Children in the Morning

by Anne Emery

  Normie and I enjoyed a laugh over Tom’s impersonation of his mother.

  But all the talk about cars and repair shops put me in mind of something that was still missing from the Delaney file. Beau was supposed to provide me with a receipt for the night of Peggy’s death. He said he had stopped for gas on the way home from Annapolis Royal. The receipt would show he was still on the highway at the time Peggy went down the stairs. I picked up the phone and gave Beau a call.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Beau. How’s it going?”

  “About as you’d expect under the circumstances.”

  “Listen, I was just thinking about that gas receipt. Do you have it?”

  “No, unfortunately, I can’t find it.”

  “You kept your dinner and hotel receipts to be billed against the file you were working on. Why wouldn’t the gas receipt be with the rest of them?”

  “I don’t know, Monty, but it’s not there.”

  “You paid with a credit card, I assume.”

  “Uh, yes, of course.”

  “Maybe we can track it down that way.”

  “Sure. We’ll give it a try.”

  “All right. Talk to you later.”

  The one thing we needed, he just didn’t happen to have.

  (Normie)

  Monday was a really nice day, and Mum came to St. Bernadette’s after school to listen to us singing and playing music at the Four-Four Time program. She walked over with Dominic in his stroller. He looked really cute in a little pair of blue jeans and a bright red sweater and sneakers that had pictures of animals on the bottoms of them, and he gave me a lovely smile and reached up for me to hold him. So I picked him up and gave him a big hug. I was so happy, especially when a bunch of the other kids saw him and came over and gawked at him and went “Awwww!” Then I put him back in the stroller, and sat down at the piano and started to play “The Alley Cat Song,” and Kim and Jenny sang along with me.

  Father Burke came in with a bunch of priests and other people from the grown-ups’ choir school, the schola, and he announced to all of us that the grown-ups would love to hear us play and sing a song. Dominic let out a little squeal when he heard Father’s voice and recognized him, and Father turned around and saw Dominic with a big grin on his face, and he came over. Dominic was laughing and all excited. Father picked him up and held him high in the air and jiggled him, and he laughed even more. I saw the other priests looking at each other, and one made his eyebrows go up. He must have been thinking the priests are really good with youngsters here. Then Father put Dominic back in the stroller, and I pushed it around the room so Dominic could see all the toys and instruments, and the treats, but he wasn’t allowed to eat them because he was too little. I had to leave him because I had to help Richard and Ian organize the kids into a group to sing. We did “Panis Angelicus,” and the adults all clapped. When I brought the baby and the stroller back to Mum, she was in a serious conversation with Father Burke. I didn’t hear what they said, because they stopped talking. All they did was stare at Dominic.

  That’s when I looked out the window and saw Jenny, and she had the coolest bike I have ever seen in my whole life. Laurence had his, too, but his was the regular kind. I ran outside. Jenny’s bike looked kind of thick and clunky. The crossbar curved up and then down; it wasn’t just a bar, it was big and heavy, and made the bike look like a motorcycle. It was bright red. There were silver things around the tires. Jenny called them fenders and said they were made of real chrome. There was only one speed! But I loved it.

  “Cool bike,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s old-fashioned. It was in my dad’s family for years. My brothers, Connor and Derek, got it up out of the basement and got the rust off it with steel wool, and put air in the tires. Then Corbett said he wanted it, and he took it over. But he’s gone now so I get to drive it sometimes. There are these mean guys that follow us around and they grabbed my bike and said they were going to steal it. Then they said it was an old folks’ bike and threw it on the sidewalk.”

  “That was a rotten thing to say. This is a great bike. Who are the guys you’re talking about?”

  “Two boys who look like criminals. They hang around watching me and my brothers.”

  “Aren’t you scared?”

  “Yeah, but they never do anything but follow us and give us dirty looks. And push my bike down.”

  “Can I ride it?”

  “Sure.”

  So I grabbed the handlebars and swung my leg up over the seat and pedalled it a little ways. Then I realized I didn’t know how to stop because it didn’t have any brake lever things on the handles. I didn’t want to ask, because I would feel stupid, so I just waited till I was going really slow, then slid off the seat and onto the crossbar and put my feet down to stop. I wheeled it back to Jenny.

  “You better bring it inside the school,” I told her, “or somebody will steal it.”

  “No, nobody will. Nobody likes it. But I do.”

  “They’re crazy if they don’t steal it! It means they don’t know anything about cool, old-fashioned bikes. I don’t mean it’s right to steal, but if it was, this would be a nice thing to steal. That’s all I meant.”

  “I know.”

  Anyway, we left it outside and went in to Four-Four Time, and nobody stole it.

  I dreamed about bikes and strollers that night and so the dreams were good at first, but then I thought I was on the old-fashioned bike and I was going down a hill, faster and faster, and I didn’t know how to use the brakes, and I was going to crash at the bottom of the hill and I started to scream, and that woke me up. I was lying in bed thinking how lucky I was to wake up before I hit the bottom, because I would have felt the pain just as if it was really happening. And what would happen if I got killed in a dream? Would I really die? So I didn’t want to go back to sleep. But then things came into my mind even though I was awake. I saw a tiny baby lying in a crib and all these people were standing around him wearing long black robes. And I got a really bad feeling that something was going wrong. And I thought there was another little kid in it somewhere, and I felt terrified. Or, I felt the little kid was terrified. Why was I thinking this stuff? I wasn’t asleep, but I knew I was safe in my own bed. I wasn’t with those people in the robes. I lay there and saw more stuff happening, then I called downstairs for Mummy to come up.

  She came up right away, and Daddy was with her. I remembered then that he was coming over, but I had fallen asleep before he arrived. They came in and turned on my light. Daddy was closest to the bed, and I described what I saw. And I told him I was not really asleep when I saw it. He looked like he always does when he hears something weird and wants to pretend it’s normal. “What were the people doing, sweetheart?”

  I tried to picture it again. “They just stood there. I think they were chanting!”

  “Uh-huh. Could you tell whether they were men or women?”

  “Both, I think. And then one of them did something to the baby, and the baby cried.”

  “The one who did something to the baby, was that a man or a woman? Do you know?”

  “A man,” I said. I knew it was.

  “What did he do?”

  “He reached in and put his hands all over the baby, on his face and then under his blanket.”

  “And this happened while the others were around the crib?”

  “They just watched while it was going on.”

  “Then what happened, Normie?”

  “I kept seeing the baby lying there, and then he wasn’t moving anymore. At all. Something was gone from him. I think he was dead!” My voice went up and I didn’t mean it to. But I knew the baby was dead. Maybe they killed him!

  I felt really sleepy then. Daddy didn’t say anything, just held my hand. Mummy came and kissed and hugged me. I fell asleep, and didn’t dream about anything after that.
<
br />   (Monty)

  The weeks leading up to a murder trial can be quite intense, obviously for the client, but also for the lawyer. And, it seemed, for the lawyer’s family. It was hard to dismiss the notion that there was a connection between the case, or at least the Delaney family, and the disturbing dreams or visions that Normie was having. This was the topic of discussion as Maura and I and Brennan finished up our combination Greek plates at the Athens restaurant. Brennan was getting ready to leave when the subject came up.

  “There haven’t been any of those crank news stories about ritual abuse lately, have there?” I asked Maura. To Brennan I said: “Normie’s latest nightmare — or vision, given that she claimed to be awake when it occurred — was of people in long robes, and possibly the abuse and death of an infant.”

  Brennan raised his eyebrows but didn’t speak.

  Maura answered: “I’m not aware of any news item like that, but then I just tune that stuff out.”

  “Well, you can be sure Normie wouldn’t tune it out if she heard or read anything of that nature. Most likely it would feed into this whole picture that’s developing in her mind.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” She gestured towards Brennan.

  “Ask me what?”

  “Fill us in about satanic cults, devil worship . . . child sacrifices . . .”

  The priest rolled his eyes. “As far as I know, these satanic cults, so-called, are few and far between, with the exception of some teenage amateurs. I think most of these tales of ritual abuse are horseshit. We certainly have to suss out what’s troubling Normie, but I wouldn’t waste time worrying about devil worship or child sacrifices.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” I said. “These visions could have an innocent explanation.”

  “Since when do you find innocent explanations for things, Collins?” my wife asked.

  “I invent them every day in court, remember?” I reached for my wineglass and said: “It’s probably something less exotic, and closer to home, that’s working on her mind.”

  I looked up from my glass and caught a glance passing from Brennan to Maura. “What?” I asked. “Is there something?”

  “No, no,” Maura insisted.

  But I wondered. We were separated and had been heading for a reconciliation when she found out she was pregnant by another man. That certainly derailed the homebound train. (Not that I was blameless myself in our travails.) Now, even though tensions between us had eased somewhat in the months since the child was born, I didn’t delude myself that I knew everything that was going on in her life. But maybe, knowing Brennan, he’d been on her case to get to the bottom of Normie’s trouble, and there was no more to it than that.

  “So,” I said, “the dreams began around the time she met Jenny and Laurence Delaney. Is that fair to say?”

  “I’d say so,” Maura replied. “It would make sense that her connection with them, and no doubt her concern for them and their father and the turmoil in their family, would increase over time. She still sees them regularly at the Four-Four Time program. They’ve become friends. She’s even been over to their house.”

  Brennan got up then, and gave us a little salute as he left the restaurant. I thought I saw him shoot another look at Maura, but it could have been my imagination. A vision, perhaps! I raised my hand in farewell, then returned to the matter at hand.

  “The fact that Delaney is accused of being a murderer could be the key to this. Obviously. Children whose father may be a killer. The stuff of nightmares, for sure. But we’ve always stressed Delaney’s innocence.”

  “There’s another thing now,” Maura said, in a quiet voice.

  “What?” My reply was far from quiet.

  “Over the last few days, she’s reported headaches.”

  “It’s causing her physical pain now!”

  “The headaches may simply be a result of the loss of sleep caused by waking up from these awful dreams.”

  “We don’t know that. It’s like the chicken and the egg.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying we don’t know whether the emotional turmoil is causing the headaches or the headaches are a symptom of something else entirely, and the whole thing is manifesting itself as emotional disturbance.”

  My wife’s face registered her alarm. “You’re not saying it’s . . .”

  “Something organic. Something physical.”

  “What?” Her voice was uncharacteristically high-pitched. “You’re not saying she has a brain tumour or something!”

  “I’m not saying that and I don’t think that. But the responsible course of action is to have the doctor look at her, and make a referral if that seems wise. To rule anything out.”

  “I was going to take her in, but I was convinced — I still am! — that it’s something she’s upset about. Like, well, the Delaney kids and where they might end up, or . . .” Her voice trailed off. She sat there, staring ahead, her face pale. If there was anything my formidable wife could not face, it was the idea that something might be wrong with her children’s health.

  Two days later we were on our way to see our family doctor, Lise Gaudet. We got Normie into the car without telling her what it was really about. Lise was quick to reassure us, after examining Normie, talking to her, and sending her out to the waiting room with a kids’ magazine.

  “You’re almost certainly right. She’s a sensitive little girl, and all this about the murder of the mother of a large family, the father being charged, his family being split up — all of this is likely the root of it. I don’t mean to make light of it, of course. But I wouldn’t be concerned about anything physical. I’d give you a referral to neurology, but I have a better idea. I have a patient who’s lined up for a CAT scan and, well, he’s not going to need it.”

  “Why not?” Maura asked with trepidation.

  The doctor just shook her head. “So, I’m going to do some fancy footwork, and get Normie in for that appointment. I honestly don’t believe there’s anything sinister going on. But this is the way to rule it out. I’ll call you tomorrow morning.”

  On Tuesday the following week, we were trying to reassure our terrified little daughter that entering this gigantic tube would not hurt, and would not result in any dreadful diagnosis being made. And that she would have something fascinating to tell the other kids about her morning off from school. I thought I was going to have to request sedation for her mother, but she did her best to hide her fears from Normie. Though a bright, cheerful, smiley Maura MacNeil should have been enough to make anyone sit up and pay closer attention to the radar screen. But anyway, the little one allowed herself to be extricated from our embrace and placed on the moving table for the scan. Our son, Tom, showed up at the hospital just after his sister went in for the test.

  “This is just procedure, right? There’s nothing really wrong with her . . .”

  “I’m sure that’s right, Tom. They have to rule things out, is all.”

  He looked around, and his thoughts were there to be read by one and all: there would be no medical school in the future for Tommy Douglas Collins. His namesake, Tommy Douglas, was the father of universal free health care in Canada. Our Tommy would be content to see others deliver the service. And others, presumably, were welcome to receive it. He sat down beside his mother, swallowed, and didn’t say another word.

  The doctor called with the results later that week.

  “Nothing wrong at all, Normie,” I assured her. “But we knew that. Doctors have to be extra cautious, and give tests to prove that there’s nothing wrong. You’re fine.”

  Her brother chimed in: “You can tell everybody they did a brain scan and they couldn’t find anything.”

  She stared at him blankly for a few seconds, then: “Ha ha, very funny. You’re saying I don’t have a brain.”

  “I’ve been saying it for year
s, and now we know for sure. Nice hair, though.” He ruffled her curls and, try as she might to maintain a pose of righteous anger, she couldn’t help but smile.

  (Normie)

  They put me in that great big machine. They slid me in there on a moving table, and I nearly had a heart attack I was so scared. But it showed there was nothing wrong. That didn’t mean people left me alone about it, though. I guess they couldn’t, because I made the mistake of telling Daddy about another thing I saw in my mind one day after school.

  I told him I was wide awake and still at the school, and I had a bad dream anyway. My mind saw a little kid standing in a room, and suddenly this big shadow came over him and the little kid was crying and screaming. I felt he was scared and sad, and feeling pain. And I thought I heard a kind of echo sound of people laughing. It was laughter, but it sounded mean. I had an awful feeling that something had happened. Or maybe something was going to happen!

  After I told Daddy this, he went and called Mummy on the upstairs phone. I heard him whispering something; then he came back down to the living room.

  “Mum and I are worried about you, angel. We know there’s nothing wrong with you, with your brain or anything, but it still might be good for you to see someone who can help you.”

  “Who?”

  “Well, maybe a different kind of doctor.”

  “What kind? I don’t want to see any more doctors! And I don’t want any more tests!”

  “This doctor wouldn’t do tests; she would just talk to you.”

  “You mean a mental doctor! You think I’m crazy!”

  “No, Normie, you’re not crazy. We know that. But these doctors can help. When there’s something bothering you, a psychiatrist can help you deal with it.”

  “Nobody can help me deal with it until we find out what really happened. Or what’s going to happen!”

  “But, sweetie, we don’t know whether anything happened.”

  “I know it did! Or it’s going to! You don’t believe me! You think I’m mental!”