by Jodi Picoult
“Would you?” the chaplain asked Meredith, although she’d missed the question the first time. She looked at Eli for help, and he nodded toward the earth on the ground.
Meredith picked up a handful, which she sprinkled over Pike’s coffin. Eli discreetly slipped a check to the reverend, and Meredith flushed to think she hadn’t even considered this part of the ritual. From whose bank account had that money come . . . Eli’s? The town’s? Neither, she hoped. Spencer Pike had bled Comtosook dry enough already.
The minister offered Meredith his condolences and walked solemnly to his VW Bug to drive off, leaving behind a faint trace of Simon and Garfunkel from the open windows. Eli’s big hand touched her shoulder. “You want a lift back?”
Meredith shrugged. “I may just stay for a minute.”
“Sure,” Eli said. He started off with his dog, and then came back and unclipped his cell phone from his belt. “Call me when you’re ready, okay?”
Meredith thanked him and watched him drive off in his truck. She wondered if Shelby realized how lucky she was, to have a man like that who’d happened to cross into her life at just the right moment. A light breeze ruffled the bottom of the black dress she’d borrowed as she looked at the fresh grave. “Good-bye,” she said quietly, because she felt that someone should.
“Good riddance,” she heard behind her.
Az Thompson stood a few feet away, dressed in an ill-fitting black suit with a white shirt and string tie. “You’re the last person I expected to see here,” Meredith said.
“I didn’t come for him.” Az looked down at the raw mouth in the ground where the coffin lay. “First time in a long time I’m happy to have outlived someone.” He glanced up at Meredith. “You care to walk a ways?”
She slipped her heels off and padded along beside Az in her stockings. He climbed the hill, striding right across some of the graves. At some spots, she felt a tickling on the arches of her feet. He stopped at a weeping willow with a lopsided stone bench beside it. “This is a poor excuse for a thinking spot,” he said, frowning.
“Where would you go instead?”
“A waterfall,” Az said immediately. “Or flat on my back under the stars.” He looked at her, then stretched out on the ground. “See what I mean?”
She only hesitated a second, and that was because this dress was not her own. Then she settled herself beside Az and stared up at the sky. “What do you see?” she asked, the game she played with Lucy.
“Clouds,” Az answered, matter-of-fact.
Meredith hugged her knees. In the crook of her arm was a small bruise from the blood that had been drawn days ago. Az had one too. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“It’s just . . . well, I don’t know what I’m supposed to call you. Mr. Thompson, or Az, or John.”
“I’ve always fancied being called Ted Williams by a whole stadium of fans, but I guess I could settle for one skinny girl calling me N’mahom.”
“What does that mean?”
“My grandfather.” He looked directly at Meredith. “I suppose, then, you believe it all.”
She nodded. “Not that it does anyone any good.”
“Why would you say that?”
Tears came to Meredith’s eyes. Surprised, she told herself that it was the day, the heat, the lack of sleep. “So much has already happened,” she said quietly. “So many people hurt.” She was thinking of people like Az, like Lia, like the faceless Abenaki of this town, yet Ross’s features came swimming up to the surface. “This wasn’t supposed to be about me, and somehow, it got that way.”
“People work too hard to figure out the meaning of their lives. Why me, why now. The truth is, sometimes things don’t happen to you for a reason. Sometimes it’s just about being in the right place at the right time for someone else.”
“That’s it?” she said.
“That’s quite a lot.” He turned and smiled. “You going home today?”
Meredith had been planning to fly to Baltimore that afternoon. But she’d postponed her trip till tomorrow. She just didn’t want to leave Comtosook with Pike’s funeral as her last memory. “Soon,” she hedged. “Will you write me?”
“I’m not a big fan of the written word. Pike and his friends wrote down a lot of stuff that should never have been put to paper. And the Alnôbak prefer an oral history to a written one.”
“With one great big chapter left out,” Meredith murmured.
“Then that’s the one you have to tell.”
When she realized he was serious, she shook her head. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“Doesn’t matter. Just start somewhere.”
“To Lucy, you mean?”
“To anyone,” Az said, “who will listen.”
She tucked her hair behind her ear. “About that . . . I’m going to the reading of the will this afternoon. Eli arranged for a judge to write something up so that the property will revert back to me, because I was my mother’s successor . . . and all these years, she was the one who really owned it. I’d like . . . I’d like you to have it.”
He laughed. “What am I going to do with a great big piece of land like that?”
“I thought you might want to share it.” Meredith split a blade of grass with her thumbnail. “Provided, of course, that Lucy and I have a place to stay when we come to see you. Will you take care of the details for me?”
“Look up a man named Winks Champigny. He’s in the phone book. He’ll know what to do. I would help you, but I may not be around for a while.”
“Story of my life. I meet a great guy, and find out he’s sailing on the next ship.” Meredith smiled at him. “You’ll be here, when I come back to visit?”
“Count on it,” Az said.
“You’re sure you don’t mind?” Shelby asked for the tenth time. She looked at Meredith’s reflection in the mirror as she fastened a locket around her neck.
“Why would I mind? The kids watch each other. I’ll be sitting on the couch eating bonbons and watching soaps.”
It was a novelty for Shelby—she was being taken out on a real date, at a real time, for dinner. “Well, I know you’ll want to pack up for your flight tomorrow. So consider yourself off duty the minute Ross gets back.”
He had left to collect equipment he’d left at the Pike property. Why he’d chosen to do this in the dark, at 8:30 P.M., was beyond Meredith. “Do you know where Eli’s taking you?”
“Some five-star place in Burlington.” She fell backward onto the bed beside Meredith, smiling so hard that her face actually hurt. “I’ve been out with him a dozen times,” Shelby murmured. “To the store, to his place, for a drive. So why do I feel like this?”
“Because you’re crazy about him,” Meredith said. “Blame it on the dopamine being secreted by your brain.”
“Leave it to a geneticist to reduce love to a scientific reaction.”
“Those of us who don’t have it readily available prefer to think of it that way.”
Shelby rolled onto her stomach. “Who’s Lucy’s father?”
“A guy who shouldn’t have been,” Meredith replied. “How about Ethan’s?”
“That guy’s brother, apparently.” Shelby propped her chin on her hand. “Did you love him?”
“To pieces.”
“Me too.” She looked at Meredith. “Sometimes I pretend that I haven’t met Eli. Or that he isn’t the last thing I think about before I fall asleep. It’s like a superstition, you know— if I don’t put that much value on a relationship, maybe it won’t get ripped out from under my feet.”
“No one’s going to rip this out from under your feet,” Meredith said. “Relationships succeed and fail because of the people in them . . . not some karmic plan.”
“You think? Don’t you ever wonder if there’s one person you’re meant to be with?”
“God, no! To say that you’ve got one soul mate in the world, out of six billion people . . . well, mathematically that’s setting yours
elf up for failure. What are the odds?”
Shelby shook her head. “That’s where fate comes in. If I hadn’t had Ethan, I wouldn’t have gotten divorced from Thomas. If Ethan hadn’t had XP, I wouldn’t have moved to a town like this one, where the houses are far apart so he can play at night. If Ross hadn’t come to the end of his rope he wouldn’t have been here to investigate the Pike property. All these things, which were awful at the time . . . maybe they were just leading up to my meeting Eli.”
“Did you think that you were destined to marry Thomas?”
“Well, sure, at first—”
“There you go. Fate,” Meredith argued, “is what people invent to explain what they can’t understand. If you think Eli’s the one, you tell yourself it was meant to happen. And if he breaks your heart, you’ll tell yourself it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve spent ten years trying to find a man who knows where I am in a room the moment he steps inside, without even having to look. But it hasn’t happened. I can admit the truth to myself—that I’ve got lousy luck at finding love—or I can tell myself that I haven’t crossed paths with my soul mate yet. And it’s always easier to be a victim than a failure.”
Shelby sat up. “Then what’s that something that draws you to one guy out of a crowd? Or that first strike of lightning between you? Or the realization that you’ve connected so deeply when you’ve only just met?”
“Love,” Meredith said. “Love defies explanation. Destiny doesn’t.” She thought of Lia, materializing in the clearing. “There are things you can’t explain, that happen anyway. Like the guy who takes a bullet meant for his wife, even though survival’s a basic instinct. Or the little girl who writes in a diary a secret sentence that her true love will say to her, when they meet—and lo and behold, one day, he does.”
“That happened?”
“Well, no,” Meredith said quietly. “But I haven’t entirely given up hope. The thing is, if it does, it’ll be because I went looking for him, and I found him. Not because it was meant to be.”
“Why, Meredith! You’re a closet romantic!” Downstairs, the doorbell rang. Shelby leaped off the bed and shoved her feet into two different shoes. “Which ones, the flats or the FMPs?”
“If it’s destiny,” Meredith said, smiling, “it shouldn’t make a difference.”
Shelby grinned, and picked the heels. After one final look in the mirror, she hurried downstairs with Meredith trailing and opened the front door.
Eli stood holding a pink rose with a forked stem and a smaller rose growing from it. Like a mother and child. He was dressed in a dark gray suit with a crisp white shirt and cranberry tie. “Well,” Shelby said. “Don’t you clean up well.”
“You look . . . you look . . .” Eli shook his head. “I had all these words that I looked up for you, and I can’t remember a single one.”
“It’s the dopamine,” Shelby said sympathetically.
“Radiant?” Meredith offered. “Resplendent? Bewitching?”
“No,” Eli said finally. “Mine.”
Az took another sip of the whiskey Ross had brought to the quarry. They sat side by side on folding chairs that Az had pilfered from a storeroom, drinking and watching the sky fall, a cauldron spilled of its stars. “You know I’m supposed to tell you to leave,” he said.
“So tell me.”
“Leave,” Az said.
“You know I won’t,” Ross pointed out.
Az shrugged. “It’s the dynamite. There are charges all over the quarry. The computers are gonna set them off in the morning, at dawn.” He glanced sidelong at Ross. “Don’t do anything stupid, all right?”
“Stupid,” Ross repeated, rolling the word around. “Stupid. What would constitute stupid? Would that include pining after not one, but two dead women?”
“Hey,” Az pointed. “Pass the whiskey, will you?”
Ross hefted the alcohol toward him, only to have Az toss the bottle into the quarry, where it shattered on broken rocks. “What the hell did you do that for?”
“Your own good.” Az got up slowly from his folding chair, tucked it beneath his arm. “Do me a favor, and keep an eye on this place for a few minutes, will you?”
“Where are you going?”
“Cigarette break,” Az said.
Ross watched him walk off along the perimeter of the quarry. “You don’t smoke!” he yelled after the old man, but by then Az couldn’t hear, or didn’t want to. He stood up, hands in his pockets, and looked down at the remains of his bottle of Bushmill’s. The glass sparkled like mica. “Shit,” Ross said, and he kicked at a rock, sending it caroming over the lip into the canyon. Because it felt good, he did it again. He glanced over his shoulder, saw Az was still missing, and then lit a cigarette. He tossed it into the quarry, where it landed six inches away from a dynamite plug and fizzled black.
He was tired of reliving his life, when he hadn’t been so fond of it the first time around. Like Lia, he was trapped by his own past. The moment Aimee had died, so had Ross. And then when he found someone else to live for, it turned out she’d been dead for seventy years.
He imagined that cigarette landing on the dynamite, the bursting explosion that would shake the earth and send him tumbling into the quarry. He pictured his body being consumed by fire, flames that ate at his clothes and peeled away the pain. Why me? Why was he connected to the deaths of not one, but two women? Was he some kind of supernatural link? A cosmic pawn? A lightning rod for lost souls? Or maybe he was being punished. In the aftermath of Aimee’s death, he’d been hailed as a hero, when Ross knew all along he was exactly the opposite.
As a child he’d read comic books, dazzled by the strength and the daring on pages cut into squares like a sidewalk, as if these superheroes were already walking a path toward greatness simply by appearing on the page. He had told Meredith he was invincible, but he was no Superman, no Captain Marvel. He was not even the sort of man that good things happened to. Meeting the girl of one’s dreams, winning a scratch ticket, finding a ten-dollar bill on the street—these were experiences in someone else’s daily existence. There was a point where the bad luck ended, and the bad choices began, and Ross could not see the fine distinction. He couldn’t live a life worth saving, and he couldn’t save a life worth living.
Ross climbed onto the safety railing. He stood with his arms akimbo, his legs spread, a messiah or a target or both. He was swallowing glass with every breath; he was running on nails with every step. Jump, he thought, and you get to start over.
He slipped, caught himself, and then laughed at his own caution. He balanced like a chair on the nose of a circus clown—something far too heavy and gravity-laden to defy the laws of nature for very long.
Pitching forward, Ross managed to stop himself from falling over the fence. His Bogeyman Nights baseball cap went spinning, and landed on a stick of dynamite.
The clown might drop that chair, but he’d always snatch it just before it smashed on the floor. After all, he had to come back and do the same act night after night. Ross stepped away from the fence, then took the prop that was his body and slouched toward home.
Rod van Vleet had cashed his last paycheck at the only bar in Comtosook, a place that had taken pity on him in spite of his former association with the development property that had caused so much unquiet. Oliver Redhook himself had called to terminate his employment and to inform him that he expected the company car and the company cell phone back at their Massachusetts headquarters by Monday. “I could have sent a trained monkey to Vermont,” Redhook had said on speakerphone. “But I made the grave mistake of sending you.”
In a truly Machiavellian twist of fate, the bartender was one of the Indians who had been banging a drum outside his company trailer for three weeks. Gracious winner, he’d given Rod three shots on the house before he started taking his money. Now on his eighth, Rod could barely get the nerve endings in his hand firing well enough to lift the drink, which seemed so small and slippery that he was about to ask the bartender for a
magnifying glass to help locate it.
“One more,” he said, or he thought he said, he didn’t quite think it was English.
The bartender shook his head. “Can’t, Mr. van Vleet. Not unless you call yourself a taxi.”
“I’m a taxi,” Rod said.
The bartender exchanged a glance with a woman beside Rod. She had long black hair and the shoulders of a linebacker, and at closer glance turned out to be a man. Rod downed the last of his drink. “Fine, then,” he slurred. “I’ll just take myself up and over to Burlington. Crash a frat party.”
“You do that,” the bartender said. “But you might just crash your car first.”
Rod fished in his pocket and held up a set of keys on the first try. He stumbled and landed hard against the polished bar. “Would serve ’em right.”
The police lights whipped across the truck’s windshield, casting Shelby’s skin with a faint blue tinge. She pulled Eli’s jacket closer around her shoulders, shivering although she wasn’t cold. He’d taken care to park off to the side, so that she would not have to stare at the wreckage and the body that had been tossed onto the street, but her head kept turning and her eyes kept straining to make out the details of the catastrophe.
“I’m sorry,” he had said to her, when the radio went off in his truck en route to the restaurant. “I have to go.”
She understood, which was why she got out of the passenger door, now, her high heels slipping on the damp pavement. Outside the cocoon of the truck there was a rally of noise, from sirens to shouting cops to the subtle clicks of the crime-scene photographer. She edged closer to the circle of activity, fully expecting to look down and see Ross.
