Suffer the Children (37 page)

Jack wondered how much of a family they would ever be again.

“If I can be any help to you, please let me know,” Belter went on. “It isn’t the end of the world, you know. It’s just been a very bad year. For you, and everyone else in Port Arbello. But it’s over now.” He held out his arms to receive the sleeping child.

Jack looked once more into the face of his daughter, and kissed her gently.

“I love you,” he whispered. “I always have. I’m so sorry, my baby. So very sorry.”

Then he placed his child in the doctor’s aims, and Sarah Conger was taken away from the house on Conger’s Point. As he watched the car taking his daughter from her home, Jack Conger wondered if it would, indeed, be all over now. He hoped so.

He stood alone in the driving snow and watched the taillights disappear. He raised one hand in a final salute.

“Sarah,” he whispered. And then again: “Sarah …”

A week passed, then two. Port Arbello began to return to normal, though it was a slightly different normal. Most of the children returned to walking to school, but some of them kept on riding. “What happened once could happen again,” some of the parents were saying.

Three days after Sarah walked out of the woods, Carl and Barbara Stevens put their house on the market. Rose Conger was surprised when she got the listing for it, and turned it down. She explained that she was taking some time off to recuperate, but that was only part of the truth. The rest of it was that she couldn’t face seeing Barbara Stevens again.

Marilyn Burton continued to operate her dress shop, and people noticed that she was beginning to talk to herself. For a while many of the women in Port Arbello made an effort to drop in on her as often as possible, but it didn’t seem to do any good. After a while they stopped dropping in, and if Marilyn Burton’s habit became worse, no one knew about it.

Martin Forager did his best to keep the talk alive, but as the days dragged on and nothing else happened, people began to tell him to let it be; they’d just as soon forget. He couldn’t, of course, and few nights passed without Marty Forager suddenly standing up in the tavern and drunkenly demanding that someone find out what really did happen to his daughter. After a while people stopped paying attention.

Jimmy Tyler’s parents acted as if nothing had happened.
They kept his room just as it had been on the day he disappeared, and always set a place for him at the table. Mrs. Tyler told everyone that she expected Jimmy home any day now, and that the waiting was hard. But she also insisted that she was holding up well under it and it would all be over soon, when Jimmy came home. The people of Port Arbello clucked sympathetically, but shook their heads when Mrs. Tyler wasn’t around. They saw another Port Arbello legend in the making.

For Jack and Rose Conger, the weeks after Sarah left their home were difficult Rose stayed in the house almost all the time; after the second week she telephoned the Port Arbello Realty Company to tell them she would not be back. They were not surprised; rather, they were relieved. They had been trying to figure out the most diplomatic way of telling her that her services would no longo: be necessary, that Conger was no longer a name to be proud of in Port Arbello.

Jack Conger couldn’t stay at home. He had a paper to run, and he had to try to act as if nothing were wrong. It was impossible, of course, and he imagined that people were looking at him strangely even when they weren’t. He found that he was spending most of his time barricaded in his office, talking to no one but Sylvia Bannister.

Sylvia had come into his office on his first day back at the Port Arbello
Courier
and had closed the door firmly behind her.

“Are you going to be all right?” she had asked him without preamble.

“That depends on what you call all right,” he had said. “I intend to go on living, and go on working, if that’s what you mean.”

“I suppose that’s what I meant,” Sylvia had said. Then she had left his office as abruptly as she had entered it.

The Congers told Elizabeth that her sister had finally had to be put in an institution, and she had accepted it without further explanation. She had not asked any questions about the day Sarah had come out of the woods, and while they thought it was a little odd, they accepted it gratefully. Neither Jack nor Rose wished to discuss that day, and they counted themselves lucky that Elizabeth, too, seemed to want to forget it.

In early November, about a month after Sarah was sent to the Ocean Crest Institute, Jack and Rose Conger were sitting in the small study at the back of the house. Jack was reading; Rose was trying to read. Without knocking, Elizabeth came into the room and sat down on the sofa beside her mother. When Rose looked up to see what she wanted, Elizabeth was staring at the portrait of the young girl that hung above the mantel. Rose glanced up at the picture.

“Sometimes it’s hard to remember that she isn’t you,” Rose mused. Elizabeth looked at her mother sharply.

“Well, she isn’t,” Elizabeth said petulantly. “I don’t think she looks anything like me at all.”

Jack set his book aside and smiled at his daughter. “You wouldn’t have said that two years ago, or three. Of course, you’re older than she was when that picture was painted, but when you were that age you looked exactly like her.”

“I’m not like her,” Elizabeth said flatly.

“Well, no one said you are, dear,” Rose said. “All your father or anyone else ever said was that you looked like her.”

“I don’t want to look like her,” Elizabeth said, her face growing slightly red with anger. “She’s an awful person, and I don’t want anything to do with her. I wish you’d take the picture down.”

“Take it down?” Rose said, puzzled. “Why on earth should we take it down?” She examined it once more,
trying to see what her daughter could dislike in it. She could see nothing.

“Because I want you to,” Elizabeth said. “I think it should go back in the attic, where you found it.”

“I don’t see any reason to put it away,” Jack said. “I should think you’d be proud of it. Not every girl has a portrait like that of herself.”

“It isn’t me,” Elizabeth insisted, her anger swelling. Her parents glanced at each other nervously.

“Well,” Jack said, hesitating, “if it means that much to you—”

“It does,” Elizabeth declared. “I never want to see that picture again. I hate it.” She paused and glared at the picture, at the little girl who looked so much like Elizabeth smiling down at her.
“I hate you!”
Elizabeth suddenly shouted at the picture. Then she ran from the study, and a moment later her parents heard her pounding up the stairs to her room. They looked at each other again, and there was worry in their eyes.

“What do you suppose brought that on?” Jack said.

Rose thought about it a moment, and when she spoke it was in a manner of thinking out loud.

“She seems to be changing lately. Have you noticed it? She isn’t like she used to be. She’s starting to get a little sloppy. Just little things. And she’s started arguing with me. It used to be that if I asked her to do something she either did it immediately or it was already done. Lately she’s started arguing with me, or simply not doing what I ask her to do. And she fiat out refused to do something for Mrs. Goodrich the other day. You should have heard Mrs. Goodrich!”

Jack chuckled. “I have heard Mrs. Goodrich. Thirty years ago I flatly refused to do something she told me to do. I heard her then, and it was the first and last time I ever refused to do anything she asked me to do.”

“I suspect it’ll be the last time for Elizabeth, too.” Rose smiled. Then her smile faded, and her voice grew serious again.

“But, really, Jack, haven’t you noticed it too? Or is it just my imagination?” Rose bit at her lower lip anxiously. “I’m afraid my imagination works overtime these days.”

Jack thought it over and realized that Rose was right Elizabeth had been changing, but it wasn’t anything serious, as far as he could see. Elizabeth, in his opinion, was simply beginning to act like any other thirteen-year-old girl.

“I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. After all, she’s been through just as much as we have, and her life’s changed just as much as ours. We can’t expect her to be the same as she always was. You’re not and I’m not—why should she be?”

“I don’t know, really,” Rose said thoughtfully. “I’m not sure I’m even worried. In a way, it’s kind of a relief. She was so perfect, she sometimes made me feel incompetent I could never handle Sarah the way she could.”

Jack seemed to stiffen, and Rose realized that it was the first time either of them had mentioned Sarah in a month. They hadn’t been to visit her yet; it was almost as if they were trying to pretend that she hadn’t existed. But she had.

The next day they drove to Ocean Crest, forty miles south of Port Arbello. It was close enough to make visiting Sarah easy, but far enough away so that Port Arbello would be able to feel safe. Sarah would be there for a very long time.

It was a difficult visit. The child sat in front of them, her enormous brown eyes fixed on a spot somewhere in space, somewhere Rose and Jack could not go.

She did not resist when each of them embraced her, nor did she respond.

“She’s always like that,” the nurse explained. “So far she hasn’t responded to anything. She eats, but the food has to be put in her mouth.” When Rose seemed
to be on the verge of tears, the nurse hastened to explain.

“It isn’t anything to worry about,” she said. “Sarah’s had a bad trauma, and she’s reacting to it She’s temporarily withdrawn, just as normal people do. Except that she was already so withdrawn that now she’s practically shut down. But she’ll come out of it. I’m sure she will.”

They made the drive home in silence. When they were in the house Rose said, “Fix me a drink, will you? I feel like I need one. I’m going up to say hello to Elizabeth.”

“Kiss her once for me,” Jack said. He headed for the study as Rose disappeared upstairs.

A couple of minutes later, when Rose went into the study, she found her husband standing in the middle of the room, staring at the empty place on the wall above the fireplace.

“It’s gone,” he said. “She put it back in the attic.”

Rose stared at the blank space herself, then went to the study door.

“Elizabeth!” she called.

“What?” The muffled shout came through indistinctly from upstairs. Rose’s eyes narrowed, and she went to the foot of the stairs.

“Come down here,” she said sharply.

“In a minute,” she heard from upstairs.

“Now!”
Rose commanded. She stalked back to the study. A very long minute later Elizabeth walked into the room.

“You used to knock before you entered a room,” Rose pointed out to her.

“Oh, Mother,” Elizabeth protested.

“Don’t whine,” Jack said sharply. “It doesn’t sound attractive. Did you take that picture down?”

“What picture?” Elizabeth said evasively.

“You know perfectly well what picture,” Rose snapped. “The one above the fireplace.”

“Oh, that,” Elizabeth said, offhandedly. “I told you I hated it.”

“Where did you put it?”

“Back in the attic,” Elizabeth said. “That’s where it belongs.” Then she marched out of the study.

“Well,” Jack said, “I guess that’s that.”

“I don’t know,” Rose said. “We certainly don’t have to leave the picture there. It seems to me that if we want to hang
our
picture in
our
study in
our
house,
our
daughter is no one to tell us we can’t.”

“But if it means so much to her—” Jack began.

But Rose cut him off. “It’s not that. It’s just that she’s starting to act like an only child.”

“In a way,” Jack said softly, “she is, isn’t she?”

The picture of the unknown child stayed in the attic.

Ray Norton drove slowly along the Conger’s Point Road, partly because he was keeping only one eye on the road and partly because he was getting older, and driving more slowly was a part of getting older. He would be retiring next year, and he was ready. Port Arbello was changing, and Ray Norton was changing, and he no longer felt that he was the best chief of police the town could have. He’d kept this feeling a secret, but he knew it was an open secret As the years had worn on he had turned more and more of the work of his department over to his deputy chief. Port Arbello had ten policemen now, and even they weren’t enough.

Not like the old days, Norton thought as he stopped the slowly cruising car entirely. Everything’s changing.

He was parked by the Congers’ field, and he was watching the work that was going on in the woods on the far side of the field. An apartment complex was being built there, and though Ray Norton didn’t approve of it, even he had to admit that, for what they were doing, they were doing a good job. The complex would fit well on the Point, long and low, snug to the ground against the north winds of winter.

As he watched the building progress it occurred to him that what he really resented was not the building itself, but the fact that the building would spell an end to what had become, for him, an annual tradition.