“Let me ask you a question,” Shelley said. “Forgive me for being blunt, but I’ve been thinking about this since you came to visit before. That man who taught you to fly. Did he try to… touch you? Do something inappropriate?”
Jess was surprised by the question. She considered what to say. “Yes. Once he did.”
“And you stopped him?”
“I thought it was disgusting, it made me angry. I was hurt. I was old enough to know about what he wanted to do.”
“I wondered. His gift of the plane seemed like an offering. Only once, though? He never tried again?”
“No. He seemed genuinely sorry, like he had slipped. But we never talked about it and I didn’t go see him much after that. Things were different between us. Something had changed.”
Shelley seemed satisfied with the answer. She nodded. “Sometimes we take too much responsibility for others, don’t we? We assume that they’ll act as we do, with decency and respect. And when they don’t we take it upon ourselves, we take in their sins and we try to erase them from memory in any way we can.”
“I guess so. But it isn’t as simple as all that.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Professor Shelley, I saw a man today with Dr. Wasserman, he was well dressed, white hair, short and stocky. I hadn’t seen him before. Do you know what he might have been doing at the hospital?”
Shelley didn’t seem to hear her. When she spoke it was with distance, and tinged with a dull anger. “I don’t think I’ll be going back to school,” she said. “I’ve been feeling very nauseated lately and my strength is gone. I just don’t see the value—”
“Professor, please. You’d said before I’d have the truth. Tell me what’s going on.”
“Do you know anything about acute lymphocytic leukemia? It’s a brutal disease. Your bone marrow makes too many immature white blood cells. These cells never develop into lymphocytes, as they should. Here are the symptoms. First you feel a shortness of breath, exhaustion. Your skin is too pale. This leads to bruises and cuts that do not heal. Finally, there are infections, as the dwindling number of white blood cells can no longer fight off germs.
“First-line treatment is chemotherapy. Next is a bone narrow transplant. I tried both. There is no third option.”
They sat in silence for a moment as a breeze rippled through the flower heads and rustled the trees. A smattering of red and orange leaves drifted down to settle upon the ground.
“Evan has always suffered from a lack of self-worth. It’s important you understand that. His father had run up a tremendous debt and he was determined to show that he could overcome it. In trying to save the business, Evan accepted a very generous sum of money to help study Sarah and catalog the results. But he couldn’t get her to cooperate. There was… an accident. Two men died in a fire. Sarah felt responsible. She withdrew from him, fought him; he was frightened to death of her and what might happen if she lost control again. And he was beginning to feel the pressure. I finally convinced him that if we brought in someone who could relate to Sarah in a slightly less professional manner, connect to her as a friend and mentor, we could use that to our advantage.”
“You have some sort of hold over him, don’t you?”
“We have a history. I met him in grad school, there was something briefly between us, he thought it was more. He’s still in love with me, even after all these years. I suppose I use it, just like anything else.”
“What did you think would happen when I found out the truth?”
“That you would have won her trust by then, and that I might win yours in the end. That’s it.”
Jess watched a pigeon strutting across the grass, looking out of place here. Two people, dead. It made better sense to her now. Wasserman’s evasive manner, his slow disintegration, the fear in his eyes. But something important was still missing. “Where did the money come from that kept the facility afloat? Who is the man in the blue suit?”
“Does it matter? People are interested in her for the same reasons they have always been interested in things like this. Power. They don’t care where it comes from or why. They just want it.”
Bitterness tasted sour at the back of Jess’s throat and she swallowed it away. “You lied to me from the beginning.”
Shelley shook her head. “I never really lied, Jess. I just didn’t tell you all of it. As I’ve said before, you wouldn’t have believed me.”
“You should have given me the chance.”
“Maybe so. But it’s water under the bridge, isn’t it?”
“You’re still her legal guardian, you can move her. All you need to do is petition child and welfare services—”
“You haven’t been listening to me. It’s out of our hands now.”
“But goddammit, why?”
“I’m tired,” Shelley said. “There are too many others involved now. Sometimes you have to bow your head and admit defeat. Maybe you don’t believe that. But you’re young.”
“What are they going to do to her? They’re going to keep pushing her until she breaks, aren’t they?”
“Now, don’t you jump to conclusions. I’m sure she’ll be treated gently enough. The Wasserman Facility is still a li-censed institution, Evan won’t want to risk—”
“So you’re not going to help me,” Jess said. Anger made her cheeks feel hot and her skin prickle. “Goddamn you. You’re a coward,”
“I want you to understand something, all right? I’m not an evil person. I’m not uncaring. I did what I could for her, and what I thought was best for all of us. But I don’t have much time now, and I’ve got to make a choice. I have to choose how to live the last of my days. I can’t be bothered with this anymore.”
They sat in the silence of the afternoon. Jess rose to her feet and blinked back tears of frustration. Betrayal stung like acid. Shelley had been a mentor, someone she had trusted. No way. You’re not going to see me break down. She turned to go.
“There’s one other thing you’ll want to know,” Shelley said, stopping her in her tracks. “Remember I told you that there were signs of abuse on Sarah? Hitting little kids wasn’t the only thing Ed Voorsanger was doing at that house. When Evan ran some genetic tests we found out that Ed was Sarah’s natural father. He never admitted it and his wife wouldn’t hear a word. Of course Annie never talked about it, never talked about the rapes, the sexual and physical abuse she must have been suffering from her father for years. She couldn’t. But those tests proved it to be true.
“After that was when things really began. Suddenly Sarah became very interesting to a lot of people. It’s in her genes, Jess, some sort of mutation, and something like that can be isolated. It can be enhanced. Replicated.”
Jess turned away again. She walked in stunned silence across the spotless stretch of lawn, toward manicured shrubs and pine mulch, into the shadows of the house. She tried to keep her mind from dwelling on the images that had sprung unbidden into her head.
“You’re fighting something you can’t possibly win,” Shelley called after her. “You can’t turn back the clock. Even if you saved her, do you really think it would stop whatever pain you feel? Do you think it would silence those voices in your head?”
“Good-bye, Professor Shelley.” The words felt strange in Jess’s mouth. “God be with you.”
—31—
As she left Shelley’s drive, trees looming over the car like threatening hands, Jess calmed herself enough to think. She thought about how the psychiatric system might deal with a child that was out of control. Foster homes, juvenile halls, outpatient facilities couldn’t hold her; this child was not only violent but utterly beyond the realm of anything humanity had ever seen, or could understand. Where would they put a child like that?