by Heidi Pitlor
I wondered if I should “accidentally” switch off the movie. I also wondered whether I should start exposing Cass to something other than Nickelodeon Junior.
The museum was set on thirty-six acres of snowy lawns and woods that children were encouraged to explore. Maggie’s friends from Northampton, Cecil and Wendy, met us near the gift shop with two more boys, one around Cass and Liam’s age, and a tween or young teenager. Cecil and Wendy looked strikingly similar to each other, with their long blonde ponytails and brown barn jackets.
“Should we let the boys go off on their own?” Wendy asked, although her two had already disappeared.
“Be good,” Maggie told Connor and Liam, as they turned and sprinted after their friends.
Cass hovered behind my legs. “He’ll probably just stay with us,” I said. “He’s a little shy.”
“That’s totally fine,” Wendy said. “Every child is different, right?”
I nodded. Out the window, I saw the boys begin to climb a bare apple tree. There was a particular loneliness in watching other children happily frolic while your own held back. This fell away when I saw the older boy yank Connor, who had to be half his weight, from a branch, and slam him on the ground. The older boy jumped down from the tree and twisted Connor into a chokehold. It looked like he might be crying. “Mag,” I whispered and gestured outside.
“He’s fine. It’s always a wrestling match when these guys get together.”
The older boy flipped Connor onto his back and mounted him.
Maggie and Wendy began to chat about some other mutual friends, and we wandered the museum, taking in the many Saturday Evening Post covers, all those doll-like children’s faces caught in innocent moments of daily life, the adults hovering over them or belting out songs in a barbershop quartet, eagerly playing baseball or taking a break from playing Santa (while a little boy looked on, stunned). Life before the tyranny of iPhones and the Internet, before the existential dread of autocracy and climate change. We got to the Four Freedoms paintings, and I stopped in front of Freedom from Fear, the cozy scene of a couple tucking their two children into bed, the father grinning almost smugly. He held a newspaper with a headline about the Blitz. Here was his family, safe and sound, while across the Atlantic, bombs lit up the night sky in London. Rockwell had painted the series after Roosevelt’s speech, the one that was meant to galvanize American support for the war. Though intended to promote democracy, the paintings now seemed, from this particular moment in history, more like a celebration of American exceptionalism and the nuclear family. Of course, everything was tainted now.
The four boys came back inside, grabbing at each other’s heads. “Cole, Max,” Wendy said, “not here, not inside. Quit it.” She caught me looking at them and Cass keeping his distance as we made our way toward some other rooms.
I hated to be seen as a prude. “How old is Max?” I said.
“Twelve. This one loves his mommy, doesn’t he?” she said, her own eyes on Cass.
“He does,” I said. Lana’s words rang in my head: Never Apologize.
Onto the awkwardness brewing between us, Maggie said, “Wendy and Cecil run an incredible store called Music with Conscience. They sell recycled instruments and all this cool stuff that benefits African charities. I bought my favorite necklace there. It’s made from recycled paper beads. Wendy works with a group of Maasai women in Kenya, and the money goes to bringing in water.”
“Wow, nice,” I said.
We had made our way to The Problem We All Live With, the famous picture of Ruby Bridges on her way to an all-white school. What real progress had been made since this moment captured in the painting?
The boys piled on top of each other and began to yank each other’s hair only feet away from the painting. Max and Cole made noises like grunts, or small sobs, and the tangle of boys rolled left and right.
I called, “Hey, guys! Kids!” Worried they might take down the painting, I moved into a defensive squat, my arms flung wide, and hustled my body between them and the wall. Where were the museum guards or docents? “Watch it!”
“You and Cass should come to Northampton for a concert some time. We sponsor all kinds of kids’ shows,” Wendy said magnanimously, indifferent to the scene before her, although she then raised her voice so I could better hear her say, “Charlie Barleycorn is playing next week. Does Cass know him?”
“Actually, he loves Charlie Barleycorn,” I said, taking quick lateral steps as I shadowed the boys. I had so many questions for Wendy. How much are tickets? Will your sons be there and do they tend to wrestle during your concerts? Do the kids get to meet Charlie Barleycorn? What would Charlie say if he saw these boys permanently damage that painting of the civil rights movement?
She told me that tickets were fifty bucks each. I reminded myself that I was sick of his music anyway, and intercepted Cole’s arm just as it was about to graze the frame. “Back off,” I said to him, and he winced when I briefly dug my nails into his skin.
Max mounted Liam and farted in his face, and it had the effect of loosening the tangle of boys just as a museum worker finally appeared and clapped his hands. “Ok, kids, take it outside. Let’s go!”
That week I got a call to sub at the middle school, and Bertie agreed to watch Cass for the day. But when she answered her door, she said, “What are you two doing here?” She had forgotten to put in her dentures again.
I reminded her of my subbing job, swallowed away an acid dread and guilt, and on the back of a ripped envelope, wrote down the phone numbers of the school, the Garbellas, the hospital, poison control, and my cellphone, which she already had, but what could it hurt? “Don’t forget your teeth,” I whispered to her before I left.
On my way inside the school, Maggie and I met up and chatted for a moment. “So we’ll be gone by the end of the month,” she said.
“What?”
She looked at me. “I didn’t tell you that we are moving? To Bolivia? Too much on the brain right now—we only found out the day before yesterday, right after we got back from the museum. It’s only for six months. Brian’s firm transferred him—some guy down there just quit and they need someone to fill in for him right away. I cannot believe I forgot to call you! Who knows what else I’ve forgotten to do.”
“Wow,” I said. “Wow!”
“You have to come visit! You would love it. We’ll be close to Copacabana and Lake Titicaca. There is even a treehouse on the property! The guy from Brian’s company who’s helping us relocate said that our neighbors have alpacas. I’m going to have to homeschool the boys, but honestly? I’m kind of excited. They need less time sitting on their butts inside all day. Wendy sent me the name of an ex-pat artisan she knows there, a woman who homeschools her kids, too, and she’s going to help me get started.”
I blinked fast. I could not manage to take it all in.
“You and Cass have an open invitation. You can even sleep in the treehouse! Liam would love to have a friend there.”
“It sounds incredible,” I said, but we both knew that Liam and Cass were as compatible as a squirrel and a shark, and that flights to South America were not exactly feasible for me. She was my one close friend and the news hit me hard. Another person gone.
“Hey, did the school get another teacher to fill in for you?” I asked as we made our way to the teacher’s lounge.
“No. And get this—they’re not sure they are even going to. They might fold music in with band or something.”
“Do they need a sub?”
“I don’t know, but if they do, I’ll tell them to call you. I’ll say that you’re the best sub in the system!” She shifted her canvas bag on her hip and said, “Promise me you’ll find some way to come visit us. I’ll cook salteñas and we’ll sip piña coladas and watch our sons run around and play in the trees.”
I had no idea what a salteña was, but I guessed that it was delicious. I tried not to betray a coil of envy inside me. “How can I say no?”
She blew me a k
iss and headed off to her first class.
Her family had to be over the moon with excitement at the thought of such an adventure—who would not be? I let myself fantasize about filling in for Maggie when she was gone, then visiting them at their utopian lakeside property, gossiping about the middle school teachers, going for hikes and spotting alpacas and Incan ruins or whatever.
I was emotional all day, and that afternoon, when I stopped at Bertie’s and found her and Cass peacefully playing Candy Land, I found myself awash in gratitude. Why not celebrate the small things in life, like my son not overdosing on Ex-lax and Bertie not passing out while on the clock? I was writing a book for an amazing feminist woman; I had Cass, and we both had our health. We were not headed to Bolivia for six months, but things could be worse. We drove directly to the grocery store and splurged on ingredients for a red velvet cake, his favorite.
“I thought you could only have cake for birthdays,” he said.
“I just feel like celebrating how lucky a mom I am. You can actually have cake whenever you want, except not every day because it’s not that good for you.”
Back at home with Highway 61 Revisited playing in the kitchen, I mixed the batter and let Cass lick the extra frosting from the spatula.
He said, “Bertie is alone right now.”
“Oh, Sweetie.” I was raising an empathetic son—something else to celebrate. “We should share our cake with her,” I said.
After we had frosted our rather lumpy pink-and-white finished product, we headed back down the street. I knocked on Bertie’s door, but no one answered, so we let ourselves in and peered all around.
“Bertie?” I called.
The place was stone silent.
“Come on,” I said to Cass, a little uneasy, and left the cake on the counter. “Let’s check Jimmy’s house.” Sometimes he drove her to doctors’ appointments.
But Jimmy had not seen her. In the dim evening, we made our way around the neighborhood and to her friends—Peg Myers, Sandy Truscello. I suggested to Jimmy that we call the police if we did not find her at home once we got back there.
“Don’t freak out. Maybe she just went for a walk,” Jimmy said. He had been irritatingly calm since I had first gone to his house.
“After dark? On a cold winter night?”
We returned to her house, which was still empty, and I said, “Do you remember her son’s name?”
Jimmy made a pained expression. “Robert? John?”
I was already filing through a stack of little notebooks on the counter, and found her address book at the bottom. “Norm!” I said when I found the correct entry.
“Give him a call in the morning if she doesn’t show up,” Jimmy said.
“All right,” I said, but then I did call 911. The dispatcher was Sandy Truscello’s cousin and had met Bertie once or twice, and he let us file a missing person report early.
“Nothing else we can do,” Jimmy said. “She’ll be fine. Go on home.”
“You’re not worried a little?”
“I’ll worry when I know that there’s something to worry about,” he said.
I buckled Cass into his car seat and we drove my truck at a crawl toward the lights of the Mass Pike, just visible through the trees at the end of our street. We turned and headed past the Truscellos’ and the blue colonial where a couple of my old classmates lived with their four kids. You could see the lights from TVs in the windows of the houses. No one was out walking around. I vowed that when we found Bertie, I would check in with her every morning and offer to run errands—grocery shop or whatever else she needed. I would take her to see a neurologist. Maybe ask her to move into the basement with us if Kurt did not end up coming back, a thought that sat heavily in my ribcage. The truck’s brakes clutched as we hit some black ice, and I decided to head home.
Anyway, all those stairs were far from ideal for an eighty-four-year-old with bad knees and mediocre balance.
I woke the next morning and it took a moment for me to remember that Bertie had vanished, a fact that landed on me like an axe blade through a wall. I got Cass, and herded him down the street once again, but Bertie’s house was still empty. Again we climbed into the truck and drove a few fruitless laps around my neighborhood.
Back home, I paced my kitchen. I found my book. “ ‘No going to the lighthouse, James,’ he said, as he stood by the window, speaking awkwardly, but trying in deference to Mrs. Ramsay to soften his voice into some semblance of geniality at least.” I gazed over at the picture of Lana on my window. She seemed to look back at me standing there, panicking that my friend and only viable babysitter was lost right now, wandering the back roads of Lee in her nightgown and likely no dentures, about to freeze to death. What would Lana do if she were me?
The answer was easy: Lana would tell herself that she had tried all that she could to help Bertie right now, and then open her laptop and focus on work.
When I logged in, I saw that Lana had emailed me last night.
“Ned Boyle didn’t have any stats about empathy?” She had only just finished reading the third chapter.
“Well, he did say that modeling compassion was the best way to teach empathy,” I replied. “Do you want me to focus on the parent’s well-being here? What teaching empathy does emotionally for her/him/them? Might be interesting to zoom in on you for a bit.”
“Okay.” I could see that she was online right then, and I guessed she would instant-message me soon. When she did, I asked her, How did you and Lester teach Norton empathy?
Lana: Hard to say.
Me: What is Norton like? I know so little about him! Do you feel that he’s empathetic?
Lana: Yes. He’s a well-rounded kid, and he gets good grades. He likes martial arts and is currently obsessed with The Twilight Zone!
Me: So he’s into Sci Fi—very cool! Is it the sport or the philosophy of martial arts that he likes?
Lana: He’s naturally athletic—likes basketball and soccer too.
Me: Are you two close? We were almost six months into working together and still I had to ask this question.
Lana: Of course! The three of us are close.
Me: How does he show empathy to girls and women? Can you remember any times when you took it upon yourself to teach him compassion or empathy?
Lana: Hmmm. Once I helped him hold a door for an elderly woman and he carried her groceries to a cab that was waiting.
Finally we were getting somewhere. Did you talk to him about it afterward? What did he have to say about it?
Lana: This was at least a few years ago—sorry, don’t remember much more.
“Come on,” I groaned.
Me: What do you like to do with him? It might help me if you describe in more detail your relationship with Norton.
Lana: Watch movies, play with the dog, all the usual stuff. Sometimes we take him to Yankees games. He really likes Morgenstern’s ice cream. Norton is at the age when he just wants to be with his friends, though, not so much his parents any more. Allie, the third chapter looks great overall.
Me: Thanks! These kind of details are so, so helpful.
Lana: What else can I help with?
Me: Has Gloria been with you since Norton was born?
Lana: Yes.
Me: Would it make sense for me to talk to her?
No response came for a few minutes. Maybe she had gotten a phone call or something. Maybe she did not like the question.
Lana: If you need to, you could just write about other places that moms usually take their kids in NY, the places where you take your son and the things you like to do with him, and I can alter or add in more details when you send me the draft.
Me: Actually I don’t live in New York. I live in Western Mass.
Lana: Oh! Really?! Well, I’m sure you’ll figure it out. I’ve got a deadline in half an hour, and then I go shoot Ellen this afternoon.
Me: Ellen?
Lana: Degeneres. The talk show. Apparently she is a fan.
Berti
e’s son flew in from Wichita that evening. “Norm McQuecken,” he said, his hand thrust out. Blond, ruddy, and strapping, he hunched his back in order to fit inside my doorway. He looked nothing like his mother, who was dark-eyed and barrel-chested, but elsewhere petite. From what I remembered, Norm had not visited Bertie in over five years. “You haven’t found her yet, have you?”
I shook my head.
We had already combed the area several times that day, and again just an hour earlier, but I offered to drive us all around again. “Your mother has been a lifesaver to me with Cass,” I told Norm, as we headed to the truck.
“Yeah, well, and then she just takes off on you?” He kept his eyes straight ahead, one hand around the back of his neck. “You drive that Tacoma? That’s a big truck for a little lady.”
“It’s not so big.”
“Watch out. This little lady’s a spitfire,” Jimmy said from behind us, Bruin trailing along after him on a leash.
I tried in vain to think of a way to invite Jimmy to stay back. We piled into the truck, Norm in the passenger seat, and Jimmy snapped his fingers for Bruin to jump up and onto the back seat. A part of me believed that he was including Bruin in our plans just to spite me. “How about we swing by your house and leave the dog there,” I said.
“Mother of Christ, not this again. He’ll just sit here with me.”
Cass climbed onto my lap, between the steering wheel and me. So that he would not have to sit next to the dog, who was now crackling something in his teeth, I allowed it. “You had to bring the damn dog,” I said.
Norm turned, and I saw a look of bemusement pass between him and Jimmy. The sight plucked at a string within me. I shoved the truck into reverse before Jimmy had even closed the door, gunned it out of my driveway, and Bruin flew forward between the two front seats. Cass yelled out. I slammed on the brakes, and pushed the dog over my arm rest. “Go on, get back there.”
“Might help if you don’t drive like a lunatic,” Jimmy said.
“You guys talk to the police yet today?” Norm said.
“Yeah. No news,” Jimmy said. “I’ll swing by the station first thing in the morning.” He opened his window halfway and Bruin stuck his head into the frozen air. The cab of the truck filled with cold, and Cass pulled my sweatshirt jacket around himself. We crept along the streets, passing all the small flags and Christmas lights and inflatable Santas in people’s yards, the dark, still woods at the edge of the neighborhood. Soon the only sound in the truck was the engine. The streets were empty, the sky metal gray.