The Child Eater by Rachel Pollack Page A

“Rebecca? Are you okay?”
    The first thing he saw was the word Remember! written in red marker all across the blue living room wall. He stared at it a moment, shook his head and ran into the kitchen, the den—He found her on the floor of the bedroom, her red and black silk dress scrunched up around her knees, her face as empty as the rumpled bed, her hair bunched up under her neck. He wanted to rearrange her, lay her out properly, but he knew from television that that wasn’t allowed.
    He didn’t even realize he’d squatted down until he saw his own hand touch her cheek, her neck, her forehead. Cold. She was cold and thick and empty. He lost his balance and fell back against the bed. How long? he wondered. How many hours? He tried to remember how long it took for a body to get cold but nothing came to him. Was she already dead when the squirrels showed up? Is that what they’d wanted to tell him? He’d thought they were summoning him, but maybe it was already too late. He couldn’t decide if that made it worse or better.
    He needed to call someone. 911? Was it an emergency if it was already too late? And he needed to call his parents, they would want to know. And Simon. He had to tell their perfect son that his beautiful, crazy mother would never see him again, never hold him—He shook the thought away. He didn’t have to tell Simon. Not now, at least, not for many years. But he had to call the police, or the doctor, someone.
    Abruptly he jumped up and rushed down to the basement, where a leftover half-gallon of paint stood on a wooden shelf with a couple of brushes. Upstairs he painted over the giant command to memory with great slashes of blue. No one would see her craziness, no one. Did she really think he would forget her? He wanted to shout, “How could you think that? You were everything to me.” But his voice wouldn’t work, only his arms and shoulders as they obliterated the insults of madness.
    At last he called 911, and then his parents. They didn’t ask how he’d known.
    At the funeral, Jack’s father and a cousin had to hold him up. At least it wasn’t suicide. Brain aneurysm, the coroner said. Sudden, quick and unforeseen. “It just happens,” he told Jack. “There’s no way to predict something like that.”
    When they got back to the house, Jack let his parents take care of Simon and set up for visitors. “There’s something I have to do,” he said. He searched the bedroom and everywhere else he could think of forRebecca’s Tarot cards. He wanted to tear them up, piece by piece. They were gone, or at least were nowhere he could find. Maybe, he thought, she’d come to her senses before the end.
    Jack went home after that. His mother—once again the only Mrs. Wisdom—came for three months, not leaving until she was sure he was okay. Before she left, she helped Jack find a good day care for Simon, who was almost a year old. Jack resisted at first, said he was fine to work at home, but his mother told him he needed to get back with people. At the Happy Hands Center, Jack’s mother did almost all the talking. Near the end, as they were filling out forms, Jack suddenly said, “You don’t have anything to do with Tarot cards or anything like that, do you?”
    Mrs. Beech, a large woman with muscular arms and tangled black hair, frowned at him. “Tarot cards? Now why would you think that?”
    “Oh no, I didn’t—” Jack stopped, not sure what to say.
    “Maybe you’d be happier with a religion-based center,” Mrs. Beech said.
    “No, of course not. I just . . . I had a neighbor who was always throwing Tarot cards, and it just seemed . . . I don’t know, a bad influence, I guess. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything.”
    “Well, I can promise you we don’t do anything like that here. We’re pretty traditional.”
    “Good. Good. Thank you. Oh, one more thing. Simon has a kind of, I guess phobia, about squirrels.”
    “Squirrels?” Mrs. Beech said, and Jack’s