and sink back onto the couch, her hands smoothing the soft linen of her dress. “I’m afraid I’ve got a lot on my mind,” she explained. “You see, my baby didn’t die of SIDS. It was something else.”
Across the room, a woman who had been quiet all evening suddenly spoke.
“I’m Jan Ransom, Mrs. Montgomery,” she said. “Would you mind telling us what happened to your baby?”
“I—I don’t know yet,” Sally admitted. “But I’ll find out.”
“Of course you will,” Jan agreed. “Just like I did. I spent nearly a year trying to find out what happened to my daughter, and I finally did.”
Sally looked at the woman sharply. “What was it?” she asked.
“SIDS,” Jan said, shrugging her shoulders. “You know, one of the hardest things to accept is the simple fact that with SIDS no one can tell you what happened. For me, the idea that the doctors—the people who are always supposed to know what happened and why it happened—didn’t have the slightest idea why my baby died was absolutely unacceptable. So I started reading and studying and talking to everyone I could think of. And no one knew. Of course, what I was really doing was burying my head in the sand. Deep down, I was afraid that if there was no reasonable explanation for my baby’s dying, I must have made it happen myself.”
“No one would want to kill her own baby,” Muriel Flannery said softly.
“No?” Jan Ransom replied bitterly. “People kill their own babies every day. And I never wanted a baby in the first place.”
For the first time, Sally Montgomery began listening.
“I had my life all planned,” Jan went on. “I was going to finish my masters—I’m in communications—then go to New York and get a job in advertising. When I was in my thirties, I’d get married, and my husband would be as career-minded as I am. No children. They only get in the way, and besides, what kind of world is this to bring up children in? Energy shortages, overpopulation, all the usual things. And then one day I turned up pregnant.”
“Why didn’t you have an abortion?” someone asked.
Jan Ransom smiled bitterly. “Did I forget to tell you? I was raised a Catholic. I thought I’d gotten over that, but it turned out I hadn’t. Oh, I went for the birth control—that didn’t bother me at all. But when it came right down to having an abortion, I just couldn’t do it. And then, when the baby came, I couldn’t put it up for adoption either. Maybe I should have.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference,” Lois Petropoulous told her. “SIDS doesn’t have anything to do with who’s raising the baby.”
“Doesn’t it?” Jan shot back. “Who says? And how do they know? If they don’t know what SIDS is, how can they say it doesn’t have anything to do with the parents? Maybe,” she added, her voice trembling, “the baby senses that its mother doesn’t want it and just decides to die.”
Sally felt her fingers digging into her thighs as she listened to Jan Ransom. Right here, in front of all these people, the woman was voicing all the dark suspicions with which Sally had tormented herself in the small hours of the night. Now she could feel Jan Ransom’s eyes on her. When she looked up, the young woman was smiling at her gently.
“I don’t think I killed my baby anymore, Mrs. Montgomery,” she said softly. “And I’m sure you didn’t kill yours either. I don’t know exactly why you’re so sure that SIDS didn’t kill your baby, but I do know that if the doctors say that’s what happened, it’s best to believe them. You can’t spend the rest of your life searching for answers that don’t exist. You have to go on with your life and accept what happened.”
“I’m not sure I can do that,” Sally said, suddenly standing up. “But I know that I have nothing in common with you people. Steve?” Without waiting for a reply, Sally started toward the door. Steve, his face flushing with embarrassment, tried to apologize for his wife.
“It’s all right,” Lois Petropoulous told him. “This isn’t the first time this has happened, and it won’t be the last. When she needs us, well still be here. If not us, then there will be others. Take care of her, Steve. She needs you very badly right now.”
She stood by the door and watched Steve and Sally Montgomery disappear into the night. As she returned to the