by Jodi Picoult
It smelled of smoke. Meredith watched him walk to the driver’s side. His hair was long—all one length, nearly to his shoulders; he wore a short-sleeved bowling shirt open over a man’s tank-style T-shirt; his jeans had a hole on the left thigh. He looked like the kind of guy you’d find strumming a guitar for tips in a subway hollow, or writing bad poetry in the rear of a rundown café. The kind of guy who scribbled notes to himself on gum wrappers and stuck them in the pocket of his jacket, only to forget what they were about in the first place. The kind of guy who drove taxis while people like her were busy getting their doctorates. The kind of guy she would never have given a second glance.
The car started right up, a small miracle. “So,” he said, smiling. “Where to?”
“Somewhere close.” Meredith gave him directions to the first Starbucks that came to mind, and when he turned away she told herself that she had imagined the flash of disappointment in his eyes.
Those eyes. She’d give him that. They made her think of the sort of pool you’d stumble across in a rain forest, so jewel green and rich that once you fell in, you’d be immediately over your head and unable—unwilling—to drag yourself out.
He held up a pack of cigarettes. “Do you mind?”
She did, greatly, but this was his car. She unrolled the window as he lit a cancer stick and drew deeply. It hollowed out his cheekbones even more, casting the planes of his face in stark relief. “Just so you know,” Meredith announced, “I am not in the habit of being fixed up by my grandmother.”
“Of course not.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Ross blew a stream of smoke out his window. “That someone like you can get her own dates.”
In spite of herself, Meredith felt heat rise up from her neck. “Like me,” she repeated, immediately putting up her guard. “How do you know anything about me?”
“I don’t,” Ross admitted.
“Then why don’t you just stop making assumptions.” And yet, Meredith thought, hadn’t she been doing the very same thing about him?
He drove with his right hand, the cigarette in his left. The end glowed like a game-show buzzer, an evil eye. “It’s only that you remind me of someone I used to know. She was just as beautiful as you are.”
In her lifetime, Meredith could count on one hand the number of times she had been complimented on her looks. Accomplished, intelligent, groundbreaking—those were all adjectives that had often been tethered to her name. But she’d set her physical attributes on a back burner, choosing instead to play up her mental acuity, and the world had followed her lead. Beautiful, she thought again.
She wondered what had happened to this woman he used to know, if she had died or gotten into a fight with him or walked out of his life. Meredith looked at Ross again across the front seat of the car and this time, instead of seeing a loser, she saw someone who had a story to tell.
To her great surprise, she wanted to hear it.
“So?” Ross asked, and she thought maybe he could read minds, too.
“So what?”
“So . . . are we going in?” He glanced out the window, and she realized that they had pulled into the parking lot of Starbucks. He had a dimple in his left cheek when he smiled.
“Yes. Right.” Ross came around to her side of the car and opened the door for her. They walked into the café to find several people in line in front of them. “Do you know what you’d like?” he asked.
For the first time in years, Meredith didn’t have a ready answer.
Bruno Davidovich had been a pro linebacker, a bouncer, and, in one career aberration, a television chef, before getting into lie detection work. The trick, he’d told Eli, was to never take your eyes off your subject. He kept time with Swiss precision, and always arrived at the exact scheduled hour to perform his tests, which was one reason Eli liked to employ him. The other was that Bruno’s sheer size often scared people into telling the truth.
“Try to relax,” Bruno said to Spencer Pike, as the old man sat trussed up to the polygraph. Pike had agreed to the test when Eli asked, saying he wanted this over and done with, already. Now two pneumograph tubes were attached to his chest and abdomen, two metal plates hooked onto his ring and index finger, a blood pressure cuff around his thin upper arm. “Is today Wednesday?” Bruno asked.
Pike rolled his eyes. “Yes.”
“Is your name Spencer Pike?”
“Yes.”
“Are you a healthy man?”
A pause. “No.”
“Have you ever told a lie?” Bruno asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever told a lie about something serious?”
“Yes.”
“Have you ever lied to get out of trouble?”
“Yes.”
Eli listened to Bruno continue through the questions, working his way up to the relevant ones. It was not as if this polygraph test would be used in court, nor was it considered accurate enough to acquit or condemn Pike. But Eli needed to know for his own peace of mind why Spencer Pike seemed to think that he was responsible for the death of a child that hadn’t been killed, yet innocent of the murder of his wife.
“Was the baby born dead?” Bruno was asking.
“No.”
“Did you hold the baby after it was born?”
“Yes.”
“Did you kill the baby after it was born?”
Pike’s breath left his body in a thin stream. “Yes,” he said.
“Did you have a fight with your wife before the baby was born?”
“Yes.”
“Did you fight with your wife after the baby was born?”
“No.”
“Did you harm your wife?”
Pike bowed his head. “Yes.”
Bruno stared at Pike. “Did you hang your wife?”
“No,” he answered.
“Thanks,” Bruno said. He pulled the printout from the polygraph and walked into the hallway, Eli following.
While Eli waited, Bruno scored the charts. “So?”
“Look here. When I asked him if he hurt his wife, and he replied affirmatively . . . that was the control question. Then I asked him if he killed his wife, and his physiological response wasn’t as strong as it was to the previous question.”
“He didn’t do it,” Eli said softly.
“Seems that way.” Bruno hesitated. “You want me to scare him up a little bit, see if we get something different?”
Eli glanced through the door. Pike’s watery eyes were fixed on something outside the window. His hands flexed on the arms of his wheelchair. “No,” Eli said. “He’s done.”
It was not until the clerk from behind the Starbucks counter took off his apron and began to swish a mop around the table where Ross and Meredith had settled that she realized they had been sitting there for five hours. “Designer babies are the norm in nature,” she argued. “Look at gorillas, okay? Grayback males are the ones all the ladies go for, because they’ve lived long enough to go gray. So when it comes time to pick your mate, you choose someone who’s going to give your offspring the best chance for longevity.” Meredith felt her brain snapping with the challenge of defending her work, and she knew it wasn’t only because this was her fourth caramel macchiato. “All we’re doing in the lab is making nature run a little more smoothly.”
“But how big a leap is it from discarding embryos because they carry cystic fibrosis,” Ross countered, “to getting rid of anything that doesn’t have blue eyes?”
Meredith thought for a moment. “Well, technically, blue eyes are a one-gene defect, so that would be possible. But most traits that parents would consider undesirable involve hundreds of genes acting in tandem. That was where Hitler was categorically wrong. You can’t pinpoint stupidity or frailty or ugliness at one place on the DNA strand.”
“Not yet,” Ross qualified. “But once you figure that out, it’s only a matter of time before stem cell therapy is used to get rid of those . . . undesirable t
raits. And suddenly you’ve got a whole world full of Stepford people.”
“First off, there’s a difference between curing someone who is already sick, versus engineering someone who can’t get sick. Second, 99.9 percent of the scientists doing this kind of research are in it for the right reasons—not because they’re megalomaniacs set on creating a master race. Third, you can’t criticize me until you talk to a woman whose three babies have died of leukemia, a woman who’s come to beg for a baby that won’t die this time around.” Meredith shook her head. “I have this sign on my office door that says The Last Resort. I put it there because that’s what the parents who meet with me think they’ve come to. And to have those same parents show up with a healthy baby months later—well, no parent should have to suffer through having a sick child.”
“And who gets to define sick?” Ross swirled a stirrer in his coffee mug. “My nephew has XP. You ever heard of that?”
“Sure.”
“He’s just the sort of child PGD would have recommended discarding. But Ethan’s the smartest, sharpest, bravest kid I’ve ever met. And even if he can only be smart and sharp and brave for ten years or thirteen years or thirty, who’s to say that time isn’t better than none at all?”
“Not me,” Meredith agreed. “That would be up to the parents.”
“But there are plenty of parents out there who would have gotten rid of Ethan—”
“—Who was not Ethan at the time,” Meredith argued. “Barely a clot of cells.”
“Whatever. The point is, parents draw the line at all different places. What if PGD diagnoses a disease that won’t come out until a person’s thirties or forties? Or if it screens a predisposition to heart disease or cancer . . . which still might never develop in the course of a lifetime? What if you find a way to tell that a child will grow up to be suicidal?” Ross’s gaze slipped away from hers. “Do people have the right to get rid of those embryos too?”
Meredith raised her brows. “And what if deaf parents used PGD to be able to have a child with the same inherited condition? That would be endorsing a disability.”
“You can’t tell me that’s what most of your clients do.”
“No,” she admitted. “But it does happen. And it’s exactly why my job is not evil incarnate. Is it so wrong for a parent to know what her child will be like in advance?”
“How about when a kid finds out that the circumstances of her birth aren’t what she thought they were?” Ross asked, looking at her carefully.
“It’s up to the parents to tell her, or not. If things go well, either way, she’s happy . . . because she’s got parents who love her for the way she turned out.”
“Love has nothing to do with science,” Ross said. “Love’s not a because, it’s a no matter what.”
“But why take the chance?” Meredith argued. “Can you honestly say that there’s one thing about yourself you don’t wish could have been changed for the better before you were born?”
For a moment Ross did not respond. Then he asked, “Have you found the gene for happiness yet?”
She fell silent, looking at him, wondering about the genesis of an answer like that. The only sound was the quiet swish of the mop, rasping its tongue along the tile floor behind them. Meredith realized, in that moment, what was so different about Ross Wakeman—in the five hours they’d spent in each other’s company, this was the first glimpse into himself that he’d offered. They had talked about Lucy, about Ruby’s health, about Meredith’s career . . . and not at all about him. Meredith could not recall a single date that hadn’t centered on the man she was with. Ross—well, Ross was doing what she usually did.
She did not know anything about this man who caused her mind to spin, except that he had a nephew with XP, knew her grandmother, and made the seam of her pulse lose a stitch every time he smiled. “I’m sorry,” Meredith said. “I’ve completely monopolized this conversation.”
“No. I wanted to know about you.”
“I want to know about you too,” Meredith admitted.
“Nothing very interesting, I’m afraid.” Ross took out a pack of cigarettes, lighting up.
She waved away a cloud of smoke. “Those things will kill you.”
“I wish.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t die,” Ross admitted.
In spite of herself, Meredith grinned. “Unless I take out my kryptonite necklace, you mean?”
“No, really. I’ve been hit by bullets, thrown from a car crash, fried by lightning, and every time I come away without a scratch.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I’ve got the doctor bills to prove it.”
Meredith was stunned for a moment. “That’s a pretty remarkable gift.”
“Not when you want to save someone other than yourself,” Ross said.
“Your nephew.”
“Among other people.”
She leaned forward, drawn by the flicker of pain at the back of his eyes. “The person you said I look like?”
He didn’t answer—he didn’t seem capable of answering at that point. Meredith wondered what it would feel like to have a man so enamored of her that even after her death, he might still carry a torch. He might look for her face in the faces of others. The Starbucks worker approached their table. “You can’t smoke in here.”
Ross turned to him. “I guess self-immolation is out of the question, then.”
The kid blinked. “Dude, whatever perverted stuff you do on your own time is your own business.”
Meredith covered her laugh with a cough. “Maybe we ought to go.” She hesitated. “I’ve really enjoyed being with you. I think the last time I told that to a guy and meant it, I was making mud pies in the nursery school sandbox.”
“And you didn’t even get your hands dirty tonight.”
“Imagine.” Meredith looked up at him shyly. “Are you in town for a while? Maybe we could, you know, get together. For a whole meal this time. Or just the appetizer, if you want to work up to that.”
“I can’t.”
Immediately her eyes flew to his left hand. Bare. “You’re gay,” she said.
“It’s not that.”
The old reflex kicked in—she had been at this juncture of an evening before, where she was found unattractive or lacking in some other way. Meredith felt herself separating by degrees. “Yes. Right.” She briskly held out her hand. “Well, it was very nice to meet you.”
He took her hand with reverence, turning it over between his own for a long moment, as if she were made of the finest crystal instead of ordinary flesh and blood. “Meredith,” Ross said quietly, “I like you. I like you a lot. But there’s someone else.”
The woman, the one Meredith looked like. She ducked her head. “I’m sorry,” she muttered. “I didn’t realize you two were still—”
She felt something being pressed into her hand. A newspaper clipping, yellowed and faded, but it was still possible to see the face of the woman in the center. A face that was a mirror of Meredith’s. Lia Beaumont Pike, said the caption. 1914–1932.
“This was your biological grandmother,” Ross said. “And I’m in love with her.”
It was a war, Ross realized, and Meredith was losing. She stood with her arms crossed tight, her back straight, her eyes the color of anger. Ross and Ruby, on the couch, took turns fielding her outrage and tossing it back, in the hopes that she would start to believe what they were trying to say.
“When I told your mother that she was not my child, not even named Luxe, but really Lily Pike,” Ruby said, “she had a heart attack and died. Can you blame me for not wanting to bring it up again?”
“Yes!” Meredith exploded. “You don’t hide something like that from a person!”
“You do if it saves their life,” Ross pointed out.
She turned to him, lashing out like a wounded bear. “Explain something to me. How could you possibly have known a woman who died before you were born?”
“I
met her at work.”
“Work. What do you do for a living, raise the dead?”
Ross exchanged a glance with Ruby. “I don’t raise them. I just sort of find them.”
“Great. You hunt for ghosts, when you’re not getting hit by lightning and managing to stay alive. Ruby, I don’t know how this guy walked in and convinced you the way he did, but he’s crazy. Wacko. I think—-”
“I think you’d better listen to him, Meredith,” Ruby interrupted. “He’s telling you the truth.”
“The truth. So now you believe in ghosts, too? Fine, then. Conjure this grandmother of mine. If she floats in here and tells me the same thing, I’ll believe you.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Ross explained.
“How convenient.”
The corners of Ruby’s mouth turned down. “Don’t shoot the messenger.”
“Then what would you like me to do? Thank him for coming here to tell me my entire life has been a lie?”
“It hasn’t been a lie,” Ross said. “It just . . . hasn’t been what you thought it was.” He walked toward Meredith. “You are the direct descendant of Lia Pike. And that means you own a really nice piece of real estate in Comtosook, Vermont.”
He wished he could tell her that from this property, you could see mountains so green it made your eyes hurt, and that the air smelled cleaner than anything you could ever imagine. He wished he could show her the spot where he’d fallen in love with Lia.
“I don’t need real estate in Vermont,” Meredith said.
“Well, there are a boatload of Abenaki Indians who do, who’ve been fighting to keep the land from being developed.”
“That’s not my problem.”
“No, but if you own the land, you get to decide what’s done with it.”
“Ah, see, now we’re getting somewhere. You’re an Indian-rights activist.”
“I’m—”
“And naturally, if you can convince me I’m part Abenaki, I’m supposed to side with my relatives. Am I the only person here who can see what’s right in front of her eyes? Look at me.” Meredith yanked her hair out of its neat bun. “I’m blond. I’m pale. Do I look like I have even a drop of Native American blood in me?”