Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  Bending down, he pulled a dandelion from the base of Winnie's headstone. As if the motion had dislodged it, a word rolled into his mind: chibaiak . . . ghosts. His grandmother's language, which burned on Eli's tongue like a peppermint. "No such thing," he said aloud, and walked back to the car to see what else this night might hold in store.

  Shelby Wakeman had awakened exhausted after a full day's sleep. She'd been having that dream again, the one where Ethan was standing beside her in an airport, and then she turned around to find that he'd disappeared. Frantic, she'd run from terminal to terminal looking for him, until at last she flew out a door onto the tarmac and found her nine-year-old standing in the path of an incoming jet.

  It terrified her, no matter how often Shelby told herself that this would never happen--she'd never be in an airport with Ethan in the middle of the day, much less lose sight of him. But what frightened her most was that image of her son standing with his arms outstretched, his buttermilk face lifted up to the sun.

  "Earth to Mom . . . hello?"

  "Sorry." Shelby smiled. "Just daydreaming."

  Ethan finished rinsing his plate and setting it into the dishwasher. "Do you think it's still daydreaming if you do it at night?" Before she could answer, he grabbed his skateboard, as much an appendage as any of his limbs. "Meet you out there?"

  She nodded, and watched Ethan explode into the front yard. No matter how many times she told him to be quiet-- at 4 A.M., most people were asleep, not racing around on skateboards-- Ethan usually forgot, and Shelby usually didn't have the heart to remind him.

  Ethan had XP, xeroderma pigmentosum, an incredibly rare inherited disease that left him extremely sensitive to the sun's ultraviolet rays. In the world, there were only a thousand known cases of XP. If you had it, you had it from birth, and you had it forever.

  Shelby had first noticed something was wrong when Ethan was six weeks old, but it took a year of testing before he was diagnosed with XP. Ultraviolet light, the doctors explained, causes damage to human DNA. Most people can automatically repair that damage . . . but XP patients can't. Eventually the damage affects cell division, which leads to cancer. Ethan, they said, might live to reach his teens.

  But Shelby figured if sunlight was going to kill her son, all she needed to do was to make it infinitely dark. She stayed in days. She read Ethan bedtime books by candlelight. She covered the windows of her house with towels and curtains that her husband would rip down every night when he came home from work. "No one," he'd said, "is allergic to the goddamned sun."

  By the time they were divorced, Shelby had learned about light. She knew that there was more to fear than just the outdoors. Grocery stores and doctors' offices had fluorescent fixtures, which were ultraviolet. Sunblock became as common as hand cream, applied inside the house as well as out. Ethan had twenty-two hats, and he donned them with the same casual routine that other children put on their underwear.

  Tonight he was wearing one that said I'M WITH STUPID. The brim was curled tight as a snail, a shape Ethan cultivated by hooking the lip of the hat beneath the adjustable band in the back. When Shelby saw the caps being stored that way, she thought of swans tucking their heads beneath a wing; of the tiny bound feet of the Chinese.

  She finished cleaning up the kitchen and then settled herself with a book on the edge of the driveway. Her long, dark hair was braided into submission, thick as a fist, and she was still hot--how on earth could Ethan race around like that? He ran his skateboard up a homemade wooden ramp and did an Ollie kickflip. "Mom! Mom? Did you see that? It was just like Tony Hawk."

  "I know it," Shelby agreed.

  "So don't you think that it would be totally sweet if we--"

  "We are not going to build a half-pipe in the driveway, Ethan."

  "But--"

  "Jeez. Whatever." And he was gone again in a rumble of wheels.

  Inside, Shelby smiled. She loved the attitude that seemed to be creeping into Ethan's personality, like a puppeteer throwing words into his mouth. She loved the way he turned on Late Night with Conan O'Brien when he thought she was somewhere else in the house, to try to catch all the innuendoes. It made him . . . well, so normal. If not for the fact that the moon was riding shotgun overhead, and that Ethan's face was so pale the veins beneath his skin glowed like roads she knew by heart--if not for these small things, Shelby could almost believe her world was just like any other single mother's.

  Ethan executed a shifty pivot, and then a Casper big spin. There was a time, Shelby realized, when she couldn't have distinguished a helipop from a G-turn. There was also a time Shelby would have looked at Ethan and herself and felt pity. But Shelby could hardly remember what her existence had been like before this illness was flung over them like a fishing net; and truth be told, any life she'd lived before Ethan could not have been much of a life at all.

  He skidded to a stop in front of her. "I'm starving."

  "You just ate!"

  Ethan blinked at her, as if that were any kind of excuse. Shelby sighed. "You can go in and have a snack if you want, but it's looking pink already."

  Ethan turned toward the sunrise, a claw hooked over the horizon. "Let me watch from out here," he begged. "Just once."

  "Ethan--"

  "I know." His voice dipped down at the edges. "Three more hardflips."

  "One."

  "Two." Without waiting for agreement--she would concede, and they both knew it--Ethan sped off again. Shelby cracked open her novel, the words registering like cars on a freight train--a stream without any individual characteristics. She had just turned the page when she realized Ethan's skateboard was no longer moving.

  He held it balanced against his leg, the graphic of the superhero Wolverine spotted white. "Mom?" he asked. "Is it snowing?"

  It did, quite often, in Vermont. But not in August. A white swirl tipped toward her book and caught in the wedge of the spine; but it was not a snowflake after all. She lifted the petal to her nose, and sniffed. Roses.

  Shelby had heard of strange weather patterns that caused frogs to evaporate and rain down over the seas; she'd once seen a hailstorm of locusts. But this . . . ?

  The petals continued to fall, catching in her hair and Ethan's. "Weird," he breathed, and he sat down beside Shelby to witness a freak of nature.

  "Pennies." Curtis Warburton turned over the coin Ross had handed him. "Anything else?"

  Ross shook his head. It had been three hours, and even with a raging storm outside providing a well of energy, the paranormal activity had been minimal at best. "I thought I saw a globule on the screen at one point, but it turned out to be a smoke alarm hung in the back of the attic."

  "Well, I haven't felt a damn thing," Curtis sighed. "We should have taken the case in Buffalo instead."

  Ross snapped some used film back into its canister and tucked it into his pocket. "The wife, Eve? She mentioned a little sister who died when she was seven."

  Curtis looked at him. "Interesting."

  The two men walked downstairs. Maylene sat on the living room couch in the dark with an infrared thermometer "You get anything?" Curtis asked.

  "No. This house is about as active as a quadriplegic."

  "How is it going?" Eve O'Donnell interrupted. She stood at the doorway of the living room, her hand clutching the collar of her robe.

  "I think it's safe to say that you're not alone in this house. In fact," Curtis held out the penny Ross had given him, "I just found this."

  "Yes . . . sometimes there are coins lying around. I told Ross that."

  "Did you?"

  Ross turned, frowning. But before he could ask Curtis why he was playing dumb, his boss started speaking again. "Ghosts can be mischievous that way. Especially the ghost of a child, for example."

  Ross felt the charge of the air as Eve O'Donnell lay her trust at Curtis's feet. "I have to tell you," Curtis said. "I'm getting some very strong sensations here. There's a presence, but it's someone you know, someone who knows you." Curtis tipped hi