Second Glance Read online

  It was an established fact of the universe that Meredith was never going to meet a decent man. At work, she was too smart, and therefore too intimidating. Blind dates didn’t prove any more successful. The last one she’d been on was with an actor her grandmother had met in the park, who’d arrived at the restaurant dressed as Hamlet. To leave or not to leave, Meredith had thought, that was the question. Since that debacle, her grandmother had presented her with the phone numbers of a mortician, a vet, and a chiropractor, but Meredith had conveniently lost each one. “I want a grandchild before I die,” Ruby said, on schedule, every two to three months.

  “You have one,” Meredith would remind her.

  “One with a father,” Ruby would clarify.

  Meredith had finally caved in, when Ruby told her that this one spent his free time doing volunteer work with senior citizens. So now, Meredith was sitting across from Michael DesJardins, trying to convince herself that this wasn’t nearly as bad as it seemed.

  He was drooling. All right, so it had to do with dental surgery he’d had that day, but it wasn’t particularly appetizing for Meredith. “So,” he slurred, “you work in a lab? What do you do . . . feed all the mice and stuff?”

  “I do PGD. Preimplantation genetic diagnosis.”

  “I’m in the catering business.”

  “Oh?” Meredith folded her hands in front of her, watching him butter an entire slice of bread and stuff it in his mouth. On the bright side, it did mop up his excess saliva. “Are you a chef?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact.”

  She’d always harbored the fantasy of a man whisking her to a cozy apartment, where a fabulous gourmet meal had been prepared for her enjoyment. “I guess being in a restaurant feels like work, then.”

  “This is a cut above my place, actually . . . you ever go into the Wendy’s on Sixteenth Street?”

  Meredith was saved from responding when the waiter approached with their entrées. Michael began to cut his entire steak into little quarter-inch cubes. It made her think of the meals they served in mental institutions.

  She smoothed down her napkin and looked down at her chipolata sausage, nestled on a bed of polenta. The silver lining, she told herself, is that I’m going to get a good meal out of this.

  Michael pointed to her dinner with his knife and laughed. “Looks like a Great Dane did his business there.” A line of drool dribbled down his chin.

  I will stand up and excuse myself to go to the bathroom, Meredith thought. And then I just won’t come back.

  But if she did that, Granny Ruby would accuse her of deliberately ruining another date. So Meredith began to think of ways to make Michael want to leave of his own volition. She would ask for crayons and start to color on the fancy linens. She would sculpt with her polenta. She would lick her plate and offer to lick his. She would communicate only in mime, or Pig Latin.

  “Can I ask you a personal question?” Michael said. “Are you ovulating?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s just that these days, when I look in the mirror, I see Daddy.” He grinned and pointed to his forehead, as if the word had been tattooed there.

  Meredith wished for many things in that moment: her grandmother’s head on a pike, patience, lesbian tendencies. Volunteer work with senior citizens, she remembered. She stared at Michael’s plate. “Are you going to eat that?”

  “The steak?”

  “No, the bone. I wanted to bring it home to my grandmother.” Meredith leaned closer. “She’s in her seventies, practically dead, and it’s cheaper than feeding her.”

  Michael choked on his sip of water. Then, recovering, he raised his hand and signaled for the waiter for the check. “You’re finished, aren’t you?”

  Meredith folded her napkin on the table. “Oh, yes.”

  Ethan now knew what fear felt like: your forehead, being pressed in from all sides, although there was nothing around you. All the hairs on the back of your neck, rising one by one like dominoes in reverse. Your legs going to water, and shaking so hard you had to sit or fall.

  “It wasn’t like I was afraid,” Ethan insisted for the hundredth time since yelling out for his uncle the night before. “I mean, it was just weird, you know? To be in the dark all of a sudden?”

  Ross sat beside him in the living room, his infrared video equipment hooked into the TV. The picture was grainy and dark, the edges crackling. Plus, since it had been mounted on a tripod, it was boring as all get out. Ethan didn’t know what on earth was interesting about staring at a wall for three hours of tape. In spite of the fact that this was apparently a Very Important Element of paranormal investigation, he could not keep from yawning.

  That was something else Uncle Ross had taught him: When you’re in the presence of ghosts, they wear you out.

  His uncle was being cool, especially since—well, if he wanted to be honest, Ethan had to admit he’d freaked out when the flashlight went dead and the video camera just shut itself off. The camera, it turned out, had only run to the end of its tape. The flashlight’s batteries were shot.

  Now, his mom frowned at the picture on the TV. “Am I missing something?”

  “Not yet.” Ross turned to Ethan. “You know what I think? I think it was in the room with you.”

  Ethan couldn’t help it; he shivered. Could a ghost hitchhike home with you? Could you catch one, like a cold or the measles? He felt his mother’s arms come around him and he leaned back, lock to key. “I . . . I thought you went outside because you saw something there.”

  “No, that turned out to be someone.” Suddenly Ross hit the pause button on the remote. “See those?”

  “Fireflies?” Shelby said.

  “When was the last time you saw so many fireflies moving around it looked like a snowstorm?” He rewound the tape and pumped up the volume, so that his voice and Ethan’s could be heard again. “This is where I leave,” Ross narrated. His footsteps, on tape, thudded lighter and lighter as he made his way downstairs. “See? Those lights show up just after I go.”

  Then the camera went black.

  Ross rolled his shoulders until the bones popped. “I think whatever it is came into the room with Ethan when I was outside. Those sparks on the tape—that was energy changing form. And that would explain why the flashlight went out. Ghosts need energy to materialize and move around; this one was using the double A’s in the Maglite.” He watched Ethan stifle another yawn. “And, apparently, whatever force keeps Ethan going.”

  But Ethan had been alone in that room, and he hadn’t seen anything. Or had he?

  A bathtub. A foot, rising from the bubbles.

  The picture rose from the still blue of his mind, then sank to the bottom before he could grab hold. Each of Ethan’s eyelids, by now, easily weighed ten pounds. He heard his mother’s voice, an underwater current. “What are you going to tell the development company?”

  But Ethan did not hear his uncle’s answer. He was already dreaming of a beach, of sand so hot it felt sharp as a knife beneath his jitter-bug feet.

  Shelby knew that some librarians felt the human brain was like a microfiche file, impossibly tiny images and words on transparent leaves, arranged page by page for a person’s viewing pleasure. But every time she saw those miniature dossiers, she thought that if any part of the body were similarly cataloged, it would be the heart. She imagined autopsies, the organ sliced thin. One sliver would chronicle the way you had cherished a child; one would record the feelings you had for parents and siblings. Another, scarlet, might be etched with moments of passion; angels embracing on the head of a pin. And for those who were lucky, the thinnest slice would be teeming with memories of a love so strong it turned you inside out and left you gasping, and would be an identical match to a slice stored in the heart of a soul mate.

  Desiderate: to long for.

  “Do you need any help?”

  Shelby pushed her reading glasses up her nose and turned to the pockmarked clerk of the probate court. “No, thanks. I can