Frank De Felitta - For Love of Audrey Rose

Janice sat wearily against the desk. Her eyes fixed on Jennie, sleeping peacefully near her feet, but she barely noticed the girl, only a general impression of vulnerable sweetness.

“I don’t know,” she said, almost inaudibly. “I’m tired of hoping.”

He seemed to know what she meant. Though they stood isolated, only inches apart, a radiant silence permeated the space between. Neither could have met the other without thinking of how to help Bill; yet a healthy Bill, Janice knew, would mean that she and Elliot Hoover could never be together.

As though to dispel any abhorrent thought, or any suggestion wrought by despair and the pain of her own misery, Janice went to Jennie and knelt down. A ribbon had been wound clumsily into the black hair — by a man’s hand, she thought — and she slowly untied the ribbon and then tied it again.

“Does Jennie hope?” Janice asked.

“No. I don’t think she does. I expect the world is chaos for her.”

“Well, then, do you look for some key to open her up?” Janice asked.

“Yes,” he said eagerly. “That’s exactly how we work. We have to get into the child’s defenses, make her accept us because we accept her.” He knelt down by Jennie. “With Jennie, we accept her number language. With Jackson it’s fire, pictures of car explosions. With Lily we let her eat food from the floor.” Hoover’s face took on a tinge of excitement mixed with triumph. “You see? We worm our way into the citadel. Then we storm the last defenses.”

“And where is the key to Bill?” she asked, looking directly at him.

Hoover licked his lips, paused, then stood up.

“I’m hoping you’ll… that you’ll see that yourself,” he confessed. “I could tell you, but it would mean so much more if you saw it for yourself.”

Perplexed, Janice tucked Jennie’s blanket around the small shoulders.

“There’s only one thing Bill wants,” she said.

“Yes. I know.”

She looked up.

“Have you found Juanita?”

He turned from her. The vein along his temple throbbed, and she did not know what violent emotions caused him to retreat from her.

“No.”

“Did you look for her?”

“There was no point. Whether Juanita is or she isn’t, is not important. We don’t need her, Janice. Not now.”

She stared at him. Things were not making sense. “Why did you send for me? It wasn’t just to meet Jennie and see the clinic.” She was almost afraid to hear the answer.

“It was to meet Jennie and see the clinic,” he said gently. “I’d like you to meet the children. It will make you understand better. Then we can talk.”

“All right.”

The day passed for Janice like a deranged cinema. By darkness, she had witnessed the full range of human suffering. James rocked furiously on the corner of his bed. Lily smiled in their direction, seeing very little, her freckled face hopelessly ignorant of where she was. Janeen rolled her obese body onto the floor. When Janice touched her, the girl made absolutely no response.

Room after room, child after child, and Janice felt drawn deeper and deeper into the labyrinth of autism. It was a peculiar, silent world in spite of the howls, moans, and abrupt hyenalike chatter that erupted from the tiny throats. It was silent because there was no communication with the outer world. None of the children knew that there was anybody else in the building but himself.

“What are you thinking?” he asked after watching Jackson mechanically slam his prosthetic arm into his pillow, a robot as lifeless as the aluminum of his artificial limb.

“I feel as though I know what it’s like to be insane,” she said, looking back down the corridors. “All these rooms, all these terrifying rooms, and nobody can help you.”

Hoover led her on. Neville was sleeping in the next room. When Janice peered into the scrunched, anxiety-ridden face, she saw something that did not appear human. It looked like a lower order of hominid, something from the Malay jungles, an imperfect human being. In the next room Uncle Earl began his low, piercing howls that had no stop, no pause, as though he never breathed, but had all the patience in the world to slowly pour out his grief and pain to the unseeing void.

Janice peered into the room. Uncle Earl simply sat like a Hindu priest, lowing like a sick cow. With not the slightest desire to do anything else, ever, until he might die.

“What pain he must be suffering,” she whispered, “to simply sit there, hour after hour.”

“It’s almost religious,” he said. “Some primal pain that can be expressed in no other way.”

Energetic breathing now displaced Earl’s moaning. It was James. The boy flopped among the sheets of his bed in his pajamas, his limbs jerking, rocking mechanically, a pugilist among the bright mobiles, and Janice instantly thought of her own daughter. Ivy had been the identical focus of terror, an unreachable, self-destructive maniac in her nightmares, who saw nothing around her but sheets of psychic pain.

“What we do here,” he said, as they watched Roy, “is try to reach that primordial disturbance, and try to neutralize it.”

Janice began to grasp something of the spiritual force that dominated the clinic, an atmosphere of calm intensity that had slowly grown on her.

“With love,” he said. “We try to cure them through intense, spiritual love.”

He took her hand.

“Come with me, Janice,” he whispered.

And she sensed that he led her, not to another room, a different child, a different variety of torture, but into the labyrinth of his own heart. The children were analogues of his own psychic wounds. The clinic was the exhibition of his most secret motivations, and like a slow whirlpool, the passion of it grew stronger as he approached the center.

The next room was dark. One single bed. A blue light on at the floor, and then her eyes made out a child’s limp hand. It was Jennie, washed and tucked into the sheets by the staff. Hoover stepped quietly over the carpet.

“Janice,” he said, half in supplication, half in demand.

She slowly approached him and looked down at the sleeping child.

“Who does she look like?” he whispered.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Yes you do, Janice.”

“She — she looks like a million children.”

“Janice, has your heart not been opened? Have I shown you suffering for nothing? Look!”

Jennie’s small face was cast in a blue shadow. At the nostrils, a black shadow suddenly began, like the eclipse of death over the pale skin.

“She reminds me…of Ivy…I suppose.”

“Exactly!”

“It’s the eyes. No, it’s the expression, really. Trust and fear…a little secretive…”

He smiled triumphantly.

“Janice,” he whispered. “She reminded me — so forcefully — of my own daughter.”

Janice sat down on the edge of the bed. For an instant neither spoke. Jennie’s softened face glowed like the rim of a distant planet, against the annihilating darkness. Life never appeared more fragile than in the face of the sleeping child.

“Listen to me, Janice. For months, I thought — believe me, I truly thought…”

“Jennie?”

“Yes. Amazing that my life should end in such a strange but certain destiny.”

He knelt down to be with her. His voice trembled, and his eyes glittered in the blue light.

“Elliot, this can’t be true.”

“No. Of course it can’t. She was born six months too early.”

Jennie turned in her sleep. The small hand flopped against Janice’s. Janice placed the hand on the carefully tucked sheet.

“Then what are you saying? What strange and certain destiny are you talking about?”

“Jennie is not my child. Nor could Juanita ever be your child. But we wanted them to be!”