For a moment, George drew a blank, and then he nodded. “What are we going to do with her?”
“Why, keep her,” his wife said. “Until her mother is out of the hospital.”
“Maybe there are relatives,” George said, but he knew, saying it, that the Franklins were self-contained, a single unit, a closed universe.
His wife confirmed this. No one could be located, in any event.
“Melissa may not be aware that her father is dead,” Mrs. Hume said. “The child is, I believe, a stranger girl than we ever realized. Here we were thinking she was just a quiet thing, well behaved. I think there is something wrong with her mind. I can’t seem to talk to her, and what she says makes no sense. I’ve called Dr. Gowers, and he has agreed to see her. You remember Dr. Gowers, don’t you? We sent Nancy to him when she was going through that bad time at thirteen.”
George remembered child psychiatrist Gowers as a bearded man with a swollen nose and thousands of small wrinkles around his eyes. He had seemed a very kind but somehow sad man, a little like Santa Claus if Santa Claus had suffered some disillusioning experience, an unpleasant divorce or other personal setback, perhaps.
Nancy came into the room as her mother finished speaking. “Steve and I can take Melissa,” Nancy said.
“Well, that’s very good of you, dear,” her mother said. “I’ve already made an appointment for tomorrow morning at ten. I’m sure Dr. Gowers will be delighted to see you again.”
“I’ll go too,” George said. He couldn’t explain it but he was suddenly afraid.
* * *
The next morning when George came down to breakfast, Melissa was already seated at the table and Nancy was combing the child’s hair.
“She isn’t going to church,” George said, surprised at the growl in his voice.
“This is what she wanted to wear,” Nancy said. “And it looks very nice, I think.”
Melissa was dressed in the sort of outfit a young girl might wear on Easter Sunday: a navy blue dress with white trim, white knee socks, black, shiny shoes. She had even donned pale blue gloves. Her black hair had been brushed to a satin sheen and her pale face seemed just-scrubbed, with the scent of soap lingering over her. A shiny black purse sat next to her plate of eggs and toast.
“You look very pretty,” George Hume said.
Melissa nodded, a sharp snap of the head, and said, “I am an angel.”
Nancy laughed and hugged the child. George raised his eyebrows. “No false modesty here,” he said. At least she could talk.
On the drive into town, Steve sat in the passenger seat while George drove. Nancy and Melissa sat in the back seat. Nancy spoke to the child in a slow, reassuring murmur.
Steve said nothing, sitting with his hands in his lap, looking out the window. Might not be much in a crisis, George thought. A rich man’s child.
* * *
Steve stayed in the waiting room while the receptionist ushered Melissa and Nancy and George into Dr. Gowers’ office. The psychiatrist seemed much as George remembered him, a silver-maned, benign old gent, exuding an air of competence. He asked them to sit on the sofa.
The child perched primly on the sofa, her little black purse cradled in her lap. She was flanked by George and Nancy.
Dr. Gowers knelt down in front of her. “Well, Melissa. Is it all right if I call you Melissa?”
“Yes sir. That’s what everyone calls me.”
“Well, Melissa, I’m glad you could come and see me today. I’m Dr. Gowers.”
“Yes sir.”
“I’m sorry about what happened to your father,” he said, looking in her eyes.
“Yes sir,” Melissa said. She leaned forward and touched her shoe.
“Do you know what happened to your father?” Dr. Gowers asked.
Melissa nodded her head and continued to study her shoes.
“What happened to your father?” Dr. Gowers asked.
“The machines got him,” Melissa said. She looked up at the doctor. “The real machines,” she added. “The ocean ones.”
“Your father drowned,” Dr. Gowers said.
Melissa nodded. “Yes sir.” Slowly the little girl got up and began wandering around the room. She walked past a large saltwater aquarium next to a teak bookcase.
George thought the child must have bumped against the aquarium stand—although she hardly seemed close enough—because water spilled from the tank as she passed. She was humming. It was a bright, musical little tune, and he had heard it before, a children’s song, perhaps? The words? Something like by the sea, by the sea.
The girl walked and gestured with a liquid motion that was oddly sophisticated, suggesting the calculated body language of an older and sexually self-assured woman.
“Melissa, would you come and sit down again so we can talk? I want to ask you some questions, and that is hard to do if you are walking around the room.”
“Yes sir,” Melissa said, returning to the sofa and resettling between George and his daughter. Melissa retrieved her purse and placed it on her lap again.
She looked down at the purse and up again. She smiled with a child’s cunning. Then, very slowly, she opened the purse and showed it to Dr. Gowers.
“Yes?” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“There’s nothing in it,” Melissa said. “It’s empty.” She giggled.
“Well yes, it is empty,” Dr. Gowers said, returning the child’s smile. “Why is that?”
Melissa snapped the purse closed. “Because my real purse isn’t here. It’s in the real place, where I keep my things.”
“And where is that, Melissa?”
Melissa smiled and said, “You know, silly.”
* * *
When the session ended, George phoned his wife.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I guess it went fine. I don’t know. I’ve had no experience of this sort of thing. What about Mrs. Franklin?”
Mrs. Franklin was still in the hospital. She wanted to leave, but the hospital was reluctant to let her. She was still in shock, very disoriented. She seemed, indeed, to think that it was her daughter who had drowned.
“Did you talk to her?” George asked.
“Well yes, just briefly, but as I say, she made very little sense, got very excited when it became clear I wasn’t going to fetch her if her doctor wanted her to remain there.”
“Can you remember anything she said?”
“Well, it was very jumbled, really. Something about a bad bargain. Something about, that Greek word, you know ‘hubris.’”
“Hewbris?”
“Oh, back in school, you know, George. Hubris. A willful sort of pride that angers the gods. I’m sure you learned it in school yourself.”
“You are not making any sense,” he said, suddenly exasperated—and frightened.
“Well,” his wife said, “you don’t have to shout. Of course I don’t make any sense. I am trying to repeat what Mrs. Franklin said, and that poor woman made no sense at all. I tried to reassure her that Melissa was fine and she screamed. She said Melissa was not fine at all and that I was a fool. Now you are shouting at me, too.”
George apologized, said he had to be going, and hung up.
On the drive back from Dr. Gowers’ office, Nancy sat in the back seat with Melissa. The child seemed unusually excited: her pale forehead was beaded with sweat, and she watched the ocean with great intensity.
“Did you like Dr. Gowers?” Nancy asked. “He liked you. He wants to see you again, you know.”
Melissa nodded. “He is a nice one.” She frowned. “But he doesn’t understand the real words either. No one here does.”
George glanced over his shoulder at the girl. You are an odd ducky, he thought.
A large, midday sun brightened the air and made the ocean glitter as though scaled. They were in a stretch of sand dunes and sea oats and high, wind-driven waves and, except for an occasional lumbering trailer truck, they seemed alone in this world of sleek, eternal forms.