Regina Clarke lives in the Hudson River Valley, in New York, not very far from where mister Twilight Zone Rod Serling grew up. Her background at one time, after teaching English literature at a university, was in the field of IT, writing about subjects engineers wanted to explain, including virtual reality, military surveillance software, and augmented reality. Her stories have appeared in T. Gene Davis’s Speculative Blog, Mad Scientist Journal, NewMyths, Aurora Wolf, Alien Dimensions, Fifth Di, and MetaStellar, among others. Her fantasy novel MARI was a finalist in the ListenUp Audiobooks competition and three of her short stories have been featured on podcasts. You can see her books and story page, book trailer videos, and blog posts at her website: www.regina-clarke.com, as well as over a hundred essays on all and sundry on Medium.
“Where have you gone, my little one? Where have you gone?” Jamie would sing the song as soon as she could talk, the faintest lisp in the words. She had done so well for so long before they took her away. And I’m here alone, left listening to the sound of my own breathing. But I still have the blue box that I kept the day they came for her that one last time.
“Don’t open it, Mama. Not until I get back. Then we can listen to them together,” she had said.
I’d promised, of course, but it was so hard to pretend. Would the doctors let her come back to me?
Sometimes I would hold the box for a while, imagining what was happening inside. I didn’t even try to get into it. My daughter, my life. I would stay true to her wishes.
“Annie! You got that Northrup file done? Peters wants it and you know how cranky he can be.” I started at the interruption, glad my back was to the outer office.
“I’ll bring it,” I said, laying my hand over the box. I’d brought it with me into work. “Thanks,” I added, looking around to find Ralph Benzer standing in the doorway.
“You know, I’ve been wondering,” Ralph continued. “You’ve been acting jumpy lately, seems to me you need a little R&R. How about we take in a movie this week, just the two of us—it can be one of those women’s movies, doesn’t have to be action. What d’ya say?”
“You have to stop asking me out, Ralph. I told you. I’m not interested.”
“You don’t know what you need, but I do. You’re going to regret it.”
Good old Ralph. I can still remember him in high school, skinny and pale and always prepared for class. Now he was a triathlon athlete, and if he spent a whole day working, I never saw it. Don’t we change, now, when we least think we can.
“The people where you work,” Jamie had said to me once, “what are they like?” So I’d shown her the office catalog and described some of the personalities.
“It seems sad, doesn’t it, that all those people are just so lonely,” she said when I finished.
“What do you mean?” I asked her, curious. “They have families, some of them, and friends. The office isn’t all that nice, maybe, but they have lives outside the office, or most of them do. Whatever on earth do you mean, my Jamie?”
“There’s only one of them,” she answered. “Like you, Mama. You’re sad. Because there’s only one of you. You don’t see all the others who are there with you, the way I do.”
I had felt disturbed then, aware that if the doctors heard her talk that way they’d come and get her and put her in the hospital again.
“Don’t you talk about that to anyone, you hear me? They won’t understand.”
“I know. Of course I won’t. I’m a big girl. Come on, let’s go feed the ducks. Come on, Mama!” And she had raced off, then, her young feet flying across the grass down to the lake where people were rowing boats and having picnics on the sloping lawn.
I watched her with the ducks as they all ran up to her and inspected the bag of popcorn in her hand. They weren’t aggressive with Jamie. She bent down and petted each one. I should have called out to her, told her to keep her distance, but I knew I didn’t need to worry. After she handed them the last of the food, she ran up to me and sat down smiling, her eyes glowing with happiness. Jamie was a special child. All that and more. Sometimes I thought my love for my daughter would break me in two, for I wanted so much to protect her, and didn’t know if I could.
After she returned home the last time, she said she would never go back to the hospital.
“They are afraid of me, Mama. They say they want to help me, but they’re afraid of me. And I’m tired of all the tests. So are the others. They told me so. They won’t go back, either.”
I felt my heart sink at that. Nothing the doctors had done had made the slightest difference. She still believed in those figments of her mind, still thought that they were with her, supporting her, a part of her. What could I do?
There was one thing that had always puzzled me. Finally, I asked her.
“Jamie,” I said one day, not long after we had been to the lake. She had looked up from the game she was playing and smiled in that way she had, all filled with light. “Why don’t they come out to meet me?” I was making coffee and asked the question as casually as I could, but my hands shook a little.
“Oh, Mama, how could I let that happen?” she said, happily. “I would miss you too much. They understand. I always want to be here when I’m with you.”
How easily I accepted that. I trusted her. I knew that if that was what she believed, then it was true for her, and so the others would stay beneath the surface, or deep inside, wherever they lived within her mind. For a moment, I almost felt as if she were protecting me, for what would I do if I saw them, anyway? How would I be able to manage that?
There had been signs so early. The doctors were so eager, as if they had found a species of fish in the dark water miles and miles down in the sea. I remember now as vividly as then what they asked me, and the look they gave her when they examined her, when they asked her so many questions. And I remember the history they took from me, before I understood what they were about, what they really wanted.
“When did you first notice her behavior changing?” the head of the group asked me, a Dr. Moss. From the day she was born, I wanted to say, but I didn’t.
“About a year, fourteen months. She had just learned how to walk and couldn’t go far. But I would find her in places it seemed impossible she could get to. She’d tell me another, older child brought her there, but there was no one else. I’d scold her for fibbing, but she’d still insist. Then in pre-school, right away, the reports about her work and behavior were so erratic, you see, changing all the time.”
“What did the teachers do about it? Do you mean you never saw any of this happen?” Dr. Moss wrote his notes in a book and never looked at me during the entire interview. I found that unnerving, and it was difficult to keep my focus, but I knew I had to, for Jamie’s sake.
“I thought you had their reports,” I said to him. He turned away from me and spoke to one of the other doctors present, who got up and left the room, coming back a moment later with a file. Dr. Moss held it up while he was still writing.
“This is our file on the school, but we need to hear what else you have to say,” he answered, laying the file on the desk in front of him. I could see the title: “Jamie Wenson, Fifth Level.” I knew what that meant. They thought she would never get better.
“All right,” I said. “She would answer to her name sometimes, and other times she wouldn’t. She would tell everyone not to call her Jamie.”
“What were they supposed to call her?”
“I don’t know. And by the time I arrived at the school, she was Jamie just as I know her to be. She was fine.”
What those teachers told me was to put her in a special school. We are such a small town here, everyone talking, knowing our business. I thought the special school would help give Jamie some room to breathe, and for a few months it seemed better for her. Only, the counselor there fooled me. She called in Dr. Moss. After our interview, he told me more could be done to help my daughter. I let them take Jamie to the state hospital over in Andersonville. They said if I were with her it would be harder for her, that she’d be okay once they had left. My little girl was so frightened, holding her arms out to me, and I did nothing. I believed them. How do I forgive myself for that?
They’ve tried to dissect her mind, make sense of her. They’re so ignorant. And they don’t know that I have the box. I’ll be keeping her safe with it. I know what they want. They want to rest their fears. Jamie really did scare them, just as she said. All those people inside her fascinated all the doctors and psychiatrists and reporters, but scared them, too, because they couldn’t break her down, couldn’t make her send away any of the people she loved so much. They could make the others inside her show up, but they couldn’t destroy them.
“I don’t see any of them, Mama. I don’t talk to any of them, exactly. It’s different. I feel their sound. They each give me their sound, and it’s different from all the others. That’s how I know that they’re there,” Jamie said, trying to help me understand more. “See? So I keep them in the box!”
That was the first time she explained the small cardboard box she kept in her room. She asked me not to open it unless she was there. The first time, when she lifted the cover, I didn’t know what I would see. But there was nothing inside. Just the pretty lining that was pale blue with tiny silver roses.
“They’re all resting now. But sometimes when I hold the box I can hear them inside, all talking at once,” Jamie said, laughing.
The hospital made videos when the others appeared. I never watched those. I didn’t need them. I had Jamie.
She spoke about the sounds often after that. She had her own symphony inside that box, was what it seemed like, and the instruments, the voices, that played, played for her. She listened with her heart and knew each one of them that way.
“We need to know their names, Jamie, right now,” one of the doctors said to her the last time I visited her in Andersonville. He was new, and impatient.
“Will you name them for us, Jamie?” he asked.
“All of them?” she’d said, so sweetly.
And when they said yes, she sang a song that brought tears to my eyes. The tones she sang spun out and wove together like a fabric and I felt the colors of the notes. I knew it was a gift that Jamie was giving me, an opening into all of the others, after all. I know now she didn’t expect to see me again.
When the song ended and the beauty of it hardly had time to resonate, the doctors, went on with their questions as if nothing had happened. Again and again, they asked her to name the others for them. They never understood that she had already done that through the music of her voice, in the song.
At night I’d leave the box on her bed while she was away. I felt better doing that. I believed in miracles, that Jamie could still come home, and so she would find the box waiting for her.
Then at last I knew otherwise, understood that I would never see her again. It was Sam Harris, Dr. Harris, who came over. Dr. Moss was out of town, he said, with just a hint of apology in his voice. Sam had been my own doctor for twenty years, yet he’d never attended a single session with Jamie.
“Ella. Can’t beat about the bush. She’s gone. No surprise.”
I didn’t take in what he said. I looked at him and realized he hadn’t shaved that morning, and that the stubble was almost white. He’s getting to be an old man, I thought. And then I took in what he had told me and shut it out before it had a chance to reach me.
“You should be more careful how you tell people such things, Sam,” I said to him. “Doesn’t do me any good to hear it that way. Why didn’t the hospital call me?” I looked at him and I didn’t see him, just the faded green jacket he was wearing.
“Police are still there. No one thought to call. You know state hospitals. Lots of chaos. Sorry about that. They called me when they realized Moss was out in California. I told them I’d tell you.”
“What? What are the police doing there?” I asked, stunned, and cold, a feeling of cold settling into me.
“Eight years you’ve cared for the girl. For what, Ella? Look what it brought you. You look years older than you are. You’ve never gone anywhere the whole time that child’s been growing up. She was messed up since she was hardly out of her crib. So—this morning—she went through one of her changes, and someone interrupted her, and she attacked them, screaming that she had to see you, and when they tried to subdue her, she had a seizure, and that’s when it happened. She didn’t come out of it.”
I pulled my sweater close around me. Jamie hadn’t had seizures for a very long time.
“Something was going to happen eventually. You knew that,” Sam volunteered. I wanted him away from me.
“Not to Jamie. It doesn’t happen to Jamie,” I said, looking out the window. Smoky haze over the bare November trees. Jamie loved the fall.
After the funeral I opened the blue box. Not right away. I just went into her room when I got back. All her treasures there, the usual things, the pictures and ornaments and keepsakes from our trips to the lake and the seashore and our car rides out into the countryside. She’d always be excited to get out and explore a new place and would always bring something home with her.
The box looked such a pretty shade of pale blue on the bed in the afternoon sunlight. I stayed there for hours, for when I roused myself it was growing dark outside.
“How do I do it all without you, my sweet Jamie?” I couldn’t cry, so I guessed I was numb and probably should call someone and get them to come over and talk to me. But who? Who would understand?
The faint sounds came then, or maybe they had started before and I hadn’t noticed. I looked at the box. High-pitched sounds seemed to come from it, like the leaking sound when I would pass by someone listening to music, with their ear buds never good enough to keep the music in. Something tinny and persistent. So it seemed.
The box was all I had of her.
“Okay, my Jamie. If you don’t mind, I’ll open it now.” I looked up at the ceiling as if she could hear me.
A small clasp held the box closed. I released it and opened the cover. It was just as before, empty. I heard nothing. I started to cry, and found I couldn’t stop. Such a grief, I thought, I can’t survive such a grief. Where was my little girl?
It was then the sounds began again, with the cover open, and they were different from before. It was the song Jamie had sung to the doctors in the hospital, the same song they hadn’t really heard at all. The box was filled with voices singing the same music, not tinny at all, but pure, silvery, and incandescent, and all of it was the gift of my Jamie.