“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.”