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 The sparkle had been replaced by a strange intensity that seemed to glow from deep within her.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.