Laura’s mouth was exceedingly dry, as if she’d spent the last half hour eating sand. There was a metallic taste of fear as well. ‘Say it, Doctor Pantangello. Don’t mince words. I’m a doctor myself. A psychiatrist. Whatever you’ve got to tell me, I can handle it.’
Speaking rapidly now, words running together, anxious to deliver the bad news and be done with it, he said, ‘Autism, mental disorders in general, they really aren’t my field. Evidently, they’re more yours. So I probably shouldn’t say anything at all about this. But I want you to be prepared when you go in there. Her withdrawal, her silence, her detachment — well, I don’t think this condition is going to go away quickly or easily. I think she’s been through something damned traumatic, and she’s turned inward to escape from the memory. Bringing her back is going to take … tremendous patience.’
‘And maybe she’ll never come back?’ Laura asked.
Pantangello shook his head, fingered his red-brown beard, tugged on his stethoscope. ‘No, no, I didn’t say that.’
‘But it’s what you were thinking.’
His silence was a wounding confirmation.
Laura finally pushed open the door and went into the room, with the doctor and the detective close behind her. Rain beat on the only window. The sound seemed like the wings of nocturnal birds beating in a frenzy against the glass. Far off in the night, out toward the unseen ocean, lightning pulsed twice, three times, then died in the darkness.
Of the two beds, the one nearer the window was empty, and that half of the room was dark. A light was on above the first bed, and a child lay under the sheets, in a standard-issue hospital gown, her head resting on a single pillow. The upper end of the bed was tilted, raising and angling the girl’s body, so her face was entirely visible when Laura entered the room.
It was Melanie. Laura had no doubt about that. The girl had inherited her mother’s hair, nose, delicate jaw line. She had her father’s brow and cheekbones. Her eyes were the same shade of green as Laura’s but deeply set like Dylan’s. During the past six years, she had become a different child from the one Laura remembered, but her identity was confirmed by more than her appearance, by something undefinable, a familiar aura perhaps, an emotional or even psychic link that snapped into place between mother and daughter the instant that Laura walked into the room. She knew this was her little girl, though she would have had some difficulty explaining exactly how she knew.
Melanie resembled one of those children in advertisements for international hunger-relief organizations or a poster child for some rare and debilitating disease. Her face was gaunt. Her skin was pale, with an unhealthy, grainy texture. More gray than pink, her lips were cracked and peeling. The flesh around her sunken eyes was dark, as if it had been smudged when she had wiped away tears with an inky thumb.
The eyes themselves were the most unnerving evidence of her ordeal. She stared at the empty air above her, blinking but seeing nothing — nothing in this world. Neither fear nor pain were evident in those eyes. Just desolation.
Laura said, ‘Honey?’
The girl didn’t move. Her eyes didn’t flicker.
‘Melanie?’
No response.
Hesitantly, Laura moved toward the bed.
The girl seemed oblivious of her.
Laura put down the safety rail, leaned close to the child, spoke her name again, but again elicited no reaction. With one trembling hand, she touched Melanie’s face, which felt slightly fevered, and that contact shattered all her reservations. A dam of emotion broke within her, and she seized the girl, lifted her away from the bed, held her close, and hugged her. ‘Melanie, baby, my Melanie, it’s all right now, it’ll be okay, really it will, you’re safe now, safe with me now, safe with Mommy, thank God, safe, thank God.’ As she spoke, tears burst from her, and she wept with a lack of selfconsciousness and control that she had not experienced since she had been a child herself.
If only Melanie had wept too. But the girl was beyond tears. She didn’t return Laura’s embrace, either. She hung limply in her mother’s arms: a pliant body, an empty shell, unaware of the love that was hers to receive, unable to accept the succour and shelter that her mother offered, distant, in her own reality, lost.