The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  Instead of going into town, however, I go down to camp on the lake. After several days of seeing me in Gray Wolf’s company, the people who live there have stopped staring. Some know me by name. “This,” Gray Wolf says when he introduces me, “is my daughter.”

  The familiar Abenaki phrase for “my father” is N’Dadan. Spoken, it sounds like a heartbeat.

  Today, it is raining. We sit in Gray Wolf’s tent at a scarred table. While he reads the sports page of the newspaper, I sift through a small cigar box. A cameo, a violet hair ribbon, a lock of hair—these are the things my mother left him. Each time I come I study them, as if they might hold a clue I haven’t yet discovered. Sometimes I think of Houdini; of what more one could possibly need to return from the other side.

  He tells me I can have all of these, if I would like them. He says he doesn’t need things to recall her, because unlike me, he met her. I do not know how to tell him that what I really want is something of his—something to remember him by, just in case.

  He makes a small sound of dismay. “Sox just blew their chance at the Series,” he sighs. “It’s the Curse of the Bambino. The worst trade in history since we swapped Manhattan for a few shells and beads.” I stand up and pretend to wander around the small tent. I touch his shaving brush, his razor, his comb. With his back to me, I take a pipe from his nightstand and slip it into my pocket.

  “I thought you preferred cigarettes,” he says, without turning around.

  I whirl. “How did you know?”

  He glances over his shoulder. “I can smell how nervous you are. I would have given the pipe to you if you’d asked.” Grinning, he says, “My daughter’s a thief. Must be all that Gypsy blood in her veins.”

  My daughter. Once again, the title makes me feel as if I have swallowed a star. “You haven’t asked me,” I point out, “if I’m going to tell Spencer or my . . . Harry Beaumont.”

  Gray Wolf studies his newspaper. “That isn’t my choice to make. I didn’t tell you so I could claim you. Nobody belongs to anyone else.”

  I think of him in prison, making the decision to be sterilized so that he would be free to search for me. Whether he wants to admit it or not, people do belong to each other. Once you make a sacrifice for someone, you own part of his or her soul. “But you must want me to.”

  When he looks up at me, I take a step back; there is that much passion in his eyes. “I wanted you. On any terms. I was willing to trade anything just to see you. Would I like to hear you say you’re my daughter, to have you shout it to anyone who’ll listen? God, yes, there’s a part of me that says that’s why I did what I did. But there’s a bigger part of me that only wants to make sure you’re safe.” He folds the sports page, pleats it neatly, as if he will be judged on the result. “And if you go out and tell people about me, they won’t hear how proud you are. All they’re gonna hear is that you’re Indian.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “That’s because you’ve never been one. You haven’t spent years wearing someone else’s clothes, taking someone else’s name, living in someone else’s houses, and working someone else’s jobs to fit in. And if you don’t sell out, then you run away . . . proving you’re the Gypsy they said you were all along.” He shakes his head sadly. “I want you to have a better life than the one I had. Even if that means keeping your distance from me.”

  The baby does a slow roll inside me, unsettled. “Then why would you bother to look for me? Why didn’t you just stay away?”

  He stares at me for a long moment. “How could I?”

  “Then how,” I say, “can you ask me to?”

  He looks out the flap of the tent, into the rain. “You’ll understand, when that baby is born. There’s an old phrase, Awani Kia. It means, ‘Who are you.’ Not your name, but your people. You hear it a lot when you move from place to place. Every winter, when I go up to Odonak and someone asks me, I get to tell him about my great-grandfather, who was a spiritual leader. Or my Auntie Sopi, who was the best healer in her day. Every winter when I answer I remember that it doesn’t matter what people call me, as long as I know who I really am.” He hesitates. “This winter, I’ll tell them about you.”

  It is the first time he’s talked about his departure from the camp. He is a wanderer, an itinerant—I have always known this. But for the first time I realize that when he leaves for Canada, he will be leaving me.

  “What if I come?” I blurt out.

  “To Odonak? I don’t think you’d be happy there.”

  “But I’m not happy here.”

  “Lia,” he says quietly. “I won’t tell you not to go; I’m too selfish for that. But the minute you get to Canada, you’ll be thinking about what you left behind here.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “Don’t I?” He glances at the table, at my mother’s cameo. “A person can’t live in two worlds at once.”

  “But you just found me!”

  Gray Wolf smiles. “Who said you were lost?”

  I duck my head. Without being conscious of it, I rub my fingers over the scars at my wrist. “I’m not as brave as you,” I say.

  “No,” he answers. “You’re braver.”

  No one has a right to become a parent who has so sinned that their children must suffer.

  —Mr. Harding, of W. Fairlee, quoted in the Burlington Free Press on March 21, 1931, during the debate in the Vermont State House regarding the Sterilization Bill

  In the billiards room, the balls strike each other with precision. “Spencer,” my father laughs, “you’re not going to let an old man beat you!”

  “Harry, shut up and take your turn, will you?”

  I smile and press my hand to the small of my back. At the sideboard in the adjoining hall, I am counting the silver. Spencer has me do it once a month. We never come up short, but he says you can never be too careful.

  I am on the seventh teaspoon when I hear the word Gypsy.

  “Actually,” Spencer responds, “I had to finish the job myself.”

  “Can’t say it’s any surprise.” There is a neat click as my father hits another ball with his cue. “Stealing, lying . . . I wouldn’t be surprised to find unreliability an inherited trait.”

  “Well, this one also happened to have served time for murder.”

  “Good God—”

  “Exactly.” Spencer scratches, curses. “I’m all for believing in the rehabilitation of criminals, but I’d rather not test the theory at the expense of my own wife.”

  There is a sharp crack, a muffled click, and then the sound of my father racking up the balls for another game. “The problem with the Sterilization Law is that it doesn’t get rid of the degenerates that have already been born,” he says. “That’s what needs to be addressed next.”

  All the blood drains from my head. He does not say this with malice; for his statement to be hateful he would actually have to know some of the people he wants to eliminate. He and Spencer, they are only trying to change the world, to make it a better place for their children.

  By getting rid of someone else’s.

  I stare at them through the open doorway; it is like seeing a saucer of milk go sour before your eyes. Spencer grins amiably. “Genocide’s not legal.”

  “Only if you get caught,” my father laughs, and he picks up his cue again. “Stripes or solids?”

  Before I know it I have pushed myself into the doorway. I am white as a sheet; Spencer’s cue rattles to the ground and he is at my side in an instant. “Cissy?” he says frantically. “What’s wrong? Is it the baby?”

  I manage to shake my head. “The baby . . . is fine.”

  My father frowns. “Darling, you look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  Maybe I have, because I have just watched something that clearly has been here all along, even if I was too blind to bear witness before. Spencer pries the teaspoons from my hand. “You aren’t up to this. That’s why we have Ruby, isn’t it? Come. Let’s get you off your feet.”