Blackwood Farm - Anne Rice [271]
I sat down beside Merrick.
Patsy nodded to these introductions and said with a searingly vicious smile, “I’m Tarquin’s mother.”
“Patsy, did he have a twin?” Merrick asked. “A twin that was born at the same time he was or moments after?”
Utter silence fell over Patsy. I had never seen such an expression on her face. It went blank, yes, with a combination of stupefaction and dread, and then she screamed for Cindy. “Cindy, I need you, Cindy, I’m panicky! Cindy!”
She turned this way and that, until Lestat placed his hand firmly on her shoulder. He spoke her name in a whisper. She appeared to look into his eyes and to lose her hysteria as if it were being drained out of her.
Cindy appeared in the door with the syringe poised.
“Now, Patsy, you just hang on,” she said, and then she came forward and, sitting on Patsy’s left, she very modestly lifted the gown and gave Patsy a shot of the sedative in her left hip, and then stood there waiting.
Patsy was still looking into Lestat’s eyes.
“You understand,” Patsy said. “It was the most pitifulest, terriblest thing—.” She shuddered. “You can’t imagine.”
Without taking his eyes off Patsy, Lestat told Cindy that Patsy was fine now.
Patsy turned her eyes to the Oriental rug and she appeared to be tracing its patterns. Then she looked up at me.
“I hated you so much,” she said. “I hate you now. I always hated you. You killed it.”
“Killed it! How—?” I was stunned.
“Yes,” she said. “You did it.”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “How did I do that?” I wanted to probe her mind, but I’d never used that power with her and some profound inveterate distaste kept me from doing it.
“You were so big,” she said. “You were so healthy, so normal. Ten pounds, eleven ounces. Even your bones were big. And then that other little one, my little Garwain, only three pounds, and they said he had given you all his blood in my womb, all his blood. You were like a vampire baby drinking up all his blood! It was so awful, and he was so small. Just three pounds. Oh, he was the most terriblest, pitifulest creature you ever saw in your life.”
I was too amazed to speak.
The tears were rolling down her cheeks. Cindy took out a clean Kleenex and wiped them away.
“I wanted so badly to hold him, but they wouldn’t let me,” Patsy went on. “They said he was the donor twin, that’s what they called him. The donor twin. He gave everything. And there he was, too tiny hardly to live. They put him in an incubator. They wouldn’t even let me touch him. I sat there in that hospital day and night, day and night. And Aunt Queen kept calling me and telling me, ‘This baby at home needs you!’ What a thing to say to me! Like this tiny little baby in the hospital didn’t need me! Like this little pitiful creature in the hospital didn’t need me! She wanted me to come home and give my milk to a ten-pound monster of a baby. I couldn’t even look at you! I didn’t want to be in the same house with you! That’s why I moved out back.”
She wiped angrily at her tears. Her voice was so soft. I don’t think human beings could have heard her. I’m not sure Cindy who sat right beside her could hear her.
“I sat there in that hospital day and night,” she said. “I begged them to let me touch that tiny little baby, and don’t you know he died in that machine with all those tubes and wires, and monitors and numbers clicking. He died! That little baby, that poor little Garwain, my Little Knight, that’s what I called him, Garwain, my Little Knight, and then they let me hold him, when he was dead, that poor tiny infant, I held him in my arms.”
I had never seen her like this, never seen her cry such tears, never seen her in such abject sadness. On she went:
“And we had a tiny coffin for him, a white coffin, with him in a white christening gown, all nestled in it, poor little thing, and we went to the Metairie Cemetery, all of us, and Aunt Queen, for the love of God, why on