Second Child

by John Saul

  “I don’t know what to do,” Phyllis had reluctantly admitted. “I know everyone thinks it was all my fault, that I was too hard on Melissa, but …” Her voice had trailed off and her eyes filled with tears. Lenore’s years-old grudge against the woman had melted away in the face of Phyllis’s self-recrimination.

  “Nonsense,” she’d replied, though privately she believed that most of what Phyllis had said was true. “I’m sure you did the best you knew how, and no one can blame you for what’s happened. If you sit here in the dark for the rest of your life, you won’t have much of a life left and you’ll never be of help to Melissa or anyone else. Now let’s get you dressed and go have some lunch.”

  “But I couldn’t,” Phyllis protested. “I couldn’t face anyone. What will I say? People will stare at me!”

  “People will certainly stare at you if you try to turn into a hermit,” Lenore replied. “Now, come on.”

  She’d taken Phyllis upstairs, gone through her closets and selected a deep maroon suit and a simple blouse. “Wear this. It’s not gaudy, but on the other hand, if you wear navy blue or black, it will look like you’re in mourning.”

  Phyllis had winced. “I—I feel like I am,” she’d stammered.

  Lenore sighed heavily. “Well, you’re not. Everyone in town knows what happened, and they know Melissa isn’t dead. So you can’t act as though she is. It will only make things worse than they already are.”

  Phyllis had echoed the sigh. “I suppose so. At least that’s what Teri’s been telling me. But I just haven’t known how to act.”

  Lenore, for the first time in her adult life, had spoken literally without thinking. “Well, she’s absolutely right. Let’s face it, Phyllis—you’ve never known how to act. You’ve spent a whole decade trying to pretend to be something you’re not, and it hasn’t worked. So why not give it up and just try being yourself?”

  And over the last weeks it seemed that was exactly what had happened. Phyllis had begun showing up at the club again, but more and more often it was with Teri. And instead of pushing their way into whatever group happened to be there, Phyllis and Teri had usually taken a spot by themselves.

  Inevitably, people had begun to drift over to speak to her, at first simply out of adherence to the Cove Club Crowd’s strict sense of duty, but eventually because they discovered that Phyllis had changed.

  She was quieter, and seemed to listen more, and, somewhere along the line, had lost her sense of desperation. She seemed to have mellowed.

  Perhaps, out of Melissa’s tragedy, the people of Secret Cove decided, some slight amount of good had emerged.

  Now, giving a few final instructions to the workmen, the two women emerged from the dining room just as Teri was approaching the door. “Caught you,” Phyllis told her. “Thought you could sneak a look, didn’t you?”

  Teri grinned at her stepmother. “Well, you can’t blame me for trying.”

  “I can, but I won’t,” Phyllis replied. “Come on. We’re going to be late for our hair.” She turned to Lenore. “How about if we meet you there?” she asked. “Charles is going to the hospital, and I have something I want him to take to Melissa.”

  Lenore’s countenance softened into an expression of sympathy. “How is she? Has there been any change?”

  Phyllis compressed her lips into a resigned smile. “I wish I could say there has,” she said. “But Dr. Andrews seems to think it could take a long time.”

  Lenore shook her head sadly. “If there’s anything I can do—”

  “I wish there were. But it seems as though there’s nothing, really, that any of us can do. And who knows? Perhaps she’s better off just the way she is. I know it’s a horrible thing to say, but if she does get better, what’s it going to be like for her? The things she’ll have to face …” Her voice trailed off, but then she straightened her shoulders. “Well, I simply cannot dwell on it, can I? After all, I have Teri to think about, too. And you,” she added, turning to her stepdaughter, “have a lot to do tonight, or Brett’s going to wind up going to the ball alone.”

  “Oh, no he’s not,” Teri assured her. “The one thing I am is prompt.”

  The two of them said good-bye to Lenore and started away. Lenore watched them leave. It was remarkable, she thought, how well stepmother and daughter got along. For each of them the other seemed to have replaced the person they’d lost this summer, and both seemed to be better for it.

  Perhaps, after all, she and her friends had been far too hard on Phyllis over the years. Perhaps, after all, Phyllis hadn’t been pushing Melissa too hard.

  Perhaps Melissa’s madness had been there all along, and Phyllis had only been doing her best to keep it under control. It must have been awful for her, all those years, coping with a child whose grip on reality had been so tenuous.

  Yes, Lenore decided as she got into her Corniche, it had probably all ended the only way it could have. In all likelihood, Phyllis was right.

  Perhaps it would be better if Melissa never remembered what had happened at all. Perhaps it would be better if she simply stayed in her world of fantasy and let everyone else’s scars heal as best they could.

  As they walked along the beach toward Maplecrest, Teri reached out and took her stepmother’s hand. “How’s it going?” she asked. “Are you all right?”

  Phyllis was silent for a moment, but finally smiled at her stepdaughter. “I’m fine,” she assured her. “And you were right—they’ll do anything for you, as long as they think you need help. All those years I tried to be just like them, and they treated me like dirt. But now I do what I want and say what I want, and they’ll forgive me for anything. It’s as if they’ve decided I’m a saint.”

  “Well, aren’t you?” Teri asked, her voice reflecting perfect innocence. “I mean, I just don’t see how you did it all those years. With Melissa getting weirder and weirder, and you doing your best to help her. It must have been even worse for you than it was for her. I mean, she didn’t know she was going crazy.”

  “Well, I didn’t either, really,” Phyllis replied. She began talking, letting herself ramble on. It was so easy talking to Teri—Teri always seemed to understand how she felt about things.

  Especially how she felt about Melissa.

  After that day when they’d taken Melissa away, she hadn’t known what to do. She’d been certain everyone in town was talking about her, and all she’d wanted to do was hide. But then Teri had begun talking to her, explaining that none of it had been her fault. “You didn’t know what was happening to her,” she’d insisted. “No one did. So how can anyone blame you?”

  “But they do,” Phyllis had replied. “They’ve always thought I was too hard on her.”

  Teri had shrugged. “Then tell them that,” she suggested. “Tell everyone you see that it was all your fault. And see what happens.”

  And to Phyllis’s surprise, it worked. All she’d had to do was summon up a few tears for Lenore Van Arsdale, and suddenly a woman who’d snubbed her for more than a decade had turned into her best friend.

  And the rest of them—all the people she’d thought were so smart—had fallen right into line.

  She smiled silently to herself. All those years, when Melissa had humiliated her in front of everyone … Now, with Melissa finally out of her way, she was at last getting the recognition she deserved.

  And, in Teri MacIver, she had the daughter she deserved as well.

  Her life, finally, was turning out exactly as she’d planned it that first day she’d arrived at Maplecrest and recognized Teri as the perfect child she’d always wanted.

  Now they were together, the two of them, and life was just the way it was supposed to be.

  She squeezed Teri’s hand affectionately, dismissing Melissa from her mind.

  Everyone, after all, was better off with Melissa gone.

  Charles Holloway pulled up to the Harborview Clinic and nodded to the guard, who pressed a button that allowed the large wrought-iron gate to swing slowly op
en. At either side of the gate a cyclone fence, discreetly screened with tall shrubs, stretched away into the distance. The fence completely surrounded the fifty landscaped acres on which the clinic sat, but as Charles drove up to the mansion that housed the insane patients within, he had no sense of being in a prison. Rather, the clinic still looked exactly like the estate it had once been, and though he’d been shown the security systems installed when it had been converted to a private mental hospital, they’d been so cleverly concealed that he could see none of them now.

  Charles parked the Mercedes on the apron in front of the main building and hurried up the steps. The receptionist, sitting at a small antique desk just inside the front door, smiled welcomingly at him. “We can always count on you, can’t we?” she asked.

  Charles nodded an acknowledgment of her words, but his eyes shifted immediately to the day room. The receptionist’s smile faded as she understood what he was looking for.

  “Not yet,” she said. “They brought her down again this morning, but she did the same thing she always does. She seems to feel safest in her room.”

  Charles felt the faint hope he’d been nursing all day die within him, but he made himself smile. “Well, maybe tomorrow.” He mounted the stairs to the second floor, where a duty nurse sat at another desk—almost identical to the one downstairs—placed at right angles to the wall on the landing.

  “You can go right in, Mr. Holloway,” the nurse told him.

  Charles strode down the west corridor, pausing outside the third room on the left. He peered through the small window in the door and, just as he had yesterday and the day before, saw Melissa sitting in a chair by the window, her hands in her lap, staring straight ahead.

  Staring at nothing.

  No, Charles told himself as he turned the knob on the door and went inside. She sees something. She’s looking at something she only sees in her mind—something she can’t understand. But she’ll figure it out, and when she does, she’ll be all right again.

  “Melissa?” he said, pulling a straight-backed chair close to his daughter. “Missy, it’s me. Can you hear me?”

  There was no response from Melissa at all. It was as if she hadn’t heard his words, wasn’t even aware of his presence.

  “But it doesn’t necessarily mean she doesn’t hear you,” Andrews had assured him only last week. “Melissa’s personality is still there, even though we don’t see it.” He’d paused for a moment, searching for a simile. “Maybe you should think of it as a game of hide and seek. You can’t see Melissa, and you can’t hear her, but she’s somewhere nearby, and she might very well be listening to you. You have to remember that she’s a very frightened little girl, and it’s quite possible that she’s so terrified of what might happen to her that she simply won’t expose herself.”

  “But D’Arcy says she’s asleep, doesn’t she?” Charles had asked.

  Andrews had nodded. “But D’Arcy probably doesn’t know the whole truth, any more than Melissa did. Melissa knew D’Arcy existed, but had no knowledge of what D’Arcy experienced. We have to assume D’Arcy’s the same way.”

  “Has D’Arcy told you what happened?”

  Andrews shook his head. “As I said, it’s quite probable that she doesn’t know. All I can say for sure is that she’s protecting Melissa. Or at least she thinks she is.”

  It had taken Charles several weeks simply to adjust to the reality of his daughter’s dual personalities, and though he’d finally been able to accept it enough to discuss D’Arcy with Andrews, he had been unable to bring himself to talk to the strange and silent girl who seemed to have simply appropriated Melissa’s body.

  And so on his daily visits he sat next to Melissa, holding her unresponsive hand in his own, talking quietly to her, sometimes telling her about what he’d been doing, but more often reminiscing about the past, about the good times they’d had together.

  Today he stayed with her for nearly an hour. Finally, he glanced at his watch. “I have to go now,” he said apologetically. “It’s a big night at home. Your mother’s been spending all her time getting the club ready, and she hasn’t even told me what the theme of the party is. But from the look on her face the last few days, I’ll bet it’s going to be something special.”

  He leaned forward, taking both Melissa’s hands in his own. “I wish you could be there,” he said softly. “Remember what I always promised you? The summer you turned thirteen, I’d take you to the August Moon Ball and dance the first dance with you.”

  For a split second a flicker of interest seem to spark in Melissa’s eyes, and he felt his heart suddenly race. “Missy?” he asked. “Missy, did you hear me?”

  But as quickly as it had come, the spark died away. Charles reluctantly got to his feet. Kissing her gently on the forehead, he left the room, but even after he closed the door, the image of that strange brief light in her eyes stayed with him.

  He turned back and gazed once more through the glass panel in the door.

  Melissa, though, sat as she’d been sitting before, her eyes staring at nothing. Then, just as he was about to turn away, her right hand came up and gently fingered the string of pearls around her neck.

  Charles’s eyes flooded with tears as he remembered her words when she’d opened the box containing the necklace last Christmas.

  “I’ll wear them to the August Moon Ball,” she’d breathed.

  But she wouldn’t be going to the ball. Not tonight. Perhaps not ever.

  Wiping the tears from his eyes, Charles turned and hurried away.

  CHAPTER 29

  Teri tightened her arm around Brett Van Arsdale’s neck and let her head rest against his chest. Her eyes were closed, the slow music of the last dance of the evening enveloping her in its gentle melody. All around her other couples were moving just as slowly, as if by slowing their steps they could prolong the perfect evening.

  And it had been a perfect evening, ever since the doors to the dining room had been thrown open at precisely eight-thirty. By then most of the club members had gathered in the large foyer, and when Phyllis Holloway and Lenore Van Arsdale had finally stepped forward to unlock the huge double panels of polished mahogany, the crowd had unconsciously held its breath.

  Collectively, they gasped in amazement as the doors were thrown open to reveal a nearly perfect re-creation of the dining room as it had been a century ago. Temporary panels had been placed against the walls, covered with a red-flocked wallpaper that was the closest anyone had been able to find to the original. The chandeliers—never replaced over the past century—had been freshly gilded for the occasion, and new bulbs put in that imitated the flickering of the original gas jets.

  Along the walls, mounted to the temporary panels, were real gas sconces, their flames lending the room a glow that seemed to wipe away the passage of time.

  Potted palms filled every corner of the room, and on the orchestra stand there were no microphones. Tonight, the orchestra would play without amplification. Above the orchestra the banner that Phyllis herself had so carefully lettered, announced the theme of the ball.

  Full Circle

  Back To Our Beginnings

  And, indeed, the whole evening had felt as if the intervening century had never taken place at all.

  Phyllis had thought of everything—each of the women had a dance card, tied around her wrist with a velvet ribbon. The music, all of it, was from another era, the orchestra playing from yellowed sheet music that had been culled from almost every attic in Secret Cove.

  Pictures were on display—faded daguerreotypes from another era—but nearly everyone who had been at that first August Moon Ball a century ago had a descendant present at the party tonight.

  Brett, after absorbing the spectacle, had swept Teri out onto the dance floor, and pulling her close, whispered into her ear. “It’s almost creepy. You don’t suppose D’Arcy is actually going to show up, too, do you?”

  A chill had run through Teri. She’d quickly shaken it off, and yet, for
the first hour of the dance, it seemed to her that the same thought must have crossed other people’s minds, for time after time she saw people glancing furtively toward the door, then reddening slightly as they realized what they were doing.

  But as the hours had passed, the crowd had relaxed, and now, as the last strains of the final waltz faded away, a ripple of applause passed over the room.

  The guests began drifting toward the doors, all of them pausing to congratulate Phyllis and Lenore on the success of the evening. Phyllis listened to the compliments, the words of praise sounding far sweeter than the music itself could possibly have been.

  At last Teri and Brett, their hands entwined, approached the door. Teri leaned forward to kiss her stepmother’s cheek. “It was perfect, Mother,” she murmured.

  Phyllis, her eyes dampening at the word Teri had just used for the first time, pulled back slightly, wondering if it had been a slip of the tongue.

  But Teri was smiling at her. “It’s how I feel,” she said, “I just feel as if you’ve always been my mother. And I think you’re as perfect for me as the ball was for everyone else.”

  Phyllis felt her heart swell with pride. “And I feel the same way,” she whispered, holding Teri close. “I feel just as if you’re the daughter I always wanted. And now I have you.”

  A few moments later Teri and Brett stepped out into the night. It was warm and balmy, as if the weather itself had conspired with Phyllis to make the evening perfect, and when Brett started toward the parking lot, Teri stopped him. “Let’s walk,” she said. “Let’s go home the way they would have that first night.”

  They descended the steps to the pool, then on down to the beach, Teri pausing to remove her shoes before stepping onto the cool sand. The moon was high, the sea glittering with silver light, and as they walked, Teri slipped her hand back into Brett’s.