"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."