like. It might make things easier. For you and your wife, if not for her. Frankly, I doubt she’ll even be aware of what’s happening. I’m sorry, but I imagine all this will make things worse for her.” Then he smiled, seeing the expression on Jack’s face. “Don’t forget,” he went on, “we don’t really know what goes on in the mind of a child like Sarah. Often I suspect that a child’s schizophrenia is much harder on the family than it is on the child. A person’s mind generally takes him where he wants to go. Sarah will be all right. Maybe not by your standards, or by mine, but she’s living where she wants to live. All we can do, really, is wish her well.”
“But what’s going to happen to her?” Jack asked dazedly. He picked up his child and began carrying her downstairs. He knew it would be the last time.
Dr. Belter waited until they had reached the front door before he answered Jack’s question.
“It’s hard to say,” he murmured at last “With Sarah, only time will tell what’s going to happen. All I can advise you to do is go on with your life. There’s literally nothing you can do for Sarah.” At the look of pain in Jack’s eyes, he relented. “I didn’t say forget about her. By all means go on loving her. But it’s time to stop living your lives around her. You and your wife and Elizabeth are still a family, you know.”
Jack wondered how much of a family they would ever be again.
“If I can be any help to you, please let me know,” Belter went on. “It isn’t the end of the world, you know. It’s just been a very bad year. For you, and everyone else in Port Arbello. But it’s over now.” He held out his arms to receive the sleeping child.
Jack looked once more into the face of his daughter, and kissed her gently.
“I love you,” he whispered. “I always have. I’m so sorry, my baby. So very sorry.”
Then he placed his child in the doctor’s aims, and Sarah Conger was taken away from the house on Conger’s Point. As he watched the car taking his daughter from her home, Jack Conger wondered if it would, indeed, be all over now. He hoped so.
He stood alone in the driving snow and watched the taillights disappear. He raised one hand in a final salute.
“Sarah,” he whispered. And then again: “Sarah …”
25
A week passed, then two. Port Arbello began to return to normal, though it was a slightly different normal. Most of the children returned to walking to school, but some of them kept on riding. “What happened once could happen again,” some of the parents were saying.
Three days after Sarah walked out of the woods, Carl and Barbara Stevens put their house on the market. Rose Conger was surprised when she got the listing for it, and turned it down. She explained that she was taking some time off to recuperate, but that was only part of the truth. The rest of it was that she couldn’t face seeing Barbara Stevens again.
Marilyn Burton continued to operate her dress shop, and people noticed that she was beginning to talk to herself. For a while many of the women in Port Arbello made an effort to drop in on her as often as possible, but it didn’t seem to do any good. After a while they stopped dropping in, and if Marilyn Burton’s habit became worse, no one knew about it.
Martin Forager did his best to keep the talk alive, but as the days dragged on and nothing else happened, people began to tell him to let it be; they’d just as soon forget. He couldn’t, of course, and few nights passed without Marty Forager suddenly standing up in the tavern and drunkenly demanding that someone find out what really did happen to his daughter. After a while people stopped paying attention.
Jimmy Tyler’s parents acted as if nothing had happened. They kept his room just as it had been on the day he disappeared, and always set a place for him at the table. Mrs. Tyler told everyone that she expected Jimmy home any day now, and that the waiting was hard. But she also insisted that she was holding up well under it and it would all be over soon, when Jimmy came home. The people of Port Arbello clucked sympathetically, but shook their heads when Mrs. Tyler wasn’t