by Nate Kenyon
He started to turn away, then stopped again at the sound of a screen door banging, and a woman in a faded dress and apron hurrying out of the house. Jess saw his eyes change. “You’re gonna catch cold, now, go on back inside,” he said to her.
“Just a moment, Ed.” The woman had her arms wrapped around herself. She was plump, in her sixties, with shoulder-length white hair and a soft, expressive face. Her eyes darted from face to face, fishing for something. “You here to tell us something about our girl?”
“She needs your help,” Shelley said. “I wouldn’t have disturbed you if we had any other choice.”
“She hasn’t…done nothing, has she?” “We’re worried about her own well-being.” The woman nodded. “That’s the way it is, then. Why don’t you come inside? Ed, you go on now. I’ll call you when we’re done.” She looked at him and he didn’t move; then finally he walked away, and didn’t look back. They all watched him until he had returned to the fire again, and he bent and started throwing leaves and branches to the flames.
“Please forgive Ed,” the woman said as the screen door cracked shut and they walked through a mudroom full of boots and hanging clothes, into a large, brightly lit kitchen. “He’s watching out for me is all. And it’s slaughtering time for the chickens and that always gets him in a mood.” “This is hard for you,” Shelley said. “We do appreciate it.” The woman waved a pink-scrubbed hand. “I knew you’d come. I wondered what was taking so long.” She smiled but her eyes were dark. She shrugged. “I suppose I figured everyone would want to know where something like that comes from. Not that I got the answer.” “Something like what, Mrs. Voorsanger?” Cast-iron pots bubbled and hissed on the stove. Next to the stove crouched a deep metal sink, a cutting board, and the gray-pink carcasses of birds. The air smelled of bones boiled clean and white.
“Well, you know.” She searched Jess’s face with eyes that seemed desperate. “After all this time? You must know what she is?” She turned to Professor Shelley. There was sudden bitterness in her voice when she spoke again. “Oh yes, I remember. My Lord. Nine years and you still don’t believe a word.”
“I think Jess would like to hear what you have to say.” “I see.” The woman stuck out her hand. “Well now, aren’t you a pretty little thing? Jess, is it? Forgive my manners. I’m Cristina. Would you folks like some tea? I was just about to make a pot.”
Mrs. Voorsanger showed them through the kitchen and hallway and into a low-ceilinged room. The room had the feeling of unfinished business. The walls were bare except for a large silver cross, mounted over the old fireplace mantel. A faded plastic recliner sat in front of a folding table and large console television, and couches crouched at right angles, the patterns long since blurring into a uniform grayness that was either age or dirt, it was difficult to tell. The arms and backrests, where people rested their heads or put their feet up, were slightly darker than the rest.
The best pieces in the room were matching glass-fronted cabinets, which held what seemed like hundreds of painted trinkets: trolls, elves, fairies and dolls, toadstools, collector plates. Glass eyes winked at them from everywhere, peering over the tops of others. Little figures crouched and smiled as if holding secrets.
“My collection,” Mrs. Voorsanger said with pride. “I get them through the mail. Why don’t you sit down? I’ll bring in a pot of tea in a minute.”
They sat waiting on a couch as dust turned and drifted through the still air. “What did Mrs. Voorsanger mean in the kitchen?” Jess asked.” ‘Nine years and you still don’t believe a word’?”
Shelley seemed to consider whether to answer the question. She glanced to the hall, and when she spoke it was in a soft way, under her breath. “This is delicate, you understand. One of die reasons I took Sarah away was for her own good. The whole family seemed to be suffering from a delusion. I’d heard of it before, a kind of mass hysteria, but I’d never seen it firsthand.”
“What sort of delusion?”
“They didn’t see her as a little baby anymore. They had come to believe that Sarah was the Antichrist. Thank God they called me first. They might have killed her if I hadn’t stepped in.”
Dear Lord, have mercy, Jess thought. There seemed to be nothing else to say. But it would explain a lot: the silence for all these years, the missing sections of file, the reluctance of both Wasserman and Shelley to divulge any family history. The reason Sarah’s existing family had been kept a secret was as much for her benefit as anything else.
“I’ll help her with that tea,” Shelley said. She went to the kitchen. A moment later Mrs. Voorsanger returned carrying a tray with a kettle and two little cups with sugar and milk. Shelley brought out three mugs, poured tea into each, and handed one to Jess that read World’s Greatest Dad.
The tea was scalding and bitter. Jess forced herself to sip it while she waited, still slightly stunned. This house and these people were familiar to her; there were many like them where she grew up. People used to hard work, simple but strong. Money was tight but there was a code to follow that would see them through. It was hard for her to believe they were the sort that would harm a child.
But it happens all the time. People lose their grip.
“Sorry it took so long. I had to see to Annie upstairs. She won’t speak a word for months….” The woman shrugged. She sat very straight on the other couch with her hands in her lap. “Our daughter tries, so very hard. But life just don’t come easy for her. And she hasn’t been the same since Sarah was born.”
“Have you had her examined?”
“Of course. But they could never tell us nothing that would help. So we keep her at home.”
Mrs. Voorsanger told them about Annie’s difficult childhood. Never seemed to relate to any of the other children. At first they thought she was just simple, and that would have been all right; they could have handled it just fine.
“But soon it seemed it was more than that. When she went through puberty it got worse, but we managed. She was the strangest child. She’d go days without speaking, and you’d think she wasn’t even there, and then out of the blue she’d come up with something no one in their right mind could know.
“Then when she was nineteen we found out she was carrying a child. We didn’t know who the father was, never did. Just one day she was pregnant and she never would say a word after. Ed got crazy in the head about it. He was going to track the father down and make him own up to what he’d done. But that was just talk. Truth was it could have been any number of drifters, people who took advantage of Annie’s feeblemindedness. The boys used to get her down in their basements by offering her sweets. You know she loved cake and lollipops. Then she would come home with her shirt undone and her underwear gone, crying…she didn’t know what they done. She just didn’t understand.
“Most of them boys are gone now. Moved away to Lord knows where. Good riddance.”
Jess felt a strange sensation of falling into a life that had been so hard, so cruel. Closets full of arts and crafts, moldering papers in crayon, half-finished ashtrays and lopsided mugs. She wondered if Mrs. Voorsanger hated herself for the nights when she thought of putting the pillow over her daughter’s face, just holding it there until she stopped moving.
Mrs. Voorsanger reached for the teapot. Her hands shook as she refilled her mug. “Did you know Annie just up and disappeared? On about her eighth month she walked right out of the house.
“We looked for her for weeks. The police came out and combed the woods, we put up posters in town. Then we get word that she’d been found, up in New Hampshire somewhere, and she’s had her baby and won’t we please come pick her up? There’d been some trouble, as I imagine she’s told you.” Mrs. Voorsanger nodded at Shelley. “The hospital where Sarah was born burned right to the ground. It was a miracle they got out alive.”
“It took us a while to identify them,” Shelley said. “Annie wouldn’t talk to us and she had nothing on her.”
“Course not,” Mrs. Voorsanger s
aid. “Didn’t I tell you how she was? She couldn’t earn a license and she’d lose her pocketbook if we didn’t tie it onto her sleeve.”
“So you went up there and brought Annie and Sarah home….”
“They told us not to do it but we did. Ed was furious. But here was this little child, and she was sickly, not expected to live. We tended to her as best we could. Annie and Sarah seemed to have a bond. Annie wouldn’t speak to her, half the time she wouldn’t even look at her, but every once in a while she’d just get up and go to the crib as if she’d been called. She’d stand there and stare. And the strangest things would happen.
“At first I thought I must be seeing things. Curtains moving without any breeze. The mobile above her crib would start spinning for no reason at all. I remember once I came into the room in the morning and there was this ball”—she made a gesture with her hands—“a blue and gold one, Sarah’s favorite. And it was floating in the air over her crib. Just hanging there like some kind of—some kind of little planet. Spinning. And Sarah was laughing.
“There were worse things too. Pictures falling off the walls. Glass breaking. Sarah would have these fits, her face getting all red, holding her breath. And she would get out of her crib before she could even walk. Once I found the crib splintered, wood snapped right in half. Ed himself couldn’t have done it without a hammer.
“It got so I didn’t like to go into her room, afraid what I might see.
“Then finally there was the time after her first birthday. She’d spilled something and she was screaming and throwing things. I went to punish her and it was like I hit a wall. I couldn’t move. Then my throat started getting tight and I couldn’t breathe. Things from the kitchen started flying through the air by themselves—knives and forks from the drawers, pots and pans off the walls. And all the time little Sarah was just staring at me with this look in her eyes. I knew I couldn’t handle her anymore. I called and they came and took Sarah away.
“She wasn’t even two years old,” Mrs. Voorsanger whispered. “And she could do something like that. What was going to happen when she grew up?”
Jess felt sudden memories that were too fresh. The buzzing sounds, her strange disorientation. The lights blowing in the hall. The frozen door locks. Sarah’s seizure and the feeling that the air had suddenly come alive.
Mrs. Voorsanger had pulled out a package of cigarettes from somewhere and she was in the process of trying to light one. After a moment Shelley got up and took the match from her trembling fingers.
“Much obliged.” Mrs. Voorsanger smiled. She leaned forward and inhaled deeply. “Sorry, do you mind? I quit a year ago. But I feel I need one.”
“That’s all right,” Jess said. “You just go ahead if you’d like.”
“What I’d like is to know why you’re here,” she said. “A person doesn’t just come out from Boston to have a conversation. I told my story and now you tell me what she’s done.”
“We’re trying to learn how to make her better,” Shelley said. “Sometimes it helps to talk to the family.”
“You did that before. It didn’t help then.”
“She’s got a mental disorder, Mrs. Voorsanger—”
“A mental disorder? Is that what you’re calling it?” Her voice had become shrill and the cigarette hadn’t calmed the tremors in her hands. Mrs. Voorsanger took a drag on her cigarette and let out a great, sighing puff of smoke. Something had been stripped away from her surface, and what was revealed beneath looked raw and frightened. “You see how it’s been for us. Then she’s taken away and we don’t hear for years. Waiting and waiting for something to happen. I knew she wasn’t going to just disappear. Something like that doesn’t go away.”
“One of the doctors believes Sarah has a mental disability called a schizophreniform disorder,” Jess said. “It’s a disruption of the regular thought process, a scrambling of the mind.”
“But you don’t believe it, do you?”
The surprise must have been evident in her face. Mrs. Voorsanger nodded. “I got some of it, and Ed too. Sensitive to mood. But it don’t take a psychic to know that’s just nonsense. Any halfway intelligent person could see that.”
“Her problems…there’s a good possibility that whatever’s wrong is genetic. That’s why we’re here.”
“You want to see her mother.”
Jess nodded. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I wouldn’t disturb her, Mrs. Voorsanger, and it might mean the difference for Sarah.”
Tears trembled in the old woman’s eyes and white flecks dotted the corners of her mouth. A silence filled the room. “It’s been hard with her. But what she has…it isn’t hurtful. It isn’t evil.”
“I don’t believe it is.”
Mrs. Voorsanger shrugged. “Go on up, then. We’ll wait for you here. You won’t be gone long.”
The hallway was dim and full of clutter, crumbling yellow newspapers and magazines in stacks along the walls. A set of stairs led up into gloom. The air smelled of mice, and damp things left too long without sunlight.
Jess went up the steps slowly, hearing the creak of old wood, and stopped at the first doorway, looking into a small, square room with a four-poster bed, and a floor dipping to the middle and worn white with age. She stepped carefully, half afraid the boards would give under her weight and send her tumbling through.
She paused for a moment just inside the door, listening. Something seemed to buzz softly, like voices speaking too far away to make anything out.
Annie Voorsanger sat in a rocking chair by a large, curtained window. She was bone-thin and her black hair was pulled tightly back and held with elastic. Wiry strands had escaped their bonds and stuck out around the patches of gray at her temples. As hard as it was to believe looking at her, Jess thought, she must have been barely thirty years old.
Annie’s clothes were loose-fitting and made of a stretchy fabric, the kind that pulls on easily. She stared unblinking at the curtains, as if focused on something out of sight beyond the glass. Her face was absent, as if she were a puppet that had been tucked away between performances.
Standing there in the wings, Jess tried to piece things together. A silver cross on the wall, the hundreds of figurines. Simple, God-fearing folk. They had been given a daughter who was not whole, a terrible burden to carry. They had asked God to protect her, to give her a decent life even if she couldn’t live alone, even if she couldn’t tie her own shoes.
But it had gotten even worse with Annie’s pregnancy. There would be another child to watch over. God had not listened. Or He had not been strong enough. Was it any wonder Mrs. Voorsanger had seen Sarah as the child of the devil? It all made terrible, perfect sense.
Then why suddenly couldn’t she keep her hands from shaking or get her heart to slow down?
Easy now, girl. Those are old wives’ tales, witches and demon familiars.
Jess stepped closer and said clearly and firmly, “Ms. Voorsanger? Annie?”
She might have been talking to the air. Sarah’s mother was in a place very far from here.
Jess could see something of Sarah in her broad forehead, angular features, and narrow shoulders, in the way she rocked back and forth. There was an intensity to her features made all the more apparent by the slackness of the facial muscles. Annie might have been pretty once. But the life that was supposed to live here was absent.
Jess stepped closer still. The curtains drifted slightly on an unseen draft from the closed window, as below her feet the furnace kicked on.
The room seemed to tick the way a hot engine ticked in silence.
Jess willed herself to be still. “Annie? Annie Voorsanger?”
Nothing. The woman might have been wax. Jess reached out to brush a strand of hair away from her forehead, then thought better of it. “I’ve come to talk about your daughter.”
A blink. The woman’s eyes were blank walls of glass. “Do you remember her, Annie? Do you remember Sarah?”
A finger twitched. Movement i
n the throat; was there life here after all? “I don’t want to upset you, Annie. I just wanted to talk for a minute. I’ve been seeing Sarah back in Boston. She’s doing real good. I thought you might want to know. We’re taking good care of her.”
She wondered if this was cruel, if Annie felt any maternal instinct. If it were her, would she want to know any of this? Jess decided that she would.
“Sarah’s been coming along lately. I’m going to make sure she gets all the care she needs, Annie. If you can hear me, I’m going to make sure your daughter’s given every chance. She’s ten now, she looks like you too. A pretty little girl. Can you hear me, Annie? Do you want me to tell you anything else?”
Nothing—
And suddenly the woman’s head was turning, her mouth opening in a silent, wide black O that seemed to grow larger and larger. A screech began low in her throat and grew into a rusty, cracked wail, rising in pitch like the tortured sounds of cats in moonlight. It was an alien voice, one that did not belong here in the middle of a farmhouse bedroom.
The sound came from both outside and within her head. Disoriented, Jess reached out as if to touch her, drew her hand back in shock at the waves of cold air washing across the dusty space.
Annie’s eyes jumped and rolled as the sound grew to fill the little room, a mindless howl of protest as her fingers plucked at something only she could see, as she rose out of her chair, and Jess stumbled backward as if pushed by a monstrous, unseen hand.
—11—
They did not speak until the car was back on the asphalt road, headed into Gilbertsville. They had left Mrs. Voorsanger tending to her daughter, Annie’s screams slowly quieting as her mother spoke softly, gently in her ear. It had been nothing but a reflex, a simple release of tension, or at least that was what Jess kept telling herself; it had probably been building for a long time.
But she couldn’t keep the chills from running up and down her spine, or the quivers from her muscles. It was almost as if she had experienced Annie’s fear, had been inside the woman’s mind.
