They waited.
Each hour of each day they waited.
The phone would ring and the message would be
Good news, Mrs. Whitcomb! We’ve found your son and he is—
The choice of this next word was crucial. The word might be
well, or alive and well,
or
—alive.
Just to hear that word—
alive.
“‘Alive.’ ‘Alive.’”
In her scratchy voice Dinah practiced. Her jaws were not so painful now when she spoke though she still had difficulty eating and so did not eat anything that involved an agitation of her jaws.
Alone, Dinah practiced. She had her physical-therapy exercises to do and these she did religiously as required and she forced herself to walk up and down stairs using just a single crutch
now. She thought
It’s no worse than arthritis would be. Millions of people have arthritis.
The landline rarely rang now. Yet, Dinah often heard it.
A single short ring, cut off. She was sure.
Her heart beat hard, as she listened. In the silence of the house it would have been difficult not to hear the phone ring and yet, she was anxious that she might miss it.
Mrs. Whitcomb? Good news! We’ve just got word—
It was a foolish sort of consolation and yet: her heart lifted, hearing her own scratchy voice as if it were a stranger’s voice on the phone that rarely rang for it was a phone with an unlisted number and this number was known only to law enforcement officials.
Aloud she practiced the words she would someday hear:
“‘We’ve found your son Robbie and he is—
alive
.’”
Or, “We’ve found your son, Mrs. Whitcomb, and Robbie is
alive and well.”
On a cork bulletin board in the kitchen, on the refrigerator door and on a wall above the telephone were snapshots of Robbie, Robbie and his parents, drawings and watercolors of Robbie’s in bright colors—Dinah stared at these countless times a day.
Alone in the house on Seventh Street, Ypsilanti. Often she was alone.
She’d had to quit her part-time job at the University of Michigan biology library. They’d given her a medical leave but it wasn’t clear when she’d be well enough to return and so, in all fairness to her employers, Dinah had quit.
As she’d withdrawn from her classes in the education school. She’d been six credits from a master’s degree in public-school science education, with a social sciences major.
Co-workers from the library had more or less ceased dropping by for there was no news to relay to them. And Dinah’s physical condition—her faltering words, her poor motor coordination and scarred face—her attempt to seem
upbeat
—was just too sad.
Friends and neighbors were more faithful. Especially if Dinah was sitting out on the front porch with her laptop, furiously typing.
The Internet had not yet yielded any helpful information. But the Internet was a great abyss of information, she believed.
So many “lost” children! Their wide-eyed faces stared at her, pleading.
Some of the children’s photos have been posted for years.
It was a shock to discover photos of young children who’d been abducted as long as ten years ago.
Among them
Robbie Whitcomb, five years old, Ypsilanti, Michigan. Abducted from Libertyville Mall, April 11, 2006. Witnesses reported “battered beige minivan.” If you have information about this abducted child please call this toll-free number
…
There was a fantasy you might inhale from the Internet, that all these children—abducted, kidnapped, “lost”—were together in one place, waiting to be brought back home.
As soon as she’d been discharged from the hospital and could see clearly enough to use her computer, Dinah was obsessed
with typing in Robbie’s name. Her own name, and Whit’s. A dozen times a day.
Checking e-mail. A hundred times a day.
Whit had cautioned her. Take care, Dinah.
You don’t know what you’re going to see online. There are sick people out there.
It was a risk Dinah took. Daily, hourly.
Though once she’d been appalled, sickened—she’d clicked onto some sort of public-forum Web site and there were (anonymous) individuals busily discussing the abduction of her son.
Seems like the mother lost him at the mall. Bitch told this itty-bitty child to wait for her while she goes for a smoke and when she comes back, some guy with dreadlocks is dragging the kid into a van.
The bitch should be arrested—“negligence.”
Hey the mom almost got killed—got dragged under the van. She’d run after it and tried to stop it.
Bitch should’ve been killed. Neglecting her son like that.
Dinah had struggled up from the computer, half-fainted falling to her knees.
“God forgive me! I know—I have been a bad mother.”
“Do you know where he is—really? Have you ever known?”
Her mother came to see her. Her mother had the air of a Fury of ancient times, perching on a chair in Dinah’s living room. Her talons shone red.
“Your husband. Your—‘exotic’—‘DJ’—husband.”
Dinah said nothing. The ache behind her eyes and in the region of her heart was too painful.
Her mother blamed her, Dinah knew. The loss of the grandson was Whit’s fault somehow, and so it was Dinah’s fault too, for sleeping with Whit before they’d been married, and then for marrying him.
Dinah’s mother had long held a grudge against Whit Whitcomb who’d failed to flatter and to adore his mother-in-law as she believed she deserved. And she’d never entirely succeeded in resisting speaking reproachfully to Dinah, that Dinah had taken up with a
mixed-race individual.
“Not that I am a racist, Dinah. I hope you know that.”
Dinah nodded. Oh yes, Dinah knew.
“It’s just that Whit is—well, a certain kind of person.”
Not our kind, Dinah thought. That’s right.
Dinah’s father had been a midlevel executive at Ford Motors in Dearborn, Michigan. They’d lived in a whites-only gated community called Bloomfield Vistas in Birmingham, Michigan. Geraldine and Lewis McCracken and their little daughter Dinah who’d been sent to Birmingham Day School, not the public school. In her class there were two Chinese-American children, both brilliant; no Hispanic children, no African-American children, no
mixed-race
children.
Not our kind
Dinah thought, smiling.
Thank God.
Six years before, Geraldine McCracken had happened to observe Whit Whitcomb smoking a joint in the backyard of the little rented Ypsilanti house. Dinah’s mother, who drank whiskey,
and whose words sometimes slurred when she came to visit her convalescent daughter, had been incensed, outraged. Marijuana is illegal. It’s a
controlled substance.
Whit had said, mildly, Not in Ypsilanti–Ann Arbor, it isn’t.
This was a joke. But Dinah’s mother didn’t laugh.
After the abduction, after Dinah returned home from rehab, her mother’s visits became more frequent. The drive from Birmingham to Ypsilanti was nearly forty miles but not a sufficient deterrent for the older woman who’d given up her volunteer work in Birmingham, she’d said, and her friends, to “help out” her “disabled” daughter.
Dinah had grown to dread the sound of her mother’s voice as she knocked on the front door—“Dinah? I know you’re home. Please open this door.”
If Dinah wasn’t feeling well, lying on a sofa in the living room, at the rear of the house, her mother was likely to come peer in the window, shading her eyes to make out Dinah cringing beneath a blanket.
“Dinah! Let me in, or I’ll call 911. This isn’t normal.”
Sometimes, Dinah was lying on Robbie’s little bed. In Robbie’s room on the second floor.
This room had not been altered since the day of Robbie’s disappearance of course. It was a small room beside Dinah and Whit’s bedroom and when Dinah had been pregnant with Robbie she’d fantasized having a door between the rooms that might be kept open at night. Like a nursery in a fancier sort of house.
Now, the room was a small-boy’s room. There was a four-foot bookcase Whit had built for Robbie out of glass blocks and in this bookcase were Robbie’s storybooks—quite a few, in fact. In a paralysis of hope and dread Dinah would remove one of the books from its shelf—
The Littlest Fox
, with its astonishingly beautiful watercolor illustrations—and quickly skim the familiar text, that she and Robbie had both memorized. She recalled how, when she read the story to Robbie, he’d begun to read along with her, running his finger beneath the words. He’d gotten ahead of Mommy, sometimes! She could hear his voice, which left her shaken.
On the pale-blue walls of Robbie’s room were more of the child’s drawings and paintings as well as photographs and snapshots that Robbie, with his somewhat quirky taste, had particularly liked: some were pictures of himself, and Mommy and Daddy; one was Robbie with pre-school classmates at the Montessori school, and their smiling vivacious Miss Jameson; others were glossy pictures of animals—dinosaurs, a gigantic octopus, lions, elephants, giraffes, antelopes, wild horses. Recently Robbie had become fixated on horses and had it in his head that Mommy and Daddy should buy a farm in the country so that he could have a pony.
“And who would take care of the pony?”—Daddy had asked.
“Me.”
“
You
? By yourself?”
“Well—me and Mommy.”
They’d repeated this exchange many times. Why it was so funny, Dinah couldn’t say. But they laughed, and laughed.
Well—me and Mommy.
More recently Robbie had taped to his walls posters of hulking figures dressed for intergalactic space, or for war—video-game-like warriors that were unsettling, in a child’s room. Dinah had told Whit that she wasn’t ready for this yet—Robbie was only five years old! Whit said, sensibly, We can’t censor our kid. Don’t even try.
Now that Robbie was gone, Dinah wondered if she should remove the warrior-posters? Reasoning that, when Robbie returned, he’d have forgotten them—wouldn’t he?
Mid-mornings when Dinah’s medication caused her to weave groggily along the upstairs hall it was natural to her to enter Robbie’s room and lie down carefully—not fall down, limp and exhausted—onto the little bed which was always neatly made-up.
“Robbie. Oh, Robbie …”
She lay very still. Tears gathered in the corners of her eyes and spilled over onto her cheeks.
“It was my fault, honey. I should never—never—have let go of your hand.”
She held her breath waiting for Robbie to speak to her. She did not exhale her breath for so long, her heart began to beat irregularly.
“Can you hear me, Robbie? It’s Mommy. We’re looking for you, honey, and we will never, never give up.”
Dinah! Dinah!
—there came an urgent rapping on the door downstairs.
The rapping was at the front door. If Dinah didn’t hurry down to her mother, or had not the energy to hurry down to her mother, the rapping would recommence at the rear door.
Dinah! Are you in there? Where are you? Let me in.
Let me in, Dinah! Or I will call 911.
So Dinah had no choice but to hobble downstairs. To let the Fury in.
Wanting to say
You had your chance to be a good, loving mother and you weren’t interested. Why now?
Dinah’s mother had many times apologized for being a “distracted” mother when Dinah had been a little girl. The fault had been primarily “your father—you know how he betrayed us.”
Dinah’s father had separated from her mother when Dinah was ten. Dinah’s impression was that her mother had driven her father away and when he’d gone she’d laughed telling her friends—
Good riddance! He wasn’t half a man, anyhow.
As long as Geraldine had the house on Summit Drive, Birmingham. As long as Geraldine received monthly alimony and child support.
She’d never remarried. Possibly she’d never found a
whole man
who’d wanted to support her.
Since the abduction Dinah’s mother had been interviewed on Ypsilanti–Ann Arbor TV and for the local newspapers. The “terrible anguish” of her beloved grandson being abducted “in broad daylight”—the “frustration” of waiting for law enforcement to
find him—the “faith in God,” that Robbie would certainly be found. Dinah read her mother’s interviews in dread of what her mother might say impulsively—“My daughter did no wrong. She
did not let that child out of her sight for a minute
.”
Whit read such interviews snorting in derision and tossing the paper down.
“Your mother is really getting off on this, isn’t she! Like it’s some kind of hobby for her, in her boring life.”
“Whit! She’s serious. She loves Robbie. This is very hard for her, too.”
There was drama in Dinah’s mother’s life now. In her circle of friends—of whom most were divorcées like herself, or widows—it was Geraldine McCracken who was the center of attention, invariably.
She’d had her hair styled and lightened so that it shone now like a synthetic peach. She’d bought new clothes—in which to appear on a local afternoon TV talk show as
the grieving grandmother of missing five-year-old Robbie Whitcomb of Ypsilanti.
For a week or ten days in late May, there’d been a distraction—Dinah’s mother had discovered a cyst in one of her breasts, that had had to be removed for a biopsy; during this brief time, Dinah’s mother had not visited the house on Seventh Street, nor had she called more than a few times. What relief!
The cyst had been benign. Dinah’s mother returned.
Until finally Dinah told her mother please, she couldn’t see her for a while.
“What do you mean, you ‘can’t see me for a while’? What kind of a thing to say is that, to a woman grieving for her lost grandson? Her only grandchild?”
“Mother, just go away.”
“‘Go away’—where?”
Dinah’s mother had been too astonished to be angry. She’d thought it altogether natural, Dinah supposed, that, in her daughter and son-in-law’s house, she had the right to answer the landline, and to speak knowledgeably to whoever was on the other end, in the matter of Robbie; she had the right to answer reporters’ questions, and to be interviewed, without troubling to learn who a reporter was, and for what publication, if any, he was writing. She had the right, as Dinah overheard her saying, to proclaim
Both my daughter and son-in-law are devout Christians. We are praying for Robbie to be returned and he would be, if the police had more gumption to make arrests.