Second Glance by Jodi Picoult

Author:Jodi Picoult
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Psychological, ebook, Contemporary, General, Romance, book, Fiction, Cultural Heritage
ISBN: 9781741758047
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2009-05-01T06:08:56.075000+00:00

We pay full price for the virtues our culture develops at any particular period. . . . The very ethnic and religious prejudices which still live in the community may be forged into the tools by which a demagogue can further divide the population and stultify human development.

—Elin Anderson, We Americans: A Study of Cleavage in an American City, 1937

In my mind’s eye, I am running. The rain sluices over my face and muddies my feet and yet I know I have to get away from whoever is chasing me. When I look over my shoulder I see him—the same man who has been in my other dreams, with the long brown hair and quiet eyes. He calls out my name, and I turn again, and a moment later he trips and sprawls across the ground. I stop to make sure he has not hurt himself and then I see it—the tombstone with my name on it, the tombstone that I have run right through.

Jerking awake, I feel something heavy on my thigh. Spencer is draped across my lap. At first I think he is asleep and then I realize he is sobbing. His eyes are so bloodshot it frightens me, and his skin gives off the steam of alcohol.

“Cissy,” he says, rising. “You’re awake.”

My body feels as if it has been beaten for days. My legs are too tender to shift on the mattress. Someone—Spencer?—has pressed cold compresses between my thighs to stanch the bleeding. “Lily,” I ask. “Where is she?”

Spencer takes my hand and raises it to his lips. “Cissy.”

“Where is my baby?” I push myself up in the bed.

“Cissy, the baby—she was too young. Her lungs . . .”

I go perfectly still.

“The baby died, Cissy.”

“Lily!” I scream. I try to get off the bed, but Spencer holds me down.

“You couldn’t have done anything. No one could have.”

“Dr. DuBois—”

“He’s doing a surgery in Vergennes. Ruby left word for him to come as soon as he gets home. But by the time she came back the baby was . . .”

“Don’t say it,” I threaten. “Don’t you dare say it.”

He is crying too. “She died in my arms. She died while I was holding her.”

All I want is my baby. “I have to see her.”

“You can’t.”

“I have to see her!”

“Cissy, she’s been buried. I did it.”

I throw myself out from beneath the covers and hit Spencer in the chest, the arms, the head. “You wouldn’t. You wouldn’t!”

He grabs my wrists hard, pulls me back, shakes me. “We couldn’t have baptized her. We couldn’t have buried her in consecrated ground.” A sob rounds from his throat. “I thought, if you saw her, you would try to follow her. I can’t lose you, too. Jesus, Cissy, what did you want me to do?”

It takes a moment for his words to sink it. We couldn’t have baptized her, we couldn’t have buried her in the church graveyard, because to Spencer she was illegitimate. Spencer gathers me into his arms while I am still stiff with shock.

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