For all her travels in Africa, Georgie has never experienced that.
Close calls—almost every summer there was something. But never terror.
Now walking on the path toward the Bone River, Georgie is dissembling like the legos that Thomas used to construct as a little boy and then with a slash of his arm destroy.
She takes a deep breath, lets the air out slowly.
“Don’t hold hands,” the woman behind them calls out. “It’s making me nervous. Nervous is not good.”
The sun is moving overhead, the morning warming, and Georgie pulls off her turtleneck, a tee shirt underneath and underneath that a camisole, no bra. She tucks the tee shirt into her jeans and ties the turtleneck around her waist.
“I was too hot,” she says in explanation, but the woman does not respond.
Only halfway back to the river now and then what? Will they stop someplace along the way? Will the woman wait until they reach the campsite and then something will happen?
To Georgie and Thomas. To Oona?
Unimaginable what the woman has in mind.
“Fill up your mind,” Georgie whispers to Thomas.
“Shut up,” the woman says. “I told you not to talk. I meant don’t talk at all.”
THE AIR IS suddenly cold. Shortly after nine and clouds must be floating across the sun, the light filtered in the forest, a chill up Georgie’s spine and she finds herself off balance, the ground uneven enough to trip her and tripping could lead to a fall and falling as she read just recently in the New York Times—it actually stopped her and she read it twice—is the second-leading cause of death in people over sixty.
She cannot die now at this moment.
Gone and then what? Who will be there to help her family if she has the carelessness to die in these woods?
“Better not do something to make me nervous,” the woman calls out. “Nervous I’m dangerous. You’ll see.”
Georgie keeps her eyes peeled to the ground. High tree roots breaking through the earth. Unexpected dips in the land. A hidden animal hole.
“Listen, you folks, just sit in the corner of your own minds and have a conversation with yourself and leave me be,” the woman says. “Got it?”
Thomas nods.
“You got it too—Professor Georgianna Grove—daughter of a murderer?”
How did she know? How could she, this woman with a gun, possibly know about Georgianna Grove.
Nicolas was right of course. Nicolas is always right.
Why did Georgie need to come to Missing Lake, Wisconsin, to stand on the same earth where her mother had been strangled? She could have gone by van to Camp Minnie HaHa to meet Roosevelt McCrary there and skip Missing Lake altogether.
It is beginning to rain, mist settling on her body and her face—rain without weight or even drops, as if the dampness were coming from inside of her.
Georgie looks over at Thomas. His profile, his articulated nose and heavy brow, his forehead wrinkled in a frown, his bottom lip protruding as if he were about to cry.
But he will not cry.
She cannot seem to put a stop to memories of death, as if a pattern were preordained in the texture of her psyche, and what had begun in Georgie’s life when her mother was murdered set up the markers for endings, one after the other, up to this moment on the path to Missing Lake.
It is cooler than it was and cloudy. Not chilly, but Georgie is cold. She wraps her arms around herself, her shoulders lifted, her chin down.
AT THE TOP of the incline ahead, against a backdrop of the black trunks of pine trees and glistening in the sun—the red wheelbarrow.
“You see that?” the woman asks.
“Yes,” Georgie says.
“It’s mine,” she says. “I brought it here because I thought the place needed a little color.” She hesitates. “Don’t bother to add your two bits.”
Georgie walks past the wheelbarrow to the one remaining tent where Oona had been sleeping and stops, Thomas beside her whispering something she cannot hear.
“Go into the tent now. Both of you,” the woman says. “Go in and sit down and shut up and I’ll be out here with my child.”
It occurs to Georgie that the woman has a plan.
But maybe not.
Maybe the tent is simply a way station while she decides what next.
Maybe there is no plan at all.
Just a gun and Oona.
When Georgie and Thomas came down the path, the woman must not have expected them. Wherever she was planning to take Oona or for whatever reason, she must have believed she’d been successful in capturing the little girl and would have time to execute her plan.
“Did you hear me? Get in the tent.”
Georgie crouches and climbs through the flap. It isn’t high enough for a person to stand easily, a small two-person tent, and besides she is too weary to stand, even to think and make a plan herself, so she sits on the sleeping bag with Freddy on the pillow and faces the entrance. Thomas beside her.
She can see the women’s boots through the flaps, her tanned legs, the bottom of her shorts and Oona from the waist down.
“Just sit down,” the woman calls. “We’ve got some time here before we leave.”
“What does that mean?” Thomas’ voice reverberates. “Leave for where?”
“None of your business where you’re going.”
“Do you think she really has a gun?” he whispers to Georgie.
“Hush.”
“She can’t hear us over the sound of the river,” Thomas says.
Georgie shrugs.
“It’s wise to believe what she says.”
Outside, Oona is whimpering.
The woman is leaning through the flap.
“Is there a pig in here?” she asks. “The girl wants her pig.”
Thomas picks Freddy up from Georgie’s lap.
“Here,” he says. “Freddy.”
The woman reaches in and takes the pig.
“We’ll hit the road in about half an hour,” the woman says. “I got it together now and we’ll be motoring pronto.”
“What road?” Thomas whispers to Georgie.
“Maybe the road home,” Georgie says.
“Does she scare you?”
“I don’t know if she scares me, but we have found Oona. That’s enough for me.”
“Enough would be heading up the river to Roosevelt.”
“But that is not happening, Thomas. Not yet.”
He reaches in the back pocket of his shorts for his journal, leans against the pole of the tent and opens to the last page he wrote.
“What’s happening in there,” the woman calls into the tent. “What’s that in your hands, kid?”
“It’s my journal,” Thomas says. “I am writing a journal about this trip.”
“That’s nice. That’s very nice writing a journal. I should do that,” she says. “My name by the way is Linda in case you’re planning to put me in the journal.”
OUTSIDE THE TENT, a sudden darkness and the figures through the flap move out of Georgie’s view.
The woman is standing and Oona can no longer be seen.
The wind picks up, slapping the canvas tent.
“A storm?” Georgie calls to the woman.
There is no answer, but she can see her legs as high as her thighs, just below the shorts.
“What do you think?” Thomas asks.
“Either there’s a cloud covering the sun and it will pass by, or a storm, or both.” Georgie leans back to see more of the woman through the flap. Oona’s legs are hanging in view so the woman must be holding her. No socks and her feet are muddy.
“What now?” Thomas asks.
Georgie is listening.
In the distance, far in the distance—thunder and a high gust whips through the pines above them.
It is a storm.
A sudden hammering of rain and the woman takes cover in the tent, dropping to the ground, Oona in her arms.
“No funn
y business,” she says. “This storm will be done in a flash and then I’ll go on with my plan. I know all about the weather in Missing Lake.”
She is sitting on the tent flap, holding the child, her left arm around Oona’s torso, her hand on the pocket holding the gun.
The tent small, damp, suddenly cold, fills with too sweet a smell—maybe cheap perfume or the stank odor of the woman’s body. Too strong for a small space.
Next to her, Thomas buries his face in his knees.
“Hello, Oona,” Georgie says quietly.
Oona’s eyes are wide, as if she is holding them open.
“You know the rules here,” the woman says.
Even in the semidarkness of the tent, she is so close that Georgie can see her heavy-lidded eyes, the slight tremor in her arm, a look of desperation on her face. Her lips tremble from nerves.
“I was at the bar at Blake’s Lodge Monday night with my boyfriend and saw all you guys and I saw the child.”
She rearranges Oona on her lap.
“The next morning while you were paddling to Missing Lake, I came here with my wheelbarrow and left it as a sign that someone had been here and it was me and I was going to take the child.” She lifts her arm that has been concealing the gun and brushes the hair out of her eyes. “I leave signs. Get it?”
Georgie nods although she does not get it.
“I don’t get it,” Thomas says.
“My father made me that wheelbarrow when I was a little girl and I keep it on my front porch where I live in the Shallows.” She takes a deep exasperated breath. “So now you understand?”
“I do,” Georgie says speaking lightly as if nothing is of consequence.
She is vigilant, but somehow the urgency of the situation is vanishing.
The pelting rain hammers the canvas tent, but thunder no longer roars above them, and in her peripheral vision Georgie can see the woman’s eyes beginning to close, then flapping open.
“I got here way before the sun rose and told the child I would hurt her if she screamed and I would have hurt her but she didn’t scream.”
She sits—her knees bent, her legs under her, Oona on her lap.
“I need a cigarette.”
“I don’t have one,” Georgie says. “I don’t smoke.”
“A cigarette would calm me down,” she says. “You surprised me coming up the path like you did. I heard someone behind me and stepped out of the forest and there you were coming up the path. I could have shot you then, but I didn’t.”
The rain diminishes to thin drops. Thunder in the far distance moving south, and the woman starts to stand, losing her balance.
“Shit.”
She tries again, pulling herself up holding onto a tent pole sufficiently pliable to bend.
This time she gets halfway to standing and falls against the tent behind her.
“Forget it,” she says to no one in particular. “I’m a little tired because I was up all night.”
Outside, a cacophony of bird cries, the wind settles to a soft breeze, the sun through the flap shines a half circle of light into the tent.
“Everybody in Missing Lake knows about your father,” the woman says. “It’s the only famous thing that ever happened in this town where nothing happens, and we tell that story to our children.”
“How do you tell the story?” Georgie asks.
“We say your father strangled your mother and went to jail and died.”
“Do they say why he killed her?” Georgie asks.
“He wanted her dead is what they say.”
She seems to be preparing to stand again, on one knee now.
“I don’t tell that story to my children because I don’t have any.”
She pushes herself up slowly and finally she is standing, a little unsteady, Oona still in her arms.
“I’m going first and you follow me,” she says.
Georgie gets up, waiting until the woman is outside, Thomas behind her.
Outside the tent, the day has turned suddenly bright and cloudless.
Georgie leans against a large rock, Thomas squatting on the ground beside her.
The woman is next to the tent and standing. Oona, her fingers splayed across her eyes, is in her arms.
“Heading to Camp Minnie HaHa now?” the woman asks.
Georgie hesitates.
“My children are already there,” she says finally, adding, to test the temper of the moment, “We’re going to Minnie HaHa with Oona.”
The woman shakes her head. “You are not going to take Oona,” she says.
Oona uncovers her eyes, looking up at Georgie, and from somewhere deep inside her body, a high-pitched shriek.
Then silence.
The air is still.
The pines above them soundless, the sun even warm on Georgie’s face.
Oona’s eyes are closed.
The woman speaks into the quiet.
“You can call me by my name.”
“Linda,” Georgie repeats, as if her name spoken aloud might settle the woman’s nerves.
There is a long pause.
It appears from the short distance between them that tears are spilling into the corner of Linda’s red-rimmed eyes.
“When I was younger,” she says. “I had a little girl and my little girl died.”
Georgie’s throat tightens as if to close without warning. She pushes herself off the rock.
In the last few years, something has changed in Georgie’s response to her world, as if here and there a missing synapse causes a commotion in her brain and she has to catch an emotion on the fly.
Now, the summer of Rose.
“I am so sorry,” she says to the woman, Linda. “I don’t know what to say but that.”
She walks away from the tent, up the slight hill to the place where she has chosen to believe that her mother’s body was discovered among the roots of an ancient oak tree.
“Where are you going?”
“Just up here before we leave for camp.”
She kneels beside the tree, her legs damp with wet leaves.
Georgie called the girl Rose because in just that month of her eleventh year, she had gone from bud to bloom—trailing Georgie wherever she went among the Baos in Botswana. In this village scooped out of the jungle, she imitated the way Georgie folded the tops of her fingers together, resting her lips against them, the way she flung her hair out of her eyes and pinned it back in a comb although Rose’s hair was kinky and not long. The way Georgie touched … talking with her hands, resting them briefly on an arm, a shoulder, a waist, gathering the community into her.
Woo was Rose’s name for Georgie, and she breathed it into the air, her lips open and together as if to whistle—wooooo was the sound she made coming from the back of her throat.
They cooked together and walked together and carried water and built the fire in the evening and danced together. It was the summer after Georgie and Charley were married, Charley in Ann Arbor. Georgie overflowing with love took on Rose as her own.
Until one afternoon, late August, a storm—sitting with Rose in her hut, teaching her to make a pot out of mud, watching her fingers smooth the clay.
She thought she heard thunder.
Shhh, she said to Rose. Listening.
Thunder on such a day, hot, humid, but with a stiff breeze.
The sound louder and louder, coming in her direction not from the heavens but from the earth. She peered out of the hut, and there were the men, bare-chested, not running, loping, spread, maybe ten across the wide center of the village turned brown with the sun, their bare feet slapping the hard ground, and out of their mouths, their throats, their bellies, came a sound like a growl, like a pack of dogs.
In unison. A loud unmistakable sound of grief.
From Rose, barely audible, atonal, without a breath—a long high-pitched whine.
An answering call to her people.
The men stopped in front of the tent, the whole crowd of them saying her nam
e, the name she had been given by the tribe.
Not Rose.
She stood, handed the half-formed pot to Georgie without looking her in the eye, her chin up, her back straight, and she walked through the middle line of the band of men, disappearing beyond them.
Inside the hut, Georgie sat on her haunches, water on her fingers, smoothing the pot until there were no longer protrusions of clay, no cracks. Only a perfect circle the size of a grapefruit hollowed out to hold water once it was baked in the sun.
She did not go out of the hut to the communal meal that evening. Rather she sat cross-legged on the dirt floor writing a letter in her notebook to Charley. Not one that she would send but one to read when she got back to the states in late August.
Dear Charley,
When I arrived at the village July 29, I was homesick. I have never belonged and now I have you and you are home but thousands of miles away.
Coming here where I know the people and they trust me—a sudden sickness for home. I laid claim to this young girl and made up my own name for her, which was Rose, and made her believe that I was indispensable to her—when in truth she was indispensable to me.
Now sitting alone in my hut writing you to the rhythm of voices just outside, I understand how things go here for the rest of the summer. How they will go summers in the future. Slowly … and I will have to start my work all over again as if as a stranger.
I am someone they no longer trust, who took from them what did not belong to me.
Always, G
Why now? Why suddenly Rose, who must be in her late fifties if she is still alive, and Georgie hasn’t thought of her for years.
Likely Rose never thought of Georgie.
After all, it was nothing. Just a week or two of a tiny love affair.
“THOMAS?” SHE CALLS, stepping away from the rooted bed of her mother’s death. “Help me pack up.”
She walks down the hill to where the last canoe is anchored, unties the rope and turns the canoe right side up.
Thomas is taking down the tent, folding it, tying the rope to contain it. Together they roll the sleeping bags, zip the backpacks and carry the equipment to the bank, packing it in the center of the canoe, leaving room for Oona, who will be in the bow between Georgie’s legs.
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