The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  As he passed Shelby at the kitchen table, he touched her shoulder. “And that isn’t even the whole of it,” Eli said, sitting down across from her. “Spencer Pike died last night.”

  He kept talking, but Shelby did not hear a thing. She was concentrating on the way her shoulder felt when Eli’s hand had drifted away, as if there were something missing.

  In that moment a track switched in her mind, and Shelby could no longer imagine a time she had not known Eli Rochert. He had written himself onto every previous page of her life and only now in its edited version did she realize how great the ellipsis had been.

  Oh, shit, she thought, I love him.

  Shelby believed that love was like a solar eclipse—breathtakingly beautiful, absorbing, and capable of rendering you blind. She had not necessarily gone out of her way to avoid a relationship, but she hadn’t wanted one either. It was called falling in love for a reason—because, inevitably, you crashed at the bottom.

  She had been in love before, with her ex-husband—she knew what it was like to have your heart speed up at the sound of a man’s voice on the phone, and to feel the world stop spinning when you kissed. But that relationship—which she’d been so sure of at first—had been doomed, just like every other one she knew. Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom. But for Shelby, that man had run away before she landed. And frankly, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to leap again.

  “. . . and if you look at it that way . . . Shelby, hey, are you all right?” Eli squeezed her hand to get her attention, and she flinched. Immediately, he drew away. “What’s wrong?”

  A thousand answers to that question tangled in her mind. “If I were dying, would you give me a kidney?”

  Eli looked nonplussed. “You mean one of mine?”

  “How many others do you have access to?” She stared hard at him. “Well?”

  “I . . . I . . . yeah. I would.”

  Groaning, Shelby buried her face in her hands.

  “That wasn’t the right answer?” Eli asked, bewildered.

  She forced herself to meet his gaze. “I want to love you, Eli. But at the same time, I don’t want to. When I’m with you, I don’t think I’ve ever felt anything so right in my life. But if I admit to that, then it’s got nowhere to go but downhill. Look at what love did to my brother. Or to Gray Wolf. Or even to Lia Pike. Or . . . what’s so funny?”

  Across the table, Eli was grinning from ear to ear. He took her hand again, and this time when she would have pulled away he held her fast. “Love,” he repeated, all that he’d needed to hear. “You said love.”

  Lucy held the flashlight up to her palm so that it turned red. Ethan, balancing his own flashlight on his knees, could nearly see the tissue and bone. Their secret spot—beneath the plastic tarp that covered the outdoor furniture—was getting smoky, but it was worth it. This was Ethan’s first pact, and he was planning to make the most of it.

  He waved the blade of his Swiss Army knife through the candle flame. “Is it ready?” Lucy asked.

  It turned out that she was less than a year younger than him, but you’d never know it to talk to them both. Lucy jumped if a daddy-longlegs walked within a yard of her, and everyone knew that daddy-longlegs were about as scary as Puff the Magic Dragon. She was so quiet that sometimes Ethan forgot she was sitting right next to him. She couldn’t even stand on his skateboard without falling.

  On the other hand, however, she knew all the interesting body-part words in the dictionary without Ethan having to look them up, and said her mother had been the one to tell her about them. She smelled like sugar cookies. And because she’d been at day camp all summer, she had the most beautiful tan Ethan had ever seen.

  She told Ethan what it felt like to swim out to a dock in a lake, and to fall asleep under the sun so that you woke up hot and dizzy and not sure of what day it was or how you’d gotten there. He told her how the hair stood up on the back of his neck when the ghost had followed his uncle out of that old haunted house. She admitted that sometimes, she hid under her covers to pretend she wasn’t there when the spirits came. He told her how the liquid the dermatologist used to freeze a pre-cancerous growth off his skin actually burned like fire.

  “Come on already, Ethan,” Lucy said. “I’m choking to death.”

  That was another thing—she said things like I’m going to kill you, or I’ll die if you don’t hand over that bag of chips—all the things his mother was so careful not to say to him, just in case he was stupid enough to take it the wrong way.

  “All right.” Ethan held the flashlight over the knife, dropped the flashlight, and then the knife. “Jeez. You hold this.” He handed Lucy the flashlight and wiped off the blade—no need to contract the bubonic plague—before waving it through the candle flame again. When he glanced up, Lucy seemed uncharacteristically pale. “You’re not gonna faint on me, are you?”

  Scowling, she held out her wrist.

  Ethan placed his right alongside hers. “I’ll help you find a ghost before it finds you,” he said.

  She stared into his eyes. “I’ll take you to where the sun comes up.”

  “To courage,” Ethan said, and he slashed the blade fast as a gasp across his wrist and hers. He pressed the open wounds together.

  Lucy sucked in her breath. “To courage.” She wrapped a strip ripped from Ethan’s T-shirt around their arms as they both waited and hoped that bravery might be every bit as binding as blood.

  Az woke abruptly at the sound of birds. On his cot, he lay still for a moment, trying to pick apart the threads of a junco’s whine from the trill of a whippoorwill and the throaty contralto of the loon. It had been weeks since he’d heard this particular melody. It had stopped the same morning he had told the other Abenaki about the burial ground, and had helped carry a drum to the Pike property, to formally launch a protest.

  He sat up slowly, feeling the creak and snap of each vertebra. Swinging his feet over the side of the cot, he toed off his slippers and put the sole of his foot right down on the packed earth that formed the floor of his tent.

  It was warm, just like it should be in August. Not frozen, as it had been.

  Az pushed back the flap of his tent and stepped outside.

  The world seemed centered now, not off just a few degrees to the point where it would keep spinning just a little more lopsided each day until you could not help but notice. Az snapped a flower off the honeysuckle vine that grew beside his tent and watched the pearl of nectar bead at the base of its horn. He drew it onto his tongue and tasted sugar instead of tears.

  Overhead, a plane cut the sky in two, and it did not fall. Az stood very still but did not feel yesterday pressing at the base of his skull like a hammer. He closed his eyes and knew, instantaneously, which way was true north.

  Az poured water into his immersion heater for his coffee and measured out the grounds. He washed his hands and his face and dressed carefully, because one missed button on a shirt can change your fortune for months at a time. He did not do anything differently in his morning routine than when Comtosook had been under a spell. After all, you couldn’t mess with physics: just as Az had known what entropy was coming, he’d also known there would be a day when it all would fall to rights again.

  Had he been a wizard, Ross would have left his sister strength. Not he-man brute force, but endurance, because that was the way to get through anything, and as someone without a shred of it, he ought to know. Instead, though, Ross found himself sorting through the meager possessions in his duffel. This softest shirt of his, he’d give Shelby, because it smelled like Ross and he knew she’d want to save that memory any way she could. His watch, that would be for Ethan, in lieu of the time Ross really wanted to give him instead. The pennies from 1932 he would take with him to lay a trail across eternity like Gretel’s bread crumbs, so that Lia could find him, just in case.

  Quiz: What kind of man spent thirty-five years on earth and accumulated on