Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  In my dream I can even feel it, the square box of its body and the white face with a small scale of numbers and a quivering needle. There is writing on the handheld base: TriField Natural EM Meter. A man with hair as long as a woman's explains the settings: Magnetic, sum, electric, radio/microwave, battery test. He wears a faded T-shirt and denims, like a field hand.

  What is a cell phone?

  I wake up, sweating. Even the fan blowing over the surface of the bed can't make up for the fact that the windows are stuck shut. The other side of the bed is empty. Restless, I walk to the bathroom and splash water on my face. Padding downstairs, I try to find Spencer.

  He is in his study. The lights are all out, with the exception of a green accountant's shade lamp on his desk. Several of his pedigree charts are unraveled on the hardwood floor like old roads, and through the open windows, bullfrogs are calling his name. When he lifts his head, I realize he has been drinking.

  "Cissy. What time is it?"

  "Past two." I take a tentative step forward. "You should come up to bed."

  He buries his face in his hands. "What woke you?"

  "The heat."

  "Heat." Spencer picks up his glass and drains it. An ant crawls across the desk, and in one smooth move he smacks the base of the tumbler down to crush it.

  "Spencer?"

  He wipes off the glass with his handkerchief and looks up at me. "Do you think," he asks quietly, "that they feel it? Do you think they know it's coming?"

  I shake my head, confused. "You need to go to sleep."

  Before I realize what he is doing, Spencer has twisted me onto his lap. He holds my arm fast, and touches the spot where the bandage has been taped in the crook of my elbow. "Do you know how it would kill me to lose you?" he whispers, fierce. "Do you have any idea what you mean to me?"

  My lips barely move. "No."

  "Oh, Cissy." He buries his face between my breasts, his breath falling over our baby. "You're the reason I do it."

  The small Old American group has been helped to maintain its predominant position by the strength of its traditional feeling of the racial superiority of the Anglo-Saxon.

  --Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937

  Ruby is the one who tells me he is waiting.

  "Spencer's inside," I say, panicking the minute I see Gray Wolf on our porch, with the morning sun slung over his shoulders like a matador's cape.

  "Ask me," he demands.

  I glance into the house. Spencer is in the tub. And I have so many questions. "Did you know my mother?" When he nods, it is no surprise. "What was she like?"

  His gaze softens. "You."

  There are no words in the place where I have arrived. "More," I manage.

  So he tells me what she looked like, standing on this very porch, in this home where she grew up before marrying my father. He paints the color of her hair, and it matches mine. He tells me how she could whistle louder than any girl he'd ever known, and that her clothes always smelled of lemons. He had worked for her father as a seasonal field laborer--back when this property was a producing farm, before that parcel of land was sold off to the current neighbors.

  He tells me that once, on a dare, my mother drove a tractor onto the UVM green at midnight.

  He tells me that she wanted a daughter, more than anything, so that she could grow up all over again.

  I lean against the exterior wall of the house and close my eyes. I have waited my whole life for this moment. Will my child be as lucky? Will there be someone, years from now, to tell him about me?

  I blink at Gray Wolf. "I'm going to die."

  "Lia," he says, "we all are."

  The door opens suddenly. Spencer's hair is still wet, and there are small damp patches on his shirt where his skin pinks through the cotton. "I thought I heard you talking to someone," he accuses, and I wonder if Gray Wolf hears how the edge of his words are as sharp as a razor.

  "This is Gray Wolf," I announce. "I'm hiring him."

  Spencer stares, trying to figure out why Gray Wolf's face is so familiar . . . but he will not be able to. That day on the street, Spencer had wanted nothing more than to dismiss a Gypsy. For Gray Wolf to stand out in his mind, he would have had to be important enough to leave an impression in the first place.

  "The roof needs work. Both here, and the icehouse. You told me to hire a handyman to take care of it. Gray Wolf, this is my husband, Professor Pike."

  Spencer looks one last time between Gray Wolf and myself. "There's a ladder in the garage," he says finally. "Go on, then. You can start with the drainpipes."

  "Yes, sir." Gray Wolf's expression is blank. He strikes off toward the shed to start working a job he never asked for.

  Spencer watches him leave. "Where did you find him?"

  "The Hardings," I lie.

  "Cal Harding?" This will impress Spencer; our neighbor is a stickler for detail. "Did they check his references?"

  "Spencer, he's patching a roof, not signing on as the nanny."

  From a distance comes the clatter of things being moved in too small a space. "I don't like him," Spencer says.

  "Well," I answer. "I do."

  Eugenics is the scientific projection of our sense of self-preservation and our parental instincts.

  --O. F. Cook, "Quenching Life on the Farm: How the Neglect of Eugenics Subverts Agriculture and Destroys Civilization," from a review by E. R. Eastman in the Journal of Heredity, 1928

  As a child, I used to go to my father's office at the university and pretend his big leather desk chair was a throne, and I was the Queen of Everything. My subjects--pencils, paperweights-- lined up at attention on the desk to hear me speak and watch me twirl in circles. My court jester, a typewriter carriage with a bell at each return, sat at my elbow. I was only three-and-a-half feet tall, and I pretended I could fill this space with as much command as my father.

  He is sitting at the desk, laboring over a legal pad, when I let myself inside. Seeing me, he puts down his work. "Cissy! This is a nice surprise. What brings you to town?"

  For the past few days, my belly has been stretched to breaking, my skin on the verge of splitting. "Your grandson wanted to pay a visit."

  He sees me looking at his chair, and he smiles slowly. "Did you want to take a spin, for old time's sake?"

  Ruefully, I shake my head. "I wouldn't fit."

  "Of course you would. I've seen Allen Sizemore stuff his considerable, er, assets into that seat." When I don't laugh along with him, he stands and reaches for my hand. "Tell me what's the matter."

  Oh, God, where would I even start? With the way I look at a blade as a silver opportunity? With the nightmares I have of my own father and Spencer, pulling this baby out from between my legs? Or should I appeal to him as a scientist: Hypothesis--fear is a room six feet by six feet, without any windows or doors.

  What comes out of my mouth instead is a single word. "Mama," I whisper.

  "She would have been so proud of you. She would have loved to see this baby." He pauses. "It's perfectly natural to worry. But Cissy, you're a different woman from your mother, God rest her soul. You're stronger."

  "How do you know?"

  "Because part of you came from me." Suddenly he tugs me into his leather chair. He spins it slowly, a carousel.

  "Daddy!"

  "What? Who's here to see?"

  So I lean my head back and try to find the eye at the center of the cyclone. My feet fly out in front of me, my hands rest heavy on the armrests. "That's my girl," my father says, and he brings me to a stop. "I might come out to your place this afternoon. I hear you're having some work done by a Gypsy."

  "Yes." I wonder what else Spencer has told him.

  "Never hired one, myself." My father leans against the desk. "There was an Indian in grade school with me. Linwood . . . good God, I can't believe I remember his name. This kid was as Indian as the Indian on a buffalo head nickel. Braids and all. Of course, every boy back then played cowboys a