Danielle Steel - Remembrance

“She's so beautiful … she looks just like you, Mommy …” She didn't look up at Linda as she spoke, and Linda sat very still, worried about both Vanessa and the baby. “What'll we call her?” And then softly, she began to croon her name. “Charlotte … Charlie. I want to call her Charlie.” She looked up at Linda then, but her eyes were blind to the people around her. She cradled the baby gently and began to sing softly, as Teddy and Linda watched her. Some deep-seated maternal instinct told Linda to take back the baby, but another sense knew that it was important that she leave him with Vanessa.

“Isn't she pretty, Vanessa?” Linda's voice was like a whisper in the quiet room, and Teddy watched with awe what was happening. “Do you like her?”

“I love her.” Vanessa looked straight at Linda, and saw her mother. “She's mine, isn't she, Mommy? She doesn't have to be his. She's ours. He doesn't deserve her.”

“Why not?”

“Because he's so mean to you, and … and those things he does … the drugs … and when he didn't come back … and … Uncle Teddy said you could have died. But you didn't.” She looked at once agonized and relieved, as they watched her relive it. “You didn't because Uncle Teddy came and got the baby out.” She winced then, remembering how she had seen her mother, near death, her legs in stirrups, strapped helplessly to the table. “Why did they do that to you? Why?” Instinctively Linda knew.

“So I could have the baby. That was all. They didn't mean to hurt me.”

“But they did, and they almost let you die … and he wasn't there …”

“Where was he?”

“I don't know. I hope he's gone for good. I hate him.”

“Does he hate you?'

“I don't know …” Vanessa started to cry. “I don't care …” She continued to cradle die baby, and then, as though she'd had enough, she held him out to Linda. “Here, I think she wants you.” Linda nodded, took the sleeping infant from her, and handed him to Teddy, nodding toward the door. Teddy left with him immediately, and returned a moment later, alone, to watch the drama unfurl. He was terrified at what was happening to Vanessa, but he had always known that it would have to come one day, and it was best if it came now, all at once, with Linda there to guide her.

“Does he hate you, Vanessa?”

“I don't know … I don't know …” She jumped out of the chair and went to the window, staring out of it blindly. And then she wheeled around and looked at Linda. “He hates you … he hates you … he hit you … oh, Mommy … we have to go away … back to New York, to Uncle Teddy.” And then suddenly her face clouded again and she seemed to stare into space with a look of horror. “Back to Uncle Teddy …” It became almost a chant. “Back to New York … oh, no … oh, no …” She looked around frantically, from Linda to Teddy, and he wondered for an instant if she would ever be the same again, if she would ever be sane. “Oh, no! Oh, no! …” And then a wail. “He killed her! That man … he killed my mommy!” She began to sob and reached out to Linda. “He killed you … he killed you … he killed you …” She looked up then as though for the first time she really saw Linda, and it was not the face of a child that Teddy and Linda saw as they looked at her, but the face of a ravaged young woman. “That man”—it was a hoarse whisper, she had come back—”the one I saw in the newspaper that day … he killed my mother.” She stared at Teddy, seeing him too, and then she went on, as though waking from a dream and trying to remember. “And then … the police came and they took him away, and I was”—she looked at them, puzzled—”I was holding a baby.” She closed her eyes then and trembled. “Charlie. Her name was Charlie … the baby Mama had in London … and they took her away from me in a courtroom.” She began to cry great gulping sobs then. “And they made me live with Greg and Pattie …” She looked at Teddy and held her arms out to him. “And then I came to live with you … but I never knew … I never remembered, until”—she looked at Linda in shock and despair—”until I saw that baby … and I thought …” She looked up at her uncle and his wife. “I don't know what I thought …”

Linda helped her at last. “You thought it was Charlie.”

She looked at Linda then. “Is all of this true? I feel like I dreamed it.”

Linda looked at Teddy. “It's true. You repressed it all after it happened, and it's been waiting to come out for years.”

She looked frightened then. “Is there more? Did something else happen?”

Linda was quick to answer. “Nothing else. You remembered it all. It's all over now, Vanessa. It's out.” Now all she had to do was learn to live with it, which Linda knew wouldn't be easy either. She watched the girl closely. She had had a tremendous shock. “How do you feel?”

She looked blank for a minute. “Scared … empty … sad.” And then two huge tears rolled down her face. “I miss my mother.” She hung her head down and began to sob again. “He killed my mother …” She was shaking all over. “When I came into the room, she was … she was lying there … her eyes open, his hands were on her neck and I knew she was dead … I knew …” She couldn't go on, and with tears streaming down his face, Teddy took her in his arms.

“Oh, baby … I'm so sorry.”

“Why? Why did he do it?” The questions were sixteen years later.

“Because he was crazy. And maybe because he was into drugs, I don't know. I think he loved her, but he was terribly disturbed. She left him, and he thought he couldn't live without her.”

“So he killed her.” For the first time she sounded bitter, and then she looked up at her uncle with a look of shock. “What happened to Charlie? Did they give her to him?”

“No, they put him away in an institution. For a while at least. Your sister was given to Vasili's brother. He was a decent man, I think. He was as distraught as I was at the time, and he wanted Charlotte.” Teddy smiled sadly. “He was very fond of you too. Do you remember him at all?” She shook her head.

“Have you stayed in touch with him over the years?”

Teddy sighed. “No, I haven't. The judge discouraged us from having contact with each other. He said that you and Charlie had gone to separate lives. I don't know how Arbus felt about it, but I was nervous about you, because you had repressed it all. I didn't want anyone coming along to surprise you over the years.” She nodded slowly in understanding and spoke softly after a little while.

“She would be almost sixteen now. I wonder what she looks like.” Her lips trembled again. “When she was a baby, she used to look just like Mommy.”

Teddy began to think of something but he thought it was too soon to suggest it. Perhaps in time, when Vanessa had absorbed it all, they could all go to Greece and look up Andreas Arbus. Vasili, he knew from the article, two years before, was dead now. It was, of course, that article and Vanessa's subsequent nightmares that had led him to Linda. He smiled at his wife. She had handled it all so beautifully.

“I'm sorry I spoiled everything, Linda. I came to see the baby and to be happy for you, and instead I went crazy.” She looked rueful and blew her nose. She felt very strange, as though she had just run ten miles or climbed a mountain, it wasn't so much a feeling of exhilaration but of being drained.

Linda reached out to her and put an arm around her in maternal fashion. “You didn't go crazy. You did something very healthy. You finally reached back into the past and opened a door that's been locked for years. And the reason your psyche let you do it is because you were ready. You can handle it now, and your mind knows that. What you did took sixteen years to do, and it wasn't easy. We all know that.”