For three years after Abigail was born, Grace spent every daytime moment with them, and her evenings with Charles, going to partners’ dinners and dinner parties. They went to the theater, and he introduced her to the opera, and she found that she liked it. Her entire life was opening up, and at times she felt guilty, knowing that in other places, other lives, people were less fortunate, and were suffering as she once had. She was so lucky and so free now.
She wondered what had happened to Luana and Sally sometimes, and the women she had tried to help at St. Andrew's. But there didn't seem to be time for things like that anymore. She thought about David in California sometimes too, and wondered where he was now. Her life seemed so far removed from those troubled years. Sometimes even she had a hard time remembering that she had had any other life before marrying Charles. It was as though she had been born again the day she met him.
She wanted to have another baby once Abigail started nursery school, but this time it didn't seem to happen. She was only twenty-eight by then, and her doctor said it was hard to know why sometimes it was easier to get pregnant than others. But she also knew that with all she'd been through before, she'd been lucky to get pregnant at all, and she was grateful to have the two children she had. She would stand there and just smile at them sometimes, watching them. And then she and Andrew would go to the kitchen and make cupcakes, or she and Abigail would cut out paper dolls, or string beads, or make pictures with spaghetti. She loved being with them, and she never got bored, or tired of them.
And then one morning, as she was waiting to pick them up from nursery school, she sat in her kitchen reading the paper and having a cup of coffee. And as she read the headline of the New York Times, she felt her stomach turn over. A New York psychiatrist had killed his adopted child, a six-year-old girl, and his battered, hysterical wife had stood by helplessly and watched him do it. It brought tears to her eyes as she read about it. It was inconceivable, he was an educated man, with an important practice, and a teaching position with a major medical school. And still he had killed their little girl. They had had her since birth, and their natural child had died in an accident two years before, which was now considered suspect. Grace started to cry as she read about it, wanting to comfort the little girl, imagining her cries as her father beat her. It was so vivid that even after she left for school, she was still crying. And she was quiet as she and the children walked home for lunch. Andrew asked his mother what was the matter.
“Nothing,” she started to say, and then thought better of it. She wanted to be honest with him. “I'm sad.”
“Why, Mommy?” He was four years old and the cutest little boy she'd ever seen. He looked just like Charles except for his dark red hair and blue eyes, but all his features and expressions were his father's. It always made her smile just looking at him, but today, even seeing her own children made her grieve for the little girl who had been killed. “Why are you sad?” Andrew persisted, and her eyes filled with tears as she tried to answer.
“Somebody hurt a little girl, and it made me sad when I heard about it.”
“Did she go to the hospital?” he asked solemnly. He loved ambulances and police cars and sirens, even though they scared him a little too. But mostly they fascinated him. He was a lively child.
Grace wasn't sure what to say to him then, whether or not to tell him that she was dead. But that was just too much to tell a four-year-old child. “I think so, Andrew. I think she's very sick.”
“Let's make her a picture.” Grace nodded, and turned her head away so he wouldn't see her cry. There would be no more pictures for that little girl … no loving hands … no one to save her.
There was a huge outcry in New York over the next few days. People were shocked and outraged. Teachers at the private school where she had been in first grade defended themselves, claiming that they had suspected nothing. She had been a frail child and bruised easily, and she had never said anything about what was happening at home. But hearing that infuriated Grace. Children never told of abuse at home, they always defended their abusers. And teachers knew that, and had to be especially alert these days.
For days people left flowers and bouquets outside the Park Avenue building where she'd lived, and when Grace and Charles drove by it the next day, on their way to dinner with friends, Grace felt a sob catch in her throat as she caught sight of a big pink heart, made of tiny roses, with the little girl's name written on a pink ribbon across it.
“I can't bear it,” she cried into a handkerchief he handed her. “I know what it's like,” she whispered … why don't people understand? Why don't they see? Why can't they stop it? Why did no one suspect what went on behind closed doors when atrocities were happening there? The real tragedy was that sometimes people did know and did nothing about it. It was that indifference that she wanted to stop. She wanted to shake people to wake them.
Charles put an arm around her shoulders then. It hurt him to think of what she must have gone through, it made him want to be good to her every day, to make up for all of it, and he had been.
“I want to go back to work,” she said as they drove along in the cab, and he looked at her, startled.
“In an office?” He couldn't imagine why she would want to do that again. She was so happy at home with their children.
But she smiled at him as she shook her head and blew her nose again. “Of course not … unless you need a new secretary,” she teased, and he grinned.
“Not that I know of. So what did you have in mind?”
“I was thinking of that little girl … I'd like to go back to working with battered women and kids again.” Her death had reminded Grace again of her debt, to help those who were living the same hell that she had. She had escaped, and she had come to a better place in her life, but she could not forget them. She knew that, in some way, she would always have a need to reach a hand back to them, to offer to help them.
“Not at St. Andrew's,” he said firmly. He had never let her go back there to work again, only to visit, once they were married. And Father Tim had been transferred to Boston the year before, to start a similar shelter there. They had had a Christmas card from him. But Grace had something else in mind. Something more complicated, and far-reaching.
“What about starting some kind of organization,” she had been thinking about it for two days, trying to figure out how she could help, and really make a difference, “that would reach out to people, not only in ghettos but middle-class neighborhoods, where the abuse is more of a surprise and better hidden. What about reaching out toward education, to teach educators and parents and clergymen and day-care workers, and everyone who works with kids, what to look for and how to deal with it when they see it … and reaching out to the public, people like you and me, and our neighbors and all the people who see abused kids every day and don't know it.”
“That sounds like a big bite,” he said gendy, “but it's a great idea. Isn't there some existing program you could latch on to?”
“There might be.” But five years ago there hadn't been, there was only the occasional shelter like St. Andrew's. And the various committees set up to help victims of abuse she heard of seemed to be badly run and ineffective. “I don't really know where to start. Maybe I need to do some research.”
“Maybe you need to stop worrying so much,” he said, smiling at her in the cab, as he leaned over and kissed her. “The last time you let your big heart run away with you, you got pretty badly beaten up. Maybe it's time for you to let other people take care of it. I don't want you getting hurt again.”
“If I hadn't, you'd never have married me,” she said smugly, and he laughed.