Her voice came only faintly from the hallway in dull monosyllables. Then she was back, scooping him up in her arms. She sat in a rocker and looked down at him thoughtfully, a serious frown across her wide, white brow. "You poor little darling. You'll never know your daddy."
For an instant Baxter's consciousness flickered back and forth across miles of intervening space. A cold panic clutched his heart. He heard a sharp sob escape from Annie's lips, then Rolanda was rocking him and comforting him.
"Don't you worry, sweetheart. It's all right. We'll get along. Daddy's insured. And there's his service pension. We'll get along just fine."
An intuitive flash of horror chilled Baxter. He struggled to escape to his own brain, his own dying body, but now the barrier was up again, not impalpable but tough and impenetrable.
The more he struggled the weaker he became. Sensations from the nursery began to fade. The light grew dimmer, and Rolanda's face became hazy. Frantically, he tried to withdraw from Annie's mind, but he was mousetrapped!
Was this Annie's doing? Was this the vengeance she took against her own father for his invasion of her privacy?
Or was it his own mind's refusal to face life again through the network of pain and misery of his adult identity? Infantile regression, the doctor had called it—but the doctor didn't know about Annie.
He could still feel the gentle rocking motion and his wife's arms holding him tenderly in the warm blankets.
"We'll get along just fine, honey," she was saying. "When we get the insurance money we'll have a larger house and a new car."
Rolanda! For God's sake, make Annie let me go!