Second Glance (6 page)

Ross had been working that night, which meant setting up the chairs for the audience, arranging the books to be signed on a small table, getting the author bottled water at the podium. It was a good crowd—academic sociologists rubbing tweedy elbows with spiky-haired Goths in black overcoats. As the lecture went on, Ross stood in the back, amazed at how many ways there were to say good-bye.

Aimee had stumbled in sometime in the middle. She was still wearing her scrubs, and Ross’s first thought was that she must be cold; she was always cold when she wore them as pajamas, yet here she was running through the streets of the city in December.

His second thought was that something was terribly wrong.

“Hey.” Ross caught her as she almost wandered past him into the stacks of the store.

She threw herself into his arms and started sobbing. Several members of the audience turned around; the speaker himself glanced up, distracted.

Ross pulled Aimee by the hand into the gardening section, where nobody in New York City ever bothered to browse. He framed her face in his hands, his heart pounding: she had cancer; she was pregnant; she did not love him anymore.

“Martin died,” she choked out.

Ross held her, trying to place the name. In fits and starts the story came out—Martin Birenbaum, fifty-three, had been the victim of a fire at a chemical plant. Third-degree burns covered 85 percent of his body. It had fallen to Aimee, as a third-year medical student in the ER, to try to make him as comfortable as possible by debriding his wounds, keeping them clean, and administering Silvadine. When he asked if he was going to die, she had looked him in the eye and said yes.

He was the first patient she had ever lost, and because of this his face was scarred into her mind. “I stayed with him because I knew I couldn’t help,” Aimee confessed. “Maybe it gets easier, you know, every time it happens. But maybe it doesn’t, Ross. Maybe I shouldn’t be in medicine.” She suddenly stared at him. “When I die, you have to be there. Like I was, today.”

“You’re not dying—”

“Ross, Jesus Christ, I just had a profoundly upsetting experience . . . can’t you promise me this?”

“No,” he said flatly. “Because I’m going first.”

She was silent for a moment, and then a tiny laugh escaped. “Did you already book your ticket?”

“
Guei
, or hungry ghosts,” the lecturer said just then, “are the souls of the Chinese who passed on unnaturally . . . as a result, they wander the earth making trouble for the living.”

At that, Aimee looked up. “What the
hell
are we listening to, Ross?”

“Yes,” he answered. “That’s close enough.”

Afterward, they never spoke of Martin Birenbaum. Ross had accompanied Aimee to the funeral. Over the course of her residency, more patients died in her care. But he could not remember her ever breaking down over it. Eventually, like most doctors, she came to understand that death was just the tail end of life.

He skipped a stone into Lake Champlain, which sank before the second rock he threw even skimmed the surface. Aimee had been cremated. Her ashes were somewhere on the other side of this lake, with her parents. He did not know what they had done with them; after the first three years he had stopped returning their phone calls and letters, simply because it hurt too much.

Ross picked up his shoes, intent on heading back to his car. As he slid into the driver’s seat he remembered one more story from the speaker at the bookstore. The Mexicans believed that for one day every year, the veil was lifted, and old souls could journey home to visit people they’d left behind.

When I die, you have to be there
.

But he hadn’t been. Yet now, he couldn’t seem to leave.

Meredith Oliver’s office at Generra Institute had a Washington, D.C., zipcode, and if you looked closely from the window, you could see the Jefferson Memorial. She found it fairly ironic, since most of the scientists at her place of business flouted the very concept of all men being created equal—in their opinion, only the strongest survived.

Sitting across from her, nervously wringing each other’s hands, were Mr. and Mrs. De la Corria. “Good news,” Meredith said with a smile. In the decade she’d been doing preimplantation genetic diagnosis, she’d learned that the only thing more stressful for a couple than in vitro fertilization was waiting for the results of the tests that led up to it. “There are three viable embryos.”

Carlos De la Corria was a hemophiliac. Terrified to pass the disease on through his offspring, he and his wife had opted for assisted reproduction, in which embryos were created from their own sperm and eggs and then genetically screened by Meredith. Before the embryo was put into the mother’s uterus, she would know that her baby did not possess the gene for hemophilia.

“How many are boys?” asked Carlos.

“Two.” Meredith looked him in the eye. The gene for hemophilia was carried on the X chromosome. That meant a male child born to the De la Corrias would not be able to pass on his father’s illness. In effect, if they had only boys, they’d stamp out hemophilia in future generations of their family.

Carlos lifted his wife from the chair and whirled her around Meredith’s small office. All those ethicists who were terrified of what might come of gene modification—well, they need only witness a moment like this. Meredith kept two pictures on her desk—one of Lucy, and another of her first patient, a beaming woman with cystic fibrosis holding her son, who—thanks to Meredith—had been born without the disease.

Mrs. De la Corria sank down in her chair again, still breathless. “The girl?” she asked softly.

“The third embryo tested is, in fact, a carrier. I’m sorry,” Meredith replied.

Carlos squeezed his wife’s hand. “Well, then,” he said optimistically. “It looks like we’ll be having twin boys.”

There were plenty of obstacles still to overcome, and there was every chance that the embryos wouldn’t succeed—but Meredith had done her part of the job. From here, other doctors at Generra took over with the implantation. Meredith accepted the De la Corrias’ gratitude and then scanned her appointment sheet. Two more consultations, and then she had the afternoon to work in her lab.

She slipped on her reading glasses—she kept them in a pocket, too vain for overt display—and pulled the pen that anchored her curls into some semblance of a knot. Her honey-gold hair tumbled around her shoulders in a tangle, the mess it always was, as if it were God’s joke to give Meredith Oliver, the control freak, hair that had seemed to have a mind of its own. She scrubbed her hands down her face, rubbed bloodshot brown eyes. “Tonight,” she told herself out loud, “I will not let myself work. I will go home, and take a hot bath, and read Lucy something other than an article from the
Journal of
Theriogenology
.”

She wondered if saying it, instead of just thinking it, made it any more likely to happen.

“Dr. Oliver?” A knock on the door, followed by her secretary. “The De la Corrias signed this release.”

Without looking, Meredith knew what it was—permission for Generra to discard their third, female embryo. “They should wait until after implantation. There’s a chance that the in vitro won’t take, and then . . .”

Her voice drifted off. And then, it would make no difference. The De la Corrias would rather be childless than utilize this damaged embryo. The baby would not be hemophiliac herself . . . in all likelihood she’d be a perfectly healthy girl with her mother’s shining hair and her father’s chestnut eyes. But she had the potential to pass the illness to her own male children one day, and given that, her parents would rather she never be born.

Meredith signed off on the release and set it to one side of her desk. “The Albertsons are here,” said the secretary.

“Give me a minute.”

As soon as the door closed, Meredith picked up the phone and dialed home. She imagined her daughter sitting at the kitchen table, two braids curling down her back like replicas of the human genome, as she practiced her
U
s and
V
s for handwriting homework.
Ula unrolled uneven umbrellas
. Lucy lifted the receiver. “Hello?”

“Hey, Noodle.”

“Mom! Where are you?”

“On Jupiter. Where are you?”

“In the Calamari Desert.”

Meredith smiled. “That might be Kalahari.”

“When are you coming home?”

“Soon.”

There was a beat of silence. “Before it gets dark?”

Meredith closed her eyes. “I’ll be back for dinner,” she promised. “Tell Granny Ruby. And no more Oreos until I get home.”

Lucy sucked in a breath. “How did you know I was—”

“Because I’m the mom. Love you.” Meredith hung up, then twisted her hair onto the top of her head. She scrabbled through her drawer for a rubber band, but could only come up with a few paper clips, which worked about as well as bobby pins. Her glance fell on the release the De la Corrias had signed. On impulse, Meredith slipped the form into the lower drawer of her desk. She would lose it, temporarily. Just in case.

She pushed the button of her intercom and a moment later the door swung open, revealing the Albertsons. They looked beaten and drained, like most of the other couples who came through her office for the first time. Meredith held out her hand. “I’m Dr. Oliver. I’ve reviewed your case. And,” she said briskly, “I can help.”

Az knew that if push came to shove, he wouldn’t be able to chase a squirrel out of Angel Quarry, much less give full pursuit to an armed intruder. The owners kept him on as a security guard out of kindness, or pity, or maybe because he only bothered to pick up half his paychecks, not having much use for them in the long run. Luckily, there was only one access road into the quarry, not that Az paid much attention to it. He sat in the small illuminated booth at the quarry office, where three closed-circuit televisions monitored activity at different locations, and kept his eye instead on the fourth monitor, tuned to the Red Sox.

“Ha,” Az snorted at the batter. “They pay you eleven million bucks a year for
that
?”

The quarry was one of Vermont’s granite mines, veins of rock etched into the cliffs like the deep lines of Az’s face. A long time ago, they’d drilled the charges by hand, blasted, and milled the stone for export. These days, it was mostly computerized. Working alone at night, he never saw another soul . . . for all he knew, it was like that at peak hours too. Az sometimes wondered if he was the only human employed there.

In the thirty years he’d been working at the quarry, he had filed only two security reports. One involved an electrical storm that set off an explosion intended to detonate the following day. The second was about a suicidal man, who scaled the protective wall and tried to jump off one of the cliffs into the jagged rubble at the base. The fool broke both legs, recovered, and started a dot-com business.

Az liked working at night, and he liked working alone. If he was quiet when he made his rounds, he could hear buds burst; he could smell the turn of the seasons. On occasion he would lie on his back, his hands propping up his head, and watch the stars reconfigure themselves into the constellations of his life—an angry bull of frustration, the imbalanced scales of justice, the twin loves he’d lost ages ago.

He wondered what was going on at Otter Creek Pass. In the week Rod van Vleet had been on the site, the Abenaki protest had intensified, and the public had noticed. It helped that Thule Abbott, the town drunk, had awakened one morning with all his straight hair gone curly, and he’d spent a day in the church getting a dose of Jesus and blaming the ghosts for his misfortune. Rumors flew through Comtosook like the occasional dusting of rose petals, which fell like pollen on the cars parked at the Dairy Twirl and clogged the drains in the outdoor showers at the town pool.

If Rod van Vleet had half a brain, he’d roll his construction equipment in during the night, when most of the Indians were snoring in their tents a distance away. Good thing the frontman for the Redhook Group was a fool. Given the habitual disorganization of the Abenaki protest, it put them on equal footing.

A small firefly winked past Az’s left eye. Then he realized it wasn’t a June bug at all, but a small bobbing light on the pitch-dark screen of one of the satellite TVs, the one that viewed the mine’s northern wall and most active stripping site. A flush of heat ran down between Az’s shoulders—it took a moment for him to recognize excitement for what it was. Jamming his hat on his head, he struck off toward the spot where the light had been. The years fell away with each footstep, until he was once again straight and strong as an oak that punched the sky, until he was needed.

Ross didn’t know whom he blamed more: Ethan, for planting this seed in his mind; or himself, for bothering to listen.
Angel
Quarry is haunted
, his nephew had said,
everyone says so
. He walked softly along the narrow path until he felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle. This, then, was where he would set up. He didn’t dare use his flashlight yet—something he’d learned early from the Warburtons. Authorities usually left ghost hunters alone, but trespassing was trespassing. If you were exploring a graveyard, you learned to back in with your headlights off, so that you could make a quick escape. Likewise, if you were creeping through private property in the middle of the night, you did everything possible to keep from calling attention to yourself.

Thinking of Aimee this afternoon had made him want to try, one last time, no matter that he’d told Shelby he’d hung up his paranormal shingle. So from Lake Champlain he’d gone to Burlington, to a discount electronics store, where he bought a new infrared video camera. When Shelby put dinner on the table, he told her he had a date that night.

“Really?” She’d smiled so brightly it hurt Ross just to look. “Who is it?”

“None of your business.”

“Ross,” Shelby answered, “this is exactly what you need.”

He hated that he’d lied to his sister. He hated the way she had reached into the window of his car before he left to straighten the collar of his shirt, how she told him the door would be open whenever he got home.