Liz had set them out on the floor to play in a bright patch of sun around quarter of five in the afternoon. After ten minutes or so of confident crawling and shaky standing (the latter accompanied by lusty crows of accomplishment to their parents and to each other), William pulled himself up on the edge of the coffee-table. He glanced around and made several imperious gestures with his right arm. These gestures reminded Thad of old newsfilm showing Il Duce addressing his constituency from his balcony. Then William seized his mother's teacup and managed to pour the lees all over himself before toppling backward onto his bottom. The tea was fortunately cold, but William held onto the cup and managed to rap it against his mouth smartly enough to make his lower lip bleed a little. He began to wail. Wendy promptly joined in. Liz picked him up, examined him, rolled her eyes at Thad, and took him upstairs to soothe him and then clean him up. 'Keep an eye on the princess,' she said as she went.
'I will,' Thad said, but he had discovered and would shortly rediscover that, in the Golden Age of Mess-Making, such promises often amount to little. William had managed to snatch Liz's teacup from under her very nose, and Thad saw that Wendy was going to fall from the third stair-riser just a moment too late to save her the tumble. He had been looking at a news magazine - not reading it but thumbing idly through it, glancing every now and then at a picture. When he was finished, he went over to the large knitting basket by the fireplace which served as a sloppy sort of magazine-rack to put it back and get another. Wendy was crawling across the floor, her tears forgotten before they were entirely dry on her chubby cheeks. She was making the breathy little rum-rum-rum sound both of them uttered when crawling, a sound that sometimes made Thad wonder if they associated all movement with the cars and trucks they saw on TV. He squatted, put the magazine on top of the pile in the basket, and thumbed through the others, finally selecting a month-old Harper's for no particular reason. It occurred to him that he was behaving quite a bit like a man in a dentist's office waiting for a tooth
extraction.
He turned around and Wendy was on the stairs. She had crawled up to the third one and was now rising shakily to her feet, holding onto one of the spindles which ran between the rail of the bannister and the floor. As he looked at her she spied him and gave a particularly grandiloquent arm-gesture and a grin. The sweep of her arm sent her chubby body swaying forward over the short drop.
'Jesus,' he said under his breath, and as he rose to his feet, knees popping dryly, he saw her take a step forward and let go of the spindle. 'Wendy, don't do that!'
He nearly leaped across the room, and almost made it. But he was a clumsy man, and one of his feet caught on the leg of the armchair. It fell over, and Thad went sprawling. Wendy fell outward and forward with a startled little squawk. Her body turned slightly in midair. He grabbed for her from his knees, trying to make a saving catch, and missed by a good two feet. Her right leg struck the first stair-riser, and her head struck the carpeted floor of the living room with a muffled thud. She screamed, and he had time to think how terrifying a baby's cry of pain is, and then he had swept her into his arms.
Overhead, Liz called out, 'Thad?' in a startled voice, and he heard the thump-thump of her slippered feet running down the hall..Wendy was trying to cry. Her first yell of pain had expelled all but the tidal air from her lungs,
and now came the paralyzing, eternal moment when she struggled to unlock her chest and draw in breath for the next whoop. It would bludgeon the eardrums when it finally came. If it came.
He held her, looking anxiously into her twisted, blood-engorged face. It had gone a color which was almost puce, except for the red mark like a very large comma on her forehead. God, what if she passes out? What if she strangles to death, unable to pull in breath and utter the cry locked in her flat little lungs?
'Cry, damn it!' he shouted down at her. God, her purple face! Her bulging stricken eyes! 'Cry!'
'Thad!' Liz sounded very scared now, but she also seemed very distant. In those few eternal seconds between Wendy's first cry and her struggle to free the second one and so go on breathing, George Stark was driven totally out of Thad's mind for the first time in the last eight days. Wendy drew in a great convulsive breath and began to whoop. Thad, trembling with relief, hugged her to his shoulder and began to stroke her back gently, making shushing sounds. Liz came pounding downstairs, a struggling William clasped against her side like a small bag of grain. 'What happened? Thad, is she all right?'
'Yes. She took a tumble from the third stair up. She's fine now. Once she started crying. At first it was like . . . like she just locked up.' He laughed shakily and traded Wendy for William, who was now bellowing in sympathetic harmony with his sister.
'Weren't you watching her?' Liz asked reproachfully. She was automatically swinging her body back and forth at the hips, rocking Wendy, trying to soothe her.
'Yes . . . no. I went over to get a magazine. Next thing I knew, she was on the stairs. It was like Will and the teacup. They're just so damned . . . eely. Is her head all right, do you think? She hit on the carpet, but she hit hard.'
Liz held Wendy at arm's length for a moment, looked at the red mark, then kissed it gently. Wendy's sobs were already beginning to diminish in volume.