“Fine. What specifically is there about children.. .” Then, in his mind, he saw the picture that was stuck in her own, hidden from her by trauma. “That’s it,” he said. “What is that?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing.” Her voice was little more than a whisper.
“Is that lady in bed your mother?”
He felt her rush of emotion, followed by a sense of brittleness, as if she’d turned to glass. Then the brittleness dissolved, and she began silently to cry. Briefly he let her, then said, “Tell me about it.”
“She-she died-because of me.”
“All right. How did that happen?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, don’t remember. I was just a little child. A baby, really.”
“Ah. Look earlier, and tell me what you see.”
“I don’t see anything. There’s nothing there.”
“Okay. A minute ago you could see a lady in bed. Your mother. What I want you to do now is see what happened before she was in bed.”
That picture came through too, for him as for her. “I see-I see her flopping around on the floor. Jerking. Howling.” Mary’s voice remained little more than a whisper. “I run out of the house to Mrs. Nelsen’s next door.” Mary’s focus left the scene she’d described, shifting to Macurdy. “Mrs. Nelsen called the doctor. Mama had cancer of the brain. She died a few weeks later, maybe a few months, and they wouldn’t let me see her while she was dying. They thought it was too terrible for a child to see. She’d have convulsions, and scream, and say terrible things.”
Macurdy took a deep breath. “All right.” He paused. “Did you do something to make that happen?”
Mary grimaced through her tears. “Me? What could I have done?” Abruptly her voice intensified. “She had cancer! In her brain! Don’t you understand?”
“How old were you?”
Her anger subsided. “I was three when she died. On my birthday. So, two-something when she-got sick.”
“Okay.” He continued quietly, with a calm learned from Arbel. “Look a little earlier, to before her convulsions started, and tell me what you see.”
She frowned, peering inward, then her aura sparked and swelled like a threatened cat, while her face began to slacken as if entering a trance.
“What do you see?” he nudged.
“I-see -a little child. Me. I’m playing with a dish, a bowl, and drop it. It breaks in pieces. Mamma’s bowl that her isoditi gave her. I start to cry, and mamma hears and comes in, and cries hard, and scolds me because her grandma is dead, and spanks me so hard.! So hard! And screams at me because I broke her grandma’s beautiful bowl she gave her before she died, that I knew I wasn’t supposed to touch. And I’m so scared, and she spanks me so hard, I pee on her lap when she spanks me, and she throws me on the bed and falls on the floor, and begins to jerk and scream!”
All through her description, Mary’s whisper had tightened, tightened, her body writhing now, twisting with inner a; ony. “Then cry!” Macurdy ordered sharply. “Cry! Let it out!-” and she began to keen, dismally.
Seconds later he heard feet hammering down the stairs inside. A wild-eyed Fritzi stepped onto the porch in his nightshirt. “What in hell?!” he said, staring.
“She told me about her mother dying.”
Fritzi gawped, bug-eyed. Mary’s keening had turned to blubbering; it seemed to Macurdy she didn’t even know her father was there. When she’d calmed a bit, he spoke once more. “Tell me again, from the beginning. See if there’s something you missed before.”
Basically she repeated, this time in the past tense but added something now. “And while she was spanking me, mama yelled, `You terrible terrible child! I wish I’d never had you! How could you cause me such pain?!’ Then she threw me on the bed and fell on the floor.”
Mary’s tears still flowed, but the terrible grief was gone. Both Macurdy and Fritzi stared. Klara too was peering out the door now, alarmed and bewildered. “And that’s it,” Mary said, then hiccuped, which made her giggle. Even Macurdy gawped at that. He’d seen Arbel’s patients respond in more or less the same way, but he’d never caused such an effect himself.