by Jodi Picoult
His hand came up slowly, grabbing her wrist. When Meredith looked down, she realized that he was awake and crying. He tried to speak, but the oxygen feed over his mouth made it impossible to understand what he was trying to say. She hesitated, and then pulled the clear funnel away from his face.
“I’m sorry,” Spencer Pike said. “I am so sorry.”
Meredith froze. “It’s all right,” she murmured, attempting to pull away.
“Don’t go. Please don’t go yet.”
She swallowed, then nodded. Drawing a chair closer to the bed, she sat down beside her grandfather.
His breathing grew more erratic, and a wash of pain crossed his face. “Cissy,” Spencer Pike said, “will you wait for me?”
Cissy. Cecelia. You look like someone I used to know. Meredith had forgotten the obvious—if she truly did look like her deceased grandmother, then this man would be the person most inclined to take notice.
“Yes, Spencer,” she replied evenly. “For as long as it takes.”
He lay back after that, falling into an uneasy sleep. Meredith kept her promise. She sat with her grandfather as his lungs rattled and pumped. She sat until the symphony of machines that had been playing a swan song became a single note in her head. She sat until the nurses came to give Spencer Pike his next dose of morphine; until they convinced Meredith that it was all right for her to leave him now, because he’d passed away.
Tuck Boorhies was cranky, and deservedly so. He’d been paged from a golf game by Eli, and told to be at the Montpelier lab in an hour and a half. If he didn’t show up, Eli promised to arrive with a warrant for his arrest for the obstruction of justice.
He was all bluster, Tuck knew that, but something in Eli’s voice—as though he were on the edge of the cliff and about to look over the rim—made him even more curious to know what was up than to find out if he’d finish his game under par. Eli had been pacing at the door when he arrived, and herded Tuck into his photography lab to enlarge another one of those prints from the murder. This one, though, zoomed in on the feet. Tuck had pumped up the contrast on Adobe Photoshop, and damn if there weren’t footprints on the damp sawdust that seemed to match some of the other prints, a woman’s. But even more interesting was the long drag mark through the shavings.
He looked up from the lab stool where he was sitting, at the ready with an instant camera. “What are we doing again?” he asked Eli, who was rigging a Hefty trash bag to a hook in the ceiling of the borrowed room. Inside the bag was about three-quarters of a pint of water. On the ground was a load of sawdust Eli had secured from the nearest horse barn.
“According to Wesley Sneap, a human urinary tract system can hold about four hundred millileters of fluid, max,” Eli said.
“Which is important because . . .” Tuck raised one eyebrow.
“Just give me a hand here, will you?” He climbed onto a free stool, motioning to Tuck to shoulder the weight of the water bag while he made a sturdy knot at the hook above. “He said that at the moment of death, there’s a loss of nerve stimulation to the anal and urethral sphincters, causing incontinence.”
“Good to know.”
Eli kicked some of the shavings around under the garbage bag, then stepped back to observe. “Okay, Tuck,” he said. “Pop my bladder.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“My bladder.” Eli pointed overhead.
Tuck had learned that you didn’t upset guys who got to carry a gun as part of their paycheck. “Whatever,” he murmured, and he pierced the Hefty bag with his pen.
They both watched the trickle and stream of water, matting down the sawdust. It covered their footprints, blurring the edges. When the bag was empty, the sawdust that had been stained wet beneath it was about the size of a manhole cover. “Shoot that for me, will you, Tuck?” Eli asked, as he walked out the door of the lab.
Tuck glanced at Eli’s holster, lying on its side on one of the examination tables, and then down at his Polaroid camera. Shrugging, he took a few photos.
As they rainbowed up, Eli came inside again, hauling a wooden crate. “So?”
“So it looks like a puddle. What did you expect?”
Eli took the photograph out of Tuck’s hand and stared at it, then placed it beside the print Tuck had just enlarged. “Is it just me, or do those puddles not match?”
They didn’t. The darkened spot of wet sawdust in the new Polaroid was nearly twice as small as the one in the black-and-white enhancement. Before Tuck could respond, however, Eli cracked open the wooden crate and grunted as he hoisted out a two-foot by one-foot block of ice. He carried this to the sawdust, tipped it so that it was vertical, and shoved it into the center of the puddle, creating a long, familiar drag mark in the sawdust. Then he pulled up a stool beside Tuck’s, and took a folded New York Times crossword puzzle out of his back pocket.
“What are you doing?” Tuck asked.
“Four across.”
“No.” He waved at the setup in the middle of the room. “Over there.”
Eli followed his gaze. “I’m waiting,” he replied.
Ethan was tying his sneakers when he heard the scream. He ran down the hall, to the room where Lucy and her mother were staying, and pushed open the door.
She was sitting up on the cot, shaking like crazy. “Lucy?” Ethan said, creeping closer. “You okay?” He looked around the room. Her mother was nowhere to be found. Well, it was only midnight. Maybe she hadn’t gone to bed yet. “Can you breathe?”
She nodded, and hands relaxed their death grip on the blanket. “Did I wake you?”
“Nah, I was getting up anyway.” Ethan scuffed his sneaker on the carpet. “Where’s your mom?”
She looked around, as if just noticing that her mother wasn’t there. “I don’t know. Your mother tucked me in.”
Ethan grinned. “You see one mother, you’ve seen them all.”
She smiled, but just a little. Ethan tried to remember what his mom did for him when he had nightmares. “Milk,” he announced. “You want me to get you some?”
“Why would I want milk?”
“I don’t know. If you stick it in the microwave it’s supposed to make you go back to sleep. That’s what my mother says if I freak out when I’m sleeping.”
“I bet you never freak out.”
“Sure I do. Everyone has nightmares.”
“What are yours about?”
“Getting stuck in the sun,” Ethan said flatly. “How about yours?”
“Ghosts,” Lucy whispered.
They stood in the still of the house for a moment, which suddenly seemed cavernous. All in all, Ethan knew, it felt better just then to be standing there with someone. “Well, I’m not scared of ghosts.”
“I’m not scared of the sun,” Lucy answered.
He should have told her more. Ross beat himself up mentally once again, certain that he was responsible for Meredith’s disappearance. She’d been gone now for hours, not even putting a call in to make sure Lucy was all right. Maybe she just needed time to think.
Maybe she didn’t want to think at all.
He smacked his head lightly against the trunk of the tree on which he was leaning. What he would have liked, now, was five minutes in the past. Five minutes to talk to Meredith Oliver and make her see that he understood what it was like to wake up and realize your life had turned out different from the one you once imagined you’d be living.
Regret hung from the hem of everyone’s lives, a rip cord reminder that what you want is not always what you get. Look at himself, outliving Aimee. Or Az, trying to find his daughter, only to have her wind up dead. Look at Shelby, with a child who was dying by degrees. Ethan, born into a body nobody deserves. At some time or another, everyone was failed by this world. Disappointment was the one thing humans had in common.
Taken this way, Ross didn’t feel quite so alone. Trapped in the whirlpool of what might have been, you might not be able to drag yourself out—but you could be saved by someone else who reac
hed in.
Maybe that was why he’d gone to find Meredith in Maryland.
Heroes didn’t leap tall buildings or stop bullets with an outstretched hand; they didn’t wear boots and capes. They bled, and they bruised, and their superpowers were as simple as listening, or loving. Heroes were ordinary people who knew that even if their own lives were impossibly knotted, they could untangle someone else’s. And maybe that one act could lead someone to rescue you right back.
When Ross lifted his face, he was not surprised to find rose petals drifting down from the night sky. He closed his eyes, smiling, but became distracted by the cry of a baby. Maybe it was a bobcat in the hills, or an animal mating. But it came again: thin, wild, more human. Walking into the clearing, he found Meredith crouched down on the ground.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, and when she stood—her hands and nails dark with dirt—Ross realized that it was not Meredith at all.
Who’s calling me? I look up, and around, worried that I have already been found out. But there is no one, only my own suspicion, which seems broad and barrel-armed as these old oaks. I bend down and pull aside more tangles and thicket, looking. Where has he hidden her; where can she be?
I heard a cry, I know I did. Once, the Klifa Club held a lecture with an African jungle zoologist, someone who had come to meet Spencer. The zoologist said that in nature, mothers know the sounds of their offspring. Put a clot of hippos in a wading pool, and a mama and baby will find each other. Stick a giraffe across a savannah and it will find its way home. The fetus hears a voice in the womb, and comes out able to pick its mother from a host of others.
My hands are bleeding. I have searched beneath every stone, behind every tree. Then I hear her again, silently calling to me.
This time all my senses narrow, and I find myself standing, turning, walking toward the icehouse. I push open the door, shuffle through the sawdust. And see her.
Her eyelashes are as long as my pinky nail. Her cheeks are milky blue.
Lily. Lily Delacour Pike.
Even after I put her back inside her crate, I can feel the still weight of her in my arms. There will always be something missing.
He will never listen to me; he will never understand. The only way to show him what he’s done is to do the same to him. To take away what he wants most in this world.
There’s one block of ice that’s thinner than the others. I can tip it upright, I can drag it out. I tie the knot around my neck first. Then I balance on this makeshift stepstool, and I fix the other end to the beam. Wait for me, I think, and I jump after my baby.
It hurts more than I thought, the heaviness of my own life pulling me down along with gravity. My lungs reach the bursting point, the world begins to go black.
But then she cries. And cries. Through the window of the icehouse, as I turn on this rope like a crystal ornament, I see her tiny fist wave back and forth. She has come back to me, when I am already gone.
Lily, I scream in my head, and I try to claw at the rope, to pull it free from the beam. But I have done too good a job. Lily. I kick with my feet at the posts, at anything. I scratch but only reach my chest; my arms can’t seem to make it any higher.
Oh, God, I cannot lose her twice.
She will hear my voice, even though I cannot speak aloud. She will find me across a savannah; she will swim to me in the deepest pool.
I make my baby the promise my own father made to me, before he had a chance to know me: I will find you.
As she disappeared before his eyes again, Ross realized he had been holding his breath. He let it out in a long, silent rush. Curtis Warburton would have said that what he’d witnessed was a residual haunting, a repetition of a significant event played over and over like a video loop. Curtis would have said that the spirit wasn’t even there, just the energy that it had left behind. However, Ross, who had watched firsthand, knew this was not the case. This had been no imprint, no impression made in time. Lia’s ghost had come back again, trying to find something.
But she hadn’t been searching for her baby, and she hadn’t been looking for Ross. It was not until after the vision dissipated that he realized why she had returned: on the other side of the clearing, her face striped with shock and disbelief, was Meredith Oliver, who also had seen and heard everything Lia needed to say.
TWELVE
For ten minutes, Meredith sat in silence, while the night closed like a fist around her. Her insides had gone to water, and Meredith knew she would not be capable of moving, thinking, breathing anytime soon. She was suddenly aware that this universe—big as it seemed—was still too small to contain possibilities beyond her own imagination.
Like a ghost.
Could insanity come on so quickly, like the flu . . . or a flipped circuit breaker? Her mind could not even process the vision. It was like being told that the sun would not appear in the morning: Meredith’s balance of reality had been tipped over, a skyscraper that turned out to be only a house of cards.
Yet this had not been smoke and mirrors; this was not some lunatic’s rant. Meredith had seen a ghost with her own eyes. A woman who had vanished just as quickly as she’d come. A woman who looked exactly like her.
Meredith thought of all the times she had told Lucy there were no such things as ghosts. Everything she had believed was now cast into doubt—if she had been mistaken about this, after all, what else had she gotten wrong? Maybe the sky was not really blue, maybe science did not hold all the answers, maybe she was not happy with her life. She could be certain of only one fact: the world she’d awakened in this morning was very different from the one she was living in now.
She found herself leaning down to touch the ground, certain that it too might not be as solid as she expected. She shivered again, and felt something being draped over her shoulders. Until that moment, when Ross put his coat around her, she hadn’t truly registered that someone was sitting beside her.
Turning, she tried to find her voice. “Did that . . . did that happen?”
“I think so.” Ross seemed just as shaken as she was. Meredith looked at him carefully. She had not truly believed what he’d told her—about ghost hunting, about her grandmother. People who believed in that sort of thing were a little crazy . . . yet now she seemed to be standing squarely among their ranks. She tried to remember what other things Ross had said—comments she’d summarily dismissed that she now had to reevaluate.
“She looked like me,” Meredith stated the obvious.
“I know.”
“But . . . but . . .” There were no words in this new place.
She felt Ross’s hand find her own, his long hair brush over her cheek as he leaned close. He was crying. “I know,” he repeated, when what he was really saying was that he didn’t.
She had not believed in ghosts, but she believed in pain. And she certainly understood what it felt like to be alone, when you didn’t want to be. These emotions were so real that they transcended the impossible, gave her a hook to grab onto. Meredith’s mind spiraled back to the frantic search, the fear, the suicide. “Is that how it happened?” Meredith asked. “Did she . . . kill herself?”
“I guess so.” His voice was raw with grief.
“Isn’t there something we can do?”
“It already happened,” Ross said. “She’s already gone.”
The ghost had stared directly at Meredith. And it had been like gazing into a mirror—not just because of the physical resemblance, but because the expression in Lia Pike’s eyes was something that Meredith saw when she looked at herself. Meredith might not have been able to grasp the concept that the line between life and death was drawn in invisible ink, but she understood what it was like to be a mother who wanted nothing more than to protect her child.
Motherhood was elemental, cellular. You could feel a child inside of you, even after you gave birth; share blood and tissue for that long and you become part of each other. And if that child died—as an embryo, as a newborn, as a thirteen-year-ol
d with XP—a part of you would die too. All Lia had done, after looking into the still face of her baby, was hasten the process.
“She was following her daughter,” Meredith said.
Even if she knew that the human body disintegrated to become organic matter, on some level Meredith had hoped that her mother existed in some form, in some place with windows on the world where she could watch over Meredith and Ruby and Lucy. This had been Lia Pike’s hope, too . . . but she’d never quite gotten there. If she made it to that place, after all these years, would her child even recognize her?
Meredith turned to Ross. “Do you think in the end they’ll find each other?”
He didn’t answer; he couldn’t. His face was buried in his hands, and he was sobbing hard. It was a sorrow that sprung as deep and black as a well; a sorrow that Meredith had seen minutes before on Lia Pike’s face when she believed her daughter was truly gone.
“Ross,” she said, and in that moment she remembered something he had said to her once, something she had discounted that she now knew to be true: You could imagine yourself in love with someone who was not real. With great care she reached out to touch his arm, to let him know that this time, if he were falling, she would hold him upright. But he shook her off, and as he did, twisted his wrist enough for her to see a scar, a lightning bolt where his skin should have been smooth.
“They’ll find each other,” he said, looking away from her. “They will.”
“The baby wasn’t dead,” Eli explained, “but she thought it was, and that was reason enough to hang herself.” He moved around Shelby’s kitchen, helping himself to a glass of water as he relayed what he’d discovered. “She dragged a good-size block of ice through the sawdust and onto the porch, as a stepstool to reach the rafter. But by the time Pike found her in the morning, the ice had melted, and the hanging looked more like a murder than a suicide. After seventy years, I just officially signed off on the case.” He shook his head. “Jesus. We might be a little on the slow side, but never let it be said that the Comtosook detective squad isn’t on the ball.”