Over and over she’d begged Dr. Phillips to let her see her parents, but he always told her the same thing. “When you’re better. You don’t want to make your mommy and daddy sick, too, do you?”
She heard a door open, and turned her head the other way. Sometimes it was the woman who came in, the silent woman who never said a word, no matter how much Jenny begged.
But this time it was Dr. Phillips, and when he came over to the bed to look down at her, smiling, she started crying.
“I had the dream again,” she said. “The man — the old man who looks like he’s dead.”
“It was just a bad dream, Jenny. You mustn’t let it scare you,” she heard the doctor tell her.
“But it does scare me,” Jenny wailed. “I want my mother. Why can’t I have my mother?”
“Because you’re sick,” Phillips explained. “And that’s why I’m here. To take care of you. Haven’t I always taken care of you?”
Jenny hesitated, but finally nodded. She’d known Dr. Phillips as long as she could remember, and he’d never hurt her, not really. Sometimes, when he gave her shots, it stung a little, but after he took the needle out of her arm, he always gave her a lollipop and she always felt better.
Except this time she kept feeling worse every time she woke up.
It was a funny kind of feeling. Every time she went to sleep, she hoped she’d feel better when she woke up, but she didn’t. She always woke up feeling empty, as if something inside of her was slowly draining out. She felt all cold inside, and when she thought about her mother and father, and even Michael, something was different.
She still wished they’d come and see her, and take her away from this place, but each time she woke up, the ache inside her when she thought about them didn’t hurt as much.
Instead, that strange icy lump inside seemed to get a little bit bigger each day, numbing her.
Jenny silently wondered if she was dying, and if she was, what being dead would be like. But she was afraid she already knew — it would be like being in the dream again, with the man coming after her, reaching for her, wanting something from her.
But if she was dead, she wouldn’t wake up from the dream, and it would just go on and on and on.
The thought made her gasp, and Dr. Phillips frowned down at her, his eyes leaving the bottle that hung on the rack above her, dripping clear liquid that she had been told was food into a tube that went into her arm.
There was another tube, coming from a big needle that was in her chest, held in place with a piece of tape. That needle hurt, and the tape itched, but she couldn’t scratch it because of the straps that bound her to the bed, which were only undone when she had to go to the bathroom.
“Are you all right? Does something hurt?” Dr. Phillips asked.
Jenny shook her head. “What are you doing?”
“I’m just adding something to your food.”
“What?”
Phillips smiled at her. “Something to make you sleep,” he told her. “Haven’t you been telling Lavinia that you can’t sleep?”
Lavinia. That was the name of the woman who came to take her to the bathroom, and change the babies’ diapers, and sat with her sometimes, even holding her hand, though she never said a word. “I don’t want to sleep,” she complained. “If I go to sleep, the dream will come back.”
“No, it won’t,” Dr. Phillips promised. “I’m putting something in your food to make it go away, and when you go to sleep, it won’t be there at all.”
Jenny looked up at him, her eyes wide with apprehension. “Promise?”
“Promise,” Phillips repeated. He finished attaching the morphine vial to the IV, and turned the valve that switched the feeder tube from the glucose solution to the narcotic. “Go to sleep, Jenny,” he said. “Just let yourself drift away.”
He stayed with her, waiting for the narcotic to take effect. Only when she had fallen once more into a deathlike coma did he unstrap her bonds and carefully remove the needles that had been inserted in her body. Finally he picked her up, carrying her out of the room, then up the stairs to the main floor of his isolated house. He stepped out into the darkness, glancing to the east, but there was no sign yet of the rising sun.
It had been three days since he’d brought Jenny here. Each day he’d brought her up from the subterranean chambers before dawn and taken her back to Villejeune, where she’d lain all day in her coffin, deep in a narcotic-induced coma, her life apparently over. And each night, after dark, he’d taken her back to the laboratory beneath his house, bringing her out of the deathlike sleep.
Each day, he’d drained a little more of the priceless fluid from her thymus.
Stolen her youth, to prolong his own.
Stolen her soul to stave off his own mortality.
But this would be the last time he would take her into Villejeune, for today was a very special day for Jenny Sheffield.
Today was the day of her funeral.
• • •
Just a few more minutes, Barbara told herself. Just a few more minutes, and then I’ll be alone with Craig and Michael, and I can let go.
She was sitting in the small darkened alcove to the right of the altar in the chapel of the Childress Funeral Home. Though a gauzy curtain separated her and her husband and son from the rest of the people who had come to Jenny’s funeral, she could see their faces clearly enough, see the confusion they were feeling as they listened to the eulogy for the little girl whose body lay in the coffin in front of the altar.
A funeral for a child.
It was wrong — children don’t have funerals; they have parties. Birthday parties, and graduation parties, and parties after proms, and finally wedding parties.
But not funerals.
What would they say to her when it was finally over and they had to take her hand and try to soothe the pain she was feeling? With an aged parent, especially one who had been ill, it was simple enough.
“It’s a blessing, Barbara.”
“I know it’s hard, Barbara, but at least your mother’s pain is over.”
“It’s better this way, Barbara.”
She’d heard it all, first at her father’s funeral ten years ago, and then at her mother’s two years later.
But there was no blessing in losing your six-year-old daughter.
Jenny had had no pain, rarely suffered so much as a day in her life.
And she hadn’t wanted to die.
Barbara had tried not to think about it during the last three days, tried to keep her mind from focusing on her little girl, slipping on the muddy edge of the canal, tumbling into the water and then struggling to get out.
Struggling, and calling, with no one to hear her or to help her.
Her hands, resting tensely in her lap, clenched the handkerchief that was soaked through from her tears, and she resolutely pushed the image out of her mind.
It won’t change anything, she told herself. It won’t bring her back.
She forced herself to gaze through the filmy curtain once again, but found herself unable to look at Jenny’s coffin. Instead, she scanned the faces of her friends and neighbors — people she had known for years — and wondered yet again what they would say to her after this ordeal was over.
Would they—could they — find any words of comfort?
Suddenly the organ began to play, and the gathering of mourners rose to its feet as the first strains of Jenny’s favorite hymn began to sound.
“Away in a Manger.”
As Barbara, too, rose shakily to her feet, she could almost hear Jenny’s piping voice as she sang in the Christmas pageant last year, looking like a tiny angel in the costume Barbara had spent three days working on.
The costume she was being buried in today.
Barbara tried to imagine her entering into heaven, dressed as the angel she had already become.