What he did recall was Lia’s face, something he would have died to see again—and
had
, apparently. He could conjure her, and Aimee, as if they were close enough to stand two feet in front of him. Ross knew that he could have stayed back there—wherever that had been, exactly. But even more than he had wanted to hold Aimee in his arms, to follow Lia wherever she led him . . . he wanted to be with his sister. His nephew. Maybe Meredith.
Ross had spent so many years searching for something, he’d never realized that what you found might not be as important as the act of trying to find it. A life wasn’t defined by the moment you died, but all the others you’d spent living.
As he watched, a tear tracked down Meredith’s cheek. Her eyes opened just a crack, and she focused on Ross. “Lucy,” she whispered.
“She’s fine.”
As her surroundings dovetailed into her memories, Meredith startled. She cried out at the pain in her leg and the touch of Ross’s hands to settle her. “You’re a ghost.”
He smiled at that. “Not anymore.”
“The dynamite—it exploded in your hand. I saw you,” she said. And then added, more softly: “They told me . . . you’d died.” She tried to struggle upright again, and as she jogged her leg, her eyes rolled back in agony.
“Stay still.” He stared at her face, at the hairline scar he’d never noticed. “You broke the leg you broke before in your car accident. In six places. The fibula and tibia were crushed; they operated and put a pin in.” Ross assumed that Meredith would think the doctors had told him of her condition, but she surprised him with her acuity.
“I never told you,” she said warily, “that I was in a car accident.”
He sat down on the edge of the bed. “You were driving a green Honda and wearing a black dress,” Ross said quietly. You cut yourself . . . here.” He touched the spot on her forehead. “They never found your shoes.”
“You’re not going to tell me you’re psychic, too,” Meredith said weakly.
“No,” Ross replied. “I’m going to tell you I was there.”
He stared at her, unblinking, until the part of memory buried so deep it’s never more than a flicker fanned a flame, until her eyes widened just a fraction. “Twice,” she said, her voice groggy, as she reached for his hand. Her lids drifted shut. “Superman.”
He waited until Meredith’s breathing evened out, and then his fingers tightened around hers. “Maybe,” he conceded.
Ethan swung his legs on the bench outside the hospital, waiting for Lucy to get caught. She was walking in the drizzling rain along the top edge of a five-foot brick wall behind the range of vision of a security guard. When she reached the end she did a little hop, like one of those gymnastics wizards on a balance beam, and then leaped off to land behind the guard and scare ten years off the poor guy’s life.
He whipped around, and Lucy gave him that sweet Shirley Temple smile that cleared her every time.
In the past month, she’d become a daredevil. She was forever climbing onto roofs and hanging her head out of the windows of moving cars and renting the biggest chain-saw gore-fests from the video store. Ethan knew it was his fault; he’d created a monster. The shrink that they both had to go to, for something called post-traumatic-stress-disorder therapy, said it was a reaction to a near death experience. Ethan, of course, knew better.
He pulled down the sleeves of his long-sleeved shirt and tugged the brim of his baseball cap lower. He didn’t feel like a mutant in front of the hospital, because other people came and went with all kinds of tubes and bags attached. Besides, he wasn’t even the biggest freak in his household anymore. That honor belonged to Uncle Ross, who had been declared clinically dead and lived to tell about it.
He was fine, or so he’d told everyone from Oprah to Larry King to the Reverend Billy Graham, via a live feed to his hospital room. He was being released today after a month’s observation—not for his sake, really, but for all the doctors who came to poke at him and try to figure out what had made him come back to life. Meredith was being released too. His mom and Eli had gone inside to wheel them out.
Ethan had visited his uncle a bunch of times while he was in the hospital. He’d coached him to the point where he could almost win one poker hand out of five. And he’d spent a lot of time just talking to him, because even if Ethan didn’t want to let himself get his hopes up, you couldn’t help but wonder if that kind of luck was a once-in-a-lifetime thing, or something that might be passed down to, say, other generations.
The last time he’d come to visit, his uncle had let him eat all the green Jell-O and noodle soup, and had brought him to Meredith’s room. She told Ethan that even though his DNA couldn’t repair itself, some scientist in New York had invented a cream that could repair the DNA damage already done. And people in her own lab were working on gene replacement therapy, which might cure XP permanently.
Who was Ethan to say a miracle couldn’t strike twice? It ran in the family, after all.
“Hey, check that out.” Lucy dug an elbow into his side and pointed. “That’s weird.”
It was a double rainbow, one tucked beneath the bend of the other. But you could only see the left half of it, curving to the midpoint of the sky before melting into muddy blue.
The right side of the rainbow wasn’t missing, Ethan knew, even if he and Lucy couldn’t see it. It wasn’t wishful thinking, or magic, but a simple law of nature. After all, once you know that part of something exists, it stands to reason that the rest of it is somewhere out there, too.
Believing in ghosts is a bit like being pregnant—you either are, or you aren’t, and there’s no in between. So when I set out to create Ross Wakeman, I knew I needed to find people who not only believed, but could explain to me why. It was my good fortune to become acquainted with the Atlantic Paranormal Society—in particular, Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson, who took me out ghost hunting and convinced me that there is more to this world than meets the eye, and Andy Thompson, who explained what it’s like to be a sensitive. What they taught me was so fascinating that I just may have to write another ghost story, if only so that I have a good reason to tag along again.
As promised: a nod to the Women Who Luv Books ladies who ardently helped me find my title: Lori Maurillo Thompson, Sherry Fritzsche, Sandy Langley, Joyce Doherty, Laurie Barrows, Connie Picker, Sara Reynolds, Nancy Martin, Claudia Kari, Pamela Leigh, Suzi Sabolis, Linda Shelby, Carol Pizzi, Diane Meyers, Karen Sokoloff, and MJ Marcks.
Thanks to my usual tribe of professionals: Dr. Elizabeth Martin, Lisa Schiermeier, Dr. David Toub, Dr. Tia Horner, and two specialists—Dr. Aidan Curran and Dr. Daniel Collison; to my legal sources, Jennifer Sternick, Andrea Greene Goldman, Alan Williams, and Allegra Lubrano; and to my law enforcement guru, Detective-Lieutenant Frank Moran. Rhode Island State Police Detective Claire Demarais gets a special nod, for teaching me Forensics 101. Sindy Follensbee, thanks for transcribing so fast, and with a smile. Rebecca Picoult translated French for me
trés vite
and came to Mass MOCA with me; Jane Picoult, Steve Ives, and JoAnn Mapson all read drafts of this book and kept me from getting lazy. Aimee Mann put Ross’s pain to music for me, and helped inspire me to translate it to fiction. To my agent, Laura Gross, I want to offer my gratitude for an entire decade of service, and hopefully a good thirty or forty years more. Thanks to Laura Mullen and Camille McDuffie, the matchmakers who take my books and find me an adoring public. And I’d like to thank everyone at Atria Books for falling in love with this book as much as I did—but I need to single out Judith Curr, Karen Mender, Sarah Branham, Shannon McKenna, Craig Herman, and Paolo Pepe. My editor at Atria, Emily Bestler, is not only incredibly gifted at making me write better than I think I can, she is also a good, true friend and the best person to have in one’s corner.
And finally, thanks to Kyle, Jake, and Samantha, who share their mom’s time with a lot of imaginary characters, and to my husband, Tim, who makes my life possible.
This book is a work of fiction. However, the Vermont Eugenics Project in the 1920s and 1930s is not. It is a chapter of history that has only recently been rediscovered and that still causes great pain and shame to Vermonters of many different cultural backgrounds. The archives of the Eugenics Survey are housed today in the Public Records Office in Middlesex, Vermont— many examples of which serve as epigraphs in the middle section of this book.
Spencer and Cissy Pike, Gray Wolf, Harry Beaumont, and Abigail Alcott are characters I created, but Henry F. Perkins
did
exist. As pointed out by Nancy Gallagher on her Web site “Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History” (
www.uvm.edu/~eugenics
), he was a professor of zoology at the University of Vermont who organized the Eugenics Survey of Vermont in conjunction with his course on heredity. He believed that through research, public education, and support for legislation, the growing population of Vermont’s most problematic citizens might be reduced. His leadership was instrumental in bringing about the passage of Vermont’s Sterilization Law in 1931, and he continued to teach genetics and eugenics until his retirement from UVM in 1945.
Although it was titled a Law for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization, there are doubts about just how voluntary a procedure it truly was. Evidence suggests that a person could be sterilized simply if two doctors signed off on it. Thirty-three states enacted a sterilization law. During the war crimes trials after World War II, Nazi scientists cited American eugenics programs as the foundation for their own plans for racial hygiene.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the ACLU targeted sterilization laws, leading to the successful repeal of many. Others were stripped of eugenic language and reworded to protect the rights of the individual. Several states have passed resolutions officially censuring the American eugenics movement and expressing regret for their role in it. Vermont has not.
Henry Perkins died in 1956, just when the structure of DNA had been discovered. Reproductive technology and genetic diagnosis are the new face of eugenics. And in a strange case of history repeating itself, Human Genome Project research continues to be done in Cold Spring Harbor, New York—the site, in 1910, of America’s newly formed Eugenics Record Office at the Station for Experimental Evolution.
For those interested in finding out more about eugenics, I have enclosed a bibliography of books and documents that were instrumental to me during the writing of this book. I would also like to thank Fred Wiseman, Charlie Delaney, and Marge Bruchac for enlightening me from the Abenaki point of view; Mike Hankard and Brent Reader for initial Abenaki translations, and Joseph Alfred Elie Joubert from Odonak Indian Reservation, P. Que., Canada, for making corrections to the Abenaki phrases in the text, as well as teaching me proper pronunciation. I am also indebted to Kevin Dann, who in 1986 recovered the ESV documents, made sure the world stood up and took note, and then let me explore his files and his own imaginings in order to create a structure upon which I could then build my own. And finally, I am grateful to Nancy L. Gallagher, who graciously taught me what she knew from her research for
Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project
in the Green Mountain State
, and whose command of the facts was invaluable. Readers interested in exploring this topic further should read that book or visit her Web site, “Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History” (
www.uvm.edu/~eugenics
). I made liberal use of her insights and documents, which provided the historical materials for my novel. Without the work of these people, I never could have completed my own.
Finally, xeroderma pigmentosum is unfortunately a very real disease. If you’d like to learn more about XP or to make a donation, please visit
www.xps.org
.
Jodi Picoult
July 2002
Anderson, Elin.
We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American
City
. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937.
Bandler, James. “The Perkins Solution.” Vermont Sunday Magazine,
Rutland Herald
, April 9, 1995.
Dann, Kevin. “Playing Indian: Pageantry Portrayals of the Abenaki in the Early Twentieth Century.” From a talk presented at a UVM conference, Burlington, Vermont, November 1999.
Dolan DNA Learning Center, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York. “Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement.” Online resource,
www.eugenicsarchive.org
.
Eugenics Survey of Vermont and the Vermont Commission on Country Life. Papers, Public Records Office, Middlesex, VT.
Gallagher, Nancy L
. Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project
in the Green Mountain State.
Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.
Gallagher, Nancy L. “Vermont Eugenics: A Documentary History.” Online resource,
www.uvm.edu/~eugenics
.
Kincheloe, Marsha R. and Herbert G. Hunt, Jr.
Empty Beds: A
History of Vermont State Hospital.
Barre, VT: Northlight Studio Press, 1988.
Laws of Vermont
. 31st Biennial session (1931): 194–96. No. 174— An Act for Human Betterment by Voluntary Sterilization.
Oatman, Michael. “Long Shadows: Henry Perkins and the Eugenics Survey of Vermont.” Exhibit at Mass MOCA, Spring 2001.
Wiseman, Fred.
The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the Abenaki
Nation.
Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2001.