Second Glance: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  She made the decision to go to Boston, defend her dissertation, and then come back to Silver Spring to live with Granny Ruby. But four sleepless nights had taken their toll; several hours into the journey north, she lost control of her Civic.

  Meredith awakened in the hospital with a cast on her left leg, bruises on every inch of her body, and a nurse at her side who kept telling her that her baby was going to be fine. Baby? she had thought, or maybe said aloud. What baby? Answers were fed to her like pain pills--an ultrasound meant to check internal injuries had shown the eight-week pregnancy, the butterfly heartbeat.

  She had not wanted to be a single mother. She hadn't wanted to be a mother, period. All she wanted was her own mother, back. So she'd made an appointment for an abortion.

  One that she hadn't kept.

  Meredith knew the science behind conception; she understood what parents could and could not pass along to their children. But she could not help wondering if, somehow, the intangibles bled through by osmosis. If she'd wanted a baby from the moment she'd found out--instead of wishing, in the darkest part of the night, that she'd miscarry--would Lucy have been more secure? She loved her daughter now; she could not imagine a life without her in it. But if she was going to be brutally honest with herself, eight years ago, she could have easily gone the other way.

  Life was all about being in a certain place, at a certain time.

  Oh, Lucy, she thought, if I could do it over again. She would work less, and take her daughter mountain climbing instead. She would teach her a martial art. She would admit that she did not know all the answers, and what's more, might not ever be able to find them.

  With a sigh, Meredith turned back to the scope. Two days from now this embryo would be implanted in its mother's womb. The irony didn't escape her--she, who had not wanted a baby yet wound up with one, was often the last hope of parents who wanted a baby more than anything but couldn't conceive. This child would not have cystic fibrosis, but that didn't mean it might not contract meningitis. You never knew what you were going to get. Close a door, and you'd still feel a breeze through the window.

  Neither Castleton Road nor West Oren Street turned out to be anywhere near the Pike property, but that didn't keep Ross from plotting the routes on a map he'd bought at the gas station and finding the houses. However, Lia Beaumont did not live at either the sleepy Victorian whose picket fence badly needed painting, or the log home guarded by the German shepherd named Armageddon. It was possible that she lived at the unlisted address, but he would ask her that the next time he saw her.

  If he saw her.

  Ross had eaten all his meals at the town diner, and he'd been on a vigil at the property for the past two nights, but Lia Beaumont had not materialized. He'd seen Az Thompson skulking around again, two raccoons having sex, and several times, his video equipment had picked up the most remarkable globules--large as a basketball and pearly white, streaking across the screen.

  He would have liked to show these to Lia.

  Ross wanted to ask her if she thought her mother would wait to be found, no matter how many years it took. He wanted to ask her if she loved her husband the way he loved Aimee. He wanted to know what differences between them could seem just as irreconcilable as death.

  He was worried, too, that maybe her husband had found out that she'd met Ross at the diner, and had punished her. He didn't know what that would entail. Physical abuse? Psychological? It was possible, too, that the reason she'd disappeared was because Lia--who had admitted to cutting her arms to feel something, anything--had simply decided that the surest way to find her mother was to turn herself into a ghost.

  Ross found himself reading the obituaries, and sighing with relief when she wasn't mentioned. He began to make ridiculous bargains with himself: If I can hold my breath for three full minutes, she will come tonight. If I make this light before it turns red, she will be there.

  Some nights at the Pike property were more active than others. There were wild temperature swings and tiny flashes of blue light between the branches of trees, and the smell of hemlock occasionally seemed thick enough to choke. Twice, Ross had heard the hinged cry of an infant.

  The third night, he was sitting at the edge of the clearing where he'd targeted his investigation, the night wrapped as tight as a straitjacket, when the stone fell out of the sky. It was approximately the size of a dinner plate and nearly as flat, and dropped from a high enough velocity to crack against his shin. "Shit!" Ross yelped, jumping to his feet. Pain throbbed up his leg and a welt rose below his knee. Peering up the nearest tree with his flashlight, he could see nothing. He was in no shape to climb. So he took that same rock and slammed it hard enough against the trunk to make it shake. "Hey!" he shouted. "Who's there?"

  He expected an animal--a bear cub, or some kind of mutant squirrel--but there was nothing. He snapped off a branch and then used it to beat at the others. He kept at this for a while, not because he really thought he was going to find anything, but because he wanted some measure of revenge. It was only when he stopped, exhausted, that he heard the digging.

  It was faint, like a woodchuck scratching a hole in a garden. Ross limped toward the far side of the clearing, the sound growing stronger. His flashlight illuminated about thirty small mounds, arranged in no particular order.

  Different archaeological experts and excavation teams had razed parts of the property, yet this particular spot had been intact when Ross arrived at dusk that evening. Now, enough earth had been dug out of each hole to make a small pile, although when Ross bent down and tried to dig a little deeper with a stick, the ground was just as frigid and snowy as it had been for days.

  Ross had never actually seen a primitive burial ground, but he imagined it looked something like this.

  He drew his digital camera from his pocket and took pictures from several angles. Then he bent to the tiny LCD display to see what the photos looked like. But in every single picture, the ground was perfectly flat, covered with a layer of undisturbed ice. Confounded, Ross shined the flashlight down on the same patch of land. There were no mounds of dirt, where minutes ago there had been many.

  "I know what I saw." Ross stomped around the small space, but there was no give to the ground; it was still frozen solid.

  Had he imagined all of it? He bent down and rolled up the leg of his pants--no, the welt was even bigger now, and a vivid shade of purple. That stone had fallen. That sound had been digging. Those heaps had been there.

  Another reason to miss Lia: had she come tonight, and seen this, Ross would not have thought he was crazy.

  That week the Winooski River slowed its flow, leaving fish swimming in circles and washing up on the banks in confusion. Families with satellite television systems found their programming now completely in Norwegian, the mouths of the actors not quite matching up to the words, like old Godzilla movies. At the Comtosook IGA, all four electronic cash registers--newly purchased from an industrial catalog and recently arrived--began to add wrong, so that grapes might ring up at $45 per bunch and cantaloupes cost a penny a pound, while mousetraps and fish sticks were perfectly free. The people who dared to talk of these things found they lost their train of thought right in the middle of a sentence, and would find instead the sweet taste of sugar on their tongue, or the bitter tang of chicory, depending on what they had been about to say.

  It sucked going to the dermatologist.

  Not only did it remind Ethan of what a freak he was, it also meant he had to stay up all day long, because the doctor's office hours were during the time he usually slept. And after whatever procedure had been done, he had the added fun of seeing his mother's smile crack like a hard-boiled egg; she was trying that desperately to look at him as if he were perfectly normal.

  Today he'd had three precancerous growths removed from his face. The doctor had taken a cotton swab and stuck it into a cup of liquid nitrogen, then held it to Ethan's forehead and nose. It stung enough to make tears come to his eyes, and it itched, now.r />
  His mother pulled into the driveway. Uncle Ross was out--the car was gone. Ethan could have unfastened his own seat belt but he waited until his mother came around the passenger side and did it for him. "You okay?" she asked quietly, and he nodded and got out of the car. He slipped his hand into hers as they walked up the porch, something he had not done for months, because when you have less time than everyone else it means you have to make yourself grow up faster.

  In his bedroom, he pulled off his clothes like taffy. He dragged his pajamas over his head and then glanced in the mirror. The blisters hadn't formed yet--that would be tomorrow. But his face was already a globe, shifting blotchy continents where the growths had been frozen off.

  Before he even realized what he was doing, he lifted his fist and smashed the mirror. Blood ran down his arm but the only thought spiking through his mind was that he didn't have to look at himself anymore.

  "Ethan?" His mother's voice. "Ethan!" She was behind him now, wrapping his fist in a sheet yanked from the bed. "What happened?"

  "I'm sorry," Ethan rocked back and forth. "I'm sorry."

  "Now you're propitiating . . ."

  "Pro-what?"

  "It means being agreeable. Something you always are, after the fact."

  Ethan yanked his hand away. "Then why don't you just say it?" he yelled. "Why do you use these stupid words all the time no one can understand anyway? Why doesn't anyone ever just tell me, flat out, the truth?"

  His mother stared at him. "What do you want to hear, Ethan?"

  He was sobbing, and his nose was running. "That I'm a monster." He held his splayed hands up to his face, streaking his chin and cheeks with smudges of blood. "Look at me, Ma. Look at me."

  His mother forced a smile. "Ethan, honey, you're tired. It's way past your bedtime." Her voice kicked into soothing mode, the consistency of warm honey. It rolled over Ethan's shoulders; he had to fight to keep from giving in. He felt his mother probe his hand, lead him into the bathroom to clean the cuts.

  "I don't think you'll need stitches," she said, and she wrapped his hand with gauze. Then she took him back into his bedroom. Ethan climbed into bed and stared at the frame on his wall where the mirror used to be.

  "You'll feel better after you take a nap," his mother said, and Ethan did not know if she was talking to him or to herself. "We'll do something really wonderful when you get up--take out the telescope, maybe, and try to find Venus . . . or watch all the Star Wars videos back to back . . . you've wanted to do that for a while now, haven't you?" As she spoke she crouched on the floor, picking up the shards of the mirror. He wondered if she knew she was crying.

  Although he was exhausted, Ethan didn't fall asleep. His hand throbbed, and so did his face. He waited until he no longer heard his mother moving around downstairs, then crept out of bed to reach under his desk, where his mother had missed a triangle of mirror.

  Ethan held it up to his face. You could only get a small spot in view--the tip of his nose, one eyebrow, a freckle. It was possible, this way, to believe that added together, the reflections might make up one very ordinary boy. It was possible, this way, to be someone altogether different.

  Eli woke with a start and sat up, gasping for air. The room was redolent with the scent of apples, so strong that he looked to the side of the bed to make sure there was not a cider press nearby. He rubbed his eyes, but could not seem to shake the image that danced before his face, no matter which way he turned: it was that woman again.

  He knew her voice, although he had never heard her speak. He knew that she had a scar underneath her left earlobe, that her mouth tasted of vanilla and misfortune.

  His mother had believed in the power of dreams. When Eli was a child, she'd told him a story of his grandfather, a holy man who had envisioned his own demise. He had gone to sleep and seen a mountain covered with snow, and at the very top, a hawk. The hawk reached into the drifts and pulled out a snake by its neck--pulled and kept pulling--and finally attached to the end of the reptile was the empty shell of a turtle. Shaken, it made the rattle of death. Three months later, at a ceremonial rite, a freak snowstorm stranded Eli's grandfather and three other men at the top of a sacred mountain. The others found the men days afterward, frozen. Their bodies might never have been recovered, if not for the caw of a hawk who led the search party closer and closer.

  "When we're awake," Eli's mother used to say, "we see what we need to see. When we're asleep, we see what's really there."

  He used to wonder if his mother had ever dreamed of her marriage to a white man; of the diabetes slowly killing her. He wondered if she'd known that her only son would be more likely to cut off his own arm than subscribe to the Indian belief that dreams were more than some crazy neurons firing.

  The woman, the one who came to him in the dark--she had eyes the color of sea glass, a piece that Eli found once on a beach in Rhode Island, and that he kept on the windowsill of his bathroom.

  He pulled the covers up to his chin and settled down on his pillows again. Most likely, he was horny. He was dreaming up beauties because he wasn't getting any honest action.

  Although, he admitted, as he drifted off again, if that was the case, it made more sense to picture her in a bikini, or better yet, naked in a sauna. Not like she'd been, fully clothed and crouched on a floor, weeping as she fit together what looked like the pieces of an impossible puzzle.

  The scream rang out, high and hysterical, as Meredith raced into Lucy's bedroom. No, no, no, she thought. Things have been so normal.

  Her grandmother was already there, smoothing Lucy's damp hair back from her forehead and murmuring that everything was all right. "She won't stop," Granny Ruby said, panicked. "It's like she can't even hear me."

  Meredith clapped her hands on both sides of her daughter's face and leaned closer. "Lucy, you listen to me. You are fine. There is nothing here that can hurt you. Do you understand?"

  Like a veil lifting, Lucy's gaze sharpened, and she fell silent. As she realized where she was and what had happened she curled up in a fetal position and skittered closer to the head of the bed. "Can't you see her?" Lucy whispered. "She's right there."

  She pointed to a spot between Meredith and Ruby, a spot where there was nothing at all. Then she burrowed underneath the covers. "She wants me to help her look."

  "For what?" Meredith asked.

  But Lucy had gone somewhere inside herself, and she didn't answer. Meredith's chest hurt; her heart might have been a stone. "Granny," she said, in a voice that was borrowed, "can you watch her?"

  Without waiting for an answer, Meredith walked into her own bedroom again. She picked up the telephone and the small business card she'd placed in her nightstand drawer. She waited for the appropriate series of beeps. And then she paged Dr. Calloway, a surrender.

  When Ross arrived at the Pike property at 11 P.M., Lia was waiting. "Am I late?" he asked casually, as if he'd expected to see her all along. As he set up his equipment he watched her from the corner of his eye. There was something different about her--a fragile determination that Ross didn't want to jeopardize by bringing up the circumstances of how they'd last parted. So instead, he showed her the spots where the mounds had been two nights ago. He let her look at his new EMF field meter, which had arrived in the mail that afternoon. If she wanted to ghost hunt with him, then he'd let her. It was a starting point, and that was better than nothing at all.

  She ran her hand lightly over the video camera on its tripod, pointed off in the distance. "My father has a camera," she said, "although his is a little bigger. Bulkier."

  "This one's digital." Ross glanced up at the clearing. He was already getting strong sensations from that spot. "If we sit down and wait, maybe we'll get lucky."

  "I . . . can stay?"

  "I figured that's why you came."

  Lia didn't answer, but settled herself beside him on the frozen ground. Her apprehension pressed between them like a chaperone. Ross wondered what was fueling her fear--the possibility of seein
g a ghost, or that her husband would come looking for her. "You okay?" he asked.

  She nodded. With the exception of a small flashlight, they were sitting in total darkness. Lia sat with her arms wrapped over her knees, her skirt smoothed to her ankles. She glanced at the EMF meter, its needle stable. "So this compass," she said, "it goes off if a ghost is here?"

  "Technically, it goes off when a ghost is materializing. It's the transition between states that disrupts an electromagnetic field."

  She frowned. "I don't understand."

  "If the spirit is invisible, and then suddenly starts to look solid--or vice versa--we'll hear crackling."

  They fell into a companionable silence full of questions neither one wanted to be first to ask. At some point Ross stopped attending to potential paranormal activity and started to listen instead for the sound of Lia's breathing falling between the spaces of his own. He grew acutely aware of the distance between his shoulder and hers. If he shrugged, he would touch her. Hell, if he inhaled deeply.

  It had been nearly a decade since Ross felt this--a physical awareness so intense it seemed to require all of his attention, a fleeting prayer for something beyond his control--earthquake, tsunami--that might naturally close the space between them. He had been looking for the ghost of a woman for so long, it was unsettling to find himself fascinated by one sitting right beside him. But Lia was married, and Aimee was the one he really wanted.

  What if the strange tug he felt around Lia was not the need to save her, but the possibility that she might be able to save him? What if he was not supposed to find a ghost in Comtosook . . . but rather, this woman?

  Aimee is gone. Lia is here . . .

  The rogue thought stumbled into the front of his mind, upsetting him so greatly he found himself physically going in the opposite direction, scooting out of the yellow round of the flashlight and away from Lia. "Did something happen?" she asked, breathless.

  No, Ross thought, thank God. He got to his feet and began to walk around the clearing.

  "You feel something?"

  "No," Ross answered. Yes.

  She stood up, walking into the shadows. "I do," Lia murmured. "Like everything's getting . . . sharper. Harder."