Mike told her what had happened in the darkened companionway just outside his room.
When he finished, she began sobbing again. “He’s lying, Mike,” she said. “Lying!”
Mike nodded silently and slowly. Leda Crannon had spent all of her adult life tending the hurts and bruises and aches of Snookums the Child. She had educated him, cared for him, taken pleasure in his triumphs, worried about his health, and watched him grow mentally.
And now he was sick, broken, ruined. And, like all parents, she was asking herself: “What did I do wrong?”
Mike the Angel didn’t give her an answer to that unspoken question, but he knew what the answer was in so many cases:
The grieving parent has not necessarily done anything wrong. It may simply be that there was insufficient or poor-quality material to work with.
With a human child, it is even more humiliating for a parent to admit that he or she has contributed inferior genetic material to a child than it is to admit a failure in upbringing. Leda’s case was different.
Leda had lost her child, but Mike hesitated to point out that it wasn’t her fault in the first place because the material wasn’t up to the task she had given it, and in the second place because she hadn’t really lost anything. She was still playing with dolls, not human beings.
“Hell!” said Mike under his breath, not realizing that he was practically whispering in her ear.
“Isn’t it?” she said. “Isn’t it Hell? I spent eight years trying to make that little mind of his tick properly. I wanted to know what was the right, proper, and logical way to bring up children. I had a theory, and I wanted to test it. And now I’ll never know.”