The God Project (6 page)

   It was nearly midnight, and the house was spotless, when Jim Corliss finally answered his phone.

“Jim? It’s Lucy. I want him back, do you hear? I want you to bring him back right now, or I’m going to call my lawyer.”

Jim Corliss knew by the hysteria in her voice that something was wrong. She never called him, except to demand support payments or argue with him about Randy. Suddenly, he became worried. Did she think Randy was with him? But he wasn’t scheduled to see his son for another week. “Are you talking about Randy?” he asked cautiously.

“Of course I’m talking about Randy,” Lucy exploded. “Who do you think I’m talking about? How dare you!”

“How dare I what? Isn’t Randy there?”

There was a silence, then Lucy spoke again, her voice suddenly breaking. “You don’t have him? You didn’t pick him up this morning?”

“Oh, my God,” Jim said, his heart pounding as he realized the implications of what his ex-wife was saying. “Lucy, what’s happened? Tell me what’s happened.”

“He’s gone, Jim.”

“What do you mean, gone? Gone where?”

“I—I don’t know,” Lucy stammered, her rage dissipating, only to be replaced by the fear she had felt earlier. She explained what had happened that afternoon. “I—I thought you must have picked him up,” she finished. “I know how he’s been after you to take him away from me. I thought you’d done it.”

“I wouldn’t, Lucy. I wouldn’t do that to you.”

“Wouldn’t you?” Lucy asked, her voice brittle with suspicion. “I wonder …”

“I’m coming over,” Jim said suddenly. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”

“No,” Lucy protested. “Please, Tim—”

“He’s my son too,” Jim said firmly. He hung up the phone. Within minutes he was on his way to Eastbury.

   There was an awkwardness when Jim and Lucy Corliss faced each other across the threshold of Lucy’s house, the kind of uncomfortable silence that comes over two people who have once been close but are no longer sure what to say to each other. For years Lucy had done her best to avoid Jim when he came to pide up Randy, restricting her conversations to a few stilted sentences conveying nothing more than what she deemed to be vital information. Now, as Lucy examined her ex-husband’s face, she had an impression of age, but then, noting that Jim’s face was as unlined as ever, and his hair the same thick, wavy thatch that it had always been, she decided that it wasn’t age that had come to Jim, but something else. The word that came to mind
was maturity, but she tried to reject it. If Jim had, indeed, matured over the years, she would have to see more evidence of it than a look in his eyes.

“May I come in?”

Lucy stepped back nervously, stumbled, then quickly recovered herself. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Of course.” She held the door open as Jim came in and Mrs. Willis, hands fluttering, mumbled a series of greetings, apologies, sympathies, and good-byes. Then she was gone, and a nervous silence settled over the Corlisses.

Jim glanced around the little living room, then offered a tentative smile. “Did I ever tell you I like this room? It’s nice—looks just like you. Pretty, warm, and tidy.”

Lucy returned Jim’s smile stiffly and settled herself into a chair that would, by its placement in the room, separate her from him. The thought that Jim was still very attractive came into her mind, but she put it determinedly aside and began telling him what had happened, ending up with her fear that Randy had been kidnaped.

“But he ran away last summer,” Jim pointed out when she had finished.

“This is different,” Lucy insisted. “Last summer he ran away in the middle of the night, after that problem with the Semple boy. But nothing’s happened recently—there’s no reason for him to have run away this morning. And I’d have known—I’d have sensed something at breakfast. But he was just like he always is.” She paused, then met Jim’s eyes. “He’s been kidnaped, Jim. Don’t ask me how I know, but I know Randy didn’t just run away. Someone took him.” Her eyes narrowed. “And I’m still not entirely convinced it wasn’t you.”

“Oh, God …” Jim groaned.

“It’s just the kind of thing you’d do, Jim. And I swear, if you’ve taken him and hidden him somewhere—”

“I haven’t,” Jim said vehemently. “Lucy, I wouldn’t do something like that I—well, I just wouldn’t Look. Let’s call the police again. It seems to me that he’s been gone long enough so they should at least be willing to take a report.”

“They told me they couldn’t do anything for twenty-four hours.”

“Twenty-four hours!” Jim exploded. “My God, he’s not an adult—he’s only nine years old! He could be lost—or hurt.” Jim stood up and stormed into the kitchen. A moment letter Lucy heard him talking to someone, then shouting. His voice dropped again, and she could no longer make out what he was saying. At last he rejoined her.

“They’re sending someone out,” he said. But as Lucy looked at him hopefully, he had to tell her what the police had told him. “They’ll take a report, but they said the odds are that he’s a runaway.” He fell silent, and Lucy prodded him.

“Which means what?”

Jim avoided her eyes. “I’m not sure. It could mean anything. Kids are—well, they’re running away from home younger every year. They said if he was a little older, we’d probably only see him again if he wants to see us.”

Lucy frowned. “What does that mean?”

“Just that with the young ones—the real young ones, like Randy—sometimes they don’t know what to do, and after a night or two, they turn themselves in.”

“And if he doesn’t?” Lucy asked quietly.

“I—Im not sure. They said something about a search, but they said searches usually don’t do much good either. If something’s happened to Randy, it’s more likely that someone will … well, that someone will find him by accident.”

“You mean if he’s dead.” Lucy’s voice was flat, and her eyes cold, and Jim found himself unable to make any reply other than a nod of his head.

“But he’s not dead,” Lucy said softly. “I know he’s not dead.”

Jim swallowed. There was one more possibility the police had mentioned. “They said he might have gone to Boston …” he began, but then let his words trail off. Better to let the police try to explain to Lucy what could happen to a small boy in Boston.

A
T THE SAME TIME
Jim and Lucy Corliss were trying to deal with the loss of their son, Steve and Sally Montgomery were trying to deal with the loss of their daughter.

All afternoon, and into the evening, ever since they had returned from the hospital and their talk with Dr. Malone, Sally had been strangely silent. Several times Steve tried to talk to her, but she seemed not to hear him.

Steve had spent several hours with Jason, trying to explain to him what had happened to Julie, and Jason had listened quietly, his head cocked curiously, his brows furrowed into a thoughtful frown. He seemed, to Steve, to accept the death of his sister as simply one more fact in his young life.

It was, indeed, not so much the fact of Julie’s death that worried Jason, but the reason for her death. Over and over, he’d kept coming back to the same question.

“But if there wasn’t anything wrong with her, why did she die?”

His eyes, larger and darker than his mother’s, looked up at Steve, pleading for an answer Steve couldn’t give. Still, he had to try once more.

“We don’t know why Julie died,” he repeated for at
least the sixth time. “All we know is that it happens sometimes.”

“But why did it happen to Julie? Was she a bad girl?”

“No, she was a very good girl.”

Jason’s brows knit as he puzzled over the dilemma. “But if she was a good girl, why did God kill her?”

“I don’t know, son,” Steve replied through the sudden constriction in his throat. “I just don’t know.”

“Is God going to kill me too?”

Steve pulled his son to him and hugged him close. “No, of course not. It didn’t have anything to do with us, and it isn’t going to happen to you.”

“How do you know?” Jason challenged, wriggling loose from his father’s embrace. Steve wearily stood up and began tucking Jason in.

“I just know,” he said. “Now I want you to go to sleep, okay?”

“Okay,” Jason agreed. Then his eyes wandered over to the far corner of his room where a black-and-white guinea pig named Fred lived in a small cage. “Can Fred come sleep by me tonight?” he asked.

Steve smiled. “Sure.” He brought the cage over and set it down next to Jason’s bed. Inside the cage, Fred began patrolling the perimeter, examining his environment from the new perspective. Then, satisfied, he curled up and buried his nose in his own fur. “Now that’s what I want you to do,” Steve said. “Bury your nose and go to sleep.” He bent down and kissed Jason’s cheek, snapped out the light, and left the room.

A moment later, as he came downstairs, his mother-in-law drew him into the den, and the two of them talked for a long time. At last Phyllis shook her head slowly.

“I just don’t understand it,” she said. “It seems so strange that a perfect child like Julie could just—what? Stop living? Terrible. Terrible! There must have been a reason, Steve. There must have been.”

But Steve Montgomery knew there was no reason, at least no reason that the doctors understood. That, he was coming to realize, was the most difficult part of the
sudden infant death syndrome: there was nothing to blame, no germ or virus, no abnormal condition—nothing. Simply the fact of unreasonable death and the lingering feeling of failure. Already it was beginning to gnaw at him, but there was nothing he could do about it. He would simply have to live with it and try to put it out of his mind. Even if it meant putting Julie out of his mind too.

“Life is for the living.”

The words had sounded reasonable when Malone had spoken them, and Steve knew they were true. Then why did he feel dead inside? Why did he feel as though he might as well bury himself tomorrow along with his daughter? He couldn’t feel that way, couldn’t
let
himself feel that way. For Sally, and for Jason, he would have to go on, have to function. And yet, would he be able to do any better for them than he had for his daughter?

He shut the thought out of his mind. From now on, he decided, there would have to be places in his mind that were closed off, sealed forever away from his conscious existence. It was either that or go crazy.

Now he sat with Sally, tiredness weakening every fiber in his body, his mind numb, his grief pervading him. Sally was looking at him, and he saw something in her eyes that chilled his soul.

Her eyes, the sparkling brown eyes that had first attracted him to her, had changed. The sparkle had been replaced by a strange intensity that seemed to glow from deep within her.

“She didn’t just die,” Sally said softly. Steve started to speak to her, but was suddenly unsure whether she was talking to him or to herself. “Babies don’t do that They don’t just die.” Now her eyes met his. “We must have done something, Steve. We must have.”

Steve flinched slightly. Hadn’t the same thoughts gone through his own mind? But he couldn’t give in to them, and he couldn’t let Sally give in to them either. “That’s not true, Sally. We loved Julie. We did everything we could-”

“Did we?” Sally asked, her voice suddenly bitter. “I
wonder. I wonder, Steve! Let’s face it. We didn’t want Julie—neither of us did! One child was all we were going to have, remember? Just one! And we had Jason. A little sooner than we’d planned, but we agreed that he was the only child we wanted But it didn’t happen that way, did it? Something went wrong, and we had Julie, even though we didn’t want her. And she died!”

Steve stared at his wife, his face pale and his hands shaking. “What are you saying, Sally?” he asked, his voice so quiet it was almost inaudible. “Are you saying we killed Julie?”

Tears suddenly overflowing, Sally buried her face in her hands. “I don’t know, Steve,” she sobbed. “I don’t know what I’m saying, or what I’m thinking, or anything. I only know that babies don’t just die—”

“But they do,” Steve interrupted. “Dr. Malone said—”

“I don’t care what Dr. Malone said!” Sally burst out. “Babies don’t just die!”

She ran from the room. Steve listened to her heavy step as she went upstairs.

A little later he followed her and found her already in bed. He undressed silently, slipped into bed beside her, and turned out the light. He could hear her crying and reached out to take her in his arms.

For the first time in all the years of their marriage, Sally drew away from him.

   Jason lay in his bed, listening to the silence of the house and wondering when things would get back to the way they used to be.

He didn’t like the way his mother had been crying all the time. Up until last night, in fact, he’d never seen her cry at all.

It had frightened him at first, seeing her standing in Julie’s room, holding Julie just like she always did, except for the tears running down her face. Usually, when she held Julie, she laughed.

His first thought when he saw her was that she had found out about what he’d done to Julie and was going
to be mad at him. But that hadn’t been it at all-she was crying because Julie was dead.

Julie hadn’t been dead when he’d gone in earlier to look at her.

She’d only been sleeping.

He knew she was sleeping, because he could hear her snuffling softly, like his mother did when she had a cold. So he’d wiped her nose with a corner of the sheet.

That couldn’t have hurt her.

But it did wake her up and she’d started crying.

And that was when he’d put the blanket over her face, so no one would hear her crying.

But he hadn’t left it there long enough for her to smother. It couldn’t have been that long; as soon as she’d stopped crying, he’d taken the blanket off her face and tucked it back around her just the way it had been when he went in to look at her.

But had she still been breathing?

He tried to remember.

He was sure she had. He could almost hear her now, in the silence of the house, even though she was dead.

He listened hard and was sure he heard, very faintly, the sounds of tiny breaths.

And then he remembered: Fred was sleeping next to his bed.