God Project (12 page)

“But I thought that’s what SIDS was,” Steve said.

“I wish it were,” another of the men put in. “But it seems there’s more to SIDS than that With SIDS, there’s a constriction of the throat, so even if the baby tries to breathe, it can’t. And for that, the alarm doesn’t seem to do any good at all.”

The conversation went on, moving from subject to subject. Steve found himself listening intently. These people, he began to realize, were just like himself—ordinary people who had become the victims of something they had always assumed could only happen to someone else. Each of them was dealing with it in a different way. There was grief and puzzlement in the room and a
lot of anger. But for all of them, there was understanding.

Beside her husband, Sally Montgomery listened to the voices droning on and wondered why Steve had insisted they come to this meeting. There was nothing here for her, and she had a distinct feeling that she was wasting her time. She should be at home, looking after Jason, and studying her books, searching for the answer that kept eluding her as to what had happened to her daughter.

Suddenly, she heard a voice addressing her. It was Alex Petropoulous, and his intelligent eyes were fixed on her, his expression quizzical.

“You don’t seem to be paying much attention, Mrs. Montgomery,” he said. “Is there something on your mind?”

She made herself relax and sink back onto the couch, her hands smoothing the soft linen of her dress. “I’m afraid I’ve got a lot on my mind,” she explained. “You see, my baby didn’t die of SIDS. It was something else.”

Across the room, a woman who had been quiet all evening suddenly spoke.

“I’m Jan Ransom, Mrs. Montgomery,” she said. “Would you mind telling us what happened to your baby?”

“I—I don’t know yet,” Sally admitted. “But I’ll find out.”

“Of course you will,” Jan agreed. “Just like I did. I spent nearly a year trying to find out what happened to my daughter, and I finally did.”

Sally looked at the woman sharply. “What was it?” she asked.

“SIDS,” Jan said, shrugging her shoulders. “You know, one of the hardest things to accept is the simple fact that with SIDS no one can tell you what happened. For me, the idea that the doctors—the people who are always supposed to know what happened and why it happened—didn’t have the slightest idea why my baby died was absolutely unacceptable. So I started reading and studying and talking to everyone I could think of. And
no one knew. Of course, what I was really doing was burying my head in the sand. Deep down, I was afraid that if there was no reasonable explanation for my baby’s dying, I must have made it happen myself.”

“No one would want to kill her own baby,” Muriel Flannery said softly.

“No?” Jan Ransom replied bitterly. “People kill their own babies every day. And I never wanted a baby in the first place.”

For the first time, Sally Montgomery began listening.

“I had my life all planned,” Jan went on. “I was going to finish my masters—I’m in communications—then go to New York and get a job in advertising. When I was in my thirties, I’d get married, and my husband would be as career-minded as I am. No children. They only get in the way, and besides, what kind of world is this to bring up children in? Energy shortages, overpopulation, all the usual things. And then one day I turned up pregnant.”

“Why didn’t you have an abortion?” someone asked.

Jan Ransom smiled bitterly. “Did I forget to tell you? I was raised a Catholic. I thought I’d gotten over that, but it turned out I hadn’t. Oh, I went for the birth control—that didn’t bother me at all. But when it came right down to having an abortion, I just couldn’t do it. And then, when the baby came, I couldn’t put it up for adoption either. Maybe I should have.”

“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Lois Petropoulous told her. “SIDS doesn’t have anything to do with who’s raising the baby.”

“Doesn’t it?” Jan shot back. “Who says? And how do they know? If they don’t know what SIDS is, how can they say it doesn’t have anything to do with the parents? Maybe,” she added, her voice trembling, “the baby senses that its mother doesn’t want it and just decides to die.”

Sally felt her fingers digging into her thighs as she listened to Jan Ransom. Right here, in front of all these people, the woman was voicing all the dark suspicions with which Sally had tormented herself in the small hours of the night. Now she could feel Jan Ransom’s
eyes on her. When she looked up, the young woman was smiling at her gently.

“I don’t think I killed my baby anymore, Mrs. Montgomery,” she said softly. “And I’m sure you didn’t kill yours either. I don’t know exactly why you’re so sure that SIDS didn’t kill your baby, but I do know that if the doctors say that’s what happened, it’s best to believe them. You can’t spend the rest of your life searching for answers that don’t exist. You have to go on with your life and accept what happened.”

“I’m not sure I can do that,” Sally said, suddenly standing up. “But I know that I have nothing in common with you people. Steve?” Without waiting for a reply, Sally started toward the door. Steve, his face flushing with embarrassment, tried to apologize for his wife.

“It’s all right,” Lois Petropoulous told him. “This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last. When she needs us, well still be here. If not us, then there will be others. Take care of her, Steve. She needs you very badly right now.”

She stood by the door and watched Steve and Sally Montgomery disappear into the night. As she returned to the living room, she wondered if Sally Montgomery would come back and get the help she needed, or if she would insist on bearing her problems alone until the day came, as it inevitably would, when those problems would close in on her, and destroy her.

   Jason Montgomery sat on the floor of his room, watching as his guinea pig happily darted from corner to corner, enjoying its respite from the confines of its cage. From downstairs Jason could hear the sound of the television droning on as the sitter dozed in front of it. He’d gone down a few minutes ago, but when he’d found her asleep, he’d decided not to wake her up. She wasn’t like some of the sitters he’d had, who were always baking cookies or willing to play games. She was too old, he’d decided long ago, and all she wanted was to be left alone. And if she wasn’t, sometimes she got
crabby. So Jason had stood at the door for a minute, watching her, then gone back upstairs to play with Fred.

His parents, he knew, had gone to some meeting, but he wasn’t sure what it was about Something to do with his sister and getting used to the fact that she was dead. But Jason didn’t understand why his parents had to go to a meeting. Hadn’t there already been a funeral? He’d thought that’s what the funeral was for, but now he guessed he’d been wrong.

He decided it was one more thing he’d talk to Randy Corliss about the next time he saw him.

Except that this afternoon Joey Connors had told him that Randy had run away, and most of the kids thought that even if he came back, he’d probably be sent to Juvenile Hall, where he’d be punished.

Fred moved across the floor, his tiny nose snuffling at the carpet, then crept into Jason’s lap to be petted. Jason began scratching the rodent behind the ears and talking quietly to it.

“Is that what’ll happen to me?” he asked. “But I didn’t really do anything to Julie. All I did was put the blanket on her face for a minute.” He stared down at the guinea pig, wondering for the hundredth time if he could really have hurt Julie by putting the blanket over her head. He was almost sure he hadn’t.

Almost.

But what if he had? How would he ever know?

He picked up the guinea pig, pulled his extra blanket off his bed, then knelt down on the floor once again.

“Now, you pretend like you’re Julie,” he said. He put Fred on the floor, and rolled him over on his back. The guinea pig struggled for a moment, then, as Jason began tickling its stomach, lay still.

“There,” Jason said. “Doesn’t that feel good?” Then he stopped tickling his pet and waited. The tiny animal lay still, waiting for the petting to resume.

Carefully, Jason wrapped the blanket around the guinea pig and held it firm. He began counting.

Fred wriggled and squirmed in the woolen folds, and Jason could feel him trying to bite, but it was no use.

By the time Jason had counted to one hundred, there was no more movement within the blanket.

He tried to remember—had Julie stopped struggling? He thought she hadn’t, and he was almost sure he’d held the blanket over her face for much longer than he’d kept Fred wrapped in it.

Almost sure.

Carefully, he lifted the blanket, sure that Fred, suddenly freed, would scurry under the bed.

The guinea pig lay still. Even when Jason prodded it with his finger, it didn’t move.

Maybe, he decided, he
had
done something to Julie. But if he had, he hadn’t meant to. No more than he’d meant to kill Fred.

He picked the guinea pig’s body up and cradled it in his hands for a minute, wondering what to do.

Maybe, he decided, guinea pigs were like babies.

Maybe they just died sometimes.

He put Fred back in his cage, then went to bed, and by the time his parents came home, he was fast asleep.

   It was Sally who found the guinea pig.

While Steve drove the baby-sitter home, she slipped into Jason’s room to make sure he was all right. She bent over him, listened to him breathe for a moment, then gently kissed him on the forehead. She was about to leave his room, when she realized something was wrong.

The scuffling noises that Fred made whenever his sleep was disturbed were missing. Sally switched on the lamp next to Jason’s bed and went to the cage in the corner. Fred, looking strangely unnatural, was sprawled on the bottom of the cage. She knelt, opened the cage, and picked him up. As she realized he was dead, an involuntary sound escaped her lips.

“What’s wrong?” she heard Jason asking from behind her. She turned to see her son sitting up in bed, sleepily rubbing his eyes. “Is something wrong with Fred?”

“He’s dead,” Sally breathed, fighting off the terrible emotions that were welling up inside her. It’s only a
guinea pig, she told herself. It’s not Jason, it’s not Julie, it’s only a damned guinea pig.

But still, it was too familiar. Bursting into tears, she dropped the dead animal and fled from the room. Behind her, she heard Jason’s voice.

“What happened to him, Mommy? Did the same thing happen to Fred that happened to Julie?”

Chapter 10

S
ALLY MONTGOMERY SAT IN
her living room, a small pool of light flooding the book she was trying to read.

The words on the pages made no sense to her. They kept drifting away, slipping off the pages, and over and over again she realized that she had read a paragraph but had no memory of it.

When Steve had come back from taking the sitter home, and Sally had told him about the guinea pig, all he had done was tell her to forget about it, then gone upstairs, brought the dead rodent down, and taken it outside to bury it in the backyard. By morning, he assured her, both she and Jason would have forgotten about it.

But would she?

She kept hearing Jason’s words echoing in her head.

“Did the same thing happen to Fred that happened to Julie?”

What had happened to Julie?

Involuntarily, images of her son began to flit through her mind.

Jason, standing at the door of the nursery, staring at her as she held Julie’s body.

Jason at the funeral, watching as his sister’s offin was
lowered into the ground, his eyes dry, his expression one of—what?

It had been, she admitted to herself now, an expression of disinterest.

As the long night wore on, she had twice gone upstairs to check on Jason. Each time she had found him sleeping peacefully, his breathing deep and strong, one arm thrown across his chest, the other dangling over the side of the bed. If either the loss of his sister or the loss of his pet was bothering him, it wasn’t keeping him awake. Twice she had stood at the foot of his bed for long minutes, trying to drive horrible thoughts from the edges of her mind. And both times she had at last forced herself to leave his room without waking him just to prove to herself that he was all right.

Or to ask him questions she wasn’t at all sure she wanted to voice.

Now, as she tried once more to concentrate on the book of childhood diseases that lay in her lap, she found herself once more thinking of Jan Ransom’s words.

“Never wanted a baby in the first place …”

“Maybe the baby senses that the mother doesn’t want it …”

Finally, heedless of the time, she picked up the phone book and flipped through it.

There it was:

RANSOM, JANELLE 504 ALDER ESTBY 555–3624

The phone rang seven times before a sleepy voice answered.

“Miss Ransom? This—this is Sally Montgomery. I was at the meeting tonight?”

Instantly the sleepiness was gone from the voice at the other end of the line. “Sally! Of course. You know, I had the strangest feeling you might call tonight I—well, I had the feeling I hit a nerve.”

Sally wasn’t sure what to say, and as she was trying to decide how to proceed, she suddenly felt as if she was being watched. Turning, she saw Steve standing in the
doorway. She swallowed hard, and when she spoke into the phone, her voice sounded unnaturally high.

“I—I thought perhaps we could have lunch next week.”

“Of course,” Jan Ransom replied immediately. “Any particular day?”

“Whatever’s good for you.”

“Then let’s not wait for next week,” Jan suggested. “Let’s say Friday at noon. Do you know the Speckled Hen?”

They made the date, and Sally slowly put the phone back on its cradle, still not sure why she wanted to talk further to Jan Ransom. All she knew was that she did.

Steve came into the room and sat down beside her. “Can I ask whom you were talking to?”

“I wish you wouldn’t,” Sally said uncertainly.

Steve hesitated, then, seeing clearly the strain and exhaustion in Sally’s whole being, decided not to press the issue. He stood up and switched off the light. “Come on, honey. Let’s go to bed.”