by Jodi Picoult
“I believe in my brother.”
Chagrined, Meredith looked away. “It’s just that Ross dropped out of nowhere, you understand, to tell me I had to come to Vermont.”
A flicker of lost opportunity crossed her face. Shelby heard too, how the word Ross slipped off her tongue, like a sweet butterscotch candy passed between a kissing couple. She wondered if Meredith had noticed.
Shelby pushed a small pitcher of cream and another of sugar cubes toward her. “Sometimes it’s hard to be convinced of something until you see it right before your eyes.”
“Exactly,” Meredith agreed. “A hundred years ago, no one would have held that something microscopic was responsible for the height or skin color or intelligence of a person—but now look at what we believe.”
Then maybe a hundred years from now, we will all be able to see ghosts, Shelby thought. But instead she said politely, “Is that what you do? Work with DNA?”
“No, actually I do PGD. That’s preimp—”
“I know what it stands for,” Shelby said. “I actually once—”
She broke off, dropping the spoon she was holding so that it splattered in her coffee. She could see, in her photographic memory, the entry on her calendar, circled in red marker: Dr. Oliver, geneticist. The appointment that had been canceled, because Dr. Oliver had been having an abortion. Her head turned to the window, to the two small figures in the yard. “You didn’t get rid of the baby,” she whispered.
Meredith tilted her head. “I’m sorry?”
“Don’t be,” Shelby said, smiling widely, and she topped off Meredith’s cup.
Lucy didn’t want to be in this creepy backyard in the middle of the creepy night in this creepy town. Owls seemed to be at cross-corners and the night was a black bowl pressing down on her. Plus, whatever kid that lady had been talking about wasn’t here; Lucy had the whole creepy place to herself.
She walked around the little yard, trailing her hands over the evidence that a child did exist, somewhere. A baseball bat, leaning against the fence. A Razor scooter folded neatly next to a gardening stool. The garden itself was covered with hawk moths that hovered like fairies over plants that bloomed in the dead of night. Lucy leaned closer to read some of the names on the stakes. Angel’s Trumpet, Moonflower, Aquamarine. Just whispering them made her feel like she was walking underwater.
She took another step and her foot sent a skateboard flying. Lucy watched it skid across the driveway and crash into a pole with a hanging citronella lantern. A voice crawled inside her head. Hey, she heard. What do you think you’re doing?
Spirits always talked that way to her, like there were radio speakers in her brain. So when she spun around, her heart racing, Lucy already expected the white face floating in front of her. She swallowed hard. “Are you a ghost?” she asked.
What the hell kind of question was that? “Not yet,” Ethan said, and he grabbed his skateboard from the little priss who had invaded his backyard. He proceeded to do the most bitchin’ kickflip he could, just to knock her socks off. Ghost. Like he needed reminding.
He circled back to her, breathing hard. She was maybe a year younger than he was, with hair in braids and eyes so black with fear he couldn’t see their real color. He could tell she was dying to touch him, to see if her hand would go right through. “Who are you?”
“Lucy.”
“And what are you doing in my backyard, Lucy?”
She shook her head. “Someone told me to come here.”
Ethan stepped on the back of his board, so that it flew up into his hand. Another totally cool trick. He didn’t get to show off to new people, very much. “You looking for ghosts? Because I know how to find them. My uncle showed me.”
If anything, that terrified her even more. She opened her mouth to say something, but a strangled sound came out of it. She tapped at her chest and gulped. “Get . . . in . . .”
Ethan froze. “Inside? You want to go inside?”
“In . . . haler . . .”
He ran off as if flames were spreading on the soles of his feet, and threw open the kitchen door. “She can’t breathe,” Ethan panted.
A woman moved past him so fast he didn’t even get a chance to see her face. By the time he got into the backyard she was leaning over Lucy, holding a little tube to her mouth. “Relax, Lucy,” the woman said, as Ethan’s mother put her arm around him.
“Asthma,” she murmured.
Ethan looked at Lucy’s blue skin. He figured she didn’t appear all that different from one of those ghosts she’d mentioned. “Could she . . . could she, like, die?”
“If she doesn’t take her medicine in time. Or get to a doctor.”
Ethan was floored. Here was a kid, normal by any other standard, who could have croaked just like that. Like him. There were thousands—millions—of normal kids who could step off a curb and get run over by a bus, who could get caught in a river current and not come up again. You just never knew.
Lucy’s mother fussed over her a little while longer. “Come inside,” she said. “The humidity isn’t doing you any good out here.”
Lucy followed like a sheep, passing by Ethan. “They find me,” she said, as if their conversation had never been interrupted at all.
Az couldn’t take his eyes off her. He found himself gazing at Meredith Oliver as they sat side-by-side on a Windsor bench at the state lab in Montpelier, two strangers with cotton balls in the crooks of their elbows, waiting endless hours for the results of a paternity test. “I’m sorry,” Az said. “It’s rude of me.”
She opened her mouth like she was going to lace into him—but then shrugged. “It must be as strange for you as it is for me.”
In many ways. First, she looked so much like Lia it was remarkable. Second, the private business of a paternity test was odd enough, but to be escorted into it by Ross Wakeman and Eli Rochert made it ever more bizarre.
Meredith seemed to know how he felt. She smiled to put him at ease—she had a dimple, but only in her left cheek, like him. “So,” she joked. “You come here often?”
“Once or twice a week.” Az grinned back at her, watched her eyes widen as they noticed his dimple, too. “You can’t beat the free juice and Oreos.” They settled back against the bench, a little more comfortable in their skins. “You live in Maryland?” Az asked.
“Yes. With my daughter.”
“Daughter.” He spoke the title with reverence; he had not known about yet another descendent.
“Lucy. She’s eight.”
“Does she look like you?”
Meredith shook her head slowly. “She looks like my mother did. Dark hair, dark eyes.”
Like me, Az thought; and as an invisible wall fell between Meredith and himself, he knew that she was thinking it too.
“Eli tells me that you’re a doctor there.”
“Mr. Thompson.” She said his name kindly, but there was a steel in her that reminded him of his Lily’s rebelliousness. “With all due respect, there’s a greater chance than not that we are going to leave here today strangers, just like we came in.”
“Ms. Oliver, I didn’t know my daughter very well. And I never knew my daughter’s daughter. I would like to hope that—if you turn out to be more than a stranger, after all—you might help me improve my track record.”
Suddenly Eli and Ross stepped out of the lab, holding a few sheets of paper out of the reach of the researcher who was spitting mad and a few paces behind them. “I really need more than eight hours to do this properly,” he argued.
“Relax,” Eli said over his shoulder, and he handed the papers to Az.
For all Az knew, this might have been written in Navajo. The clumps of numbers, hooked together like the pairs on Noah’s Ark, meant nothing to him. “Maybe you better let him read it to us.”
But Meredith tugged it out of his grasp. “Let me see.”
“You won’t be able to—”
“She will, Az. She does this stuff for a living.”
�
�Does what?”
Meredith didn’t look up from the column that her finger was tracing. “Genetic diagnosis. I screen embryos so that clients can have healthier babies.”
Az remembered how, as a kid, he’d stood raw eggs on end during the autumn equinox, the one moment a year when day and night were of equal measure and time stood still. This felt the same; this was what happened when the past and the present collided. “Just like your grandpa,” he murmured. He turned to Eli. “Does Spencer Pike know?”
“How could he?” Meredith said. “He’s dead.”
Az laughed. “I wish. Who told you that?”
He saw her turn, her eyes flashing fever. Ross and Eli suddenly became fascinated by the pattern of the linoleum floor. And Az realized that the issue was not what Ross had told Meredith, but what he hadn’t.
“I haven’t thanked you,” Eli said, “for bringing Meredith here.”
He and Ross were standing on the steps outside the State Lab, waiting for Meredith to come out of the bathroom, where she’d retreated after finding out the double whammy that Az Thompson was, scientifically, her biological great-grandfather, and that her biological grandfather was still alive. Az being Az, he’d told Ross and Eli to give her some space, and he’d struck off in his old Pacer so that he wouldn’t be late for work at the quarry.
“I didn’t do it for you,” Ross answered.
“I know. But all the same.” Eli fanned himself with the DNA report. It was freaking hot out here; he hoped that Meredith Oliver, whoever she was, got her act together shortly. He glanced at Ross, who was crouched on a step drawing a tic-tac-toe grid with a rock. His hair fell into his face, shading his eyes. “I also didn’t thank you for bringing yourself home,” Eli said.
Ross glanced up. “Did Shelby get you started on that? She’s a drama queen. I mean, there was none of this good-bye cruel world stuff she seemed to read into the note—”
“I guess it’s easy to make that mistake when you’ve already found your brother attempting suicide once.”
Ross rocked back, sitting down. He squinted up at Eli. “She told you?”
“Yeah.” You could argue, Eli knew, that the love between a brother and sister, or mother and child, was a different strain—a lesser strain—than the sexual love between a man and a woman. And you could argue just as surely that it wasn’t. Eli looked at his good blue dress pants, sighed, and sat down on the ground next to Ross. “Do you have any idea how much she worries about you?”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Yeah,” Eli said. “That’s exactly what she’s afraid of.” He rested his elbows on his knees. “Look. I see a lot of shit going down, stuff that happens behind closed doors. I see people with problems that no one ought to have. Compared to that, you’ve got a great life ahead of you.”
“And you know this because you let me look at some autopsy photos with you?”
“I know that any guy who’s got someone like Shelby waiting for him has no right to be thinking of killing himself.”
Ross tilted his head. “You love her?”
Eli nodded. “Yeah. I think so.”
“If she moved to Burlington, would you move?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How about if she moved to Seattle?”
Eli hesitated, and then felt something loosen in his chest. “You know, I would.”
“How about if she moved somewhere even harder to get to?”
“Like New Zealand? Yeah,” Eli said. “When someone loves you up one side and down the other like that, you make every effort to stick around.”
“Well, what if the place she moved to was even harder to get to than New Zealand? A place you couldn’t get to by boat or by plane or even by fucking rocketship? What if she went somewhere and the only way you could follow was to put a bullet through your head or hang yourself from your closet rack or run your car in a closed garage? I did it because I loved someone up one side and down the other like that,” Ross said. “Not in spite of it.”
He stood suddenly, and in the splash of sunlight Eli was temporarily blinded. “I’m going to see what the hell is keeping her,” Ross muttered, and went inside.
Eli rested his head on his knees. Trained as a cop, he’d always thought of suicide as an escape—not something you might run toward. He thought of Shelby, and the way she’d stared at the autopsy photo of Lia Pike. Is that what happens when you hang yourself?
Eli’s mouth went dry. He scrambled to his feet just as Ross burst through the doors. “Meredith,” he said. “She’s gone.”
On the bus from Montpelier to Comtosook, Meredith had made up lives for the passengers. The teenager sleeping on the camel-hump of his backpack was a runaway setting off to find adventure in the veins of the mountains along the Appalachian Trail. The old man with a white handlebar mustache and a wrinkled seersucker suit was an alchemist who’d spent years seeing gold in everything his eyes lit upon. The twitchy young mother with an infant in her arms was not a mother at all, but a maid who’d stolen the baby out of her crib, and was spiriting her to Maryland.
Ruby was not her grandmother; her grandmother had died in 1932. Meredith’s ancestors did not come from Acadia and France; they had been here all along. And her grandfather had not been some boy who’d broken Ruby’s heart and left her pregnant—the lie she’d been told all these years. Her grandfather had been a scientist, studying the way substandard traits passed from generation to generation, and trying to prevent it.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
From the bus station in Comtosook, Meredith walked to Shelby’s house. And there, Shelby had told her the truth—from the horrifying results of her grandfather’s eugenics movement to the fact that Spencer Pike was alive, if not well, in a nursing home ten miles away. She gave Meredith all the details that her brother had conveniently left out: Cecelia Pike’s brutal death, Gray Wolf’s disappearance, Az’s confession just a week before. She knew now why the Abenaki were fighting so hard for that ragged piece of land. It was not about ancestry, and it was not about property. It was about trying to get back the essence of something that was irretrievably lost.
Once, a heartbroken couple had come to Meredith’s office, asking her to help them conceive a daughter. They had three boys, but their baby daughter had died recently of SIDS. They wanted to know, before they went through with a pregnancy, that they’d be getting another little girl.
Meredith had refused to accept them as patients. Not because she wouldn’t have been able to do what they asked, but because she didn’t think they’d be satisfied with the results. They wanted a replica of the child who had died, and science couldn’t offer that kind of miracle.
Yet.
Would her grandfather, in the same circumstance, have taken their case? Science was at the mercy of the people who created it. She was suddenly reminded of her conversation at the Starbucks with Ross. For all the greater good that genetic diagnosis and replacement therapy could do, there was still a line that had to be drawn—one which hadn’t been, yet, by the government or any ethics organization: who got to choose which traits were worth keeping, and which should be eliminated from the human genome? A scientist, of course. But a scientist like Meredith . . . or one like Spencer Pike?
She looked down at the directions to the nursing home that Shelby had given her, along with the leave to borrow her car. Left at the light, another right, and she would be there. If Pike was alive, she didn’t understand why Ross and his detective friend hadn’t taken his blood for a paternity test—which, by definition, would have been scientifically simpler. Was it because they had wanted her to meet Az Thompson, whose sacrifice had been far greater than Meredith’s could ever be? Or was it because no one even wanted to lay eyes on a man who’d done as much damage as Spencer Pike?
The nursing home was stately, an old winged Colonial flanked by oak trees and brick paths. Meredith walked up the stairs and into the lobby. Although the décor was pleasant and sunny, there was a ste
nch in the room that seemed to seep from the cracks between the floor tiles. It was not the smell of death, but regret—sweeter, more pungent. It caught in the folds of Meredith’s clothes, and weeks from now, even after several washings, she would put on this blouse and pair of khakis and breathe it in.
A nurse wearing a stethoscope with a dinosaur clinging to its thick rubber vein sat at a desk. “Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see someone.”
She smiled. “You looked a little young to be checking in. Who is it?”
“Spencer Pike.”
The nurse furrowed her brow. “He’s not doing very well today . . .”
“I’m . . . I’m a relative,” Meredith said.
Nodding, the nurse gave her a pass to clip to her shirt and gave her directions down the hall. Spencer Pike’s room looked no different from anyone else’s—a row of hospital doors with cheery smile stickers pasted around the name of the resident inside. It reminded Meredith of nursery school, and for a moment she was grateful that her mother had not had to go through this regression before sliding into death. She pushed open the door.
The shades were drawn, the lights off. A respirator rasped somewhere to her left, and all she could see were the most amorphous shapes. Stepping gingerly around the largest one, which must have been the bed, Meredith walked to the other side of the room and opened the curtains just a slit.
Spencer Pike was frail and hairless, embryonic. A white sheet covering him only emphasized the bones of his spine. She walked toward the bed, expecting to feel resentment or outright hatred or even some sad kinship—but there was absolutely nothing. This man could have been a stranger.
What made a family wasn’t blood, or genes, or what was passed down through either of them. You only had to look at Meredith and her mother and Ruby to see. You only had to look at Spencer Pike, dying alone, to know.
He rolled in his morphine sleep, catching his arm on some of the clear tubing that connected to his upper torso and face. He’ll strangle himself, Meredith thought, and immediately on the heels of this: Would that be a bad thing? But she found herself reaching to untangle the lines.