For Love of Audrey Rose by Frank De Felitta Page A

flashing across his eyes.
    “Say yes, Mrs. Templeton.
Please!
”
    “Yes,” Janice wept, and she felt that she was about to fall.
    Early the next morning, drugged from lack of sleep, Janice trudged to the library, selected several Tibetan books, and mailed them to Bill, resolving to think no more about it.
    That night Janice found herself working into the wee hours with Elaine, trying to complete two separate sets of layouts before the spring deadline.
    Two Tensor lamps cast bright cones onto their adjacent work tables. The rest of the suite was lost in the night, where bits of red and yellow lights gleamed inward from the city skyscrapers.
    Together they prepared the outlines and marked out instructions for the staff in the morning. Wearily, Janice stood, rubbed her eyes, and stretched, yawning with a deadly fatigue. It was 2:30 in the morning, but Janice didn’t mind. She was gratified that Elaine depended on her professional collaboration in these all-night sessions.
    “It
is
late,” Elaine yawned. “I’m sorry.”
    “It’s all right,” she said. “I’m in no rush to go home to an empty apartment!”
    They worked in silence for several minutes.
    “But you do have a daughter?”
    Janice licked her lips. A nightmarish, queasy sensation invaded her, as though this one moment of perfect friendship, this island of hard work and steady hopes, might also break apart.
    “What makes you say that?” Janice asked.
    “Do you remember when we worked on that series of sporting outfits for pre-teens? You drew those very well. In fact, I pointed that out, and you made some joke about an artist’s eyes being different from a mother’s. Do you remember?”
    Janice said nothing. She turned away from Elaine and listened to the subterranean rumble of the city that never died, not even at 2:30 in the morning.
    “Her name was Ivy,” Janice said softly. “She died eight months ago. It was an accident.”
    There was a long space of silence. Then Elaine said softly, “I’m so very sorry to know that.”
    “I should have told you long ago,” Janice said. “That’s why Bill isn’t home. It was Ivy’s death that caused his breakdown.”
    “It’s been difficult for you. I can tell.”
    Janice inhaled deeply.
    “It was,” Janice said slowly. “I’ve never told anybody just how horrible it really was.”
    In a slow, even voice, as though she had rehearsed it for months, Janice began to tell Elaine about what it was like when she first realized that a man was shadowing Ivy. What it was like watching Ivy bend and twist, scream, and suffocate with fear, not once, not twice, but many times, until there was no remembering when it all began. It was so hard to explain what it was like, seeing a presence— Hoover’s—gradually insinuate itself into your apartment, your life, your child—into your own soul.
    For hours she spoke, until the dawn spread its frigid, pale glow through the slatted blinds, and Janice, hoarse from the ordeal, groped for her coffee cup.
    Elaine, divining her need, pushed it across to her. “Of course. I remember it all. The papers were full of it.” Then, in a small, amazed voice: “So you’re
that
Templeton.”
    Janice’s eyes lowered. “Yes, I’m
that
Templeton.”
    Elaine looked away, in a seeming quandary.
    “All this Buddhist stuff, or Hindu,” she said. “Did you actually believe it?”
    “I believed one thing. My daughter was in serious trouble and Elliot Hoover was the only person who could get her out of it.”
    “It must have been painful testifying against your own husband, like that.”
    Janice smiled bitterly.
    “I had no choice. I would have signed a pact with the devil.”
    “And now?”
    “Now? Now, I try not to think about it. It’s actually a lot of hard work sometimes, not thinking about it.”
    “That’s why Bill just stopped thinking at all?”
    Janice stood up. She looked out at the gray, cold dawn on the stone streets. For a long time, she just looked