by Jodi Picoult
His mind wandered further back, to the moment he had noticed his beautiful Lily, the first afternoon he’d been working for her father. He’d come in from the fields to get another basket for the berries, and saw her—silver-haired and white-skinned, dancing on the porch to a song she was humming under her breath. She held her arms in place around an imaginary mate, waltzing. She didn’t know anyone was watching, and that alone took Az’s breath away. She needs a partner, Az thought, and that was the beginning.
He wondered if Meredith had talked to Winks yet about the land. He wondered if she’d come back to Comtosook, like she said. He didn’t know her well enough to read her. Sometimes in the fluid moments before he dropped off to sleep he confused her in his mind with Lia. They looked alike, certainly, but it went deeper than that. He would not speak for his daughter, but he thought Lia would be proud.
When he had strapped the last of the files to himself and used up all of the silver tape, Az walked into the water. Cold even in August, it numbed his ankles. He felt the files at his hips starting to soak. The papers were sponges, anchoring him to the muddy bottom.
Az took a deep breath just before his head went under. He moved along the floor of the lake, kicking up snails and stones and forgotten treasure. He let the air bubble out of his lungs and lay down on his back, sunken by the weight of the history he had strapped to himself, and he waited for the morning to come.
“I’m sorry,” Eli said to Shelby for the thirtieth time, as he opened the door of his house and greeted a lonely Watson.
“It’s not your fault.”
They had not only missed their dinner reservation in the aftermath of the car crash, they had completely missed serving hours at the restaurant. Now 2 A.M., there wasn’t even a McDonald’s that was open for a bite to eat. Eli tossed his keys into a bowl on the kitchen counter that held three molting bananas. “I’m a pretty awful date,” he muttered, opening the fridge. “I can’t even cook you something. Unless you like bread and mustard.” He scrutinized the loaf. “Make that penicillin and mustard.”
Suddenly Shelby’s arms circled him from behind. “Eli,” she said, “I’m not even all that hungry.”
“No?” He straightened, turned toward her.
She tugged loose his tie. Then she stepped out of her high heels. Barefoot like that, she seemed so small and delicate that it reminded Eli of a snowflake; one blink and it might melt away into nothing. “No,” she said. “But I am a little hot.”
You’re telling me, Eli thought, and then she turned around and lifted her hair off her neck. “Unzip me?”
He inched the little metal tag down, and with every opened tooth Eli could feel his nerves fray. Shelby’s skin was the whitest, smoothest expanse he’d ever seen. A little farther, and the hooks of her black bra came into view.
He stepped away. There was just so much a guy could take. “Maybe, uh, you should go find something to change into,” he suggested.
“Oh, damn,” Shelby said, not contrite at all. “I didn’t bring anything.” She reached up behind her, finished unraveling the last six inches of zipper, and let the dress fall to the floor so that she stood before him like a mirage of flesh and blood and lace. With a smile, she turned and headed up the stairs, Watson at her heels.
Eli did not have to think twice. He pulled his pager and cell phone from his belt and turned them off, took the receiver of his home phone off the hook. This was all against departmental procedure, but one tragedy a night was enough. And to be honest, he didn’t much care if the world was coming to end, as long as he was moving inside Shelby when it happened.
Meredith finished reading every catalog that had come to Shelby’s house in the past month and realized something was very wrong—namely, that she’d finished reading every catalog that had come to Shelby’s house in the past month. Her daughter, who seemed to have an internal radar that blipped whenever Meredith managed to sit down for a second, usually commandeered those smidgens of private time to ask questions that could not wait, like what made lips look pink or why they weren’t allowed to have a dog. But Lucy hadn’t bothered her at all tonight. Neither had Ethan. And mathematically, it stood to reason that a household with two children under the age of ten should generate twice the interruptions.
She put aside the Pottery Barn catalog and called upstairs. No answer, but they had been playing a computer game with the door closed. Meredith jogged up the stairs and rattled the locked doorknob. “Ethan?” she called out. “How are you guys doing in there?”
When there was still no answer, she felt the first wave of alarm. She grabbed a wire coat hanger from her own bedroom closet and straightened the neck, poking it into the simple lock device on the doorknob. It swung unlatched and Meredith stepped inside Ethan’s room to find a typical messy boy’s haven—nothing missing, except two children.
The window was open.
She raced downstairs to the list of emergency numbers beside the phone, the ones that Meredith had told Shelby she’d never need.
As Ross walked into the kitchen, Meredith slammed down the telephone and turned, tears running down her face. “The restaurant’s closed and Eli’s pager and his cell phone, they’re supposed to be on but they aren’t, and the police won’t tell me anything even though his number’s unlisted and—”
The blue funk he’d ridden in on dissipated immediately. “What happened?”
“The kids,” Meredith said. “They’re missing.”
“For how long?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. I went upstairs just now and they weren’t there.”
“And you can’t reach Shelby and Eli?” She shook her head. “Okay. I’ll go find them.”
“You can’t. You don’t know where they are.”
“Yes I do. Stay here, in case they call, or Shelby comes home.” But he knew as he headed out the door that Meredith was only a step behind him.
Who knew there were so many shades of black? Being under the moonless sky was no different from hiding beneath a blanket, and the bowl of the quarry, a big circle of nothing just past the toes of Lucy’s sneakers, was a little bit darker than the night itself. One step, one mistake, and you’d go falling. Only by squinting could she see Ethan, who suddenly let go of the guardrail and disappeared before her eyes.
Her breath solidified, a block in her throat. She would have screamed, but what would Ethan think if she was afraid of simply getting to the ghosts, not just the ghosts themselves? Then his head popped up near her ankles. “Are you waiting for an invitation?” he asked, and she realized he was holding fast to a ladder that led into the pit of the quarry.
Ethan said there was a ghost here, a quarry supervisor who’d been killed by some crazy guy. He said seeing the spirit was a sure thing. He’d told her they might have to avoid a guard, but she and Ethan seemed to be the only ones around. Maybe that was luck, maybe it meant it was okay to be there. At any rate, Lucy started to climb down. Huge pillars of stone reared up around her, seeming to move in the lack of light. The soles of her sneakers skidded down a slope of granite, and she wound up in a heap on a pile of rubble. “You okay?” Ethan called. He probably turned around too, but it was too dark to see him.
She realized that this was what life was like for Ethan all the time.
They crawled through crevasses so narrow Lucy had to hold her breath, up columns of rock where their only foothold was hope, underneath listing piers and over great craggy tablets. They balanced on thin needles of stone, toppled like a giant’s game of pick-up sticks. Every now and then their forward motion would dislodge some careful equilibrium, and the granite would crumble with a roar and a flurry of dust. “You all right?” Ethan’s voice would float back to her, and then they would keep going.
Lucy’s hands and shins were scraped over and over, and she had one really bad cut that she was afraid to even look at. She smacked into Ethan’s back and realized that they had reached the other side of the quarry, across from the ladder. “We’ll hang out there
,” Ethan said, and pointed to two fallen slabs of granite that had haphazardly formed an A-frame and a ledge.
He climbed first. Then Lucy grabbed onto his hand so that he could pull her up, but their fingers, dusty, slipped away from each other and with a tiny shriek Lucy landed on a crumbled bed of rock. “Jeez, Lucy, are you okay?” Ethan called.
Tears came to her eyes, but she made herself get up. “Yeah,” Lucy said, and she made her way up to the ledge with great care, firmly jamming her feet between cracks in the granite before she released her handhold to climb again. On the ledge, she collapsed on her back and closed her eyes while Ethan set up his ghost-hunting equipment. When she’d caught her breath, she sat up and flicked on a flashlight, swinging its beam across the expanse they’d just traveled.
Lucy’s eyes went wide at the spires and jagged edges, the sheer distance. The ladder they’d climbed down was so far away it might have been forever since they’d started.
She had already been braver than she thought she was.
“So what do we do?” Lucy asked.
“Nothing. Now’s the part where we wait.” They sat with their shoulders touching, shivering from the cold and the awareness of what they had done. “You know what a star is?” Ethan asked after a moment, and Lucy shook her head. “An explosion that happened, like, hundreds of years ago, but that we’re only just seeing now.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how long it takes light to travel.”
Maybe, Lucy thought, it was the same for ghosts. Maybe sadness moved at a different speed than real life, which is why they showed up years after they’d died. She squinted up at the cloudy sky, trying to find a single star. When it happened—the explosion—it had to have been loud and bright and terrifying. But what she saw, now, was beautiful.
Maybe everything looked better, with some distance.
Even before that radio thing that Ethan held in his hand began to beep, Lucy knew something was coming. She felt it in the weight of the air on her skin, in the hollow echo that came into her ears. The fine hairs on her arm stood up, and her stomach did a slow roll. “Is it me,” Ethan whispered, “or did it just get about a hundred degrees colder?”
The little radio began to twitch like crazy. “Lucy,” Ethan whispered. “Stand up.”
She did. She walked all the way out to the edge of their ledge and she thought as hard as she could in her head, You can’t scare me.
Ethan had told her that ghosts couldn’t materialize without energy. Fear was a type of energy, the kind you wrapped tight into a ball. So Lucy summoned all the terror she’d tucked into the creases of her bedsheets and behind the wall of clothes in her closet. She thought of all the asthma attacks she’d had when a spirit got right into her face. She squinched her eyes shut and focused and a moment later, when she peeked, she saw a man walking toward her.
It was a man, but it wasn’t a man. This one was transparent, like the lady who came to her bedroom, and Lucy could see the jagged edges of rocks right through his shoulders and spine. He was dressed weird, too, in a striped shirt that looked like an old mattress and a pair of pants with no loops for the belt, and a vest with a shiny gold pocketwatch. He had a mustache that twirled at the ends like a circus strong-man’s, and his hair was plastered down to his head. Get to work, he said, right in the middle of her mind.
Lucy felt her knees shaking so hard they knocked into each other. Get lost, she thought right back at him.
To her surprise, the ghost did exactly as she’d asked. He took two steps forward, one of which brought him directly through her, icing her bones and her blood so thoroughly that for a second she was still as these rocks surrounding her, and then he vanished.
Lucy smiled. She even laughed a little. She looked around, but there was nobody else haunting this pit. And sure enough, the tightness in her belly was gone. Slipping into their cave again, she sat down beside Ethan, who was banging the side of the EMF meter into the slab of granite. “Well,” he said, “this is a piece of crap.”
Lucy stared at him. “You didn’t see anything?”
“Nah, it was a false alarm.” He glanced up. “Why? Did you?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said with wonder, and she sat down to tell Ethan all about it.
Shelby had been saving up words for this: velutinous, sybaritic, hedonic, effulgent. She had imagined them painted across the ceiling—paroxysm, tumult, fillip, whet. Yet as Eli’s hands skimmed over her skin, as her nails dug into his back and urged him closer, Shelby found that she could not think at all.
His body was long and lean and sculpted, his touch as light as the promises he whispered. She followed his lead through the moment when she was certain she would not recall what to do or how to do it right, and by the time their limbs were tangled together, Shelby could not remember ever having doubts.
He kissed his way from her ankles up, calves and knees and thighs, until she was shaking for him to settle. When he did, when his mouth came over her, she arched into him and closed her eyes to see vistas of gold, glowing emeralds, scatters of rubies. They burned hotter, smaller, into quasars and novas and filled a universe. Eli moved as if he had all the time in the world. Then, just as she could not hold on any longer, he was suddenly above her, forcing her to look at him so that she would know exactly what road her life was heading down. “Where have you been?” Eli murmured, and he filled her.
Their bodies rocked at a fulcrum; their rhythm told a story. And at the moment they both let go, Shelby lost every word she’d ever learned except for one: Us.
When Eli fell asleep heavily in her arms, Shelby slipped out from beneath his weight and curled up against him. She tried to memorize the constellations of his freckles and the crooked line of the part in his hair. She smelled herself on his skin.
Something bit into the soft side of her thigh, and she shifted, trying to get comfortable. But whatever it was moved with her, and Shelby reached down between herself and Eli to grab a small, sharp item. She held it up to the pink sliver of daylight that fell diagonally across the covers and frowned. This particular setting, this combination of stones, was all too familiar.
“Hey.” Eli reached for her.
“Hey yourself,” Shelby said against his lips, forgetting everything but Eli as she dropped the diamond solitaire Ross had once given to Aimee, and then lost months ago in a room at her own house.
It was the prettiest thing Ethan had ever seen—the thin pinks and creeping salmons, the rosy flush that swallowed the stars, the line where the night became the day. Ethan wanted the dawn to happen all over again, right now, even if it meant that he would be another day older and closer to dying.
Lucy had still been asleep when Ethan crept onto the ledge. He sat cross-legged, his arms held out in front of him, each degree that the sun hiked in the sky causing another blister to rise on his skin.
But, God, it was worth it. To witness the arrival of the morning, without a pane of glass between him and it. To feel a sunrise, instead of just to see it.
His left arm was an angry red now, itching like crazy. Lucy came up beside him, yawning, and then looked down at his arm. “Ethan!”
“It’s no big deal.” Yet it was. Anyone could see. Suddenly something glinting on the bottom of the quarry caught his eye. A silver button—or buckle, maybe. It was a baseball cap, and when Ethan leaned over the edge of the granite ledge he could make out the writing on it. “That’s weird,” he said. But before he could point out to Lucy what he believed to be his uncle’s cap, it exploded before his eyes.
Like every other morning when Angel Quarry blasted for granite, the computers set off the first explosion of dynamite, pausing to let the rock settle for minutes before the next charge was detonated. Boulders flew and fine particles rose in a mushroom cloud; rock dust blanketed the roof of Ross’s car. In the wake of the first blast, the second one rang out. One spike of granite smashed into the windshield, shattering it. “Oh, God,” Meredith cried, and she opened the car door while Ros
s was still driving, stumbling out and breaking into a dead run toward the quarry where her daughter might be.
Great slabs of granite fell like dominoes, knocking other pillars of stone from their pedestals and sending up such a thick cloud of silver grit that Meredith couldn’t see two feet in front of her, much less into the base of the quarry. Ross came running up to her. “I can’t find Az,” he said. “I don’t know how to stop it.”
She was breathing in rock; she was covered with residue. Meredith hooked her fingers into the chain-link fence. “Lucy!” she yelled. “Lucy!”
The only answer was another round of bombardment, a one-sided war. The roar of rending stone was even louder than the blasts of dynamite, and rang in Meredith’s ears. Then there seemed to be a détente, several long seconds of absolute silence, punctuated by the gravel avalanche of shifting granite.
Another person might not have heard it—the small gasp that preceded a sob—but Meredith would have been able to pick that sound out in the middle of a holocaust. “Lucy,” she whispered, and she strained to see some evidence that her ears had not deceived her. She found it, huddling on a stone ledge—the thinnest flash of color through the haze, a magenta stripe of Lucy’s T-shirt that hadn’t been covered with gray powder. Meredith leaped onto the fence and began to climb.
“Meredith!”
She heard Ross’s voice, before he simply stopped in mid-sentence and started after her. There was every chance that the dynamite hadn’t run its course yet, that this was a lull to let things settle. Meredith could have cared less. She set her sights on Ethan and Lucy, down in the pit and five hundred yards away, and started her descent down a ladder drilled into the quarry wall.
At the bottom, she hesitated, daunted by fallen stone obelisks six times taller than she was. Determined, she scaled the first one and began to chart a course, the shortest distance between herself and her daughter. The rock scraped up her palms, and her own blood made it harder to grab hold. She slid down hard on one ankle and cried out, and at that moment Lucy caught a glimpse of her. “Mommy!” she heard, that and crying, and she forced herself another fifty feet forward.