by Jodi Picoult
The height of the Industrial Revolution was also the height of the Spiritualist movement. The fact that Edison was a supporter of the mechanical breakthroughs in the physical world doesn’t mean he wasn’t equally entranced by the metaphysical. If mediums could do it via séance, he reasoned, surely a machine calibrated with great care could communicate with those on the other side.
He didn’t talk much about this intended invention. Maybe he was afraid of his concept being stolen; maybe he had not come up with a specific design. He told Scientific American magazine that the machine would be “in the nature of a valve”—meaning that, with the slightest effort from the other side, some wire might be tripped, some bell might be rung, some proof might be had.
Can I tell you that Edison believed in the afterlife? Well, although he was quoted as saying that life wasn’t destructible, he never came back to tell me so personally.
Can I tell you he wasn’t trying to debunk Spiritualism? Not entirely.
But it is equally possible that he wanted to apply a scientist’s brain to a field that was hard to quantify. It is equally possible that he was trying to justify what I used to do for a living, by giving cold, hard evidence.
I also know that Edison believed the moment between being awake and being asleep was a veil, and it was in that moment that we were most connected to our higher selves. He would set pie tins out on the floor beside each arm of his easy chair and take a nap. Holding a big ball bearing in each hand, he’d nod off—until the metal struck metal. He’d write down whatever he was seeing, thinking, imagining at that moment. He became pretty proficient at maintaining that in-between state.
Maybe he was trying to channel his creativity. Or maybe he was trying to channel … well … spirits.
After Edison’s death, no prototypes or papers were found that suggested he’d started work on his machine to talk to the dead. I suppose that means the folks in charge of his estate were embarrassed by his Spiritualist leanings, or they didn’t want that to be the memory left behind of a great scientist.
Seems to me, though, that Thomas Edison got the last laugh. Because at his home in Fort Myers, Florida, there’s a life-size statue of him in the parking lot. And in his hand, he’s holding that ball bearing.
I am having the sense of a male presence.
Although, if I’m going to be honest, that might just be a sinus headache coming on.
“Of course you’re sensing a guy,” Virgil says, balling up the aluminum foil that housed his chili dog. I have never seen a human being eat the way this man eats. The terms that come to mind are giant squid and wet vac. “Who else would give a chick a necklace?”
“Are you always this rude?”
He picks off one of my French fries. “For you, I’m making a special exception.”
“You still hungry?” I ask. “How about I serve up a steaming platter of I told you so?”
Virgil scowls. “Why? Because you tripped over a piece of jewelry?”
“Well, what did you find?” The pimply boy in the corrugated metal trailer who served up our hot dogs is watching this exchange. “What?” I bark at him. “Have you never seen people argue?”
“He’s probably never seen someone with pink hair,” Virgil murmurs.
“At least I still have hair,” I point out.
That, at least, hits him where it hurts. He runs a hand over his nearly buzzed cut. “This is badass,” he says.
“You just keep telling yourself that.” I glimpse the teen hot dog vendor from the corner of my eye again, staring. Part of me wants to believe that he’s drawn to the spectacle of the Human Hoover polishing off the rest of my lunch, but there’s a niggling thought in my head that maybe he recognizes me as the celebrity I used to be. “Don’t you have some ketchup bottles to fill?” I snap, and he shrinks back from the window.
We are sitting outside in a park, eating the hot dogs I bought after Virgil realized he didn’t have a dime on him.
“It’s my father,” Jenna says, over a mouthful of her tofu dog. She is wearing the necklace now. It dangles over her T-shirt. “That’s who gave it to my mother. I was there. I remember.”
“Great. You remember your mother getting a rock on a chain, but not what happened the night she vanished,” Virgil says.
“Try holding it, Jenna,” I suggest. “When I used to get called in for kidnappings, the way I got my best leads was to touch something that had belonged to the missing child.”
“Spoken like a bitch,” Virgil says.
“I beg your pardon?”
He looks up, all innocence. “Female dog, right? Isn’t that how bloodhounds track, too?”
Ignoring him, I watch Jenna curl the necklace into her fist, squeeze her eyes shut. “Nothing,” she says after a moment.
“It’ll come,” I promise. “When you least expect it. You’ve got a lot of natural ability, I can tell. I bet you’ll remember something important when you’re brushing your teeth tonight.”
This is not necessarily true, of course. I’ve been waiting for years now, and I’m as dry as a bar in Salt Lake City.
“She’s not the only one who could use that to jog a memory,” Virgil says, thinking out loud. “Maybe the guy who gave it to Alice could tell us something.”
Jenna’s head snaps up. “My father? He can’t even remember my name half the time.”
I pat her arm. “No need to be embarrassed about the sins of the fathers. My daddy was a drag queen.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Jenna asks.
“Nothing. But he happened to be a very bad drag queen.”
“Well, my father’s in an institution,” Jenna says.
I look at Virgil over her head. “Ah.”
“Far as I know,” Virgil says, “no one ever went back to talk to your father, after your mom disappeared. Maybe it’s worth a try.”
I’ve done enough cold reading to be able to tell when a person is not being transparent. And right now, Virgil Stanhope is lying like a rug. I don’t know what his game is, or what he hopes to get out of Thomas Metcalf, but I’m not letting Jenna go with him alone.
Even if I swore I’d never go back into a psychiatric facility.
After the incident with the senator, I had a run of dark days. There was a lot of vodka involved, and some prescription medication. My manager at the time was the one who suggested I take a vacation, and by vacation, she meant a little sojourn at a psych ward. It was incredibly discreet—the kind of place that celebrities go to to refresh, which is Hollywoodspeak for get your stomach pumped, dry out, or have ECT. I was there for thirty days, long enough to know I would never let myself get that low again if it meant returning.
My roommate was a pretty little thing who was the daughter of a famous hip-hop artist. Gita had shaved off all her hair and had a line of piercings down the curve of her spine, linked by a thin platinum chain, which made me wonder how she slept on her back. She talked to an invisible posse that was absolutely real to her. When one of those imaginary people apparently came after her with a knife, she had run into traffic and gotten hit by a taxi. She was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. At the time I lived with her, she believed that she was being controlled by aliens through cell phones. Every time someone tried to send a text, Gita went ballistic.
One night, Gita started rocking back and forth in her bed, saying, “I’m gonna get struck by lightning. I’m gonna get struck by lightning.”
It was a clear summer night, mind you, but she wouldn’t stop. She kept this up, and an hour later, when a thunderstorm cell came sweeping through the area, she started to scream and rip at her own skin. A nurse came in, trying to calm her down. “Honey,” she said, “the thunder and the lightning are outside. You’re safe in here.”
Gita turned to her, and in that one moment I saw nothing but clarity in her eyes. “You know nothing,” she whispered.
There was a drumroll of thunder, and suddenly the window shattered. A neon arc of lightning staggered in, seared the rug,
and burned a hole the size of a fist into the mattress beside Gita, who started rocking harder. “I told you I was gonna get struck by lightning,” she said. “I told you I was gonna get struck by lightning.”
I tell you this story by way of explanation: The people we define as crazy just might be more sane than you and me.
“My father’s not going to be helpful,” Jenna insists. “We shouldn’t even bother.”
Again, my cold reading skills shine: The way she cuts her eyes to the left like that, the way she is now chewing on her fingernail—Jenna’s lying, too. Why?
“Jenna,” I ask, “can you run to the car and see if I left my sunglasses in there?”
She gets up, more than happy to escape this conversation.
“All right.” I wait for Virgil to meet my gaze. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t trust you.”
“Excellent. Then we feel exactly the same way about each other.”
“What are you not telling her?”
He hesitates, deciding whether or not to trust me, I’m sure. “The night the caregiver was found dead, Thomas Metcalf was nervous. Antsy. It could have been because his wife and daughter were missing at the time. And it could have been because he was already showing signs of a breakdown. But it also could have been a guilty conscience.”
I lean back, crossing my arms. “You think Thomas is a suspect. You think Alice is a suspect. Seems to me you think everyone’s to blame except yourself, for saying in the first place that the death was an accident.”
Virgil looks up at me. “I think Thomas Metcalf might have been abusing his wife.”
“That’s a damn good reason to run away,” I say, thinking out loud. “So you want to meet with him and try to get a reaction out of him.”
When Virgil shrugs, I know I’m right.
“Did you ever consider what that might do to Jenna? She already thinks her mother abandoned her. You’re going to take off her rose-colored glasses and show her that her father was a bastard, too?”
He shifts. “She should have thought of that before she hired me.”
“You’re really an ass.”
“That’s what I get paid for.”
“Then for all intents and purposes, you ought to be in a different tax bracket.” I narrow my gaze. “You and I know you’re not getting rich off this case. So what do you get out of it?”
“The truth.”
“For Jenna?” I ask. “Or for you, because you were too lazy to find it out ten years ago?”
A muscle tics in his jaw. For a second I think I’ve crossed the line, that he is going to get up and storm off. Before he can, though, Jenna reappears. “No sunglasses,” she says. She is still holding the stone, still fastened around her neck.
I know that some neurologists think that autistic kids have brain synapses so close together and firing in such quick succession that they cause hyperawareness; that one of the reasons children on the spectrum rock or stim is to help them focus instead of having all sensations bombard them at once. I think clairvoyance isn’t really all that much different. In all probability, neither is mental illness. I asked Gita, once, about her imaginary friends. Imaginary? she repeated, as if I were the one who was crazy, for not seeing them. And here’s the kicker—I understood what she was talking about, because I’d been there. If you notice someone talking to a person you can’t see, she may be a paranoid schizophrenic. But she may also just be psychic. The fact that you can’t see the other half of the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not truly happening.
That’s the other reason I don’t particularly want to visit Thomas Metcalf in a psychiatric facility: I just may be coming face-to-face with people who can’t control a natural gift I’d kill to have once again.
“You know how to get to the institution?” Virgil asks.
“Really,” Jenna says, “it’s really not such a great idea to visit my dad. He doesn’t always react well to people he doesn’t know.”
“I thought you said he doesn’t even recognize you sometimes. So who’s to say we’re not just old friends he’s forgotten?”
I see Jenna trying to work through Virgil’s logic, deciding if she should be protecting her father or trying to take advantage of his weak defenses.
“He’s right,” I say.
Virgil and Jenna are both shocked by my statement. “You agree with him?” Jenna asks.
I nod. “If your dad has anything to contribute about why your mother left that night, it might point us in the right direction.”
“It’s up to you,” Virgil says, noncommittal.
After a long moment, Jenna says, “The truth is, my mother’s all he ever talks about. How they met. What she looked like. When he knew he was going to ask her to get married.” She bites her lower lip. “The reason I said I didn’t want you to go to the institution is because I didn’t want to share that with you. With anyone. It’s, like, the only connection I have with my dad. He’s the one person who misses her as much as I do.”
When the universe calls, you don’t place it on hold. There is a reason I keep circling back to this girl. It’s either because of her gravitational pull or because she’s a drain I’m bound to be sucked down.
I offer my brightest smile. “Sugar,” I say, “I’m a sucker for a good love story.”
ALICE
The matriarch had died.
It was Mmaabo, who had slipped to the back of her herd yesterday, her movements laborious and jerky, before she sank down on her front knees and then toppled over. I had been up for thirty-six straight hours, observing. I noted how Mmaabo’s herd—her daughter Onalenna, who was her closest companion—had tried to lift her mother with her tusks and had managed to prop her on her feet, only to have Mmaabo fall over for good. How her trunk had reached toward Onalenna one last time before unfurling on the ground, like a skein of ribbon. How Onalenna and the others in the herd had made sounds of distress, had tried to prod their leader with their trunks and their bodies, pushing and pulling at Mmaabo’s corpse.
After six hours, the herd left the body. But almost immediately, another elephant approached. I thought it was a trailing member of Mmaabo’s herd but recognized the notched triangle on the left ear and the freckled feet of Sethunya, the matriarch of a different, smaller herd. Sethunya and Mmaabo were not related, but as Sethunya approached, she, too, got quieter, softer in her movements. Her head bowed, her ears drooped. She touched Mmaabo’s body with her trunk. She lifted her left rear foot and held it above Mmaabo’s body. Then she stepped over Mmaabo, so that her front legs and back legs straddled the fallen elephant. She began to sway back and forth. I timed this for six minutes. It felt like a dance, though there was no music. A silent dirge.
What did it mean? Why was an elephant not related to Mmaabo so profoundly affected by her death?
It had been two months since the death of Kenosi, the young bull who’d been caught in the snare, two months since I’d officially narrowed the focus of my postdoctoral work. While other colleagues working at the game reserve were studying the migration patterns of Tuli Block elephants and how they affected the ecosystem; or the effects of drought on the reproductive rate of elephants; or musth and male seasonality, my science was cognitive. It could not be measured with a geographic tracking device; it was not in the DNA. No matter how many times I recorded instances of elephants touching another elephant’s skull, or returning to the site where a former herd member died, the moment I interpreted that as grief, I was crossing a line animal researchers were not supposed to cross. I was attributing emotion to a nonhuman creature.
If anyone had ever asked me to defend my work, here’s what I would have said: The more complex a behavior is, the more rigorous and complicated the science behind it. Math, chemistry, that’s the easy stuff—closed models with discrete answers. To understand behavior—human or elephant—the systems are far more complex, which is why the science behind them must be that much more intricate.
But no one ever asked. I’m
pretty sure my boss, Grant, thought this was a phase I was going through, and that sooner or later, I’d get back to science, instead of elephant cognition.
I had seen elephants die before, but this was the first time since I’d changed my research focus. I wanted every last detail to be noted. I wanted to make sure I didn’t overlook anything as too mundane; any action that I might learn later was critical to the way elephants mourn. To that end, I stayed there, sacrificing sleep. I marked down which elephants came to visit, identifying them by their tusks, their tail hair, the marks on their bodies, and sometimes even the veins on their ears, which had patterns as unique as our own thumbprints. I cataloged how much time they spent touching Mmaabo, where they explored. I wrote down when they left the body, and if they returned. I cataloged the other animals—impala, and one giraffe—that passed through the vicinity, unaware that a matriarch had fallen. But mostly, I stayed because I wanted to know if Onalenna would come back.
It took her nearly ten hours to return, and when she did, it was twilight and her herd was off in the distance. She stood quietly beside her mother’s corpse as night fell, immediate as a guillotine. Every now and then she would vocalize, to be answered by rumbles from the northeast—as if she needed to check in with her sisters, and to remind them she was still here.
Onalenna hadn’t moved in the past hour, which is probably why I was so startled by the arrival of a Land Rover, the headlights slicing through the dark. It startled Onalenna, too, and she backed away from her dead mother, her ears flapping in threat. “There you are,” Anya said, as she pulled her vehicle closer. She was another elephant researcher, who was studying how migratory routes had changed because of poaching. “You didn’t answer your walkie-talkie.”
“I turned the volume down. I didn’t want to disturb her,” I said, nodding toward the nervous elephant.
“Well, Grant needs you to do something.”
“Now?” My boss had been less than encouraging when I told him about shifting my focus to elephant grief. He hardly talked to me at all now. Did this mean he was coming around?