The night before, Carrie was the last person to leave the baby’s room. John was not surprised by that; he was surprised she was willing to leave at all. The three of them stood over his crib before they went to bed themselves, saying their own form of prayer or blessing for a day of peace. And while they didn’t discuss what they would choose to do the next day, Carrie knew in her heart she would not have to make that decision.
At five forty-five a.m., Danielle bolted upright to the sound of a scream from the room next door, followed by the baby’s squawk. She grabbed her robe and ran into the nursery.
Her daughter stood next to the crib, hand over her mouth, sobbing.
“Carrie, honey, what is it?”
“He’s…here!”
“Well, of course he—”
Danielle stopped talking, swallowed hard. So this was the moment of reckoning, the proof. The terrible evidence when her daughter learned she was wrong. When her daughter learned, perhaps, that she was crazy.
The baby cried out again, but Carrie made no move to pick him up. Of course, Danielle thought. She knows he’s a stranger now. The bond, the spell, was broken. But hunger, need, loneliness, those continued. Carrie reached in and picked up the baby, cooing to him, walking him around the room.
“Why is he still here?”
“Carrie, I—”
“What does it mean, that he stayed and the others left?”
“Honey, you need to face the possibility that—”
“That what, Mom?”
“That you were wrong about all of this.”
“All of this?” She screwed up her face. “You don’t believe anything I said either?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“You don’t believe your own daughter? You don’t believe your own mother?”
“Carrie, calm down. What I’m saying is…”
“Yes, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying isn’t it possible…that you were right about the others and wrong about the baby?”
Carrie blinked in the low light of the room.
“No,” she said. “The only one I was wrong about was Nolan, and he—he tricked me, because he was sick. I know he was sick. That’s why he came to me, so I could save him.”
Danielle’s mouth was a straight line, her lips disappearing. A signal, sure as birds on a wire, that she held words inside she was afraid to say.
“We have to get the baby to Ben’s pediatrician,” Carrie said suddenly.
“Carrie, honey, it’s been long enough. We need to get this baby somewhere safe before this goes any—”
“No, see, I’m thinking that sickness gives off the same kind of signal…I sense it around someone’s body, like heat waves off a grill. It’s a kind of half-dead smell, it’s like…a predeath, I guess. So it confuses me.”
“Carrie,” her mother said, grabbing her hands. “Listen to me.”
“What?”
“Carrie… Your father. He—”
“What, Mom?”
“He…saw things too.”
“Things?”
“After he came back from Vietnam. Post-traumatic stress. The people who died, that his unit killed…they…sometimes came back to him.”
“What are you saying? That I’m crazy like he was? That it runs in the family?” Carrie’s eyes flashed. The idea of it—and that her mother might believe it and might have told John, and John told Dr. Kenney, and someone told Maya Mercer.
“No,” Danielle said, but quietly, guiltily. “I’m saying there was a reason he drank, and a reason he gambled, and a reason he couldn’t stay with the people he loved. And I’m saying that stress can do terrible things to a person’s psyche.”
Carrie shook her head. The room felt smaller than it had a few minutes before. Her mother, the ultimate skeptic. Who believed only in the power of one foot in front of the other, of tackling the list, of getting it done, nothing else. If this, then that.
Well, she thought, when they went to the pediatrician and found out that something was wrong with this child, then it would all become clear. She’d show her. She’d show everybody.