IV
Visitors
Carl
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
hen Carl Stoddard regained consciousness, he was laid out flat in theW back of Dick Shattuck’s pickup truck, looking up at the sky. Beneath him, the truck bed was rumbling; above him, the world was racing.
Overhanging tree branches blurred into a steady green. He blinked slowly, trying to imagine how it was that he had gotten to be here. Then he heard Maryanne’s voice.
“Thank God,” she was saying. “Thank God.”
She peered over him, her face upside-down, her head swaying each time there was a bump in the road.
• • •
Dr. Treadwell, pressing a gentle stethoscope to his bare chest, said it was an arrhythmia. His was a regional clinic, not equipped for much more than first- aid care and the occasional delivery of a baby whose mother couldn’t make it to Glens Falls. Dr. Treadwell, eighty now, knew his limitations, and they precluded a more formal diagnosis than that.
“You’ll have to go to the hospital, I’m afraid,” he said.
Carl glanced at Maryanne. Both of them, he knew, were thinking the same thing: the emergency room was a much more expensive proposition than a
local doctor. They were still working to pay off the mountain of bills that resulted from Scotty’s care.
“Is it really an emergency?” said Carl. “Couldn’t I—couldn’t I call and make an appointment with someone? I’m not in any pain.”
He was, in fact, in a bit of pain—though only when he exerted himself.
“Carl,” said Maryanne.
Dr. Treadwell cleared his throat. He sat down. “Professionally, I can’t recommend you wait,” he said. “But if you were to, I would move as little as possible, rest in bed, drink plenty of water. I’d avoid cigarettes, coffee, and . . .” He looked at Maryanne. “Any activity at all that elevates the heart rate.”
• • •
At home, Maryanne walked him up the stairs to their bedroom. Turned on a light. Kept one hand on his back as he maneuvered into bed, still aware of some dull pain in his chest.
When he was settled, she sat down on the edge of the mattress. As always, he had the feeling she was reading his mind.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Carl Stoddard’s presence on those grounds won’t mean the difference between finding the boy and leaving him unfound.”
He broke their gaze. Looked up at the ceiling.
“I know the land,” he said.
“You know who else knows the land well? Better than you, even?”
Carl nodded.
“Vic Hewitt,” said Maryanne.
“What if you go back?” Carl asked. “I’m sure they still need extra hands.”
Maryanne scrutinized him. “Who’ll look after you?”
“I’m fine,” said Carl. “Dr. Treadwell said so. I’ll rest. Jeannie will help.”
“Our Jeannie?” said Maryanne. “Or another one?”
He smiled. Most of the humor between them, now, could be found in the gentle deriding of their remaining children. It was something mundane; something that reminded them of before, when the fragility of their children’s
bodies wasn’t so heavy on their minds. Maryanne had once confessed to him, in the wake of Scotty’s death, the fear that she would be unable to let the girls out of her sight. To make fun of them, ever so slightly, was a reminder to be light with them as well.
Maryanne placed a hand on his cheek. It was the most generous touch she’d given him in a year. She stroked his hair back from his forehead. He blinked rapidly to prevent himself from crying.
“You’re a good soul,” she said.
He put his hand over hers. Brought it to his mouth. Kissed it.
“All right,” said Maryanne. “I’ll go.”
• • •
He woke up some time later to the sound of Maryanne’s footsteps. They were different from the footsteps of his daughters, who had been traipsing around the house with abandon since their mother’s departure.
Now he sat up first on his elbow, measuring how that felt, and then, when no light-headedness threatened to fell him, he swung his legs over the edge of the bed, and then rose slowly until he was on his feet.
“Maryanne?” he called, tentatively.
Upon receiving no response, he shuffled toward the threshold of his bedroom. The house—their house—had been in Maryanne’s family for 150 years. It was close-walled, low-ceilinged, built to accommodate only the insubstantial height of her ancestors. Across the upstairs hallway was the dormer bedroom that all three girls shared; Scotty had slept downstairs, on a former sleeping porch that Carl had imperfectly winterized. Now the Stoddards rarely ventured onto it, despite the small size of the house.
It was a surprise, therefore, to descend the staircase and find Maryanne standing quite still in the threshold of that room. For a moment he gazed upon her rigid back, inside her Sunday dress, both hands pressing upon the doorframe as if bracing against a storm.
He spoke her name quietly so as not to startle her, but still she jumped.
“What are you doing out of bed,” she said to him. “You should be in bed.”
“I feel better,” said Carl—a half-truth. In fact, the walk down the stairs had made him dizzy.
He approached her, and together they gazed out onto the closed porch. A twin bed still sat at the edge of the space, but the rest of the room was bare, every artifact boxed up and placed in the basement: Maryanne’s work. She had been asking him to do something to it, to make use of the space in some way, an instinct that Carl understood to be self-protective rather than cold.
“Maybe we can open it up again,” Carl said now—imagining this to be the thought on Maryanne’s mind. “Put the screens back on. It’d be nice to eat out
here in summer.”
But Maryanne said nothing.
Carl was beginning to feel like he should sit down. He shifted his weight from one leg to another.
“How was the rest of the day?” he asked. “Did they find anything?”
Maryanne nodded.
“What was it?”
“Carl,” said Maryanne. “How well do you know that boy?”
He frowned. “Oh, a little,” he said. “He liked the outdoors. He used to come around asking about the plants we were putting in. Once I taught him how to build a fire.”
“Carl,” said Maryanne, “why are you talking about him like he’s dead?”
He paused. “How do you mean?”
“You said liked,” said Maryanne. “You said he liked the outdoors.”
“I don’t know.”
“They did find something,” said Maryanne. “A few feet off the path to the trailhead, buried in some underbrush. Ron Shattuck’s hound sniffed out a little carving of a brown bear. Just like the ones you know how to make.”
“All right,” said Carl.
“That’s strange,” said Maryanne. “Don’t you think it’s strange?”
“Not so much,” said Carl. “I taught him how to whittle once. Taught Bear, I mean. I probably taught him how to make a couple things. Maybe that was
one.”
“Does anyone else know that?”
“I’m not certain. I think Vic Hewitt probably does. The boy hung around
Vic, too.”
And then, catching himself: “Hangs.”
“I overheard them talking,” said Maryanne. “They’re curious about it.
They’d like to find the person who carved it. The police were saying this, and the news spread. It was all we came up with at the end of a full day’s search.
The hounds are useless because of the rain. There’s nothing. They’ll keep searching, but.”
She trailed off. And then, abruptly, she turned from the threshold of Scotty’s room and walked to the kitchen, began to open cabinets. Searching
them for some kind of dinner.
“Want help?” Carl asked.
“No,” said Maryanne. “You go back to bed. Shouldn’t be down here to begin with.”
She thought for a moment, and then: “Why do you think he had it with him?”
“Not sure,” said Carl. “Must have liked it.”
“And why do you think he dropped it?”
“Not sure.”
• • •
Carl took the stairs one at a time, resting for several seconds in between. In his peripheral vision he noticed his girls regarding him silently from the dining room table, where they were meant to be studying. He waved at them.
Back to your schoolwork.
On the upstairs landing, he allowed himself to acknowledge why he’d used the past tense when speaking about Bear Van Laar. The truth was: he’d been thinking of Scotty. The two boys were becoming closer in his mind.
Carl
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
aryanne went back to search the next day, and the next. Each eveningM she reported on the day’s events: as word spread, there were more and more people in the field. A hundred the second day. Five hundred the third.
The whole town of Shattuck had paused in its daily operations to contribute to the cause: every adult older than school age, and some children as well.
For two whole days, the grocery store was closed while the Shattucks and their employees searched for Bear, meaning that anyone who’d run out of milk or bread or toilet paper had to drive half an hour to get some.
Vic Hewitt, said Maryanne, had been in charge of operations so far; each day he sent small groups farther and farther afield in every direction. Still, there was no sign of Bear.
What Vic shouted at the group each morning was formal and hopeful, meant as much for the ears of the parents as for the searchers themselves.
What Maryanne learned in whispers from the other wives was less so.
The hounds, they said, had lost the boy’s scent quickly on the first day.
Ron Shattuck’s Jennie had been the one to sniff out the carving of the bear, halfway between the house and the trailhead; after that she had not pointed for the rest of the day.
The problem had been the downpour on the day of the boy’s disappearance. If not for the rain, they said—but no one would finish the
sentence.
“Vic’s losing hope,” said Maryanne, the evening of the third day. “You can tell. His posture’s different.”
Carl nodded. It was difficult to imagine a boy of Bear’s age surviving in the wilderness much beyond this point. Even one with his know-how.
“Are people speculating?” Carl asked.
Maryanne hesitated for a moment before responding.
“They are,” she said, carefully. “There’s a lot of folks who think the boy just wandered off. Out of curiosity or anger, no one’s sure. No telling how far a boy his age and size could have gotten before realizing he was lost. After that,” she said, “well, if he were down with an injury, he might have succumbed to the cold overnight.”
Carl nodded. This was his theory too—the main one, anyway. He hated to say it, to even think it, but this sounded like the most probable theory. Except — Maryanne continued. “But Carl,” she said, “people have another thought
too.”
He knew what it was before she said it.
“The carving,” he said.
“No,” she said. “Not that.”
“Then what?” Carl said.
Maryanne hesitated. “There’s a rumor,” she said. “It’s that you were the
last person to see Bear alive.”
Carl paused. Nodded.
“That’s true. I saw him just as I was leaving. He was sitting on the front steps of Self-Reliance. Tying his shoes.”
She looked at him, blinking. “Why on earth did you not tell me that?”
“I have to tell you something else,” said Carl.
Maryanne put her face in her hands.
“No, Maryanne,” said Carl. “Nothing like that. My God.”
He reached for one of her hands and took it.
“Bear was afraid of his grandfather,” he said.
“How do you know?”
He described the change in the boy’s expression when he heard his name called; he described what he had said. That’s my grandfather. I don’t like him much. He did not say outright what he was thinking, but Maryanne did.
Then she began to cry.
“What’s wrong, Maryanne?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Please.”
She swiped at her nose. “All right,” she said. “I’m crying because I think you’re probably right.”
Her shoulders were hunched and miserable. Her head was down.
“And because I think no one will believe you,” said Maryanne.
• • •
Neither of them could sleep. Maryanne tossed and turned. Carl lay still, looking up at the dark ceiling, feeling the ache of his heart as it thudded inside him. He had managed to find an appointment with a doctor at Glens Falls for Monday morning. Until then, his only job was to keep calm: an increasingly impossible task.
At some point they heard a knock at the front door. Maryanne sat up, listening; it came again louder. Carl didn’t know what time it was. Midnight or one, maybe.
“I should get that,” said Carl. But again, when he tried to sit up, he found his vision dimming at its edges.
“You stay here,” said Maryanne. She moved to the closet and retrieved from the top shelf a shotgun that had been her father’s. She loaded it. Headed for the door.
“Maryanne,” whispered Carl, feeling useless. “Whoever that is can come
back in the morning.”
But she ignored him.
• • •
He listened hard. The front door opened. He heard the voices of men, low and murmuring. He propped himself up, straining to hear more.
A pause, then, followed by footsteps on the stairs—lots of them—which meant Maryanne was not returning alone.
Carl ran his hands over his face, around his mouth. Three days of stubble had made his chin rough. He was wearing a white undershirt, yellowed at the neck and armpits.
Then into the room came Maryanne, followed by Dick Shattuck, Bob Lewis, and Bob Alcott.
The three big men overtook the little low-ceilinged room. Carl, looking up at them from his bed, felt like a child.
“Carl, these men have something to tell you,” said Maryanne.
• • •
The police would be coming for him in the morning. His friends wanted to alert him before they did.
“We don’t believe you had anything to do with the boy’s disappearance,” said Dick Shattuck. “Want you to know that. That’s the reason we’re here, I
guess.”
Carl put a hand to his chest.
“What should I do?”
He heard that it sounded pathetic.
“Run for the hills,” said Bob L. “These yahoos’ll hang you.”
“Bob,” said Shattuck, admonishingly.
“Sorry, Maryanne.”
“I don’t know, Carl,” said Shattuck, head lowered. “I wish there was something we could do.”
For a moment, there was silence in the room.
“They have no evidence,” said Bob Alcott. It was the first he’d spoken. He was a quiet man, a history teacher at the central school. “All their evidence is circumstantial. That won’t cut it in a court of law.”
Carl wasn’t certain what that meant, but it was the first thing he’d heard that brought him comfort.
• • •
They had a brief conversation, after the men had left, about whether he should, in fact, disappear. Maryanne was for it. Carl against. His chest was hurting more than ever; he had to consciously remind himself not to put his hand to it, because each time he did, Maryanne looked like she was going to cry.
Finally, at three in the morning, Maryanne put her arms around him, holding him like a child, and they both fell asleep that way.
At seven in the morning, the second knock came.
Alice
1950s | 1962 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
he wanted to love the new baby.S Over the course of a nearly unbearable labor, Alice chanted these words like a prayer: I will love the new baby. I will love the new baby.
Peter, of course, was nowhere. Other fathers waited in the waiting room, reading newspapers—but not her husband, who had a meeting he couldn’t miss. When the baby was born, he’d be driven over from the bank. The baby would be handed to him. And then he’d go back to work, and the baby would be taken to the nursery, and then, at last, Alice could sleep.
She pictured only this as she labored: the moment of rest.
I will love the new baby, thought Alice.
• • •
It hadn’t been like this with Bear. She knew she would love him from the moment she felt his first kick. She’d been eighteen years old then, married only a few months. She had nothing to do inside her new house, with Peter gone all day. The first fluttering motions of her baby felt to her like gifts.
After nearly ten months of carrying her son inside her like a pearl, she delivered him into the world, and he was no longer hers alone. As soon as Alice brought her son home, people began to take him from her.
First there was her own mother, who lifted the babe from her arms as soon as she walked in the door to the Albany house. Ordered Alice upstairs to wash her hair.
Next came the Van Laars, mainly Peter’s father, who inspected Bear as if inspecting livestock. He made pronouncements about the size of his head, the length of his legs. Both were deemed respectable. The baby was handed back.
Last came the two nurses—Peter’s idea. One for the day. One for the night.
Peter interviewed them in private, so she only met each of them on their first day of work. The day nurse, Francine, was a matron, gray-haired and thin, who worked with quiet efficiency and smiled frequently and tended as much to Alice as she did to Bear, especially in the months just after his birth.
Alice liked her very much, actually, and told Peter so.
But the night nurse, Sharon, was different. She was red-haired, stout, not much older than Alice. Catholic, Alice thought: she lived at home with her parents still. She spoke often of being the oldest of ten, with a kind of pride in her voice that often turned to authority when Alice questioned anything she did.
The worst part was that Peter generally took her side.
“He’s cold,” said Alice, hearing Bear cry in the night. “She has him in those light pajamas. The house is so drafty.”
And Peter would say—“A lowered body temperature induces sleep.”
“He’s hungry,” said Alice. “He didn’t eat a good dinner.”
“If he starts eating at night he’ll only want more.”
Sharon stayed with them for several years at the start of Bear’s life, impervious to Alice’s disapproval of nearly every choice she made. She hummed cheerfully to herself as she took him up to bed, and Alice watched her go, longing to hold the soft small body of her son, clad in cotton; longing to feel that weight in her arms.
“Maybe,” she said once to Peter, “maybe I could put Bear to bed each night, and then Sharon could be the one to wake up with him, if he’s restless.”
Peter, who’d been reading, looked up in annoyance. “Honestly, Alice,” he said. “What are we paying her for? To sleep here? Sharon should be paying us,” he said. “Rent.”
The best parts of Alice’s day were the two hours between Sharon’s departure in the morning and Francine’s arrival, and the two hours at the end of the day, when they switched. During these four hours, with no one to watch or correct her, she played with him, or read to him, or lay with him on her bed, observing him. He was smart, Alice thought—most importantly, he was smart. He spoke early and he made observations about the world that shocked her with their clarity. He counted early. He sang in a sweet voice all the songs she taught him—Alice liked to sing—and repeated them sometimes for Peter, at Alice’s urging. Even Peter smiled, on these occasions.
When he cried, he was easy to console, said Sharon. Alice heard him overnight—she always did—but his cries were over quickly.
When Bear was two, though, and saying words, he suddenly began to cry for Alice in the night. Mamma, he began to say.
The first night he did this, Alice sat up straight in bed.
“What is it?” said Peter, sleepily.
Down the hall, Bear called again. Mamma.
“He’s never done that before,” said Alice. Peter shrugged. Turned over.
“Sharon’s in the room with him,” said Peter. “She’ll tell us if anything’s wrong.”
The cries stopped quickly, but Alice couldn’t sleep for an hour. What if he had been calling for her because of something Sharon was doing? What if she was hurting him in some way?
The next night, the same thing happened, and the next. Until one night, she heard him say, clearly and plaintively—Mamma, you hear me?
The first time he called out this way, Alice bolted out of bed with an urgency she had never felt before. Her whole body was on fire with the need to go to her son. Peter, behind her, called after her, but she didn’t stop.
She threw open the door to Bear’s nursery, and light from the hallway spilled in. Sharon was still prone on the twin bed in her corner of the room,
awake but unmoving. When she saw Alice she sat up. Her nightgown was bunched up around her knees. She wore curlers in her hair.
“Mrs. Van Laar, what are you doing?” said Sharon, but Alice was already at Bear’s crib. There he was, her son, soft in his cotton pajamas, his arms outstretched to her, grinning now with glee at the novelty of seeing his mother overnight. She lifted him out and he wrapped his limbs around her tightly and her body rewarded her, flooded her with the same calm that came whenever she was reunited with her son.
“Mrs. Van Laar,” said Sharon, and Bear said, “Mamma!” Delighted. He put both hands on her cheeks. She put her forehead to his.
Then, from the doorway, she heard a different voice. Peter’s. Angry.
“Alice,” he said. “What are you thinking?”
She turned to him, the boy still in her arms. “He called out for me,” she said.
Peter held a hand out, palm up, in Sharon’s direction. “He has his nurse right here,” he said. Sharon nodded once, firmly, victoriously.
“Give him to Sharon,” said Peter. “Alice.”
Her son held her more tightly.
“Alice,” said Peter. And he went to her, and took the boy gently from her —immediately, Bear began to wail—and handed him to Sharon, in her curlers, in her nightgown, and then he took Alice by the elbow and led her from the room.
Bear’s cries continued. For ten minutes, he cried forcefully, screaming for Alice.
It was torture: a sort of physical distress that surpassed almost every pain she’d ever known. Alice cried too. “He needs me,” she said. “Peter, he’s calling for me.”
“Put some beeswax in your ears,” said Peter. “Tie yourself to a mast.”
She didn’t know what he was talking about. He often spoke in riddles, or used references to literature or history that she didn’t understand. She felt he got some pleasure out of doing so—out of flaunting his education, when she didn’t have one. Not like his, anyway. During the day, the long hours in between her mornings and evenings with Bear, she sometimes tried to make
herself read the books in Peter’s library that he had kept from college. But generally she got bored of them, and went for walks instead, or read smutty novels she’d found in bins outside the public library in town.
Mamma? Bear called down the hall—one more time, a certain defeat in his voice—one more question unanswered, and finally he was silent.
“I can’t do this,” whispered Alice. She was certain Peter was asleep. He hadn’t moved in minutes.
But he spoke to her. “You can,” he said.
You will, he meant.
• • •
Now, in labor with her second child, Alice was fighting the urge to push.
If she could just keep the child inside her, she thought—if she could just protect him or her from the world for one minute longer.
But the urge was becoming unbearable, and at last a balding doctor was brought in holding a mask, which he placed over her face without warning.
She remembered this from Bear’s birth. This is very rude, Alice thought, and then suddenly she had no more words.
That was when she heard her own name being called—not Alice, but Mamma, a distressed cry that she recognized at once as her son’s.
• • •
Bear was there.
He was standing in a corner, eight years old, wearing an expression she had rarely ever seen on his beautiful face. Over the nurse’s shoulder, she saw him, and she cried out.
“He’s there,” she said—“he’s right there.”
Why did nobody notice him? “He’s come back,” said Alice. The search was over.
She tried to point but the nurse restrained her.
“Please,” said Alice. “Please bring him to me. I don’t want him to leave
again.”
Bear was flickering now, candle-like.
“Go to him,” Alice said. “Please, please. He’s leaving.”
She had to get off the bed. She had to get to him. If she didn’t get to him quickly he would be gone. She rocked left and right.
“Mrs. Van Laar,” the doctor said, “Mrs. Van Laar, you need to keep still.”
With all of her strength she wrested her ankles from the doctor’s grip and rose off the table. She was trying to get her legs to the floor.
In the corner, Bear raised his arms to her as if he were a toddler who wanted to be held. It was unbearable—unbearable—to be kept from him.
The doctor shouted something she could not understand. She was weeping, and she could not see well, but she was almost to the corner where Bear was.
He stretched his hands toward her, and she lunged for him. She could almost touch him. She could almost feel his skin. Her hands and his hands grasped for one another.
Someone took hold of her. She was forced backward, onto the bed. Her limbs were held down by hands and then cords.
She was wailing now, openly, great yells that shook her whole body, and the nurse put a hand on her forehead, telling her it would be all right, that her baby was coming soon.
My baby is there, thought Alice. In the corner. Right there.
Over and over again she wailed his name. Bear. Bear. And the name itself became a chant or incantation, assumed all of its many meanings at once.
Abide. Endure. Sustain. Accept. Convey. Bring forth. Give birth to.
If she said it enough, she thought, perhaps the word would summon him in her direction.
But it was too late: he flickered out of sight, and was gone.
He had left her again. The place in the corner where he had been was empty.
The mask was placed abruptly over her mouth, this time for longer.
Then she slept.
• • •
“It’s a girl, Mrs. Van Laar,” said the doctor.
She opened her eyes. Closed them. The light overhead was too bright.
Bear, she thought, and she sat up as well as she could, but still he was gone.
“My son,” she said—but the words came out in a croak.
“Your daughter,” said the doctor, bringing the baby to her. She was wrapped in a blanket. He held her out to Alice expectantly, but her arms were heavy at her sides.
“Mrs. Van Laar,” said the doctor. He was young, despite his hairline, and he sounded frightened. “Are you all right?”
There was a window in the room and it faced a courtyard. Through the glass, Alice could see a very green tree waving its branches. Beyond the tree
was another building, and then sky.
“Mrs. Van Laar?”
• • •
A nurse came and grasped her arm.
“This will clear your milk up,” said the nurse. And she gave her a shot before Alice could respond. She had not nursed Bear. She had a half-formed thought that she would have liked to try it, once, with this child.
In the hallway, murmuring. Peter’s voice: he’d arrived from work.
After a moment he came into the room, holding the new baby in his arms.
He sat down on the bed with her. Two nurses hovered behind him and he turned to them, speaking sharply.
“A little privacy, please,” he said, and they scattered.
Then he turned back to Alice.
“Peter,” said Alice, urgently. “I saw Bear. He was right there.” She pointed to the corner. She could picture him: tall for his age and handsome, in need of a haircut, wearing his favorite blue shirt. His fingernails with dirt beneath them from love of the woods. One baby tooth missing.
“We have to find him,” she said. “He’s alive, Peter. He was here.”
But Peter was shaking his head. “It was the gas they gave you.”
“It wasn’t,” said Alice. Her voice rose, and she knew she would cry. “I
saw him.”
Peter was shaking his head.
“I think it was a sign,” said Alice. “Even if he wasn’t here. I think it was a sign that he’s alive.”
She lowered her face into her hands, hiding. Peter hated crying.
Inside the dark of her hands she heard him sigh. Next would come shouting.
But instead she felt his hand on the side of her face. She grasped it.
“Look at me,” said Peter, with surprising gentleness. “Look at me. He’s
gone.”
“You don’t know that,” said Alice.
Peter paused. “We have to live our lives as if he is, Alice.” He looked down at the baby in his arms, who stretched a tiny hand suddenly upward and then let it down.
“Barbara,” said Peter. He pronounced it in three syllables. Bar-ba-rah.
“I’d like to name her Barbara.”
Alice was caught off guard. Twice, in the past month, she had tried to broach the subject of names with him. She liked Darien for a boy—she had known a boy with that name in her youth, and had always found it beautiful —and Charlotte for a girl. But each time she asked, Peter had brushed her off, saying he was busy.
Now here he was, next to her, suggesting a name she had never considered at all. Barbara. She knew several people with the name—all of them Peter’s age. It was a name she associated more with his generation than the baby’s.
“If that’s all right with you,” added Peter, finally.
“Why Barbara?” asked Alice.
“It’s just a name I’ve always liked,” said Peter. “I think it has a nice ring to it. Bar-ba-rah Van Laar.”
And he gazed down at his daughter with such sudden tenderness that Alice said she liked it too. It was important, she had heard, to let one’s husband feel invested in the children. Any interest he expressed should be rewarded.
• • •
It was only later, when they were back in the Albany house after a week in the hospital, that Alice found the book of names she had bought from a bookstore. This was when she was expecting with Bear—whose Christian name, too, had been chosen without her input.
She turned to the section on girls’ names, and then to the page on Barbara.
From the Greek word “barbaros,” said the book, meaning “foreign,”
“wild,” or “strange.”
Alice looked up with a jolt. How terrible, she thought—how absolutely terrible to name a baby strange.
The book went on. “Barbarian” derives from the same root, it said cheerfully.
Alice shuddered. Did everyone know this about Barbara? She often had trouble discerning what sort of knowledge was common, and what facts were considered obscure.
She closed the book sharply, resigned. She wouldn’t bring it up with Peter —she couldn’t. The name was fixed, the birth certificate issued. She’d just live with it, she thought. There were lots of famous Barbaras, after all.
Alice
1950s | 1962 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
or two months after Barbara came home, things seemed better. AF newborn in the house distracted her from her grief—which to that point had felt all-consuming.
She hadn’t wanted to get pregnant so quickly after Bear. It was Peter who insisted they try. We aren’t getting younger, he said.
Besides, he said, it will give you something to do.
• • •
But something changed in the middle of Barbara’s third month, when, in the early hours of the morning, Alice woke to the sound of a child calling for her.
Conceptually, she understood that an infant of Barbara’s age could not produce her mother-name, the name Bear gave her. Mamma.
She sat up in bed. Held still. Listened.
There it was again.
Mamma.
• • •
The nursery was dark and quiet. She tiptoed into it. The new nurse, Lorraine, was asleep on one side. Barbara was asleep on the other. For two minutes,
Alice listened, standing in her nightgown in the center of the room. But there was only silence.
She tiptoed out again, and as she was closing the door behind her, there it came: Mamma.
She pivoted. Drifted back toward the nursery that used to be Bear’s. Put a
hand on the doorknob.
“Alice.”
She jumped.
At the end of the hallway was Peter, frowning.
“Go back to bed,” he said.
• • •
It kept happening. She heard the voice each night. Sometimes, it seemed to be coming from outside her window. Sometimes, from a lower floor. Often, from the nursery.
Despite the night nurse, she slept very little.
Peter, noticing this, brought in the family doctor—the same elderly physician who’d been treating the Van Laars since Peter’s father was in his twenties.
Dr. Lewis was his name, and the first pill he ever prescribed to Alice was meant to help her sleep.
But the word broke through the pills, inflecting her dreams with dark and anxious images. Mamma. Mamma, came the call.
She couldn’t talk to Peter. She couldn’t talk to her own family. Everyone in her life encouraged her to move on, to move forward on the assumption that Bear would not ever be found.
But this, for Alice, was an impossible task.
Until she had proof to the contrary, she allowed herself to imagine that her son might still exist in the world, someplace just out of sight, an actor in the wings who might at any moment walk onstage.
Alice would wonder, later, whether this notion was what prevented her from fully embracing Barbara. Some part of her feared that Bear—wherever
he was, in this world or the next—would sense some division in her motherly heart, would vanish or perish because of it.
And so each night, before she fell under the spell of Dr. Lewis’s pills, she did not pray that the voice she heard would stop, but that it would come to her, again and again. That Bear, in any form possible, would continue to visit her for the rest of her life.
The problem began when Bear’s visits got longer.
Alice
1950s | 1962 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
t was a nice place, and very discreet.I These were the two words that everyone used when describing it.
Her parents were the ones to take her, presumably at the request of her husband and father-in-law. They were silent, all of them, for the three-hour drive. Not even the radio played.
• • •
When imagining the hospital, Alice had pictured something historic— something not dissimilar in appearance, in fact, from Self-Reliance. Set in nature, perhaps. A beautiful old building where she’d be given time to rest.
Instead, the building—on the North Shore of Long Island—was brand-new, Brutalist in style, made of yellowy concrete that darkened in the rain. The grounds were treeless and barren. On benches here and there, uniformed employees sat with charges who looked half asleep.
Perhaps they had the wrong place, thought Alice. But no, there was the sign: The Dunwitty Institute. Founded by a friend of Dr. Lewis, who had recommended it.
In the front seat, her father turned his head toward her mother, trying unsuccessfully to catch her eye. Surely they, too, saw what she saw; certainly they’d understand that some mistake had been made. But her mother got out
of the car without a word, and her father, after a beat, followed suit. Then he opened the back door for Alice.
• • •
She had no roommate. At least there was that. She was granted this privilege, said a nurse, by virtue of her family connection to Dr. Dunwitty. The nurse— a thin frowning woman in her late middle age—had revealed this disapprovingly, clearing her throat after speaking the words as if ridding her
mouth of their taste.
No books were allowed. No television.
The only permitted activities were puzzles of various kinds: jigsaw, crossword, acrostic. There was some theory behind this, no doubt; idly, Alice wondered what it might be.
What she hated most was that Bear didn’t visit her here. The first night, she prayed that he would: some company would have been nice.
Instead, she was visited only by nightmares in which she returned to those terrible first days of searching, in which she was thwarted over and over again by forces or people she couldn’t control. When they were children, Delphine had called them can’t-get-there dreams: visions of missed trains and exams, traffic that stopped the car just before the boat departed. They’d happened to Alice all her life, but none of them compared to the ones she had at the Dunwitty Institute.
• • •
For one month, she had no visitors, and she was permitted no telephone calls.
On the thirty-first day she was there, a nurse came into her room and retrieved her. Alice followed her, puzzled, down a long hallway she’d never seen before. At its end was a pay phone. The nurse handed Alice a coin.
Alice looked at it.
“Well?” said the nurse. “Go ahead.”
But there was no one, she realized, that she wanted to call.
She fed the coin into the pay phone. Dialed a number she remembered from childhood. On the other end, a woman’s voice.
“Is Geraldine home?” Alice asked. The name of a friend from Brearley, to whom she had not spoken since she’d married Peter.
A pause. “May I ask who’s speaking?”
“This is Alice, Mrs. DeWitt. Alice Ward.”
“Oh, Alice,” said Mrs. DeWitt. “Alice, I was so sorry to hear—”
Swiftly, she hung up the phone.
• • •
A week after that, she was told she had a visitor.
If she had known who it would be, she wouldn’t have emerged from her room. But she didn’t ask, and this was how she came to find herself face-to- face, across a table set for checkers, with her sister, Delphine.
Alice turned to the nurse. “I want to leave,” she said. “I don’t want to be here. I’d like to go back to my room, please.”
But the nurse said: “Come now, that’s your sister, and she’s driven such a long way.”
Delphine smiled tightly, first at the nurse and then at Alice. “I won’t keep her long, Nurse,” said Delphine, using her grandest and airiest voice. And the nurse, obedient, practically bowed her way out of the room.
• • •
For some minutes, they sat in silence. The only way to survive this, thought Alice, was to imagine herself into a different world. And so, just as she had done in childhood, she closed her eyes, sitting quite upright, and left the earthly world.
You’re outside Bear’s room, she thought. He’ll wake up shortly. He’ll call
for you.
“Alice,” said her sister.
Mamma, thought Alice.
“Alice. Can you hear me?”
Mamma.
“I’m sorry,” said Delphine.
