The Night Visitors(74)
I drove away from the gas station repeating all the reasons I didn’t have to worry: I’d ditched my old phone and bought a new one with cash. I didn’t tell anyone except Laurel about the job and Laurel won’t tell. I haven’t passed a car in the last fifty miles. I’m in the middle of nowhere, just me and a crying baby—
She’s stopped screaming. I’m not sure how long it’s been since she stopped. Since Chloe was born I sometimes lose little bits of time like that. Mommy brain, Esta, the leader of the mothers’ support group, called it. It’s a hormonal thing. I angle the rearview mirror to see Chloe’s face but the car is so dark I can’t see her at all. I don’t know how to find the dome light and there are no streetlights on this country road to illuminate the interior. It’s so dark and quiet in the car it’s almost as if she isn’t there.
Of course she’s there, don’t be ridiculous, I tell myself, but already I can feel the thought taking root in my brain. Bad thoughts, my mother would say, stick like burrs. You need something to make them go away. A couple or six shots of whiskey is what she used. Sometimes when she got home late from her job at the bar I’d hear her muttering to herself, Leave it! like her brain was a dog who’d picked up a piece of garbage on the street.
Leave it! I’d tell myself on all the sleepless nights I lay awake imagining that Chloe had stopped breathing or that she had been stolen out of her crib. If you keep going into her room, Daphne, Peter would say, she’ll never learn to sleep on her own.
Leave it! I say now. She’s in the car seat. She’s just sleeping. But I can’t leave it. Instead I remember a Schuyler Bennett story that had been one of my favorites in college, the one called “The Changeling.” Like many of her stories it was borrowed from an old piece of folklore. In it a woman who believes her own baby has been stolen by fairies carries the changeling through the woods to leave it on the fairy hill. She waits all night, listening to the sickly wail of the child, until at last at dawn she sees the fairies come and leave a healthy baby in its place. She lifts the plump but strangely quiet baby into her arms and carries it home. The baby seems to grow heavier and heavier in her arms until at last when she comes out of the woods she looks down and sees that what she carries is a log of wood and she knows that she has given up her own baby to the fairies and brought home a changeling instead.
Maybe you’d feel better, Peter had said, after skimming the story from the book on my night table, if you didn’t read such morbid stories.
Now I can’t shake the idea that when I reach the house I’ll find an insensate lump of wood strapped into the car seat—or nothing at all. Maybe I left Chloe at the Quickie Mart. Maybe—the thought makes my mouth go dry—she was never in the car at all. I try to reassure myself by going over the details of leaving the house, carrying her out to the car . . . but all I can see is me sitting in the car, writing in my journal, getting ready to go in to get Chloe. I can see myself getting out of the car, going up the front path, but then the picture goes blurry, like a film out of focus. Mommy brain, like Esta said, hormones—but when the film comes back into focus I can see myself walking back down the path holding Chloe’s car seat. I can see myself putting her in the back of the car. So it’s ridiculous to think she’s not in the car.
Still, I call her name. There’s no response.
Because she’s asleep, I tell myself, not because she’s stopped breathing.
Leave it! I tell myself.
Once I get an idea in my head, though, it’s very hard for me to let it go. Intrusive thoughts, Esta said, get worse with stress, and I’ve certainly been under a lot of stress these last few weeks. Hiding what I was doing from Peter, applying for the job with Schuyler Bennett without him knowing, then worrying that she would call and tell me she’d changed her mind, she didn’t need an archivist after all. Hadn’t it been too good to be true? The ad had appeared on the library job site as if it had been left there just for me. Archivist wanted for author, must love books and be willing to relocate. Room and board included. And when I found out it was Schuyler Bennett, one of my favorite authors, it really had seemed too good to be true—
Usually that’s because it’s not true. Peter’s voice is so real in the car I almost believe that he’s sitting in the passenger seat next to me. That he’s been there all along. I can even hear what he’d say next. You have to be realistic. No one’s going to give you a job with your background—
But then I see the sign. WELCOME TO CRANTHAM. POPULATION 4,300. A half a mile later there’s a sign pointing to the village center. After the sign for the village, Schuyler Bennett had said, you’ll pass the entrance to the hospital. The turnoff for the house is a mile up on the right.
I see why she mentioned the hospital. The entrance is the most noticeable landmark I’ve passed in an hour. Two brick pillars and a wrought iron arch with the name Crantham spelled out in large black iron letters. The Crantham Retreat for the Insane, it was called when Schuyler Bennett’s father was the head doctor there in the fifties and sixties. Of course it’s not called that anymore. Now it’s the Crantham Psychiatric Center.
Don’t worry, Schuyler Bennett had said when she mentioned the hospital’s proximity to her house, they take a very genteel class of patient there these days—celebrity rehabs, anorexic teenagers, overworked executives. You don’t have to worry that any serial killers will get out and make their way over.