by Jodi Picoult
Ethan held it up to his face. You could only get a small spot in view—the tip of his nose, one eyebrow, a freckle. It was possible, this way, to believe that added together, the reflections might make up one very ordinary boy. It was possible, this way, to be someone altogether different.
Eli woke with a start and sat up, gasping for air. The room was redolent with the scent of apples, so strong that he looked to the side of the bed to make sure there was not a cider press nearby. He rubbed his eyes, but could not seem to shake the image that danced before his face, no matter which way he turned: it was that woman again.
He knew her voice, although he had never heard her speak. He knew that she had a scar underneath her left earlobe, that her mouth tasted of vanilla and misfortune.
His mother had believed in the power of dreams. When Eli was a child, she’d told him a story of his grandfather, a holy man who had envisioned his own demise. He had gone to sleep and seen a mountain covered with snow, and at the very top, a hawk. The hawk reached into the drifts and pulled out a snake by its neck—pulled and kept pulling—and finally attached to the end of the reptile was the empty shell of a turtle. Shaken, it made the rattle of death. Three months later, at a ceremonial rite, a freak snowstorm stranded Eli’s grandfather and three other men at the top of a sacred mountain. The others found the men days afterward, frozen. Their bodies might never have been recovered, if not for the caw of a hawk who led the search party closer and closer.
“When we’re awake,” Eli’s mother used to say, “we see what we need to see. When we’re asleep, we see what’s really there.”
He used to wonder if his mother had ever dreamed of her marriage to a white man; of the diabetes slowly killing her. He wondered if she’d known that her only son would be more likely to cut off his own arm than subscribe to the Indian belief that dreams were more than some crazy neurons firing.
The woman, the one who came to him in the dark—she had eyes the color of sea glass, a piece that Eli found once on a beach in Rhode Island, and that he kept on the windowsill of his bathroom.
He pulled the covers up to his chin and settled down on his pillows again. Most likely, he was horny. He was dreaming up beauties because he wasn’t getting any honest action.
Although, he admitted, as he drifted off again, if that was the case, it made more sense to picture her in a bikini, or better yet, naked in a sauna. Not like she’d been, fully clothed and crouched on a floor, weeping as she fit together what looked like the pieces of an impossible puzzle.
The scream rang out, high and hysterical, as Meredith raced into Lucy’s bedroom. No, no, no, she thought. Things have been so normal.
Her grandmother was already there, smoothing Lucy’s damp hair back from her forehead and murmuring that everything was all right. “She won’t stop,” Granny Ruby said, panicked. “It’s like she can’t even hear me.”
Meredith clapped her hands on both sides of her daughter’s face and leaned closer. “Lucy, you listen to me. You are fine. There is nothing here that can hurt you. Do you understand?”
Like a veil lifting, Lucy’s gaze sharpened, and she fell silent. As she realized where she was and what had happened she curled up in a fetal position and skittered closer to the head of the bed. “Can’t you see her?” Lucy whispered. “She’s right there.”
She pointed to a spot between Meredith and Ruby, a spot where there was nothing at all. Then she burrowed underneath the covers. “She wants me to help her look.”
“For what?” Meredith asked.
But Lucy had gone somewhere inside herself, and she didn’t answer. Meredith’s chest hurt; her heart might have been a stone. “Granny,” she said, in a voice that was borrowed, “can you watch her?”
Without waiting for an answer, Meredith walked into her own bedroom again. She picked up the telephone and the small business card she’d placed in her nightstand drawer. She waited for the appropriate series of beeps. And then she paged Dr. Calloway, a surrender.
When Ross arrived at the Pike property at 11 P.M., Lia was waiting. “Am I late?” he asked casually, as if he’d expected to see her all along. As he set up his equipment he watched her from the corner of his eye. There was something different about her—a fragile determination that Ross didn’t want to jeopardize by bringing up the circumstances of how they’d last parted. So instead, he showed her the spots where the mounds had been two nights ago. He let her look at his new EMF field meter, which had arrived in the mail that afternoon. If she wanted to ghost hunt with him, then he’d let her. It was a starting point, and that was better than nothing at all.
She ran her hand lightly over the video camera on its tripod, pointed off in the distance. “My father has a camera,” she said, “although his is a little bigger. Bulkier.”
“This one’s digital.” Ross glanced up at the clearing. He was already getting strong sensations from that spot. “If we sit down and wait, maybe we’ll get lucky.”
“I . . . can stay?”
“I figured that’s why you came.”
Lia didn’t answer, but settled herself beside him on the frozen ground. Her apprehension pressed between them like a chaperone. Ross wondered what was fueling her fear—the possibility of seeing a ghost, or that her husband would come looking for her. “You okay?” he asked.
She nodded. With the exception of a small flashlight, they were sitting in total darkness. Lia sat with her arms wrapped over her knees, her skirt smoothed to her ankles. She glanced at the EMF meter, its needle stable. “So this compass,” she said, “it goes off if a ghost is here?”
“Technically, it goes off when a ghost is materializing. It’s the transition between states that disrupts an electromagnetic field.”
She frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“If the spirit is invisible, and then suddenly starts to look solid—or vice versa—we’ll hear crackling.”
They fell into a companionable silence full of questions neither one wanted to be first to ask. At some point Ross stopped attending to potential paranormal activity and started to listen instead for the sound of Lia’s breathing falling between the spaces of his own. He grew acutely aware of the distance between his shoulder and hers. If he shrugged, he would touch her. Hell, if he inhaled deeply.
It had been nearly a decade since Ross felt this—a physical awareness so intense it seemed to require all of his attention, a fleeting prayer for something beyond his control—earthquake, tsunami—that might naturally close the space between them. He had been looking for the ghost of a woman for so long, it was unsettling to find himself fascinated by one sitting right beside him. But Lia was married, and Aimee was the one he really wanted.
What if the strange tug he felt around Lia was not the need to save her, but the possibility that she might be able to save him? What if he was not supposed to find a ghost in Comtosook . . . but rather, this woman?
Aimee is gone. Lia is here . . .
The rogue thought stumbled into the front of his mind, upsetting him so greatly he found himself physically going in the opposite direction, scooting out of the yellow round of the flashlight and away from Lia. “Did something happen?” she asked, breathless.
No, Ross thought, thank God. He got to his feet and began to walk around the clearing.
“You feel something?”
“No,” Ross answered. Yes.
She stood up, walking into the shadows. “I do,” Lia murmured. “Like everything’s getting . . . sharper. Harder.”
As she moved past Ross, he could feel a breeze. The light edge of her skirt grazed his hand, and before he could stop himself, he grabbed for it, only to have it slip through his fingers like wind.
His heart was too large in his chest, and it was beating out of rhythm. Ross, who had not let his love die when his lover did, was suddenly distracted by something as mundane as the dimple on a woman’s knee.
He told himself that he had built a world with Aimee; that she had known him better than anyone had
in his life. But the truth was, Aimee would not recognize Ross now. Grief had changed him, from the pitch of his voice to the way he carried himself down a busy street. Aimee had understood what made Ross happy.
But Lia seemed to understand what had crushed him.
There was suddenly, quite clearly, the cry of an infant. “Did you hear that?” Lia whispered, and she reached for Ross, her hand closing over his wrist.
He had heard it. But he realized that Lia was no longer focused on the distant sound. She picked up the flashlight, shined it square on the scars on Ross’s arm. “Oh . . .” Lia said, and the light clattered to the ground, pitching them both into darkness.
Although he could not see Lia, Ross knew she was feeling beneath her sleeves for her own old wounds. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You didn’t ask.” Ross reached into his pocket and lit a cigarette, bringing her face back from the shadows.
“When?” she said simply.
“A while ago. Back when I didn’t think there was anything left for me in this world.” He met her gaze, then took the glowing cigarette and pressed it to the flesh inside his arm, daring her to feel sorry for him. “I still don’t.”
To his surprise, Lia didn’t try to stop him. She waited until he tossed away the butt, until there was an angry, blistered burn on his skin. “I didn’t come here tonight to look for a ghost,” Lia admitted. “I came because when I’m with you, I’m not sitting at home and wondering if I should use a knife or pills or poison.” All the fine hairs on his arms stood up as she pressed her lips to his ear. “Ross,” she whispered, “tell me what’s on the other side.”
Ross had felt like this once before—dizzy and agonized and bursting from every cell. Afterward, when he’d awakened, three doctors said he’d been struck by lightning. He brought his hand up to Lia’s jaw. If you can see me so clearly, he thought, then I must be real.
A few feet away, the EMF meter began to crackle. The static came slowly at first, eventually growing so loud Ross could hear it over the blind swell of his mind. Ross had never experienced a response this strong—something significant was coming. And it made perfect sense: the spirit was using the energy that had sparked between Ross and Lia to materialize.
Ross scrambled away, grabbing for the EMF and squinting in an effort to see the readings. “The light,” he called to Lia.
But a moment later, his shoe connected with the flashlight. The meter was already waning again, the crackles subsiding. It was the most significant proof of a spirit he’d ever witnessed, yet Ross didn’t think he’d care at this moment if the ghost walked right up to him and introduced itself. He needed to find Lia, to see what was written on her face.
Ross turned on the flashlight and swung the beam, but she was gone.
It would not be the first time Ross had seen a person run away during a paranormal investigation. Yet Lia’s fear had nothing to do with the coming of ghosts. What had scared her was the same thing that had scared Ross—what, even now, kept him shaking: the knowledge that for the second time in his life, he wanted someone he could not have.
FOUR
In Comtosook, residents began adapting to a world they could no longer take for granted. Umbrellas were carried in knapsacks and purses, to ward off rain that fell red as blood and dried into a layer of fine red dust. China dishes shattered at the stroke of noon, no matter how carefully they were wrapped. Mothers woke their children, so that they could see the roses bloom at midnight.
After a while, hems on pants began to unravel and words would not stay still on the pages of books. Water never boiled. People in town found they’d wake up without a history— walking out to get the morning paper, they would trip over their own memories, unraveled like bandages across the sidewalk. Women opened their dryers to find their whites had turned to feathers. Meat spoiled in the freezer. The color blue looked completely wrong.
Some attributed the events to global warming, or personal bad luck. But when Abe Huppinworth walked into the Gas & Grocery only to find every single item balanced backward and upside down on the shelves, he wondered aloud if that Indian ghost on Otter Creek Pass didn’t have something to do with it. And the three customers who had been shopping at the time told their neighbors, and before evening fell the inhabitants of Comtosook were all speculating on whether or not it might not just be best to leave that piece of land alone.
There was a large part of Rod van Vleet that didn’t want to hear what Ross Wakeman had to say. If there was a ghost— ridiculous as it seemed—what was Rod supposed to do about it? The house had been demolished; the crews were moving the wreckage into Dumpsters. The Redhook Group was going to build, no matter how many locals’ signatures and petitions crossed his desk. Maybe Rod would need to call in a priest to exorcise the damn bagel shop that was to be eventually built here, and maybe he wouldn’t. The point was that the ghost was negotiable; the development was not.
And yet, Rod really wanted to know if he was displacing a spirit. If the reason his meals all tasted of sawdust, if the reason his toothbrush went missing every night, had anything to do with his current occupation.
“These things . . .” Rod pointed to the TV screen, where a grainy image of a forest at nighttime was scored by blue lines and floating balls of light. “These things are supposed to be a ghost?” He relaxed inside. Whatever he had been expecting, this was not it. A few sparks and bubbles couldn’t hurt anyone. They certainly wouldn’t run off potential business.
Ross Wakeman was a charlatan; plain and simple. He’d seen an opportunity to grab a little attention for himself, and he had climbed right aboard Rod’s bandwagon to do it.
“That’s not a spirit in and of itself,” Wakeman explained. “That’s a spirit’s effect on the equipment. I’ve had flashlights cut out on me on the property, and this sort of interference recording, and very strong readings on machines that measure magnetic fields.”
“Mumbo-jumbo,” Rod said. “There’s nothing concrete.”
“Just because something defies measurement doesn’t mean it’s not here.” Wakeman shrugged. “Consider the difference between property value and actual worth.”
“Ah, but you can measure property value. It’s how much people are willing to pay to acquire something.”
“You can measure a ghost, too, by what people are willing to believe.”
Suddenly the door to the construction trailer burst open. Van Vleet turned away to find three angry equipment operators storming closer, their excavators as dormant as sleeping dinosaurs.
One, the ringleader, poked van Vleet in the chest. “We quit.”
“You can’t quit. You haven’t finished the job.”
“Screw the job.” He removed his hard hat and tossed it at van Vleet, a gauntlet. “They’re driving us crazy.”
“What is?”
“The flies.” Another worker stepped forward, continuing to speak in a thick French Canadian accent. “They come right into the ears, and they whisper.” With his hands he made small, spinning circles by the sides of his head. “Tsee-tsee. Tsee-tsee.”
“And when you go to bat them away,” the first worker added, “there’s nothing there.”
The third worker, still silent, crossed himself.
Ross coughed, and van Vleet glared at him. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” he assured them. “A trick of the wind. Maybe a virus.”
“Then it’s freakin’ contagious, because those Abenaki out front heard it too. And the old one, he spelled the word we heard. C-H-I-J-I-S. It means baby, in his language.”
“Of course he’s going to tell you that!” van Vleet cried. “He wants you to leave. He wants you to be so scared you do just what you’re doing now—get off your trucks and stop working.”
The men looked at each other. “We aren’t scared. But until you get rid of the ghost, you can find yourself another crew.” They nodded a farewell, then began to walk off the construction site.
“What was it you were saying?” Ross asked.
>
Van Vleet picked up his phone. “I have to find another construction crew,” he said. “I don’t have time for this now.”
Ross shrugged. “If you need me, you know where to find me,” he said, and left. Rod dialed a number and waited through a recorded message. His eyes strayed to the TV screen in his office, where static flickered. Wakeman had left his tape behind by accident. Or, Rod thought, watching one streak of light, maybe not.
The blood hit her in the face.
Meredith had no sooner walked out of the building than the liquid spattered her hair, and ran down her cheek and neck. “How many babies did you kill today?” the protester cried.
She wiped it out of her eyes. Not real blood, but Kool-Aid, or something similar, from the sweet smell. Her employer did not get targeted quite as often as the abortion clinics in the area, but the objection was the same—part of Meredith’s job included choosing which embryos got to live and which were incinerated, and the right-to-lifers couldn’t accept that. “Get back to me when you’re infertile,” Meredith muttered to the small group of picketers, and she walked a little faster to her car.
What she wanted to say, what she did not even let herself think until she was safe inside the comfort of the driver’s seat with the air-conditioning turned up high, was that she knew more about those protesters than any of them could ever know about her. Nine years ago she had walked past a line of them, all wearing the same faces they were wearing now, as if righteousness were nothing but a Halloween mask. She had canceled her genetic counseling appointments for the whole day, because even if she were feeling well enough to work during the afternoon she did not think she could sit across a desk and talk to other people about their children, not after aborting her own.
Meredith remembered that the clinic smelled like steel and mouthwash. That the chairs in the waiting area were filled with girls so young their distended bellies seemed impossible. That she had knotted the first two ties on the back of her dressing gown before she decided she could not go through with it.