The Jodi Picoult Collection #2 Read online

  He had left to collect equipment he’d left at the Pike property. Why he’d chosen to do this in the dark, at 8:30 P.M., was beyond Meredith. “Do you know where Eli’s taking you?”

  “Some five-star place in Burlington.” She fell backward onto the bed beside Meredith, smiling so hard that her face actually hurt. “I’ve been out with him a dozen times,” Shelby murmured. “To the store, to his place, for a drive. So why do I feel like this?”

  “Because you’re crazy about him,” Meredith said. “Blame it on the dopamine being secreted by your brain.”

  “Leave it to a geneticist to reduce love to a scientific reaction.”

  “Those of us who don’t have it readily available prefer to think of it that way.”

  Shelby rolled onto her stomach. “Who’s Lucy’s father?”

  “A guy who shouldn’t have been,” Meredith replied. “How about Ethan’s?”

  “That guy’s brother, apparently.” Shelby propped her chin on her hand. “Did you love him?”

  “To pieces.”

  “Me too.” She looked at Meredith. “Sometimes I pretend that I haven’t met Eli. Or that he isn’t the last thing I think about before I fall asleep. It’s like a superstition, you know—if I don’t put that much value on a relationship, maybe it won’t get ripped out from under my feet.”

  “No one’s going to rip this out from under your feet,” Meredith said. “Relationships succeed and fail because of the people in them . . . not some karmic plan.”

  “You think? Don’t you ever wonder if there’s one person you’re meant to be with?”

  “God, no! To say that you’ve got one soul mate in the world, out of six billion people . . . well, mathematically that’s setting yourself up for failure. What are the odds?”

  Shelby shook her head. “That’s where fate comes in. If I hadn’t had Ethan, I wouldn’t have gotten divorced from Thomas. If Ethan hadn’t had XP, I wouldn’t have moved to a town like this one, where the houses are far apart so he can play at night. If Ross hadn’t come to the end of his rope he wouldn’t have been here to investigate the Pike property. All these things, which were awful at the time . . . maybe they were just leading up to my meeting Eli.”

  “Did you think that you were destined to marry Thomas?”

  “Well, sure, at first—”

  “There you go. Fate,” Meredith argued, “is what people invent to explain what they can’t understand. If you think Eli’s the one, you tell yourself it was meant to happen. And if he breaks your heart, you’ll tell yourself it wasn’t meant to be. I’ve spent ten years trying to find a man who knows where I am in a room the moment he steps inside, without even having to look. But it hasn’t happened. I can admit the truth to myself—that I’ve got lousy luck at finding love—or I can tell myself that I haven’t crossed paths with my soul mate yet. And it’s always easier to be a victim than a failure.”

  Shelby sat up. “Then what’s that something that draws you to one guy out of a crowd? Or that first strike of lightning between you? Or the realization that you’ve connected so deeply when you’ve only just met?”

  “Love,” Meredith said. “Love defies explanation. Destiny doesn’t.” She thought of Lia, materializing in the clearing. “There are things you can’t explain, that happen anyway. Like the guy who takes a bullet meant for his wife, even though survival’s a basic instinct. Or the little girl who writes in a diary a secret sentence that her true love will say to her, when they meet—and lo and behold, one day, he does.”

  “That happened?”

  “Well, no,” Meredith said quietly. “But I haven’t entirely given up hope. The thing is, if it does, it’ll be because I went looking for him, and I found him. Not because it was meant to be.”

  “Why, Meredith! You’re a closet romantic!” Downstairs, the doorbell rang. Shelby leaped off the bed and shoved her feet into two different shoes. “Which ones, the flats or the FMPs?”

  “If it’s destiny,” Meredith said, smiling, “it shouldn’t make a difference.”

  Shelby grinned, and picked the heels. After one final look in the mirror, she hurried downstairs with Meredith trailing and opened the front door.

  Eli stood holding a pink rose with a forked stem and a smaller rose growing from it. Like a mother and child. He was dressed in a dark gray suit with a crisp white shirt and cranberry tie. “Well,” Shelby said. “Don’t you clean up well.”

  “You look . . . you look . . .” Eli shook his head. “I had all these words that I looked up for you, and I can’t remember a single one.”

  “It’s the dopamine,” Shelby said sympathetically.

  “Radiant?” Meredith offered. “Resplendent? Bewitching?”

  “No,” Eli said finally. “Mine.”

  Az took another sip of the whiskey Ross had brought to the quarry. They sat side by side on folding chairs that Az had pilfered from a storeroom, drinking and watching the sky fall, a cauldron spilled of its stars. “You know I’m supposed to tell you to leave,” he said.

  “So tell me.”

  “Leave,” Az said.

  “You know I won’t,” Ross pointed out.

  Az shrugged. “It’s the dynamite. There are charges all over the quarry. The computers are gonna set them off in the morning, at dawn.” He glanced sidelong at Ross. “Don’t do anything stupid, all right?”

  “Stupid,” Ross repeated, rolling the word around. “Stupid. What would constitute stupid? Would that include pining after not one, but two dead women?”

  “Hey,” Az pointed. “Pass the whiskey, will you?”

  Ross hefted the alcohol toward him, only to have Az toss the bottle into the quarry, where it shattered on broken rocks. “What the hell did you do that for?”

  “Your own good.” Az got up slowly from his folding chair, tucked it beneath his arm. “Do me a favor, and keep an eye on this place for a few minutes, will you?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Cigarette break,” Az said.

  Ross watched him walk off along the perimeter of the quarry. “You don’t smoke!” he yelled after the old man, but by then Az couldn’t hear, or didn’t want to. He stood up, hands in his pockets, and looked down at the remains of his bottle of Bushmill’s. The glass sparkled like mica. “Shit,” Ross said, and he kicked at a rock, sending it caroming over the lip into the canyon. Because it felt good, he did it again. He glanced over his shoulder, saw Az was still missing, and then lit a cigarette. He tossed it into the quarry, where it landed six inches away from a dynamite plug and fizzled black.

  He was tired of reliving his life, when he hadn’t been so fond of it the first time around. Like Lia, he was trapped by his own past. The moment Aimee had died, so had Ross. And then when he found someone else to live for, it turned out she’d been dead for seventy years.

  He imagined that cigarette landing on the dynamite, the bursting explosion that would shake the earth and send him tumbling into the quarry. He pictured his body being consumed by fire, flames that ate at his clothes and peeled away the pain. Why me? Why was he connected to the deaths of not one, but two women? Was he some kind of supernatural link? A cosmic pawn? A lightning rod for lost souls? Or maybe he was being punished. In the aftermath of Aimee’s death, he’d been hailed as a hero, when Ross knew all along he was exactly the opposite.

  As a child he’d read comic books, dazzled by the strength and the daring on pages cut into squares like a sidewalk, as if these superheroes were already walking a path toward greatness simply by appearing on the page. He had told Meredith he was invincible, but he was no Superman, no Captain Marvel. He was not even the sort of man that good things happened to. Meeting the girl of one’s dreams, winning a scratch ticket, finding a ten-dollar bill on the street—these were experiences in someone else’s daily existence. There was a point where the bad luck ended, and the bad choices began, and Ross could not see the fine distinction. He couldn’t live a life worth saving, and he couldn’t save a life worth living.