that it had left behind. However, Ross, who had watched firsthand, knew this was not the case. This had been no imprint, no impression made in time. Lia’s ghost had come back again, trying to find something.
But she hadn’t been searching for her baby, and she hadn’t been looking for Ross. It was not until after the vision dissipated that he realized why she had returned: on the other side of the clearing, her face striped with shock and disbelief, was Meredith Oliver, who also had seen and heard everything Lia needed to say.
TWELVE
For ten minutes, Meredith sat in silence, while the night closed like a fist around her. Her insides had gone to water, and Meredith knew she would not be capable of moving, thinking, breathing anytime soon. She was suddenly aware that this universe—big as it seemed—was still too small to contain possibilities beyond her own imagination.
Like a ghost.
Could insanity come on so quickly, like the flu . . . or a flipped circuit breaker? Her mind could not even process the vision. It was like being told that the sun would not appear in the morning: Meredith’s balance of reality had been tipped over, a skyscraper that turned out to be only a house of cards.
Yet this had not been smoke and mirrors; this was not some lunatic’s rant. Meredith had seen a ghost with her own eyes. A woman who had vanished just as quickly as she’d come. A woman who looked exactly like her.
Meredith thought of all the times she had told Lucy there were no such things as ghosts. Everything she had believed was now cast into doubt—if she had been mistaken about this, after all, what else had she gotten wrong? Maybe the sky was not really blue, maybe science did not hold all the answers, maybe she was not happy with her life. She could be certain of only one fact: the world she’d awakened in this morning was very different from the one she was living in now.
She found herself leaning down to touch the ground, certain that it too might not be as solid as she expected. She shivered again, and felt something being draped over her shoulders. Until that moment, when Ross put his coat around her, she hadn’t truly registered that someone was sitting beside her.
Turning, she tried to find her voice. “Did that . . . did that happen?”
“I think so.” Ross seemed just as shaken as she was. Meredith looked at him carefully. She had not truly believed what he’d told her—about ghost hunting, about her grandmother. People who believed in that sort of thing were a little crazy . . . yet now she seemed to be standing squarely among their ranks. She tried to remember what other things Ross had said—comments she’d summarily dismissed that she now had to reevaluate.
“She looked like me,” Meredith stated the obvious.
“I know.”
“But . . . but . . .” There were no words in this new place.
She felt Ross’s hand find her own, his long hair brush over her cheek as he leaned close. He was crying. “I know,” he repeated, when what he was really saying was that he didn’t.
She had not believed in ghosts, but she believed in pain. And she certainly understood what it felt like to be alone, when you didn’t want to be. These emotions were so real that they transcended the impossible, gave her a hook to grab onto. Meredith’s mind spiraled back to the frantic search, the fear, the suicide. “Is that how it happened?” Meredith asked. “Did she . . . kill herself?”
“I guess so.” His voice was raw with grief.
“Isn’t there something we can do?”
“It already happened,” Ross said. “She’s already gone.”
The ghost had stared directly at Meredith. And it had been like gazing into a mirror—not just because of the physical resemblance, but because the expression in Lia Pike’s eyes was something that Meredith saw when she looked at herself. Meredith might not have been able to grasp the concept that the line between life and death was drawn in invisible ink, but she understood what it was like to be a mother who wanted nothing more than to protect her child.
Motherhood was elemental, cellular. You could feel a child inside of you, even after you gave birth; share blood and tissue for that long and you become part of each other. And if that child died—as an embryo, as a newborn, as a thirteen-year-old with XP—a part of you would die too. All Lia had done, after looking into the still face of her baby, was hasten the process.
“She was following her daughter,” Meredith said.
Even if she knew that the human body disintegrated to become organic matter, on some level Meredith had hoped that her mother existed in some form, in some place with windows on the world where she could watch over Meredith and Ruby and Lucy. This had been Lia Pike’s hope, too . . . but she’d never quite gotten there. If she made it to that place, after all these years, would her child even recognize her?
Meredith turned to Ross. “Do you think in the end they’ll find each other?”
He didn’t answer; he couldn’t. His face was buried in his hands, and he was sobbing hard. It was a sorrow that sprung as deep and black as a well; a sorrow that Meredith had seen minutes before on Lia Pike’s face when she believed her daughter was truly gone.
“Ross,” she said, and in that moment she remembered something he had said to her once, something she had discounted that she now knew to be true: You could imagine yourself in love with someone who was not real. With great care she reached out to touch his arm, to let him know that this time, if he were falling, she would hold him upright. But he shook her off, and as he did, twisted his wrist enough for her to see a scar, a lightning bolt where his skin should have been smooth.
“They’ll find each other,” he said, looking away from her. “They will.”
“The baby wasn’t dead,” Eli explained, “but she thought it was, and that was reason enough to hang herself.” He moved around Shelby’s kitchen, helping himself to a glass of water as he relayed what he’d discovered. “She dragged a good-size block of ice through the sawdust and onto the porch, as a stepstool to reach the rafter. But by the time Pike found her in the morning, the ice had melted, and the hanging looked more like a murder than a suicide. After seventy years, I just officially signed off on the case.” He shook his head. “Jesus. We might be a little on the slow side, but never let it be said that the Comtosook detective squad isn’t on the ball.”
As he passed Shelby at the kitchen table, he touched her shoulder. “And that isn’t even the whole of it,” Eli said, sitting down across from her. “Spencer Pike died last night.”
He kept talking, but Shelby did not hear a thing. She was concentrating on the way her shoulder felt when Eli’s hand had drifted away, as if there were something missing.
In that moment a track switched in her mind, and Shelby could no longer imagine a time she had not known Eli Rochert. He had written himself onto every previous page of her life and only now in its edited version did she realize how great the ellipsis had been.
Oh, shit, she thought, I love him.
Shelby believed that love was like a solar eclipse—breathtakingly beautiful, absorbing, and capable of rendering you blind. She had not necessarily gone out of her way to avoid a relationship, but she hadn’t wanted one either. It was called falling in love for a reason—because, inevitably, you crashed at the bottom.
She had been in love before, with her ex-husband—she knew what it was like to have your heart speed up at the sound of a man’s voice on the phone, and to fe
el the world stop spinning when you kissed. But that relationship—which she’d been so sure of at first—had been doomed, just like every other one she knew. Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom. But for Shelby, that man had run away before she landed. And frankly, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to leap again.
“. . . and if you look at it that way . . . Shelby, hey, are you all right?” Eli squeezed her hand to get her attention, and she flinched. Immediately, he drew away. “What’s wrong?”
A thousand answers to that question tangled in her mind. “If I were dying, would you give me a kidney?”
Eli looked nonplussed. “You mean one of mine?”
“How many others do you have access to?” She stared hard at him. “Well?”
“I . . . I . . . yeah. I would.”
Groaning, Shelby buried her face in her hands.
“That wasn’t the right answer?” Eli asked, bewildered.
She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I want to love you, Eli. But at the same time, I don’t want to. When I’m with you, I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything so right in my life. But if I admit to that, then it’s got nowhere to go but downhill. Look at what love did to my brother. Or to Gray Wolf. Or even to Lia Pike. Or . . . what’s so funny?”
Across the table, Eli was grinning from ear to ear. He took her hand again, and this time when she would have pulled away he held her fast. “Love,” he repeated, all that he’d needed to hear. “You said love.”
Lucy held the flashlight up to her palm so that it turned red. Ethan, balancing his own flashlight on his knees, could nearly see the tissue and bone. Their secret spot—beneath the plastic tarp that covered the outdoor furniture—was getting smoky, but it was worth it. This was Ethan’s first pact, and he was planning to make the most of it.
He waved the blade of his Swiss Army knife through the candle flame. “Is it ready?” Lucy asked.
It turned out that she was less than a year younger than him, but you’d never know it to talk to them both. Lucy jumped if a daddy-longlegs walked within a yard of her, and everyone knew that daddy-longlegs were about as scary as Puff the Magic Dragon. She was so quiet that sometimes Ethan forgot she was sitting right next to him. She couldn’t even stand on his skateboard without falling.
On the other hand, however, she knew all the interesting body-part words in the dictionary without Ethan having to look them up, and said her mother had been the one to tell her about them. She smelled like sugar cookies. And because she’d been at day camp all summer, she had the most beautiful tan Ethan had ever seen.
She told Ethan what it felt like to swim out to a dock in a lake, and to fall asleep under the sun so that you woke up hot and dizzy and not sure of what day it was or how you’d gotten there. He told her how the hair stood up on the back of his neck when the ghost had followed his uncle out of that old haunted house. She admitted that sometimes, she hid under her covers to pretend she wasn’t there when the spirits came. He told her how the liquid the dermatologist used to freeze a pre-cancerous growth off his skin actually burned like fire.
“Come on already, Ethan,” Lucy said. “I’m choking to death.”
That was another thing—she said things like I’m going to kill you, or I’ll die if you don’t hand over that bag of chips—all the things his mother was so careful not to say to him, just in case he was stupid enough to take it the wrong way.
“All right.” Ethan held the flashlight over the knife, dropped the flashlight, and then the knife. “Jeez. You hold this.” He handed Lucy the flashlight and wiped off the blade— no need to contract the bubonic plague—before waving it through the candle flame again. When he glanced up, Lucy seemed uncharacteristically pale. “You’re not gonna faint on me, are you?”
Scowling, she held out her wrist.
Ethan placed his right alongside hers. “I’ll help you find a ghost before it finds you,” he said.
She stared into his eyes. “I’ll take you to where the sun comes up.”
“To courage,” Ethan said, and he slashed the blade fast as a gasp across his wrist and hers. He pressed the open wounds together.
Lucy sucked in her breath. “To courage.” She wrapped a strip ripped from Ethan’s T-shirt around their arms as they both waited and hoped that bravery might be every bit as binding as blood.
Az woke abruptly at the sound of birds. On his cot, he lay still for a moment, trying to pick apart the threads of a junco’s whine from the trill of a whippoorwill and the throaty contralto of the loon. It had been weeks since he’d heard this particular melody. It had stopped the same morning he had told the other Abenaki about the burial ground, and had helped carry a drum to the Pike property, to formally launch a protest.
He sat up slowly, feeling the creak and snap of each vertebra. Swinging his feet over the side of the cot, he toed off his slippers and put the sole of his foot right down on the packed earth that formed the floor of his tent.
It was warm, just like it should be in August. Not frozen, as it had been.
Az pushed back the flap of his tent and stepped outside.
The world seemed centered now, not off just a few degrees to the point where it would keep spinning just a little more lopsided each day until you could not help but notice. Az snapped a flower off the honeysuckle vine that grew beside his tent and watched the pearl of nectar bead at the base of its horn. He drew it onto his tongue and tasted sugar instead of tears.
Overhead, a plane cut the sky in two, and it did not fall. Az stood very still but did not feel yesterday pressing at the base of his skull like a hammer. He closed his eyes and knew, instantaneously, which way was true north.
Az poured water into his immersion heater for his coffee and measured out the grounds. He washed his hands and his face and dressed carefully, because one missed button on a shirt can change your fortune for months at a time. He did not do anything differently in his morning routine than when Comtosook had been under a spell. After all, you couldn’t mess with physics: just as Az had known what entropy was coming, he’d also known there would be a day when it all would fall to rights again.
Had he been a wizard, Ross would have left his sister strength. Not he-man brute force, but endurance, because that was the way to get through anything, and as someone without a shred of it, he ought to know. Instead, though, Ross found himself sorting through the meager possessions in his duffel. This softest shirt of his, he’d give Shelby, because it smelled like Ross and he knew she’d want to save that memory any way she could. His watch, that would be for Ethan, in lieu of the time Ross really wanted to give him instead. The pennies from 1932 he would take with him to lay a trail across eternity like Gretel’s bread crumbs, so that Lia could find him, just in case.
Quiz: What kind of man spent thirty-five years on earth and accumulated only enough to fit in a single canvas bag?
Answer: One who’d never planned to stay for very long.
After seeing Lia’s ghost, he had taken Meredith home. He’d heard her on the phone to Ruby—waking her, at 5 A.M., explaining what she’d seen in words filigreed with wonder. She’d said she would return to Maryland in a couple of days, after taking care of a few things here. Like the land, Ross imagined, and Spencer Pike’s funeral. He didn’t know if Meredith believed what he’d said about ghosts, now, and frankly, he didn’t care. What mattered to him was Lia, and she wouldn’t be back. He knew this the same way he knew that every breath was like drinking in tar, that every subsequent day cut like a knife. He was tired, so very fucking tired, and all he wanted to do was sleep.
Ross stuffed his hand into the duffel again. A razor that had been his father’s; that was for Shelby. His EMF meter— Ethan, naturally. He pulled out the old spirit photograph he’d taken with Curtis—globules over a lake—and smiled. Maybe he’d give this to Meredith.
He wouldn’t leave a note, that was for sure. Look at how his sister had read into it the last time, and
he hadn’t even been trying to leave one then. He deliberately shredded every last bit of paper in the desk into pieces and tossed them, confetti, into the trash.
Then he noticed Lucy Oliver standing in the doorway of his room. “Hello,” he said. Truth be told, she made Ross uncomfortable. Her eyes were nearly silver, too light for the rest of her features, and she acted as if she’d known him for months instead of days. Tonight she was wearing jean shorts and a T-shirt that said MADAME PRESIDENT. She had a Shrek Band-Aid on her wrist. “You fall down skateboarding?” Ross asked amiably.
“No,” Lucy answered, just no, and that was all. “I’m supposed to tell you we’re about to eat.”
Ross tried to answer—something like All right, or I’ll be right there, but what came out instead surprised them both. “Did Lia talk to you about me?”
Lucy nodded slowly. “Sometimes.”
“What did she say?”
But instead of responding, Lucy looked around his room at the careful piles. “What are you doing?”
“I’m getting ready to go,” Ross replied.
“Where?”
When he looked at her, he had the sense that Lucy knew the answer wasn’t a place.
“Not yet though,” Lucy said, a confirmation.
He tilted his head. How much could she know? “Why not?”
“Because it’s time for breakfast.” Lucy took a step closer and held out her hand, the one with the Band-Aid at its base. “So come on,” she said, and waited a long moment before Ross grabbed hold and put himself into her keeping.
It was not that Meredith expected a huge outpouring of mourners at Spencer Pike’s funeral, but standing alone with Eli Rochert and a bloodhound as the Congregational minister did a hasty graveside service was a little embarrassing. Then again, considering how the Abenaki picketed the development of his land, she supposed she should be grateful that there wasn’t a drum banging on the other side of the fence. She hadn’t brought Lucy, because Lucy didn’t know the man from Adam, and the last place her impressionable daughter needed to be was a graveyard. Shelby would have come if Meredith had asked, but she needed someone to watch Lucy more than she needed moral support at the interment of a man she barely knew. And Ross, well, who knew where he was. Meredith hadn’t seen him since the night Lia had appeared, and didn’t want to. Then she would have to find the correct words to say, and I’m sorry and I’m here didn’t seem nearly as fitting as Don’t.
