Oh, God. Was he calling for her, crying for her now? She felt so helpless, it was all she could do not to claw the hair out of her own scalp, not to scream and scream until she had no voice left, not to heave her sobs deeper and deeper into his pillow until she couldn’t breathe. Low, sorrowful moans escaped her as she clutched her fists around wads of blanket and clenched the stuffed dalmatian and alligator puppet and train pillow and polar bear and all the other remnants of her son that failed to comfort her but that she could not resist holding because she had nothing else to hold. It hurt, dreadfully, being surrounded by his things. She might have managed to get a bit more sleep—any sleep, really—in her own bed. But lying here seemed like a protest, a prayer, sent out into the universe. I am supposed to be with Bear, she was saying. Bear is supposed to be with me. Every hour of the day or night that she wasn’t curled up here in Bear’s place—and those hours were as few as she could make them, though Gram was starting to get more insistent about propping her up, marionetting her through the motions of a human being’s day—she felt as if she was ticking down the minutes until she could return. She wanted only to bury her head and focus every bit of her energy back on the useless task of wishing with all of her heart that she would wake up to find that this was all just a bad dream.
The physicality with which Violet missed Bear was the most unbearable component of her pain. She felt his absence like a phantom limb. He had been cut from her without anesthesia, the act as shocking and abrupt as it was absolute, and her wound was laid so bare for the world to see that amputation didn’t seem like a far-fetched comparison. She felt the space where he used to be as an emptiness that could not be described as mere yearning or longing. It was painful. It was ugly. It was unnatural. And yet in spite of how horrifying it was, in spite of the fact that she felt nothing but his absence whether she was awake or asleep, somehow her cruel subconscious mind could not stop from a hundred times a day turning her head to look for him, tuning her ear to listen for him, or opening her mouth to speak to him before realizing with a start that he was not there.
She’d gone from being a full-time mom to being a mom who was unable to actively mother. She was acutely aware that mother was both a noun and a verb, and left without the ability to take action, the reality struck her that it was no longer possible to be who she was without Bear. Not even a little bit. Not even for a moment, let alone days, a week—how long would it be? How long could she go on this way? How long could Bear? How long could Finn?
She’d once read a description of new motherhood that had struck her, at the time that she was returning to work after maxing out her maternity leave allowance, as a beautiful metaphor for her own days back at the office. It was that mother and baby are like a ball of yarn, and when the mother leaves the baby’s side, it’s as if the baby grabs hold of the loose end, a tug that both mother and baby feel in their every fiber. As they both move through the hours spent apart, the string unravels more and more, and then just when each is starting to feel diminished, barely even a ball of yarn at all anymore, it’s time for the mother to make her way back. Together again, they need only a bit of time to wind the string back up, and then it’s as if they had never been apart, right up until they wake up and do it all over again.
Whenever Violet had picked up the infant Bear from day care, he always wanted to nurse first thing when they got home, even if he’d just had a bottle. She’d thought of this as Bear’s way of winding the string back up. Where had she read that? She was almost certain it had been in a novel. She always had preferred fiction—a fact that had not struck her as grounds for self-analysis until precisely now.
As Bear became a toddler, Violet thought less and less of that metaphor. But now she knew that it wasn’t something they’d outgrown. Because Violet was completely, unequivocally unwound. And the only thing worse than being unwound herself was the knowledge that wherever Bear was, he had to be unwound too. Where did he think she was? Did he understand that she couldn’t get to him—not that she wouldn’t, but that she couldn’t? What had Finn told him? She’d read online that a lot of parental abductions involved the abducting parent informing the child that the other parent was dead. She couldn’t imagine Finn being so cruel as to do that to either Bear or her. But then again, she couldn’t imagine Finn being so cruel as to take Bear from her at all.
She had conducted her own investigation, of course, left to her own devices within the walls of their home. But they hadn’t lived here long enough to amass much to go through. The fact that her husband had not brought to their relationship much in the way of worldly artifacts, and did not lead much of a digital life, had never struck her as anything other than a part of his character. Having lost his parents in showstopping medical emergencies, he’d had to sell the house where he grew up, along with nearly everything in it, to pay the bills not covered by insurance. His relatives, all of them distant, tried to help, but his independent streak brushed them away. A recent college graduate at the time, apartment bound, he hadn’t had room to hang on to possessions for sentimental reasons in any case. He loved the outdoors; he loved art; he had what he needed to be happy even when he had nothing at all. He spent too much of his days at the computer screen to spend his nights there too. He was not overly social beyond his close, trusted circle, and so why would social media have appealed? She had loved her husband not in spite of but in part because of these qualities. She resented the implication that she should have ever thought them strange.
The not knowing why he had done this or where he had gone was enough to make her feel as if she might be on the verge of something essential coming loose in her mind. And of course she couldn’t let that happen. Bear would need her. Bear did need her. She knew it as sure as she knew that her husband was not at all the man she had thought he was.
6
AUGUST 2010
Long shadows stretched across Fountain Square as the sun streamed hazily between the high-rise buildings from its position sinking lower in the sky. The tall bronze statues showering the brick and stone with mist always reminded Finn of the iconic fountain in Savannah’s Forsyth Park, and he caught himself pining for the Spanish moss–lined squares of the historic district there, instead of this one in the decidedly unatmospheric Midwest. It had become a bad habit, wishing things away, longing to be somewhere else. He reminded himself that he was here in search of someone who just might help him break it. He didn’t know if he could shake it on his own. He suspected that having become so entirely on his own was part of the problem.
Finn had been hoping she’d wear the Camp Pickiwicki shirt again—he hadn’t exactly been worried he wouldn’t recognize her without it, but he hadn’t exactly been confident he would either. Now that he was here, though, he felt certain the woman from the beach was not among the people milling about or perching around him. None of them remotely resembled her. He pressed the button to illuminate his cell phone screen: 7:20. Traffic had been awful for some unknown reason, but still, it struck him as out of character that she’d be more than twenty minutes late. He immediately recognized the thought as ridiculous. Of course he knew nothing about her character. Why would he feel like he did?