The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  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.

  It turned out he’d never kept that appointment with the psychiatrist.

  “You tell me,” she said, “why I’m supposed to believe you now.”

  Ross looked off into the distance, his eyes fixed on a poster urging people to donate organs. He began to tell her a story, then, of a woman who had disappeared. Frightened . . . fragile . . . beautiful . . . curious: Ross balanced adjective upon adjective to form a friable house of cards that might collapse at any moment; and suddenly this Lia Beaumont might have been standing between them, shaking and unsure.

  One word snagged in Shelby’s mind. “Married?” she repeated.

  “She’s terrified of him.”

  “Ross—”

  He shook his head. “It’s not like that,” he said. Shelby knew he was lying; she just wasn’t certain if Ross realized it, too. “I’m worried about her. She has nowhere to go. She wants out, but she can’t find her way there. I think . . . I think she might try to kill herself.”

  How do you like it? she thought, but before she could speak she noticed her brother’s face. It was an expression she knew so well—one she had worn a thousand times, every time she looked up and saw the sun, or stared at Ethan’s seasoned, sleeping face. It was an expression she had seen Ross wear, after his suicide attempt. Sometimes, when you come up against a wall of reality, there simply is not a way to get around it. He has fallen in love with her, Shelby thought, and that’s not going to change a thing.

  Her voice rocked him gently. “Ross, you can’t save them all.”

  He reared back as if Shelby had slapped him again. “Just once,” he said softly. “Just once would be nice.” Staggering to his feet, he ran out of the hospital and as far away from this memory as he could.

  The sun swallowed his uncle up, like the fiery breath of a dragon, the moment he raced out of the sliding-glass doors. Ethan kicked the bottom of his chair, which made the whole row shake, since they were attached. His mother sat beside him, her face buried in her hands, like she did when they watched Friday the 13th and she couldn’t bear to see someone hacked into pieces. “What’s with Uncle Ross?” Ethan said. “If that lady isn’t in the hospital, isn’t that a good thing?”

  His mother blinked. “You were listening.”

  “Duh. I was, like, two feet away.”

  His mother sighed, and Ethan knew she was doing the math in her head: how old he was, chronologically, multiplied by how old he was, emotionally, divided by some standard number for childhood innocence. “One time he tried to save someone’s life, and he wound up losing something very important to him.” She tightened her hold on his hand. “You know Uncle Ross was in a car accident with the woman he was going to marry. Ross was the person who was hurt the least, and he carried Aimee out of the car to the side of the road. But the other car, the one that hit them—there was a driver still stuck in there. He left Aimee while he went to see if that person was all right.”

  “And she died,” Ethan breathed, the last puzzle piece fitting snug in his mind.

  “Mmm-hmm. Aimee didn’t look that bad on the outside, which is why Uncle Ross thought it was okay to leave her alone for a second—but inside, her organs? They were bleeding badly. She was taken to the hospital, but the doctors couldn’t do anything.”

  “Like me,” Ethan said simply. His mother turned her face away.

  He swung his legs a little, made the row of seats move again. “Mom, would Aimee have gotten better if Uncle Ross had stayed with her?”

  “No, honey.”

  “Does he know that?”

  “I think so.”

  Ethan thought about this for a second. “But her dying—it wasn’t his fault.”

  His mother stared at him the way she did every now and then, as if she were going to be given a pop quiz on his features. “Sometimes that doesn’t make a difference,” she said.

  Lucy slept a lot. Sometimes she dreamed that she was sleeping, and she could see herself lying on the bed. Sometimes she dreamed that she was being chased, but her legs didn’t move fast enough anymore. Once, she imagined that a giant had eaten her, and she curled up right in a cavity in his back molar where she slept and slept and slept.

  She still screamed in her sleep, but her throat was too tired to let it out.

  Every now and then a voice would slice like a knife. Her mother, begging her to get up and eat a little something. Granny Ruby, remarking on how much better Lucy looked now, couldn’t everyone see the roses in her cheeks? She heard them from a distance. She had fallen down a well and was doing a backfloat, staring up at the sun.

  Faces were printed on the backs of her eyelids: her mother, Granny Ruby, and the lady who came. The one who had been hanging from the tree, the one who stood by the edge of her bed and sat with her, now, on the couch, so close that Lucy’s feet were freezing.

  It was this woman, Lucy realized, who was supposed to be gone now. But since she’d started on the medicine, the woman was more clear than ever—the blue scan of her skin and the way sadness got stuck in the corners of her eyes, like little bits of sleep. She wasn’t as scary to Lucy anymore. In fact, it was like she knew. She understood what it was like to stand right in front of people you loved, even though they could not see you.

  It was the first time Eli could remember being called in on a reverse vandalism charge. But Rod van Vleet had called dispatch, complaining that the demolished house was being rebuilt, somehow. Overnight, the frame of the whole downstairs had been erected again. Clearly, he said, it was the Abenaki. He wanted the Comtosook police to catch them in the act.

  Eli glanced over at Watson, who apparently believed that the chemicals in dog saliva might dissolve the passenger-seat window if applied liberally. They had already been to the campsite where the Abenaki were staying. With the exception of Az Thompson, everyone had been fast asleep. Yet moments later, as he and Watson stepped onto the Pike property, he could easily see why van Vleet was concerned: inside the temporary safety fencing, the demolished house seemed to be knitting itself back together.

  Beside him, Watson whined and backed away. “Scaredydog,” Eli murmured, and he pushed down the wire fence so that he could step over it. The reconstruction reminded him of shattered bones—support beams and roof joists healing in a way that wasn’t quite right, but that managed to bear the weight all the same. More interesting, though, was the fact that the house had gone past the framing stage. Plaster had been haphazardly smoothed into the downstairs walls. In some places, clapboards were already hanging. It would have taken an entire building crew weeks to accomplish this; for it to have happened overnight was impossible.

  Eli moved carefully over the rubble and shattered glass, and Watson, gathering courage, followed. There were no front steps yet, so he had to climb into the open doorway. Eli shined his flashlight around, assessing. Inside, patches of Sheetrock were missing and doorways were not square, but this structure was solid and standing. He could smell fresh paint.

  “If the Indians did this,” Eli said softly to Watson, “I’ll eat my hat. Which, come t