He checked Daddy Love’s closet: the
safety-box
was gone.
Daddy Love asked, how’d Son like to go digging for treasure?
This was a Daddy Love game, Son supposed and so brightly Son replied.
Yes Daddy.
Gideon wasn’t so sure. Gideon saw that Daddy Love was looking hot-skinned, edgy. His face was sweaty and his eyes were showing white above the dark rim of his irises. And his hands were shaky, with nervousness or excitement.
The night before Daddy Love had returned home late in the minivan after Gideon was in bed and he had not entered Gideon’s room as he sometimes did to kiss him good night and play a Game of Tickle—it was a long time now since Daddy Love had kissed Gideon good night and played a Game of Tickle with him. And Gideon had lain in bed hearing sounds in Daddy Love’s room which he could not interpret.
Was Daddy Love talking to himself? Did Daddy Love have the TV turned on, high?
Gideon thought
He has brought a little boy home with him. In the
safety-box.
Son had no such thoughts. For Son was all brightness and shining eyes and a yearning to be loved by Daddy Love even if the love came hurtful and hard and caused his insides to bleed out onto the bedclothes.
Take up the shovel, Son.
They went out. Daddy Love led the way. Through the ruins of the garden which Daddy Love seemed to have forgotten this spring, hadn’t instructed Gideon in what to plant, or provided him with plants or seeds. Through the ruins of the garden and through the ruins of the old apple orchard in which on this warm May morning bees were buzzing and small birds were calling to one another.
Daddy Love seemed preoccupied. Daddy Love was frowning and chewing at his lower lip.
In the night, Gideon had heard some sounds. Gideon had not slept much in the night.
Stupid little boy would be gagged. Screaming inside the gag and pissing his pants like a baby.
Gideon had known better than to make noise, himself. Knew better than to call attention to himself. Not long ago, now that he no longer fit into the
safety-box,
he’d had to be chained by the neck as Missy had been chained, as a discipline.
It hadn’t been clear why Daddy Love had felt the need to discipline him. This has been shortly after the trip to Trenton when many things seemed to have changed.
Daddy Love had said, There is some mutiny in your heart, Son. This is a fair warning of what to expect if it comes out.
Daddy Love had chained him with Missy’s chain. Chained to the stairway railing, that would not budge if Gideon yanked at it hard enough to break his neck.
Another time he’d fucked up one of the macraméd purses attaching the clasp upside down and Daddy Love hadn’t noticed until his woman-friend at the Gift Basket pointed it out.
On the hike into the countryside, into an area of scrubby hills and shallow creek beds, Daddy Love led the way as Gideon struggled behind dragging the shovel.
Daddy Love was wearing a backpack. Gideon wondered what was inside the backpack.
That morning, he hadn’t heard anything inside Daddy Love’s bedroom. But of course, the stupid little boy would be
gagged
.
Daddy Love did not like crying, screaming, shrieking.
Except sometimes, Daddy Love did like crying, screaming, shrieking.
On the hike, Gideon began to sweat. Rivulets of itchy sweat ran down his sides, beneath his T-shirt. He was wearing shorts, and sneakers with no socks.
It was a wild place to which Daddy Love was taking him. He seemed to know, other sons had been brought to this place.
Deuteronomy
—that had been the name of a predecessor. He knew this without recalling how he knew.
Son. We can stop here.
They had hiked about a mile. They’d come to a stop in a sandy-pebbly place. On the banks of an old creek bed now lush with cattails were outcroppings of shale like broken crockery. Oddly shaped boulders were strewn about, with shallow indentations that suggested ghost-faces in the stone.
Gideon thought
This is where they are buried.
He has brought a knife to kill me.
Instead, Daddy Love instructed Gideon to begin digging.
You dig for a while, Son. Then, I can take over.
Dig your own grave, Son.
Son stabbed at the earth with the shovel. Pushed down on the shovel with his foot. He was very hot, panting. He saw in the corner of his eye Daddy Love observing him, stroking his whiskers. On his head Daddy Love wore a baseball cap pulled low.
Gideon’s heart was pounding faster and faster. Almost, he could not catch his breath.
Daddy Love had slipped off his backpack. A bottle of Evian water he offered to Gideon and gratefully Gideon took it. He could not see any flash of a knife blade inside the backpack.
He would dig a little longer. A little deeper into the earth. Was the treasure here? Daddy Love had seemed to have forgotten the treasure.
Gideon turned blindly, wielding the shovel.
Whack!
came the shovel down onto Daddy Love’s head, and Daddy Love
staggered, and fell to his knees, and the shovel was knocked out of Gideon’s hands.
Gideon began to run.
Daddy Love had a knife but not the rifle. Daddy Love was too dazed to pursue him or even to shout after him.
Daddy Love’s forehead was bleeding. A tributary of blood down his face, the last memory Gideon would have of Daddy Love.
On terrified feet he ran, ran.
Mommy, I don’t like her to look at me.
Josh! That’s very rude.
Don’t
like her.
The child wriggled out of his mother’s arms and ran away, toward his little friends in the playground.
Dinah, I’m so sorry. I can’t understand …
It’s all right, Katie. Really.
I
understand.
Dinah laughed to show that she wasn’t hurt. And really, after six years, she wasn’t.
In his place I’d run, too. Scarred vampire-woman without a child of her own, enough to terrify any kid.
She was a volunteer at the National Registry of Missing Children, Ypsilanti branch. The storefront organization was in Kendall Square and close by was Curries ‘n’ Spice where she bought
lunch, vegetarian-tofu salads she ate with a white plastic fork. It was a phenomenon to her,
appetite
.
Six years after Robbie, most food still tasted like mulched cardboard. Yet the brain is so conditioned, when she saw food she’d once liked, and had once eaten with pleasure, her brain signaled her
Eat!
though she knew that the food was just the usual mulched cardboard.
Was this a fact of human mental life? Had she penetrated some small shabby truth of the human psyche?
Our memories goad us to repeat the past, when we’d been happy. Even as we know that the past is past, and we will not be happy.
The very playground to which she’d taken Robbie.
Of course, six years later none of the young mothers in the park remembered Robbie Whitcomb.
She knew most of the young mothers. They knew
her
.
A new generation of small children had come into being, since Robbie. A fact of such simplicity seemed to confuse and baffle her who had wished for time to halt when her child had been taken from her.
For, at first, it had been a matter of mere
days
. And then,
weeks
.
She had not given up hope—of course. The desperate do not give up hope, it is a proof of their desperation.
In the playground she sat with Rhoda, Tracey, Evan. These were stylish young mothers who had, among them, two Ph.D.’s and a post-doc in microeconomics. Their children were all younger than five.
Eating her tofu lunch and sipping from her bottle of Evian water.
Dinah Whitcomb is so friendly, it’s hard to avoid her.
You feel guilty as hell avoiding that poor woman.
Dinah’s generation of young mothers in this park had long moved on. Their children were in middle school now, or older. Though from time to time Dinah saw, or thought she saw, a young mother from that time, who seemed, glancing at Dinah, and quickly away, to recognize her.
Her son was never found? How many years has it been?
The look in her eyes. It’s hard to bear.
In fact, Dinah Whitcomb was a source of much merriment. She laughed a good deal, and she inspired laughter in others. She did not ever speak of her own situation, nor did she allude to it. Like one who is tethered to an enormous boulder, which she must drag with her when she moves, she felt no obvious need to speak of her disability but rather more an instinct to make light of it.
Her worst days, she still used a cane. But this was rare.
She walked
swaying
. But God damn, she
walked
.
In the park, at lunchtime, talking and laughing with the young mothers, as if she were not a woman now of thirty-four and no longer young and no longer a mother.
As she talked and laughed with Rhoda, Tracey, and Evan she watched their children playing together at the sandbox. In a paralysis of yearning and wonderment she watched. When she’d had Robbie, in this park, she’d been so caught up in the minutiae of
young-motherhood, like a swimmer in a turbulent sea, she hadn’t had much awareness of herself, as she had now; for now, nothing seemed so astonishing to her as the fact that, six years before, she’d been one of these young mothers
and she had not grasped the miracle.
Now, it took her breath away.
The children were so beautiful! So funny, needy, exasperating, endearing …
She could not ever tell these young mothers what frightened her: that she’d begun to forget what Robbie looked like. That she needed to page through the albums, to hold the snapshots to the light, to recall.
This forgetfulness had begun soon after the neurological damage. Yet Dinah did not think it was neurological but a failing of spiritual strength.
That was her terrible secret: her unworthiness.
Eleven years old! She felt faint and sick, she could not imagine her son now.
Poor Dinah! They should’ve had another baby.
Either that or kill yourself. I mean—what could you do?
The children’s cries over-excited her. The children digging in the sandbox, playing at the teeter-totter, as Robbie had done. There was always a boy very like Robbie … That morning she’d driven out of her way for the first time in more than a year to pass, slowly, the Montessori school where her son had been enrolled six years before.
It was never such a wild stretch of the imagination that Robbie would be waiting for her at the rear, with his little friends …
Talking and laughing and trying not to recall. One of her rueful little anecdotes involving
my husband.
She meant to be entertaining. The women knew Whit Whitcomb who was a quasi-public figure in Ypsilanti–Ann Arbor, host of local fund-raisers, co-chair of the annual spring Walk-A-Thon for Memorial Children’s Hospital and more recently the Walk/ Bark for Autism—a ten-mile hike through the University of Michigan arboretum in which dog owners and their dogs participated, with much publicity and success.
He hadn’t wanted another child. He hadn’t wanted to try.
In secret, she’d tried. But she had not succeeded.
It was a spiritual failing, she believed. Not physical, or not physical merely.
She was losing the train of her thought. She’d been entertaining her friends with a story about an experiment in one of her social psychology laboratories, but she was losing the point of the anecdote, and sensing their discomfort.
That poor woman! She can’t stop talking.
It was the proximity of the children here in the playground. Their high sharp cries were distracting to her. Already six years before these
live children
had begun to replace Robbie in the world.
She stammered and fell silent. The others were silent, abashed.
She snatched at the Evian water, drank and dribbled water down her chin.
Her mother had said of her in sharp disappointment
Dinah! You’ve let yourself go.
In Geraldine McCracken’s vocabulary that was the worst you could do—
let yourself go
.
It was very hard to confront herself in a mirror. The most torturous were three-way mirrors at rehab.
Papery-thin scar tissue in layers. The thin-lashed eyes like eyes peering through a mask. Her face was the most subtle of Hallowe’en horror-masks since it mimicked actual skin.
The
uncanny valley
in which the degree of the unbearable increases as the nonhuman approaches the look of the human. Dinah had learned of the
uncanny valley
in her graduate psychology course and had wanted to say to the professor wittily, Hey I live there!
In a paroxysm of itching she’d scratched, scratched, scratched her face while sleeping and woke confused and bleeding and there was Whit staring at her in horror.
Dinah. My God.
There was the impulse to scratch with her fingernails now. But Dinah would not.
Not in public: no scratching her face, no touching. No feeling-sorry-for-herself.
It was time to leave Admiral Park. She must not stay long.
She’d hoped for a quick little farewell to one of the children—a hug, a kiss—but this wasn’t going to happen, it seemed. For the children were at the sandbox and it would seem very odd for her to approach them.
Her face frightened them. The just-perceptible misalignment of her jaw, and the focus in her right eye.
In the street, she often saw people staring at her. And at the university where she’d re-enrolled in a graduate program in social psychology.
Either they knew who she was, or suspected.
Or they had no idea who she was but were startled by her appearance.
When she rose to leave, one of the young mothers leapt up to help her, for her right knee buckled in pain.
Her awkward body quivering in pain, she would not acknowledge.
Her face draining of blood she laughed in farewell. Bravely she walked away.
Knowing that they were looking after her, pitying her. Knowing they would be speaking of her.
Poor Dinah! She just talks, talks …
Is she on medication, do you think?
Oh God. What hell for her. And her husband …
Do you think she talks like that all the time? At home?
It was true, Dinah talked too much. Dinah talked without listening to her own scratchy voice. Dinah prized those moments when a listener smiled and laughed. When she’d
amused
.
It was an addiction of hers, Whit said.
She’d forced herself to give up her prescription of OxyContin, Vicodin. She limited herself to Tylenol for pain and for sleepless nights. She didn’t allow herself to drink as much as a glass of wine—if she began, she might not be able to stop.
Haunting parks, playgrounds. Even the Libertyville Mall. And driving past the Montessori school. These were the addictions.
Her volunteer work was more plausibly integrated into her adult life. It was addictive too, but it was of genuine use to others.
Whit didn’t criticize Dinah’s volunteer work. But his own volunteer work did not overlap with hers any longer.
Crossing a street from Admiral Park she nearly lost her balance. But for her pride, she’d have brought her cane.
Ma’am? You needin some help?
Thank you, no. I’m—fine.
Dubiously the girl watched her. Jamaican, young, in the white uniform of a medical worker.
Whit had said, take the damn cane with you, at least! It’s just your pride, plenty of people use canes.
Her mother hated seeing Dinah with the cane. Still more, with the walker. Oh Dinah look at you! My
daughter
.
When she rose to her feet after sitting for a while, there was often a roaring in her head. It would require a few minutes for Dinah to get her bearings, it was
not serious.
She’d had MRIs. No further neurological damage had been discovered in the injured part of her brain.
In recent months she’d had another brain scan, an echocardiogram, an angiogram, a colonoscopy, and much bloodwork.
She continued with physical therapy, intermittently. She’d ceased seeing a psychotherapist, as Whit had. There was no point, for there was nothing wrong with either of them that the return of their lost son would not remedy.
The fact is, she’d let Robbie go. She’d had his hand firmly in hers and then …
A therapist will work with you on issues of
guilt
. But a therapist cannot work with you on the primary issue, the reversal of the situation that has caused
guilt.
The children in the playground had over-excited her, that was it. For always there was one who might have been Robbie seen from the back, or the side …
Always there was one whose voice, heard at a little distance, uplifted, elated, excited, was Robbie’s voice …
Mommy? Mom-my!
And somehow, the child-voice was her own. So wistful!
Mom-my
…
Her mother e-mailed links to Dinah, Web sites and home pages involving other missing children. For there were so many.
And when Geraldine visited, and Whit wasn’t near, Geraldine was likely to unfold for Dinah a newspaper article from the
Detroit News
about a child-abduction in, for instance, New Mexico, or Florida, or North Dakota—
7-Year-Old Taken from Backyard, No Witnesses.
And,
10-Year-Old Abducted by Car-Jacker, Mother in Hospital.
Please don’t show me these things, Mother—so Dinah begged.
In these six years, Geraldine too had aged. But you would have to see her near-flawless face in a harsh light, and to consider the tight, taut skin around her eyes, to register this fact.
It was one of the prevailing subjects of which the young mothers in the park spoke: their mothers, and their mothers-in-law.
Inescapably, a world of women. Dinah recalled a play of the English Renaissance—
Women Beware Women.
Or was the title
Women Betray Women.
Possibly it was rude, yes of course it was rude, but everyone did it, the young mothers, and not-so-young Dinah Whitcomb: checking for cell phone messages, e-mail.
Though Dinah Whitcomb checked more compulsively than the others.
Dozens of times a day. Always with hope.
For one day the news would come. One day, the vigil would end.
She had no doubt. Not for a moment.
Unlike Whit who said with a savage laugh, he doubted the very ground upon which he walked.
Back at the Missing Children center she managed to collapse at her desk. It was a plain bare battered Salvation Army desk with a landline—the “hotline” that rarely rang. How weak she felt, like water rushing out of a drain. Voices came to her at a distance. Why do we care for other people, why do we love them, grieve for them, yearn for them, require them?—when we will die alone, far from them.
So weak! She could rest her heavy head on her crossed arms, hide her ruined face against the desktop and sleep and never wake.
Dinah? Dinah?
Dinah?
Never wake.
* * *
Leila said, Oh! let me see it.
He showed her. One of the colored chalk portraits.
What a beautiful child … His name was—Robbie?
He smiled. He smiled in order not to say something very cutting to her.