In the Company of Crazies by Nora Raleigh Baskin Page A

nothing was wrong with her leg. It must have been some tiny fracture that elevated some tiny blood protein. Whatever.
    It was nothing.
    She was fine. But for a while, for about a month or so, things were awful. Just the thought of what might have been, what could have been. It stayed with our family for a long time.
    That’s what my morning in the nursery school was. It was the might have been and the could have been. Not that any of these kids had cancer, but almost all of them had medical problems. They had brain defects and physical handicaps, learning disabilities and alcoholic mothers who drank themselves into oblivion all through their pregnancies.
    That’s what the twins had, fetal alcohol syndrome. Mary Belle told me.
    * * *
    “Do you ever worry that there are only so many words in the world?” Drew asked me. We were walking from the School House to the House for lunch. It was only a couple of days until Thanksgiving break, a couple of days and I would have been at Mountain Laurel for one month. I would get to go home this weekend.
    It was so cold, my cheeks were pinched. My scalp was cold. Everyone else was way ahead. They were probably inside already. Warm. Warmer. I stayed back with Drew.
    “What do ya mean?” I asked. I was trying to hurry, but Drew was slow.
    “Well, just technically speaking, there are only a finite number of words in any language, right?” Drew asked me. “Yeah, I guess so.”
    “So then one day,” Drew said, “everything that can ever be said will be said. And every book that could ever be written will be.”
    “Hmmm.”
    I suppose I wasn’t really listening. I was too cold, and besides, half the things Drew (or anybody here) said were crazy. And sometimes with Drew, if you didn’t agree with him, he took it the wrong way. Like you didn’t like him, or like he had said something wrong, and he’d get upset. Or he’d just slip away and forget he had been talking to you at all. So sometimes it was better to just listen and pretend to agree.
    “And it’s the same with music, isn’t it?” Drew talked as we walked.
    “With music?”
    “Yeah,” Drew went on. “If there are only a certain number of musical notes, then, someday, no matter how far in the future that is, someday, every possible combination of musical notes will have been put together. And there will be no new songs.”
    “But there are so many combinations.” I wanted to reassure him.
    “But there is no such thing as infinite,” Drew was saying. “There has to be a finish to everything. An end.”
    I blew my warm breath into my hands. “Maybe, but it’s more than your brain could ever even imagine. That will never happen in your lifetime.”
    “Maybe not mine,” Drew said.
    I wasn’t sure if Drew was referring to his lifetime or his brain.
    I was just about to ask him, but when we got up onto the porch we could hear John screaming. Yelling angrily, urgently. His voice was so strange, high-pitched and frightening. It hardly sounded like him at all. Drew and I looked at each other, both wondering, I suppose, what John would be capable of doing if he ever lost control.
    We hurried into the mudroom. I took off my shoes without even thinking about it. I had started keeping an extra pair of socks in my coat pocket, and I slipped them on.
    We could hear Karen’s voice now. And Gretchen’s. Gretchen was telling Carl to go and find Sam. A second later, Carl brushed by us. He didn’t even grab his coat from the mudroom.
    “John’s gone crazy,” Carl said. He flew out the door. Gone crazy?
    * * *
    John had been caught cheating on his life.
    * * *
    Apparently. Karen had had her suspicions, turned over those folded-over pages marked PRIVATE in John’s writing journal, and read them.
    She discovered that John had been asking Maggie about her plans for the week’s menu not just because he was weird (which he was) but because he had been writing his daily journal entries a week in advance. The only missing