The Reach

—1—

Present day

The Thomas Ward School of Psychology is located on Boston’s Beacon Street, within a connected row of converted private homes that seem to ask nothing more than to blend in and keep out of sight. It is a small school, modestly funded, but well known within certain circles as one of the best of its kind in the country.

Jess Chambers climbed the front steps to the porch and paused by the door to the administrative offices, looking absently at the small bronze sign and readying herself for whatever waited for her within. She had been here many times before, but this time was different and she knew it. Professor Shelley’s voice on the phone had contained a conspiratorial edge, something she had never heard before. Shelley was not the sort to fraternize with students outside of class. The call had piqued Jess’s curiosity, as it had obviously been meant to do.

She checked the fall of her black cotton slacks and adjusted the collar of her blouse before stepping through the heavy wooden doors and into the reception area, a small, cramped room guarding the administrative and faculty offices.

The room smelled of stale coffee. Several Styrofoam cups sat discarded on the horseshoe countertop facing the door, and Jess resisted the nearly compulsive urge to straighten them up. Computer printouts were tacked to the walls, listing current events relating to the field and lecture times, along with an upcoming conference poster. A table to her left contained stacks of papers and magazines in an organized clutter, below a window that looked out onto the street and the T-tracks, where the trains rattled and shook on their way into the city. A bit of gray light filtered inside, but did not do much for the decor.

Though she could hear muffled voices somewhere, the outer rooms were empty. In Professor Shelley’s office she sat down in the slick vinyl chair facing the desk and crossed her hands in her lap.

The room was filled with odds and ends, files and folders, curling news photographs of various unsmiling people tacked to the walls. A few of them she recognized as researchers or faculty members; most she did not.

Though Shelley was known for throwing an occasional pop quiz, she was well respected among her students. It was the mystery that surrounded her which gave them pause; some claimed to have seen her sitting in the butterfly position for hours, her eyes closed. A few had even insisted they’d seen her levitating. These stories were told in the thirdhand way of urban legend, often around a bar table, and Jess did not believe them for a second.

But Shelley’s private life remained a mystery. What was it about psychiatrists and psychologists anyway? Complex minds unraveling each other. And yet such a need for secrecy. Jess found herself staring in mild amusement at a chart that supposedly revealed the details of the human aura. One thing was certain, no one had ever accused Shelley of being dull.

The professor was at the door; Jess hadn’t heard her come in. “There you are,” Shelley said. “Hope I didn’t pull you away from something important?”

“I’ve caught up on my reading.”

“You always did seem to be ahead of the game. Maybe I should give a bit more, just to keep you busy.”

Jess risked a smile. Students complained that Shelley gave more reading than the rest of their classes combined. Slightly more to it than good-natured grumbling, she thought, to be fair. She took Shelley’s classes for the challenge, and she welcomed it, but there were others who did not feel they should be spending every spare moment in the library.

Shelley moved rather carefully now around a mountain of old exam papers to her desk, a tall woman in her early forties who bore a striking resemblance to the actress Diane Keaton. She wore a chocolate long-sleeve mock-ribbed cardigan that looked expensive. Her hair was cut in a fashionable, shoulder-length style, and she was blessed with aristocratic bone structure and very long fingers. Slight calluses on the tips, Jess noticed. A piano player, perhaps, or strings.

Normally she carried herself with elegance and style, but she seemed worn down today, too pale, and the circles under her eyes were darker than usual. Something was clearly going on with the professor, though what exactly that might be, Jess could not guess.

“Let’s see how much of that reading made an impression, then,” Shelley said, sitting down in her chair. “You’re familiar with Jacob’s reconstructive study on depression?”

Jess recited from memory. “A five-step model, beginning with a long-standing history of early childhood problems, which leads to an acceleration of problems in adolescence, an isolation from peer groups, and a dissolution of social relationships, which finally ends in a justification of the suicidal act or attempt.”

“And earlier than that?”

“Extreme separation anxiety or isolation in early childhood, regressive behavior. Complaints of stomach pains.”

Shelley nodded, her graceful fingers steepled before her nose. “But I’m referring to instances of total withdrawal. Come on now. No more book definitions. Give me your thoughts.”

Jess felt slightly off balance and didn’t like it. Come on, girl, get a grip, as her friend Charlie would say. “Let’s see. The child is dependent on a caregiver to an unusual degree. Any unfamiliar event or surrounding sends her into a fugue state, caused mainly by the child’s inability to accurately express what is wrong. Undue stress would come from feeling depressed, without actually understanding the concept. In the most severe cases, lack of response can be a sign of a serious mental disease—brain damage, autism, even schizophrenia.”

“Interesting.” Shelley was not one given to praise easily. Jess could not tell if she was satisfied or not. The professor shuffled some papers on her desk. “Now you’re wondering why you’re here.”

The thought had crossed her mind. She had taken a class with Shelley once before and received an A, one of two that had been given that semester, she’d heard. Now she had her for neurobiological disorders, which she was finding very interesting. Male teachers had approached her in a less professional manner before; she was well aware of the effect she had on men. But Shelley was a woman. And this was certainly not a private tutoring session.

“I took the liberty of examining your records,” Shelley said. “You’re interested in child psychology, severe developmental disorders in particular. Any reason?”

“My younger brother was autistic.”

“I see. So there’s a personal element in your interest. But it has to stay out of your professional conduct. I say this because what I’m going to talk to you about requires it.”

“Professor, with all due respect, if I didn’t think I was capable of remaining professional, under any circumstance, I wouldn’t be enrolled here.”

It came out a little more forcefully than she’d intended. But Shelley simply nodded and smiled. “You’ve done well in my courses. Don’t think I haven’t noticed. That’s one of the reasons you’re here today. And the reports from your internship at the DSU clinic are stellar. You haven’t chosen a topic for your dissertation?”

“Not yet.”

“There’s a girl whose case I’ve been keeping an eye on for a long time,” Shelley said. “Right now she’s in the Wasserman facility downtown. She’s severely medicated, completely withdrawn for the past several weeks, though she has shown the ability to communicate. The director of the clinic has asked for my help in the past, and we’ve had some success. We haven’t been able to reach her this time.”

“Is there a diagnosis?”

“Dr. Wasserman believes she has a schizophreniform disorder.”

Jess felt the familiar early buzz of excitement that came with an opportunity. “How old is she?”

“Ten.”

“Awfully young for that sort of illness to manifest, isn’t it?”

“It is. Here’s the nuts and bolts of it, Jess. I’m not sure the diagnosis fits, but Dr. Wasserman disagrees. We do agree, however, that she may be more responsive to someone younger, less polished, if you forgive the description. To be honest, we could have given this to a counselor on staff, but I wanted to give the experience to one of my own.”

“I’m glad to have it.”

“Good. You have a rare mix of intellect and empathy. I think you might appeal to her. I want you to test her— Stanford-Binet, Weschler, Peabody, Rorschach. Let’s hear any hypotheses you might have, suggestions for treatment. Then, if I like what you’ve done and Sarah shows progress, I’ll allow you to present the case to the board of trustees.”

“It would be an honor, Professor.”

“You’ll do just fine, I’m counting on it. But I want you to understand something. This is not some case study from a textbook. It is not a hypothetical situation. This is a very disturbed child we’re talking about. She can be unpredictable, even violent. She’s had an unusual history from the moment she was born. I know because I delivered her. I’ve been keeping tabs on her ever since.”

Jess tried to picture a younger Professor Shelley in hospital scrubs. She had heard that the professor had been a practicing physician, but had thought it nothing more than a rumor. Shelley was a very good teacher. It seemed to Jess that she had been born to it.

“This girl is… unusual. She’s been in foster care and institutions since she was little more than a year old. I don’t know if she’s seen the outside world more than a handful of times in her life. Don’t misunderstand me. Most of the time she is simply catatonic, and that may be all she’ll be for you. But I want you to be on your guard.”

Shelley rose, signaling an end to their chat. A thread on her cardigan dangled down and trailed through the papers on her desk, at odds with the rest of her. She didn’t seem to notice.

—2—

The Wasserman Children’s Psychiatric Facility is located in the Boston neighborhood of Mattapan, in a section of town that has not enjoyed the improvements new money can bring. It sits on the edge of a 250-acre parcel of land that formerly housed the Boston State Hospital for the mentally ill, until that campus was shut down in 1979.

The location is an odd mix of desolate, abandoned wild-lands in the middle of urban sprawl. In this particular neighborhood and its cousins, Roxbury and Dorchester, it is not unusual to hear gunshots on a sunny Wednesday afternoon. Still, the facility is as pleasant as it can be considering the circumstances, a large brick building resembling an elementary school, set well back from the road and against a backdrop of wild grasses and shrubbery, with a wide lawn and a playground in the rear. The only details that set it apart from other buildings of its type are the wire mesh and bars on the windows, and the chain-link fence and guardhouse, where the man or woman on duty has a police baton and pepper spray within easy reach. There are many disturbed young patients here, some in their late teens, not all of them easily controlled.

Dr. Wasserman stood when Jess Chambers entered his office, and extended his hand. He was a bit younger than she had expected, mid to late forties, balding in front and mildly effeminate, wearing a forest-green turtleneck and corduroys, and delicate glasses with thin wire frames balanced upon a hawkish nose. His grip was moist and limp, and he had a slight eye tic that made it seem as if he were trying to wink at her.

“So glad you could come. Jean has told me all about you. You’re quite a student, isn’t that so? Lovely to know of the talented young people joining the profession.”

“Thank you.”

“Please, sit.”

Dr. Wasserman’s office was in marked contrast to Professor Shelley’s organized clutter. Everything was neatly in its place here, from the framed diplomas and awards on the walls, to the neatly labeled file cabinets. A polished-wood coatrack stood in the corner. The huge oak desk was bare except for an intercom, pen and pencil, notepad, file folder, a lamp, and a notebook computer. Too neat; to Jess, it hinted at a compulsive personality.

Wasserman sat down behind the desk and leaned forward on folded hands, as if imparting a secret. “Jean has told me the course and fieldwork you’ve completed so far, and has assured me you are competent. So I’ll skip by that and assume that you’ll handle Sarah extremely gently.”

“Of course.”

“Now, there are some things you should know before we proceed further. One, Sarah has no relatives and no visitors. She rarely leaves the grounds. If you’d like to take her anywhere during your visits, and I mean anywhere, even inside this building, you must contact me first. Agreed?” “Fine.”

“Secondly, she is on a strict schedule of medication. This schedule must be kept to the minute. We’ll try to plan your visits at alternate times, but that will not always be possible.”

“What is she on?”

“Hmmm.” Wasserman pushed at his glasses with a finger, opened the file folder on his desk. He punctuated each word by tapping on the file. “Let. Us. See. Neuroleptics, mostly. And sedatives. Sarah is extremely sensitive and can be devilishly clever. We had a new orderly here once who felt such a number of pills weren’t necessary. Sarah managed to get out of her room. It took us hours to find her. She’d holed up in a ventilation shaft. Lucky she didn’t make it out to the street.”

Lucky for who, Jess could not help thinking. “I understood from Professor Shelley that you would tell me a little about Sarah’s psychiatric background. It would help to know the case history. Perhaps if I could look at your file—”

“We’d prefer you to open your own file. Start fresh, so to speak. We’re really looking for a new perspective from someone who has no preconceived notions of the case. I can tell you all you need to know for the moment. Feel free to ask me what you like.” Wasserman stood up abruptly and took a white lab coat from the rack near the window. “Shall we take a quick tour?”

The Wasserman Facility was indeed a converted school building. “We’re a modest enterprise, privately endowed, but we do receive the occasional grant for research purposes. We have three psychiatrists on call, not including myself of course, four full-time counselors, and a number of support staff. Classrooms and evening quarters on the second floor, private rooms and conference areas on the third. This first floor is mostly staff offices, along with a small exercise facility and playroom. And then there’s the basement, where the more difficult patients are given quiet time.”

It was like most facilities Jess had seen. White tile floors, prints of colorful paintings hung on cream-colored walls, along with the occasional cluttered bulletin board and posters of children’s television characters. They passed a small room that contained the sad remains of someone’s birthday party: sagging balloons tied to the door handle, trash bags spilling over with paper plates and napkins. The corridors were cool, clean if a little tired. Everything had the look of having been scrubbed too many times.

Jess was reminded of her mother’s struggle to keep her brother out of places just like this. Her youngest memories of Michael were filled with a sense of nostalgia mixed with regret. The Chamberses did not have enough money for proper treatment, and after her parents’ divorce an even larger burden was assumed by Jess’s mother. Eventually they had moved from the little saltbox in Edgecomb to a trailer park on Indian Road in White Falls. During their years living there Jess was constantly confronted with reminders of a life that could be hard and cruel. Drunks, wife beaters, and abused animals were her constant neighbors.

They walked back down the hall, their footsteps echoing through the empty corridor. An open doorway revealed a black man in blue janitor’s overalls pushing a mop across a bare floor; he smiled as he glanced at them and then away, his mop moving with more purpose.

“That’s Jeffrey,” Wasserman said, after they’d passed. “He’s sort of a jack-of-all-trades around here, I’ve had him for years. He cleans up the place, acts as a general handyman, even helps with the patients. They love him.”

The raised voices of children grew louder as they turned a corner and passed by the empty cafeteria. “Forgive me,” she said, “but you seem young to be running a place like this.”

“My grandfather started a clinic many years ago in West-wood, and moved to this location when I was just a boy. He was a great man. I’m simply following in his footsteps.” Wasserman stopped in front of a set of wide double doors. “This is one of my favorite places.”

Inside the carpeted room were different kinds of play sets, tunnels and rings, blocks, tables, and chalkboards. Eight or nine children crawled and tumbled over themselves and played with several white-shirted adults, and for a moment Jess was fooled into thinking she was in a playroom like any other, before the details bled through. Wire mesh over the windows. A child of perhaps six in the corner rocking slowly back and forth in repeated, rhythmic motion, another muttering to himself and patting his head roughly with his palm. A third rubbing her chapped hands together again and again over a plastic toy sink.

She had done group casework before, assisted in community outreach programs, visited hospitals and sat in on counseling sessions. But this would be different.

Face it, head-on. This is what you want, what you need.

Her brother’s death had given Jess a deep resolve to make the health care environment easier and more accessible for mental health patients, especially children. It had been a long road, but now here she was and it was time to put up or shut up.

“We try to keep the numbers down,” Wasserman was saying. “They’re easily distracted.”

“Is she here?”

“Sarah? Oh no. These children are minimally supervised and generally nonviolent. We’ve had to keep her separated for some time now.”

A young man spotted them from across the room. He moved in a sidestep, shuffling motion, skirting the younger children and coming to their side like a nervous bird looking to be fed. “Twenty-three. Twenty-three steps.”

“Hello, Dennis.” Wasserman smiled. “Dennis helps out with the younger children.”

“Do I go to bed early tonight?” Dennis said. He had a plump, boyish face; he was dressed like a boy of six or seven, red baseball cap, blue striped pullover shirt and blue shorts, Velcro shoes with long, white socks pulled up almost to his knees. The stubble on his cheeks stood out in awkward contrast to the rest of him. “Is it Thuuuurrrs-day? Thursdays are early nights. Friday I go outside. Not Wednesday.”

“This is Miss Chambers, Dennis. She’ll be visiting us for a while. You might see her, and if you do I don’t want you to be afraid. She’s our friend.”

“Do you love me? Then say it. Sa-aaay it.”

“I love you, Dennis.”

“I make her spirit glow.” Dennis smiled brightly and shuffled away, muttering to himself and pulling at the brim of his cap.

“One of our roles here is to place various psychopathologies in a developmental context. Most of Dennis’s mannerisms would not seem all that out of place in a four-year-old. However, in a boy of almost eighteen, they are extreme. At the core is our belief that most adolescent pathologies stem from normal childhood development.”

“Sigmund Freud.”

“He pioneered the concept, yes.”

“But you don’t adhere to his theory of psychosexual development.”

“Not as a general rule. Piaget’s cognitive theory is more appropriate.”

They watched the group of children for a moment. “There are things to learn about each of them,” Wasserman said. “For example, Dennis doesn’t like to be touched. Most of the time he’s harmless and quiet, but if you touch him he’ll become extremely agitated. That is a simple rule. For Sarah, you’ll have to learn more.”

“And what about biological causes of mental disorder?”

Wasserman looked at her like a parent at a misbehaving child. She was suddenly aware that he was lecturing to her. “This is a progressive facility, Miss Chambers. Our staff is well educated. We treat chemical imbalance with medications, and provide support with play therapy and modeling.”

Wasserman turned and proceeded out the door. After a moment, and a deep breath to calm her singing nerves, Jess followed, her briefcase tucked tightly under her arm.

“Sarah’s in the basement level at the moment, in one of our quiet rooms,” Wasserman said, as they walked to a set of elevators next to the fire stairs. “You might be a bit shocked at first by her appearance. Let me assure you that everything has been done to make her life here as comfortable as possible. However, she’s been very difficult recently. There are precautions that must be taken in regards to her safety and that of those who work around her. She’s deceptively strong, and as I said before, she can be very clever.”

“I’m curious, Doctor. Why did you introduce me to Dennis?”

“To show you that not all of our guests are so severely restricted. And to see how you reacted to him.”

“I hope I didn’t disappoint you.”

“It’s important that they not sense your discomfort. If you’re unsure of how to proceed in a given situation, and all of us are at some point, it is best to refer to your superior.”

The elevator doors opened onto another world. Heavy cinder block walls and bare concrete floors met them as they stepped from the elevator into a narrow rectangular room. The overhead lighting was bright and unwavering, but it was the shadows Jess noticed. Clinging like cobwebs to the corners, they disappeared when she turned her gaze on them, but then returned to lurk at the edges of her sight. Perhaps it was her mood.

A heavy woman wearing a white coat stepped out from behind a desk as they approached. She was large through the shoulders and hips and very dark-skinned, and moved with a quiet shuffle so that she seemed to avoid the light, slipping through it like one of the shadows.

“This is Maria. She’ll be here whenever you need anything. Maria is well trained in handling our difficult patients. And her English is getting much better. Isn’t that so?”

"Si,” Maria said. Pockmarked skin stretched across darkly plump cheeks. Her expression was inscrutable, but her eyes darted nervously back and forth. “Gracias, thank you.”

They entered a corridor lined with solid metal doors on either side, each of them with an eye-high, centered window. The air smelled damp with the slightest hint of lemon cleanser.

Jess could hear noises from behind the walls, thumps and muffled shouting. She concentrated on Wasserman’s back as he spoke over his shoulder.

“Most of our patients are assigned a counselor and a team that works together to ensure that things are progressing. I’ve taken a personal interest in Sarah, and in this instance you’ll be working directly with Maria and myself. Often you’ll be alone. Sarah tends to react badly to crowds.” Nearly at the end of the corridor, he stopped at a door and turned to her. “Are there any more questions before you have a look?”

About a million of them. Jess squared her own shoulders and faced him. “I have to admit here, Dr. Wasserman, I don’t feel comfortable with what you’ve given me. Really it would be better if I could study the file. I need to know what tests she’s been given, what sort of diagnoses have been made—”

“Sarah has a schizophreniform psychotic disorder. She was diagnosed at age six. As I’m sure you’re aware, diagnoses of this sort prior to six years of age are extremely rare. Sarah was always difficult, but by her sixth birthday she was showing signs of marked withdrawal, looseness of association, and a breakdown of reality testing. There were hallucinations—”

“I understood that those didn’t start until early adolescence.”

“Not in this case.” Wasserman paused and seemed to choose his words carefully. “Sarah began to believe… still believes… that she could influence people. That she could bend things to her will. Fantasies of omnipotence are not uncommon—again, this stems from early childhood—but in Sarah these fantasies extended far beyond the normal stages. And then the phobias and the suicide attempts began. Recently she has grown so uncontrollable that we’ve had no choice but to confine her to the basement for good portions of the day. She fought us by withdrawing in her therapy sessions and refusing her medication. She hasn’t spoken a word in over three months now.”

Wasserman’s gaze kept slipping from the tiny window in the door, to Jess’s face, to some point in the corridor beyond her head.

“What about her parents?”

“Sarah has no surviving relatives, as I believe I told you. That’s the case with so many of the children here, unfortunately. They’ve been either orphaned or abandoned, and the foster care system is simply not well equipped to handle those with more severe mental disorders.” Wasserman glanced at his watch and then dug a set of keys out of the pocket of his white lab coat. “Now, Jean and I agreed that your first contact with her should be alone. Our intent here is to shake things up, draw her out, expose her to someone she might eventually be more comfortable with and who is not associated with me or my staff.”

“I’d still like to see her file.”

Wasserman blinked at her from behind his glasses. “You’re persistent, I’ll give you that. I’ve made my decision. If you need assistance there’s a button on the wall. Maria will let you out.” Wasserman fumbled the key into the lock as if he couldn’t get a handle on it. Then the key turned and the metal door swung open.

—3—

The girl crouched in the middle of a padded room. The restraint jacket that pinned her arms over her chest seemed to swallow her slender, boyish frame. Her black hair hung down far enough that Jess could not get a good look at her features.

If Sarah heard the door open, she gave no sign. Her breathing came slow and deep. A thin line of spittle hung trembling from a strand of hair to the floor.

Jess stopped just inside the door and listened as it swung shut behind her. The noise was enough to make her jump, but she caught hold of herself inside like the clenching of teeth.

“Hello, Sarah,” she said firmly. “My name is Jess Chambers. I’d like to visit with you for a while, if that’s all right.”

There were two ways to go about this: pretend to be occupied with something fascinating, and see if she became curious, or try to engage immediately. Either way it could take days, weeks, to break through. Both options assumed that Sarah was even reachable at all.

The girl had not reacted to her presence, and Jess found herself staring. Were the restraints really necessary? How violent could a ten-year-old possibly be? Perhaps she had tried to harm herself; Shelley had mentioned that she was suicidal. Jess had heard of psychiatric patients tearing at their faces, pulling out their own eyes, digging out their throats. It was difficult to kill yourself with your bare hands, but that didn’t stop some of them from the attempt.

She did not want to appear threatening and so she sat down on the floor against the wall, keeping a good distance, but getting into the girl’s line of sight. She had worn loose clothes specifically for this, a soft suit in neutral colors that covered her wrists and left only her hands and part of her neck bare. She wore contact lenses, her hair held up by a plain, white-cotton Scrunchie.

Remember what you have learned. Finding the real world too much to bear, Sarah had formed her own. It was up to Jess to interpret it. She would be a translator of sorts. To do this she would have to form a bond, allow herself to let the girl in and hope that Sarah would trust her enough, be lucid enough, to let her in too.

She opened her briefcase and removed a lined notebook and pencil. At the top of the first page, she wrote interpersonal contexts, and then, under it: Interaction with peers? Foster homes? Teachers? As she did this she spoke quietly, repeating her name, and why she was there.

It was like talking to herself. When she was a small girl her grandmother Cheryl had a stroke, and the family visited her at the Maine Medical Center in Portland. It was a place she was already well familiar with from various visits with Michael. They had gathered around Grandma Cheryl’s bed, and everyone spoke as if she could hear them, as if at any moment she would sit up and answer their questions. Her grandmother died three days later, having never uttered another word.

But this is different. Obviously Sarah was in a catatonic state, but that did not mean she had always been that way, or that she would not come out of it again. Studies indicated that catatonics were often aware of their surroundings and simply unable to respond. Jess had to believe the girl was listening, that whatever barrier she had erected in her mind did not entirely cut her off from the world.

After a few minutes of note-taking on her observations of the surroundings and Sarah’s condition, she risked a glance, saw that the girl had not moved. The buckles must be hurting her. She thought about loosening the jacket, decided against it. She did not know exactly what Sarah was on. Tranquilizers, Wasserman had said. Neuroleptics.

“I wonder if you could help me come up with some fun things to do,” she said, scribbling on the notepad. “We could try painting. I used to paint a lot when I was your age. I still do, like sometimes when I’m feeling sad or lonely. It’s like I’m putting those feelings down on paper where they can’t hurt me.”

Had the girl moved her head? This was silly. Damn you, Wasserman, for leaving me in here alone. She continued, feeling like a fraud, forcing the anxiety from her voice. This was a familiar, unsettling discomfort. Sarah is not Michael. She was much older than her brother when he died. The two were nothing like each other. Just keep going.

“There are other things I like to do when I’m lonely. I like to watch old movies and eat popcorn. I’m a sucker for a classic romance—Bogart, Grant, Bacall.” She talked some more about the world outside the walls, keeping her voice slow and steady. She held up the notepad to show off a few sketches. After a while she tried a different approach: “Dr. Wasserman told me you’ve been here a long time, Sarah. How do you feel about this place? Do you like it?”

This time she was sure she saw movement, a slight trembling. It could be nothing more than muscle fatigue. Keeping her voice calm and smooth, she said, “I’ve seen places like this before. Most people don’t want to be here. Most people need a friend. I can be your friend. I’ll come visit you whenever you’d like. We can talk about anything you want.”

She shifted, up onto the balls of her feet so that she was mirroring the girl’s crouch. “A place like this would make me upset. All those kids upstairs having fun while you’re stuck down here alone. I wonder if you’ve ever been to the zoo, or a ball game. We could go to those places, if Dr. Wasserman says it’s okay.”

She was concentrating so hard that when the rattling came at the door she jumped. Gaining her feet, she went over and peered out the little window, but could see nothing except the opposite wall of the corridor. The noise did not come again. The button that would bring Maria was at eye level, housed in a small plastic casing, but she did not press it.

When she turned around again, Sarah began to shake. The shaking started in her lower body and spread upward. The buckles on the straitjacket made a slight tinkling sound.

The line of spittle attached to her hair danced and curved, but did not break.

“I know you can hear me. I know you’re in there. I’m not going to hurt you.” Jess approached the girl and crouched, showed her open hands. “What are you afraid of, Sarah?”

When the ringing began, she at first thought it was a distant noise of the clinic, or the lights humming over her head. But then the ringing grew louder, and with it came a buzzing as if the air itself were electrified. Jess felt a familiar disorientation, her mind growing heavy and sluggish, and thought of alcoholic haze, those dim nightclub dreams of her undergraduate days rushing back like a distant train coming at her through a tunnel. And something else, a memory so old and fragmented it was like a part of her she had forgotten was there.

Dimly she felt herself falling, felt the impact from the floor run up her spine.

Then Sarah raised her head. Instantly Jess knew that everything she had assumed about the girl was wrong. Her eyes were like flecks of white lightning surrounded by darkness, gathering themselves for a storm. Jess lay half on her back and could not move, watched as the girl stared back at her and continued to shake, as the ringing grew louder and Sarah’s lips moved in a silent, pleading prayer.

Help me.

Somehow Jess gained her feet and stumbled to the door, laying her hand against the button and her forehead against the glass of the window. She felt a cool looseness deep in her belly.

In the distance she could hear the buzzer and the sound of running feet.

—4—

The student lounge (or “The Cave,” as it is somewhat affectionately called) is underneath the Thomas Ward main buildings, reached by a wide set of stairs from the street, which end at a triple set of glass doors. A converted basement, it holds a big-screen television and a small eatery with snacks and sandwiches available at outrageous prices, along with huge quantities of very bad coffee.

The two women had chosen a booth out of the way of general traffic.

“So you’ve seen her,” Professor Shelley said. “What do you think?”

“She’s heavily sedated, restrained, isolated in a padded cell. And she’s immobile. I think she’s buried inside herself somewhere. I just don’t know how deep.”

“Do you feel that you’re in over your head?”

Jess glanced at her murky coffee. She was afraid of what she might see when she tipped the cup. A rumor continued to circulate about someone finding a dead roach once among the grinds. Right now the whole thing seemed quite possible. “I had a little run-in with Dr. Wasserman. He refused to show me Sarah’s file. And I disagreed with his methods and I think he took offense to it.”

“What exactly did you say?”

“I told him Sarah’s treatment was abusive and that I was going to report him.”

“And how did he react to that?”

“He basically said that I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.”

When Jess had burst into his office, Dr. Wasserman had looked up but did not seem surprised to see her. She did not slow down until she was at his desk, and a small juvenile part of her had wanted to go at him with her nails like a cat. Wasserman had seemed to regard the whole thing with amusement, sitting and watching her with an earpiece of his glasses tucked in one corner of his mouth, a half smile on his face.

She’d wanted to hit him. Only now had she calmed down enough to talk about it. It was a stupid, childish move, threatening to report him. She would be working with him for the foreseeable future, and this wasn’t going to help their relationship.

But if she were truthful to herself, the part that really burned her was that he was right. She knew nothing about Sarah’s violent side, or the kind of drug therapy the girl needed. There was only her intuition, and trusting in that was naive at best. And yet the image of that room stayed with her, and the look on the girl’s face.

What more do you need to see?

Shelley’s keen gray eyes seemed to appraise her carefully. “You don’t back down from anything, do you?”

“I was angry. I felt I had been put into a situation without being properly prepared for it.”

“What exactly bothered you the most?”

“She’s just a little girl, and she’s scared. She’s all alone. There’s nothing in that room that’s remotely human.”

“So you feel that Sarah would be better served in a more friendly environment.”

“A child in this situation needs more intense therapy, interaction with peers. Schooling, if it’s at all practical.”

“Yes,” Shelley said. “That’s true. But let me play devil’s advocate for a moment. You can’t know what she has available to her or how she’s been treated. She’s been Evan’s patient for eight years, most of her life. There’s no one else who knows her better.”

“Which is exactly why I asked to see her file.”

“Evan wanted to minimize any prejudices that might enter into your thinking.”

“If that were true, he wouldn’t have told me anything about her condition.”

“Did it ever cross your mind that he might be testing you?” Shelley sipped at her coffee. “You know that I chose you for a reason. There are plenty of talented students in my classes, but none of them have the gift that you do. I’ve read your essays, your case studies, and they’re all first-rate.”

High praise indeed. Jess did not know how to respond. How could she talk about her secret doubts now, the strange disorientation, the helplessness she had felt when Sarah looked at her and mouthed those words? Had she mouthed them? Or was it just a figment of Jess’s imagination, something she had wanted to see and created from nothing more than random muscle spasms?

“Quiet rooms are used in a lot of facilities like this,” Shelly said. “As for the sedatives, those are very carefully monitored. There’s nothing terribly unusual that you wouldn’t see in another violent case, especially when the patient’s violence is self-directed.” She reached out to touch Jess’s wrist. “I don’t mean to confuse you. I have to admit, Evan’s tendencies are a bit more extreme than my own, and you know how I feel about the diagnosis. I’ve been concerned lately with her treatment, which is another reason I decided to bring you into it. So I’m glad to have your thoughts. I’ll ask you again. Do you feel like you’re in over your head?”

Jess tipped her coffee cup once more, saw something swirling like oil across the surface, and set it down. She examined her level of confidence and found it sound. She could continue, but not with the odds stacked against her the way they were. “I have to be honest with you. Without a proper understanding of her background I don’t see how I could do Sarah any good.”

Shelley nodded. Wrinkles bunched around her mouth and eyes and she looked ten years older. “All right. Stop by my office tomorrow afternoon. I don’t care what Evan says. I’ll do what I can to get you that file.”

—5—

Jess could not get herself to slow down. Her mind raced at warp speed, pulling up bits of fact and memory, expressing theories and then discounting them. These were things she had filed and then put away in her mind, where they had been gathering dust for years.

Always at the top of the class, even in elementary school, Jess had often been given special projects and work to complete on her own. The school was small, fifteen to twenty to a grade, a little brick building with a playground in back and temporary trailers to hold the overflow of younger students. Gradually she came to realize that the other children resented her special treatment, and it instilled in her a need to hide most of herself from the world.

Then there was Michael. Her brother’s autism had been so severe he could not possibly relate to anyone. Cases like these tore people and families apart; she had seen it firsthand. Michael’s condition had put a terrible strain on them all. It had caused her parents’ divorce, her mother’s slow and painful free fall from their comfortable farmhouse to the trailer in the poor part of town. Then came Michael’s accident, and her mother’s drinking binges, taking her to a deeper and blacker place than Jess could reach.

But that was ancient history. What she could not discount now was the feeling that the look in Sarah’s eyes was nothing like her brother’s disconnected gaze, that no matter how deeply sedated she was, Sarah’s eyes were alive.

Back at the desk under the eaves in her cluttered little top-floor apartment, with the windows open to the breeze and her cat curled at her feet, she jotted down everything she remembered about the girl. The file was in her briefcase, but she did not touch it, not yet. She wanted to formulate her thoughts first. Traffic moved sluggishly on the street below, the train clacking by on its way downtown, filled with freshly scrubbed college students looking for some kind of nightlife. For a moment she wished she were with them. But she knew she would not be fit company for anyone. Once she had something in her teeth she had to worry at it until it was gone.

She flipped through her developmental psychopathology book, looking for anything on schizophrenia. Most of what she could find dealt with the adolescent transition; there was a frustrating lack of information about younger schizophrenics. She got up and went around the narrow counter to the stove. The real estate agent had sold her on the charm of the place, a long, narrow studio added into the attic of a three-family home; after living in it for a week, she’d come to understand that “charm” meant hopelessly run-down and open to drafts. The best part of the apartment was the seat under the eaves near the west window. It overlooked a line of trees and grassy lawn, and it was where she kept her easel and paints. She painted to calm herself when life became too stressful. Bits and pieces of artwork, some freshly done, decorated the walls.

The rest of the apartment was like everything else in Boston. The kitchen counter was scratched Formica, the floors dull and battered hardwood and linoleum. Wind moaned around the closed windows at night, and the radiators banged and rattled at all hours.

But Otto loved it. There were mice.

She put a pot of water on the stove for tea. Otto came clicking over and curled himself around her bare legs. “You’re the first male to do that since I can’t remember when,” Jess said. She sighed. Men had always found her attractive, but there was something about her that put them off, some sense of distance. Or maybe she pushed them away intentionally. More than one man had described her as chilly, stuck-up, or spoiled.

But she was none of these things, far from it.

Several times when she was younger she had had unnerving experiences with first dates who would not stop pawing at her as soon as they were alone. By the time she was in high school her mother was a full-blown drunk, in and out of AA meetings, unable to stay sober, going through boyfriend after boyfriend. One of these had taken a special interest in Jess, cornered her in an empty room, and tried to kiss and touch her. She never told anyone about it, not even her mother. Especially not her mother. She took a few self-defense classes after that, bought pepper spray for her purse. Loss of control was something she could not tolerate, in herself or in others.

She studied herself briefly in the faux-antique pub mirror to the right of the door. Not so had, old chum. Her body had always been slim and athletic, stomach flat and tight without much effort on her part. Her face looked a bit worn down and puffy from lack of sleep, and her hair could use a brushing. But overall, the effect softened her features and made her look as if she’d just rolled out of bed.

Soft and full lips, her best attribute. Her nose held the slightest bump on its ridge, the result of a childhood injury and the one thing about her face she’d always wanted to fix.

“Gives you character, girl,” her friend Charlie would say.

She scooped the cat up in her arms and breathed in his fine, soft hair. He purred, stretched, and jumped down. “So much for cuddling,” she said. “You just want me for my can opener anyway.”

Otto meowed accusingly at her. She had come home late; how dare she? Jess fixed a can of food for him and waited for her water to boil.

Her mind drifted back to Sarah. Something was not making sense. What she was supposedly dealing with here was a fragmentation of the thought process, where so many unrelated topics intruded on directed attention that the patient became overwhelmed and simply withdrew. Delusions of grandeur and auditory hallucinations were common.

But was that really what she had seen today? Sarah was immobile, seemingly unresponsive, but in the end she had moved, she had responded.

Jess crossed the room and removed Sarah’s file from her briefcase. She set it next to her cup on the little kitchen table, poured steaming water over her tea bag, added milk and sugar. Then she opened to the first photocopied page.

Height and weight had remained within normal range, if closer to the small end of the scale. No distinguishing marks except for a slight scar, approximately three centimeters, near the temple.

She was being examined on the recommendation of Dr. Jean Shelley. The specific reasons for the recommendation were not given. Jess was surprised to see Shelley also listed as court-appointed guardian.

This was followed by a battery of tests, many of them medical and focusing on brain function and brain wave activity. Each opinion was backed by a second and sometimes a third. But the physicians’ notes were lacking any real insight, and the entire section seemed fragmented. She flipped further, into psychological testing. They had tested Sarah at various age levels for motor skills and language and found her ahead of developmental stages. Detachment and marked withdrawal were noted, which indicated an absence of a familiar caregiver. Sarah showed unusual cognitive abilities for her age. The phrase “unusual cognitive abilities” was not defined.

What little schooling she had received was largely on a one-on-one basis. Still, Sarah had learned her alphabet quickly and read at a third grade level by the time she was seven. But almost from the beginning she had shown a lack of contact with reality, delusions of grandeur. These went beyond normal developmental stages. When she was just four years old she became convinced she could force open locked doors, simply by thinking about it. It was noted that, in fact, she did become quite proficient at breaking and entering. Several times they found her wandering around areas of the facility when she should have been confined to her room.

A year or two later she got suddenly worse. She believed she could read people’s thoughts. Sarah became violent with those who tried to restrain her during these fugues.

Bender, Children’s Depression Inventory, CMMS, Goodenough-Harris, all were given as the girl grew older. Apparently she had cooperated well enough for the tests. Wasserman’s notes (at least she assumed they were his) were scribbled in a hand so slanted and confused they were all but illegible. At least his handwriting is a mess. Perhaps his impeccably neat office was an attempt to hide a cluttered psyche. Jess felt as if she had just caught him with his pants down, and she smiled a secret smile.

And that was about all of it. She went back and looked for anything physically abnormal. Blood pressure was high, especially during morning and evening hours. Sarah’s CAT scan had shown some accelerated activity in the parietal lobe, but this did not seem to be substantiated on further trials.

Studying the file further, Jess was convinced there were missing sections. Where were the initial indications, problems, developmental abnormalities? Where were the extensive physical follow-ups, blood work, chemical screens? Where was the family history, the events of early infancy? Months were missing, whole blocks of time. Had nothing of interest happened, or had someone removed the record?

Feeling energized, Jess picked up the phone and dialed information. But when she obtained the number for the Wasserman Facility and finally got through, she was told Dr. Wasserman was not available.

She dialed information again. There were no listings for a Dr. Evan Wasserman in the immediate area.

Her tea was cold. Frustrated, she went to the window, and found herself beginning to drift. Outside, it had begun to drizzle, the streets stained dark, water reflecting the ripple of passing headlights.

She had been left hanging. She did not like to wait for anything. When she was little she was always grabbing things off the supermarket shelves, running off alone, driving her mother crazy. But then had come Michael, to draw the attention off her. When her brother was born they all knew something was wrong right away. He did not respond to them properly, did not play, did not cry, did not sleep at night. She became free to do what she wanted; Michael required constant supervision. Like her, he could and would do anything. But for him it was not a matter of choice.

Jess fought against the images from the past, and finally succumbed to them, images of pain and fear, and most of all, guilt. She listened to the soft patter on the roof and let them wash over her like rain.

Later Otto wandered over from his hiding place under the bed and curled up in her lap. She sat with him by the window and watched the trains go by.

—6—

At the Wasserman Facility, all of the rooms were dark, except one.

Evan Wasserman sat at his desk, listening to the sounds of his charges settling in for the night. These were familiar to him now. He often worked late, and sometimes stayed over on the army cot he kept in his closet. On these nights he left strict instructions for the overnight nurses that he was not to be disturbed unless it was an emergency.

His apartment was all the way in Newton and the traffic was murder. If it weren’t for the rumors among the staff, he might sleep here more often. It was easier that way; he didn’t have to make the drive in the morning, and there was no one to keep him at home.

Night sounds. Someone shuffling somewhere, an occasional shout, an incoherent cry. He swung around in his chair and looked out the window. Darkness outside, swarming at the glass. Beyond a certain length of manicured backyard stretched acres of wild, abandoned land. A series of crumbling brick buildings, part of the old Boston State Hospital, sat about half a mile away through the brush. All this unused acreage in the middle of the city, some would say it was a shame. But right now it gave him space to breathe. That space was under attack. There were two development proposals currently with the city, and if he wasn’t careful they would mean the end of his business.

He could not think clearly tonight. The uneasy feeling threatened to explode within him, and it kept him from his usual lists. Dr. Wasserman was a list man, everything neatly in its place, he would cross his tasks off with a freshly sharpened pencil when he had completed them, one by one. If something was not done on time he became very agitated. His grandfather had been like that too; during his early years he had often come across fragments of Grandfather’s paper that had been scratched and rewritten and worn clean through.

After his grandfather had passed away, his father had taken over the family business, but he was hopeless at it. Wasserman had spent many nights slipping through these very floors as a child, his father locked away in an office downstairs, diddling one of the nurses. When the sounds of their union grew to be too much to bear Evan would ride up the creaking elevator to these vast and then empty rooms, crumbling paint and chipped linoleum, footsteps echoing like the whispers of a ghostly companion. There were always interesting games to play, closets and more hidden spaces to explore. Every once in a while he would discover one of his grandfather’s lists, tucked away in the back of a drawer or cabinet like some sort of treasure map in code.

How he had loved this place, even then. How he had hated his father for letting it fall to pieces. His father was not fit for the job; his grandfather’s death had forced the issue.

He wondered what his grandfather would think of all this now. The children’s welfare had been the most important thing to him. He was a much better man than me, Wasserman thought. I am putting them all at risk.

He wondered why he was so restless tonight. Perhaps it was the girl Jean had sent him. She was attractive, certainly, more attractive than most with her high cheekbones, raven-black hair, and determined mouth; a glow about her, a focused strength. She seemed very bright and capable. All this worried him very much. He picked up the phone and hit a number on his speed dial.

The phone was picked up on the fifth ring. There was a long moment of silence. “I’m sorry to bother you,” Wasserman said. “You weren’t sleeping? I didn’t wake you?”

“As a matter of fact, you did.”

“That girl, Jess Chambers. I don’t know that she’s right for this.”

“We’ve talked it to death, Evan. We’ve gone over it a thousand times. You know the odds, they’re worse than winning the lottery.”

“She’s headstrong, very pushy. She has a problem with authority. I don’t like her.”

“You don’t have to like her. It’s Sarah we’re concerned with. The bond will form, take my word for it. I think the first session went well.”

“She was agitated afterward. We had to sedate her again.”

“That’s a good sign. Look, you’ve been with this from the beginning. But if you want to throw in the towel, by all means, let me know. We can pull the plug right now. Just never mind what it would mean for your funding. I hate to be selfish, but you know what that will mean for me. It’s a death sentence, Evan.”

Wasserman clenched the phone. He fought his instant panic at the thought, and hated the way his voice sounded afterward. “Don’t say that. We’ll go on, of course we will. We’ll get things up and running again. I’m just concerned about introducing a new element into all this. I don’t want Chambers… testing me. And she’d better not talk -to anyone.”

“It doesn’t matter. Nobody’s going to believe her.”

That was right, of course. He was a respected member of the APA, and no matter how unconventional his treatment, there would be nobody who would get through security to see it.

But there were countless other things to consider. The late-night hours invited so many insecurities. He worried about money-hungry developers trying to yank the land out from under him, or worse, putting a strip mall in his backyard. He worried about what he might have to do if their plans backfired. They were sitting on a time bomb, for God’s sake.

But most of all, he worried about losing the only person other than his grandfather who had ever meant anything to him.

He sighed. “I don’t have to tell you what could happen here if she loses control again.”

“We don’t have a choice. That’s a risk we have to take. Now stop worrying and get some sleep, please. You need to be fresh when Helix comes in for the next site visit. Impress them, or we’re both in trouble. You know what I mean, Evan.

There was a long pause on both ends. I need you, he thought, but didn’t say anything. Damn it, he was never able to say it.

Don’t even think about dying on me.

“Good night,” he said softly.

He hung up the phone and stared out at the murky right sky.

It was all true, of course; he needed to get his head together and prepare, or things would get bad very fast. He had worked very hard to regain the upper hand in this case, and he did not want to lose it now. The possibilities were far too frightening.

He thought about the Room upstairs, and his mind seemed to stretch and threaten to get away from him.

He set about making a list of the things they wanted to accomplish. The list was long. He scratched things out and started again, working silently in his office until it was far too late to go home. Began to imagine the girl housed somewhere below his feet. Just below his feet. Then he unfolded his bed from the closet and went to sleep with the lights still burning as a talisman against a deeper darkness.

—7—

In classes Jess felt as if she had been set adrift, awash in the steady drone of flat voices, the words in her textbooks failing to hold her interest. She was anxious to be doing something. The gaps in Sarah’s file bothered her terribly. Through all the reports there had been precious little psychiatric opinion. She had to have some more information before she met with Wasserman. She was determined never to allow him to have the same advantage over her again.

In her class on personality disorders, Professor Thomas singled her out to be his latest target. The little auditorium was filled with the rustling of papers as everyone tried desperately to look busy. They were trying to avoid “the stick,” a nickname students had for the wooden yardstick the professor used to point out offending members of his class. As far as anyone knew, he had yet to make physical contact with it; but nobody wanted to be the first.

Thomas was a very large black man in his sixties with a full head of gray hair, which most of his students assumed was a wig. He was also an expert on personality development, and he often traveled across the country to speak on the subject.

“Self-control,” Thomas said. “Is acting-out behavior ‘outgrown’?” He tapped the stick lightly on the back of an empty seat. “Miss Chambers? Do you feel that aggression is an inherent trait, or something that can be unlearned?”

“Kohn shows us a definite link between defiant behavior in preschoolers and subsequent aggression during adolescence. But not all of his subjects remained aggressive throughout their lives.”

“What is your personal opinion?”

“It’s a matter of degree. If we looked at the severity of the aggressive behavior, I think the data would hold up. The behavior has to fit into the parameters of the subject’s stage of development.”

“Example.”

“If a three-year-old is throwing temper tantrums, that’s normal for his age. If the tantrums involve beating another child senseless with a yardstick, that’s cause for concern.”

Snickers from several people in class. “All of you should stop laughing long enough to clear your ears,” Thomas said, pointing. The yardstick quivered in the air as if it were eager to strike. “Miss Chambers’s logic may seem obvious to you all, but she has just given us an excellent example of using what we have learned to form an opinion. A diagnosis and eventual treatment follows the same line of thought. Now, what would you do to diagnose the disorder in such a hypothetical?”

“It’s difficult to say without more information. Is the problem chemical? Biological? Environmental? I’d investigate a number of factors: abuse in the home, previous patterns of behavior, any relatives with overaggressive tendencies. Is he learning by example? Or are there other indicators of a chemical imbalance, previous head trauma, even possible brain damage?”

Thomas nodded. “Each case is unique,” he said. He let the yardstick touch to the floor, and it thumped. “It’s vital not to have any biases when you begin. You must weigh the evidence and eliminate possibilities, one by one.”

After class they stood below the semicircle of seats as students slowly filed out, a few of them staring curiously back like drivers past the scene of an accident.

“I want you to know that the yardstick comment did not go unnoticed,” Thomas said. “By the way, I never beat my students unless they truly deserve it.”

Jess hoped her small smile was properly apologetic. “Of course not, Professor. I did wonder if you could help me, though. I’m writing a paper on the symptoms and treatments of schizophrenia—mainly younger patients, preadolescents.”

“Then you won’t have much data. The adolescent transition tends to trigger a schizophrenic type.”

“But there are cases as young as, say, six years old?”

“Extremely rare. Where before a child might be hyperactive, or moody, or even aggressive, the hormonal changes during puberty wreak havoc in the brain and you see personality fragmentation, psychosis. I’d be surprised to see a confirmed diagnosis as young as six.”

“If a diagnosis were in doubt—say a child has been labeled as schizophrenic by an expert, but others had reason to question it—what would you look for?”

“Organization of any kind, Miss Chambers. In schizophrenics the thinking process has been interrupted, scrambled, if you will. Without medication a patient is often unable to focus on a particular line of thought and carry it through. Autism is often mistaken for schizophrenia, and vice versa.”

“Would a child in this situation be sedated, restrained? Would neuroleptics be an effective treatment?”

Thomas frowned. “I would emphasize family therapy and behavioral modification techniques. You want to reward a patient’s good behavior while controlling his environment to the utmost degree.”

“So you would not isolate a child in these circumstances?”

“Absolutely not. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got another class to teach. Unless you’d like me to write your paper for you?”

When Jess arrived back at her apartment, there was a message on the machine from Professor Shelley.

“Have you had time to take a look at her file?” Shelley asked, when Jess had reached her at home.

“I read through it, yes.”

“Any questions?”

“Something struck me. It said that you were the one who recommended her admittance. It also said that you’re her court-appointed guardian.”

There was a long pause on the other end. Jess imagined Shelley sitting in a wing chair by the light of a lamp. Did she have an apartment or a house? Did the professor live alone? She realized how little she knew about Shelley’s personal life. At the same time she wondered why it mattered.

“I did recommend her, yes,” Shelley said. “I kept close track of Sarah after she was born. She had family who raised her for a year or so. Sarah’s mother was not entirely stable, her parents were taking care of both of them. It was difficult. Sarah’s grandparents had my number, and when she got to be too much to handle, they called me. I agreed to watch over her treatment.”

“None of this is in the file. Do you know why?”

“That you’d have to ask Dr. Wasserman.” A sudden sharp intake of breath; then the professor moved on. “I think it’s important to capitalize on any progress you made during your first meeting. You should get down there as many times as you can this week.” Then, quietly, a bit more gently, she said, “I know you feel that we sprang this on you without proper warning. I can only say that if it were completely up to me I might have handled things differently.”

“I appreciate that.”

“Take another look,” Shelley said. “You’ve read the file, you’re better prepared. Now’s your chance to get through to her. Write down everything you see, everything you feel is important. We’ll meet in my office on Monday.”

—8—

The next few days passed uneventfully. But when Jess Chambers reached the hospital for what would be her fourth session with Sarah, she was informed by the admitting secretary that Dr. Wasserman had gone to attend a psychiatric conference in New York. He had left instructions for her.

I am allowing you to continue with your sessions while I am gone on one condition: that you hold them only in Sarah’s room and only after she has received her medication. She remains in restraints for the time being at my request. If you are alone with her, be alert and do not allow her to touch you.

The staff has my instructions and will follow them to the letter. I do not want Sarah moved while I am gone for any reason. Maria is perfectly capable of handling any request. She is aware of the situation and will decide what is reasonable.

Please record in your notes everything that occurs. If you have any questions I may be reached through my secretary.

Jess did not know whether to feel angry or relieved that Wasserman was gone. He had hovered over her for much of the week, and pushed her a bit after her last visit, asking her in detail about her observations and theories. She hadn’t had much to say; each of the hour-long sessions since the first had been spent in silence. Sarah had not moved or made a sound, and after long periods of note-taking, sketching, and the occasional unanswered question or thought, Jess had left to go home again, her frustration levels growing.

She knew it would take time for Sarah to get used to her presence. And there was always the chance she’d never respond to anyone or anything again. But still, it was a depressing experience. She had begun to wonder if Sarah mouthing those words during that first visit had been her imagination playing tricks on her. Muscle spasms could sometimes look like attempts at speech.

Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I just saw what I wanted to see.

She made her way down to the basement, feeling the chill of the place settle into her bones. Do not allow her to touch you. A strange warning indeed. She wondered whether it was simply Wasserman’s way of lending a greater importance to the proceedings. His instructions made her feel like a child left home alone for the first time, and of course that was exactly the way he wanted it. Goddamn it if I’m going to play his games.

Maria was out from behind the desk before the elevator doors fully opened. Her voice was tense and her face and neck rigid, and sweat stood out on her forehead.

“She is not still,” the big woman said. “The way she looks, it is not right.”

“Has she had her medication, Maria?”

Maria shook her head. “Soon. I do not like to go there. I let you in the hall, no further.” The woman nodded again. “You go see what I tell you.”

This time at Sarah’s door was subtly different than the last. The hallway seemed darker than before. A bulb was out and the lights farther down the hall cast strange shadows. Jess stopped for a moment before swinging the door open.

Sarah was crouched against the far wall, rocking slowly back and forth, her long black hair sweeping across her face. She still wore the straitjacket. At the sound of the door closing she jumped, and then continued rocking from the heels to the balls of her feet.

Any change is a good sign, Jess told herself. Something is better than nothing. She examined her own state of mind, reaching deep down inside where cold things grew. On the way here she had been jumpy for some reason, nervous enough that she checked for sweat stains under her arms. But now that she was in the room with Sarah she felt her anxiousness subside. Wasserman’s instructions had made her angry, and the anger helped her focus.

Establish trust, Jess told herself. The first goal. “I’m going to release your arms now, Sarah. Do you hear me? I’m going to release you.” She reached over, slowly, slowly, undid the buckles. Slipped the girl’s arms from the jacket and let it fall, and stepped back. Through it all Sarah remained limp, pliable as soft clay. The rocking had ceased abruptly as soon as Jess touched her.

Later she would admit to herself that releasing the girl had satisfied the small, petty part of her she had allowed Wasserman to reach. Now she only thought of it as an attempt at a connection.

The signs of schizophrenia. Disorganized thinking, unstructured thoughts. Bizarre and illogical behavior. What else had Professor Thomas said? Study the facts and make your own determination.

Crouching by the girl’s side, she spoke once again of her reasons for coming, trying to be as honest and straightforward as possible. She told Sarah that they could be seeing each other a lot in the future, and that they could be friends if she wanted that. She reassured the girl that all she wanted to do was help.

Then she spoke of anything that came into her head: her classes, her cat Otto’s unexpected arrival on her doorstep last fall, her family. Jess concentrated on keeping the words coming, keeping her voice calm and even, letting the sound soothe the girl who was rocking once again back and forth at her feet.

Eventually her thoughts began to go off onto new tangents, so that it was several moments before she realized something else had changed. She heard a single sound, slow, muttered, unintelligible. The rocking had slowed; Jess kept her voice close to the same pitch while she shifted gears.

“I know you’ve been treated badly by some people in the past. It’s just you and me now.”

Sarah did not look up, but her hair had fallen away from her face, and she had stopped moving. Silence lasted for what seemed like hours. Then, in a remarkably clear, quiet voice, she said, “They’re looking at me. Staring at me. All the time.”

Bingo. A thrill ran up Jess’s limbs. “Who, Sarah? Are they with us right now?”

Sarah did not move or indicate that she had heard. Jess got the sudden idea the girl had been talking to herself. Still, she glanced around, more to satisfy Sarah than anything else. All she saw were the ash-gray walls and ceiling, and the padded metal door.

She took this opportunity to examine the girl’s face more closely. A plain face, pale and broad, but her eyes were large and set widely apart above a long nose. She was the sort of girl who might have been pleasant-looking, under certain circumstances; but here under the blue-white lights she looked like a dog that had been kicked too many times.

Of course she was drugged. And judging from the way the skin stretched across her skull and limbs, Sarah had not been eating well.

Jess tried again: “Who’s watching you, Sarah?”

Sarah looked up from beneath a black slash of hair. Jess was pinned by the sparks of light dancing in her eyes. Those eyes did not belong to that face. She felt like a burglar caught in a searchlight, exposed, naked, open to ridicule.

Don’t be silly. She’s just a child.

“I could kill you. Stop your heart if I wanted. If you’re lying.” Suddenly Sarah dropped her gaze from Jess’s face and turned, muttering, “No. No. No. She isn’t one of them. Not that one. No.” Her voice had quickly become rhythmic, almost a muttered incantation. A method of coping with something that cannot be faced. A defensive tactic meant to soothe the mind. Meaning to distract her, Jess moved quickly to her briefcase for her notepad, but as she moved she felt the girl’s eyes seize her again, and for a single, groping moment a hand tightened inside her chest.

And then it was gone. She froze with her fingers on the notepad inside the case, her heart fluttering.

She was imagining things. She was too keyed up, her adrenaline pumping. There were moments in time that coincidence lent a greater importance; this was simply one of them.

Jess took the notepad out very slowly, telling Sarah exactly what she was doing in an easy, quiet voice. “What I said before, everything I told you is true. I’m here to listen to you, when you’re ready to talk. That’s all. Do you understand?”

“No friends for me here.”

“I see why you might feel that way. But I’m not from this place. I was asked by a friend of mine to come see you. They thought I might be able to cheer you up.”

The girl regarded Jess with some curiosity. Jess was reminded once again of an animal that had been abused. Her heart ached for this girl.

“Do you remember when I came to visit you the very first time? You asked me to help you.”

“My head. It’s fuzzy.”

“When you want to say something, it comes out different. All mixed up. Is that it?”

“ They do it. They’re watching me all the time.”

Delusions of persecution was a common symptom of a schizophreniform disorder. And yet, so far Sarah had followed their conversation better than Jess could have hoped. She had showed a clear progression of thought, memory recall, cause-and-effect reasoning. These things didn’t add up.

“Do you know where we are, Sarah?”

“Prison.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

“I was bad.”

“And what did you do when you were bad?”

“Hurt people.”

“Who put you here?”

“Them.”

“Am I one of them?”

“They’re white."

“You mean they have white skin? What do they look like?” For a moment she was puzzled, and then, suddenly, “You mean they have white clothes. White coats. Is that it?”

Sarah just looked at her.

“They’re doctors,” Jess said, “and you’re right. I’m not a doctor. You can tell that, can’t you?”

“No doctors.”

“Why don’t you like them?”

“They hurt my head.”

“Does your head hurt right now?”

“Yes. I know what they’re thinking. They don’t like me.”

Where to go from here? She was running the risk of overwhelming the girl, of pressing too hard. “Sarah, would you like to play a game?” Jess dipped into her briefcase again and pulled out a series of test cards. “I’ll ask you some questions, and show you some pictures, and you tell me what you think. Okay?”

She went through the deck, testing Sarah first on colors, then shapes, both concrete and abstract. She had to use tricks several times to make the girl focus. Then she moved on to a TAT test, giving Sarah scenes on cards and asking her what was happening in them. It was a simple way of determining mood, the idea being that the subject would describe a scene in a certain light depending on how he or she was feeling, giving the interpreter a glimpse of the deeper emotions underneath.

Sarah reacted mostly as Jess had expected, when she would react at all. Her answers indicated hostility and depression.

Jess tried Rorschach. “What do you see here, Sarah?”

“People. Big and mean people. Ugly.”

“And here?”

“Fire. A roof on fire.”

“It’s a building? A house?”

She shook her head. “It’s burning. They’re gonna go away. They’re gonna be gone.” She wouldn’t say anything more. Jess tried another inkblot, and another, but Sarah kept silent, withdrawn inside herself again.

Jess found herself at a loss. Sarah was exhibiting signs of mental distress, but nothing to the extent that had been described by Wasserman. Absent were the unusual postures or mannerisms, loose associations that were common to schizophrenics. Her observation about the “white” doctors was perceptive and her fear was understandable.

Something still did not add up. It was as if her file were written about someone else.

Suddenly the girl stiffened. Jess paused and put the inkblots down. Sarah had turned to face the door and was clearly growing agitated. Her eyes seemed to turn a deeper, violent color. And there was something else in her gaze, something Jess could not pin down. The feeling she got was of looking at a lake of dark water and seeing a huge, black shape rising to the surface.

Jess stood up and stumbled to the narrow window, aware of a new depth to the air, a sudden charge. She could hear muffled footsteps coming along the corridor. She craned her neck as Maria came into view, carrying a tray and another set of restraints. Maria stopped outside the door, fumbled in her pocket as if for her keys; then she looked up and made a gesture. The door was locked.

Jess tried the bolts, but they wouldn’t budge. She fumbled in her own pocket. Maria’s keys were here somewhere; she had let herself in with them. But they were not in her pocket. They were nowhere to be found. She rattled the handle.

When Sarah began to shout, the sound was so sudden and so loud in the tiny room that Jess flinched and whirled around.

“Leave me alone!” There was fear in the girl’s eyes, and something else. “I don’t want you to come here!”

Jess saw Maria freeze outside the door. She heard a popping sound and the tinkle of glass as several lights blew in the hallway. Maria’s tray clattered to the concrete floor. Jess Chambers felt the hair on her head lift as if she were rubbing her feet across a carpet. The air temperature dropped. Something had entered this room; she felt the air ooze thick and heavy, filled with a presence that snapped and writhed like live electrical lines.

She tried the bolts again, but they would not budge. She scanned the room and struggled to keep herself calm. She had never been irrational; there was no reason to start now. There on the floor, nearly at her feet, were the keys.

She looked back at the girl through the liquid air.

Sarah’s eyes had rolled up into her head. Droplets of sweat slid off her forehead and spattered to the floor. Her limbs were shaking. Jess immediately thought of an epileptic fit, but the indications were not quite right. It was more like a concentration so tense and desperate as to cause a seizure. She shouted Sarah’s name, and the girl whipped her head back and forth, teeth chattering together, making one long unintelligible sound: “N-n-n-n-n-n-n-n—”

It built, swelled—

—then, all at once, ceased. It was as if a wave of water had broken over their heads, as if a light switch had been flicked off. In the sudden stillness Jess could hear Sarah’s unconscious body slump to the floor, and her own breathing, rough and ragged, loud in her ears as a bellows. Quickly she went to the girl, felt her pulse, quick and light as a bird’s wing, her breath fast and shallow. But the skin of her forehead had smoothed and she looked peaceful.

Jess went back to the door. This time the bolts slid back smoothly into place with a soft click, and the door swung open. Maria was on the floor on hands and knees, scrambling to sweep up the contents of the tray. A syringe and several vials, more pills…

Emergency lights had blinked on, throwing feeble orange light on the hallway. Slivers of glass from the broken bulb glinted orange on concrete. There were shouts from the other rooms, someone running above their heads.

“She’s okay,” Jess said into the silence, more for herself than the nurse. “She’s out cold.”

Maria seemed to flinch at her voice. Then the big woman climbed to her feet and took a new syringe out of her pocket. Wordlessly she entered the small room and knelt at Sarah’s side; lifted the syringe to the light with trembling hands, tapped it, squirted a tiny fount of sparkling clear fluid, and bent again to the girl’s arm.

Only then did Jess remember that she had forgotten to put Sarah’s straitjacket back on. But Maria did not seem to notice.

—9—

“Evan Wasserman called this morning,” Shelley said. She sat straight in her chair with her hands folded over the papers strewn across her desk. “He told me you went directly against his orders and removed Sarah’s restraints.”

“I felt that she had to trust me. I took a chance.”

“A very dangerous one, according to Evan. Sarah has been aggressive with people before. You went in before she had her medication. He was extremely upset about that.”

“What could she possibly have done? She’s ten years old.”

“That’s not the point.” Shelley paused. “Evidently there are problems between the two of you. I understand why. But the simple fact of the matter is that this is his hospital and his patient. You have to follow his rules.”

Jess tried to keep down the sudden blood that rushed to her cheeks. She nodded, feeling like a scolded child. It was ridiculous, really. Shelley was right. And yet she felt betrayed.

“Tell me exactly what happened.”

Jess related the previous day’s visit, beginning with her arrival in Sarah’s basement room. She tried to remember everything Sarah had said, each indication of her mental state, including her paranoia about the “white” people. Still, Jess had the frustrated feeling that she was unable to get across the thrust of events exactly the way they occurred. There were things that happened that would sound crazy if she repeated them now: the way the lights had blown out in the hall, the sudden jamming of the door locks, the way Sarah knew her medication was on its way long before there was any sign of Maria and the tray. Jess prided herself on her logical, orderly mind. Those things were not logical and she tried her best to dismiss them.

And yet she couldn’t, damn it. They kept pushing themselves back in.

When she had finished, Shelley said, “She’s all right, you know. Evan wanted it stressed, however, that she was in a very dangerous state and that it was touch-and-go for a while. Apparently she’s had seizures before.”

“Has she been tested for a lesion in the temporal lobe?”

“I’m sure they would have taken an EEG to rule that out.”

“Her file had a lot in it about brain wave activity. Maybe they suspected some sort of damage, or tumor.”

“I suggested it myself, actually, when Sarah was first assigned to state care. Though she was only a little over a year old, the symptoms indicated some physical trauma. We looked for swelling, collections of fluid, anything that might suggest an injury. We thought epilepsy, searched the readings very carefully. But there was nothing.”

“She thinks she’s in prison,” Jess said. “They’ve got her scared to death.”

Something must have shown in her eyes. Shelley leaned forward intently. “You’ve done more with her in your visits than that entire staff has in months. She had shut down entirely with me, saw me as some kind of enemy, which is one reason I haven’t gone to see her the past few weeks. But she’s connecting with you, you’re building trust. That’s good. That’s one reason why we decided to bring you into this. Still, you have to be careful to view her as your patient and nothing more. Getting too attached can only be painful. There are bound to be setbacks.”

Jess nodded. She had read about a case involving a young girl and a home care specialist; the child had been ill with a lengthy terminal disease, the sort that led to many highs and lows and false hopes. The specialist and the child spent most of the day together, and slept near each other at night. By the time she died the specialist had formed such a strong attachment that she refused to return to work, and in fact reported many of the same false symptoms of the disease. She described the death as if her own child had died.

“I want to ask you something,” Shelley said. “This may be painful too and if you don’t want to talk about it I’ll understand. Earlier you mentioned your younger brother was autistic.”

The use of past tense did not escape Jess’s notice. Either Shelley had remembered from their previous conversation, or she had taken a guess. “And now you’re wondering whether that has something to do with it. Whether I have some hidden agenda.”

“The thought crossed my mind.”

Maybe Shelley was right. She would have been a fool not to realize that her brother’s death had pushed her toward child psychology in the first place.

Just because I’m interested in Sarah’s case doesn’t mean I’m looking for some kind of payback.

A familiar memory slipped up on her. Michael, standing on the sidewalk, the sound of the children in the playground, the noise of passing cars. She reached out to him but he did not see her. He did not see anything or hear her screaming.

“I was supposed to be watching him. We were near the park. My mother was at a pay phone and Michael stepped out into traffic. He was hit and killed instantly.”

After countless looks of pity and murmurs of sympathy through the years she had learned to keep the whole thing to herself. But Shelley’s reaction was not the one she had expected. Shelley simply looked at her and said, “And you blamed yourself for this.”

“My mother had put him in my care. I knew what he might do. I should have stopped him.”

“You were how old?”

“Nine.”

“You must see,” Shelley said gently, “how ridiculous that is.”

“I was old enough for it to matter.”

“Of course. But not old enough to be blamed for it.”

Shelley said this as if it were a common truth. And Jess supposed that under normal circumstance it was, but she was not a normal girl. She knew what she was capable of and what she wasn’t, and that was what had made it so difficult. Anyone could say that she had been too young, that her mother should never have left her alone with him. But that didn’t change anything. It only shifted responsibility.

“And what happened then?”

“My mother started drinking more heavily, staying out at night. She treated me as if I weren’t there. I suppose she blamed me too, in her way.”

“Or herself, for leaving you to watch him.”

“Maybe so.” But now they were getting too far off the subject. She did not want to dig into the past any longer. Suddenly she felt as if there weren’t enough air in the room to breathe.

“I’ve thought this case over very carefully. I’ve studied the facts and the data at hand and I do not believe Sarah is schizophrenic. She has some obvious adjustment problems and hostility toward the staff, but I won’t know what else she needs until she’s given a better chance to be lucid. I don’t believe she should be locked up alone and I don’t think she’s a danger to anyone.”

Jess listed off her reasons; Sarah had followed their conversation, been receptive to questions, showed short-term memory recall, scored well on cognitive tests. Her paranoia about the people in white seemed valid given the circumstances. And there were other, less tangible reasons; Jess might have called them gut instincts.

“Perhaps the antipsychotics are finally having an effect?”

“I just don’t see it happening all at once like that. According to Dr. Wasserman she’s been having breaks with reality for several years now, and the medications haven’t done a thing. She’s been so withdrawn and then so violent they’ve been forced to confine her to what is basically a cell. But I’ve seen little evidence of any of that.”

Wasserman’s voice, inside her head: she can be devilishly clever. Sarah playing possum. Could she be doing that again now? But she couldn’t be this clever, Jess thought. How could you be psychotically disturbed and still plan such an elaborate game?

Instead of dismissing her, Shelley looked troubled. “I feel like I let her down,” she said. “I should have been more involved the past few months, checked in more frequently. When Evan called I was ashamed because I hadn’t looked in on her recently.” She paused and her long, elegant fingers plucked absently at her sleeve.

“I’ve been distracted,” Shelley said. “But of course that’s no excuse.”

“You could come with me to see her. It might do her some good.”

“Sarah may associate me with the people in white coats. She’d see you with me and then in her mind you’d be one of them too.”

“Maybe that’s a chance we should take.”

“No.” Shelley shook her head. “That would complicate things. Evan is a capable psychiatrist and the Wasserman Facility is well known. I know from our conversations that he is at the end of his rope. Bringing you into this was quite a gamble. If you don’t get anywhere, he’s still exposed an outsider to an extremely difficult and controversial case. He opens himself up to criticism. And if you do succeed in making a connection with Sarah, he’ll be getting questioned left and right as to why a graduate student could come in and do in a couple of weeks what he’s failed to do in eight years.”

Because he’s an unimaginative asshole, Jess thought, but resisted saying it in spite of the pleasure the idea gave her. “I have to ask you. You delivered this girl. Was there any indication from the start she wasn’t normal?”

“The circumstances were unusual. It was a difficult time.”

“How do you mean?”

Shelley looked away. For a long time Jess was not sure if she would speak at all. “Sarah was born in the middle of one of the most intense snowstorms I have ever seen. What made matters worse was that somehow the storm turned electrical. I don’t know the physics of it, but when Sarah’s mother went into labor we lost power. Everything happened very quickly. We were working under primitive conditions to say the least.

“She delivered very fast. One moment she was dilated and there was nothing, and then…”

Shelley became very still and her face grew tight. The professor did not even breathe. And then she seemed to ease, as if a sharp pain had come and gone.

“The hospital was hit by lightning. We weren’t sure what had happened at the time. All we knew was that all hell was breaking loose. The world seemed to be caving in. The emergency lights were on but most of the equipment was useless. The noises… it sounded like the earth was splitting at the seams.” Shelley smiled, but her face held no warmth. “We got out but it was close. The hospital burned to the ground.”

My God. Jess tried to imagine the scene, the frantic cries of the hospital workers, the storm howling all around them as the flames reared up and licked across the building’s innards. “I think Sarah has some sort of memory of it. Could that be possible? When I administered the Rorshach she described something about a building being on fire.”

“As far as I know no one has ever mentioned it to her. It hasn’t been proven that newborns are even aware of their surroundings, at least in the way you or I might be. Sarah wouldn’t have had any idea what was happening. She wouldn’t even have a working concept of life and death.”

“Her mother, then. Maybe she picked up on her mother’s feelings.”

“Sarah’s mother is mentally disturbed,” Shelley said. “I never saw her react to anything.”

Jess breathed in deeply. Is? She felt a spark of something and fumbled for it. Talking about this case with Shelley was like pulling teeth, and she couldn’t understand why. Wasserman too, for that matter. What were they hiding and why would they feel the need to hide it from her, when they had been the ones responsible for bringing her into this in the first place?

“You’re wondering why that isn’t in her file,” Shelley said. “Evan and I have been going back and forth on this from the start. The fact is that there are some ethical and legal issues involved. But we all know that one of the most important aspects of diagnosis and treatment of mental disease is a family history, and you’ve been denied that.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Sarah’s grandparents are alive,” Shelley said. “Her mother too. They live in Gilbertsville, New York.”

—10—

The Newton Fliers’ Club meets every third Friday of the month in the Jacob’s Field Lounge. Made up of people who don’t have the money to own a plane privately, members contribute to the initial cost and maintenance by paying monthly dues and sign up for use of the aircrafts.

Jess Chambers had been a member since she moved to the area two years ago. “Before that I logged my hours at a private strip back home,” she explained as she pulled through the gates of the tiny airport. “There was a man in my town who used to fly in air shows, doing tricks in an old single-engine Cessna he kept in his barn. They called him the Flying Frenchman. He ran a small farm with a dirt landing strip in a cornfield. To make more money he would crop-dust during the summers, and give flying lessons. He taught me to fly when I was twelve.”

It was another thing she had learned to keep to herself. The truth was she had always loved planes and flying was something she had dreamed of doing since she was five years old.

Most people said something like it was the last thing in the world they expected. Boys grinned and punched her in the arm, as if she were putting them on. Jean Shelley just looked at her from the passenger seat. “Your mother let you go up in a plane with someone called the Flying Frenchman?”

“She had other things on her mind.”

Shelley shook her head. “Interesting. And you’re sure there’s a plane available today?”

“They said there’d been a cancellation. You’re not afraid to fly with me, are you?”

“Of course not. I’m sure you’re very capable.”

Jess stole a glance at her professor. She remembered Shelley’s look of surprise when she suggested they fly to Binghamton that afternoon. They could be there and back by supper.

But this wasn’t just an excuse to log some hours. She needed to meet Sarah’s family. She needed some background on the case. And most importantly, she needed to know just what could be so horrible to make a mother give up her own child.

"The family had been through too much and it was too painful for them. They agreed to sign a voluntary placement agreement, with me acting as guardian. There was a custody transfer. It was the only way they could deal with what they were doing."

"You mean they didn’t want to give her up?"

"There’s more to it than that. I’d rather just let you see and judge for yourself."

She stopped the car in front of the one-room lounge and office and turned off the ignition. The engine ticked in silence. “Could I ask you something? Why did you decide to tell me about Sarah’s family now?”

“I felt it was essential to your diagnosis and the development of your and Sarah’s relationship. I’d always felt that way, but Evan disagreed. The family had requested anonymity. And there are other reasons that you’ll understand soon enough.

“I want you to know that ordinarily I wouldn’t agree to something like this. But I think we do owe you this much.”

Jess nodded. “You’re sure you don’t want to call the family and let them know we’re coming?”

“I don’t think they’d agree to see you. It will be more difficult for them to refuse when we’re standing on their front step.”

The plane, a class-four V-tail Beechcraft Bonanza in brown and white, was tethered outside the lone hangar. The Bonanza had a variable pitch propeller, an oil-operated device that rotated on its axis and worked like a gearshift in a car; in high pitch the angle of the blades took a bigger bite out of the air and allowed for a higher cruising speed.

It was her favorite plane. When she’d first joined the club she trained with a Cessna 150 High Wing. It took her three months to move up to the Bonanza, and that only because she had to find hours between her classes.

Jess filed a VFR flight plan and prepared herself as she always did, checking the plane by hand, a familiar thrill hastening her step and quickening her fingers. It would be an easy flight and the weather looked clear. Soon they were on the runway and the throb of the engines increased to a steady buzzing pitch as she tipped the throttle, the edges of the ground flashing and blurring and finally slipping away as the plane lumbered into the air.

Fifteen minutes later they were at a cruising speed of 150 knots. Jean Shelley sat silently by her side and watched out the window as the ground slid by far below their feet. Jess wondered again about her professor; what did she do on her off-hours? The legends continued to grow. When she’d mentioned to a fellow student that she was working with Shelley outside of class, the girl had looked at her as if she’d just sprouted an extra head.

Some said Shelley belonged to a cult. It was rumored that she had spent a month in the Himalayas, searching for spiritual peace on the back of a donkey. There were stories of strange-looking bag lunches and greenish liquid in thermoses. And yet none of these things seemed to damage her professional reputation. She remained as aloof and unreachable as ever. It was as if her students were afraid to ask, for fear of what she might say.

They rented a car in Binghamton for the drive to Gilbertsville, passed through narrow, shadowed streets lined with two-story clapboards and Victorians with new plastic gutters and sagging front porches. Dogs napped in long grass. Swing sets moved gently in the afternoon breeze.

Jess stopped and asked directions at a gas station with two pumps and a sign that said please pump, then pay. The girl behind the counter looked at her for a long moment and then got out a map. She ought to know better, the look said. We protect our own here. But Jess’s clothes and manner of speaking seemed to convince the girl she was up to no harm.

The Voorsanger family lived in the foothills on land that looked rippled from above, crests of tree-covered forest and valleys with silver streams twisting through the depths.

On the ground the area looked tired, as if the land were molting. The leaves were changing on the trees, some of them already littering the earth and turning the shoulders of road into brown, soggy resting places.

A dirt road led through a copse to a wide yard and a farmhouse with a long, narrow barn in back. The house was slowly falling to dust. A station wagon sat listing to one side on the lawn. Pulled off the shoulder was a pickup truck with wooden slats in the bed. Mud caked the wheel wells and spattered across the fenders.

When they stepped from the car the air was crisp, clear, with a hint of smoke. Jess recognized the scent of burning leaves. Smoke curled up from behind the barn and they moved quickly in that direction.

Damn but it was cold. Jess wished she’d brought gloves. Stuffing her hands in her pockets would keep her warmer, but she knew it would not look friendly.

A dog barked from somewhere inside the barn. As they cleared the back of the house a man came into distant view, wearing overalls, a plaid hat with earflaps, and strong leather work gloves. He was throwing leaves and branches onto a fire already piled high and smoking thickly. His breath puffed silver in his face. At the sound of the dog he stopped and brushed his hands together and then turned in their direction.

“Mr. Voorsanger? Excuse me, Mr. Voorsanger.”

The man stood motionless for a moment, as if deciding something; then he strode toward them. The front of his overalls was stained a dull brown. He was a tall, older man, grim-faced, with deeply lined cheeks and chapped skin. The lines in his flesh were so deep it looked as if someone had carved them with a knife. He looked worn and serious, a man who expected everyone to work as hard as he did.

When he got near them he stopped; then, looking long and hard at Shelley, he said, “Thought we had a deal. You wasn’t supposed to come back here.”

“That’s my fault, Mr. Voorsanger,” Jess said. “I’m the one responsible for bringing her here. We’ve come a long way to speak to you. If we could just have a moment?”

“That ain’t possible,” the man said abruptly. “We don’t want nothing to do with you like we said before. Nothing’s changed. If that’s all, I got a lot to do.”

He started to turn away, then stopped again at the sound of a screen door banging, and a woman in a faded dress and apron hurrying out of the house. Jess saw his eyes change. “You’re gonna catch cold, now, go on back inside,” he said to her.

“Just a moment, Ed.” The woman had her arms wrapped around herself. She was plump, in her sixties, with shoulder-length white hair and a soft, expressive face. Her eyes darted from face to face, fishing for something. “You here to tell us something about our girl?”

“She needs your help,” Shelley said. “I wouldn’t have disturbed you if we had any other choice.”

“She hasn’t… done nothing, has she?”

“We’re worried about her own well-being.”

The woman nodded. “That’s the way it is, then. Why don’t you come inside? Ed, you go on now. I’ll call you when we’re done.” She looked at him and he didn’t move; then finally he walked away, and didn’t look back. They all watched him until he had returned to the fire again, and he bent and started throwing leaves and branches to the flames.

“Please forgive Ed,” the woman said as the screen door cracked shut and they walked through a mudroom full of boots and hanging clothes, into a large, brightly lit kitchen. “He’s watching out for me is all. And it’s slaughtering time for the chickens and that always gets him in a mood.”

“This is hard for you,” Shelley said. “We do appreciate it.”

The woman waved a pink-scrubbed hand. “I knew you’d come. I wondered what was taking so long.” She smiled but her eyes were dark. She shrugged. “I suppose I figured everyone would want to know where something like that comes from. Not that I got the answer.”

“Something like what, Mrs. Voorsanger?”

Cast-iron pots bubbled and hissed on the stove. Next to the stove crouched a deep metal sink, a cutting board, and the gray-pink carcasses of birds. The air smelled of bones boiled clean and white.

“Well, you know.” She searched Jess’s face with eyes that seemed desperate. “After all this time? You must know what she is?” She turned to Professor Shelley. There was sudden bitterness in her voice when she spoke again. “Oh yes, I remember. My Lord. Nine years and you still don’t believe a word.”

“I think Jess would like to hear what you have to say.”

“I see.” The woman stuck out her hand. “Well now, aren’t you a pretty little thing? Jess, is it? Forgive my manners. I’m Cristina. Would you folks like some tea? I was just about to make a pot.”

Mrs. Voorsanger showed them through the kitchen and hallway and into a low-ceilinged room. The room had the feeling of unfinished business. The walls were bare except for a large silver cross, mounted over the old fireplace mantel. A faded plastic recliner sat in front of a folding table and large console television, and couches crouched at right angles, the patterns long since blurring into a uniform grayness that was either age or dirt, it was difficult to tell. The arms and backrests, where people rested their heads or put their feet up, were slightly darker than the rest.

The best pieces in the room were matching glass-fronted cabinets, which held what seemed like hundreds of painted trinkets: trolls, elves, fairies and dolls, toadstools, collector plates. Glass eyes winked at them from everywhere, peering over the tops of others. Little figures crouched and smiled as if holding secrets.

“My collection,” Mrs. Voorsanger said with pride. “I get them through the mail. Why don’t you sit down? I’ll bring in a pot of tea in a minute.”

They sat waiting on a couch as dust turned and drifted through the still air. “What did Mrs. Voorsanger mean in the kitchen?” Jess asked. “’Nine years and you still don’t believe a word’?”

Shelley seemed to consider whether to answer the question. She glanced to the hall, and when she spoke it was in a soft way, under her breath. “This is delicate, you understand. One of the reasons I took Sarah away was for her own good. The whole family seemed to be suffering from a delusion. I’d heard of it before, a kind of mass hysteria, but I’d never seen it firsthand.”

“What sort of delusion?”

“They didn’t see her as a little baby anymore. They had come to believe that Sarah was the Antichrist. Thank God they called me first. They might have killed her if I hadn’t stepped in.”

Dear Lord, have mercy, Jess thought. There seemed to be nothing else to say. But it would explain a lot: the silence for all these years, the missing sections of file, the reluctance of both Wasserman and Shelley to divulge any family history. The reason Sarah’s existing family had been kept a secret was as much for her benefit as anything else.

“I’ll help her with that tea,” Shelley said. She went to the kitchen. A moment later Mrs. Voorsanger returned carrying a tray with a kettle and two little cups with sugar and milk. Shelley brought out three mugs, poured tea into each, and handed one to Jess that read World’s Greatest Dad.

The tea was scalding and bitter. Jess forced herself to sip it while she waited, still slightly stunned. This house and these people were familiar to her; there were many like them where she grew up. People used to hard work, simple but strong. Money was tight but there was a code to follow that would see them through. It was hard for her to believe they were the sort that would harm a child.

But it happens all the time. People lose their grip.

“Sorry it took so long. I had to see to Annie upstairs. She won’t speak a word for months….” The woman shrugged. She sat very straight on the other couch with her hands in her lap. “Our daughter tries, so very hard. But life just don’t come easy for her. And she hasn’t been the same since Sarah was born.”

“Have you had her examined?”

“Of course. But they could never tell us nothing that would help. So we keep her at home.”

Mrs. Voorsanger told them about Annie’s difficult childhood. Never seemed to relate to any of the other children. At first they thought she was just simple, and that would have been all right; they could have handled it just fine.

“But soon it seemed it was more than that. When she went through puberty it got worse, but we managed. She was the strangest child. She’d go days without speaking, and you’d think she wasn’t even there, and then out of the blue she’d come up with something no one in their right mind could know.

“Then when she was nineteen we found out she was carrying a child. We didn’t know who the father was, never did. Just one day she was pregnant and she never would say a word after. Ed got crazy in the head about it. He was going to track the father down and make him own up to what he’d done. But that was just talk. Truth was it could have been any number of drifters, people who took advantage of Annie’s feeblemindedness. The boys used to get her down in their basements by offering her sweets. You know she loved cake and lollipops. Then she would come home with her shirt undone and her underwear gone, crying… she didn’t know what they done. She just didn’t understand.

“Most of them boys are gone now. Moved away to Lord knows where. Good riddance.”

Jess felt a strange sensation of falling into a life that had been so hard, so cruel. Closets full of arts and crafts, moldering papers in crayon, half-finished ashtrays and lopsided mugs. She wondered if Mrs. Voorsanger hated herself for the nights when she thought of putting the pillow over her daughter’s face, just holding it there until she stopped moving.

Mrs. Voorsanger reached for the teapot. Her hands shook as she refilled her mug. “Did you know Annie just up and disappeared? On about her eighth month she walked right out of the house.

“We looked for her for weeks. The police came out and combed the woods, we put up posters in town. Then we get word that she’d been found, up in New Hampshire somewhere, and she’s had her baby and won’t we please come pick her up? There’d been some trouble, as I imagine she’s told you.” Mrs. Voorsanger nodded at Shelley. “The hospital where Sarah was born burned right to the ground. It was a miracle they got out alive.”

“It took us a while to identify them,” Shelley said. “Annie wouldn’t talk to us and she had nothing on her.”

“Course not,” Mrs. Voorsanger said. “Didn’t I tell you how she was? She couldn’t earn a license and she’d lose her pocketbook if we didn’t tie it onto her sleeve.”

“So you went up there and brought Annie and Sarah home….”

“They told us not to do it but we did. Ed was furious. But here was this little child, and she was sickly, not expected to live. We tended to her as best we could. Annie and Sarah seemed to have a bond. Annie wouldn’t speak to her, half the time she wouldn’t even look at her, but every once in a while she’d just get up and go to the crib as if she’d been called. She’d stand there and stare. And the strangest things would happen.

“At first I thought I must be seeing things. Curtains moving without any breeze. The mobile above her crib would start spinning for no reason at all. I remember once I came into the room in the morning and there was this ball"—she made a gesture with her hands—"a blue and gold one, Sarah’s favorite. And it was floating in the air over her crib. Just hanging there like some kind of—some kind of little planet. Spinning. And Sarah was laughing.

“There were worse things too. Pictures falling off the walls. Glass breaking. Sarah would have these fits, her face getting all red, holding her breath. And she would get out of her crib before she could even walk. Once I found the crib splintered, wood snapped right in half. Ed himself couldn’t have done it without a hammer.

“It got so I didn’t like to go into her room, afraid what I might see.

“Then finally there was the time after her first birthday. She’d spilled something and she was screaming and throwing things. I went to punish her and it was like I hit a wall. I couldn’t move. Then my throat started getting tight and I couldn’t breathe. Things from the kitchen started flying through the air by themselves—knives and forks from the drawers, pots and pans off the walls. And all the time little Sarah was just staring at me with this look in her eyes. I knew I couldn’t handle her anymore. I called and they came and took Sarah away.

“She wasn’t even two years old,” Mrs. Voorsanger whispered. “And she could do something like that. What was going to happen when she grew up?”

Jess felt sudden memories that were too fresh. The buzzing sounds, her strange disorientation. The lights blowing in the hall. The frozen door locks. Sarah’s seizure and the feeling that the air had suddenly come alive.

Mrs. Voorsanger had pulled out a package of cigarettes from somewhere and she was in the process of trying to light one. After a moment Shelley got up and took the match from her trembling fingers.

“Much obliged.” Mrs. Voorsanger smiled. She leaned forward and inhaled deeply. “Sorry, do you mind? I quit a year ago. But I feel I need one.”

“That’s all right,” Jess said. “You just go ahead if you’d like.”

“What I’d like is to know why you’re here,” she said. “A person doesn’t just come out from Boston to have a conversation. I told my story and now you tell me what she’s done.”

“We’re trying to learn how to make her better,” Shelley said. “Sometimes it helps to talk to the family.”

“You did that before. It didn’t help then.”

“She’s got a mental disorder, Mrs. Voorsanger—”

“A mental disorder? Is that what you’re calling it?” Her voice had become shrill and the cigarette hadn’t calmed the tremors in her hands. Mrs. Voorsanger took a drag on her cigarette and let out a great, sighing puff of smoke. Something had been stripped away from her surface, and what was revealed beneath looked raw and frightened. “You see how it’s been for us. Then she’s taken away and we don’t hear for years. Waiting and waiting for something to happen. I knew she wasn’t going to just disappear. Something like that doesn’t go away.”

“One of the doctors believes Sarah has a mental disability called a schizophreniform disorder,” Jess said. “It’s a disruption of the regular thought process, a scrambling of the mind.”

“But you don’t believe it, do you?”

The surprise must have been evident in her face. Mrs. Voorsanger nodded. “I got some of it, and Ed too. Sensitive to mood. But it don’t take a psychic to know that’s just nonsense. Any halfway intelligent person could see that.”

“Her problems… there’s a good possibility that whatever’s wrong is genetic. That’s why we’re here.”

“You want to see her mother.”

Jess nodded. “If it wouldn’t be too much trouble. I wouldn’t disturb her, Mrs. Voorsanger, and it might mean the difference for Sarah.”

Tears trembled in the old woman’s eyes and white flecks dotted the corners of her mouth. A silence filled the room. “It’s been hard with her. But what she has… it isn’t hurtful. It isn’t evil.”

“I don’t believe it is.”

Mrs. Voorsanger shrugged. “Go on up, then. We’ll wait for you here. You won’t be gone long.”

The hallway was dim and full of clutter, crumbling yellow newspapers and magazines in stacks along the walls. A set of stairs led up into gloom. The air smelled of mice, and damp things left too long without sunlight.

Jess went up the steps slowly, hearing the creak of old wood, and stopped at the first doorway, looking into a small, square room with a four-poster bed, and a floor dipping to the middle and worn white with age. She stepped carefully, half afraid the boards would give under her weight and send her tumbling through.

She paused for a moment just inside the door, listening. Something seemed to buzz softly, like voices speaking too far away to make anything out.

Annie Voorsanger sat in a rocking chair by a large, curtained window. She was bone-thin and her black hair was pulled tightly back and held with elastic. Wiry strands had escaped their bonds and stuck out around the patches of gray at her temples. As hard as it was to believe looking at her, Jess thought, she must have been barely thirty years old.

Annie’s clothes were loose-fitting and made of a stretchy fabric, the kind that pulls on easily. She stared unblinking at the curtains, as if focused on something out of sight beyond the glass. Her face was absent, as if she were a puppet that had been tucked away between performances.

Standing there in the wings, Jess tried to piece things together. A silver cross on the wall, the hundreds of figurines. Simple, God-fearing folk. They had been given a daughter who was not whole, a terrible burden to carry. They had asked God to protect her, to give her a decent life even if she couldn’t live alone, even if she couldn’t tie her own shoes.

But it had gotten even worse with Annie’s pregnancy. There would be another child to watch over. God had not listened. Or He had not been strong enough. Was it any wonder Mrs. Voorsanger had seen Sarah as the child of the devil? It all made terrible, perfect sense.

Then why suddenly couldn’t she keep her hands from shaking or get her heart to slow down?

Easy now, girl. Those are old wives’ tales, witches and demon familiars.

Jess stepped closer and said clearly and firmly, “Ms. Voorsanger? Annie?”

She might have been talking to the air. Sarah’s mother was in a place very far from here.

Jess could see something of Sarah in her broad forehead, angular features, and narrow shoulders, in the way she rocked back and forth. There was an intensity to her features made all the more apparent by the slackness of the facial muscles. Annie might have been pretty once. But the life that was supposed to live here was absent.

Jess stepped closer still. The curtains drifted slightly on an unseen draft from the closed window, as below her feet the furnace kicked on.

The room seemed to tick the way a hot engine ticked in silence.

Jess willed herself to be still. “Annie? Annie Voorsanger?”

Nothing. The woman might have been wax. Jess reached out to brush a strand of hair away from her forehead, then thought better of it. “I’ve come to talk about your daughter.”

A blink. The woman’s eyes were blank walls of glass. “Do you remember her, Annie? Do you remember Sarah?”

A finger twitched. Movement in the throat; was there life here after all? “I don’t want to upset you, Annie. I just wanted to talk for a minute. I’ve been seeing Sarah back in Boston. She’s doing real good. I thought you might want to know. We’re taking good care of her.”

She wondered if this was cruel, if Annie felt any maternal instinct. If it were her, would she want to know any of this? Jess decided that she would.

“Sarah’s been coming along lately. I’m going to make sure she gets all the care she needs, Annie. If you can hear me, I’m going to make sure your daughter’s given every chance. She’s ten now, she looks like you too. A pretty little girl. Can you hear me, Annie? Do you want me to tell you anything else?”

Nothing—

And suddenly the woman’s head was turning, her mouth opening in a silent, wide black O that seemed to grow larger and larger. A screech began low in her throat and grew into a rusty, cracked wail, rising in pitch like the tortured sounds of cats in moonlight. It was an alien voice, one that did not belong here in the middle of a farmhouse bedroom.

The sound came from both outside and within her head. Disoriented, Jess reached out as if to touch her, drew her hand back in shock at the waves of cold air washing across the dusty space.

Annie’s eyes jumped and rolled as the sound grew to fill the little room, a mindless howl of protest as her fingers plucked at something only she could see, as she rose out of her chair, and Jess stumbled backward as if pushed by a monstrous, unseen hand.

—11—

They did not speak until the car was back on the asphalt road, headed into Gilbertsville. They had left Mrs. Voorsanger tending to her daughter, Annie’s screams slowly quieting as her mother spoke softly, gently in her ear. It had been nothing but a reflex, a simple release of tension, or at least that was what Jess kept telling herself; it had probably been building for a long time.

But she couldn’t keep the chills from running up and down her spine, or the quivers from her muscles. It was almost as if she had experienced Annie’s fear, had been inside the woman’s mind.

According to her mother, that scream was the first sound that Annie Voorsanger had uttered in almost three years.

“So what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” Jess said. She did not want to look away from the road, but finally she did.

Shelley sat up straight in the passenger seat and was looking at her with the calm and considered gaze of a doctor. “Give me an opinion.”

“She’s obviously disturbed. Beyond that—she’d need to be examined more fully.”

“You can see how it was,” Shelley said. There was a gleam in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. “Sarah was alone with them and I wanted to get her out as fast as I could. They agreed to give me full legal responsibility and the state signed the paperwork. If she ever got to the point of leaving my care I would contact them.”

“Would you have?”

“I doubt it.”

Take her, I told you, Mrs. Voorsanger had said, turning to Shelley as they left, as her daughter’s screams had finally turned to low moans. You remember. Care for our Sarah, I said. But never forget what she is.

And what was that?

A child with the power of the devil in her hands.

“You think they’re all insane?”

“I didn’t say that. If there’s one thing I’ve learned,” Shelley said, seeming to choose her words carefully, “it’s that the mind is capable of amazing feats. But what they’re asking us to consider here is in the realm of parapsychology. Pseudoscience. You understand what I’m saying.”

Something that was not logically possible, according to all the laws of physics. A child of the devil? Certainly not. That went far beyond anything she was willing to believe. A lapsed Catholic, she was not a particularly religious woman. Only in times of great stress had her mind searched for belief in a higher power, and afterward she always felt slightly embarrassed, a little childish, as if someone might have seen what she had been thinking and thought less of her for it.

But there had been studies, she knew, examining just this kind of phenomenon. ESP. Psychokinesis. Some of them were fairly persuasive.

And yet. All those years of training in the science of everything, an unwavering belief in everything explained, rationalized, dissected. Things like this just didn’t happen, or if they did there was a logical explanation. Did she believe it now? Could she believe it?

“That wasn’t the whole story,” Shelley said quietly, interrupting her thoughts. “I want you to understand that we acted in the true interests of the child. There was evidence of physical abuse when we took her in. Bruises, a slight concussion. We think it was the husband, Ed, though it could have been any of them.”

“They were hurting her?”

“Something happened to that little girl, and it wasn’t falling out of her crib. Remember that when you’re thinking about what we just heard.”

They reached the airport. Jess ignored the appreciative glances from the two men who filled the plane’s gas tank, their eyes moving across her face and breasts like men considering a purchase. She felt a cold dark emptiness, as if she were outside herself looking in.

Soon she was looking down the wing as they turned to circle back over a tiny toy airport and flash of hills, a ribbon of road through green trees and grass, lines of houses drawn in neat patterns and squares. From above, everything looked as if it had been fashioned by giant hands, laid out in neat geometric shapes.

The distance gained was more than physical. There were many times in her teenage years when she had felt the lift of the wings like a sudden unburdening, and the whoosh of air sounded like something chasing her from the ground.

It was still that way, she decided. No matter how hard she tried she could never outrun what was chasing her. She always had to land.