5
David Stone had been teaching American history and twentieth-century European history to undergraduates for ten years, and knew how to organize a story so the interior logic was hard to miss. He began this one by pointing out that their infant daughter’s marathon crying spree had ended almost immediately after the second jetliner had struck the World Trade Center. Then he doubled back to the dreams in which his wife had seen the American Airlines flight number on Abra’s chest and he had seen the United Airlines number.
“In Lucy’s dream, she found Abra in an airplane bathroom. In mine, I found her in a mall that was on fire. Draw your own conclusions about that part. Or not. To me, those flight numbers seem pretty conclusive. But of what, I don’t know.” He laughed without much humor, raised his hands, then dropped them again. “Maybe I’m afraid to know.”
John Dalton remembered the morning of 9/11—and Abra’s nonstop crying jag—very well. “Let me get this straight. You believe your daughter—who was then only five months old—had a premonition of those attacks and somehow sent word to you telepathically.”
“Yes,” Chetta said. “Put very succinctly. Bravo.”
“I know how it sounds,” David said. “Which is why Lucy and I kept it to ourselves. Except for Chetta, that is. Lucy told her that night. Lucy tells her momo everything.” He sighed. Concetta gave him a cool look.
“You didn’t get one of these dreams?” John asked her.
She shook her head. “I was in Boston. Out of her . . . I don’t know . . . transmitting range?”
“It’s been almost three years since 9/11,” John said. “I assume other stuff has happened since then.”
A lot of other stuff had happened, and now that he had managed to speak of the first (and most unbelievable) thing, Dave found himself able to talk about the rest easily enough.
“The piano. That was next. You know Lucy plays?”
John shook his head.
“Well, she does. Since she was in grammar school. She’s not great or anything, but she’s pretty good. We’ve got a Vogel that my parents gave her as a wedding present. It’s in the living room, which is also where Abra’s playpen used to be. Well, one of the presents I gave Lucy for Christmas in 2001 was a book of Beatles tunes arranged for piano. Abra used to lie in her playpen, goofing with her toys and listening. You could tell by the way she smiled and kicked her feet that she liked the music.”
John didn’t question this. Most babies loved music, and they had their ways of letting you know.
“The book had all the hits—‘Hey Jude,’ ‘Lady Madonna,’ ‘Let It Be’—but the one Abra liked best was one of the minor songs, a B-side called ‘Not a Second Time.’ Do you know it?”
“Not offhand,” John said. “I might if I heard it.”
“It’s upbeat, but unlike most of the Beatles’ fast stuff, it’s built around a piano riff rather than the usual guitar sound. It isn’t a boogie-woogie, but close. Abra loved it. She wouldn’t just kick her feet when Lucy played that one, she’d actually bicycle them.” Dave smiled at the memory of Abra on her back in her bright purple onesie, not yet able to walk but crib-dancing like a disco queen. “The instrumental break is almost all piano, and it’s simple as pie. The left hand just picks out the notes. There are only twenty-nine—I counted. A kid could play it. And our kid did.”
John raised his eyebrows until they almost met his hairline.
“It started in the spring of 2002. Lucy and I were in bed, reading. The weather report was on TV, and that comes about halfway through the eleven p.m. newscast. Abra was in her room—fast asleep, as far as we knew. Lucy asked me to turn off the TV because she wanted to go to sleep. I clicked the remote, and that’s when we heard it. The piano break of ‘Not a Second Time,’ those twenty-nine notes. Perfect. Not a single miss, and coming from downstairs.
“Doc, we were scared shitless. We thought we had an intruder in the house, only what kind of burglar stops to play a little Beatles before grabbing the silverware? I don’t have a gun and my golf clubs were in the garage, so I just picked up the biggest book I could find and went down to confront whoever was there. Pretty stupid, I know. I told Lucy to grab the phone and dial 911 if I yelled. But there was no one, and all the doors were locked. Also, the cover was down over the piano keys.
“I went back upstairs and told Lucy I hadn’t found anything or anyone. We went down the hall to check the baby. We didn’t talk about it, we just did it. I think we knew it was Abra, but neither of us wanted to say it right out loud. She was awake, just lying there in her crib and looking at us. You know the wise little eyes that they have?”
John knew. As if they could tell you all the secrets of the universe, if they were only able to talk. There were times when he thought that might even be so, only God had arranged things in such a way so that by the time they could get beyond goo-goo-ga-ga, they had forgotten it all, the way we forget even our most vivid dreams a couple of hours after waking.
“She smiled when she saw us, closed her eyes, and dropped off. The next night it happened again. Same time. Those twenty-nine notes from the living room . . . then silence . . . then down to Abra’s room and finding her awake. Not fussing, not even sucking her bink, just looking at us through the bars of her crib. Then off to sleep.”
“This is the truth,” John said. Not really questioning, only wanting to get it straight. “You’re not pulling my leg.”
David didn’t smile. “Not even twitching the cuff of your pants.”
John turned to Chetta. “Have you heard it yourself???”
“No. Let David finish.”
“We got a couple of nights off, and . . . you know how you say that the secret of successful parenting is always make a plan?”
“Sure.” This was John Dalton’s chief sermon to new parents. How are you going to handle night feedings? Draw up a schedule so someone’s always on call and no one gets too ragged. How are you going to handle bathing and feeding and dressing and playtime so the kid has a regular—and hence comforting—routine? Draw up a schedule. Make a plan. Do you know how to handle an emergency? Anything from a collapsed crib to a choking incident? If you make a plan, you will, and nineteen times out of twenty, things will turn out fine.
“So that’s what we did. For the next three nights I slept on the sofa right across from the piano. On the third night the music started just as I was snugging down for the night. The cover on the Vogel was closed, so I hustled over and raised it. The keys weren’t moving. Which didn’t surprise me much, because I could tell the music wasn’t coming from the piano.”
“Beg pardon?”
“It was coming from above it. From thin air. By then, Lucy was in Abra’s room. The other times we hadn’t said anything, we were too stunned, but this time she was ready. She told Abra to play it again. There was a little pause . . . and then she did. I was standing so close I almost could have snatched those notes out of the air.”
Silence in John Dalton’s office. He had stopped writing on the pad. Chetta was looking at him gravely. At last he said, “Is this still going on?”
“No. Lucy took Abra on her lap and told her not to play anymore at night, because we couldn’t sleep. And that was the end of it.” He paused to consider. “Almost the end. Once, about three weeks later, we heard the music again, but very soft and coming from upstairs this time. From her room.”
“She was playing to herself,” Concetta said. “She woke up . . . she couldn’t get back to sleep right away . . . so she played herself a little lullaby.”
6
One Monday afternoon just about a year after the fall of the Twin Towers, Abra—walking by now and with recognizable words beginning to emerge from her all-but-constant gabble—teetered her way to the front door and plopped down there with her favorite doll in her lap.
“Whatcha doon, sweetheart?” Lucy asked. She was sitting at the piano, playing a Scott Joplin rag.
“Dada!” Abra announced.
“Honey, Dada won’t be home until supper,” Lucy said, but fifteen minutes later the Acura pulled up the drive and Dave got out, hauling his briefcase. There had been a water-main break in the building where he taught his Monday-Wednesday-Friday classes, and everything had been canceled.
“Lucy told me about that,” Concetta said, “and of course I already knew about the 9/11 crying jag and the phantom piano. I took a run up there a week or two later. I told Lucy not to say a word to Abra about my visit. But Abra knew. She planted herself in front of the door ten minutes before I showed up. When Lucy asked who was coming, Abra said, ‘Momo.’?”
“She does that a lot,” David said. “Not every time someone’s coming, but if it’s someone she knows and likes . . . almost always.”
In the late spring of 2003, Lucy found her daughter in their bedroom, tugging at the second drawer of Lucy’s dresser.
“Mun!” she told her mother. “Mun, mun!”
“I don’t get you, sweetie,” Lucy said, “but you can look in the drawer if you want to. It’s just some old underwear and leftover cosmetics.”
But Abra had no interest in the drawer, it seemed; didn’t even look in it when Lucy pulled it out to show her what was inside.
“Hind! Mun!” Then, drawing a deep breath. “Mun hind, Mama!”
Parents never become absolutely fluent in Baby—there’s not enough time—but most learn to speak it to some degree, and Lucy finally understood that her daughter’s interest wasn’t in the contents of the dresser but in something behind it.
Curious, she pulled it out. Abra darted into the space immediately. Lucy, thinking that it would be dusty in there even if there weren’t bugs or mice, made a swipe for the back of the baby’s shirt and missed. By the time she got the dresser out far enough to slip into the gap herself, Abra was holding up a twenty-dollar bill that had found its way through the hole between the dresser’s surface and the bottom of the mirror. “Look!” she said gleefully. “Mun! My mun!”
“Nope,” Lucy said, plucking it out of the small fist, “babies don’t get mun because they don’t need mun. But you did just earn yourself an ice cream cone.”
“I-keem!” Abra shouted. “My i-keem!”
“Now tell Doctor John about Mrs. Judkins,” David said. “You were there for that.”
“Indeed I was,” Concetta said. “That was some Fourth of July weekend.”
By the summer of 2003, Abra had begun speaking in—more or less—full sentences. Concetta had come to spend the holiday weekend with the Stones. On the Sunday, which happened to be July sixth, Dave had gone to the 7-Eleven to buy a fresh canister of Blue Rhino for the backyard barbecue. Abra was playing with blocks in the living room. Lucy and Chetta were in the kitchen, one of them checking periodically on Abra to make sure she hadn’t decided to pull out the plug on the TV and chew it or go climbing Mount Sofa. But Abra showed no interest in those things; she was busy constructing what looked like a Stonehenge made out of her plastic toddler blocks.
Lucy and Chetta were unloading the dishwasher when Abra began to scream.
“She sounded like she was dying,” Chetta said. “You know how scary that is, right?”
John nodded. He knew.
“Running doesn’t come naturally to me at my age, but I ran like Wilma Rudolph that day. Beat Lucy to the living room by half a length. I was so convinced the kid was hurt that for a second or two I actually saw blood. But she was okay. Physically, anyhow. She ran to me and threw her arms around my legs. I picked her up. Lucy was with me by then, and we managed to get her soothed a little. ‘Wannie!’ she said. ‘Help Wannie, Momo! Wannie fall down!’ I didn’t know who Wannie was, but Lucy did—Wanda Judkins, the lady across the street.”
“She’s Abra’s favorite neighbor,” David said, “because she makes cookies and usually brings one over for Abra with her name written on it. Sometimes in raisins, sometimes in frosting. She’s a widow. Lives alone.”
“So we went across,” Chetta resumed, “me in the lead and Lucy holding Abra. I knocked. No one answered. ‘Wannie in the dinner room!’ Abra said. ‘Help Wannie, Momo! Help Wannie, Mama! She hurted herself and blood is coming out!’
“The door was unlocked. We went in. First thing I smelled was burning cookies. Mrs. Judkins was lying on the dining room floor next to a stepladder. The rag she’d been using to dust out the moldings was still in her hand, and there was blood, all right—a puddle of it around her head in a kind of halo. I thought she was finished—I couldn’t see her breathing—but Lucy found a pulse. The fall fractured her skull, and there was a small brain-bleed, but she woke up the next day. She’ll be at Abra’s birthday party. You can say hello to her, if you come.” She looked at Abra Stone’s pediatrician unflinchingly. “The doctor at the ER said that if she’d lain there much longer, she would have either died or ended up in a persistent vegetative state . . . far worse than death, in my humble opinion. Either way, the kid saved her life.”
John tossed his pen on top of the legal pad. “I don’t know what to say.”
“There’s more,” Dave said, “but the other stuff’s hard to quantify. Maybe just because Lucy and I have gotten used to it. The way, I guess, you’d get used to living with a kid who was born blind. Except this is almost the opposite of that. I think we knew even before the 9/11 thing. I think we knew there was something almost from the time we brought her home from the hospital. It’s like . . .”
He huffed out a breath and looked at the ceiling, as if for inspiration. Concetta squeezed his arm. “Go on. At least he hasn’t called for the men with the butterfly nets yet.”
“Okay, it’s like there’s always a wind blowing through the house, only you can’t exactly feel it or see what it’s doing. I keep thinking the curtains are going to billow and the pictures are going to fly off the walls, but they never do. Other stuff does happen, though. Two or three times a week—sometimes two or three times a day—the circuit breakers trip. We’ve had two different electricians out, on four different occasions. They check the circuits and tell us everything is hunky-dory. Some mornings we come downstairs and the cushions from the chairs and the sofa are on the floor. We tell Abra to put her toys away before bed and unless she’s overtired and cranky, she’s very good about it. But sometimes the toybox will be open the next morning and some of the toys will be back on the floor. Usually the blocks. They’re her favorites.”
He paused for a moment, now looking at the eye chart on the far wall. John thought Concetta would prod him to go on, but she kept silent.
“Okay, this is totally weird, but I swear to you it happened. One night when we turned on the TV, The Simpsons were on every channel. Abra laughed like it was the biggest joke in the world. Lucy freaked out. She said, ‘Abra Rafaella Stone, if you’re doing that, stop it right now!’ Lucy hardly ever speaks sharply to her, and when she does, Abra just dissolves. Which is what happened that night. I turned off the TV, and when I turned it on again, everything was back to normal. I could give you half a dozen other things . . . incidents . . . phenomena . . . but most of it’s so small you’d hardly even notice.” He shrugged. “Like I say, you get used to it.”
John said, “I’ll come to the party. After all that, how can I resist?”
“Probably nothing will happen,” Dave said. “You know the old joke about how to stop a leaky faucet, don’t you? Call the plumber.”
Concetta snorted. “If you really believe that, sonny-boy, I think you might get a surprise.” And, to Dalton: “Just getting him here was like pulling teeth.”
“Give it a rest, Momo.” Color had begun to rise in Dave’s cheeks.
John sighed. He had sensed the antagonism between these two before. He didn’t know the cause of it—some kind of competition for Lucy, perhaps—but he didn’t want it breaking out into the open now. Their bizarre errand had turned them into temporary allies, and that was the way he wanted to keep it.
“Save the sniping.” He spoke sharply enough so they looked away from each other and back at him, surprised. “I believe you. I’ve never heard of anything remotely like this before . . .”
Or had he? He trailed off, thinking of his lost watch.
“Doc?” David said.
“Sorry. Brain cramp.”
At this they both smiled. Allies again. Good.
“Anyway, no one’s going to send for the men in the white coats. I accept you both as level-headed folks, not prone to hysteria or hallucination. I might guess some bizarre form of Munchausen syndrome was at work if it was just one person claiming these . . . these psychic outbreaks . . . but it’s not. It’s all three of you. Which raises the question, what do you want me to do?”
Dave seemed at a loss, but his grandmother-in-law was not. “Observe her, the way you would any child with a disease—”
The color had begun to leave David Stone’s cheeks, but now it rushed back. Slammed back. “Abra is not sick,” he snapped.
She turned to him. “I know that! Cristo! Will you let me finish?”
Dave put on a longsuffering expression and raised his hands. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“Just don’t jump down my throat, David.”
John said, “If you insist on bickering, children, I’ll have to send you to the Quiet Room.”
Concetta sighed. “This is very stressful. For all of us. I’m sorry, Davey, I used the wrong word.”
“No prob, cara. We’re in this together.”
She smiled briefly. “Yes. Yes, we are. Observe her as you’d observe any child with an undiagnosed condition, Dr. Dalton. That’s all we can ask, and I think it’s enough for now. You may have some ideas. I hope so. You see . . .”
She turned to David Stone with an expression of helplessness that John thought was probably rare on that firm face.
“We’re afraid,” Dave said. “Me, Lucy, Chetta—scared to death. Not of her, but for her. Because she’s just little, do you see? What if this power of hers . . . I don’t know what else to call it . . . what if it hasn’t topped out yet? What if it’s still growing? What do we do then? She could . . . I don’t know . . .”
“He does know,” Chetta said. “She could lose her temper and hurt herself or someone else. I don’t know how likely that is, but just thinking it could happen . . .” She touched John’s hand. “It’s awful.”