The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Although séances have been held on Halloween, now, for five years, he hasn’t come back.

  This is what I think about Mr. Houdini: if he hadn’t been so desperate to contact his departed mother, he wouldn’t have fought so fiercely against Margery. He denounced the spirit world because he feared it was the one space from which he could not escape.

  I feel like a fool, hiding here in my bedroom closet. It’s where I’ve gone for privacy, dragging in a little card table that is jammed up against my belly. Table tipping is something else I have read of; it’s a way of contacting the spirits. I should have more people sitting here with their hands linked, but I certainly could not tell Spencer what I am doing, and I don’t know what Ruby would make of it.

  The silks of my dresses brush my shoulders. I press my palms against the table, close my eyes. “Mama?” I whisper.

  Suddenly, a hand touches my side. I jump, and then realize that the fingers are on the inside of my skin—it’s this baby, trying to push away for all he is worth. “Hush, now. We’re trying to talk to your grandma.”

  If I can find her, if I can open a door . . . then maybe even after I die I will be able to find my way back.

  I take deep breaths to concentrate. I focus all my energy on that table. “Mama, if you can hear me, let me know.”

  The table, beneath my hands, remains perfectly still. But then I hear a creak. I open my eyes in time to see the doorknob of the closet turning by itself. The brightest light appears, growing wider and wider until it silhouettes the figure of a woman.

  “Miz Pike,” Ruby asks, “what on earth are you doing in here?”

  My heart is pounding so hard that it takes a moment to answer. Pretending it is perfectly normal to be found sitting inside a closet, I say, “What did you need, Ruby?”

  “Your lunch with the professor . . . you’re going to miss it if you don’t hurry.”

  My lunch . . . I have forgotten. Spencer and I have a standing summertime date, a picnic on the university grounds after his Wednesday morning graduate school lecture. We sit beneath the oaks and speak of the things that matter: Spencer’s research, his most promising students, names for a son.

  Ruby has already packed a basket with grapes and cold meats, sesame rolls, macaroni salad. “Thank you,” I say, taking one last glance inside the closet before I close the door.

  Spencer walked to work today—three miles to the university—and left me the car. A Packard Twin 6 with a 12-cylinder engine, it’s his pride and joy. It has suicide doors, named so because they open backward and can rip you out of the car if unlatched during transit.

  I’ve thought about it.

  Spencer’s graduate lecture is being held in a small classroom that smells of linseed oil and philosophy. At the front, Spencer stands with his jacket off, his shirtsleeves rolled up in deference to the heat. Lantern slides of skulls have been projected onto a screen behind him. “Notice the difference between the dolichocephalic and the brachycephalic in the Negroid skull,” Spencer says. “The prognathous jaw, the flattened nose, the apelike similarities . . . these all are signs of a degraded race.”

  A hand shoots up. “How primitive are they?” a student asks.

  “Rudimentary,” Spencer explains. “Think of them as children. Like children, they’ll be fond of bright colors. Like children, they are capable of forming base friendships.” He glances at the clock on the wall, and his eyes skim over me, lighting briefly. “Next week we’ll be outlining the classification of all humanity into five distinct races,” he promises, as the class gathers their books and disperses. Smiling, Spencer walks down the aisle toward me. “To what do I owe this honor?”

  “It’s Wednesday,” I remind him. “Our lunch.” As illustration, I swing the basket out from behind my back, where I have kept it hidden.

  A small V forms between Spencer’s brows. “Damn, Cissy, Harry Perkins asked to meet with me this afternoon. I don’t have time for lunch.”

  “I understand,” I tell Spencer.

  “That’s my girl.”

  “Spencer?” I call after him. “Should I wait?” But he does not hear me, or else he chooses not to. Sighing, I put down the picnic basket and walk to the front of the classroom. My boot heels click like teeth, and when I get close, my body makes a bulbous silhouette against the white screen. I hold up my hand and make a shadow puppet, a wolf. Then I send it swooping and diving along the jutting brow of a dolichocephalic specimen.

  “Mrs. Pike?”

  Caught in the act, I whirl around to find Abigail Alcott watching me. A wide-eyed woman in her late twenties, Abigail is a social worker currently employed by the Department of Public Welfare. She is dressed for work in a smart navy skirt and a pleated white shirt. Of late, she has been meeting with Spencer to discuss the ESV records, which she uses in her investigations. Her job involves assessing which degenerate families are turning around, versus which will benefit from the new sterilization law.

  “Hello, Abigail,” I say with as much poise as I can, given that she is older than I, and has a true education, instead of two years in a finishing school.

  “Is the professor here?” She checks her wristwatch. “We’re supposed to be driving out to Waterbury this afternoon.”

  So I am not the only person Spencer disappoints. I wonder what they are planning to do at the State Mental Hospital. I imagine her walking beside my husband, pulling threads of scientific conversation from thin air to make a verbal bouquet she might hand him—one that by its very topic is irresistible to Spencer. In this, I have always been the outsider—I do not know as much about eugenics as my father or my husband. What would it be like to sit at the dinner table with them, to say something relevant, to watch them look at me as someone to be considered, instead of something to be dismissed?

  That sweet coil of insurrection swims in me. I am ten again, and climbing to the roof to shout down to the good people of Comtosook. “Didn’t he tell you?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “About the meeting with Professor Perkins?” There, that much is not a lie. “Spencer was going to send you a note . . . but then he gets so preoccupied, you know . . .”

  “Mrs. Pike,” Abigail interrupts. “What note?”

  “The one about me going to Waterbury in his place.”

  Abigail stares at me, but she is too polite to say what she is thinking: that I have never been trained in social work, that being born into a family of eugenics scholars doesn’t automatically make me one. Her eyes settle on the swell of my abdomen. “Spencer was quite sure it was safe,” I add.

  That, ultimately, is what clinches it: Abigail would rather cut off her right arm than question Spencer’s judgment. Her lips set in a thin line, she assesses me, and nods. “Well, then,” she says, “let’s go.”

  Vermont needs a mental survey which will locate every case of mental defect within our borders and facilities for thorough psychiatric examination of all dependent and delinquent individuals.

  —Asa R. Gifford, “Report of the President,” Vermont Children’s Aid Society Second Annual Report, 1921

  The Vermont State Hospital for the Insane was built in Waterbury in 1890, to ease the overcrowding at the Retreat down in Brattleboro. Dr. Stanley, the superintendent, had once come to our home for dinner when I was thirteen, after he’d testified in support of the 1927 Sterilization Bill that did not pass. I remember circles of sweat around his collar, the fact that he did not eat brussels sprouts, and the way he stood too close to me while making small talk.

  “You would think that the group represented in highest concentration at Waterbury was the Huntington’s chorea family, because of the inherited mental illness,” Abigail says as we walk up the street from our parking spot. Now that she has taken it into her mind to educate me on all I’ve missed to date leading up to this meeting, she is chatty—friendly, almost. “But no, it turns out there are plenty of Pirates and Gypsies too.”

  By now we have reached the front door of A Building, the n