now. I wonder what she looks like.” Her lips trembled again. “When she was a baby, she used to look just like Mommy.”
Teddy began to think of something but he thought it was too soon to suggest it. Perhaps in time, when Vanessa had absorbed it all, they could all go to Greece and look up Andreas Arbus. Vasili, he knew from the article, two years before, was dead now. It was, of course, that article and Vanessa's subsequent nightmares that had led him to Linda. He smiled at his wife. She had handled it all so beautifully.
“I'm sorry I spoiled everything, Linda. I came to see the baby and to be happy for you, and instead I went crazy.” She looked rueful and blew her nose. She felt very strange, as though she had just run ten miles or climbed a mountain, it wasn't so much a feeling of exhilaration but of being drained.
Linda reached out to her and put an arm around her in maternal fashion. “You didn't go crazy. You did something very healthy. You finally reached back into the past and opened a door that's been locked for years. And the reason your psyche let you do it is because you were ready. You can handle it now, and your mind knows that. What you did took sixteen years to do, and it wasn't easy. We all know that.”
Vanessa nodded, unable to speak for the tears, and Linda looked cryptically at Teddy and he understood.
“I'm going to take you home now, sweetheart, so you can get some rest.” He took her gently from Linda. “Want to come home with me?”
She looked at him sadly and tried to smile. “I'd like that. But don't you want to be here with Linda?”
“I'll come back later.”
“I need some rest anyway.” Linda smiled at them both, and there was a special smile in her eyes for her husband. She had loved him even more than before since they had shared the birth of their baby. The baby created a bond between them that they could already feel. “You two take it easy today. Brad and I will be home in a few days. That'll be plenty of time for all of us to be together.” She kissed Vanessa again and told her that everything she was feeling was normal and healthy and she should go with it and just let it flow, let the memories come, cry with the sadness, feel the grief and the pain and the loss, and then it would finally be done with once and for all. And then she said gently, “I think your friend John could tell you something about that.”
But Vanessa looked shocked. “How can I tell him? He'll think I'm crazy.”
“No, he won't. Try him. From what you've told me, I don't think you'll be disappointed.”
“What? And just tell him that sixteen years later I remember that my mother was murdered. It sounds nuts to me.” She sounded bitter again but Linda was firm with her.
“Well, it isn't nuts, so you'd better understand that. What has just happened to you is the most normal thing that's happened to you in twenty-five years. And the fact that your mother was murdered isn't your fault, Vanessa. You couldn't help that. It's not a reflection on you, or even on her. It happened. Her husband was obviously crazy when he did it. And you couldn't have stopped him.”
“He was crazy long before that.” Vanessa remembered him clearly now, and hated him all over again, and then she turned to Teddy.
“Did my mother love you?” It was a blunt and painful question for him. Serena had loved him, he knew, but never as he had loved her.
He nodded slowly. “Yes. I was someone she could depend on. I was like a brother to her, or a very special friend.” He looked at his wife now. It was the first time he had told her that, and he wanted her to know it too. And there was something gentle and loving in her face as she looked at him.
“Why didn't they let you keep Charlie?” That had been bothering her for the past half hour.
“Because she was no blood relation to me, and you were. Her uncle wanted her, and he had a claim to her.”
“Would you have taken her?” Vanessa needed to know that. Suddenly she wanted to know everything about what had severed her from her sister. It was as though she had to know