by Jodi Picoult
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 of
f 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.
What if being pregnant was not the colossal mistake she believed it was? What if the timing was not off, but terribly right--a wake-up call, a message? So what if her baby had no father. Meredith's had left at age four, when her parents divorced, and she'd seen him only a handful of times while growing up. Yet she was living proof that you could do very well with only a mother, if you had the right one. If Meredith could not bring Luxe back alive, she at least had the opportunity to show her what she'd learned from her. She would make a safe haven for her daughter; she would feed her love.
When she dressed again and got her money back and walked outside the clinic, one of the protesters had flung a bucket of fake blood at her. It was the last straw--Meredith grabbed the man by his collar and shouted right in his face that she hadn't gone through with it. She broke down sobbing in the stranger's embrace.
They gave her cookies and hot chocolate from a thermos. They let her sit on a pile of blankets. The man who had doused her offered his own dry shirt. For that whole afternoon, Meredith was a hero.
Nearly a decade later, in her rearview mirror, Meredith assessed the picketers. She wished she had the balls to walk back and ask if any of them had ever made a choice that changed their future. She wished she could take them into her lab, where so many healthy embryos sat waiting. She wished she could explain to them that there were some sorts of lives that were not worth living. That it was not cruel to be the judge of that, but humane.
Then Meredith eased the car out of the parking spot and nosed it toward home, where she would find her daughter lying on the couch, dazed and lethargic from the antipsychotic meds. She wove dangerously in and out of rush-hour traffic. She cut off trucks. She pressed her foot to the gas pedal, doing 65 through a 30-mile-per-hour zone, as if sheer recklessness might convince her that after all these years, she still had what it took to save Lucy.
Ross sat in the emergency room, searching the faces of the scarred and the sick as they came through the automatic doors. Every time it was not Lia he relaxed by degrees. He had been here for two days, long enough to make friends with the triage staff and to ascertain that no one named Lia Beaumont, or for that matter, Jane Doe, had come through the hospital. That was what he was most worried about--the thought that she might hurt herself, or be hurt by her husband, before Ross had a chance to speak to her.
He wanted to tell her that he could not remember the shape of Aimee's eyes. Maybe, at first, that didn't seem like something she'd need to hear. But for eight years now, Ross could picture this as clearly as if Aimee were just inches away--the ovals tipped up at the ends, the cinnamon at the center, the lashes that cast shadows on her cheeks when she was sleeping. Since the night that Lia had put her lips up to his cheek and whispered in his ear, he could not envision Aimee's face without it morphing into Lia's.
He changed his clothes three times a day, and still he smelled roses.
He wanted to kiss her.
He wanted, period.
There was no happy ending here, Ross knew that. He would not break up Lia's marriage; he would not put her in a position to choose. But he needed to know that she was all right. He needed to believe she wasn't sitting somewhere in Comtosook right now with a blade balanced over her wrist.
Suddenly a woman rushed into the nurse's desk dragging a child behind her like a pull toy. "I'm looking for a patient," she demanded. "His name is Ross Wakeman."
Ross's head snapped up at the sound of Shelby's voice. He called her name.
Ethan turned first, then his mother. "Ross!" She barreled toward him, face twisted in fear. Ethan, behind her, was wrapped in his daylight gear--swathed from head to toe to keep the sun from touching his skin. The parts of his face that Ross could see were mottled and raw.
Shelby glanced from Ross's face to his arms. His wrists. "What's the matter? How long have you been here? God, Ross, why didn't you call me?"
Then she saw the cigarette burn he'd made on his forearm when he was with Lia. Blistered now and oozing, Shelby could not bring herself to touch it. Maybe it reminded her of Ethan. "Shel, I'm fine."
"You're in a hospital."
"I know. I've been trying to find someone. I thought she might be hurt."
"You're hurt too."
"That's nothing. An accident."
She didn't believe him, that much was clear. But she said, "You're all right? You're sure?"
"Positive."
"Excellent," Shelby replied, and she slapped him as hard as she could across the face.
Watching Ross's head snap back, and the proof of her hand rising on his skin, was the most satisfying moment Shelby had had in forty-eight hours, which was approximately how long her brother had been missing. She'd spent that time calling around everywhere, trying to find people who had seen him. But very few residents of Comtosook even knew him, much less could identify him by sight. She'd called the police station, and was patched through to a Detective Rochert, who said a missing person's report couldn't be filed until two full days had gone by. To that end, she had taken Ethan out in broad daylight, driving slowly through town and canvassing the diner and even demanding an audience with Rod van Vleet, who had been the last person to see Ross, at ten o'clock yesterday morning.
"Jeez, Shel," Ross said, still smarting. "Nice to see you, too."
"You son of a bitch." Shelby narrowed her eyes. "Do you have any idea where I've been? After the usual places, that is, that I would have bothered to look for my brother, who disappeared without any trace or for that matter the courtesy to leave me something like a note telling me where he was going or when he'd be back?"
"We went under the highway," Ethan piped in. "There was a dead seagull there. It was awesome."
Sh
elby's head was red with thoughts of succussion, the satisfying concept of shaking her brother so hard it caused him damage. "Yes, that's right. Under the highway. You know, in case you'd decided to jump off the bridge there."
"I told you before," he said wearily. "I'm not going to kill myself."
She grabbed his arm, near the burn. "Then what's this?"
"A really inefficient way to go about committing suicide?"
Tears were coming now, and that made her even angrier. "I'm glad you think this is so funny," Shelby said. "I guess I'm just an idiot, you know, to assume that the people I care about actually have some obligation to me--at least when it comes to letting me know they're not lying dead in a ditch somewhere." She swiped at her eyes. "I'm glad you're not killing yourself, Ross, because you're doing a goddamned good job of killing me instead."
"The seagull?" Ethan said, tugging on Ross's sleeve. "One of its eyes had been pecked out."
"Stop worrying about me, will you? I never asked you to," Ross said.
"You don't get to make that choice."
"Then why don't you worry about someone who really needs it?"
"You don't qualify?"
"Not as much as you do," Ross shot back. "For God's sake, Shel, you're living like some kind of nocturnal animal. You've closed yourself off to everyone but Ethan. Not a single friend comes over to have coffee with you, at least not since I've been here. You haven't had a date in . . . Christ, in the past ten years the Pope's gotten more action than you have. You're forty-two and you act like you're sixty. You're doing a really good job of killing yourself; you don't need me to do it for you."
She was not going to break down, not in the middle of the emergency room, not in front of Ross, especially not in front of Ethan. Fighting for control, she pressed her fists into her lap. "Are you finished?" she asked tightly.
Ross took his sister's hand and waited until she looked up at him. "Shelby. I am not going to kill myself. I promise."
"You promised before, Ross," she whispered. "And it turned out you lied."
Shelby had known, after Aimee's death, that her brother was not coming back from the edge. She had seen the way he stopped sleeping, the way his clothes began to wear him instead of the other way around. She had seen him hold a conversation when he was not really present. So she had been the one to give him a psychiatrist's name, to set up an appointment. That night at dinner, he reported that it had gone well; he'd even thanked her. When Shelby had found Ross bleeding days later, he had mouthed the words I'm sorry, before he passed out.