by Jodi Picoult
Instead of going into town, however, I go down to camp on the lake. After several days of seeing me in Gray Wolf’s company, the people who live there have stopped staring. Some know me by name. “This,” Gray Wolf says when he introduces me, “is my daughter.”
The familiar Abenaki phrase for “my father” is N’Dadan. Spoken, it sounds like a heartbeat.
Today, it is raining. We sit in Gray Wolf’s tent at a scarred table. While he reads the sports page of the newspaper, I sift through a small cigar box. A cameo, a violet hair ribbon, a lock of hair—these are the things my mother left him. Each time I come I study them, as if they might hold a clue I haven’t yet discovered. Sometimes I think of Houdini; of what more one could possibly need to return from the other side.
He tells me I can have all of these, if I would like them. He says he doesn’t need things to recall her, because unlike me, he met her. I do not know how to tell him that what I really want is something of his—something to remember him by, just in case.
He makes a small sound of dismay. “Sox just blew their chance at the Series,” he sighs. “It’s the Curse of the Bambino. The worst trade in history since we swapped Manhattan for a few shells and beads.” I stand up and pretend to wander around the small tent. I touch his shaving brush, his razor, his comb. With his back to me, I take a pipe from his nightstand and slip it into my pocket.
“I thought you preferred cigarettes,” he says, without turning around.
I whirl. “How did you know?”
He glances over his shoulder. “I can smell how nervous you are. I would have given the pipe to you if you’d asked.” Grinning, he says, “My daughter’s a thief. Must be all that Gypsy blood in her veins.”
My daughter. Once again, the title makes me feel as if I have swallowed a star. “You haven’t asked me,” I point out, “if I’m going to tell Spencer or my . . . Harry Beaumont.”
Gray Wolf studies his newspaper. “That isn’t my choice to make. I didn’t tell you so I could claim you. Nobody belongs to anyone else.”
I think of him in prison, making the decision to be sterilized so that he would be free to search for me. Whether he wants to admit it or not, people do belong to each other. Once you make a sacrifice for someone, you own part of his or her soul. “But you must want me to.”
When he looks up at me, I take a step back; there is that much passion in his eyes. “I wanted you. On any terms. I was willing to trade anything just to see you. Would I like to hear you say you’re my daughter, to have you shout it to anyone who’ll listen? God, yes, there’s a part of me that says that’s why I did what I did. But there’s a bigger part of me that only wants to make sure you’re safe.” He folds the sports page, pleats it neatly, as if he will be judged on the result. “And if you go out and tell people about me, they won’t hear how proud you are. All they’re gonna hear is that you’re Indian.”
“I don’t care.”
“That’s because you’ve never been one. You haven’t spent years wearing someone else’s clothes, taking someone else’s name, living in someone else’s houses, and working someone else’s jobs to fit in. And if you don’t sell out, then you run away . . . proving you’re the Gypsy they said you were all along.” He shakes his head sadly. “I want you to have a better life than the one I had. Even if that means keeping your distance from me.”
The baby does a slow roll inside me, unsettled. “Then why would you bother to look for me? Why didn’t you just stay away?”
He stares at me for a long moment. “How could I?”
“Then how,” I say, “can you ask me to?”
He looks out the flap of the tent, into the rain. “You’ll understand, when that baby is born. There’s an old phrase, Awani Kia. It means, ‘Who are you.’ Not your name, but your people. You hear it a lot when you move from place to place. Every winter, when I go up to Odonak and someone asks me, I get to tell him about my great-grandfather, who was a spiritual leader. Or my Auntie Sopi, who was the best healer in her day. Every winter when I answer I remember that it doesn’t matter what people call me, as long as I know who I really am.” He hesitates. “This winter, I’ll tell them about you.”
It is the first time he’s talked about his departure from the camp. He is a wanderer, an itinerant—I have always known this. But for the first time I realize that when he leaves for Canada, he will be leaving me.
“What if I come?” I blurt out.
“To Odonak? I don’t think you’d be happy there.”
“But I’m not happy here.”
“Lia,” he says quietly. “I won’t tell you not to go; I’m too selfish for that. But the minute you get to Canada, you’ll be thinking about what you left behind here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Don’t I?” He glances at the table, at my mother’s cameo. “A person can’t live in two worlds at once.”
“But you just found me!”
Gray Wolf smiles. “Who said you were lost?”
I duck my head. Without being conscious of it, I rub my fingers over the scars at my wrist. “I’m not as brave as you,” I say.
“No,” he answers. “You’re braver.”
No one has a right to become a parent who has so sinned that their children must suffer.
—Mr. Harding, of W. Fairlee, quoted in the Burlington Free Press on March 21, 1931, during the debate in the Vermont State House regarding the Sterilization Bill
In the billiards room, the balls strike each other with precision. “Spencer,” my father laughs, “you’re not going to let an old man beat you!”
“Harry, shut up and take your turn, will you?”
I smile and press my hand to the small of my back. At the sideboard in the adjoining hall, I am counting the silver. Spencer has me do it once a month. We never come up short, but he says you can never be too careful.
I am on the seventh teaspoon when I hear the word Gypsy.
“Actually,” Spencer responds, “I had to finish the job myself.”
“Can’t say it’s any surprise.” There is a neat click as my father hits another ball with his cue. “Stealing, lying . . . I wouldn’t be surprised to find unreliability an inherited trait.”
“Well, this one also happened to have served time for murder.”
“Good God—”
“Exactly.” Spencer scratches, curses. “I’m all for believing in the rehabilitation of criminals, but I’d rather not test the theory at the expense of my own wife.”
There is a sharp crack, a muffled click, and then the sound of my father racking up the balls for another game. “The problem with the Sterilization Law is that it doesn’t get rid of the degenerates that have already been born,” he says. “That’s what needs to be addressed next.”
All the blood drains from my head. He does not say this with malice; for his statement to be hateful he would actually have to know some of the people he wants to eliminate. He and Spencer, they are only trying to change the world, to make it a better place for their children.
By getting rid of someone else’s.
I stare at them through the open doorway; it is like seeing a saucer of milk go sour before your eyes. Spencer grins amiably. “Genocide’s not legal.”
“Only if you get caught,” my father laughs, and he picks up his cue again. “Stripes or solids?”
Before I know it I have pushed myself into the doorway. I am white as a sheet; Spencer’s cue rattles to the ground and he is at my side in an instant. “Cissy?” he says frantically. “What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”
I manage to shake my head. “The baby . . . is fine.”
My father frowns. “Darling, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Maybe I have, because I have just watched something that clearly has been here all along, even if I was too blind to bear witness before. Spencer pries the teaspoons from my hand. “You aren’t up to this. That’s why we have Ruby, isn’t it? Come. Let’s get you off your feet.”
“I don’t want to be off my feet,” I say, my voice escalating. “I don’t want . . . I don’t . . .” As I push Spencer away, the teaspoons clatter to the floor. I burst into tears.
My father grasps my shoulders firmly. “Cissy, you’re overwrought. Sit down, now.”
“Listen to your father,” Spencer agrees.
The problem is, I have been. And I no longer know who I am.
“Call Dr. DuBois,” Spencer says quietly to my father, who nods and lifts the telephone receiver.
Spencer kneels beside me and puts his arm around my shoulders. What does one do with an insane wife? “Cissy?” he says, his bewilderment twisting my name like ribbon candy.
Silver winks at me, a conspiracy at my feet. “Oh, Spencer,” I sob. “Look at what you’ve done.”
Every woman in the Vermont House, with the exception of Mrs. Farr of Monkton, who was absent, favored the [passage of the 1931 sterilization] bill.
—Burlington Free Press, March 25, 1931
Dr. DuBois sets his stethoscope in his ears. As I lay back on my pillows, he shields me with his body for privacy and begins to unbutton my blouse. I remember too late that I am still wearing the medicine pouch Gray Wolf gave me.
My eyes meet the doctor’s. Before he can touch the pouch I grab the edges of my blouse and pull them together. I shake my head once, sharply, staring hard at Dr. DuBois, whose brow has furrowed in a frown. Without breaking my gaze, I slide the buttons back into their holes, and wait for him to make the next move.
He is Spencer’s puppet, but I am his patient, and to my surprise, that actually counts for something. Dr. DuBois tugs his stethoscope from his ears and hangs it around his neck. His eyes pose a question I have no intention of answering. “Well, your baby is fine,” he says briskly. “I think all you need is a good rest.” He shakes two sleeping pills from a medicine bottle and watches carefully as I put them into my mouth and take a drink from the cup of water he’s holding out. “That’s a good girl. You should feel better in no time. But you know, Cissy, that you can call on me whenever you have anything you need to . . . ask.”
With that, he rises and approaches Spencer, hovering in the doorway. As they begin to speak quietly, I roll onto my side and spit out the pills I’ve tucked high in my cheek. I slip them into my pillowcase.
I cannot take a nap, because then I won’t be able to meet Gray Wolf as I am supposed to this afternoon. Of course, now that Dr. DuBois has come to visit, I will have to concoct some new excuse. Maybe I will say I’m going to the stationer for vellum, to write invitations to our dinner party. What they do not understand is that I don’t need pills, and I don’t need rest. What I need is someone who does not want me to sleep through my own life.
The bed sinks as Spencer sits down beside me. I roll toward him, my eyelids half-lowered. “I’m already getting tired.”
“You aren’t the only one,” Spencer answers, and his voice is full of edges.
In that moment I forget how to breathe.
“Why is it that Dr. DuBois—the physician you’ve gone to see six times in the past two weeks, for various aches and pains—has no recollection of these visits?” His face is stained crimson, which makes the blond roots of his hair stand out like platinum. “What on earth could my wife be doing that would make her lie to me?” He has my shoulders in his hands, and shakes me. “Not just once, but over and over?”
My head snaps back on the stalk of my neck. “Spencer, it’s not what you think . . .”
“Do not tell me what I think!” he roars, and then suddenly collapses into himself. “Cissy, God, what have you done to me?”
Seeing him fall apart, I push myself into a sitting position and cradle his head in my lap. “Spencer. I was going out for walks. By myself. I just wanted to be by myself.”
“Yourself?” Spencer murmurs against my skin. “You were by yourself?”
I stare square into his eyes. “Yes.”
Stealing, lying . . . I wouldn’t be surprised to find unreliability an inherited trait.
“Look at me,” I say wryly, gesturing at the swell of my belly.
“I do,” Spencer answers. “I am.” He cups my face in his hands and kisses me lightly. When he pulls away, he is holding an apology between his teeth. “I’m sorry, Cissy.” I squeeze his hand as he gets to his feet. It is not until he takes the key to the bedroom door from his dresser that I realize he has not been asking forgiveness for what he has done, but for what he is about to do. “Dr. DuBois agrees with me—you can’t be left alone. Especially not now, when your emotions are running so high with the pregnancy. He says that you’re at risk to . . . to hurt yourself again.”
“And God forbid I do it where someone else could see. What would people say if they knew Spencer Pike was married to a woman who belonged with the rest of the feebleminded in Waterbury!”
Spencer’s hand strikes my cheek with a sound like thunder, and shocks me into submission. He stares at his palm, as surprised by his actions as I am. I touch the pads of my fingers to my face, feeling the print of him rising like a second skin. “I’m doing this,” Spencer says stiffly, “because I love you.”
The minute the door closes behind him and the lock turns into place, I get out of bed. I try the windows, which are stuck as always. I bang on the door. “Ruby!” I yell. “Ruby, you get me out of here this instant!”
I hear her scratching on the other side of the door. “I can’t, Miz Pike. The professor, he says so.”
I beat my fist one last time against the panels. Thrashing around has only made the close room even hotter; my hair sticks to the back of my neck and my shirt is damp. A princess in an ivory tower, that’s what I am. But if the prince knew, at heart, that I am a toad, would he fight so hard to keep me?
Crawling around on my hands and knees I plug in the electric fan and hold my face close. Immediately I am cooler. I wonder if this is what the air in Canada is like. I wonder if Gray Wolf will worry, when I do not come.
As the fan spins I speak into it, a child’s trick, so that my voice sounds like someone else’s. “Nia Lia,” I say. I am Lia. “N’kadi waji nikônawakwanawak.” I want to go home.
Henceforth it shall be the policy of the state to prevent procreation of idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded or insane persons, when the public welfare, and the welfare of idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded or insane persons likely to procreate, can be improved by voluntary sterilization as herein provided.
—“An Act for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization,” Laws of Vermont, 31st Biennial Session (1931), No. 174, p. 194
“I’m thinking about caramelized onions,” Ruby says.
She sits on a chair beside my bed, my only visitor. Outside, on one of the trees in the backyard, a bird is making a nest. A red thread unwinds from its beak, like a magician doing sleight-of-hand with a handkerchief. “Fine.”
There is nothing sharp in my bedroom. Nothing I could swallow or use to string myself up. I know, because Spencer has had Ruby canvass the space. What he doesn’t understand is that I will not try to kill myself, not yet. Just in case, just in case . . . oh, I cannot finish the sentence, and jinx it.
Ruby flips through another cookbook. “Or else, a pepper crust.”
“Yes,” I say. “Wonderful.”
Ruby frowns. “Miz Pike, I can’t put them both on the roast.”
Spencer is not a tyrant. When he comes home from work, he takes me out for a walk on the edge of our property. He buys me books. He brings me dinner himself, and holds bits of chicken and potato up to my lips as if we are on a picnic. He brushes my hair for me, long lean strokes that make me forget where we are and who I am. But in the morning, when he leaves, he turns the key in the bedroom door. And the only person I see, until he comes home again, is Ruby.
I drag my attention toward her. “You said you need two roasts, for that many guests. Do one of each.” Or serve it raw. I don’t care.
“We don’t have room in the icebox for two roasts, plus a dessert. Som
e of it, I’ll have to store in the icehouse.” Ruby makes a note to her checklist. “What do you think about a seven-layer cake? Or baked Alaska?”
Her words blend together at the edges. I turn away. The robin has woven the thread through the rest of his nest. It looks like a line of blood.
Why go to all that trouble, when soon he will be flying south for the winter?
“Miz Pike.” Ruby sighs. “Miz Pike?”
The robin is no more than ten feet away from where I am. I have no idea how to get from here to there.
Ruby touches my hand. “Cissy?”
“Go away,” I tell her, and pull the covers over my head.
When a Doctor wants a boat
On the broad highway to float
He will find a place where sapheads congregate
He will chase them to a shed
And at fifty bucks a head
He will freeze his conscience out and mutilate.
—E. F. Johnstone’s “Authority to Mutilate,” from newspaper clippings on sterilization, Henry F. Perkins Faculty File, UVM archives
By the third day of my imprisonment, I have stopped bothering to dress myself. I lay on the bed with my hair a rat’s nest, my nightgown hiked high. Ruby has gone to the butcher’s, Spencer is at the university. The radio warbles band music that beats like my baby’s heart.
When I hear the lock turn at first, I wonder how Ruby has made it back from town so quickly. But even the way Gray Wolf moves through a room is different from anyone else. I sit up, unable to speak as he kneels beside the bed and embraces me. “You told him?”
“No.” He smells of the outdoors. I drink him in.
“He locked you in for something else?” Gray Wolf says, shocked.
Before I can explain, he starts speaking, his words tumbling like avalanche stones to land at our feet. “When you didn’t show up, I thought maybe you had listened to me after all about staying away.”