Victor reached the room first with Marsha on his heels.

Janice was standing in the middle of her bed, clutching her Bible. She was a sorry sight. Her hair, which had become brittle, stood straight out from her head, giving her a demonic appearance. Her face was hollow, her jaundiced skin stretched tautly across her all-too-visible bones. Her eyes were like yellow neon lights and they were transfixed.

For an instant, Marsha was mesmerized by this vision of Janice as a harpy. Then she followed the woman’s line of sight. Standing in the doorway to Janice’s rear entry was VJ. He didn’t even blink but calmly returned Janice’s stare with one of his own.

Marsha immediately surmised what had happened: VJ had innocently come up Janice’s back stairs, apparently frightening her. In her illness-induced psychosis, Janice had screamed her terrible scream.

“He is the devil!” Janice snarled through clenched teeth. “He is a murderer! Get him away from me!”

“You try to calm Janice,” Marsha shouted, running for VJ. She scooped the six-year-old up into her arms, and retreated down the stairs, rushing him into the family room and kicking the door shut behind her. She pressed VJ’s head against her chest, thinking how stupid she’d been to keep the crazed woman at home.

Finally Marsha released VJ from her bear hug. VJ pushed away from her and looked up at her with his crystal eyes.

“Janice doesn’t mean what she said,” Marsha told him. She hoped this awful moment would have no lasting effect.

“I know,” VJ said with amazingly adult maturity. “She’s very sick. She doesn’t know what she’s saying.”

Since that day, Marsha could never relax and enjoy her life as she had before. If she did she was afraid God might strike again and if anything happened to VJ, she didn’t think she could bear the loss.

As a child psychiatrist, she knew she could not expect her child to develop in a certain way, but she often found herself wishing VJ were a more openly affectionate child. Since he had been an infant he had been unnaturally independent. He would occasionally let her hug him, but sometimes she longed for him to climb onto her lap and cuddle the way David had.

Now, watching him get off his bike, she wondered if VJ was as self-absorbed as he sometimes appeared. She waved to get his attention but he didn’t look up as he snapped off the saddlebags, letting them fall to the cobblestones. Then he pushed open the barn door and disappeared from sight as he parked his bike for the night. When he reappeared he picked up the saddlebags and started toward the house. Marsha waved again, but although he was walking directly toward her he did not respond. He had his chin pressed down against the cold wind that constantly funneled through the courtyard.

She started to knock on the window, then dropped her hand. Lately she had this terrible premonition there was something wrong with the boy. God knows she couldn’t have loved him more if she’d delivered him herself, but sometimes she feared he was unnaturally cold and unfeeling. Genetically he was her own son, but he had none of the warmth and carefree ways she remembered in herself as a child. Before going to sleep she was often obsessed with the thought that being conceived in a petri dish had somehow frozen his emotions. She knew it was a ridiculous idea, but it kept returning.

Shaking off her thoughts, she called, “VJ’s home,” to Victor, who was reading in front of a crackling fire in the family room next to the kitchen. Victor grunted but didn’t look up.

The sound of the back door slamming heralded VJ’s entrance into the house. Marsha could hear him taking off his coat and boots in the mud room. Within minutes he appeared at the doorway to the kitchen. He was a handsome boy, about five feet tall, somewhat large for a ten-year-old. His golden blond hair had not darkened like Marsha’s had, and his face had retained its angelic character. And just like the day he was born, his most distinctive feature remained his ice-blue eyes. For as cherubic as he seemed, those intense eyes hinted at an intelligence wiser than his years.

“All right, young man,” Marsha scolded in mock irritation. “You know you are not supposed to be out on your bike after dark.”

“But it’s not dark yet,” VJ said defensively in his clear, soprano voice. Then he realized his mother was joking. “I’ve been at Richie’s,” he added. He put his saddlebags down and came over to the sink.

“That’s nice,” Marsha said, obviously pleased. “Why didn’t you call? Then you could have stayed as long as you liked. I’d have been happy to come and get you.”

“I wanted to come home anyway,” VJ said as he picked up one of the carrots Marsha had just cleaned. He took a noisy bite.

Marsha put her arms around VJ and gave him a squeeze, aware of the strength in his wiry young body. “Since you have no school this week I’d have thought you would have wanted to stay with Richie and have some fun.”

“Nah,” VJ said as he wormed his way out of his mother’s grasp.

“Are you worrying your mother again?” Victor asked in a teasing tone. He appeared at the doorway to the family room, holding an open scientific journal, his reading glasses perched precariously on the end of his nose.

Ignoring Victor, Marsha asked, “What about this week? Did you make some plans with Richie?”

“Nope. I’m planning on spending the week with Dad at the lab. If that’s okay, Dad?” VJ moved his eyes to his father.

“Fine by me as usual,” Victor said with a shrug.

“Why in heaven’s name do you want to go to the lab?” Marsha asked. But it was a rhetorical question. She didn’t expect an answer. VJ had been going to the lab with his father since he’d been an infant. First to take advantage of the superb day-care services offered at Chimera, Inc., and later to play in the lab itself. It had become a routine, even more so after Janice Fay had died.

“Why don’t you call up some of your friends from school, and you and Richie and a whole group do something exciting?”

“Let him be,” Victor said, coming to VJ’s assistance. “If VJ wants to come with me, that’s fine.”

“Okay, okay,” Marsha said, knowing when she was outnumbered. “Dinner will be around eight,” she said to VJ, giving his bottom a playful slap.

VJ picked up the saddlebags he’d parked on the chair next to the phone and headed up the back stairs. The old wooden risers creaked under his seventy-four-pound frame. VJ went directly to the second-floor den. It was a cozy room paneled in mahogany. Sitting down at his father’s computer, he booted up the machine. He listened intently for a moment to make sure his parents were still talking in the kitchen and then went through an involved procedure to call up a file he’d named STATUS. The screen blinked, then filled with data. Zipping open each saddlebag in turn, VJ stared at the contents and made some rapid calculations, then entered a series of numbers into the computer. It took him only a few moments.

After completing the entry, VJ exited from STATUS, zipped up the saddlebags, and called up Pac-Man. A smile spread across his face as the yellow ball moved through the maze, gobbling up its prey.

Marsha shook the water from her hands, then dried them on the towel hanging from the refrigerator handle. She couldn’t get her growing concern for VJ out of her mind. He wasn’t a difficult child; there certainly weren’t any complaints from teachers at school, yet tough as it was to put her finger on it, Marsha was increasingly certain something was wrong. It was time she brought it up. Picking up Kissa, their Russian Blue cat who’d been doing figure eights around her legs, Marsha walked into the family room where Victor was sprawled on the gingham couch, perusing the latest journals as was his habit after work.

“Can I talk to you for a moment?” Marsha asked.