The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Spencer’s hand cups my cheek. “That’s why you have me.”

  John “Gray Wolf ” Delacour is alleged to be the grandchild of Missal Delacour, the old Gypsy. John does not show the colored blood quite as dark as his ancestor, but has the loose, shambling walk of the Gypsy. He is considered by his own relations to be arrogant, ignorant, and immoral, although he has managed to learn to read and write. If you are interested in Evolution you won’t have to trace back very far from John Delacour to find the Missing Link.

  —From the journals of Abigail Alcott, social worker

  As anyone who’s ever contracted it knows, lies are an infectious disease. They slip under the almond slivers of your fingernails and into your bloodstream. Maybe this is why it comes so easily to me—the fabrication of a doctor’s appointment to check the progress of the baby, the hurried drive into town, the turn I take to bring me to the camp on the edge of the lake.

  This time as I walk through the labyrinth of tents, I notice the color. A woman steps outside to shake wrinkles from a rainbow-ribboned coat, brilliant silks spilling like paint across the dust. It is Madame Soliat, I realize—the fortune-teller from the Exposition on the Fourth of July. A few tents away an old woman hunches over a stool, lashing a thin ash splint to a wide-lipped basket. A calico cat plays at her feet; a splash of canary sits on her shoulder. Men who work the carnival circuit pack their wares in brightly painted boxes, loading up for the next journey to a country fair. My whole life, it seems, is pale by comparison.

  When I walk up to the basket weaver she pretends she can see right through me. “Excuse me,” I say. Her cat yowls, and runs away. “I’m looking for Gray Wolf. John Delacour?”

  Maybe it is my advanced pregnancy; maybe it is the wildness in my eyes—but this old woman gets to her feet and plucks the canary from her shoulder to sit on the back of her chair. Leaving the unfinished basket on the ground, she begins to limp toward the woods.

  We walk for several minutes, past the point where the Gypsy tents thin out. The old woman points me toward a copse of pine trees that grow up the base of a steep hill, and she leaves me to my own devices. My legs begin to burn with exertion; I am not certain I will make it. I am even beginning to have doubts that this woman understood who I was looking for, when suddenly the forest opens into a small clearing. The ground is uneven, as if the earth is boiling just under the crabgrass. In the middle of these mounds sits Gray Wolf.

  He gets up when he sees me coming and a smile washes over his face. “I didn’t know when I would get to see you,” he says, relieved.

  Uneasy, I fold my arms across my stomach. “You lied to me. Spencer found out that you were in jail. And my father says that my mother never knew you. That she was terrified of people like you.”

  “People like me. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’m not the one here who was lying?”

  “What reason would they have to lie?”

  “Why does anyone?” he says. “Down by the river, you go ask any of those people who they are, and they’re gonna tell you they’re dark French. Or that they’re cousins, six times removed, from someone Irish or Italian. I know one family that passes themselves off as Negro or Mohawk, because even that’s not quite as bad as being Abenaki. You should understand, Lia, that there can’t be any Indians around. Because that would mean someone lived here before all those old Vermonters who think they came first.”

  “That has nothing to do with going to prison for murder,” I argue. “You don’t get convicted of a crime if you didn’t do it.”

  “No?” He takes a step toward me. “Did Spencer tell you about the man I killed? He was a supervisor at the granite quarry, and he was beating a man for not hauling stone fast enough. A man who was seventy-nine years old, and who happened to be my grandfather, and who died in front of my eyes.”

  I recall Abigail’s reports: John Delacour is an absolute liar . . . it is impossible to get the truth out of him. “A jury would understand that.”

  “Not when there were people who wanted to get rid of me,” Gray Wolf says. “People jurors listen to.”

  Immediately, I think of my father, dining with Governor Wilson shortly before the passage of the Sterilization Bill in the legislature. Of Dr. DuBois, who could not convince Spencer to send me to an institution . . . and who would dare not breathe a word to the community about Professor Pike’s suicidal wife. “You didn’t serve your whole sentence,” I realize.

  “No. Believe it or not, I finally had something they wanted, something I could bargain with.” He looks down and stamps at a patch of grass with his heel. “The warden, he was real excited about the new sterilization law. Inmates who volunteered for a vasectomy got to shave five whole years off their time. For me, that was freedom.”

  It is one thing to have Spencer talk of sterilization in the abstract; it is another thing entirely to discuss a vasectomy with a man who has had one. “But at what cost,” I murmur, my cheeks flaming.

  “I wasn’t thinking of what they would do to me, or of the family I’d never have. I was thinking that if I got out, I might get to meet the child I already knew about, the one born after I went to jail.” Gray Wolf lifts my chin. “Lia,” he says, “you were worth it.”

  SEVEN

  September 1, 1932

  We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

  —Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, delivering the opinion of the Supreme Court of Appeals of the State of Virginia, in the 1927 case of Buck v. Bell, which upheld the sterilization of a “probably potential parent of socially inadequate offspring.”

  Once upon a time, when my mother was my age, she fell in love. Not with one of the long-faced boys who held their straw boaters like wheels in their hands, boys who walked down from the university clutching bouquets, boys who called my imposing grandfather Sir. Not with Harry Beaumont, a young professor who stood first in line for the prize that was my mother; a scientist nearly ten years older than she was who spoke of love and natural selection in the same sentence. My mother was courted by Harry and these other young men on the porch, and meanwhile she looked over their shoulders at a Gypsy laborer who worked in their fields.

  His skin was the color of the polished piano she played for her mother’s friends at teatime; his hair was longer than hers. His eyes were as sharp as a hawk’s, and sometimes when she was in the privacy of her bedroom with the curtains closed she knew that he could still see her. When she brought water out to the Indian workers—the only contact she was allowed—she could feel him swimming through her veins.

  She had spent seventeen years being an exemplary daughter. She had attended finishing school; she crossed her legs at the ankles; she washed her face each night with buttermilk to make it glow. She was being groomed to be an exemplary wife, something she had known all along, but now the concept seemed like a fancy coat tucked away in a hope chest: trying it on after all these years, it did not fit quite as well as she had expected.

  One day in the field, he was the last one to turn in his tin cup. Sweat ran down his bare chest, and there was a streak of dirt across his brow. He smelled of the blueberries he’d been picking. His teeth seemed too white when he spoke. “Who are you?” he asked.

  She could have said, Lily Robinson. Or, Quentin Robinson’s daughter. Or, Harry Beaumont’s intended. But that wasn’t what he had been asking. For the first time in her life she wondered why she defined herself as part of someone else.

  He began to leave her small gifts on the porch: a pair of tiny moccasins; a sweetgrass basket; a sketch of a running horse. She learned that his name was John.

  On their first date, she lied and told her parents that she was spending the night at a girlfriend’s. He m