Second Child (2 page)

The handle of the radiator?

A stray nail that had worked loose from the floor molding?

Falling! Suddenly she was upside down, slipping out of the shroud of the bedspread.

Her fingers grasped at the material; it slipped away as if coated with oil.

She dropped toward the concrete headfirst, only beginning to raise her arms to break her fall as her skull crashed against the driveway.

She felt nothing; no pain at all.

There was only a momentary sense of surprise, and a small cracking sound from within her neck as her vertebrae shattered and crushed her spinal cord.

It had been no more than three minutes since she had awakened, laughing quietly, from her dream.

Now the quiet laughter was over, and Polly MacIver was dead.

Teri MacIver stood rooted on the lawn in front of the house, her right hand clutching at the lapels of her thin terry-cloth bathrobe with all the modesty of her nearly fifteen years. Her eyes were fixed on the blaze that now engulfed the small two-story house which had been her home for the last ten years. It was an old house, built fifty years earlier, when San Fernando had still been a small farming town in the California valley of the same name. Built entirely of wood, the house had baked in the sun for half a century, its wood slowly turning into tinder, and tonight, when the fire started, it had raced through the
rooms with a speed that stunned Teri. It was as if one moment the house had been whole, and the next it had been swallowed by flames.

Teri was only vaguely aware of what was going on around her. In the distance a siren wailed, growing steadily louder, but she barely heard it. Her mind was filled with the roar of the fire and the crackling of the siding as it curled back upon itself and began to fall away from the framework of the house, venting the interior to the fresh air that fed the raging flames.

Her parents …

Where were they? Had they gotten out? Forcing her eyes away from the oddly hypnotic inferno, she glanced around. Down the block, someone was running toward her, but the figure was no more than a shadow in the breaking dawn.

Voices began to penetrate her consciousness then, people shouting to each other, asking what had happened.

Then, over the roar of the fire and the babble of voices, she heard a scream. It came from the house, seemingly unmuffled by the already crumbling walls. The sharp sound released Teri from her paralysis, and she ran around to the driveway, her eyes wide as she stared up to the second floor and her parents’ bedroom.

She saw her mother, a dark silhouette against the glow of the fire. She was wrapped in something—a blanket, perhaps, or the bedspread. Teri watched as her mother’s legs came over the windowsill, and a second later she saw her jump … then turn in the air as the bedspread tightened around her legs.

Her mother seemed to hang for a moment, suspended in midair. A scream built in Teri’s throat, only to be cut off a second later as her mother slid free from the swaddles and plunged headfirst to the driveway below.

Had she heard the sound as her mother’s head struck the concrete, or did she imagine it?

Teri began running then, but as if her feet were mired in mud, it seemed to take forever before she reached the spot where her mother lay crumpled and still on the driveway, one arm flung out as if reaching out to her daughter, as if even in death she were grasping for life.

“M-Mom?” Teri stammered, her hand falling away from
her robe to tentatively touch her mother. Then her voice rose to an anguished wail.
“M-o-m!”

There was no response, and as Teri became aware of someone running up the sidewalk, she threw herself on Polly’s body, cradling her mother’s head in her lap, stroking the blistered cheek of the woman who only a few hours ago had stroked her own before kissing her good night. “No,” she whimpered, her eyes flooding with tears. “Oh, no. Please, God, don’t let Mommy die.” But even as she uttered the words, Teri already knew somewhere deep inside her that it was too late, that her mother was already gone.

She felt gentle hands on her shoulders and slowly looked up to see Lucy Barrow, from across the street. “She’s dead.” Teri’s voice broke as she spoke the words. The admission seemed to release a tide of emotion that had been locked inside her. Covering her face with her hands, she began to sob, her body shaking.

Lucy, her own mind all but numbed by the sight of Polly MacIver’s seared and broken body, pulled Teri to her feet and began leading her back down the driveway. “Your father …” she said. “Where’s your father? Did he get out?”

Teri’s hands dropped away from her face. For a moment her shocked eyes flickered with puzzlement. She started to speak, but before the words emerged from her mouth there was a sharp crack, followed instantly by a crash.

Lucy Barrow grasped Teri’s arm tightly, pulling her down the driveway as the roof of the house collapsed into the fire and the flames shot up into the brightening sky.

Three fire trucks clogged the street in front of the MacIvers’ house, and a tangle of hoses snaked along the sidewalk to the hydrant on the corner. An ambulance had taken Polly’s body away more than an hour before, but as more and more neighbors arrived to gape in dazed horror at the smoldering ruins of the house, others would point with macabre fascination to the spot where Teri’s mother had plunged to her death. The newcomers would stare at the driveway for a few seconds, visualizing the corpse and imagining, with a shudder, the panic Polly must have felt as she died.

Did she know, at least, that her daughter had survived the fire?

No, of course not.

Heads shook sadly; tongues clucked with sympathy. Then the attention of the crowd shifted back to the smoking wreckage. Most of the beams still stood, and parts of the second floor had remained intact even when the roof collapsed. Now, as sunlight cast the ruins into sharp relief, the house looked like a desiccated, blackened skeleton.

Teri, who had spent the last two hours sitting mutely in the Barrows’ living room, unable to pull her eyes away from the spectacle of the fire, finally emerged onto the porch. Next to her, Lucy Barrow hovered protectively, her voice trembling as she tried to convince Teri to go back inside.

“I can’t,” whispered Teri. “I have to find my father. He—He’s—” Her voice broke off, but her eyes returned to the ruins across the street.

Lucy Barrow unconsciously bit her lip, as if to take some of Teri’s pain onto herself. “He might have gotten out,” she ventured, her quavering voice belying her words.

Teri said nothing, but started once more across the street, still clad in the bathrobe she’d worn when she escaped the inferno. An eerie silence fell over the block, the murmurs of the bystanders dying away as she moved steadily through the crowd, which parted silently to let her pass.

At last Teri came to the front yard of what had been her home. She stood still, staring at the charred wood of the house’s framework and the blackened bricks of its still-standing chimney. She took a tentative step toward the remains of the front porch, then felt a firm hand on her arm.

“You can’t go in there, miss.”

Teri’s breath caught, but she turned to look into the kindly gray eyes of one of the firemen. “M-My father—” she began.

“We’re going in now,” the fireman said. “If he’s in there, we’ll find him.”

Without a word, Teri watched as two firefighters, clad in heavily padded overcoats, their hands protected by thick gloves, worked their way carefully into the wreckage. The front door had been chopped away, and inside, the base of the stairway was clearly visible. The men started up,
testing each step before trusting it to hold their weight. After what seemed an eternity, they finally reached the second floor. They moved through the house, visible first through one window, then another. From one of the rooms an entire wall, along with most of the floor, had burned away. As the firemen gingerly moved from beam to beam, they appeared to be balanced on some kind of blackened scaffolding. At last they moved out of Teri’s sight as they carefully worked their way toward her room at the back of the house.

Ten minutes later the fireman with the kind, gray eyes emerged from the front door and approached Teri, who stood waiting, her eyes fixed on him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice made gruff by the memory of the charred remains of Tom MacIver, which he had found in front of the still-closed door to Teri’s bedroom at the back of the house. “He was trying to get you out. He didn’t know you’d already gotten away.” His large hand rested reassuringly on Teri’s shoulder for a moment, but then he turned away and began issuing the orders for Tom MacIver’s body to be removed from the ruins.

Teri stood where she was for a few more seconds. Her eyes remained fixed on the house as if she were still uncertain of the truth of what she had just been told. Finally Lucy Barrow’s voice penetrated her thoughts.

“We have to call someone for you,” Lucy said. “We have to call your family.”

Teri turned away from the smoldering rubble. She stared blankly at Lucy. For a moment Lucy wasn’t certain Teri had heard her, but then Teri spoke.

“My father,” she breathed. “Will someone please call my father?”

Dear Lord, Lucy thought. She doesn’t understand. She hasn’t grasped what happened. She slipped her arms around Teri and held her close. “Oh, darling,” she whispered. “He didn’t get out. That’s what the fireman was telling you. I—I’m sorry,” she finished, wondering at the helpless inadequacy of the words. “I’m just so sorry.”

Teri was motionless in her arms for a second, then pulled away, shaking her head.

“N-Not him,” she said. “We need to call my real father.” She wrenched away from Lucy’s protective embrace,
her gaze returning to the house, where three men were already working to retrieve Tom MacIver’s body. “He was my stepfather,” Teri said. “He adopted me when I was only four. Now we have to call my real father.”

Bright sunlight flooded the room. As Melissa Holloway’s eyes opened, she instantly felt a pang of guilt—she’d overslept yet again. She started to fling the thin sheet aside, then remembered. It was all right to oversleep today. Today, this and all the other tiny sins she fell victim to every day of her life would be forgiven.

For today was her birthday.

And not just any birthday, either. Today was her thirteenth birthday, the first day of a whole new era. Finally, the eternity of being a child was over. She was a teenager.

She flopped back on the pillow, stretched luxuriantly, and tried to feel the difference between the Melissa who existed today and the Melissa who had endured all the other days of her life.

She felt nothing. No different at all.

Her feeling of well-being dimmed slightly, but then she decided it didn’t matter that she didn’t feel different. That would come later. The point was that she
was
different.

She sat up and glanced around the big room in which she’d spent every summer of her life. It would have to
change now, she decided. It wasn’t a teenager’s room at all. It was a little girl’s room, the shelves that lined its walls overflowing with her collection of dolls and stuffed animals, and a few favorite toys from her toddler years still tucked away in the corners. Next to the fireplace was her enormous Victorian dollhouse, which would certainly have to go. After all, dollhouses were for babies.

She frowned, already wondering if perhaps she should compromise on the dollhouse. After all, it wasn’t as if it was just
any
dollhouse. It was big—so big that when she was very small she’d actually been able to crawl inside it—and it was furnished with perfect miniatures of Victorian furniture.

“What do you think, D’Arcy?” she asked out loud. “Don’t you think we should keep it at least for a while?” Suddenly she clamped her hands over her mouth, remembering her promise to her father. Only last week Melissa had vowed that she would give up D’Arcy today.

After all, friends who existed in your imagination were only for children, too. When you grew up, you gave up the imaginary friends for real ones. Except that in Melissa’s mind, D’Arcy wasn’t really imaginary at all—she was almost as real as she herself was. She lived up in the attic here in Secret Cove, and never traveled to the city when they were in the apartment in Manhattan the rest of the time. Of course, besides Melissa, there weren’t many people for D’Arcy to talk to—only Cora Peterson, the housekeeper—but that had never bothered D’Arcy at all.

Melissa thought that D’Arcy must be lonely when the house in Secret Cove was closed up for the winter, but years ago, during one of their long talks in the middle of the night when Melissa couldn’t sleep, D’Arcy had told Melissa that she liked being all by herself. In fact, when Melissa had confessed to D’Arcy yesterday that she’d promised to stop talking to her, D’Arcy had agreed immediately. “But I won’t stop thinking about you,” Melissa had reassured her friend.

D’Arcy had said nothing, but Melissa had been certain that her friend knew exactly what she meant—that was the wonderful thing about D’Arcy. Even when no one else understood Melissa, D’Arcy always did.

Melissa sighed. It was going to be hard giving D’Arcy
up, even harder than giving up the dollhouse. Well, maybe she’d sort of cheat. Maybe she’d keep the dollhouse and pretend when she was talking to D’Arcy that she was really talking to the tiny wooden figures that populated the house. Except that even if it fooled her parents and Cora, she herself would still know she’d been cheating.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, unconsciously speaking out loud once again. “You can have the dollhouse. I’ll move it up to the attic, and then come and visit it sometimes. And if you’re there when I come, that’s not my fault, is it?”

From far away, in the depths of her imagination, she was certain she heard D’Arcy laughing softly.

She turned away from the dollhouse and went to the window. It was a warm morning—even in Maine, July wasn’t really cool—and the sky was clear and cloudless. Tag, Cora’s fourteen-year-old grandson, had already mowed the broad lawn earlier that morning, and Melissa breathed in the green scent of fresh-cut grass. The lawn swept down toward the beach fifty yards away, where the waves that came into the cove from the open sea were gentle this morning. They broke with a soft whooshing sound, then threw a white coverlet of foam onto the sand, smoothing out the tracks of the birds that skittered in front of the advancing water.