Second Glance by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online

rituals. In Tibetan burials, a monk stripped the flesh from the bone of a corpse and cut the body into pieces, so vultures could devour the remains. In Bali, a body was buried during the years it took to plan the spectacular cremation ceremony. But before the interment, the deceased was spun and splashed and shaken in a colorful bamboo tower, so that the spirit couldn’t find its way back.
    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,