Lavinia. That was the name of the woman who came to take her to the bathroom, and change the babies’ diapers, and sat with her sometimes, even holding her hand, though she never said a word. “I don’t want to sleep,” she complained. “If I go to sleep, the dream will come back.”
“No, it won’t,” Dr. Phillips promised. “I’m putting something in your food to make it go away, and when you go to sleep, it won’t be there at all.”
Jenny looked up at him, her eyes wide with apprehension. “Promise?”
“Promise,” Phillips repeated. He finished attaching the morphine vial to the IV, and turned the valve that switched the feeder tube from the glucose solution to the narcotic. “Go to sleep, Jenny,” he said. “Just let yourself drift away.”
He stayed with her, waiting for the narcotic to take effect. Only when she had fallen once more into a deathlike coma did he unstrap her bonds and carefully remove the needles that had been inserted in her body. Finally he picked her up, carrying her out of the room, then up the stairs to the main floor of his isolated house. He stepped out into the darkness, glancing to the east, but there was no sign yet of the rising sun.
It had been three days since he’d brought Jenny here. Each day he’d brought her up from the subterranean chambers before dawn and taken her back to Villejeune, where she’d lain all day in her coffin, deep in a narcotic- induced coma, her life apparently over. And each night, after dark, he’d taken her back to the laboratory beneath his house, bringing her out of the deathlike sleep.
Each day, he’d drained a little more of the priceless fluid from her thymus.
Stolen her youth, to prolong his own.
Stolen her soul to stave off his own mortality.
But this would be the last time he would take her into Villejeune, for today was a very special day for Jenny Sheffield.
Today was the day of her funeral.
• • •
Just a few more minutes, Barbara told herself. Just a few more minutes, and then I’ll be alone with Craig and Michael, and I can let go.
She was sitting in the small darkened alcove to the right of the altar in the chapel of the Childress Funeral Home. Though a gauzy curtain separated her and her husband and son from the rest of the people who had come to Jenny’s funeral, she could see their faces clearly enough, see the confusion they were feeling as they listened to the eulogy for the little girl whose body lay in the coffin in front of the altar.
A funeral for a child.
It was wrong — children don’t have funerals; they have parties. Birthday parties, and graduation parties, and parties after proms, and finally wedding parties.
But not funerals.
What would they say to her when it was finally over and they had to take her hand and try to soothe the pain she was feeling? With an aged parent, especially one who had been ill, it was simple enough.
“It’s a blessing, Barbara.”
“I know it’s hard, Barbara, but at least your mother’s pain is over.”
“It’s better this way, Barbara.”
She’d heard it all, first at her father’s funeral ten years ago, and then at her mother’s two years later.
But there was no blessing in losing your six-year-old daughter.
Jenny had had no pain, rarely suffered so much as a day in her life.
And she hadn’t wanted to die.
Barbara had tried not to think about it during the last three days, tried to keep her mind from focusing on her little girl, slipping on the muddy edge of the canal, tumbling into the water and then struggling to get out.
Struggling, and calling, with no one to hear her or to help her.
Her hands, resting tensely in her lap, clenched the handkerchief that was soaked through from her tears, and she resolutely pushed the image out of her mind.
It won’t change anything, she told herself. It won’t bring her back.
She forced herself to gaze through the filmy curtain once again, but found herself unable to look at Jenny’s coffin. Instead, she scanned the faces of her friends and neighbors — people she had known for years — and wondered yet again what they would say to her after this ordeal was over.
Would they—
Suddenly the organ began to play, and the gathering of mourners rose to its feet as the first strains of Jenny’s favorite hymn began to sound.
“Away in a Manger.”
As Barbara, too, rose shakily to her feet, she could almost hear Jenny’s piping voice as she sang in the Christmas pageant last year, looking like a tiny angel in the costume Barbara had spent three days working on.
The costume she was being buried in today.
Barbara tried to imagine her entering into heaven, dressed as the angel she had already become.
She raised the handkerchief to her eyes, dabbing once more at the tears she was powerless to control.
The last chords of the hymn died away, the final prayer was softly uttered by the minister who had christened Jenny only six short years ago, and then the service was over. The curtain was raised, and Barbara felt Craig’s hand on her arm, steadying her as he led her toward the altar to look at her daughter’s face for the last time.
Sleeping, she thought as she gazed into Jenny’s gentle countenance a moment later.
She looks as though she’s sleeping.
As Craig’s grip tightened on her elbow, she turned away and let him guide her up the aisle and out of the chapel.
• • •
Michael paused in front of his sister’s coffin, his eyes searching her face for some sign of life. And yet he’d seen her each day as she’d lain in the viewing room, and each day she’d looked the same.
Her eyes closed, her face expressionless.
At last he reached down to touch her, resting his hand on her own much smaller ones, which were folded on her breast, holding a flower.
He squeezed her hands gently and was about to withdraw his fingers from her when he thought he felt a movement.
He froze, his hand remaining where it was, waiting for it to come again.
But no.
He’d only imagined it.
And yet as he, too, turned away from the coffin, he still couldn’t bring himself to believe that Jenny was really gone, that he’d never see her again.
Something inside him, something he didn’t quite understand, told him that she was still alive, that she wasn’t dead at all, that she was still a part of his life.
“I feel the same way,” his father had told him last night when he’d finally confessed the strange feeling he had. “We all feel like that. It’s so hard to accept the finality of death, especially with someone like Jenny. I still expect her to come running in, climb into my lap, and plant one of those wet kisses on my cheek. Sometimes I wake up in the night and think I hear her crying. It’s part of mourning, Michael. I know it all seems impossible, but it’s happened. We have to accept it.”
But for Michael it was different. Each morning, when he woke up, the feeling that Jenny was alive was stronger.
It was as if she was reaching out to him, calling to him, crying out for him to help her.
He moved down the aisle, searching the crowd for Kelly Anderson, and finally spotted her sitting with her parents and grandfather. As their eyes met, she nodded at him, not in greeting, but as if they shared some unspoken secret.
He understood.
She had the same feeling he had.
She had it, and recognized it in him.
• • •
Barbara watched in silence as Jenny’s coffin was placed in the crypt, a cold chill passing over her as the door
