Second Glance Read online

  I cannot take a nap, because then I won’t be able to meet Gray Wolf as I am supposed to this afternoon. Of course, now that Dr. DuBois has come to visit, I will have to concoct some new excuse. Maybe I will say I’m going to the stationer for vellum, to write invitations to our dinner party. What they do not understand is that I don’t need pills, and I don’t need rest. What I need is someone who does not want me to sleep through my own life.

  The bed sinks as Spencer sits down beside me. I roll toward him, my eyelids half-lowered. “I’m already getting tired.”

  “You aren’t the only one,” Spencer answers, and his voice is full of edges.

  In that moment I forget how to breathe.

  “Why is it that Dr. DuBois—the physician you’ve gone to see six times in the past two weeks, for various aches and pains—has no recollection of these visits?” His face is stained crimson, which makes the blond roots of his hair stand out like platinum. “What on earth could my wife be doing that would make her lie to me?” He has my shoulders in his hands, and shakes me. “Not just once, but over and over?”

  My head snaps back on the stalk of my neck. “Spencer, it’s not what you think . . .”

  “Do not tell me what I think!” he roars, and then suddenly collapses into himself. “Cissy, God, what have you done to me?”

  Seeing him fall apart, I push myself into a sitting position and cradle his head in my lap. “Spencer. I was going out for walks. By myself. I just wanted to be by myself.”

  “Yourself?” Spencer murmurs against my skin. “You were by yourself?”

  I stare square into his eyes. “Yes.”

  Stealing, lying . . . I wouldn’t be surprised to find unreliability an inherited trait.

  “Look at me,” I say wryly, gesturing at the swell of my belly.

  “I do,” Spencer answers. “I am.” He cups my face in his hands and kisses me lightly. When he pulls away, he is holding an apology between his teeth. “I’m sorry, Cissy.” I squeeze his hand as he gets to his feet. It is not until he takes the key to the bedroom door from his dresser that I realize he has not been asking forgiveness for what he has done, but for what he is about to do. “Dr. DuBois agrees with me—you can’t be left alone. Especially not now, when your emotions are running so high with the pregnancy. He says that you’re at risk to . . . to hurt yourself again.”

  “And God forbid I do it where someone else could see. What would people say if they knew Spencer Pike was married to a woman who belonged with the rest of the feebleminded in Waterbury!”

  Spencer’s hand strikes my cheek with a sound like thunder, and shocks me into submission. He stares at his palm, as surprised by his actions as I am. I touch the pads of my fingers to my face, feeling the print of him rising like a second skin. “I’m doing this,” Spencer says stiffly, “because I love you.”

  The minute the door closes behind him and the lock turns into place, I get out of bed. I try the windows, which are stuck as always. I bang on the door. “Ruby!” I yell. “Ruby, you get me out of here this instant!”

  I hear her scratching on the other side of the door. “I can’t, Miz Pike. The professor, he says so.”

  I beat my fist one last time against the panels. Thrashing around has only made the close room even hotter; my hair sticks to the back of my neck and my shirt is damp. A princess in an ivory tower, that’s what I am. But if the prince knew, at heart, that I am a toad, would he fight so hard to keep me?

  Crawling around on my hands and knees I plug in the electric fan and hold my face close. Immediately I am cooler. I wonder if this is what the air in Canada is like. I wonder if Gray Wolf will worry, when I do not come.

  As the fan spins I speak into it, a child’s trick, so that my voice sounds like someone else’s. “Nia Lia,” I say. I am Lia. “N’kadi waji nikônawakwanawak.” I want to go home.

  Henceforth it shall be the policy of the state to prevent procreation of idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded or insane persons, when the public welfare, and the welfare of idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded or insane persons likely to procreate, can be improved by voluntary sterilization as herein provided.

  —“An Act for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization,” Laws of Vermont, 31st Biennial Session (1931), No. 174, p. 194

  “I’m thinking about caramelized onions,” Ruby says.

  She sits on a chair beside my bed, my only visitor. Outside, on one of the trees in the backyard, a bird is making a nest. A red thread unwinds from its beak, like a magician doing sleight-of-hand with a handkerchief. “Fine.”

  There is nothing sharp in my bedroom. Nothing I could swallow or use to string myself up. I know, because Spencer has had Ruby canvass the space. What he doesn’t understand is that I will not try to kill myself, not yet. Just in case, just in case . . . oh, I cannot finish the sentence, and jinx it.

  Ruby flips through another cookbook. “Or else, a pepper crust.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Wonderful.”

  Ruby frowns. “Miz Pike, I can’t put them both on the roast.”

  Spencer is not a tyrant. When he comes home from work, he takes me out for a walk on the edge of our property. He buys me books. He brings me dinner himself, and holds bits of chicken and potato up to my lips as if we are on a picnic. He brushes my hair for me, long lean strokes that make me forget where we are and who I am. But in the morning, when he leaves, he turns the key in the bedroom door. And the only person I see, until he comes home again, is Ruby.

  I drag my attention toward her. “You said you need two roasts, for that many guests. Do one of each.” Or serve it raw. I don’t care.

  “We don’t have room in the icebox for two roasts, plus a dessert. Some of it, I’ll have to store in the icehouse.” Ruby makes a note to her checklist. “What do you think about a seven-layer cake? Or baked Alaska?”

  Her words blend together at the edges. I turn away. The robin has woven the thread through the rest of his nest. It looks like a line of blood.

  Why go to all that trouble, when soon he will be flying south for the winter?

  “Miz Pike.” Ruby sighs. “Miz Pike?”

  The robin is no more than ten feet away from where I am. I have no idea how to get from here to there.

  Ruby touches my hand. “Cissy?”

  “Go away,” I tell her, and pull the covers over my head.

  When a Doctor wants a boat

  On the broad highway to float

  He will find a place where sapheads congregate

  He will chase them to a shed

  And at fifty bucks a head

  He will freeze his conscience out and mutilate.

  —E. F. Johnstone’s “Authority to Mutilate,” from newspaper clippings on sterilization, Henry F. Perkins Faculty File, UVM archives

  By the third day of my imprisonment, I have stopped bothering to dress myself. I lay on the bed with my hair a rat’s nest, my nightgown hiked high. Ruby has gone to the butcher’s, Spencer is at the university. The radio warbles band music that beats like my baby’s heart.

  When I hear the lock turn at first, I wonder how Ruby has made it back from town so quickly. But even the way Gray Wolf moves through a room is different from anyone else. I sit up, unable to speak as he kneels beside the bed and embraces me. “You told him?”

  “No.” He smells of the outdoors. I drink him in.

  “He locked you in for something else?” Gray Wolf says, shocked.

  Before I can explain, he starts speaking, his words tumbling like avalanche stones to land at our feet. “When you didn’t show up, I thought maybe you had listened to me after all about staying away.”

  “I wouldn’t—”

  “But it came to me pretty quick that you would still say good-bye. And when you didn’t come, not that day, or the next . . . I went into town. No one there had seen you, either. And then, with the camp . . .”

  “What about it?”

  He looks at me. “There is no camp, anymore. After I was in town overnight, I