Cursed Be the Child (29 page)

Vicki gave him a tired, sidelong look.

The neurologist wanted to refer them to a psychotherapist who specialized in working with children. The woman had an outstanding reputation. It wasn’t going too far to say she’d positively worked magic with a number of profoundly disturbed young people.

Vicki suppressed a shudder.

The psychologist had an office in the city.

Her name was Selena Lazone.

— | — | —

Thirty-Two

It was Monday morning, an hour before the alarm and sunrise. Not able to gauge when she’d left sleep and had become so wide awake she thought she could see through her eyelids, Selena Lazone felt a foreboding, heavy sense of the future weighing down on her. Next to her, David lay on his stomach, body subtly moving with the loose inhalations and exhalations of deep slumber. David’s naked body radiated warmth that failed to warm her.

The hour before dawn, Selena thought, and I am afraid. There had been the omens and portents—invading her life, signs of her own past and the supernatural, ripping at the facade of normalcy she had created for herself. She couldn’t discount it or dismiss it or try to avoid reality by filling in her moments with the bits and business of day-to-day living. She had seen and recognized the threat that was always the ultimate threat—Death.

Selena thought of Kris Heidmann, as she had thought of her and thought of her and thought of her. Dead Kris Heidmann! Kris had lived 14 years and had been dead eight days, dead by her own despairing hand. I could have helped her, Selena thought, if only, if only…

Thinking of a child’s death and thinking of my own death, and in the hour before dawn, Selena thought, I am afraid. And I am so alone. She touched David’s shoulder.

“David?”

“Hmm?”

“I want…to be with you.” She hated saying it that way.

She looked into the darkness overhead. We are born alone and we die alone and in between there are so many hours in which we are condemned to our aloneness. That was it—the human condition.

And without someone else, without love, life was too empty to endure.

Then because she felt so damned bad, she said it aloud as she had never before permitted herself to say it. “David, I want you to hold me. David, I want you to love me.”

She felt him stir and felt his breath on her face. He’d propped himself up on an elbow. His hand moved to her belly, patting and petting. It wasn’t foreplay, not yet; it was foreplay to foreplay. Then there would be sex.

“No,” she said. “Not that.”

“What is it you want?” he said. “Tell me.”

I don’t want to be alone and afraid in the dark. I want to be held and loved and touched by you.

She said none of that. She answered David Greenfield’s question with a question, the one she had promised never to ask.

“Do you love me, David?”

The reply took awhile, but it came, exactly as she feared it would. “No.”

He moved away from her and lay back heavily. The distance between them felt wide and cold. “I love you, David,” she said. “You have to know that. Doesn’t it mean anything?”

“Why are you doing this, Selena?”

“I love you, goddamn you, and I want you to love me!”

He sighed. “You’re asking the impossible, Selena. I do not love you. I cannot love you. Or anyone.”

“That is bullshit, David Greenfield! You are a human being. Your mother and father gave you life. That makes you a person! And people want love and need love. They want and need to give love. David, it’s love that makes us human.”

In a voice so calm and detached it could have been termed clinical, David Greenfield said, “Why me, Selena? What made you decide to share an apartment and a bed with me? You know the way I am. You know what I am.”

“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe I know you better than you know yourself.”

David’s tone remained flat. He could have been politely conducting a telephone consumer survey. “Did you choose me as your live-in punishment, Selena? I’m Selena Lazone’s cross-in-residence. Is that what I am? Or maybe I’m your case study in abnormal psychology.”

She did not answer.

David said nothing more, and then, after a little while, he got out of bed. She heard the whisper of his clothing as he dressed.

“Where are you going?”

“Out,” he said and paused. “Do you want me to come back?”

She thought about it. “Yes.

“Things go back to what they’ve been?” he asked. “You can live with that?”

She shuddered. “Yes,” she said, wishing for that much or that little, even as she realized it would not, could not be.

There would be changes soon. That was
Baht,
momentous turnings and twistings of lives.

And there would be endings.

It had the feeling of
deja vu,
even though it was not precisely that. She knew the Barringers, felt she had met them before. That kept popping into Selena Lazone’s mind as she conducted the initial interview with the parents of her prospective new client.

It was one o’clock in the afternoon. The Barringers had the Danish modern armchairs in Selena’s Michigan Avenue office, Melissa on her mother’s lap. In a blue dress, knee socks and shiny black shoes, two ribbons in her hair, the little girl might have stepped out of the pages of a catalog offering “Fashion for Bored Children.” She exhibited none of the agitation or curiosity one might expect in such a situation. She hardly even blinked.

Facing them in a straight-backed chair, the window behind her to turn her into a more or less anonymous silhouette, Selena had a clipboard on her knee, a pen in her hand and questions to ask. She’d already thoroughly reviewed the preliminary evaluations from Lawn Crest, and, frankly, she didn’t see much validity in most of the standard tests administered as a matter of course by the hospital. Once in awhile, a projective test might reveal a psychotic, perhaps a paranoid schizophrenic, but the majority of tests were valuable in confirming only what a psychotherapist already suspected.

Actually, the questions in this introductory interview were not all that important for informational purposes. Later, if it was agreed to proceed with psychotherapy, there would be more meaningful, even painful questions for Vicki and Warren Barringer. For the present, Selena wanted simply to observe the Barringers to form initial assessments of the family’s dynamics.

Warren Barringer: Brusque but articulate responses. Seems to think this is all a waste of time. Amusing, maybe, possibly interesting—but a waste. Obviously a bright man. No less obviously a man who thinks himself bright. Seems relaxed, self-confident. Too relaxed, too self-confident?

Had she read something of his? He does seem so familiar—they both do—but she didn’t recognize the titles of the novels he mentioned. She asked him what he was writing currently. He explained he didn’t like to dissipate creative energies talking about projects until they were well along. She noted unease and thin hostility in that response.

Somewhat sensitive and secretive about your writing, Professor? Selena wondered. Do you have other secrets to hide? Well, who doesn’t?

Vicki Barringer: So straight-forward, albeit on the shy side, that you can read her not like a book but a child’s primer. The kind of woman that you think of as Midwestern. Not plain and not really pretty and fairly comfortable with that reality as shown by natural hair color and a style to suit her face and not fashion. She’s worn down now, really worn, but discovering strength of character she probably didn’t know she had. A deep rooted and powerful spirituality.

Selena frowned. Spirituality? Where did I get that? Selena asked herself. No, what makes me feel that?

Dukkeripin?
Second sight? A little flash of Gypsy-style ESP?

Suddenly a picture exploded in her mind of David. Somehow, David was a link!

David was the connection.

Other connections were tenuous and strong, dark and light, subtle, dangerous, good and evil and spiritual, all working together in inexplicable, inevitable consort.

It was
Baht.
It was fate.

It was not happenstance that had led the Barringers to her office. Mother and father and daughter were here, right this minute, because here was where they had to be. And David, too, his presence was here.

But why? What was the will of
Baht?
What did Fate hold for the Barringers?

And David?

And me?

There was a way to find out.

Selena rose, putting the clipboard on her desk and smoothing her skirt. “Well, now I think it’s time Melissa and I had a talk.”

“Missy,” Vicki Barringer said.

“What’s that?”

“Missy, that’s what we call her.”

“Yes,” Selena said. She held out her hand. “Would you like to come with me, Missy?”

The little girl smiled. She slipped off Vicki Barringer’s lap. Her long fingers reached out.

Selena felt the chill and the challenge in the little girl’s grasp. And she knew that
Baht,
fate itself, held her by the hand.

— | — | —

Thirty-Three

The three-foot-tall teddy bear on the top shelf had dark brown fur, a small, friendly smile, and a nasty-looking raw patch where its left eye had been. A year before, a four-year-old girl had gouged out Mr. Bear’s eye. She was explaining, “This is how my aunty hurt my eye.” That wasn’t exactly correct, since the child was missing her right eye, not the left.

The playroom, shared with another psychologist, was just down the hall from Selena’s office. At first glance, it could have been a classroom in a day care center or kindergarten. There were the shelves loaded with toys, a blackboard, two felt bulletin boards and bright posters. There were huggy blankets and bean bag chairs large enough for adults and kids.

There were, however, a number of differences between this room and what you might find in a school. Instead of cold tile marked with circles, squares and the classic hopscotch design, the floor was thick, soft, beige carpeting, suitable for crawling, rolling or pitching a fit. In a locked cabinet were such items as whiffle bats (“You want to hit something really hard? You can use this.”) and anatomically correct dolls so that, for example, a three-year-old child whose vocabulary didn’t equal the horror of his experience might reveal the homosexual rape performed on him by Daddy’s friend. The mirrored east wall was one-way glass; there were concealed microphones and a video camera so that the playroom could be monitored and recorded from the small adjoining room.

Releasing the little girl’s hand and glad of it, Selena said, “Now we can talk and get to know each other.”

She had no response. The child walked to the toy shelves.

Selena settled herself into one of the bean bag chairs. “Is there a toy you’d like to play with?”

No reply. A silent little girl, with her back to Selena, picked up a green-faced Oscar the Grouch puppet and put it down, picked up a G.I. Joe doll and put it down, picked up a Skipper doll and put it down.