His name
is
Robbie.
Oh yes I mean—
is
.
Six years before, Whit had taken up sketching. He’d always had a predilection for drawing, a facile talent for cartooning and caricaturing, but when Robbie was taken from them, and photographs of Robbie were publicly posted, Whit began sketching his son with colored chalks based upon memory as well as photographs. It had been Whit’s intention to update Robbie’s portrait with the passage of time but he hadn’t been so successful at this and eventually gave up.
The Michigan State Police and the FBI provided “updated” photo-images of Robbie from time to time but these uncanny images were discomforting to Whit and Dinah. Especially to Dinah who reacted emotionally.
There was something robot-like about the updated images of his son. As if an alien being had insinuated itself inside five-year-old Robbie Whitcomb and was forcing his child-body into a new shape, and his child-face into a new face, a stranger to his parents.
Robbie’s room was more or less untouched. Whit knew that Dinah entered the room at least once each day but he had no idea what she did in the room or how long she remained in it.
Whit very rarely stepped inside, though the door was always kept open.
The most obvious change was, they’d removed the disturbing posters they had not liked. In their place, they’d substituted Whit’s colored-chalk portraits of Robbie.
Whit would have liked to move out of the house—it was too small, ordinary, confining. He’d had too many sleepless nights here and too much anguish. The early memories of his feckless happy fatherhood had been abraded by more recent memories of disgust, fury.
He’d have liked to move ten miles west to Ann Arbor where he had many friends and far more admiring listeners to his radio program than he had in Ypsilanti.
But Dinah refused. To move away from this house, from Robbie’s room, was to abandon Robbie.
Whit didn’t argue with Dinah. Whit tried to respect Dinah’s beliefs—her superstitions.
His smart sardonic wife. Now attending services at the Community of Christ Church, Ypsilanti.
(To her credit, Dinah was embarrassed about this. Dinah didn’t want Geraldine, a long-lapsed Catholic, to know.)
(It was just for the
atmosphere
, Dinah had told Whit. Singing, holding hands, rejoicing in being alive,
not thinking.)
Carmella had said, You can’t ever leave her, Whit. Because you’d be leaving
him.
Whit didn’t dispute this. In his vanity he’d wanted to think that a woman like Carmella Fontaine who was artistic director
at an experimental Ann Arbor dance-theater would remain with him, in love with him, indefinitely.
After Carmella there’d been others. He was so lonely, so despairing!
His sexual being, the very essence of his soul, had been obliterated, at the time of his son’s abduction. His sense of himself as an individual with some degree of control over his life had vanished utterly. His fatherhood, his manhood, his dignity. Another man, a predator, had taken his
son
.
It might have been the most ancient and primitive of insults, Whit thought. More even than the abduction of a wife.
For wasn’t the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac the most terrifying of all Bible stories, in making of a loving father an accomplice to a wrathful God?
And there were the injuries to Dinah.
Rarely had Whit tried to make love with his wife for he feared hurting her. And he felt—well, he didn’t feel anything like his old desire for her, that had been obliterated forever, however brave and sexily brash poor Dinah might try to present herself.
We need another baby, Whit. Please.
Dinah, you’re not well.
I am well.
Women far more disabled than I am have gotten pregnant and given birth.
You’re not strong enough. We’ve been through this.
We’ve discussed it, but—we haven’t been
through this.
When Robbie comes home, whenever that is, he would expect to see
a younger sister or brother—it’s only natural. He would expect a
family
.
This was so utterly insane, Whit couldn’t trust himself to reply.
Gotten pregnant
was an expression that particularly revolted him. How did a woman
get pregnant
, was it something one did for oneself? With a syringe, an eyedropper?
Another new craziness of Dinah’s was vegetarianism.
Her revulsion for meat, for the very sight of meat, and the idea of meat—
enslavement and slaughter of innocent animals.
On several occasions at friends’ houses Dinah had become white-faced and nauseated by the smell of grilling meat, had had to excuse herself and rush away staggering to a toilet.
Great company they were, the Whitcombs!
All the more intolerable since Whit Whitcomb so loved barbecued ribs, sushi, roast pig, beef tartar, rack of lamb and the better cuts of steak.
The fact was, he’d come to hate Dinah.
The fact was, he loved Dinah. Of course he loved Dinah. It was a vow he’d taken, he would always love Dinah McCracken and he would always protect her from harm.
Dinah and Robbie. His love for his wife and his son had come so powerfully, he’d felt faint as one inhaling odorless but highly potent fumes. He had not ever loved anyone in his life as he’d loved them—he hadn’t been adult enough for such love, until the birth of his son.
Yet, he was drifting inexorably from Dinah like one in a boat without oars, drifting from another oarless boat. For a while the
stream had borne the two boats in the same direction but now the current was changing, the two were separating.
After six years he was burnt-out. His way of grieving had been to actively look for the abductor, to keep calling the Ypsilanti police and the Michigan State Police and the FBI, to print up new flyers, to go on TV and make his appeal. And again, and again—this had been Whit Whitcomb’s way for it was his way too of staying sane.
His way was not to lie on the child’s bed curled into a fetal position sleeping through much of the daylight. Not to attend evangelical Christian church services and sing hymns holding hands with strangers and crying together.
A baby. Paraplegic women can have babies. Let me show you on the Internet.
Whit, please! When Robbie comes back to us he would expect a more normal kind of family.
To the casual glance, Dinah didn’t seem incapacitated. So long as she was seated, and talking—
talking
was what Dinah did, with much animation—not on her feet, trying to walk with her old ease and grace.
To the casual glance, Dinah didn’t seem disfigured. She appeared to be a few years older than her age, which was thirty-four; she’d gained weight steadily, since a low of one hundred pounds, and now weighed, Whit guessed, as much as one hundred thirty-five pounds. Her shoulders and upper arms were muscular from rehab and weight lifting and those many months when she’d eased the pain-causing pressure on her lower body by walking with a
cane, or a walker, or propelling herself about—(“propelled” was Whit’s admiring word)—using counters, backs of chairs, tabletops and railings, like one of those disabled Olympic athletes who perform competitively, and aggressively. Her legs were relatively weak, and thin; her right knee was particularly susceptible to pain. She had migraine headaches that left her blinded, exhausted. She had difficulty typing at a computer and using a pen. She’d built up her injured body around her disabilities as a tree grows stunted yet triumphant around an impediment.
Whit was proud of Dinah: she’d had months of excruciating physical therapy and had not ever complained. She was now far better coordinated than she’d been five years ago when the doctors’ prognosis had been so poor. What upset Whit was, she insisted upon thinking of herself as strong when in fact she wasn’t strong: she collapsed easily, and had been rushed to the ER more than once, hyperventilating, or stricken with a violent tachycardia, or afflicted with a paralyzing gastrointestinal pain. She insisted upon thinking of herself as
near-normal.
It was Dinah’s God-damned pride, she rarely used her cane. Though Whit had bought her a fancy Victorian cane beautifully carved out of ivory.
(She’d said, How the hell can I walk with an
ivory cane?
An elephant was slaughtered for this ivory, Whit!)
And her pride, she insisted upon walking from the parked car, rather than having Whit drop her off as he’d gratefully have done. And inevitably she faltered, and had to rest clutching at Whit’s arm—No, no! I’m fine. I just get a little—winded, sometimes …
Often, Dinah hid her face from Whit. It made her anxious when he looked frankly at her and it made her anxious when he seemed to be averting his eyes from her.
She didn’t apologize for her face, at least. Whit would have been furious with her if she’d tried.
In fact her face didn’t repel him. Beneath the translucent scarry tissue was Dinah’s true face. And the beautiful dark-brown eyes thin-lashed and unchanged.
Geraldine said slyly to him, when Dinah was out of the range of her lowered voice, D’you think we don’t know? We know.
He’d wanted to shove the woman from him. Always her manner with Whit Whitcomb had been subtly mocking, flirtatious. She’d never tried to address Whit as her daughter’s husband and the father of her daughter’s child, only as “Whit” Whitcomb who was some sort of disc-jockey charlatan with a weakness for pot and for casual sex. This character could pull the wool over others’ eyes, but not hers.
Hotly she said,
She
knows but she won’t say a thing. Because that’s Dinah’s nature—weak, trusting. At least you could be more circumspect.
And when Whit didn’t dignify this bullshit by replying, she said meanly, That means—
evasive
. At least you could be more—
I know what
circumspect
means, Geraldine. Thanks!
He would leave Dinah, maybe. For this would be a way of leaving the bitch of a mother-in-law, too.
He would leave Dinah but not until her physical condition was stronger. And not until Robbie returned.
And if Robbie did return, if the miracle happened, certainly Whit Whitcomb wasn’t going to leave his wife and son.
In this way they waited.
For six years, they’d waited.
The mother waited with more evident faith that the child would be returned to them, the husband with conspicuously less.
Yet, they had only to glance at each other, at times, to be immediately linked, bonded.
The sight of a child on the street, a stray remark made by a stranger, the appearance of someone who reminded them of, for instance, one of the Ypsilanti detectives to whom the missing-child case had been assigned, years ago—these were triggers.
Sometimes, Dinah burst into tears for no evident reason. Whit knew the reason.
She told him her dreams. He rarely told her his.
Yet it was uncanny, sometimes their dreams overlapped.
In her dreams, Robbie was frequently a presence. But where Robbie’s face was, were blurs like eraser smudges. The terror came over her—
I am forgetting his face.
In the dreams Robbie was being returned to them. Yet, there were invariably complications. Dreams that went on and on
and on
like endless journeys on badly rutted roads in bad weather.
How many times Dinah had felt the child’s fingers wrenched from hers! How many times she’d been thrown to the ground and yet fantastically caught up beneath the abductor’s minivan in a way to drag her along the pavement like a limp lifeless rag
doll … R ecounting these dreams to Whit she described her sleep interrupted by the droning voices of strangers, recorded phone-voices, computer-voices; there were endless documents and forms for the bereft parents to fill out; a jarring squawk of radio-voices; bright fluorescent lights searing her eyes. Until suddenly it would be revealed to her that Robbie wasn’t there, and had never been there.
And Whit would think
But that was my dream!
Since she’d become a hotline volunteer Dinah had particularly exhausting nightmares in which she was on the phone trying to hear a faint, fading voice—(Robbie’s voice?)—pleading and screaming for the party not to hang up.
Don’t abandon me! Don’t abandon
me
.
Yet Whit stayed away from the house as long as he could.
He could not help it, this was his addiction.
He’d waked from the nightmare to find himself a (minor, local) celebrity. Whenever any child-abduction case erupted as breaking news, “Whit” Whitcomb was likely to be quoted in print or interviewed on TV. His was a whirligig-life in terror of solitude and silence: work, busyness, sex, drinks with friends, occasional pot, even seeing late-afternoon movies at the mall, alone. “Action” movies of brainless and relentless violence which Dinah could not have tolerated.
Dinah was lonely but never criticized him. She must have taken a vow, she would never criticize her companion in bereavement.
Her less frantic life mimicked his, to a degree: university courses, volunteer work, finding friends to spend time with,
cultivating new friends, evenings at church. She who’d been enviably self-sufficient before Robbie was born, and totally absorbed in Robbie after he’d been born, was now desperate for any sort of companionship however haphazard and transient.
Even, sometimes, her mother’s companionship. Whit could not quite comprehend.
When Whit came home, immediately he went to his computer. A kind of gravitational force pulled him to it, as into a black hole—as Dinah ruefully observed. All day, when he wasn’t engaged in work at the radio station, or meetings with people, he was obsessed with his e-mail and cell phone which he might check a dozen times an hour.
An hour?—the scale was rather more to the minute.
Like one who has come to consciousness in a devastated city, amid ruins, he would find a way of surviving, a primitive shelter.
Here, I can live. I can breathe, here.
Hadn’t meant to speak harshly to the woman.