by Jodi Picoult
She had not been present at his car accident, the one in which Aimee had been killed. But he had been the mission of rescuers like these; there had been a car overturned like that; the EMTs had strapped him to a gurney like the one whining over the pavement toward the victim right now.
When the phone call came about her brother, she’d been breastfeeding Ethan. She’d almost let the machine pick it up, because it was so much trouble to juggle a drowsy baby and a telephone. Even now, she could not remember whether the officer who told her had been male or female. Only a few words remained, stuck like cement in her memory, blocks that she still tripped over every now and then: Ross, accident, serious, passenger, dead.
Time stopped, and Ethan had rolled from her lap onto the cushions of the couch. Shelby had tried to picture Ross, battered and bleeding, but could only see him as a skinny fifth-grader with fire in his eyes, taking it upon himself to beat up the eleventh-grade soccer star who had broken Shelby’s heart.
Now, she pushed two uniformed policemen out of the way so that she could see better. The clothes were ripped, the face mangled, but Shelby could still make out the features of the businessman who’d been trying to develop the Pike property.
A hand tugged at her elbow and yanked her backward. Eli stared at her, upset. “What are you doing out here?”
“I . . . I had to see.”
“No one should have to see this. Rod van Vleet totaled his car. The only mystery is whether it burst into flames on impact, or if it was the alcohol fumes coming from the driver.”
“Is he going to be okay?”
“Yeah, but he’s got some bad breaks and burns.” Eli had led her to the truck without Shelby even realizing it. He opened the door and tucked her inside. “Stay.”
“I’m not Watson.”
His eyes softened. “I know. Watson’s used to this. You’re not.”
As he turned to finish whatever it was he had to do, Shelby blurted out his name. Immediately, he turned. Even with the sentence on her lips, she did not know why she felt the need to tell Eli what was tunneling through her mind. “Ross almost died in a car crash,” she said finally.
Eli looked over his shoulder at the debris, the rising smoke. “Almost doesn’t count,” he said.
Ethan had stolen his uncle’s EMF meter from his bedroom and after some thought had chosen a short-sleeved T-shirt— one he was only allowed to wear inside the house—as the uniform for his escape. A soft knock on his door told him Lucy was ready. She slipped inside his room, her eyes so big and nervous that it made Ethan laugh. “We haven’t even left yet. Chill out.”
“Right.” Lucy started talking to herself under her breath. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
For Lucy, the worst was that she’d get scared. Uncle Ross had said that a human spirit couldn’t actually hurt you. For Ethan, the worst was, well, a lot worse. He had told Lucy that he got sick if he stayed out in the sun, but he hadn’t explained the ultimate cost—the skin cancers, the lesions, death. She never would have agreed to this plan, then. But Ethan had thought this through, and if he was going to die young, he wanted to do it on his own terms. He didn’t want to get stuck in some Pedi ward, with stupid purple dinosaurs painted on the windows as if that was supposed to make any kid think he was anywhere but there.
Maybe hoping hard enough could redirect fate—it was possible that the blood vow he and Lucy had made the night before had changed them a little, so that Lucy was a little bit braver and he was a little bit stronger. “Okay,” Ethan said, tucking the EMF into the loop of his jeans and opening his bedroom window. “We’ll slide off the gable onto the roof of the porch, and then jump.”
“We will?”
“Well, it’s that or walk right past your mother in the living room.” He set one foot over the sill. “I’ll go first.”
“Wait.”
Ethan turned. “Lucy. We talked about this, remember? You were born a chicken, and I have this weirdo disease. So what? Only losers would stay that way forever.”
“What if it’s how we’re supposed to be, and that’s why we’re like this?”
“That’s crap,” Ethan said. “I’ll tell you what it was—it was God taking a coffee break and some dumbhead filling in for him when it came to handing out all the cool genes.” He stared at her. “If you couldn’t change things, ever, what would be the point of growing up?”
She nodded, convincing herself. “Where are we going, exactly?”
“To the only place in Comtosook where you can find a ghost and watch the sun come up,” he answered. “Trust me.” He held out his hand, milky and white, and waited until Lucy put hers into it, a sealed deal. Then they scrambled through the window and into the darkness, determined to turn themselves into what they were not.
On the banks of Lake Champlain, Az Thompson thought back to the moment his daughter, Lia, had visited with a social worker and he had given her a language to speak. He’d been too scared at that moment to tell her who he was, or that he knew her. Instead he’d fed her words, Abenaki; let her swallow them whole so that they took root in her belly, a bashful garden for the grandbaby she was carrying.
Words, for all they were flimsy and invisible, had great strength. They could be as fortified as a castle wall and as sharp as a foil. They could bite, slap, shock, wound. But unlike deeds, words couldn’t really help you. No promise ever rescued a person; it was the carrying-through of it that brought about salvation.
It seemed fitting to Az, after all that had happened, that it all still came down to what was written and what had been said. He looked at the box of files and pedigree charts that sat on the banks of the river where his bucket of muskies once had been. It hadn’t been difficult to get into the municipal building’s basement—did anyone in Vermont think to lock cellar windows?—and to haul out the remaining evidence of the Vermont eugenics project, which Ross Wakeman’s sister had brought back to the town’s keeping.
Az knew that the only way to strip words of their power was to erase them. Of course, once one had been released into the world you couldn’t call it back, but you could certainly keep it from being sent out again and listened to and digested. He picked up the roll of duct tape he’d gotten at the Gas & Grocery and unraveled the end, taping it to his shirt just beneath the armpit. Picking up the first of Spencer Pike’s extensive files, he held it to his chest and ran the adhesive around his body to secure it.
As he continued to fasten the files and papers and unwieldy genealogy charts to his thin body, Az remembered his daughter: the way her eyes lit up when she saw him coming, the movement of her hands across her abdomen, the way she stood out at the Gypsy camp like an orchid in a field of daisies. But you could transplant an orchid to that soil, and get it to grow. You just needed someone with the time and hunger to make it survive.
His mind wandered further back, to the moment he had noticed his beautiful Lily, the first afternoon he’d been working for her father. He’d come in from the fields to get another basket for the berries, and saw her—silver-haired and white-skinned, dancing on the porch to a song she was humming under her breath. She held her arms in place around an imaginary mate, waltzing. She didn’t know anyone was watching, and that alone took Az’s breath away. She needs a partner, Az thought, and that was the beginning.
He wondered if Meredith had talked to Winks yet about the land. He wondered if she’d come back to Comtosook, like she said. He didn’t know her well enough to read her. Sometimes in the fluid moments before he dropped off to sleep he confused her in his mind with Lia. They looked alike, certainly, but it went deeper than that. He would not speak for his daughter, but he thought Lia would be proud.
When he had strapped the last of the files to himself and used up all of the silver tape, Az walked into the water. Cold even in August, it numbed his ankles. He felt the files at his hips starting to soak. The papers were sponges, anchoring him to the muddy bottom.
Az took a deep breath just before his head went under
. He moved along the floor of the lake, kicking up snails and stones and forgotten treasure. He let the air bubble out of his lungs and lay down on his back, sunken by the weight of the history he had strapped to himself, and he waited for the morning to come.
“I’m sorry,” Eli said to Shelby for the thirtieth time, as he opened the door of his house and greeted a lonely Watson.
“It’s not your fault.”
They had not only missed their dinner reservation in the aftermath of the car crash, they had completely missed serving hours at the restaurant. Now 2 A.M., there wasn’t even a McDonald’s that was open for a bite to eat. Eli tossed his keys into a bowl on the kitchen counter that held three molting bananas. “I’m a pretty awful date,” he muttered, opening the fridge. “I can’t even cook you something. Unless you like bread and mustard.” He scrutinized the loaf. “Make that penicillin and mustard.”
Suddenly Shelby’s arms circled him from behind. “Eli,” she said, “I’m not even all that hungry.”
“No?” He straightened, turned toward her.
She tugged loose his tie. Then she stepped out of her high heels. Barefoot like that, she seemed so small and delicate that it reminded Eli of a snowflake; one blink and it might melt away into nothing. “No,” she said. “But I am a little hot.”
You’re telling me, Eli thought, and then she turned around and lifted her hair off her neck. “Unzip me?”
He inched the little metal tag down, and with every opened tooth Eli could feel his nerves fray. Shelby’s skin was the whitest, smoothest expanse he’d ever seen. A little farther, and the hooks of her black bra came into view.
He stepped away. There was just so much a guy could take. “Maybe, uh, you should go find something to change into,” he suggested.
“Oh, damn,” Shelby said, not contrite at all. “I didn’t bring anything.” She reached up behind her, finished unraveling the last six inches of zipper, and let the dress fall to the floor so that she stood before him like a mirage of flesh and blood and lace. With a smile, she turned and headed up the stairs, Watson at her heels.
Eli did not have to think twice. He pulled his pager and cell phone from his belt and turned them off, took the receiver of his home phone off the hook. This was all against departmental procedure, but one tragedy a night was enough. And to be honest, he didn’t much care if the world was coming to an end, as long as he was moving inside Shelby when it happened.
Meredith finished reading every catalog that had come to Shelby’s house in the past month and realized something was very wrong—namely, that she’d finished reading every catalog that had come to Shelby’s house in the past month. Her daughter, who seemed to have an internal radar that blipped whenever Meredith managed to sit down for a second, usually commandeered those smidgens of private time to ask questions that could not wait, like what made lips look pink or why they weren’t allowed to have a dog. But Lucy hadn’t bothered her at all tonight. Neither had Ethan. And mathematically, it stood to reason that a household with two children under the age of ten should generate twice the interruptions.
She put aside the Pottery Barn catalog and called upstairs. No answer, but they had been playing a computer game with the door closed. Meredith jogged up the stairs and rattled the locked doorknob. “Ethan?” she called out. “How are you guys doing in there?”
When there was still no answer, she felt the first wave of alarm. She grabbed a wire coat hanger from her own bedroom closet and straightened the neck, poking it into the simple lock device on the doorknob. It swung unlatched and Meredith stepped inside Ethan’s room to find a typical messy boy’s haven—nothing missing, except two children.
The window was open.
She raced downstairs to the list of emergency numbers beside the phone, the ones that Meredith had told Shelby she’d never need.
As Ross walked into the kitchen, Meredith slammed down the telephone and turned, tears running down her face. “The restaurant’s closed and Eli’s pager and his cell phone, they’re supposed to be on but they aren’t, and the police won’t tell me anything even though his number’s unlisted and—”
The blue funk he’d ridden in on dissipated immediately. “What happened?”
“The kids,” Meredith said. “They’re missing.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I went upstairs just now and they weren’t there.”
“And you can’t reach Shelby and Eli?” She shook her head. “Okay. I’ll go find them.”
“You can’t. You don’t know where they are.”
“Yes I do. Stay here, in case they call, or Shelby comes home.” But he knew as he headed out the door that Meredith was only a step behind him.
Who knew there were so many shades of black? Being under the moonless sky was no different from hiding beneath a blanket, and the bowl of the quarry, a big circle of nothing just past the toes of Lucy’s sneakers, was a little bit darker than the night itself. One step, one mistake, and you’d go falling. Only by squinting could she see Ethan, who suddenly let go of the guardrail and disappeared before her eyes.
Her breath solidified, a block in her throat. She would have screamed, but what would Ethan think if she was afraid of simply getting to the ghosts, not just the ghosts themselves? Then his head popped up near her ankles. “Are you waiting for an invitation?” he asked, and she realized he was holding fast to a ladder that led into the pit of the quarry.
Ethan said there was a ghost here, a quarry supervisor who’d been killed by some crazy guy. He said seeing the spirit was a sure thing. He’d told her they might have to avoid a guard, but she and Ethan seemed to be the only ones around. Maybe that was luck, maybe it meant it was okay to be there. At any rate, Lucy started to climb down. Huge pillars of stone reared up around her, seeming to move in the lack of light. The soles of her sneakers skidded down a slope of granite, and she wound up in a heap on a pile of rubble. “You okay?” Ethan called. He probably turned around too, but it was too dark to see him.
She realized that this was what life was like for Ethan all the time.
They crawled through crevasses so narrow Lucy had to hold her breath, up columns of rock where their only foothold was hope, underneath listing piers and over great craggy tablets. They balanced on thin needles of stone, toppled like a giant’s game of pick-up sticks. Every now and then their forward motion would dislodge some careful equilibrium, and the granite would crumble with a roar and a flurry of dust. “You all right?” Ethan’s voice would float back to her, and then they would keep going.
Lucy’s hands and shins were scraped over and over, and she had one really bad cut that she was afraid to even look at. She smacked into Ethan’s back and realized that they had reached the other side of the quarry, across from the ladder. “We’ll hang out there,” Ethan said, and pointed to two fallen slabs of granite that had haphazardly formed an A-frame and a ledge.
He climbed first. Then Lucy grabbed onto his hand so that he could pull her up, but their fingers, dusty, slipped away from each other and with a tiny shriek Lucy landed on a crumbled bed of rock. “Jeez, Lucy, are you okay?” Ethan called.
Tears came to her eyes, but she made herself get up. “Yeah,” Lucy said, and she made her way up to the ledge with great care, firmly jamming her feet between cracks in the granite before she released her handhold to climb again. On the ledge, she collapsed on her back and closed her eyes while Ethan set up his ghost-hunting equipment. When she’d caught her breath, she sat up and flicked on a flashlight, swinging its beam across the expanse they’d just traveled.
Lucy’s eyes went wide at the spires and jagged edges, the sheer distance. The ladder they’d climbed down was so far away it might have been forever since they’d started.
She had already been braver than she thought she was.
“So what do we do?” Lucy asked.
“Nothing. Now’s the part where we wait.” They sat with their shoulders touching, shivering from the cold
and the awareness of what they had done. “You know what a star is?” Ethan asked after a moment, and Lucy shook her head. “An explosion that happened, like, hundreds of years ago, but that we’re only just seeing now.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how long it takes light to travel.”
Maybe, Lucy thought, it was the same for ghosts. Maybe sadness moved at a different speed than real life, which is why they showed up years after they’d died. She squinted up at the cloudy sky, trying to find a single star. When it happened— the explosion—it had to have been loud and bright and terrifying. But what she saw, now, was beautiful.
Maybe everything looked better, with some distance.
Even before that radio thing that Ethan held in his hand began to beep, Lucy knew something was coming. She felt it in the weight of the air on her skin, in the hollow echo that came into her ears. The fine hairs on her arm stood up, and her stomach did a slow roll. “Is it me,” Ethan whispered, “or did it just get about a hundred degrees colder?”
The little radio began to twitch like crazy. “Lucy,” Ethan whispered. “Stand up.”
She did. She walked all the way out to the edge of their ledge and she thought as hard as she could in her head, You can’t scare me.
Ethan had told her that ghosts couldn’t materialize without energy. Fear was a type of energy, the kind you wrapped tight into a ball. So Lucy summoned all the terror she’d tucked into the creases of her bedsheets and behind the wall of clothes in her closet. She thought of all the asthma attacks she’d had when a spirit got right into her face. She squinched her eyes shut and focused and a moment later, when she peeked, she saw a man walking toward her.
It was a man, but it wasn’t a man. This one was transparent, like the lady who came to her bedroom, and Lucy could see the jagged edges of rocks right through his shoulders and spine. He was dressed weird, too, in a striped shirt that looked like an old mattress and a pair of pants with no loops for the belt, and a vest with a shiny gold pocketwatch. He had a mustache that twirled at the ends like a circus strong-man’s, and his hair was plastered down to his head. Get to work, he said, right in the middle of her mind.
