held for them on a large sofa. Steve lowered himself gratefully into its soft comfort. Sally, next to him, remained rigidly erect, her hands clasped together in her lap.
“We don’t really have a leader in the group,” Lois Petropoulous explained. “In fact, we don’t really have a regular meeting place either. The group keeps changing, and we keep moving from house to house, as people come and go.”
“How long do people stay in the group?” Steve asked.
“As long as they need to, or as long as they feel needed,” the gaunt-looking woman, whose name was Irene, said. “Kevin and I have been part of it for over a year now.”
Another woman—Steve thought her name was Muriel—suddenly grinned. “We think Irene and Kevin stick around because we’re cheap entertainment” Steve felt himself flushing and was surprised to hear several people, including Irene and Kevin, chuckling.
“Don’t be surprised at anything you might hear,” Lois said, smiling kindly. “We all have to deal with SIDS in our own way, and sometimes humor is the only way. But we also shed a lot of tears, and sometimes we get pretty loud. You have no idea how much anger builds up after you lose a child the way we all have. One of the reasons we’re here is to vent that anger. In this group there are no rules. Say what you feel, or what you think, and be assured that someone else here has felt and thought exactly the same thing. What’s most important is to realize that you’re not alone. Everyone here has gone through what you’re going through.” She glanced around the room. “Well,” she said, her voice suddenly nervous, “I suppose we’ve already begun, but I’m going to make my big announcement anyway, even though I’d planned to start the meeting with it. I’m pregnant.”
All the eyes in the room suddenly fastened on Lois, and she squirmed self-consciously. “And the first person who says ‘after what happened?’ gets the award for bad taste for tonight.”
“After what happened?” five voices immediately asked. When the laughter died, Muriel Flannery spoke out of the silence.
“But aren’t you scared, Lois? I mean, really?”
“Of course I’m scared,” Lois replied. “I’m terrified. And you can believe I don’t expect to get much sleep the first couple of years. I’ll be watching this baby like a hawk, even with the alarm.”
“I’m not sure I could do that to a baby,” another voice said. “I mean, wire it up like that. It seems so—so cruel. Almost like a lab experiment, or something.”
“But without it, I’d be afraid to let the baby sleep.”
Steve Montgomery stared from one face to another. What were they talking about? An alarm for children? He’d never heard of such a thing. Seeing his expression, Kevin tried to explain. “We’re talking about an infant monitor. You attach it to the baby when its sleeping, and it goes off if the baby stops breathing. Except that no one knows if it really works for SIDS. There’s something else, called apnea, where the baby just seems to forget to breathe.”
“But I thought that’s what SIDS was,” Steve said.
“I wish it were,” another of the men put in. “But it seems there’s more to SIDS than that With SIDS, there’s a constriction of the throat, so even if the baby tries to breathe, it can’t. And for that, the alarm doesn’t seem to do any good at all.”
The conversation went on, moving from subject to subject. Steve found himself listening intently. These people, he began to realize, were just like himself—ordinary people who had become the victims of something they had always assumed could only happen to someone else. Each of them was dealing with it in a different way. There was grief and puzzlement in the room and a lot of anger. But for all of them, there was understanding.
Beside her husband, Sally Montgomery listened to the voices droning on and wondered why Steve had insisted they come to this meeting. There was nothing here for her, and she had a distinct feeling that she was wasting her time. She should be at home, looking after Jason, and studying her books, searching for the answer that kept eluding her as to what had happened to her daughter.
Suddenly, she heard a voice addressing her. It was Alex Petropoulous, and his intelligent eyes were fixed on her, his expression quizzical.
“You don’t seem to be paying much attention, Mrs. Montgomery,” he said. “Is there something on your mind?”
She made herself relax