Strangers

and she submitted to a bath. But she was like a little zombie, slackfaced and empty-eyed, as if the terror, in passing out of her, had taken with it all her strength and her mind as well.
        That quasicatatonic state lasted almost an hour while Jorja made a dozen telephone calls in an attempt to track down Dr. Besancourt, the pediatrician who treated Marcie on those rare occasions when she was sick. As Mary and Pete tried unsuccessfully to get a smile or at least a word of response from the stricken girl, and as Marcie continued to act as if she were deaf and mute, Jorja's mind was increasingly filled with half-remembered magazine articles about autistic children. She couldn't recall whether autism was a condition that began in infancy or whether it was possible for a perfectly normal little girl of seven to suddenly withdraw into a private place and close out the rest of the world forever. Not being able to remember made her a little crazy.
        Gradually, however, Marcie came out of her daze. She began to answer Mary and Pete, though in one-word replies delivered in a flat, emotionless voice nearly as unsettling as her screams had been earlier. Sucking on her thumb as she had not done in at least two years, she went into the living room to play with her new toys. Most of the afternoon, she played without any visible pleasure, a faint scowl having taken unchallenged possession of her small face. Jorja was no less worried because of this change, but she was relieved to see that Marcie showed no further interest in the Little Ms. Doctor kit.
        By four-thirty, the girl's scowl had faded, and she had become sociable once more. In a good mood again, she was such a natural charmer that she almost made it seem as if her outburst at the table had been no worse than any child's temper tantrum.
        In fact, on the outside stairs of the apartment complex, beyond Marcie's hearing, Jorja's mother paused on the way down to the car and said, "She's just trying to let us know that she's hurt and confused. She doesn't understand why her father left, and right now she needs a lot of special attention, Jorja, a lot of love. That's all."
        Jorja knew the problem was worse than that. She had no doubt that Marcie was still disturbed by her father's behavior, deeply hurt by his abandonment, and full of unresolved conflicts. But something else was eating the girl, something that seemed disturbingly irrational, and Jorja was scared of it.
        Not long after Pete and Mary left, the girl began playing Little Ms. Doctor with the same unnerving intensity she had exhibited earlier, and when bedtime came she wanted to take the kit with her. Now, some of the Little Ms. Doctor things lay on the floor at Marcie's side of the bed, some on the nightstand. And in the dark bedroom the child dreamed and whimpered about doctors, nurses, needles.
        Jorja would have been unable to sleep even if Marcie had been perfectly still and quiet. Worry induced insomnia even more effectively than a dozen cups of coffee. Since she was awake anyway, she listened attentively to her daughter's every dreamy utterance, hoping that she would hear something that would help her understand or that would assist the doctor in arriving at his diagnosis. It was after two o'clock in the morning when Marcie mumbled something different from what she had mumbled before, something that had nothing to do with doctors and nurses and big sharp needles. With a flurry of violent kicks, the girl flopped from her stomach onto her back, gasped, and went rigid, perfectly still. "The moon, moon, the moon," she said, in a voice that was filled with both amazement and fear, "the moon," a voice of such chilling whispery urgency that Jorja knew it was not just meaningless sleeptalk. "The moon, moon, moooooonnn.
        
        Chicago, Illinois.
        Brendan Cronin, priest on probation, slept warmly under a blanket and patchwork quilt, smiling at something in a dream. The winter wind sighed through the giant pine tree outside, fluted and soughed in the caves, and moaned at his window, exerting itself in evenly spaced gusts as if nature were ventilating the night with a huge mechanical bellows that faithfully produced eight exhalations to the minute. Even lost in his dream, Brendan must have been aware of the wind's slow pulse, for when he began to talk in his sleep, the words issued from him in a sympathetic rhythm: "The moon… the moon… the moon… the