Dear Doctor Lily

by Monica Dickens

  No one had seen Maggie. Ida walked down the path that crossed empty land to the Commissary. It was closed now. Nothing in the parking lot. No Maggie. She’ll be home, time I get back, wondering where I am.

  No Maggie on the step, too lazy or too oblivious to open the door.

  Ida went to the clearing in the straggly woods behind her house and asked some of the children who were playing there on the bike bumps and in the tottering forts. She went to all the nearby houses, including that of the Englishwoman who had hung out the Union Jack on Independence Day.

  ‘Worried?’ Cora asked.

  ‘Not really. She always comes home.’

  ‘I’d be worried sick,’ Cora said unhelpfully. ‘Here, I’ll help.’ She drove Ida around the streets in her car, making wider and wider circles.

  ‘Let’s go back,’ Ida said. ‘I know she’ll be there.’

  Buddy and Bernie were there. They had not been able to buy bait. At noon, Buddy called the base police. Two men in white helmets and leggings came round in a jeep and talked to them calmly in deep voices, as if their anxiety were the only problem. After lunch – Buddy could always eat – Adam turned up, dusty-pawed and drooping as if he were tired, or guilty.

  ‘Where have you been? Where’s Maggie?’ They took him out on a leash, and encouraged him: ‘Come on, Adam, find Maggie. Good dog, take us to Maggie. Maggie! Maggie!’

  Ida’s lips were dry from repeating the sad little whistle.

  Adam would go along with them, but he would not lead ahead in any direction.

  ‘Useless mutt.’ Buddy aimed a kick at him.

  ‘Don’t, Puppa.’ Bernie went down on his knees to put his arms round the dog.

  ‘He leads her off somewhere and then comes crawling back with his belly on the ground. I’d never oughta brought him home.’

  ‘It’s not your fault.’ Ida was making herself stay calm.

  ‘Who says it is? Goddam dog.’ Buddy jerked the leash, and the dog choked and coughed up foam.

  Adam did not find the glasses. Bernie did. At the corner of their street, Maggie’s bright pink glasses lay in a crack in the sidewalk.

  ‘She don’t see so good without them,’ Ida told the police when they came back. ‘I guess she’s lost.’

  Dusk fell. Night crept in to separate Maggie from her like a wall. Dozens of people were out with flashlights. The military police drove around in jeeps and trucks with spotlight beams. Walkie-talkies appeared. The alarm was out to the town police and the cruiser cars, in case Maggie had wandered off the base, although she never went that far.

  The search was stopped briefly after midnight, and started again at dawn.

  For some reason, Lily called Ida early on Sunday morning to see how she was. When Ida heard her voice, she began to cry noisily, like a howl. Gasping and sobbing, she trembled out the words of crisis, and Lily felt a void open up within her, transposing Isobel or Cathy for Maggie.

  ‘There’s people come from all around, Lil. Hundreds of them, out searching.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ Lily said.

  ‘No, you can’t.’

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  Lily left the children with their grandmother Muriel, and she and Paul drove north. Along the road from the main gate of Watkins to the housing area, they saw groups of people, some with dogs, some men in uniform, going in and out of the trees and bushes, beating at the brushwood with long sticks, and calling. There was a crowd round Ida’s duplex. She was inside with some of the women, getting soup and coffee ready. A brown dog was tied to an outside drainpipe. It sat leaning against the wall of the house, as if it were eavesdropping.

  As Lily got out of the car, she saw Buddy coming down the road with his son, tired, with a black moustache and a sooty stubble of beard. He walked on without looking at her.

  ‘I’m Ida’s friend Lily.’ She went to them and put an arm round Bernie’s shoulders.

  ‘Oh, yeah.’

  ‘This is my husband, Paul Stephens.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, you come at a bad time.’

  ‘That’s why I’ve come.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have,’ Buddy muttered, meaning, ‘I don’t want you,’ not, ‘How nice of you.’

  ‘I couldn’t stay away. I’m so sorry, I –’

  ‘Come on, son.’ Buddy took Bernie’s arm and pulled him away from Lily. ‘Let’s go get us something to eat.’

  ‘He’s a pig.’ Lily made a face at his back, as he went through the people outside the house, paying no attention to anyone.

  ‘He’s going through hell.’

  ‘He’s a pig anyway. Do we dare go in?’

  Ida saw them in the road and rushed out, short and wide and frenzied in jeans and a black jersey top that were too tight. She clung to Lily, and then Paul put his arms round her and kissed her. He had kissed her goodbye that last morning on the plane from Iceland, and called her Ida No, because she was so uncertain about her marriage.

  Ida clung to him too, standing on tiptoe in small coloured sneakers.

  ‘Sorry.’ She righted herself, and pushed loose ends of hair behind her ears and took another turn on the childish pony-tail fastener with bobbles that held back her long straight hair. ‘Oh, Lil, what’ll I do?’

  ‘It’ll be all right, Eye. Someone will find her.’

  ‘She’s a wanderer. You don’t know. Maggie’s not like a normal seven-year-old. She’s retarded. A bit. I don’t know if you –’

  ‘Sort of. I’m sorry I bullied you at Hojo’s.’

  ‘I’m sorry I was stubborn. I didn’t want you to know.’

  ‘Of course. I’d be the same.’

  ‘Why am I always afraid you won’t understand? Oh, Lil, they think now someone might have taken her. Her picture’s in the papers this morning. It’s going out on TV. Hundreds of people are searching, not just Air Force, but civilians too from off base. They’re so great, all these people, but suppose she –’ she looked up, her eyes fixed steadily on Lily’s – ‘she could be dead.’

  Buddy shouted for her from the house.

  ‘But she’s not.’ Ida nodded and squared back her shoulders. ‘We’ll find her.’

  ‘You’ve got guts,’ Paul said.

  ‘Hope so.’ She hurried into the house, with her elbows working.

  Paul and Lily went with a truckload of men and women and teenagers who were going to walk in line through the woods on the other side of the hangars and landing field.

  ‘This is ghastly, but it’s exciting.’ Paul sat with his arm round Lily, very close on the floor of the truck. ‘I’m scared for Ida, and the poor little girl, but I’m glad we’re part of it. I never went on a rescue before, did you?’

  Lily thought about the Family Centre and taking away the Warrens’ battered son, and the time Mrs Daley’s daughter had driven her in the lop-sided van down a one-way street and up on the pavement to pass double-parked cars, because they thought Mrs Daley had taken an overdose; but she said, ‘No,’ because this was their first adventure together.

  In the woods, she stayed close to Paul, needing him, not knowing how to look in the undergrowth, where anything might be hidden, not knowing what it would be like to see a hand, a foot, a child’s dead face.

  ‘Spread out!’ Their leader was a large man in a plaid shirt and heavy boots. ‘Cover as much ground as you can, about thirty yards each. Scan in front, each side and behind you. Gently with the poles.’

  They moved slowly through the woods in a long ragged line. Paul was at the end. His red jacket moved farther out and disappeared behind pine trees into a hollow. The man on Lily’s other side had stopped to turn over a mound of dead leaves.

  She was alone. Ahead of her, the trees thinned and the ground rose, sandy, with pine needles and angled broken branches and trailing brambles. She walked to the top of the rise, above small oaks crowded into a dip where she could hear Paul moving on her left, and could see the young girl in the yellow slicker up ahead. The man on her right caught up and went on down, bent ove
r, poking his long branch everywhere, stopping, turning over dead branches with his foot.

  What does he think he’ll find? What’s the good of this? It’s something you do when a child disappears, hundreds of people like me and Paul, not able to sit at home and do nothing. But Ida’s child may be across several borders in a distant state by now. Soon she’ll be a picture on a notice in post offices: ‘Have you seen this child?’

  Let me find her. Lily clenched her stick in both hands. Let me, she prayed to the God within herself, which was the only one she knew. Let her be found, but let it be me who finds her.

  They gathered with the leader at the far edge of the wood, by a cindery road which led dry and flat to abandoned concrete workshops.

  ‘We’re off base now, folks. Let’s comb back through the woods again, and check with some of the other groups at the meeting point. By the water tower.’

  ‘Let’s not.’ Lily took hold of Paul’s arm. ‘Let’s go and have a quick look in those buildings before the others do.’

  ‘Too far away?’

  ‘Not from the houses. The road curves round.’

  ‘They must have looked there.’

  ‘We haven’t. I want to be the one who finds her.’

  ‘So do I. So does everyone who’s out looking.’

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  He gave her half a chocolate bar: He always had everything.

  Lily found Maggie in a hidden angle behind two walls. She was sitting in a deep concrete drain with her knees drawn up, picking at her bare feet and looking at nothing, looking right through Lily, as she stumbled over rusted pipes in the grass towards her, shouting for Paul.

  Let it be me who finds her. Once that was satisfied, Lily wanted to be only part of the team effort. Paul carried Maggie down the long road on his back, dirty bare feet dangling, and set her down to wave both his arms at a camouflaged truck, crossing up ahead. When the excitement started, Lily found that she wanted it to be everyone’s triumph.

  ‘Hop up in back,’ the man holding Maggie in the cab of the truck told them.

  ‘Let’s walk, Paul.’

  ‘Don’t you want to see Ida’s face?’

  Lily shook her head. It didn’t matter now. A great warm wash of light had flooded through her. The trunk and branches and twigs of all her veins were lit with a golden glow.

  When they reached the house, they stood on the edge of the crowd. People and cars and photographers and television cameras. Buddy and Bernie on the front step, having their pictures taken.

  ‘There they are!’ One of the men from the truck saw Paul’s red jacket. Attention swung to them.

  ‘It was my wife, not me. She got the hunch about the buildings.’

  ‘It was luck.’ Lily could hear the purr of the television camera. ‘Anyone could have found her. What’s it matter? She was found.’

  Lily and Paul were famous for ten minutes. A weakened Buddy, pale and at a loss, took Paul into the house for a beer. An Air Force officer stopped the press from getting inside.

  Lily went upstairs. Bernie was in his room, lying on his bed with, the dog. Maggie was in the bath, solidly fleshed, thick-legged, playing boisterously with boats. Ida knelt on the wet floor, not crying, not smiling, just looking at her, her face pinched, as it used to be, with bruised shadows, as if she had been hit across the eyes. She looked quite old, with a dead sort of passive resignation.

  Lily was the one who cried.

  Sis and Jeff had come down from New Hampshire to help with the search. Henry could not get away from the grain mill, but Verna came on Monday with Vernon and Laverne, who had grown to be like Phyllis at her age, very bossy and demanding.

  ‘How did you lose Maggie?’ Laverne bounced in, wanting to know.

  ‘I didn’t,’ Ida snapped. ‘She got herself lost. And you get lost too.’

  ‘Cut that out, Hilda.’ Mrs Legge followed Laverne into the house. ‘Where do you get the nerve to speak to the kid that way, after what you done?’

  She had come to comfort Buddy, who had been given two days’ leave after his ordeal. Bernie had been allowed to stay home from school. He and secret, silent Vernon went out with Adam, and Laverne went upstairs to look through Ida’s clothes closet, Ida suspected. The Elite Jewelry drawer was locked, or she would have been into that.

  Buddy and Ida had not talked much about what they had been through. It was over. They were no longer in the news, and Maggie was just the same as she had been before, neutral in her own world, neither contented nor disgruntled. It had not brought Ida and Buddy closer, but it had not pushed them apart.

  Verna had come not only to comfort her favourite fella, but to scold Ida for being a bad mother. Nothing Ida said made any difference, and Buddy did not stand up for her. He kept his eyes on his mother, who was gross in a green top as wide as a baseball field, and chumped his moustache up and down, and said, ‘Hey, yeah,’ when called on to agree that it was Ida’s fault.

  Ida said, ‘Thanks a bunch,’ and went out with Maggie to the Commissary to get some things to make spaghetti sauce. When she returned, Bernie was back, and Verna had started on the dog. It was true that Adam might have led Maggie astray, but equally, he might have just been following her faithfully in her wandering.

  ‘Takes her off and then abandons her. What kind of a dog is that?’ Verna demanded to be told. ‘Got the devil in him, anyway. I never liked his looks.’

  ‘He’s a good dog, Grandma,’ Bernie said in his clear, confiding voice. ‘He did come back and try to tell us something. It’s not his fault that we were too dumb to understand.’

  ‘Humph.’ Verna looked at her grandson with a face that would terrify a more timid child.

  ‘You can’t blame him for not leading us to Mags.’ Bernie stood in front of her with the dog by his side, his hand on Adam’s head. ‘He’s not Lassie, after all.’

  ‘He’s not fit to be around kids,’ declared Verna, whose own dogs nipped and snarled and killed neighbours’ chickens, and the fluffy barn kitten that Jeff had given Vernon last Christmas. ‘How can you keep him here after what he did?’

  ‘We like him,’ Ida said.

  ‘Buddy don’t. I can see that. That dog will take that poor child off again, you watch, and next time you won’t be so lucky.’

  ‘Hey, yeah,’ Buddy said. ‘Goddam dog.’

  But Adam had been a good friend to all of them.

  By the time Verna left, having allowed Ida to make a whole pan of spaghetti sauce and then said they wouldn’t stay to eat, Buddy had gone from beer to vodka, and was belligerent. When his mother drove off with his brother and sister, he went down the road to Duane, and borrowed his 38-revolver. He came back and took Adam behind the house and shot the dog, in front of Bernie.

  That’s it, Ida thought. I’ve had it with him. There was nothing she could do about it, but the knowledge – that’s it – lay with her like a reprieve, although she went through all the familiar motions in the house, where no one told stories, and there was nothing to hold them all together any more.

  The war in Viet Nam had dragged on and on, and most people wished they would put something else on the television news for a change. Watkins had lost some of its personnel. Memorial services were quite frequent in the chapels, and Bob Grainger, whose boys had been in the same class as Bernie at school, came out of hospital in a wheelchair, addicted to pain-killing drugs. Ida had never thought they would send Buddy to Nam, because what use would he be to them? But they ran out of people, and Buddy had to go. His CO promised him a promotion when he came back.

  ‘If I come back, Ah-eye-da.’ He was doleful. He thought he was going to die. Ida was almost sorry for him.

  He went up to New Hampshire to say his last farewell to his mother, who would have written to her congressman to protest, if she had known his name and had a bit of writing paper. When he came back, he stopped off at the Fisherman and got drunk, side-swiped a parked car at the corner of Lemay Street and Pershing, and charged up the stairs to have
a last bash at Ida.

  ‘Buddy, shut the door.’ Bernie might be awake. He had slept with his door open since Adam had gone. ‘Get up and shut the door!’

  He slobbered over her, giggling. His moustache stank of liquor. Ida slid out and shut the door of the room, and he was up, crouched like an orang-outang, and he swung her back on to the bed, wrenching her arm, and pounced on top of her.

  She gasped, winded. ‘Don’t get me pregnant.’ She was even more scared of that since Maggie’s wandering. Another child would kill her. She thought he had dislocated her shoulder. ‘Buddy, for God’s sake –’

  She was nothing to him. He might as well have been screwing the mattress.

  Ida had thought that Bernie would be upset about Buddy leaving. But the morning after the bedroom door had been open, the poor boy told his father, ‘I’ll kill you if you kill my Mom.’

  Buddy, who was hung over, eating chocolate-frosted cornflakes like a child, petulant, swung back a hand and clipped him.

  ‘That does it,’ Ida said. ‘That’s it.’

  Some time after Buddy left for overseas, one tall man and one short one rang Ida’s front doorbell. It played chimes. Buddy had put it in for her last Christmas, then had to move it higher, because Maggie played with it all the time.

  ‘Mrs Legge?’ the short man asked.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Legal wife of Airman Second Class Bernard Wyvern Legge?’

  ‘At the moment.’

  Ida was feeling jaunty. It was a golden fall day, and she was going to the shopping mall with her funny friend Shirley, who didn’t give a damn for anybody, and it was good to be married with children, and without a husband.

  ‘Detective Sergeant Nutting.’ The short man opened a wallet and showed her his badge. The tall one did the same, without saying his name.

  Ida took them inside. The new woman at Number 1006 opposite was cleaning her front windows.

  Detective Sergeant Nutting had reason to suspect that Airman Legge had received and passed on stolen jewellery.