by Jodi Picoult
“Abbott.” Az put his hand on the other man’s shoulder. “Let’s get you a cup of coffee.”
They headed toward the quarry office, where a fresh pot of French roast was dripping. Az had been wrong, after all. This was the disruption he’d felt in the air, the devastation that was coming. Not with the blast of dynamite, but slowly, like those dried dandelions. In small waves, people would remember. In growing numbers, their sorrow would carpet the earth.
Meredith knew the moment that Ross’s car crossed the city line into Comtosook, because suddenly the windshield was covered with gypsy moths, their wings beating in unison like a single heart. He swiped the wipers, scattering them, but not before Meredith caught Lucy hiding under her sweatshirt in the backseat.
Ruby had been left in the able hands of Tajmalla, who took it as a personal affront that Meredith had even hesitated to leave her grandmother—or whatever she was—in the health aide’s care. For the most part, the ride north had been unremarkable, silence punctuated only by traffic updates on the radio.
Meredith did not speak to Ross. She used all the energy conversation would have taken and built a barrier instead, so that whatever he tossed at her in Vermont would bounce right back off and enable her to return to her home and her job. And like all good walls, with the fortification in place, she was concentrating so much on the enemy that she did not need to remember the moments she’d been a traitor to herself.
For one night, at that Starbucks, she had watched the smoke of his cigarette curl like the letters of the alphabet and believed it was a secret message. She had smelled vanilla on his skin and grown dizzy. She had drunk from his coffee cup when he’d gone to the bathroom, the spot where his lips had touched, so that when she finally tasted him for real—when, not if—her senses would remember.
She had made a fool of herself.
After all of the disastrous dates she’d been on, after all of the professional men she had met and judged to be as intriguing possibilities—it turned out that a guy she would never have noticed made her feel like no one else ever had. At first glance, Ross Wakeman was a nobody. Until you looked again and saw his humor, his charm, his vulnerability.
And his complete intoxication with another woman, a dead one at that.
“So,” Meredith said aloud. “This is it?”
Ross nodded. “Comtosook.”
As they drove, Meredith began to notice things. The trees, for example, seemed to play a tune like a harp when the wind sang through their branches. Children playing hopscotch hung a fraction of a second too long in midair. And Doubt, in the shape of a hitchhiker, crawled into her lap to ride shotgun.
They pulled off the main road and headed down a dirt path. But instead of stopping at one of the few houses they passed, Ross drove to the end, a crossroads, and parked the car in front of absolutely nothing. “Where are we?” she asked.
It was nearly dark by now, the sky looking like the shined skin of an eggplant and the loons coming out to call to their true loves. Meredith followed Ross into the woods.
She was a scientist, she told herself, and thus naturally curious.
With Lucy plastered to her side, Meredith stepped over roots and rocks and what seemed to be construction debris. Suddenly the forest opened up into a flat plane with wrecking tape cordoning off a wide, bald spot. “This is where you live?”
Ross muttered something that sounded like I wish.
In that instant Meredith realized where she was. “Oh, for God’s sake,” she sighed, and she reached for Lucy’s hand to tug her back to the waiting car.
She hadn’t gone two steps before Ross spun her around. “You,” he said, his eyes wild, “will stay.”
Meredith had been wrong before. Until this, until now, she had not understood that Ross Wakeman truly was insane.
He was also bigger than she was, and stronger, and alone in the dark with her and Lucy. So Meredith folded her arms across her chest and tried to convey bravery. She waited for Casper or Jacob Marley’s ghost or the moment that Ross grasped, like her, that there was nobody here to be seen.
Lucy’s knees were knocking so hard Meredith could literally hear them. “Shh,” she soothed. “This is all about nothing.”
Hearing her, Ross turned slowly. The stark desolation in his eyes made her mouth go dry. What if someone loved her as hard as that? “I . . . I’m sorry,” she murmured.
Ross stormed out of the woods along the path they’d entered. Meredith reached for Lucy and followed. She reasoned that this should not have come as a surprise. I’m not Lia, Meredith told herself. I’m not.
Shelby was pulling her shirt over her head when all the hairs stood up on the back of her neck. She ran to the window just in time to see the headlights cut off on a car. “Ross,” she whispered, and then she whooped with delight and raced down the stairs still in her pajama bottoms to welcome her brother.
On the driveway, she threw her arms around him. “Thank God you’re home.”
He smiled. “I’m going to have to go away more often.”
Over his shoulder, Shelby noticed a woman getting out of the car. A little girl. “Shel,” Ross said, stepping back, “I want you to meet Lia Pike’s granddaughter.”
“That remains to be seen,” said the woman, but she held out her hand for Shelby to shake. “Meredith Oliver. And my daughter, Lucy. I’m very sorry to impose on you this late at night . . .”
“Oh, no. We’re just getting up,” Shelby replied. “Come on in, and I’ll get you two settled.”
Ross walked in ahead of them, moving stiffly, like someone with a bum ankle or a bad hip—although Shelby knew it was nothing physical that pained him. She wondered if it was worse to have Ross pining for something he could not have, or to have him find it and realize it was not the panacea he’d imagined.
“I’m beat,” Ross muttered, and headed up the stairs.
It was difficult to say who was more stunned at this breach of hospitality, Shelby or Meredith. Recovering, Shelby bent down to Lucy. “My son is out in the backyard, through that door. I think he’s probably a year or two older than you, if you want to go say hi.”
Lucy cemented herself even closer to Meredith. “Go on,” Meredith urged, peeling her daughter off.
The girl walked away like she was headed to an execution.
“Lucy has a hard time in new situations,” Meredith explained.
Shelby was left with a woman who clearly had about the same level of desire to be there as her child. “Could I, um, interest you in a cup of coffee?” As she poured for both of them, Shelby studied Meredith over the edge of the carafe. Honey-blond hair, chestnut eyes . . . she looked familiar, although for the life of her, Shelby couldn’t say why.
Meredith stood in front of the kitchen window, watching her daughter acclimate. Relaxing by degrees, she took a seat. “I take it you believe in ghosts, too?” she asked.
“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 th
e 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 biol
ogical 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.”