In fact, Dinah Whitcomb was a source of much merriment. She laughed a good deal, and she inspired laughter in others. She did not ever speak of her own situation, nor did she allude to it. Like one who is tethered to an enormous boulder, which she must drag with her when she moves, she felt no obvious need to speak of her disability but rather more an instinct to make light of it.
Her worst days, she still used a cane. But this was rare.
She walked swaying. But God damn, she walked.
In the park, at lunchtime, talking and laughing with the young mothers, as if she were not a woman now of thirty-four and no longer young and no longer a mother.
As she talked and laughed with Rhoda, Tracey, and Evan she watched their children playing together at the sandbox. In a paralysis of yearning and wonderment she watched. When she’d had Robbie, in this park, she’d been so caught up in the minutiae of young-motherhood, like a swimmer in a turbulent sea, she hadn’t had much awareness of herself, as she had now; for now, nothing seemed so astonishing to her as the fact that, six years before, she’d been one of these young mothers and she had not grasped the miracle.
Now, it took her breath away.
The children were so beautiful! So funny, needy, exasperating, endearing …
She could not ever tell these young mothers what frightened her: that she’d begun to forget what Robbie looked like. That she needed to page through the albums, to hold the snapshots to the light, to recall.
This forgetfulness had begun soon after the neurological damage. Yet Dinah did not think it was neurological but a failing of spiritual strength.
That was her terrible secret: her unworthiness.
Eleven years old! She felt faint and sick, she could not imagine her son now.
Poor Dinah! They should’ve had another baby.
Either that or kill yourself. I mean—what could you do?
The children’s cries over-excited her. The children digging in the sandbox, playing at the teeter-totter, as Robbie had done. There was always a boy very like Robbie … That morning she’d driven out of her way for the first time in more than a year to pass, slowly, the Montessori school where her son had been enrolled six years before.
It was never such a wild stretch of the imagination that Robbie would be waiting for her at the rear, with his little friends …
Talking and laughing and trying not to recall. One of her rueful little anecdotes involving my husband.
She meant to be entertaining. The women knew Whit Whitcomb who was a quasi-public figure in Ypsilanti–Ann Arbor, host of local fund-raisers, co-chair of the annual spring Walk-A-Thon for Memorial Children’s Hospital and more recently the Walk/ Bark for Autism—a ten-mile hike through the University of Michigan arboretum in which dog owners and their dogs participated, with much publicity and success.
He hadn’t wanted another child. He hadn’t wanted to try.
In secret, she’d tried. But she had not succeeded.
It was a spiritual failing, she believed. Not physical, or not physical merely.
She was losing the train of her thought. She’d been entertaining her friends with a story about an experiment in one of her social psychology laboratories, but she was losing the point of the anecdote, and sensing their discomfort. That poor woman! She can’t stop talking.
It was the proximity of the children here in the playground. Their high sharp cries were distracting to her. Already six years before these live children had begun to replace Robbie in the world.
She stammered and fell silent. The others were silent, abashed.
She snatched at the Evian water, drank and dribbled water down her chin.
Her mother had said of her in sharp disappointment Dinah! You’ve let yourself go.
In Geraldine McCracken’s vocabulary that was the worst you could do—let yourself go.
It was very hard to confront herself in a mirror. The most torturous were three-way mirrors at rehab.
Papery-thin scar tissue in layers. The thin-lashed eyes like eyes peering through a mask. Her face was the most subtle of Hallowe’en horror-masks since it mimicked actual skin.
The uncanny valley in which the degree of the unbearable increases as the nonhuman approaches the look of the human. Dinah had learned of the uncanny valley in her graduate psychology course and had wanted to say to the professor wittily, Hey I live there!
In a paroxysm of itching she’d scratched, scratched, scratched her face while sleeping and woke confused and bleeding and there was Whit staring at her in horror.
Dinah. My God.
There was the impulse to scratch with her fingernails now. But Dinah would not.
Not in public: no scratching her face, no touching. No feeling-sorry-for-herself.
It was time to leave Admiral Park. She must not stay long.
She’d hoped for a quick little farewell to one of the children—a hug, a kiss—but this wasn’t going to happen, it seemed. For the children were at the sandbox and it would seem very odd for her to approach them.
Her face frightened them. The just-perceptible misalignment of her jaw, and the focus in her right eye.
In the street, she often saw people staring at her. And at the university where she’d re-enrolled in a graduate program in social psychology.
Either they knew who she was, or suspected.
Or they had no idea who she was but were startled by her appearance.
When she rose to leave, one of the young mothers leapt up to help her, for her right knee buckled in pain.
Her awkward body quivering in pain, she would not acknowledge.
Her face draining of blood she laughed in farewell. Bravely she walked away.
Knowing that they were looking after her, pitying her. Knowing they would be speaking of her.
Poor Dinah! She just talks, talks …
Is she on medication, do you think?
Oh God. What hell for her. And her husband …
Do you think she talks like that all the time? At home?
It was true, Dinah talked too much. Dinah talked without listening to her own scratchy voice. Dinah prized those moments when a listener smiled and laughed. When she’d amused.
It was an addiction of hers, Whit said.
She’d forced herself to give up her prescription of OxyContin, Vicodin. She limited herself to Tylenol for pain and for sleepless nights. She didn’t allow herself to drink as much as a glass of wine—if she began, she might not be able to stop.
Haunting parks, playgrounds. Even the Libertyville Mall. And driving past the Montessori school. These were the addictions.
Her volunteer work was more plausibly integrated into her adult life. It was addictive too, but it was of genuine use to others.
Whit didn’t criticize Dinah’s volunteer work. But his own volunteer work did not overlap with hers any longer.
Crossing a street from Admiral Park she nearly lost her balance. But for her pride, she’d have brought her cane.
Ma’am? You needin some help?
Thank you, no. I’m—fine.
Dubiously the girl watched her. Jamaican, young, in the white uniform of a medical worker.
Whit had said, take the damn cane with you, at least! It’s just your pride, plenty of people use canes.
Her mother hated seeing Dinah with the cane. Still more, with the walker. Oh Dinah look at you! My daughter.
When she rose to her feet after sitting for a while, there was often a roaring in her head. It would require a few minutes for Dinah to get her bearings, it was not serious.
She’d had MRIs. No further neurological damage had been discovered in the injured part of her brain.
In recent months she’d had another brain scan, an echocardiogram, an angiogram, a colonoscopy, and much bloodwork.
She continued with physical therapy, intermittently. She’d ceased seeing a psychotherapist, as Whit had. There was no point, for there was nothing wrong with either of them that the return of their lost son would not re
medy.
The fact is, she’d let Robbie go. She’d had his hand firmly in hers and then …
A therapist will work with you on issues of guilt. But a therapist cannot work with you on the primary issue, the reversal of the situation that has caused guilt.
The children in the playground had over-excited her, that was it. For always there was one who might have been Robbie seen from the back, or the side …
Always there was one whose voice, heard at a little distance, uplifted, elated, excited, was Robbie’s voice …
Mommy? Mom-my!
And somehow, the child-voice was her own. So wistful!
Mom-my …
Her mother e-mailed links to Dinah, Web sites and home pages involving other missing children. For there were so many.
And when Geraldine visited, and Whit wasn’t near, Geraldine was likely to unfold for Dinah a newspaper article from the Detroit News about a child-abduction in, for instance, New Mexico, or Florida, or North Dakota—7-Year-Old Taken from Backyard, No Witnesses.
And, 10-Year-Old Abducted by Car-Jacker, Mother in Hospital.
Please don’t show me these things, Mother—so Dinah begged.
In these six years, Geraldine too had aged. But you would have to see her near-flawless face in a harsh light, and to consider the tight, taut skin around her eyes, to register this fact.
It was one of the prevailing subjects of which the young mothers in the park spoke: their mothers, and their mothers-in-law.
Inescapably, a world of women. Dinah recalled a play of the English Renaissance—Women Beware Women.
Or was the title Women Betray Women.
Possibly it was rude, yes of course it was rude, but everyone did it, the young mothers, and not-so-young Dinah Whitcomb: checking for cell phone messages, e-mail.
Though Dinah Whitcomb checked more compulsively than the others.
Dozens of times a day. Always with hope.
For one day the news would come. One day, the vigil would end.
She had no doubt. Not for a moment.
Unlike Whit who said with a savage laugh, he doubted the very ground upon which he walked.
Back at the Missing Children center she managed to collapse at her desk. It was a plain bare battered Salvation Army desk with a landline—the “hotline” that rarely rang. How weak she felt, like water rushing out of a drain. Voices came to her at a distance. Why do we care for other people, why do we love them, grieve for them, yearn for them, require them?—when we will die alone, far from them.
So weak! She could rest her heavy head on her crossed arms, hide her ruined face against the desktop and sleep and never wake.
Dinah? Dinah? Dinah?
Never wake.
* * *
Leila said, Oh! let me see it.
He showed her. One of the colored chalk portraits.
What a beautiful child … His name was—Robbie?
He smiled. He smiled in order not to say something very cutting to her.
His name is Robbie.
Oh yes I mean—is.
Six years before, Whit had taken up sketching. He’d always had a predilection for drawing, a facile talent for cartooning and caricaturing, but when Robbie was taken from them, and photographs of Robbie were publicly posted, Whit began sketching his son with colored chalks based upon memory as well as photographs. It had been Whit’s intention to update Robbie’s portrait with the passage of time but he hadn’t been so successful at this and eventually gave up.
The Michigan State Police and the FBI provided “updated” photo-images of Robbie from time to time but these uncanny images were discomforting to Whit and Dinah. Especially to Dinah who reacted emotionally.
There was something robot-like about the updated images of his son. As if an alien being had insinuated itself inside five-year-old Robbie Whitcomb and was forcing his child-body into a new shape, and his child-face into a new face, a stranger to his parents.
Robbie’s room was more or less untouched. Whit knew that Dinah entered the room at least once each day but he had no idea what she did in the room or how long she remained in it. Whit very rarely stepped inside, though the door was always kept open.
The most obvious change was, they’d removed the disturbing posters they had not liked. In their place, they’d substituted Whit’s colored-chalk portraits of Robbie.
Whit would have liked to move out of the house—it was too small, ordinary, confining. He’d had too many sleepless nights here and too much anguish. The early memories of his feckless happy fatherhood had been abraded by more recent memories of disgust, fury.
He’d have liked to move ten miles west to Ann Arbor where he had many friends and far more admiring listeners to his radio program than he had in Ypsilanti.
But Dinah refused. To move away from this house, from Robbie’s room, was to abandon Robbie.
Whit didn’t argue with Dinah. Whit tried to respect Dinah’s beliefs—her superstitions.
His smart sardonic wife. Now attending services at the Community of Christ Church, Ypsilanti.
(To her credit, Dinah was embarrassed about this. Dinah didn’t want Geraldine, a long-lapsed Catholic, to know.)
(It was just for the atmosphere, Dinah had told Whit. Singing, holding hands, rejoicing in being alive, not thinking.)
Carmella had said, You can’t ever leave her, Whit. Because you’d be leaving him.
Whit didn’t dispute this. In his vanity he’d wanted to think that a woman like Carmella Fontaine who was artistic director at an experimental Ann Arbor dance-theater would remain with him, in love with him, indefinitely.
After Carmella there’d been others. He was so lonely, so despairing!
His sexual being, the very essence of his soul, had been obliterated, at the time of his son’s abduction. His sense of himself as an individual with some degree of control over his life had vanished utterly. His fatherhood, his manhood, his dignity. Another man, a predator, had taken his son.
It might have been the most ancient and primitive of insults, Whit thought. More even than the abduction of a wife.
For wasn’t the Biblical story of Abraham and Isaac the most terrifying of all Bible stories, in making of a loving father an accomplice to a wrathful God?
And there were the injuries to Dinah.
Rarely had Whit tried to make love with his wife for he feared hurting her. And he felt—well, he didn’t feel anything like his old desire for her, that had been obliterated forever, however brave and sexily brash poor Dinah might try to present herself.
We need another baby, Whit. Please.
Dinah, you’re not well.
I am well. Women far more disabled than I am have gotten pregnant and given birth.
You’re not strong enough. We’ve been through this.
We’ve discussed it, but—we haven’t been through this. When Robbie comes home, whenever that is, he would expect to see a younger sister or brother—it’s only natural. He would expect a family.
This was so utterly insane, Whit couldn’t trust himself to reply.
Gotten pregnant was an expression that particularly revolted him. How did a woman get pregnant, was it something one did for oneself? With a syringe, an eyedropper?
Another new craziness of Dinah’s was vegetarianism.
Her revulsion for meat, for the very sight of meat, and the idea of meat—enslavement and slaughter of innocent animals. On several occasions at friends’ houses Dinah had become white-faced and nauseated by the smell of grilling meat, had had to excuse herself and rush away staggering to a toilet.
Great company they were, the Whitcombs!
All the more intolerable since Whit Whitcomb so loved barbecued ribs, sushi, roast pig, beef tartar, rack of lamb and the better cuts of steak.
The fact was, he’d come to hate Dinah.
The fact was, he loved Dinah. Of course he loved Dinah. It was a vow he’d taken, he would always love Dinah McCracken and he would always protect her from harm.
Dinah and Robbie. His love for his wife and his son had come so powerfully, he’d felt faint as one inhaling odorless but highly potent fumes. He had not ever loved anyone in his life as he’d loved them—he hadn’t been adult enough for such love, until the birth of his son.
Yet, he was drifting inexorably from Dinah like one in a boat without oars, drifting from another oarless boat. For a while the stream had borne the two boats in the same direction but now the current was changing, the two were separating.
After six years he was burnt-out. His way of grieving had been to actively look for the abductor, to keep calling the Ypsilanti police and the Michigan State Police and the FBI, to print up new flyers, to go on TV and make his appeal. And again, and again—this had been Whit Whitcomb’s way for it was his way too of staying sane.
His way was not to lie on the child’s bed curled into a fetal position sleeping through much of the daylight. Not to attend evangelical Christian church services and sing hymns holding hands with strangers and crying together.
A baby. Paraplegic women can have babies. Let me show you on the Internet.
Whit, please! When Robbie comes back to us he would expect a more normal kind of family.
To the casual glance, Dinah didn’t seem incapacitated. So long as she was seated, and talking—talking was what Dinah did, with much animation—not on her feet, trying to walk with her old ease and grace.
To the casual glance, Dinah didn’t seem disfigured. She appeared to be a few years older than her age, which was thirty-four; she’d gained weight steadily, since a low of one hundred pounds, and now weighed, Whit guessed, as much as one hundred thirty-five pounds. Her shoulders and upper arms were muscular from rehab and weight lifting and those many months when she’d eased the pain-causing pressure on her lower body by walking with a cane, or a walker, or propelling herself about—(“propelled” was Whit’s admiring word)—using counters, backs of chairs, tabletops and railings, like one of those disabled Olympic athletes who perform competitively, and aggressively. Her legs were relatively weak, and thin; her right knee was particularly susceptible to pain. She had migraine headaches that left her blinded, exhausted. She had difficulty typing at a computer and using a pen. She’d built up her injured body around her disabilities as a tree grows stunted yet triumphant around an impediment.
Daddy Love: A Novel Page 16