The Blackstone Chronicles

Chapter 9

The moment Bill awakened, he knew Elizabeth was no longer beside him, but as the big clock downstairs began to strike midnight, he still reached out to his wife’s empty place in the hope his instincts might have betrayed him.
They had not. The bed was empty, the sheets almost as cold as the room itself.
He lay in bed for a moment, trying to decide what to do. The evening had not been easy for any of them. First he’d had to try to explain to Megan that right now her mother needed the doll more than she did. “Mommy’s sick,” he’d told her. “And she needs the doll to take care of her.”
“But she’s always sick,” Megan had protested. “And I need Sam to take care of me!”
“In a few days,” he’d promised, but he could see the doubt in Megan’s eyes, and when Elizabeth finally came down for supper, the three of them sat tensely at the table. Megan, usually full of chatter about what she’d been doing all day, barely spoke at all, and Elizabeth was utterly silent.
After dinner he’d tried to interest his wife and daughter in watching a videotape, but Megan quickly retreated to her room, and although Elizabeth sat beside him on the sofa in the library, he knew she wasn’t paying attention to the movie. Finally, a little after nine, they both came up to bed.
While he stopped in to kiss Megan good night, Elizabeth went directly to their room. He told himself she’d sensed Megan’s anger and was simply giving her daughter some time to get over it, but deep inside he suspected that Elizabeth had simply not been able to consider Megan’s feelings, any more than she’d been able to concentrate on the movie.
“Mommy doesn’t love me anymore, does she?” Megan had asked when he’d gone in to say good night. Her voice was quavering, and though he couldn’t see her face in the shadowy room, he’d tasted the saltiness of tears when he kissed her cheek.
“Of course she loves you,” he’d assured her. “She’s just not feeling well, that’s all.”
But Megan had not been consoled. “No, she doesn’t,” she insisted. “She just loves Sam.”
He’d tried to assure her that things would be better tomorrow, when the two of them would go and find a Christmas tree, but even that hadn’t cheered Megan up. When he left her room, she’d already rolled over, turning her back to him.
Things had been no better with Elizabeth. She was already in bed, and though he knew she wasn’t asleep, she hadn’t responded when he tried to cuddle her close to him. At last he’d given up, contenting himself with lying next to her and holding her hand, determined to stay awake until he heard her breath drift into the steady rhythms of sleep.
But he hadn’t been able to stay awake, and now he’d awakened to find himself alone.
The last gong of the hour struck, leaving the house in silence. Then he heard the squeak of the rocking chair. Slipping out of bed and putting on the thick woolen robe Elizabeth had given him two Christmases ago, he went through the bathroom into the nursery.
Elizabeth was sitting in the rocking chair she had rescued from the attic and painted pale blue.
Once more, she was humming a soft lullaby to the doll, as she had when he’d come home in the afternoon.
But tonight she was doing something else as well.
The pale skin of her bare breast gleamed in the moonlight, and he could see the doll’s head pressed firmly against her nipple.
He went to her and knelt beside the rocking chair. “Come back to bed, darling,” he whispered. “You’re so tired, and it’s so late.”
For a moment he wasn’t sure she heard him, but then she turned her head and smiled at him. “In a minute,” she said. “I have to finish feeding the baby, and then put him down for the night.”
Though she’d spoken the words softly, in a voice so sweet it broke his heart, they still sliced through him like tiny knives.
“No, darling,” he said. “It’s not a baby. It’s just a doll.” He rose to his feet and reached down as if to take the doll from her, but she shrank away from him, and he saw her arms tighten. “Elizabeth, please,” he said. “Don’t do this. You know it’s not a—”
“Don’t say it!” she commanded, her voice rising. “Just go back to bed!”
“For God’s sake, Elizabeth—” he began again, but once again his wife cut his words off.
“Leave me alone!” she shouted. “I didn’t ask you to come in here! And I know what I’m doing! I can take care of my baby!” She was on her feet now, and there was a look in her eye that frightened Bill.
“It’s all right,” he said, forcing his voice back to a gently soothing tone. “Of course you know what you’re doing, and of course you can take care of the baby. It’s just late, that’s all. I thought maybe I could help you.”
“I can do it,” Elizabeth said, her voice taking on an edge of desperation. “I can take care of my baby. I know I can. Just leave us alone and we’ll be fine.” Her eyes met his now, beseeching him. “Please? Can’t you just leave us alone for a little while?”
Suddenly Bill felt utterly disoriented. Was his wife losing her mind? What should he do?
Take the doll away from her? No! That would only make things worse.
The doctor. He should call Dr. Margolis. Dr. Margolis would know what to do. “All right,” he said, taking care to keep his voice perfectly level. “I’ll go back to bed, and you take care of—” He faltered for a moment, but then managed to finish the sentence. “—the baby. And when he’s gone to sleep, you’ll come back to bed. All right?”
Elizabeth nodded, sinking back into the rocking chair. His throat constricting as a sob formed in his chest, Bill turned and hurried back through the bathroom, carefully closing the door behind him. But instead of going back to bed as he’d told Elizabeth he would, he went downstairs to the desk in the library, and the telephone.
After the twelfth ring he finally heard the sleepy, and faintly annoyed, voice of Dr. Margolis.
An hour later Elizabeth was back in bed, the pills the doctor had given her already taking effect. “I’ll be all right,” she said as she began to drift into sleep. “Really I will. All I need to do is take care of my baby and I’ll be all right.” Then, as Bill kissed her gently, her eyes closed.
Leaving Mrs. Goodrich to watch over Elizabeth, Bill led the doctor down to the library, where he poured each of them a shot of his best single-malt scotch. “I don’t know about you, but I really need this,” he said, handing Margolis one of the glasses, then draining half the other.
“I’m not sure it’s as bad as you think it is,” the doctor observed, taking a sip of the whiskey, rolling it around in his mouth, then swallowing it.
“For God’s sake, Phil! She thought the doll was a baby. Our baby!”
The doctor’s brows arched slightly. “She’s had a terrible shock, Bill. I don’t think any man can truly understand how hard it is for a woman to lose a baby. Especially when she knows there’s no chance of having another one, and she thought she was long past any danger.”
“But to fantasize that a doll is—”
“But isn’t that what little girls do all the time? Don’t they pretend their dolls are real babies?”
“It’s hardly the same thing.”
“Isn’t it?” Margolis countered. “Why not? The way I see it, Elizabeth is in so much pain right now that she simply can’t deal with it. So tonight she projected all her maternal feelings—the ones she’s been storing up, ready to shower on your son—onto the doll. I suspect it was far more an emotional release than a true delusion.”
“And you don’t think I should be worried?” Bill asked, hope mingling with his doubt.
“Of course you should be worried,” the doctor replied. “Hell, if you weren’t worried, I’d be more concerned about you than about Elizabeth. All I’m saying is that I think right now you need to cut Elizabeth a lot of slack. I suspect that by morning she’ll be feeling a lot better. But even if she wants to pretend the doll is her baby for a day or two, where’s the real harm? Right now she’s got hormones raging through her, causing all kinds of confusion, and she’s in just as much turmoil emotionally as she is chemically. Let’s just give her another day to calm down, and then take another look at how she’s doing. Deal?”
Bill hesitated, but as he turned Margolis’s words over in his mind, he began to see their wisdom. Finally he took the doctor’s outstretched hand. “Deal.”
In her room, Megan lay in her bed, watching the shadows on the ceiling. She’d been awake a long time, listening through the nursery door, hearing every word her mother and father had said.
And now, as she lay gazing at the dark shapes above her, she heard another voice.
The voice of the doll.
But tonight it wasn’t calling out to her.
Tonight it was whispering.
As it spoke, Megan listened, and began to understand what she must do.