“Hush, now, hush,” said Granny to the baby. “Mary Jane, you hurry now. This baby’s getting fussy.”
He was about to say they ought to put that baby in its mother’s arms, but Mary Jane would have pushed him down the steps if he hadn’t gone. She was all but chasing him, sticking her little breasts against his back. Breasts, breasts, breasts. Thank God his field was geriatrics, he could never have taken all this, teenage mothers in flimsy shirts, girls talking at you with both nipples, damned outrageous, that’s what it was.
“Doctor, I’m going to pay you five hundred dollars for this visit,” she said in his ear, touching it with her bubble-gum lips, “because I know what it means to come out on an afternoon like this, and you are such a nice, agreeable …”
“Yeah, and when will I see that money, Mary Jane Mayfair?” he asked, just cranky enough to speak his mind after all this. Girls her age. And just what was she likely to do if he turned around and decided to cop a feel of what was in that lace dress that she had just so obligingly mashed up against him? He ought to bill her for a new pair of shoes, he thought, just look at these shoes, and she could get those rich relatives in New Orleans to pay for it.
Oh, now wait a minute now. If that little girl upstairs was one of those rich Mayfairs come down here to—
“Now don’t you worry about a thing,” Mary Jane sang out, “you didn’t deliver the package, you just signed for it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“And now we have to get back in that boat!”
She hurried on to the head of the lower steps, and he sloshed and padded right behind her. Well, the house didn’t tilt that much, he figured, once you were inside of it. Clickety, clickety, clickety, there it was again. Guess you could get used to a tilted house, but the very idea of living in a place that was half flooded was perfectly—
The lightning let go with a flash like midday, and the hall came to life, wallpaper, ceilings, and transoms above the doors, and the old chandelier dripping dead cords from two sockets.
That’s what it was! A computer. He’d seen her in the split second of white light—in the back room—a very tall woman bent over the machine, fingers flying as she typed, hair red as the mother up in the bed, and twice as long, and a song coming from her as she worked, as if she was mumbling aloud whatever she was composing on the keyboard.
The darkness closed down around her and her glowing screen and a gooseneck lamp making a puddle of yellow light on her fluttering fingers.
Clickety, clickety, clickety!
Then the thunder went off with the loudest boom he’d ever heard, rattling every piece of glass left in the house. Mary Jane’s hands flew to her ears. The tall young thing at the computer screamed and jumped up out of her chair, and the lights in the house went out, complete and entire, pitching them all into deep, dull afternoon gloom that might as well have been evening.
The tall beauty was screaming her head off. She was taller than he was!
“Shhhh, shhhh, Morrigan, stop!” shouted Mary Jane, running towards her. “It’s just the lightning knocked out the power! It will go back on again!”
“But it’s dead, it’s gone dead!” the young girl cried, and then, turning, she looked down and saw Dr. Jack, and for one moment he thought he was losing his faculties. It was the mother’s head he saw way up there on this girl’s neck, same freckles, red hair, white teeth, green eyes. Good grief, like somebody had just pulled it right off the mother and plunked it down on this creature’s neck, and look at the size of this beanpole! They couldn’t be twins, these two. He himself was five foot ten, and this long, tall drink of water was at least a foot taller than that. She wasn’t wearing anything but a big white shirt, just like the mother, and her soft white legs just went on forever and ever. Must have been sisters. Had to be.
“Whoa!” she said, staring down at him and then marching towards him, bare feet on the bare wood, though Mary Jane tried to stop her.
“Now you go back and sit down,” said Mary Jane, “the lights will be on in