Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

“Can you just throw me aside?” he whispered heatedly. “Can you?”

“No,” Janice cried weakly, feeling the wet of her own tears on her face.

“Thank you,” Hoover exhaled, grateful.

He stood up, and it seemed now that he possessed the bedroom, the apartment, and all that was in it, as well as the two living beings there. He looked back at Ivy, who turned comfortably in a pleasant sleep.

“We are connected,” he said with finality. “You and I, Mrs. Templeton. All three of us. We have come together by a miracle and now we are inseparable.”

He turned, a dark look suddenly flashing across his eyes.

“Say yes, Mrs. Templeton. Please! ”

“Yes,” Janice wept, and she felt that she was about to fall.

Early the next morning, drugged from lack of sleep, Janice trudged to the library, selected several Tibetan books, and mailed them to Bill, resolving to think no more about it.

That night Janice found herself working into the wee hours with Elaine, trying to complete two separate sets of layouts before the spring deadline.

Two Tensor lamps cast bright cones onto their adjacent work tables. The rest of the suite was lost in the night, where bits of red and yellow lights gleamed inward from the city skyscrapers.

Together they prepared the outlines and marked out instructions for the staff in the morning. Wearily, Janice stood, rubbed her eyes, and stretched, yawning with a deadly fatigue. It was 2:30 in the morning, but Janice didn’t mind. She was gratified that Elaine depended on her professional collaboration in these all-night sessions.

“It is late,” Elaine yawned. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right,” she said. “I’m in no rush to go home to an empty apartment!”

They worked in silence for several minutes.

“But you do have a daughter?”

Janice licked her lips. A nightmarish, queasy sensation invaded her, as though this one moment of perfect friendship, this island of hard work and steady hopes, might also break apart.

“What makes you say that?” Janice asked.

“Do you remember when we worked on that series of sporting outfits for pre-teens? You drew those very well. In fact, I pointed that out, and you made some joke about an artist’s eyes being different from a mother’s. Do you remember?”

Janice said nothing. She turned away from Elaine and listened to the subterranean rumble of the city that never died, not even at 2:30 in the morning.

“Her name was Ivy,” Janice said softly. “She died eight months ago. It was an accident.”

There was a long space of silence. Then Elaine said softly, “I’m so very sorry to know that.”

“I should have told you long ago,” Janice said. “That’s why Bill isn’t home. It was Ivy’s death that caused his breakdown.”

“It’s been difficult for you. I can tell.”

Janice inhaled deeply.

“It was,” Janice said slowly. “I’ve never told anybody just how horrible it really was.”

In a slow, even voice, as though she had rehearsed it for months, Janice began to tell Elaine about what it was like when she first realized that a man was shadowing Ivy. What it was like watching Ivy bend and twist, scream, and suffocate with fear, not once, not twice, but many times, until there was no remembering when it all began. It was so hard to explain what it was like, seeing a presence— Hoover’s — gradually insinuate itself into your apartment, your life, your child — into your own soul.

For hours she spoke, until the dawn spread its frigid, pale glow through the slatted blinds, and Janice, hoarse from the ordeal, groped for her coffee cup.

Elaine, divining her need, pushed it across to her. “Of course. I remember it all. The papers were full of it.” Then, in a small, amazed voice: “So you’re that Templeton.”

Janice’s eyes lowered. “Yes, I’m that Templeton.”

Elaine looked away, in a seeming quandary.

“All this Buddhist stuff, or Hindu,” she said. “Did you actually believe it?”

“I believed one thing. My daughter was in serious trouble and Elliot Hoover was the only person who could get her out of it.”

“It must have been painful testifying against your own husband, like that.”

Janice smiled bitterly.

“I had no choice. I would have signed a pact with the devil.”

“And now?”

“Now? Now, I try not to think about it. It’s actually a lot of hard work sometimes, not thinking about it.”

“That’s why Bill just stopped thinking at all?”

Janice stood up. She looked out at the gray, cold dawn on the stone streets. For a long time, she just looked out.

“Elaine,” she said slowly, “Bill has started to read Hindu tracts. Buddhist texts.”

Elaine stared at her in surprise. Janice turned to look at her. “I don’t know what to make of it. He’s become so damned obsessive about it. I can’t stand to be with him when he talks about it. But what can I do? Shut him up? Only a few weeks ago, he wasn’t even speaking. I can’t very well reject him now!”

“Maybe he needs to — to understand,” Elaine offered. “Just wants to review what happened.”

Janice raised her voice.

“But I don’t want to hear about it!” she said. “I don’t want to go through it again! It’s like a madhouse, a thousand crooked mirrors screaming at you, each one of them saying Buddha, and Karma, and transmigration, making you hear it all over again, and I don’t want to listen!”

Janice paused and lowered her voice.

“I can’t go through it again, Elaine. To feel myself slipping into it like quicksand — astral planes and holy cycles — getting closer and closer to believing it. It’s like going insane. Slowly, but surely. Just like going insane.”

Janice skipped lunch that day. Instead, she lay down on the couch, closed her eyes, and sank into the oblivion of total fatigue. Just as dream images began to form, Elaine tapped her on the shoulder.

“Telephone,” Elaine said. “Sounds official.”

Janice rose quickly, swayed, caught herself, then walked calmly to her work desk. She picked up the receiver and pressed her exchange button.

“Hello?”

“Mrs. Templeton, Dr. Geddes here.”

“Is everything all right?”

“I tried calling you at home, but there was no answer.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Let me say first that Bill’s all right. Just a few scratches. There was a kind of altercation.”

Janice sat down slowly. Elaine came in, saw the look on her face, and discreetly left again, closing the door.

“Altercation? Bill?”

“Yes, with another patient, named Borofsky. Apparently, Bill had inveigled him into doing some kind of research. Borofsky was connected to the bookstore at Gimbels, or something like that. They had a falling out, Borofsky came to his room, and Bill thought he was trying to steal his notes.”

“Notes? What notes?”

Dr. Geddes started over again, more slowly.

“Bill’s been studying. Studying a lot more than we’d guessed. Newspaper clippings. Old lectures he conned out of a library in Albany. Books — you name it. And I guess he was possessive about it, and when Borofsky came down, Bill hit him with an old brass lamp from the library. Borofsky seems to be all right. He’s been X-rayed and there’s no fracture.”

“I can’t believe Bill would do something like that.”

“Mrs. Templeton, can you come to the clinic today?”

“Today? It would be very difficult.”

“It’s quite important. Bill’s a bit delirious. He thinks we sent Borofsky to spy on him. You have to come and help us reestablish his trust. Before his attitude hardens.”