Innocence

Gwyneth was taken home from the hospital, and for the next four years, Sister Gabriel visited daily, to assist with the child’s care. At the end of this period, she believed that Bailey could manage the situation himself, because Gwyneth was by then intellectually and emotionally mature beyond her years, aware of the great gift of her innocence, of the necessity and difficulty of preserving it, and of the danger of a world hostile to one such as she. Sister Gabriel elected thereafter a contemplative and cloistered life and never ventured again beyond the walls of her convent.

During those same four years, Bailey had so often experienced the involuntary examination of his conscience, which occurred when he but looked at the girl, that he came to fully understand himself and his past errors. He arrived at a state of perfect contrition, so that he could enjoy her company and she his, in as normal a fashion as any father and daughter.

He had by then divested himself of his real-estate empire and reordered his investments so that management of them could be left largely to others. He devoted himself to Gwyneth and embarked upon a most unlikely second career as a novelist, under a pen name, which proved amazingly successful in spite of the fact that he never toured or engaged in much publicity.

To explain Gwyneth’s reclusive, almost monastic, existence, Bailey told the household staff and others in his life that his daughter was afflicted with fragile health, a compromised immune system, though in fact she never had as much as a cold or a headache. Later it was said that she suffered from social phobia, which in fact she did not. The girl’s nature was such that she thrived on seclusion and devoted herself to literature and music and study. She and her father believed that hers was to be a life in waiting, that the day would come when her purpose would be clear and that in the meantime she needed only to be patient.

When she hit upon the scheme to disguise her nature and thereby be able to go out into the world, her father was at first reluctant to grant permission. But Gwyneth was nothing if not persistent, and she proved that her plan was workable. In the magazine photographs of the Paladine marionettes, she recognized a portrait of evil that would be the perfect mask to hide her true nature and to dissuade people from looking closely at her, so that if she could avoid being touched, and thereby known, she could dare to venture tentatively and cautiously out of the house in which she had, until then, passed her entire life.

When I had asked why she imitated the look of the marionettes, she had said that it was to overcome her social phobia, that she felt she needed to look edgy. She was afraid of people, and she thought the best way to keep them at a distance might be to act a little scary. I had known at the time that her answer was incomplete, that she was keeping something from me. The full truth was that she and I were two of a kind, that whereas I lived by day underground and aboveground only by night, she moved safely in the city by spackling over her true nature with Goth makeup. Her strange, disturbing eyes, black with red striations like those of the vile marionettes, were contact lenses, nonprescription because she had perfect vision, custom-made for her by a company that produced all manner of prosthetics for actors of stage and screen, as well as for the growing number of people who chose to escape unsatisfying, mundane lives by donning costumes not just for fantasy and gaming conventions but also for more and more of their lives outside of their office jobs.

Much of that I learned from Father Hanlon as we sat together in the rectory basement, with the house creaking around us and the storm rattling the door, if indeed it was the storm and not a bestial hand, though Gwyneth shared some of her story with me later.

I still had questions, not the least of which was, What next?

This might not be the last winter of the world, but by all the evidence, it was likely to be the last winter to which the people of this city or any other would stand witness. The contagion out of Asia, spread by man and bird, might have a hundred-percent mortality rate among the infected. However, if we were what we now believed ourselves to be, we were not heir to the ills of this fallen world.

I said, “If Gwyneth and I—and the child—aren’t destined to die from what those madmen have unleashed, what’s our future and how do we ensure it?”

If Father Hanlon knew the answer, he had no time to tell me, for just then Gwyneth returned with the girl.

75

DRESSED NOW IN SWEATER AND JEANS AND SNEAKERS, with a coat draped over one arm, the nameless six-year-old girl came down the basement stairs, fully alert and smiling. No evidence remained that she had been comatose for years. Her sweet smile seemed to shame the storm, or whatever wanted to be let into the house, because the door stopped rattling and the rectory ceased its creaking.