by John Saul
“What changed you?” she suddenly heard herself asking. If the question surprised him, he gave no sign.
“Life,” he said. “I guess I got tired of landing on my ass. It was either change my ways or pad my butt, and I decided wearing a pillow wouldn’t work. Maybe your throwing me out was the best thing that ever happened to me. For the first time, I didn’t have anyone to fall on, so I decided to stop falling.”
There was a long silence then, and Lucy didn’t speak again until they were in the parking lot of the restaurant.
“Jim?”
He turned to face her, and once more it was as if he’d read her mind.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “For a while, at least, I can take care of both of us. If you want to fall apart, you go ahead. You may not think I’m good for much, but right now I’m all you’ve got. And you can depend on me, Lucy. Okay?”
Her tears brimmed over, and she sat still, letting them flow. Jim sat quietly beside her, holding her hand in his own.
The Speckled Hen was very much as they remembered it, and for the next few hours they talked of things other than their son.
They talked of times past, when things had been good, and times past, when things had been bad.
Mostly, they were silent. No one watching them would have known they’d been divorced for nearly ten years. To an outsider they would have appeared very much married, with much on their minds, but little need to talk.
By the time he took her home, Jim and Lucy Corliss were becoming friends again.
Chapter 9
THE NIGHT WAS WARM and humid, a precursor of the summer that was soon to come, and Steve Montgomery left his window rolled down as he searched for the right house. “It should be in this block,” he said, slowing the car and peering through the darkness for the numbers which seemed to him to be deliberately hidden from anyone who might be looking for them.
“I still don’t see why you insisted on coming.” Sally’s voice was cold. She sat stiffly upright on the seat next to him, her arms folded across her breast, the fingers of her right hand kneading the flesh of her left arm. Steve brought the car to a halt, switched off the ignition, and turned to face his wife.
“It can’t hurt, and it might help,” he said. He reached out to touch his wife, but she drew away from him. He sighed, and when he spoke again, he was careful to keep his growing impatience out of his voice. “Look, honey, how can it possibly hurt? You don’t have to say a word if you don’t want to. But all these people have been through the same thing we’ve been through. If anyone can help us cometo grips with this thing, they can.”
He searched Sally’s face, hoping for a sign that perhaps she was willing to face the reality of what had happened to Julie. But her face remained unchanged, her eyes brooding, her expression one of puzzled detachment.
Steve knew what was happening. She was sifting through her mind, trying to find a clue that would unlock the mystery of Julie’s death for her. It had begun that afternoon, when instead of beginning to put her life back together, as Steve was trying to do with himself, she had sat straight up on the sofa, a medical book in her lap, reading intently page after page of material that Steve was nearly certain she didn’t understand. But he understood very well what she was doing.
She was looking for what he had already come to think of as The Real Reason for Julie’s death.
It had begun the night before. As Steve lay trying to fall asleep, and thinking about the funeral to be faced the next morning, Sally had left their bed and begun wandering through the house as though she were looking for something. Steve heard her footsteps in the hall, heard the soft click of a door opening and closing, and knew that she had gone to Jason’s room to reassure herself that her son was still alive. Twice he had gone downstairs to talk to her, only to find her hunched up on the sofa, a book open on her lap, reading.
And refusing to talk to him, except to doggedly repeat the litany: Babies don’t just die. But tonight, he hoped, Sally might begin to accept that theirs had. He got out of the car and went around to open the door for Sally.
Holding her arm, he guided her up the steps of the large frame house, then pressed the bell. A moment later the door was opened, and a friendly-looking woman about the same age as Sally smiled at them.
“You must be the Montgomerys,” she said. “I’m so glad you could come. I’m Lois Petropoulous.” She guided them into the living room and introduced them to the twelve people who were gathered there. There was a disparity to the group that Steve found startling at first. There was a black couple, and an Oriental man with his Caucasian wife. Two of the women had no husbands, and one couple stood out only for the apparent poverty of their lives. The woman’s face, like her husband’s, was gaunt, and there was a hopelessness in her eyes that was reflected in the shabbiness of her dress. Steve scanned the group, searching for a common bond among them, but there was none. Apparently all that had brought them together was the fact that each of them had lost a child to sudden infant death syndrome.
Two places had been held for them on a large sofa. Steve lowered himself gratefully into its soft comfort. Sally, next to him, remained rigidly erect, her hands clasped together in her lap.
“We don’t really have a leader in the group,” Lois Petropoulous explained. “In fact, we don’t really have a regular meeting place either. The group keeps changing, and we keep moving from house to house, as people come and go.”
“How long do people stay in the group?” Steve asked.
“As long as they need to, or as long as they feel needed,” the gaunt-looking woman, whose name was Irene, said. “Kevin and I have been part of it for over a year now.”
Another woman—Steve thought her name was Muriel—suddenly grinned. “We think Irene and Kevin stick around because we’re cheap entertainment” Steve felt himself flushing and was surprised to hear several people, including Irene and Kevin, chuckling.
“Don’t be surprised at anything you might hear,” Lois said, smiling kindly. “We all have to deal with SIDS in our own way, and sometimes humor is the only way. But we also shed a lot of tears, and sometimes we get pretty loud. You have no idea how much anger builds up after you lose a child the way we all have. One of the reasons we’re here is to vent that anger. In this group there are no rules. Say what you feel, or what you think, and be assured that someone else here has felt and thought exactly the same thing. What’s most important is to realize that you’re not alone. Everyone here has gone through what you’re going through.” She glanced around the room. “Well,” she said, her voice suddenly nervous, “I suppose we’ve already begun, but I’m going to make my big announcement anyway, even though I’d planned to start the meeting with it. I’m pregnant.”
All the eyes in the room suddenly fastened on Lois, and she squirmed self-consciously. “And the first person who says ‘after what happened?’ gets the award for bad taste for tonight.”
“After what happened?” five voices immediately asked. When the laughter died, Muriel Flannery spoke out of the silence.
“But aren’t you scared, Lois? I mean, really?”
“Of course I’m scared,” Lois replied. “I’m terrified. And you can believe I don’t expect to get much sleep the first couple of years. I’ll be watching this baby like a hawk, even with the alarm.”
“I’m not sure I could do that to a baby,” another voice said. “I mean, wire it up like that. It seems so—so cruel. Almost like a lab experiment, or something.”
“But without it, I’d be afraid to let the baby sleep.”
Steve Montgomery stared from one face to another. What were they talking about? An alarm for children? He’d never heard of such a thing. Seeing his expression, Kevin tried to explain. “We’re talking about an infant monitor. You attach it to the baby when its sleeping, and it goes off if the baby stops breathing. Except that no one knows if it really works for SIDS. There’s something else, called apnea, where the baby just seems to forget to breathe.”
“But I thought that’s what SIDS was,” Steve said.
“I wish it were,” another of the men put in. “But it seems there’s more to SIDS than that With SIDS, there’s a constriction of the throat, so even if the baby tries to breathe, it can’t. And for that, the alarm doesn’t seem to do any good at all.”
The conversation went on, moving from subject to subject. Steve found himself listening intently. These people, he began to realize, were just like himself—ordinary people who had become the victims of something they had always assumed could only happen to someone else. Each of them was dealing with it in a different way. There was grief and puzzlement in the room and a lot of anger. But for all of them, there was understanding.
Beside her husband, Sally Montgomery listened to the voices droning on and wondered why Steve had insisted they come to this meeting. There was nothing here for her, and she had a distinct feeling that she was wasting her time. She should be at home, looking after Jason, and studying her books, searching for the answer that kept eluding her as to what had happened to her daughter.
Suddenly, she heard a voice addressing her. It was Alex Petropoulous, and his intelligent eyes were fixed on her, his expression quizzical.
“You don’t seem to be paying much attention, Mrs. Montgomery,” he said. “Is there something on your mind?”
She made herself relax and sink back onto the couch, her hands smoothing the soft linen of her dress. “I’m afraid I’ve got a lot on my mind,” she explained. “You see, my baby didn’t die of SIDS. It was something else.”
Across the room, a woman who had been quiet all evening suddenly spoke.
“I’m Jan Ransom, Mrs. Montgomery,” she said. “Would you mind telling us what happened to your baby?”
“I—I don’t know yet,” Sally admitted. “But I’ll find out.”
“Of course you will,” Jan agreed. “Just like I did. I spent nearly a year trying to find out what happened to my daughter, and I finally did.”
Sally looked at the woman sharply. “What was it?” she asked.
“SIDS,” Jan said, shrugging her shoulders. “You know, one of the hardest things to accept is the simple fact that with SIDS no one can tell you what happened. For me, the idea that the doctors—the people who are always supposed to know what happened and why it happened—didn’t have the slightest idea why my baby died was absolutely unacceptable. So I started reading and studying and talking to everyone I could think of. And no one knew. Of course, what I was really doing was burying my head in the sand. Deep down, I was afraid that if there was no reasonable explanation for my baby’s dying, I must have made it happen myself.”
“No one would want to kill her own baby,” Muriel Flannery said softly.
“No?” Jan Ransom replied bitterly. “People kill their own babies every day. And I never wanted a baby in the first place.”
For the first time, Sally Montgomery began listening.
“I had my life all planned,” Jan went on. “I was going to finish my masters—I’m in communications—then go to New York and get a job in advertising. When I was in my thirties, I’d get married, and my husband would be as career-minded as I am. No children. They only get in the way, and besides, what kind of world is this to bring up children in? Energy shortages, overpopulation, all the usual things. And then one day I turned up pregnant.”
“Why didn’t you have an abortion?” someone asked.
Jan Ransom smiled bitterly. “Did I forget to tell you? I was raised a Catholic. I thought I’d gotten over that, but it turned out I hadn’t. Oh, I went for the birth control—that didn’t bother me at all. But when it came right down to having an abortion, I just couldn’t do it. And then, when the baby came, I couldn’t put it up for adoption either. Maybe I should have.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Lois Petropoulous told her. “SIDS doesn’t have anything to do with who’s raising the baby.”
“Doesn’t it?” Jan shot back. “Who says? And how do they know? If they don’t know what SIDS is, how can they say it doesn’t have anything to do with the parents? Maybe,” she added, her voice trembling, “the baby senses that its mother doesn’t want it and just decides to die.”
Sally felt her fingers digging into her thighs as she listened to Jan Ransom. Right here, in front of all these people, the woman was voicing all the dark suspicions with which Sally had tormented herself in the small hours of the night. Now she could feel Jan Ransom’s eyes on her. When she looked up, the young woman was smiling at her gently.
“I don’t think I killed my baby anymore, Mrs. Montgomery,” she said softly. “And I’m sure you didn’t kill yours either. I don’t know exactly why you’re so sure that SIDS didn’t kill your baby, but I do know that if the doctors say that’s what happened, it’s best to believe them. You can’t spend the rest of your life searching for answers that don’t exist. You have to go on with your life and accept what happened.”
“I’m not sure I can do that,” Sally said, suddenly standing up. “But I know that I have nothing in common with you people. Steve?” Without waiting for a reply, Sally started toward the door. Steve, his face flushing with embarrassment, tried to apologize for his wife.
“It’s all right,” Lois Petropoulous told him. “This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last. When she needs us, well still be here. If not us, then there will be others. Take care of her, Steve. She needs you very badly right now.”
She stood by the door and watched Steve and Sally Montgomery disappear into the night. As she returned to the living room, she wondered if Sally Montgomery would come back and get the help she needed, or if she would insist on bearing her problems alone until the day came, as it inevitably would, when those problems would close in on her, and destroy her.
Jason Montgomery sat on the floor of his room, watching as his guinea pig happily darted from corner to corner, enjoying its respite from the confines of its cage. From downstairs Jason could hear the sound of the television droning on as the sitter dozed in front of it. He’d gone down a few minutes ago, but when he’d found her asleep, he’d decided not to wake her up. She wasn’t like some of the sitters he’d had, who were always baking cookies or willing to play games. She was too old, he’d decided long ago, and all she wanted was to be left alone. And if she wasn’t, sometimes she got crabby. So Jason had stood at the door for a minute, watching her, then gone back upstairs to play with Fred.
His parents, he knew, had gone to some meeting, but he wasn’t sure what it was about Something to do with his sister and getting used to the fact that she was dead. But Jason didn’t understand why his parents had to go to a meeting. Hadn’t there already been a funeral? He’d thought that’s what the funeral was for, but now he guessed he’d been wrong.
He decided it was one more thing he’d talk to Randy Corliss about the next time he saw him.
Except that this afternoon Joey Connors had told him that Randy had run away, and most of the kids thought that even if he came back, he’d probably be sent to Juvenile Hall, where he’d be punished.
Fred moved across the floor, his tiny nose snuffling at the carpet, then crept into Jason’s lap to be petted. Jason began scratching the rodent behind the ears and talking quietly to it.
“Is that what’ll happen to me?” he asked. “But I didn’t really do anything to Julie. All I did was put the blanket on her face for a minute.” He stared down at the guinea pig, wondering for the hundredth time if he could really have hurt Julie by putting the blanket over her head. He was almost sure he hadn’t.
Almost.
But what if he had? How would he ever know?
He picked up the guinea pig, pulled his extra blanket off his bed, then knelt down on the floor once again.
“Now, you pretend like you’re Julie,” he said. He put Fred on the floor, and rolled him over on his back. The guinea pig struggled for a moment, then, as Jason began tickling its stomach, lay still.
> “There,” Jason said. “Doesn’t that feel good?” Then he stopped tickling his pet and waited. The tiny animal lay still, waiting for the petting to resume.
Carefully, Jason wrapped the blanket around the guinea pig and held it firm. He began counting.
Fred wriggled and squirmed in the woolen folds, and Jason could feel him trying to bite, but it was no use.
By the time Jason had counted to one hundred, there was no more movement within the blanket.
He tried to remember—had Julie stopped struggling? He thought she hadn’t, and he was almost sure he’d held the blanket over her face for much longer than he’d kept Fred wrapped in it.
Almost sure.
Carefully, he lifted the blanket, sure that Fred, suddenly freed, would scurry under the bed.
The guinea pig lay still. Even when Jason prodded it with his finger, it didn’t move.
Maybe, he decided, he had done something to Julie. But if he had, he hadn’t meant to. No more than he’d meant to kill Fred.
He picked the guinea pig’s body up and cradled it in his hands for a minute, wondering what to do.
Maybe, he decided, guinea pigs were like babies.
Maybe they just died sometimes.
He put Fred back in his cage, then went to bed, and by the time his parents came home, he was fast asleep.
It was Sally who found the guinea pig.
While Steve drove the baby-sitter home, she slipped into Jason’s room to make sure he was all right. She bent over him, listened to him breathe for a moment, then gently kissed him on the forehead. She was about to leave his room, when she realized something was wrong.
The scuffling noises that Fred made whenever his sleep was disturbed were missing. Sally switched on the lamp next to Jason’s bed and went to the cage in the corner. Fred, looking strangely unnatural, was sprawled on the bottom of the cage. She knelt, opened the cage, and picked him up. As she realized he was dead, an involuntary sound escaped her lips.