by Jodi Picoult
As Shelby examined the crystal candy bowl for hairline fractures, Eli collected the books, which had splayed open on the carpet. One was a coffee table pictorial of Vermont. The other was a scrapbook. Curious, Eli flipped through the pages. "What's this?"
Shelby read over his shoulder, her cheeks pink with embarrassment as Eli skimmed the stories she went back to time and time again. On the page he'd opened, there was an article about a six-year-old boy bitten by a shark off the coast of Florida. His leg had been severed and successfully reattached, but the blood loss had put him into a coma. After weeks of assuming the boy was brain-dead, he'd awakened just as good as new.
The most recent article involved a Canadian toddler who'd wandered out of his house and had fallen asleep in a six-foot drift of snow. "I remember this one," Eli said. "He was pronounced dead, and brought to the hospital--"
"And the doctors gradually warmed him up and he came back to life." Shelby took the scrapbook from him. "It's stupid, I know, but I keep track. I clip stories where death turns out to not be . . . well, so final. Maybe one day someone will clip a story about Ethan for the same reason."
Suddenly Ross came pounding down the stairs, his hair still wet from a shower. "I thought I heard your voice," he said to Eli, as Watson did his best to leap into his arms. "How'd it go with Pike?"
But Eli was still riveted by the story of the Canadian toddler. "The doctor's from McGill," he said. "That's right over the border in Montreal. The family must be nearby. Shelby, come with me?"
She did not consider Ethan, or her job, or her brother. She didn't consider the logistics of staying overnight with a man she'd gone out with only once. And she didn't wonder why, spontaneously, Eli seemed as interested in near-death experiences as she was. All Shelby knew was that when you are given the chance to meet a miracle, you do not think twice.
From the Burlington Free Press:
Burlington, VT -- Dr. Thomas Smalley, president of the University of Vermont, announced plans to rename the Beaumont Biology Library and the Pike Museum of Anthropological History. "The University of Vermont wants to make clear that the ideas espoused by these professors during Vermont's eugenics studies were theirs alone, and did not represent the views of the university community as a whole," said Smalley, in a written statement. Potential new names for these buildings are under review by the Alumni Committee.
When Eli was a boy, he had been certain that state boundaries and the equator were lines drawn on the ground, just like on a map. "The first time my mother took me to Canada, I asked her to pull over so I could see it," he told Shelby.
"You must have been disappointed."
"Nope." He grinned, thinking back. "She took a piece of chalk out of the glove compartment, and started drawing. Said that all the car tires on the highway must have rubbed it right off."
"And you believed her?"
He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. "I think people believe what they need to, don't you?"
"I suppose you can't be a cop unless you're cynical."
"Not true. We continue to be amazed every day."
He pulled the truck into a highway motel, one just over the city line of Montreal, according to the map. Avec HBO, promised a billboard.
They had made it to Canada in record time. However, it was nearly 8 P.M.--which meant that Eli would not be seeing Dr. Holessandro until the following day. "Sorry it's not the Ritz," Eli apologized. "But the Ritz doesn't take dogs."
"I hope you were referring to Watson. And don't worry on my account. I'd be just as happy camping out in the flatbed."
The thought of Shelby pressed against him from toe to shoulder in the rear of his truck was enough to make Eli suddenly as hard as a rock. He got out of the rig, turned away, and adjusted his jeans. Shelby followed him into the office of the motel, where a boy with a green mohawk was playing Scrabble against himself. "Do you speak French?" she asked Eli.
"Nothing to worry about." As Eli walked up to the desk, the boy made no effort to even look at him. "Hello." He rolled his eyes. "Bonjour."
"Bonjour," the boy said, smirking at Eli and Shelby--and their lack of luggage. "Vous desirez une chambre?"
Shelby opened her mouth and stepped forward. "I'll take care of this," Eli said. "Oui, deux chambres, s'il vous plait."
The boy looked at Shelby, and then back at Eli. "Deux? Vous-etes sur?"
"Oui," Eli said.
The boy raised a brow. "Et Madame? Elle est sure aussi?"
"Bon, d'accord. Avez-vous des chambres ou non?"
"Oui, oui . . . ne vous fachez pas. D'abord, j'ai besoin d'une carte de credit . . ." Eli slapped his MasterCard on the counter. "Voila les clefs pour les chambres 40 and 42."
"Merci."
"Ou, preferez-vous plus de distance entre les chambres? Deux etages differents peut-etre . . . ?"
"Non, ca va comme ca." Eli grabbed Shelby by the arm and pulled her toward the front door. "Bonne nuit, alors . . ." the clerk called after them, laughing.
Outside, Eli made a beeline for his truck. If his dick had been hard before they'd gone into the motel, by now he could be the body double for a jackhammer. "Eli--"
"I want to get the dog. You know what they say about leaving animals in cars . . ."
"Eli!" Shelby planted her hands on her hips in the middle of the parking lot. "Goddammit, listen to me!"
He turned slowly, exhaling heavily. "What."
"The reason I asked you if you speak French in there . . . was because I do, and I could have checked us in. Would you prefer more distance between the rooms?" she translated, mocking the clerk. "Two different floors, maybe?"
Mortified, Eli swore. "Shelby, it's not like you think . . ."
"You have no idea what I'm thinking," she countered, then added quietly, "I was thinking that he was right. You could have gotten one room."
Eli took a few steps forward, until he was standing just inches away from Shelby. "No, I couldn't have," he said.
He watched the light go out of her eyes, and realized she had misunderstood him. In that moment, he wished for her facility for words. He wished for a lot of things. "You know how sometimes when you're reading a really great book or watching a really great video you stop, just to make it last longer? There is nothing I want more than to, uh, oscillate with you. But that's gonna lead to more than that . . . pretty damn quick. What I feel right now--what we feel--it's eviscerant enough. We can't get that back, once it's gone." He kissed her on the forehead. "I don't want to go slow, but I'm gonna make myself do it."
"Evanescent?" Shelby smiled slowly. "Osculate?"
Eli winked. "You're not the only one who can read a dictionary." And over her shoulder what had been just a crack in the pavement, a line of trees, and a picket fence suddenly reconfigured into a city boundary line, clear as day.
The hospital was a little too clean and a little too quiet, swimming with so much false cheer that it made the tiled floor shine. As Lucy climbed on the bed, she concentrated on not making any sound--not only because her mom and great-grandma were sleeping but because the crinkly covers and plastic sheets were already covered with people who Lucy could see, even if no one else seemed to be able to.
She didn't like touching them, didn't like the way their arms and legs moved right through her and made her so cold inside that her bones ached. She didn't like the way they stared at her, as if they were jealous that she was someone who could walk into a room and be noticed without even trying. So Lucy curled herself into as small a ball as possible, and watched her great-grandmother rest.
Her mother had told her that Granny Ruby's heart was broken, and it made Lucy think of a vase she'd knocked over once and tried to glue back together. Every time she saw it, now, she knew it wasn't as good as it had been.
Lucy felt the hair on the back of her neck stand up as a girl beside her with long black braids and a funny striped apron poked at her with one long finger. She looked to be about sixteen, and sickly, her cheeks nearly blue. "Ma poule," the g
irl whispered.
Suddenly Granny Ruby blinked awake. "You're here," she said, reaching for Lucy.
"My mother brought me."
At that, Ruby looked around wildly. "Mama? She's here too?" But before Lucy could answer, her great-grandmother touched her cheek. "Simone," she said, not Lucy at all. "You came back."
"I'm not Simone," Lucy whispered, but by then her great-grandmother was no longer listening. The see-through girl with the black braids reached out, and with one shove, pushed Lucy off the bed.
On January 3rd, 2002, Alexandre Proux had awakened before his mother, Genevieve. He opened the back door, whose doorknob he had only been able to reach for a week, now, and wandered onto the porch in his Spider-Man pajamas. It was snowing, and he wanted to play.
By the time his mother woke up and realized he was gone, Alexandre had been buried beneath the snow. For six hours, the police followed kidnapping leads and looked everywhere but in Alex's own backyard.
Now, Alex was three and torturing the beagle puppy his mother had bought him last Christmas. The dog had been trussed up in a kerchief, and Alex was trying to tie reins onto its collar. "I keep thinking that the dog is going to bite him," said Genevieve, smiling. "But he seems to have the same trouble saying no to Alex as the rest of us."
"You are so lucky." Alex handed his mother the cap gun and then galloped off astride his long-suffering makeshift steed.
"There is nothing like it," Genevieve added, now that Alex was out of earshot. "Seeing your baby, not moving like that. Alex was still, and Alex is never still. I kept thinking, He will wake up now. He will open his eyes and look at me and be fine."
Shelby understood. If you lost a child, grief wasn't just part of the equation. It was the equation. Suddenly the beagle raced into the room, the cowboy hat clamped firmly between his jaws, Alex trailing behind. "You have a son, oui?"
"Ethan. He's nine."
"Then you understand."
Alex veered left, flying into his mother's arms. She kissed him on the soft spot behind his ear. "Yes," Shelby said, watching them. "I do."
Dr. Gaspar Holessandro had a bad toupee and a weakness for sardines. "I'm sorry," he said, licking his fingers after plucking another one from a Tupperware container on his desk. "I don't usually eat in front of guests." Too busy to schedule a meeting, Holessandro had agreed to meet Eli during a lunch break. His office was a closet attached to the pristine research lab at McGill where, three days a week, the doctor studied SIDS by implanting probes in the brains of infant pigs. The other four days, he worked at the hospital where Alexandre Proux had been brought in stiff and blue and presumably dead.
Eli had, again, bent the truth. He explained to Holessandro that he was a detective in Vermont, that there was an open investigation into a baby's death, one that shared characteristics with young Alex's situation. He'd wanted to know if there was some regenerative process caused by extreme cold--one that might explain why a baby who had been smothered might suddenly come back to life after being stuck in an icehouse. He didn't tell the doctor that all this had happened in 1932.
Holessandro bit the tail off a sardine. "Smothering," he explained, "would cause asphyxiation . . . and make a person hypoxic. Now, if you're an adult, that means you'd breathe more--hyperventilate. Infants, though--their bodies are physiologically quite different from ours, and for them hypoxia inhibits breathing. So if a baby was smothered, it might stop breathing for several minutes . . . and then would autoresuscitate."
"You mean it wouldn't stay dead?"
"When you stop the part of a baby's brain that's responsible for normal breathing, another part of the brain takes over . . . which makes the infant gasp a few times. The purpose is to get some oxygen in there to jump-start the heart and lungs again." He smiled. "It's actually very hard to kill an infant."
"But whoever was doing the suffocating--surely he'd have noticed an infant gasping for air."
"That depends on how quickly he left. It happened in an icehouse, you said?"
Eli shrugged. "Yeah."
Holessandro shook his head. "And I thought Canadians were provincial. Well, the icehouse adds another twist to it. Say the baby was asphyxiated . . . and then gasped . . . and was stuck in a cold environment. In that case, what happened to Alexandre would start to happen to the infant. The skin would cool, which in turn would cool the blood flow, which cools the brain, which causes the hypothalamus to lower the metabolic rate to basal levels. Perhaps even more so--the younger the child, the more potent the reflex that makes bodily systems shut down that way."
"So the baby would look dead, but wouldn't be dead?"
"Exactly. It's like energy-saver on a computer . . . the screen shuts off but you haven't lost your data. Likewise, as the blood flow was directed only to essential organs, the baby's skin would get blue and cold. It wouldn't be breathing visibly; its pulse would be indistinguishable. Like Alex."
"How long could an infant live like that?"
"It can't," Holessandro said flatly. "Scientifically, according to textbooks, it doesn't happen. But the rules of biology aren't like the rules of physics, and as we've seen with Alex--sometimes it does." He popped the last of the sardines in his mouth. "So did your baby live?"
"My baby?"
"The infant. The one from this case."
"Oh, right," Eli said. "We don't know, actually."
"Well, if it did, someone or something must have come along to warm it up. That's the only way to come out of that hibernation, so to speak. Especially an infant--neonates can't shiver, so they can't warm themselves up."
Who had been there that night to warm the baby? Spencer Pike, for one . . . who'd confessed to killing the infant. Why admit to murder--a more serious crime--if instead he'd squirreled the baby away somewhere, alive? It was possible that Cecelia Pike had managed to hide her child in the hours before her death. Maybe Az Thompson had even taken it, and knew more than he was letting on.
But if that infant had come back to life . . . where the hell was she now?
"Hope this helps you find some answers," Holessandro said.
"Definitely," Eli replied. But he could not shake the feeling that he had not yet asked the right question.
"We're good to go," Ross said, as he handed Ethan a vase filled with popcorn, then flopped into the beach chair beside him. They were sitting on the driveway at midnight, watching a video that his uncle had rigged to project on the white doors of the garage. It was some shoot-'em-up flick, R-rated and so full of dead guys and bullets that Ethan figured his mother would have a cow if she found out, which of course made it all the better.
"What's with the vase?" Ethan asked.
"We ran out of clean bowls." Ross grinned as the opening credits started to roll. "Is this, or is this not every bit as good as a drive-in?"
Ethan nodded. "The only thing that's missing is a girl in the backseat."
His uncle choked on a piece of popcorn. "Jesus, Ethan. Aren't you a little young to be thinking about that?"
"Well, that depends. On account of most guys get into that stuff when they're fourteen or fifteen, and I'll be dead by then."
Ross turned, so that the movie played over his cheek and brow, distorting his face. "Ethan, you don't know that for sure."
"That guys have sex when they're fourteen?" Ethan said, deliberately misunderstanding. "How old were you when you had sex for the first time?"
"I wasn't nine and a half."
"What's it like?"
On the screen, two cops were shooting at a bad guy in a convertible. The convertible rolled on an embankment and burst into flames. Ethan knew that the stuntman who'd done that scene had gotten out of the fire and walked away in his flame-retardant suit, perfectly okay. People died all the time in movies and then got right back up and did it again, like it was some kind of joke.
He could see that his uncle was trying to edit whatever he had decided to say, but he also knew that Ross would tell him the truth. Unlike his mother, who only wanted to
keep him a kid as long as possible, Uncle Ross understood exactly how much you needed to cram into the measure of a life before you checked out. "It's pretty amazing," Ross answered. "It feels like coming home."
Somehow, that description just didn't do it for Ethan. He thought he might hear words like round and wet and burst, dialogue from the Playboy Channel that came through the speakers on the TV even though the picture was scrambled. He wondered if his mother, in Canada, was doing things that were round and wet and bursting with that guy Eli, who made her glow every time he came over. That detective was all she thought of these days. He remembered how he had been talking to her while she was making pancakes a few nights ago, about this wicked cool pogo stick he'd seen advertised on TV that not only counted how many times you jumped but egged you on and called you by your name. "It sounds great," his mother had said.
"Maybe I could get it for my birthday," Ethan suggested, and she had turned to him, all confused.
"Get what?"
"The pogo stick?"
"What pogo stick?" she'd asked, and then she'd shook her head and flipped the pancakes again, when they were already done cooking anyway.
Uncle Ross still seemed to be coming up with his explanation. "I think when you sleep with someone, you take a part of her with you. Not just the physical stuff--cells and all that. But part of what makes her her."
Everyone had someone, Ethan thought. Everyone but him. "Maybe I could just kiss a girl, so that every now and then she'd think of me. You know, Oh, that was the kid I kissed who had that disease and died."
"Ethan, you're not--"
"Uncle Ross," he said wearily. "Don't you lie to me too."
Most of the time, the truth that he was going to die sat in his stomach like something that would not digest--a stone, a ball of wire. He understood that he'd drawn the short end of the stick genetically, that an early death was not an option, but a fact. He did not want to find Jesus, or make out a will, or do any of the things people did when they knew they were going to pass away. He just wanted to live.
In the movie, someone got his arm cut off with a chain saw.
Ethan reached for his uncle's hand. He pushed up the sleeve of his sweater, to the spot where a scar swam beneath the surface of his wrist. "Why?" he whispered.