The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Gray Wolf is waiting for me beneath the green awning of the bank, smoking a cigarette, as if we have agreed to meet. There is just one moment of shock that he’s found me, even in town, but he only raises his dark eyebrows and offers me a cigarette too. We start walking. We don’t talk, at first. We don’t need to.

  “The Klifa Club,” he says finally.

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “Magnificent, of course. We eat on plates made of 14-karat gold, and hold audiences with kings of small European countries. Why else would it be so exclusive?”

  He laughs. “Beats me.” As we come to a street corner, he takes my elbow, and I instantly freeze. Although we have met many times now, I can count on one hand the number of occasions Gray Wolf has touched me. This friendship, this easy conversation is one thing, but there are certain lines even I cannot cross. Noticing, he lets go of me and fills the fissure between us with words. “What’s a Klifa, anyway?”

  “A mistake. It was supposed to be Klifra, which is Icelandic for climber.”

  “As in ‘social’?”

  “No, these women don’t have to climb. They’ve already staked their claim at the top.” I shrug. “What’s in a name,” I quote, before I remember that Gray Wolf would not know Shakespeare.

  “Ask Juliet,” he answers dryly, fully aware of what I am thinking. “And to answer your question, a name can mean everything. Sometimes, it’s all you have.”

  “You call me Lia,” I say. “Why?”

  He pauses. “Because you don’t look like a Cissy.”

  “What would my name be in your language?”

  He shakes his head. “No one uses my language anymore.”

  “You do.”

  “That’s because I don’t have anything left to lose.” He glances at me, but I’m not giving up that easily. “There isn’t a literal translation. You can’t always take an English word and turn it into Alnôbak.” Gray Wolf nods at my brooch, a small clock pinned to my white blouse. “See, this is Papizwokwazik. But it doesn’t mean clock. It’s ‘the thing that ticks.’ A beaver might be called Tmakwa—a tree cutter—or abagôlo—flat tail—or awadnakwazid—the wood carrier . . . depending on how you see it.”

  I love the idea that a name might change based on who you are at a given moment in time. “Awadnakwazid,” I repeat, rolling the syllables on my tongue. Consonants stick to the roof of my mouth. “I wish I had a name like Gray Wolf.”

  “Then give yourself one. That’s what I did.” He shrugs. “My birth name, it’s John . . . Azo. But Gray Wolf describes me better. And I figured if the whole world saw me as an Indian, I ought to have a name that backs them up.”

  We have turned onto College Street now, which is busy and crowded. I know the mother walking with her daughter and the businessman leaning on an ivory cane and the two young soldiers are all wondering what someone like me is doing with someone like Gray Wolf. I wonder who else will see us. It is part of the excitement.

  “I used to stand on the roof of my father’s house and think about jumping,” I say.

  “Your father’s house,” he repeats.

  “Well, it’s ours now, but yes. Once, I even did it. I broke my arm.”

  “Why did you want to jump?”

  No one has ever asked me that question. Not my father, afterward; not the doctors at the hospital who set the bones. “Because I could.” I turn to him and make the traffic flow around us. “Give me a name.”

  He stares at my face for a long moment. “Sokoki,” he says. “One who has broken away.”

  Suddenly, behind me, I hear myself being called. “Cissy?” Spencer’s voice is carried on the shoulders of passersby. “Is that you?”

  Maybe I have wanted to be discovered all along; maybe I have been expecting this. But when Spencer stands in front of Gray Wolf, my insides go to water and my legs begin to shake. I would fall, if not for Spencer catching me. “Darling?”

  “I’m just a little light-headed, after the Klifa Club meeting.”

  Spencer looks dismissively at Gray Wolf. “Chief, you can move along.”

  “I’m not a chief.”

  With my heart in my throat I reach into my pocketbook and take out a dollar bill. “All right,” I interrupt, as if Gray Wolf and I have been in the middle of a business deal, “but this is all I’m willing to pay for it.”

  He plays along, but disappointment shadows his eyes. “Thank you, ma’am.” He hands me a small bundle wrapped in a handkerchief, the first thing he can find in his pocket for a sham transaction. Then he vanishes into the masses walking toward the university.

  “I’ve told you not to talk to beggars,” Spencer says, taking my arm. “Once they see you’re an easy target, they’ll never leave you alone.”

  “It’s Christian charity,” I murmur.

  “What on earth did he manage to sell you, anyway?”

  I peek inside the folds of the handkerchief, and go dizzy again. “A trinket,” I say, and stuff the miniature portrait into my purse before Spencer recognizes the face, a perfect twin to the one that sits on my dressing table to help me remember my mother.

  Within the ranks of the Old Americans are many individuals who transcend the group pattern, question the status quo, think creatively about community or social problems, and even consider the possibility of a different and perhaps even better Burlington. As long as they do not go too far with their questioning, the group will uphold them; and they seldom do go too far, knowing the price they would have to pay.

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

  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: Tri-Field 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 insid