The Third Child

by Marge Piercy

  “What, you’re going to shoot us? Father, Mother, are you crazy?”

  “You can’t do this!” Blake was sputtering with anger. “She’s my wife. You have no right! Stop trying to push me around.”

  “Get out of my house!” Dick yelled, openly furious now, phone still gripped in his hand. “I want him out of here. Now, Alison!”

  “Don’t threaten us! You think I came empty-handed?” Blake let go of her and pulled something from his jacket pocket. “Did you think I was stupid enough to trust you? You killed my father and now you want to kill me.” It was the gun she had found under his bed in November, she knew it was.

  “Blake, no!” She grabbed at his arm. A noise filled her head and deafened her for a moment so that she saw Dick’s mouth open but could not tell what he was saying. Then he was clutching his chest. “Daddy, no!” she screamed, and turned and struck at Blake, grabbing him. She could see Blake firing again and again, but because she was holding on to his arm, the shots went wildly around the room, hitting a vase, the wall, the couch where her father had been sprawled watching the football game.

  Alison came forward with the semiautomatic in front of her, both hands steadying the gun propped against her body as she was always showing Rosemary how to pose. She moved deliberately, ignoring the wild bullets careening around the room. Then Blake fell and there was blood all over his head. Melissa knelt over Blake calling his name, and she saw her mother flinging herself on her father. She stared from one to the other and the minutes gelled into something heavy and thick and she knew suddenly that they were dead, Blake and her father, both. Everybody was dead. She could hear again now. Her mother was weeping hysterically, yelling for Alison to call an ambulance.

  Alison leaned over her. “I’d love to shoot you too, you murderous traitor, you stupid little bitch! But it would kill your mother.” She turned and picked up the phone where it had dropped. “I’ll call an ambulance.”

  “Yes, hurry! I can still feel a pulse.” Rosemary looked up at Alison, her face streaked with tears. She was incredibly pale, her shoulders shaking. Blood had spattered all over her silk blouse and jumper, Dick’s blood. There was so much blood every place, so much.

  Melissa knelt over Blake’s body. She could not cry yet. She was too frozen. She was stunned. What did Blake think he was doing? Now everyone would say he was a murderer, son of a murderer. Why had he done that? He was supposed to help her reach her father, that was what he was supposed to do. She wanted to shake sense into him. But his head was all smashed and she could not even hold him. He was gone from her. He had vanished and left her with bits of bone and brain and blood, with the mess of her splattered life and a mother who would hate her always. No one would ever understand them now. Never. She knelt there, dead herself over his broken body.

  • CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE •

  Melissa put her hand over Karen’s on the table, among the plain white crockery and stainless steel cutlery of the little restaurant where Karen had taken her for lunch. The food was better than Mountain View Rehabilitation Center’s bland cuisine, but the thrill was getting out for a few hours. “I know you hate coming near the place, but I really appreciate it. And eating real food.”

  “Oh, the cooking in the bin—right. They feel that any flavor—herbs or spices—might excite the residents, cause a riot.”

  “I wonder if Dr. Baines or Dr. Hildebrand has ever failed to diagnose anybody as being whatever their families were willing to pay to have them described as. I mean, do they ever turn anybody away and say, But this kid is normal? Or, There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with Mrs. Zilch?”

  “They wouldn’t get paid then, would they? But they do turn people away—if they think they’re too much trouble. Too violent. Uncontrollable.” Karen frowned. “Do you know your diagnosis?”

  “Borderline.”

  Karen waved her hand. “BPD—Borderline Personality Disorder.”

  “You know about it?”

  “A Dr. Krotkey originally defined borderline for the DSM—the bible of psychiatry, but they keep revising it. They mostly apply borderline to women and young people—impulsive, unstable, bad self-image. Standard adolescence, in other words.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I studied up. I wanted to know what I was dealing with. A friend smuggled photocopies in for me—patients aren’t supposed to know about illnesses.” She nodded at Melissa’s empty plate. “Would you like something more?”

  “Maybe dessert?”

  “How are you bearing up?”

  “I scrape along the bottom. I hate Dr. Hildebrand. He tries to manipulate me.”

  “You didn’t hate Blake for that.”

  “Blake didn’t manipulate me. He loved me. He was pursuing justice.”

  “Through you, Melissa. You have to see that.”

  “Are you on their side now?”

  “Of course not.” Karen sighed. “I just thought you might have a few ideas about responsibility and taking control of your choices by now.”

  “How can I take control of anything while I’m locked up?”

  “Don’t get upset. Let’s have dessert.”

  She was especially grateful for Karen’s visits, because she knew how her aunt dreaded entering the gates and sitting in the waiting room with its air of stodgy disuse, chairs never sat in, couches never sprawled upon. It was in the main house, where the alcoholics and addicts were, upstairs. Karen always sat by the floor-length windows as if to provide herself an escape. The residents never entered that room unless summoned by an approved guest. Karen had only gotten on the list by managing to persuade Rosemary it would be more of a nuisance to keep her off than to put her on. An attendant would escort Melissa from Ryder, the young people’s house, to the main house, the old robber baron’s mansion, called a camp.

  The facility was in the Adirondacks, occupying what had once been an estate, then a school for rich girls whom their families did not wish to send to a normal college, and now storage of those over fourteen who had caused or threatened to cause their wealthy and powerful families some kind of annoyance. The view from the windows was beautiful, mountains all around their cloistered valley, blue today with autumn haze, patches of brilliant red and gold. But the mountains might as well have been painted on a wall. Her friend Boo, daughter of a tire family, called it the Mountain View but Don’t Touch. Boo had an affair with her gym teacher. The teacher was fired and Boo was shipped here.

  Melissa had been in Mountain View for over three months before Karen was allowed to see her. Very hard time. Now she was on milder tranquilizers than the heavy stuff they had first given her, that kept her woozy and detached, as if her head had floated loose of everything down below. She still felt lethargic, but at least her head was back on her shoulders and she could manage two consecutive thoughts without losing her way in a drug-induced soggy haze. She was slow, but she no longer shuffled.

  All she had wanted was to weep, to be unconscious, to die, but she could not even manage that. She had tried and failed in Philadelphia, with a combination of sleeping pills and antihistamines. Then she had tried a razor blade. While she was heavily drugged, her emotions had sunk deep below. In between was a thick layer of smog that choked her so she could not cry and scream, so words were fish shapes that escaped into the greyness and she was left groping for herself. Now she felt empty, but she knew how and why she hurt. She knew.

  “Have you heard from Merilee lately?” Karen was motioning for the waitress. Karen drove from Vermont to the Adirondacks to see her every two weeks. They had, after experimenting, decided on the Bear Trap as a place with big portions, comfort food and waitresses who let them sit at the table for a couple of hours without hassle. This waitress was called Freddie, short for Winifred, a name she told them she detested. She had blonded hair worn in straggle curls, a great gap-toothed grin, a sandpapery voice and an infectious giggle that Melissa could never resist no matter how depressed she was. Freddie was bringing black coffee for
Karen, who would have to drive back to Vermont, and a big slice of blueberry pie for Melissa, who would be returned to Ryder House.

  “She’s not good at writing, but she tries. She’s the only family besides you I have contact with. If only they’d let me have e-mail, I could really communicate with her. They let me have a laptop now to do my homework, but I have to send everything by snail mail.” Merilee was working for a firm out in L.A. that specialized in environmental law. Rosemary did not approve. Rosemary had visited Melissa twice, the second time on the occasion of her marriage to Senator Frank Dawes, the senior senator from North Dakota. He was hardly dashing, older than Dick had been, but a force in the Senate. He had both money and power. Rosemary would never forgive Melissa but was too busy to bother with her. Alison had waited in the car. Emily was not allowed to visit Mountain View.

  When Karen arrived, Melissa always gave her letters for Emily and received at least one she could hide away, read, reread.

  When Karen had to return her, her suicidal friend Jon was waiting. “So, she fed you up?”

  “Stuffed. Almost happy.”

  “Don’t ever get happy here. Keep fighting.” He put his arm around her waist. She shied away. He might be interested, but she wasn’t. She didn’t think she’d ever be interested in a guy again. There were quite a few young people stored here—in residence, as they said—and they hung out in little gangs, the ones who were fairly functional and not in lockup for some rebellion or infringement of the Byzantine rules. Many residents in the other houses were middle-aged, and some were quite old. Families had diverse reasons for wishing to stow members safely and silently away. There were addicts, alcoholics, kleptomaniacs, those whose sexuality had represented a problem—they liked the wrong sex or those too young to be legal. There were some genuine crazies too, stored in Clifton. Schizophrenics, mostly.

  “But I am a widow,” she repeatedly told her psychiatrist.

  “You weren’t really married, and you were manipulated into an unhealthy and abusive relationship. You won’t improve until you accept that.”

  “I knew him far better than you ever could. And I loved him. And he loved me. Those are the facts.”

  “Your delusions are standing in the way of your improvement.” Dr. Hildebrand was extremely tall, extremely thin and grey all over. Grey hair, grey eyes, greyish skin—except in ski season or once when he took off to the Caribbean for two weeks, when his face turned paprika red. They detested each other. She guessed she represented something that irritated him, maybe a daughter? He had two, she could tell from a photo on his desk. She knew why she detested him: he was trying to force her to revise her life, to turn against Blake, to forget she had been for a time really loved. He considered her attempt at suicide a sickness; she thought it common sense.

  She glanced at the fading scars on her wrists. She liked to wear sweaters with sleeves short enough so she could see her razor cuts. If they ever faded completely, she would feel she had lost her last link with Blake and the visible proof of her suffering, her shame. They would not let her wear her wedding ring—it had been taken from her.

  At first when she was shut up here, she fantasized about escaping so she could finish the job. That would prove to everyone that she had really loved Blake, that they had been meant to be together, that she saw herself as the outlaw she was and that she knew she was doomed. As time passed, she thought about suicide less, but it was still a scenario she cherished when she was more than usually bored. Karen promised that when she finally got out, she could live on the farm in Vermont. Melissa appreciated the invitation, but what would she do there? What would she do anyplace? It would not be fair to kill herself on Karen’s farm—her aunt would suffer and be blamed—but she had not come up with a better idea of where to go and what to do with herself. Not that the decision was imminent. She was not getting free soon. If she could go anyplace she chose, then she wanted to be with Emily. Emily was in her senior year, but they could still live together after Emily’s commencement.

  No one, not even Karen, would understand that her life was over. She had lived it all in a year and a half—meeting Blake, falling in love, getting married, losing him, burying him. She had done it all. She was really much older than the others her age in Mountain View. How could Jon interest her? He was just a kid from Cambridge, Massachusetts, who had taken too much Ecstasy and freaked out his parents, both college professors. He had kissed her once when she was too surprised to stop him, but he had no idea how thrilling that wasn’t.

  She dreamed about Blake often, and when she woke up, she recalled the dreams in as vivid detail as she could, over and over, until she had memorized them. After a while, she was not sure whether a memory that surfaced was from her life before the institution or her dream life here. Last night she had been with Blake in a forest with tall evergreens, needles underfoot like carpeting. They had been lost, but it had not mattered. If she was with Blake, how could she be lost? She was only lost without him. She wished they would let her have a photo of him, but that too was forbidden, as if she didn’t have a right to a picture of her own husband. He had loved her, no matter how much they all wanted to deny it.

  At some point, Dr. Hildebrand told her, she must face what she had done and come to terms with it. He was a fool. She had been done to. Her husband had been shot in front of her and died in her arms. She did not think about the other stuff. She had nothing to do with that. Sometimes she saw her father lying on the floor bleeding from his chest, with Rosemary holding him, but she veered from it at once. Twice when she had not pushed it away quickly enough, she had thrown up. No, she had done nothing wrong but try to bring her husband and her family together. It was like Romeo and Juliet, the Montagues and the Capulets, the way Emily and Nadine had said. And she, like Juliet, was supposed to die. She saw that clearly, saw her own death before her like a stage play she could watch over and over again, the way she replayed her favorite videos like My Little Pony when she was a child. If they caught her talking to Blake, they would increase her meds again till she was a zombie. She was on four different meds anyhow. She was numb sexually and she hadn’t had a period in three months. She had briefly hoped she was pregnant, but no such luck. She so did not need any heavier meds. She had known she could not be pregnant after so long, but she hoped for a miracle, as if her body might have secreted some of Blake and hidden him within.

  In the meantime, she had five minutes to get ready for the attendants to march them to food service. She brushed her hair hard and reapplied lipstick and checked herself out in the mirror. She always sat with Jon and Boo, so she wanted to look good. She’d heard too that there was a new guy just out of the preliminary solitary where they kept new “residents” for the first weeks. Then they’d watch MTV together and maybe dance. She was getting to be a better dancer. Blake and she used to dance together. She would imagine him watching her. Jon and the new guy would eye her, because she and Boo had worked out this new step that was really sexy. There wasn’t much else to do in here, except work out new ways to wear her hair, new ways to dance, try to bring up memories so vivid that she wept, secretly. Study with the lame tutor who was supposed to be teaching her history or something. She had been coaching tennis, thanks to all the lessons she’d had from Karen when she was growing up, but soon it would be too cold to play. They had a tiny indoor pool reeking of chlorine, but she wasn’t allowed in it. They thought she might try to drown herself. It looked about as exciting as swimming in a sewer.

  Death and trivia, she said to herself, as she gave her hair a last brush. That’s all we have. But at least she had her gang of friends here and that was something. They were all in rebellion from their parents, so she wasn’t an outcast, no matter how bad Rosemary and Dr. Hildebrand tried to make her feel. Everything had gone wrong, but she had only wanted to bring her two families together. That was all she had wanted. It wasn’t her fault, that terrible dying, the blood, the two of them suddenly gone and never to be again, even if sometimes, when s
he woke up at night, she shook with the pain of it. Maybe it was better she was on all those drugs. They kept bad things a little distance away, even if they didn’t always work. She brushed her hair harder. Guilt was like a slimy pit, but she would not fall into it. No. She would go downstairs and eat with her friends and then dance and maybe watch TV later. That would be okay. Guilt was outside pushing in, but she would not let it in. Not yet.

  About the Author

  MARGE PIERCY is the author of fifteen novels, including Gone to Soldiers, The Longings of Women, and Woman on the Edge of Time, as well as fifteen books of poetry, including The Art of Blessing the Day, The Moon Is Always Female, and Circle on the Water. She lives on Cape Cod with her husband, Ira Wood, the novelist and publisher of Leapfrog Press.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  PRAISE FOR MARGE PIERCY

  “A rich, insightful, and disturbing morality tale…. The Third Child is Marge Piercy at the top of her form, writing full stream ahead.”

  —John Nichols, author of The Milagro Beanfield War

  “Riveting—extraordinarily magnetizing characters—a bold and galvanizing story.”

  —Booklist

  “A compulsively readable storyteller.”

  —Library Journal

  “A biting, contemporary take on Romeo and Juliet and an acidic commentary on Washington political culture.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Piercy never writes anything less than first-class novels with a great deal to say about how we live now.”

  —Bookaholic

  “Promising blend of romance—shallow political commentary, and bang-bang thriller.”

  —People

  “Piercy—knows how to keep the reader intrigued.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “The pull of the narrative is strong—absorbing.”