Second Glance: A Novel Read online

  "How do you know they're the wrong results, if you don't have any answers yet?"

  "They're just weird, that's all."

  Eli frowned. "Weird like: it's alien DNA . . . or weird like: you can't get results because it's so goddamned old?"

  "Weird like: leave me alone so I can give you a report."

  "When?" Eli demanded.

  "Two minutes later than it would have been if you'd let me get off the phone."

  "Thanks, Frankie."

  "Don't thank me," she said. "By the time I'm done, you may not want to."

  Ethan poked his head into the bathroom, where his mother was taking a bubble bath. "Come on in," she said, and he crept inside, studiously keeping his eyes on the tile floor. She was covered with bubbles from neck to toe, but still. This was his mother . . . and that word, along with naked, felt weird jammed together.

  "Eth," she said, laughing, "I'm perfectly decent."

  He risked a glance: she was. Her face was the only body part rising above the froth of foam. "I couldn't get this open," Ethan said, thrusting a jar of peanut butter toward her.

  "Ah." His mother took it, twisted, handed it back. The sides of the jar were soapy now. "What are you up to?"

  "Making ants-on-a-log. For during the movie." They'd rented something lame and Disneyfied; Ethan was hoping he could convince his mother to watch Die Hard II instead, which was on one of the cable stations. He glanced up at the window, streaked with rain. "It bites that we can't go outside."

  "Ethan."

  "Well, it still bites, even if I'm not supposed to say that."

  When the doorbell rang, they both jumped. It wasn't just that someone shouldn't be dropping by at nine-thirty on a Saturday night. It was that nobody dropped by, ever. Ethan watched his mother's face go as white as the bubbles surrounding her. "Something happened to Ross," she whispered, and she lurched upright in the tub.

  Ethan turned away before he had to see, well, her. She shrugged into her robe and wrapped a blue towel around her hair, then hurried down the stairs.

  He could have followed her. The celery and raisins were on the counter, waiting. But instead Ethan found his mind frozen on the one piece of his mother he had glimpsed before he turned away--a foot rising from the suds.

  He had no idea why, but seeing that . . . it reminded him of the night he'd gone ghost hunting with his uncle.

  In his wildest imaginings, Eli could not have ever pictured himself collaborating with a paranormal investigator. In his opinion, evidence was something that could be held in your hand, not in your head. But Frankie's call tonight had changed everything. The alleged murderer's DNA had not been on the rope--yet someone else's DNA had been. Neither of these circumstances alone was damning or absolving . . . but taken in context, they might be. Eli needed to speak to someone who could fill in some of the historical blanks. That someone was Ross Wakeman.

  He stood on the porch, the rain pounding the metal roof overhead, and rang the doorbell a second time. Wakeman had left his phone number and address behind, "just in case," he had told Eli, "you change your mind about reopening that case." Eli's keen eye had already noticed the skateboard propped up against the wall, and the pair of yellow garden clogs next to them. It surprised Eli; he had good instincts, and Ross Wakeman hadn't struck him as a family man. He knew that someone was home; the car was in the driveway and across a lighted window upstairs, Eli had seen a moving silhouette. He rapped hard on the door. "Hello?"

  There was the systematic click of locks being undone. A flash of blue crossed the sidelight window; a terry-cloth sleeve. The door swung open, and an apprehensive voice addressed him. "Can I help you?"

  But Eli could not respond. He could not do anything but stare, speechless, at the woman who'd been in his dreams.

  Ethan dipped his hand into the bubbles and blew them gently. He had smelled something like this when the lights had gone out in the haunted house. He got up from where he was sitting and turned out the light, pitching the bathroom into darkness. Now, with the scent of flowers all around, and the humidity pressing in, it was just like it had been that night.

  His uncle had asked him if he'd seen anything, and Ethan had said no, he was hiding. But he'd peeked out once, and there had been something. A movement in the dark. At first he had thought it was his uncle again, coming back, but that had not been the case. Ethan had found himself straining to see the profile in front of him, thin as fishing line. A face, or maybe not a face, he couldn't quite hold onto it then or now.

  There was only one thing Ethan was certain of, one point that stuck like a knife thrown to its mark: that flower smell had been there, and then it had gone. Whatever it had been had followed Uncle Ross outside, instead of the other way around.

  A streak of lightning broke the spell. "You came back," Ross said, not noticing that Lia's eyes were red and raw, that she was shaking her head. She had returned to him, and for this small miracle alone, he would do what it took to keep her there. He was certain, in that moment, that he could face down a hundred reporters. He could take on her husband. He could stop the thunder, if necessary.

  "I came to say good-bye," Lia answered.

  Ross fielded the words like a blow. He could not explain to himself why he felt the way he did around this woman; why his skin hummed in her presence and the tips of his fingers went cold. He'd believed, on some level, that Lia had felt this too. For years, he had been looking for the answer to Aimee's death; only recently had he learned that he'd been asking the wrong question.

  Before you could grab onto something else, you had to let go.

  "No." The rain matted Ross's hair and ran down his face. He did not know how to make Lia understand that a parting was a joint decision, that a person could not leave you, if you were not willing to release them. So instead, he reached for her.

  Ross held her face between his hands and kissed her. He tasted doubt on her tongue and pain on the roof of her mouth. He swallowed these, and drank again. Consumed, she had no choice but to see how empty he was inside, and how, sip by sip, she filled him.

  The storm whipped stronger, sparks arcing blue and thunder drumming beneath their feet. Lia broke away from him, her eyes wide and wet. "Wait," Ross said, but she turned and started to run through the woods.

  He followed her like a hunter, eyes marking the flashes of white from her collar. She raced across the slick, snowy clearing where Ross had done most of his research, darting between mounds of dirt that had sprung up from nowhere once again. She disappeared between a fissure of trees.

  Ross had not been on this part of the property before, at least not that he could remember. His lungs were too tight, every breath a pinch, but he did not stop running. Lia had turned onto a narrow path, one overgrown with young pines and frozen scrub brush. Thorns caught at Ross's shoelaces and scraped up his calves, and then suddenly, miraculously, gave way. Beneath his feet the ground had thawed, a small patch covered with dozens of trampled white roses.

  Lia glanced down at them too, but she didn't stop. And Ross, who had not taken his eyes off her, watched her legs pass directly through two stone markers, the same ones he smacked into a moment later with his boot, sending him sprawling face-first into the mud.

  Winded and dazed, he struggled to his knees. It took another flash of lightning for him to be able to make out the names on the gravestones. LILY PIKE, SEPTEMBER 19, 1932. And on the larger one: CECILIA BEAUMONT PIKE, NOVEMBER 9, 1913-SEPTEMBER 19, 1932.

  Ross glanced up to find Lia staring at the graves, too. Slowly, she reached out to touch the smaller stone, and her hand moved right through it. She looked at Ross, stunned.

  Cissy Pike. Cecilia. Lia.

  Ross had been told of ghosts who did not know they were ghosts. He'd met paranormal investigators who had been bitten, hit, slapped, and shoved by spirits. He had always assumed that the first ghost he saw would be transparent, a storybook specter, but when there was enough energy to warrant it, ghosts could seem as solid as anyone.


  Ross, an insomniac, had slept like a baby after seeing Lia. He'd shivered in her presence. It had been physical attraction, in the most elemental sense: what he'd felt was a spirit, stealing his heat.

  "Ross," Lia said, and he heard the word in his mind, unspoken. "Ross?" Over the gravestone, her gravestone, she extended her hand.

  Even as he reached for her, he knew this would only bring him pain. Lia's fingers sent chills up his arm. Her features grew transparent. Ross wiped the rain from his eyes and forced himself to watch, so that this time he would know the very moment he'd been left behind.

  PART TWO

  1932

  There are two ways to be fooled.

  One is to believe what isn't true;

  the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

  --SOREN KIERKEGAARD

  FIVE

  July 4, 1932

  Running water purifies itself. The stream of germ-plasm

  does not seem to.

  --H. F. Perkins, Lessons from a Eugenical Survey of Vermont:

  First Annual Report, 1927

  The day after I try to kill myself, Spencer says we are going to a celebration in Burlington. He tells me this even as he is wrapping my wrist again, where I cut myself so deep that, for a moment, I could tell exactly where I hurt. "There are going to be fortune-tellers, Cissy," he says. "Fire-eaters, and historical pageants. All sorts of trinkets for sale." He ties off the bandage, and then gets to the point of why we're going to town for the Fourth of July festival. "Your father," Spencer says, "is meeting us there."

  Although it is so hot outside that the dandelions and black-eyed Susans have gone weak-kneed, he helps me into a long-sleeved white blouse, because this way the bandages won't show. "No one needs to know this happened," he says quietly, and I stare at the pink part in his hair until the shine of it makes me turn my face away. "You were sleepwalking, that's all. You didn't know what you were doing."

  For Spencer, the face you show to the world is more important than what's underneath. The end justifies the means. That is what Charles Darwin is all about, after all, and in my opinion Spencer would pray to Mr. Darwin if he didn't think it would make the biddies at the Congregational Church regard him as some kind of heathen. Spencer's long fingers curve around my jaw. "Come on, Cissy," he coaxes. "Don't disappoint me."

  I would not dream of it. I smooth my face into a smile. "All right," I answer.

  What I want to say is: Don't call me Cissy. That's the name of a coward, a self-fulfilling prophecy, and look at where it's gotten me. What I want to say is: My mother named me Cecelia, which is beautiful, a river of syllables. Once, with my head spinning from blackberry wine I'd sipped at a faculty dinner, I told my husband I wanted to be called Lia. "Leah?" he said, mistaking me, shaking his head. "But that's the one Jacob didn't want."

  He helps me stand, because my pregnancy is a condition that Spencer can accept. It's the other affliction we do not speak of. Spencer's work, dovetailing as it does with mental hygiene, keeps us from admitting that I have anything in common with those holed up in the state hospital at Waterbury.

  I cannot explain to someone like Spencer what it is like to look in a mirror and not recognize the face inside it. How there are some days I wake up and it takes everything inside me to put on a mask and walk through my life like someone else. I have sat beside him, digging my nails into the skin of my palm, because if I bleed, then I must be real.

  I think of what it would be like to push off on a raft in a vast ocean, fall asleep under a full sun: sweat, burn, never wake up. Believe it or not, there's a relief to that vision that feels like a cold sheet settling. If I'm going to die, I'd rather choose the where or when.

  After so many years of being dismissed, it is easy to believe the world would be better off without me in it. Spencer says it's because of my condition, chemicals in my body and brain blown out of proportion, but I know better. I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend does not exist, except it is all I am, all of the time.

  And yet. There is a baby in me who never asked for any of this. And if taking my own life means taking his as well, then I will have twice killed someone I should have had the chance to love.

  Spencer is wise; he uses this truth as a bargaining chip. He teases me and flirts, so that by the time we have left the house and started for town, I find myself looking forward to this celebration. I can smell the sear of fireworks on the air; I can hear the lazy pomp of a parade. My baby rolls like the silver fish in Lake Champlain, and without thinking about it I settle my hand on my stomach. Spencer sees, and covers my fingers with his own, smiling. All the way down Otter Creek Pass I think about this fortune-teller; if she'll find my mother's face in her crystal ball, or just the abyss I see when I try to do her job.

  Q. What is the most precious thing in the world?

  A. The human germ plasm.

  Q. How may one's germ plasm become immortal?

  A. Only by perpetuation by children.

  Q. What is a person's eugenical duty to civilization?

  A. To see that his own good qualities are passed on to future generations provided they exceed his bad qualities. If he has, on the whole, an excess of dysgenic qualities, they should be eliminated by letting the germ plasm die out with the individual.

  --American Eugenics Society,

  A Eugenics Catechism, 1926

  The heat makes the streets ripe as fruit, pavement bruising beneath my shoes. Men in summer suits and women in smart linen dresses hold hands. There are hawkers selling lemon ices, and red-white-and-blue pinwheels. Everyone's smiles seem too wide.

  "I heard there was a boxing exhibition this morning," Spencer says. "A soldier from the fort got trounced by an Irishman from New York City." He steers me toward the edge of a large crowd of people, and cranes his neck to look over everyone's heads toward the Hill, where my father lives now that Spencer and I have moved into the house where I grew up. "It's not like Harry to be late," Spencer murmurs. "Do you see him?"

  But Spencer is nearly a head taller than I am, and he wears glasses. I try to see what he sees, but instead I notice the barefoot boy kneeling beside a puddle of manure to pick out a handful of pennies that have fallen from someone's purse. He is part of a world I do not know--people who live in the North End tenements, two hundred yards away and a world apart.

  "Darling," my father says from behind us. He kisses my cheek. "Sorry, Spencer," he says, shaking hands. "I took in the boxing match. Amazing, really. If you look at the physiology of some of the immigrant stock . . ."

  Science is a foreign language to me, but one with which I was raised. My father, Harry Beaumont, is a professor of biology at the University of Vermont. Spencer, a professor of anthropology, shares many of his convictions about Mendelian genetics. They are disciples of another professor, Henry Perkins, who more or less introduced Vermont to eugenics--the science of human betterment through genetic improvement. Professor Perkins once headed the Eugenics Survey of Vermont--a privately funded study of Vermont families. He now volunteers under the vast umbrella of the Vermont Commission on Country Life, just like my father and Spencer. Over the years their Committee on the Human Factor has worked on a Key Family Study, tracing degenerate Vermont families to see whether a town's social and economic success is related to the type of people who settle it. Their pedigree charts are available to social workers and probation officers to help with case work. Between that and the new sterilization law, Vermont is joining other states that are already models for the country.

  It's a progressive reform movement, a thrilling one. Spencer always says it isn't about taking Vermont forward, but back--to the pastoral landscape everyone imagines when they say the word Vermont: a town green, a white church, a hillside stippled with fall color. My father and Spencer were among the first to realize that this picture dims when
strong Yankee stock is replaced by weaker strains. Their Key Family Study sent field workers out to selected towns, to see if social and economic status had any correlation to the quality of their founding families. It was no surprise that the towns in decline were full of families whose members kept cropping up at the state mental hospitals and reform schools and jails. Recessive genes like feeblemindedness and criminal tendencies, of course, get passed on to offspring--it is all there in the pedigree charts my father used to unroll across our dining room table. By targeting these populations and intervening before they propagate, Vermont could recapture its picturesque image.

  "The Ideal Vermont Family," that's what Spencer always says his field workers are looking for. "People like us."

  Since my marriage, I have tried to do my part. I've served on the board of the Children's Aid Society, I'm a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and I'm the secretary of the Ladies' Auxiliary at church. But these women, with their bobs and their shoulder pads and seamed stockings, speak the same words; they make the same suggestions; sometimes their features even blend together. And I am not one of them.

  I sometimes wonder what might have happened, had I not married Spencer but rather gone off to college and joined the eugenics survey as a field worker, like Frances Conklin and Harriet Abbott. Would I have been happier? These women, they were part of a movement that would sweep Vermont into the future. They made a difference.

  Spencer says that some women are meant to change the world, while others are meant to hold it together. And then there are those of us who simply don't want to be in it, because we know no matter how much we struggle, we can't comfortably fit.

  My father slides an arm around my shoulders. "How's my grandson?" he asks, as if this baby's sex is something we might know.

  "Strong as an ox," Spencer says. "Kicks Cissy all day long."

  Everyone beams. No one mentions my mother, although her name hovers at the edges of our conversation. Had I been strong as an ox, before I was born? Had that been the problem?

  Sweat runs between my breasts and down the line of my spine. Under my hat, my scalp itches. In the distance I hear the low-throated hum of barges on the lake, quivering to leave. "Ma'am," says a voice to my left. "Are you all right?"