The God Project (26 page)

“And maybe the fight wasn’t quite as one-sided as we thought.”

Kay nodded. “And maybe someday I’ll learn to understand little boys.” She took Joey by the hand. “As for you, young man, the next time you get into a fight, don’t come crying to me unless the boy was twice your age and four times your size. Now let’s get you cleaned up and off to school.”

“Aw, Mom, do I have to?”

“Yes, you do. You’re going to be late, but that’s going to have to be your problem too. The next time you think about fighting, maybe you’ll think twice.”

Their voices were suddenly cut off as Kay pulled the back door closed behind her. Steve sank back into his chair and poured himself another cup of coffee. But instead of drinking it, he left it sitting on the table while he went upstairs to Sally.

He found her lying on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. She made no move when he came into the room, nor did she speak to him. He crossed to the bed, sat gingerly on its edge, and took her hand.

“Sally?”

Her eyes, large and pleading, suddenly met his, and what he saw frightened him. There was terror there, and confusion, but most of all, sadness.

“What’s happening to us?” she asked in a whisper. “Oh, God, Steve, I’m so frightened. Everything’s closing in, and I have the most awful feeling.”

Steve gathered her up and cradled her against himself. “It’s all right, honey,” he crooned. “You’ll see, everything’s going to be all right. Well go see Dr. Wiseman together and see what he has to say. You’re just worn out. Don’t you see? There’s nothing wrong except that you’re worn out from worrying. You can’t do this to yourself, Sally. You have to let go of it.”

Sally was too exhausted, and too frightened, to argue further, but even as she agreed to see Arthur Wiseman
that afternoon, she made up her mind that no matter what happened, she would remain calm and rational.

After all, she reminded herself, I’m
not
irrational, I’m
not
paranoid. I am not insane.

She would give Wiseman no reason to suspect otherwise.

   Mark Malone was sipping on his coffee and leafing through a copy of the AMA journal when the intercom on his desk suddenly came to life.

“Dr. Malone, this is Suzy. In the emergency room?”

“Yes.”

“We’ve got a patient coming in, and since it’s one of yours, I thought you might want to handle it.”

“Who?”

“Tony Phelps.”

Tony Phelps was two years old and one of Malone’s favorite patients, since all he ever had to do for the boy was agree with his mother’s assessment that he was certainly “the world’s most perfect child.” And even privately, Malone wasn’t sure the assessment wasn’t too far off the mark.

“Tony? What’s happened to him?”

“I’m not sure,” Suzy replied. “Mrs. Phelps wasn’t really too coherent. You know how she is about Tony—it was all she could do to tell me who she was. She was crying, and all she said was ‘my baby … my baby …’ I sent an ambulance. They should be back in about ten minutes.”

“Okay.” Malone shoved the magazine to one side, and switched on his CRT. When the screen began to glow, he quickly entered his access codes, then tapped out the instructions that would retrieve Tony Phelps’s medical records from the computer’s memory banks. Except for the usual vaccinations and inoculations, Tony’s chart was unremarkable except in its brevity. Malone unconsciously nodded an acknowledgment to the machine, and was about to turn it off again when he noticed the small notation on the chart that identified Tony Phelps
as another of the children being studied by CHILD. Malone’s brows arched slightly.

Then he heard the faint wailing of a siren in the distance. He shut off the console and started toward the emergency room.

Three minutes later, two paramedics burst into the emergency room. One of them carried a screaming child; the other followed, supporting a trembling Arla Phelps. Her face was pale and tear-streaked, but she seemed calmer than she had been when she’d called a few minutes earlier. She glanced around the room, recognized Malone, and hurried over to him.

“Dr. Malone, he drank some Lysol. I don’t know how it happened. I was only out of the kitchen a minute, and when I came back—”

But Mark Malone was already gone, following the medics into a treatment room, snapping out orders to the nurse. Aria Phelps, left suddenly alone, sank onto a sagging plastic-covered sofa, and shakily lit a cigarette.

In the treatment room one of the medics restrained Tony Phelps, who had by now stopped screaming but was doing his best to struggle out of the strong hands that held him. Malone began the unpleasant task of forcing a Levin tube through the child’s nose, down his throat, and into his stomach. A moment later, the lavage began.

“Will he be all right?” the nurse asked.

“I don’t know,” Malone replied, his voice grim. “It depends on how much he drank, how strong it was, and how long ago it happened.”

Tony began vomiting, and the nurse tried futilely to catch the orangish mess in a bowl. Malone ignored the fact that most of it wound up on his coat.

“Well, at least he has orange juice in the morning,” the nurse said by way of an apology.

“Let’s get some more water down there.”

They repeated the lavage process until Tony was throwing up nothing more than the clear water they were pumping into him. “Okay,” Malone said at last “Clean him up, and keep an eye on him, while I go talk
to his mother.” Without waiting for a reply, he strode out to the lobby area, where Aria Phelps was working on her fourth cigarette.

“Is he going to be all right?”

“He’s still alive,” Malone told her. Tell me exactly what happened. “I need to know exactly what he drank, and how much.”

“It was Lysol,” Arla told him. “I’m not sure how much, but I think it must have been a lot.”

“What do you mean by a lot?”

“Half a bottle,” the unhappy woman whispered.

Malone’s eyes widened in surprise. “Half a bottle?” It was unbelievable. The first swallow should have been enough to make even a two-year-old choke and start screaming. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I was only out of the kitchen a few minutes. Doctor, he’s never done anything like that before—never! But when I came back in, he was sitting on the floor, holding the bottle in his hands, drinking it just like it was pop.”

Malone thought furiously. If he was to avert a disaster, he had to act quickly and make no mistakes. “Just a minute,” he said. He went back to the treatment room, intent on having the contents of Tony Phelps’s stomach analyzed.

But when he got there, the emergency seemed to have passed. Tony Phelps, sitting up on the examining table, was giggling happily while the nurse teased him. Malone stood at the door and stared.

“Suzy?” he raid at last.

The nurse turned and grinned at him. “Still the world’s most perfect child.”

“So I see,” Malone said. “Do me a favor, will you? Have the lab check out the contents of his stomach to see if there’s anything there besides orange juice. I have a feeling our young Mr. Phelps may be playing a bad joke on all of us.”

As the nurse hurried out of the room, bearing the bowl and its contents, Mark Malone picked up the gurgling child and held him high in the air. “Is that what you’re doing, Tony? Playing a game on us?”

“Where’s Mommy?” the little boy asked.

“Right out here.” Malone carried Tony out to the lobby and turned him over to Arla, who looked up at him anxiously as she took her son.

“Is he all right?”

“Apparently. But I’d just as soon you stayed around for a while. I’m having the lab check out just what it was that he swallowed.”

Twenty minutes later, a laboratory technician appeared, his face a mask. He signaled to Malone, then went into the treatment room. Malone followed.

“I don’t know what’s with that kid,” the technician said softly. “He must have swallowed at least twelve ounces of straight Lysol. You ask me, he should be dead.”

So the crisis wasn’t over after all.

For Mark Malone, it promised to be a long day, and a difficult one.

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
in five years, Sally Montgomery wished she had a cigarette. The problem, she knew, was her hands. If she only had something to do with them, perhaps she wouldn’t feel so nervous.

She was lying to herself, and she knew it.

It was Dr. Wiseman who was making her nervous, with his calm eyes and placid expression, his understanding smile and his low-pitched voice.

She had been listening to him for half an hour while Steve waited outside.

All he really wanted, he kept insisting, was for her to talk to someone—a stranger, someone who had never met her before and knew nothing about her. A stranger who would listen to her objectively and then try to help her sort things out. Perhaps, Wiseman even admitted, this stranger might actually agree with her that something was “going on,” and his fears for her would prove groundless.

Or perhaps, Sally thought, your friend will be one more voice hammering at me to stop worrying, face reality, and go on with my life. Isn’t that what you all say? That I should bury my head in the sand? Pretend nothing’s happening? She felt indignation rising up from the pit of her stomach, flooding through her like a riptide.
threatening to tear away the veneer of false serenity in which she had wrapped herself.

“Would you like something?” she heard Wiseman saying.

“No—no, nothing at all,” Sally said a little too quickly. She forced a smile. “I’m afraid I was just regressing a bit, wishing I had a cigarette.” She bit her lower lip, regretting her words even as she spoke them. “It happens every now and then, but I always resist.”

“Just as you’re resisting me now?” Wiseman said, lounging back in his chair and smiling genially.

Exactly, Sally thought. Aloud she said, “I didn’t know I was resisting you. I didn’t think I needed to. Do I?”

“I don’t see why.” He leaned forward, folding his hands and resting them on his desk. “We’ve known each other for a long time, Sally. If you can’t trust me, and you can’t trust Steve, whom can you trust? You seem to have decided that for some reason we’ve turned against you.”

Sally frowned in studied puzzlement. “I do? I’m sorry if I’ve given you that impression. I’ve listened to every word you’ve said.”

“And dismissed them,” Wiseman replied. “Sally, I’m your doctor. I’ve known you for ten years, but I’m sitting here talking to a stranger. Don’t you
want
me to help you?”

Sally felt her guard slip just a little. Did he really want to help her? “Of course I want you to help me. But I want you to help me with my problem, and you only want to help me with what you
think
is my problem. I’m not crazy, Dr. Wiseman—”

“No one has said you are.”

Sally’s resolve crumbled around her, and all the feelings she had been struggling to control boiled to the surface.
“Everyone
has said so.” The words burst out of Sally, and there was nothing she could do to stop them. “I keep hearing it from everyone—you, Steve, my mother, even the neighbors are starting to look at me strangely. ‘Oh, dear, here comes poor Sally—you know, ever since her baby died, she’s been a little odd.’ By next
week, they’ll be crossing the street to get away from me. But I’m not crazy, Dr. Wiseman. I’m not crazy, and neither is Lucy Corliss. Do you remember her, Dr. Wiseman? You probably don’t, but you did the same thing to her that you did to me, and to Jan Ransom, and to God-only-knows how many other women. We didn’t want children, so you gave us IUDs. But we had children anyway—for a while. But mine died, and Jan’s died, and Lucy’s is gone. Is that your kind of birth control? After the fact?”

She started sobbing in fury and frustration. She was dimly aware of Wiseman getting up and moving from behind his desk to lay a gentle hand on her shoulder.

“Sally,” she heard him say, “I tried to explain it to you at the time. IUDs don’t always work. Sometimes your body rejects them. There’s nothing I can do about that.”

Sally shook his hand away and rose to face him. “Isn’t there? I wonder, Dr. Wiseman. I wonder if there’s nothing you could have done, or if there’s something you
did
do. And I’ll find out! You can’t stop me, Dr. Wiseman. Not you, not Steve, not my mother, none of you!” The last vestiges of her control, the control she had nurtured all day, dipped away from her. She stumbled toward the door, grasping at the knob. It stuck, and for a frightening moment she wondered if she had been locked in. But then it turned in her hand and she pulled it open, lurching into the waiting room. Steve, on his feet, reached out to her, but she brushed him aside. As quickly as it had deserted her, her self-control returned. She glared at her husband. “Leave me alone,” she said coldly. “Just leave me alone.” And then she was gone.

Sudden silence hung in the air for a moment, and then Steve heard Arthur Wiseman’s voice. “You’d better come in, Steve. I think we need to talk.”

Numbly, Steve allowed himself to be led into the inner office. Wiseman guided him to the chair that Sally had just vacated, then closed the door. He waited while Steve settled into the chair, speaking only after the young man seemed to have recovered from his wife’s outburst.

“You heard?”

“Only Sally, and only at the end. My God, what happened in here?”

“I’m not exactly sure,” Wiseman said thoughtfully. “I talked to her, and for the first few minutes I thought she was listening to me. And then I had the strangest feeling she’d just sort of clicked off, shutting me out. It was as if she was only willing to listen to what she wanted to hear.” He paused, then went on. “And then at the end, when I asked if she wanted our help—well, you heard her. She lost control.”

“Oh, God,” Steve groaned. “What am I going to do?”

Wiseman’s fingers drummed on the desk top. “I’m not positive, Steve, but it seems to me that Sally’s on the edge of a major collapse. I hate to suggest it, but I think it might be wise if she had a good rest. Not for a long time, but for a week or two at least. Get her out of Eastbury, away from everything that might remind her of Julie.”