“I’ve been meaning to ask,” Shelley said, busy inside the huge refrigerator, “how you managed to pay for school. It doesn’t sound like you had much help from your parents.”
“A full scholarship to the University of Connecticut. I waited tables there for spending money.”
“And now?”
“The man who taught me to fly airplanes died when I was a junior. He left me his plane, along with his wishes that it be sold and the proceeds set up as a scholarship fund.”
“You were close?”
“He was the only person I trusted as a child.”
On afternoons after school, when she knew her mother would be drinking, she would listen at the foot of the driveway for the sound of the plane. She would linger at the farm down the street, watching him do his graceful loops and spins, wishing she could be up there too. Sometimes, if she was lucky, he would land and take her up again.
“I hope I’m not being too personal. I just wondered.” Shelley had turned from the open refrigerator with a container of orange juice. She looked very frail in the yellow light, years older. Jess caught a glimpse of the swelling showing in her wrist, and what looked like a particularly nasty rash up the inside of her arm. Something clicked like tumblers falling into place inside her head, and she wondered how she hadn’t seen it before.
“It’s not important,” was all she said.
“As a matter of fact, it is. Evan and I were very concerned with who we picked to help with Sarah. It’s important for us to know what makes you tick. To be perfectly blunt.”
“She’s not a schizophrenic.”
“I know.” Shelley put the juice down on the counter, turning away from the sudden silence. “Actually, I’m not very hungry after all. Why don’t we go out and sit on the patio?”
They walked through a room dominated by a huge Steinway grand piano, decorated with an antique oriental rug in deep earth tones, a Chippendale walnut chest and china cabinet, a Tiffany clock, through French doors, and onto a stone deck that overlooked the lawn and gardens. The air was pleasant but cool, the distant trees peppered with orange and yellow leaves.
“That’s better. A little sun always lifts my mood.” Shelley settled into a cushioned deck chair. “Have a seat.”
Jess took a chair opposite. “What was all that on the counter?”
“Macrobiotics. It’s supposed to help clean out my system.” She waved her hand. “Diet, meditation. You try something new. I have good days and bad days. More lately of the latter, I’m afraid.”
“You’re sick, aren’t you? Is it cancer?”
“Acute lymphocytic leukemia. You know, I never thought I would go this way. It’s not the kind of exit you wish for when you’re a little girl. And I thought, if I could cleanse myself, if I eat well and pray… it sounds silly when I say it out loud.”
“Not at all.”
“I won’t go without a fight,” Shelley said. “I’ve been living with this for ten years now, and it doesn’t get any easier. My father was CEO for the largest steel company in the country. I’ve seen the best specialists in the world. But money can’t solve everything. You go into remission, you think you’ve beaten it, and then it comes back to bite you harder than ever.”
“I’m sorry.”
They sat in silence while a gentle breeze rustled the leaves at a distant edge of lawn, while flowers bobbed their multicolored heads. There had been a frost last night; when Jess woke up it had been written across the window, the crust of ice on the inside so that when she’d dragged a nail across the pane it had come back flaked with snow.
“I’ve tried to keep this as quiet as possible. I like my privacy. I assume you’ll respect my confidence.”
“Of course.”
“Anyway, enough of all that. You didn’t come to talk about my life. You’re here to talk about Sarah.” Shelley turned to look at her, and for a moment the pain was so naked, so obvious, Jess had to keep herself from flinching.
“I always knew it would come to this,” Shelley said. “That’s one reason I fought Evan so hard to bring you into our confidence. I needed someone to uncover everything, bring it into the light, and you were the perfect choice, for a number of reasons. But I hope you don’t blame me too much for letting you in slowly. You had to do it on your own terms, in your own way. Do you understand what I mean? When you’re faced with the fact that something you’ve believed all your life is a fiction, a silly superstition… the belief dies hard. It did for me.”
“I deserve to know the whole truth. You owe me that.”
“And you’ll get it.”
“If you knew that what her family said was true, why did you let Dr. Wasserman lock her up? Drug her? Treat her for a disability that didn’t exist?”
“It wasn’t that simple. Remember that there is a history of mental illness in her family, she did show many of the classic indications—”
“With all due respect, that’s bullshit. And you know it.”
Shelley stared out over gently rustling leaves. “There are other factors involved here. I truly wanted to help her. I thought maybe we could help each other. But there are things you can’t know, things that make it all but impossible. Especially now.”
“Then tell me.”
But Shelley was no longer listening. “I’ve spent ten years trying to forget that night, the night she was born. I was the first thing she saw, coming into this world.… Can you imagine what a doctor looks like to a child coming into the light for the first time? Hooded and gowned, mask covering her face? What a human being looks like to someone who has never seen one before? I know because she let me see. I saw through her eyes.”
“I don’t think I understand.”
“I don’t know how she did it, how it happened. But I can’t ever forget that. It isn’t easy seeing yourself as a freak. Huge. Misshapen. All those features you look at in the mirror each day, turned into something alien. The next thing I remember was the firemen pulling me out, the hospital coming down, and I kept asking them where was the monster, where was that thing’"
They had gone all that way to New York, they had spoken with the family, they had listened to the stories that seemed too fantastic for belief, and never once had Shelley said a word about any of this. All Jess could think of now was Maria’s voice on the phone; Sarah, inside her head. Embrujado. Haunted.
Betrayal stung her like a slap to the face. “Sarah’s not the devil. She’s just a little girl.”
“Let’s assume she’s the product of some random genetic mutation. But do you think it’s a coincidence that my cancer began nearly ten years ago? I had no family history, no previous symptoms. I contracted what is almost exclusively a childhood disease, caused by changes in the cells of the bone marrow, changes that have been linked to high doses of radiation or exposure to toxins. Somehow she lashed out at me— I felt it—and she did something to me. She changed me. At the cellular level.
“When she was barely a minute old, I saw her tear a building apart. What do you think she’s capable of now?”
Jess had no idea what to say. During the taxi ride she had gone over and over in her head how she would present her case, and again and again she had come up against the same problem. Shelley was a pragmatist. She would never believe it.
And now here she was, saying that she believed every word. Worse, she had known about Sarah’s talents from the beginning.
“My God, listen to me,” Shelley said. “I’m a doctor, for God’s sake. But it happened. It happened.”
“I don’t know what she’s done to you, or what she’s capable of doing. I can’t answer to any of that. But we’re responsible for her, as a human being. She deserves a chance to live her life. I want to take her to see someone who has experience with this sort of thing, a parapsychologist—”