“It’s Whit who wants to send me away, isn’t it? Your—‘husband.’”
Dinah’s mother’s lip curled, at the word
husband
.
“No, Mother. It isn’t Whit, it’s me. Please will you just
leave
.”
“You’re sick. You’re not in your right mind. You’ve taken too many pills. How can I leave you alone?”
“I have not taken ‘too many pills’! I don’t even take all the pills that are prescribed for me.” Dinah tried to speak calmly. She was hearing Robbie in another room, chattering brightly. He had questions for her—she had to get to him, to hug him tight.
“I—I may have to report you, Dinah. I should call the medical clinic—your doctor—”
“Mother, go away! I’ll call you when I want to see you again but it won’t be for a while.”
Now Dinah was speaking wildly. Far from being drugged she was cursed with a clarity of perception cruel and pitiless as a shining knife blade. She hid her ravaged face in her hands hoping that, when she lowered them, the Fury would have vanished.
Your “husband.” Where is he?
Most days, all day into the evening Whit was at the radio station or—elsewhere.
Since the abduction he stopped by Ypsilanti police headquarters regularly, never less than twice a week. He’d taken an active role in the search for their son. He’d organized volunteers in the Ypsilanti–Ann Arbor area to search for Robbie and to affix
MISSING CHILD
posters in public places. He’d been many times interviewed on TV and radio and he’d traveled in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Minnesota to meet with law enforcement officers, city and state police, sheriffs’ departments. He spoke regularly with FBI officers assigned to his case. The face of Whit Whitcomb—intense, pained, earnest—was nearly as familiar in the public gaze as the face of the lost child Robbie Whitcomb.
Whit Whitcomb had become a volunteer for the Missing Children of America Foundation and had several times been interviewed on national cable channels—CNN, MSNBC.
He continued with his popular WCYS-FM program. It had become a call-in program now, and many people called to commiserate over the DJ’s abducted son.
He saw friends. Not friends whom Dinah knew but male friends, whom he’d known before his marriage. Sometimes, returning home, he smelled of alcohol.
Dinah thought
It’s the smell of grief. Who can blame him.
Her mother hinted, and more than hinted, that
a man like Whit Whitcomb
wouldn’t be faithful to her for long.
A man like that, it’s in the genes.
What precisely did Dinah’s mother mean? Whit’s genetic pool was immense, you had to suppose—that was what
mixed-race
meant.
Pursue
race
far enough back, you’d probably end in an ancient kingdom somewhere in Africa.
Now that Dinah was
disabled
. Now that Dinah’s face
needed more surgery.
Her mother protested: she was just speaking frankly! She was just saying what everyone was thinking.
It was true, Whit was away from home on an average of twice as much as he’d been before the abduction. He often missed dinner, which he’d tried never to miss before. He never watched the TV channels he’d watched with Dinah and Robbie—Animal Planet, Discovery, Comedy Central; he never watched TV at all. When he was home, he was at his computer, scrolling the Internet. Checking e-mail obsessively.
Yet Whit called home faithfully, never less than once a day. He called Dinah’s cell, not the special landline number.
Hi honey. How’s it going?
Pretty good. You?
Great.
Any news?
I guess not. You?
Guess not.
A pause then. In the background, raised voices and maybe laughter. For Whit inhabited a bright peopled world from which Dinah was exiled for now.
Are you hurting, Dinah?
No! Not bad at all.
You had kind of a bad night last night—I guess?
Did I? No.
Maybe tonight will be better.
Maybe.
Well. Love you, Dinah.
Love you, Whit.
See you later.
How late?
Not past nine. Promise.
Whit didn’t always keep his promises.
Dinah never reproached him. Lying on the sofa watching TV—not really watching, just clicking through channels as if in search of—what?—she didn’t know—until midnight. She’d lost so much weight in the hospital and in rehab, she now ate
frozen yogurt out of the container, ravenous with hunger, a kind of desperate greed, that ended in abrupt satiation, self-disgust. Then she’d drag herself upstairs to bed.
Thinking
He will never make love to me again. I am so broken.
Thinking
I would trade that—all that—for Robbie.
Dinah’s new friends were mostly women from the rehab clinic. Physical therapists, nurses, other patients. Rehab is a small closed world. You soon learn the language. Her physical therapist was a Jamaican woman named Rachelle whose fingers were soft, soothing, yet strong and deft. If Dinah broke down and cried, in pain and despair, Rachelle said
Now hon you don’t mean that. You just get that out of your system, hon. Three minutes.
If another patient stared at her raggedy face Dinah didn’t shrink and hide behind her hands as she would have liked to do but smiled and struck up a conversation.
Hi! It’s “reconstruction,” I was in a pretty bad accident. I have one or maybe two more surgeries to go.
And:
It isn’t as bad as it looks! I have my eyesight and great new
teeth.
Quickly the afflicted learns that affliction can be mined to some purpose. No one more popular than the cheerful-afflicted. Dinah had learned: misery does love company.
She spoke of Robbie, if she was asked. She spoke quietly and calmly and did not hesitate. She knew that, as everyone told her, as the police urged her, the more people who knew about her missing son, the more people who saw his picture, who were prompted to think about him, the more likely there might be a “lead.”
That was how missing children were often found, police said. You wouldn’t believe how accidental, sometimes.
Brightly she said
Yes. The search is continuing. This summer we will drive—around Michigan, we think. Just take the search into the rural counties. Of course the police and the FBI are on the case, they’ve promised to never let it rest.
Her dark desperate moods of wanting-to-die she hid. Her frantic moods of screaming-for-Robbie she hid. She could muffle her crazed mouth in a towel, if necessary. She could cry, cry, cry until her eyes flamed and swelled and her tear ducts were emptied like her heart and not even Whit would know.
Whit snoring in their bed. Dinah crouched in the bathroom sobbing into a towel.
Seeing, God!—even her toenails looked misshapen, growing in sideways. Everything about her broken and askew except her knife-sharp memory of the child’s fingers wrenched from hers.
She knew he was alive. She knew he was yearning for her.
Yearning for her and his daddy. Wherever he was, she knew.
How did she know with such certainty,
she just knew.
In this way, and in other ways, they waited.
Gideon? Come here, son.
On hesitant bare feet the child came.
The child’s rapt staring terrified eyes.
The child in pajama bottoms.
The child’s little chest showing milky-pale skin pulled tight against his ribs.
Climb onto Daddy’s lap, Gideon. C’mon!
In a trance the child did not move.
I’m commanding you, Gideon: climb onto Daddy’s lap.
They were in the TV den, as Daddy Love called it.
A leather sofa, a single chair. Rattan rug. A thirty-inch TV. In a window, a rattling air conditioner in the humid midsummer heat of New Jersey. Over both windows, heavy damask curtains as well as black blinds.
It was cuddle-time. It was bedtime.
It was
that time.
* * *
Darlene? Hi.
It was OK now, he thought. He could call the woman, and have her do some cleaning. She could meet Gideon.
The kid was so quiet, might’ve been deaf-and-dumb. No danger he’d begin babbling or crying to Darlene Barnhauser who was a stranger to him.
Come over to the house, can you? When’s a good time?
You can meet my little boy Gideon.
Yeah he’s here with me, the rest of the summer. I drove out to Traverse City to get him.
Darlene said some wiseass thing about the boy’s mother, some cunt-wisecrack, Chet Cash laughed like kicking sand.
Yeah. Somethin like that, Darlene. But we don’t talk about her here, OK? Not ever.
Darlene said, more sober, I got it, Chet.
Sooner or later you require a female, it was a fact. Certain kinds of things like scrubbing, scouring with Brillo pads, airing out bedclothes on a clothesline, mopping the linoleum floor in the kitchen—it was female scut-work and if you weren’t married to the female, or sleeping with her, you’d have to pay.
Chet resented it. But hell, Darlene was OK. Poor whites in this part of rural New Jersey, like in the Ozarks, Appalachia. Little wood-frame houses, trailer villages. Darlene smiled her brave lipstick-smile and you saw that half her teeth were discolored and one tooth missing.
It made him laugh, the female was in love with
him
.
He had that power over women—Chet Cash.
His swaggering walk, his hair tied back in a ponytail. T-shirts showing his lean-muscled chest, jeans low-slung on his hips. A zipper glinting at his groin.
He’d washed the face-powder out of his beard. Now it was mahogany-dark again, bristling and virile.
In the run-down area of Kittatinny Falls, Chet Cash was a property owner.
He’d inherited the old farmhouse, falling-down outbuildings and forty acres of farmland on the Saw Mill Road from a woman he’d met in the Church of Abiding Hope in Trenton, New Jersey, in the 1990s. The sixty-nine-year-old widow had had adult children who’d “abandoned” her, as Chet Cash, in his late twenties and early thirties at the time, would not. Mrs. Myrna Helmerich was her name. And, for a while, before she’d died of heart failure, in her tidy little brick house in Trenton, in 1999, Mrs. Chester Cash.
It had been Chet Cash’s sole marriage. Except for the minister who’d married them, no one knew.
It had been a legitimate marriage, in the Church of Abiding Hope on South Washington Street, Trenton. The Reverend Thornton Silk officiating.
The woman who’d been a widow for eighteen years became a wife again at sixty-nine. Her ponytailed bearded hippie bridegroom had been thirty-one. They were both devout Christians in the Church of Abiding Hope which was a multiracial church. Myrna Helmerich had been a volunteer in the
Presidential-candidacy campaign of Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and she’d been active in civil rights organizations in the 1970s. Her wedding dress was white muslin and braided into her
silvery-white
hair, that fell loose to her shoulders, were lilies of the valley. So fey and otherworldly the bride looked, you expected to see that she was barefoot but she wore white ballerina flats. Chet Cash wore a sharp-looking cranberry-velvet suit with a vest, acquired from a veterans’ secondhand clothing shop in Trenton. He’d trimmed his beard and secured his ponytail with glittery silver twine. To the married couple, age was not an issue. Myrna was given to gaily saying
You are as young as you feel!
Chet Cash was given to saying
Myrna is my heart and soul.
Under New Jersey law, property in the possession of one spouse becomes the property of the other, in the eventuality of the spouse’s death. To insure this, the Cashes drew up their wills.
In addition, each was insured for fifty thousand dollars—this was Chet Cash’s idea, to which Myrna Helmerich deferred.
In addition to Myrna’s property in Grindell Park, Trenton, there was a farm near the Delaware Water Gap, of which Myrna spoke negligently, for she hadn’t visited the property in years, and had only a vague idea of what condition it might be in.
In the little stucco church on Washington Street, in which the couple first met, Chester Cash had been a member of the choir and a volunteer for youth counseling, as Mrs. Helmerich had been the choir leader and a volunteer for youth and “single mother” counseling. Chet Cash was a gregarious and popular presence in the Trenton church and soon he’d been invited to
serve with the Mayor’s Community Outreach Program, that had received a one-million-dollar funding from the State of New Jersey.
Soon then, Chet Cash was in charge of financial accounts for the Outreach Program. He’d met the mayor, Leander Hollis, who’d taken a liking to him, as a
white dude
who could make you laugh. Chet Cash was making deposits, making out checks. Chet Cash liked to say
In the right place at the right time. That’s what we mean by destiny.
A photograph of Chet Cash and Mayor Hollis shaking hands and smiling at the camera had been framed and hung on the wall first in Myrna Helmerich’s Trenton house, then in Myrna Helmerich’s Kittatinny house, which Chet Cash inherited. Both men were handsome: Chet Cash resembled a shaggy Brad Pitt (so admirers said) and Leander Hollis resembled ex-heavyweight champion George Foreman. Chet was disappointed that his friendship with the popular Democratic politician had seemed to fade and woke sometimes in the night wondering
Why?
He hoped it wasn’t a race thing. He’d thought that Hollis was above that kind of primitive thinking.
Daddy Love’s son at the time had been Deuteronomy. The less said of Deuteronomy’s final years, the better. The sandy-haired boy was sulky and pimply-faced by eleven, fattish, lethargic, and suffered from chronic constipation, eating junk food with Daddy Love and watching TV seven nights of the week. And when he didn’t watch
Texas Rangers, Cops, Law & Order, X-Files, Superstars of Wrestling
with Daddy Love, he played video games—just
the same three or four, repeatedly, that Daddy Love had bought him. Deuteronomy didn’t attend school: the vague theory was, Chet Cash was homeschooling his son. The mother had died, somehow—fast-acting cancer. This was a story told to whoever expressed any mild curiosity, but few of their neighbors did. Father and son lived upstairs in a brownstone duplex on Trotter Street which intersected with State Street a mile from the
gleaming-white
dome of the New Jersey State capitol building. Nearby too were the New Jersey State Court and the Mercer County Court in a run-down neighborhood of pawnshops and bail bondsmen.
Deuteronomy didn’t yearn to get out much, any longer. Downtown Trenton was “shitty” in his opinion. He’d “run away” more than once, but had always returned to Daddy Love by suppertime. The kid had no friends—of course. His friends were TV-figures, video-game-figures whom he routinely slaughtered, or was slaughtered by. Like a captive dog chained in a basement for too long he’d lost his appetite for out-of-doors. If he remembered his old family, in some hick town in eastern Ohio, he never let on. Daddy Love thought the kid’s brain was probably a
tabula rasa
—a fancy term for a blank slate on which you could write anything you wanted, if you wanted.
Deuteronomy did cry, sometimes. A wet-blubbery noise, in the bathroom.
In Daddy Love’s bed the boy was limp and unresisting. He’d learned not to resist but had never learned to (voluntarily) kiss Daddy Love, not anywhere on Daddy Love’s body. He’d never so much as
touched
Daddy Love unless commanded.
The kid’s penis resembled a skinned baby rabbit, that rarely got hard. Daddy Love hadn’t been excited by it in years.
Daddy Love felt sorry for the kid, he’d lost his looks by age ten. There wasn’t much point in keeping him but his daddy was feeling the kind of dumb sentiment you feel for an elderly blind and incontinent dog—you can’t kill the mutt but you wouldn’t mind if somebody else ran him over in the street for you.
Mrs. Helmerich, who’d become Mrs. Chet Cash in January 1998, was never to meet Daddy Love’s son. She was never to hear the name Deuteronomy.
Nor did Deuteronomy know about Mrs. Helmerich. If he had, Daddy Love knew that the boy would have been wildly jealous.
But soon after Mrs. Helmerich came into Chet Cash’s life, Deuteronomy departed.
This won’t hurt, son. It’s B-12 vitamin for quick energy and a kind of a diet pill, you’ve been growing a gut, eh!
In Kittatinny Falls it was Chet’s account that he’d bought the Helmerich farm, as it was locally called. It was to be a
spiritual retreat
. In the countryside north of Kittatinny Falls, the property was still called the Helmerich farm even by local residents like Darlene Barnhauser who knew Chet Cash was now the property owner.
Steady, kid. She’s nobody you know.
The child so flinched, Daddy Love had to hold his skinny arm firm.
The child was staring mesmerized seeing Darlene Barnhauser striding in their direction. Daddy Love had tried to prepare the kid, he’d be seeing a “friend”—Daddy Love was well aware, this was the first person the child had seen since the Ypsilanti mall four months before.
Except for TV-people. Daddy Love did not forbid TV.
The Barnhauser female, nothing like the kid’s scrawny mother. Yet, the way the kid was staring at her, twitching and trembling, Daddy Love had to wonder if he wasn’t confused thinking this
was
his mother—not the way he remembered her, exactly.
Green-parrot T-shirt showcasing her large saggy breasts,
short-shorts
showing too much of her lardy veined thighs, and
flip-flops
on her pudgy feet. Her hair was stacked atop her head gypsy-style and her wide mouth was greasy-red.
Ohhh God, Darlene said, her eyes swimming, i’n’t he
cute
.
My little boy Gideon, Chet said proudly. He’s come to live with me, maybe more than just this summer.
“Gideon”?—that’s a real nice name. Hiya, “Gideon”!
Chet Cash squatted beside the boy, gripping the skinny arm. It was fascinating to Daddy Love, how the child gaped up at the Barnhauser female as if—what?—his five-year-old brain was trying to connect her with someone else.
The child was trembling. Shivering. Daddy Love felt rather than heard his teeth chattering.
The temperature had been in the low nineties through that day.
Chet Cash said, Looks like me in the eyes and around the mouth, don’t he? That’s what people say.
He does. Oh God, Chet, i’n’t he
cute
.
His name is Gideon. “God’s warrior.”
He’s kinda shy, huh? Not like his daddy.
Darlene was squatting too in front of the child. Couldn’t resist touching his curly-kinky hair as the boy stood stiff and unmoving staring at her and his watery eyes now rapidly blinking.
Daddy Love had dyed the boy’s hair. No longer was it so dark as to appear black but a dirty-blond color, like a ravaged beach.
The previous night, the boy had had to be disciplined. First, Daddy Love filled the sink with cold water and commanded the boy to lower his face to it, and when the boy resisted, Daddy Love seized him by the neck and forced his face into the water counting
One two three four five.
Then, he’d spent the night in the Wooden Maiden and not in Daddy Love’s bed. A sponge-gag in his mouth and rags stuffed around his ass, to soak up urine.
Daddy Love felt sorry for his son, almost. But discipline comes first, in training.
Daddy Love didn’t let Gideon out of the Maiden until around noon by which time the little boy was weak, famished, so ravenously hungry that he gobbled his food like an animal, and began to puke.
There were several punishments for puking. Daddy Love had tried them all.
Gideon, son, say h’lo to Darlene. She’s our friend and neighbor, see? She’s come over to help us. And maybe if your daddy has to travel somewheres, Darlene will look after you.
Ohhh—I’d love that. He’s so
cute
.
The child’s little finger had healed, that had been broken through the child’s carelessness. Daddy Love hoped that Darlene wouldn’t notice the bone had healed at a slight, stiff angle from his hand.
Darlene was cooing to him. Whyn’t you say h’lo to me? Sweetie?
The child’s chocolate-dark eyes with their thick lashes did not seem to be entirely in focus. As if Darlene loomed so large before him, his eyes could not absorb her.
Daddy Love was wondering if Darlene thought there might be something wrong with his son. Retarded, or maybe “ autistic”—you heard a lot about that, these days.
Tell Darlene where you come from, son.
Daddy Love gave the boy a little shake. He was gripping his arm tight, which had to hurt, but the boy was learning not to wince or whimper.
Hey? Tell Darlene where you’re from.
The boy’s lips moved but his words were inaudible. The boy was still staring and blinking at busty Darlene as if—(was this it?)—he was hoping she’d turn into someone else, who had come for him.
At last like a windup doll Gideon began to speak.
From T’vers Cit-ee, Mich’gan.
What’s that, sweetie?
He says—“From Traverse City, Michigan.” Where his mother lives.