by Karen Dionne
But now, the idea of spending a long day away from the lodge feels less like an effort and more like a reprieve. Ever since I found Rachel in that cage, the tension in our home has been unbearable. Peter and I have argued more in the past week than we have during our entire marriage. Always behind closed doors and always out of earshot of other family members, but the strain is taking its toll. No matter how many times and in how many ways I try to convince him otherwise, Peter still doesn’t believe that Diana was going to skin her sister. I understand that the very idea sounds outrageous, but he wasn’t there. I know what I saw. The sooner Diana is committed to a mental institution, the better. The one thing we do agree on is that we will let Dr. Merritt’s expertise and advice guide our decision. Thankfully, our appointment is in less than a week.
Meanwhile, I’ve been doing my best to pretend that everything is fine. Rachel still has no idea what nearly happened, and as far as I’m concerned, she never will. At the same time, it’s all I can do to speak to Diana or to sit down with her at the dinner table. Our daughter is well and truly wicked, I told Peter during one of our many arguments, her heart as black and cold as a lump of coal, and while my words were spoken through copious tears in the emotion of the moment, I stand by them. I understand that Diana can’t help what she is, that she is incapable of feeling love or compassion, and that her sole focus on pleasing herself drives her every thought and action. But you can be evil even if you don’t choose it.
I’ve also been having terrible nightmares—so much so that when I crawl into bed at night, I’m afraid to close my eyes. If I could skip sleeping altogether, I would. Always in my dreams I am in some sort of mortal danger: hanging off the edge of our cliff by my fingernails, or taking in great gulps of freezing lake water after our canoe capsizes, or being mauled by one of our wolves or bears. In each instance Diana has the power to rescue me but doesn’t. Either she stands at the top of the cliff looking down at me and laughing, or she stomps on my fingers until I am forced to let go, or she tosses the life preserver that will save me in the opposite direction. It’s not hard to imagine what Dr. Merritt would have to say about that.
Then there’s my sister. Charlotte and I have barely spoken since I discovered Diana’s flensing knives in the girls’ tree fort. I can barely stand to look at her, knowing what her betrayal almost cost me. There’s no way the girls could have built that fort without her turning a blind eye. Peter says I’m being childish and that we’ll have to start talking again eventually. I haven’t told him that as soon as Diana is gone, I am going to ask my sister to leave.
Peter downs the last of his coffee and pushes away from the breakfast table and picks up the picnic basket beside the door. “Ready?”
“Almost. But leave the basket there for a sec. I still have to put Rachel’s present inside.”
I go to the pantry and take the vintage Steiff bear I found at Rachel’s and my favorite antiques shop from its hiding place on a high shelf. Technically, this is a polar bear and not a black bear, but with a little imagination, a person could easily think it was a certain beloved albino. Rachel’s going to love it.
I tuck the bear in a corner of the basket and Peter carries the basket outside.
“Girls?” I call up the stairs. “Come on down now. Your dad’s waiting.”
As my daughters clatter down the stairs—Diana tall and blond and as thin and beautiful as a model, Rachel short and pudgy with brown hair and eyes and a ravenous sweet tooth—the moment feels so ordinary I could almost believe that we are a normal family. There was a time when I thought that “normal” was a bad word, that there might be nothing worse than being average, and unless a person aspired to something greater, they were dull and unimaginative. Now I crave normality the way Rachel loves her sugar.
Diana yawns and digs at her eyes. “No coffee?” she asks as she lifts the empty pot.
“I put the rest in the thermos. You can have a cup after we’re on the road.” If we’re going to make it to the falls in time to hike to both the Upper and Lower Falls and have our picnic, we need to get going.
Diana drags herself out to the Suburban with as much enthusiasm as if we’d asked her to clean the horse stables. Honestly, if it were up to me, we’d have left her at home, but I couldn’t think of a way to exclude her that wouldn’t disappoint Rachel.
“I’m hungry,” Diana complains after we’ve been on the road for barely an hour. Already she’s kept up a constant barrage of complaints: It’s too hot in the car, and when Peter turns down the heat, it’s too cold. Peter is either driving too fast or too slowly, she’s getting carsick in the back seat and wants to trade places with me in the front; Rachel won’t talk to her, Rachel won’t shut up.
“We just ate breakfast,” I say.
“I didn’t.”
And whose fault is that? I want to snap, but I don’t because of Rachel, and also because arguing with Diana goes absolutely nowhere.
“I don’t care if we stop,” Rachel pipes up. Of course, she would. Rachel hates conflict. I’ve read that growing up with a psychopathic sibling can make a child hyper-vigilant, overly dutiful, guilt-ridden, and guarded, which is another reason Diana has to go. I used to believe that being the parents of a psychopathic child was simply the hand we’d been dealt, and that we had no choice but to cope with it as best we could because there was nothing that we could do. Now I know that we could have taken steps—should have taken steps—to control the situation years ago. My only hope now is that it’s not too late.
“It’s too early to stop,” I say. “If we eat our lunch now, we won’t have anything left to eat at the park.”
This isn’t entirely true; I packed plenty of food for both a lunch and a dinner, and we could always stop at a restaurant on the way home if we had to, but I hate the way that Diana’s wishes dominate our family. For all I know, she is only saying this on a whim and isn’t even hungry.
Diana unbuckles her seatbelt and turns around and crouches on her knees to reach into the cargo area and starts digging through the picnic basket.
“Stop that,” I say sharply. I was planning to let Rachel discover her birthday present on her own when we stopped to eat. It would be just like Diana to pull it out now and spoil the surprise.
“Stop it,” I say again as she continues to paw through the basket. Even as I say it I realize that I’m going to have to back off because the only way to make her stop is to let her have her way. “All right. We’ll stop. There’s a roadside park in about thirty miles. We can eat there. Are you okay with that?” I ask Peter.
“Whatever you want,” he says, and I can’t help but think of another long car trip, so many years ago.
Half an hour later we turn in and park beneath a gorgeous yellow maple. During the summer this park is so crowded it’s almost impossible to find an empty table, but tourism in the U.P. falls off sharply after the school year begins and we have our pick. Rachel runs from table to table.
“This one,” she says at last, plopping herself down at a table as far as possible from the only other family, a father, mother, and a daughter who looks to be around Rachel’s age, who are also enjoying a picnic. The table overlooks a small hill with a creek burbling at the bottom.
Peter lifts the hamper onto the table. “Will you help me set out our things?” he asks Rachel. He looks at me over her head and winks.
“Ooh,” she squeals when she lifts the lid and sees her present. She snatches up the bear and cuddles him close and kisses the bald spot on the top of his head. “Thank you, Daddy! Oh, thank you, Mommy! He’s perfect! I’m going to call him ‘White Bear’!”
“You can’t call him ‘White Bear,’” Diana says, her voice dripping with scorn. “We already have a bear with that name.”
Rachel’s face falls. I’m so angry, I could slap Diana. I knew when I imposed a two-week moratorium on taxidermy as punishment for what she was planning to do to
Rachel that she would make us all pay, and indeed, Diana has been even more hateful than usual. But attacking Rachel over such a trifling thing as a stuffed bear’s name is too much.
“Don’t listen to your sister,” I tell Rachel. “He’s your bear. You can call him whatever you like.”
“I’ll ask him what he thinks.” Rachel whispers into the bear’s ear, waits, and nods. “He says he wants to be called ‘White Bear,’” she announces with a grin.
Diana only shakes her head. While I’m thankful she backed off, I can’t help but sigh. Juggling the interactions between my daughters is a full-time job.
The rest of the picnic goes about as I’d expect, with Rachel running around exploring, chatting with the girl at the other table, feeding potato chips to the chipmunks who come to beg, cajoling her father into carving her and Diana’s names into the picnic table, while Diana pokes fun at her or belittles her or criticizes her every move. Now that my eyes have been fully opened to Diana’s constant mistreatment, I’m astonished at the extent to which Rachel is able to put up with it.
“That’s defacing public property,” Diana scolds when Peter pulls out his pocketknife after Rachel shows him where she wants him to carve her name. “You could get arrested for that.”
On another day and under other circumstances, I might well have reacted exactly as Diana did because I’m a bit of a stickler for following the rules, but I am not going to do a single thing to spoil Rachel’s day.
“It’s okay,” I say quickly. “There are plenty of other names. No one will care if we add two more.”
As Peter is putting the finishing touches on the heart he carved around our daughters’ names, a man approaches our table. He looks concerned. For the briefest of moments, I think that he’s with the park service and he’s going to call us out for defacing the table. Then I recognize him as the father of the other family.
“Excuse me,” he says. “Have you seen my girl? She said she was going to check out the nature trail, but now my wife and I can’t find her.”
My stomach gets tight. A girl lost in the woods. A girl the age of Rachel.
“Rachel?” Peter asks. “You were talking to her. Did she tell you where she was going?”
“Uh-huh. She went that way.” Rachel points toward the nature trail.
“You’re sure?”
She nods again.
“We looked,” the man says. “She’s not there.”
Peter extricates himself from the table. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her. Diana, Rachel, Jenny, come on. We’ll each look in a different direction and meet back here in five minutes.”
“Come with me,” Diana says and takes Rachel’s hand. “You’re too little to go by yourself. We don’t want you to get lost.”
The idea of my daughters going off into the woods alone makes my blood run cold. “I’ll go with them,” I say quickly to Peter.
“Emily! Emily!” The forest rings with our cries. The sense of having been here and done this is almost overwhelming. Just last week I called Rachel’s name as I hiked through a forest very similar to this one. I tell myself that this situation is nothing like that one. Odds are the girl is fine. We haven’t been here long—she can’t have gone far. Rachel spoke with her maybe ten or fifteen minutes ago. She can’t have come to any harm.
But when we meet back at our picnic table in five minutes as agreed, no one has seen her.
“This is crazy,” the girl’s father says. “She can’t just disappear. I’m calling 911.” Her mother is near tears.
Peter pulls me aside. “What do you think we should do? If we’re going to make it to the falls and back, we really need to get on the road. But I don’t want to leave if someone’s child is in danger.”
“I agree. If it were my child, I’d want everyone to do everything they could to find her. But this is Rachel’s outing. I think we should leave the decision to her.”
Peter waves Rachel over and explains the situation. “What do you want to do? Should we stick around and help find her, or should we go to the falls? We can’t do both.”
“Stay,” my kindhearted daughter says without a moment’s hesitation. She tugs on Diana’s jacket. “Come on. Let’s keep looking.”
They head for the woods. I trail after them. Diana looks over her shoulder with disgust. I don’t care. My sister left my daughters unsupervised and look where it got us.
As we start down a trail that ends at a scenic lookout, a sheriff’s patrol car pulls up with its lights flashing.
“Hold up,” I call to the girls. “We should go back and talk to the officer, tell him where we’ve looked and let him direct the search.”
“Okay,” the officer says after Peter, Diana, Rachel, and I each tell him what we know. “This is what we’re going to do. Mrs. Walker,” he says to the girl’s mother, “I want you to stay here as our point person.” A kindness, because she looks ready to collapse. “Everyone else keep doing what you’re doing. But stay within earshot and check back here every fifteen minutes. We don’t want someone else getting lost.” He says this as if it’s a joke. It’s not funny.
The girl’s mother bites her lip. I sit down on the picnic bench beside her and slip my arm around her shoulders.
“It will be all right,” I promise. “We’ll stay here as long as it takes to find her.”
She nods, sniffs. I think I can safely say that I know exactly how she feels. I scan the circle of searchers looking for Diana and Rachel, intending to join them, but my daughters are gone.
Gone.
“Did you see where Diana and Rachel went?” I ask Peter. It’s a struggle to keep my voice calm. Nothing happened. It couldn’t have.
“They went that way.” He points toward the dog run.
And you didn’t stop them? I want to scream. You didn’t think to go with them? To tell them to wait for me? How could he let them go off by themselves? He knows what Diana is like. What she did. I take off running.
“Rachel! Diana!” I call. “Wait for me!”
I run faster. Rachel is wearing her favorite green canvas jacket, but Diana is wearing a bright orange hunter’s vest. She should be easy to spot. I sprint across the grass heedless of the fact that this is a dog run, looking for a flash of orange through the trees. I hit the woods and keep going. Branches tear at my hair and my clothes.
“Rachel!”
At last, I see a patch of orange at the bottom of a gully. “Diana!” I call down to her. “Is everything okay? Is Rachel with you? Did you find the girl?”
“Mom! Down here! We found her!” Rachel calls back.
“Is she all right?”
“Just come,” Diana says.
The lack of urgency in her voice leaves me cold. I get a bad feeling. Then again, Diana rarely gets excited about anything.
The ground is so steep I have to hang on to the tree trunks and bushes to keep from rolling all the way down it. When I reach the bottom, I see that Diana is bent over something pink. My heart sinks. The girl is lying on her back. Her eyes are open, and her body is still.
I drop to my knees and place my hand on her chest.
“Don’t bother,” Diana says. “She’s dead.”
“You don’t know that!” I push her aside. The last time that it was in my power to save a life, I didn’t know CPR. I do now. I place one hand on top of the other and press down hard on the girl’s chest. Two-inch- deep compressions, difficult enough while practicing on a dummy, now seem absolutely brutal in reality. I use my body weight to assist. One hundred compressions per minute. I count them off in my head. CPR is much more difficult than people realize, and a lot more physical. In a third of the cases, the patient ends up with cracked or broken ribs—a small trade-off for their life.
“Go,” I tell Diana between beats. “Hurry. Get help. Take Rachel.”
The girls clamber up the hill.
I deliver two rescue breaths with the girl’s head tilted back and her chin lifted, then go back to compressions. For the next minutes, there is only the sound of my breathing as I work to keep her alive. She can’t be dead. She can’t be.
At last the officer scrambles down the hill. The girl’s parents follow on his heels, and behind them, EMTs with a portable defibrillator and a stretcher. The girl is completely unresponsive. I watch the girl’s parents watching them work on their daughter for a long sad minute, then turn and slowly climb the hill. Another child dead. Another child I was unable to save.
Peter is waiting at the picnic table with Diana and Rachel. “Are you okay? Diana said the girl is dead.”
I collapse onto the bench beside him. “She’s gone.”
I hate speaking so plainly in front of Rachel. Then again, she’s no stranger to death, and not only because of her sister’s taxidermy; after all, our beloved bears are omnivores. But this was a person. A little girl like her. I pull her onto my lap as if she were a toddler.
“I’m so sorry you had to see that.” I push her hair out of her eyes and wipe the tears from her cheeks and hold her close. “Sometimes bad things happen.” I wish I had better words, but nothing is going to undo what she’s seen.
“Can we go now?” she asks in a shaky voice. “I don’t want to be here. I want to go home.”
“I do too, sweetie, but we have to wait until the police tell us we can leave. As soon as they’re done talking to us, we can go.”