More News Tomorrow
Page 18
The woman—Linda—went into the tent and picked up a sleeping Oona and lied to her.
There was no misunderstanding, so why the need to excuse what happened?
Why am I not outraged? Georgie asks herself.
But she is not.
“Do you know what happened?” Rosie asks.
“Oona was taken out of her tent by a woman who is perhaps a little off.”
“Kidnapped!” Venus says. “What does it matter whether the woman was off or not?”
“I suppose literally it was kidnapping, but she had no ill intent except to take Oona to her house to play because she has a lot of toys she bought for her little girl who died.”
“Honest to God, Georgie!” Venus throws up her arms. “People can tell you any terrible story and you believe them.”
“Thomas and I discovered them, Linda and Oona, when we were on the path that leads to the town of Missing Lake,” Georgie says, ignoring Venus. “They were on their way to Linda’s cabin.”
“Oh, Linda. Now she’s Linda and you guys are friends?” Venus says.
“Georgie!” Rosie is standing now on the diving board. “In the middle of the darkness of night this woman is taking Oona to her house to play with toys? Is that what happened.”
“Oona is fine,” Georgie says, “and the woman is not a criminal, so why make so much about a happy ending.”
“It’s perfectly normal to abduct a child?” Venus asks.
“Nothing on this trip is perfectly normal.”
Georgie runs her fingers through her wet hair, her combs lost at sea, her clothes wet, clinging to her skin.
“Ask Thomas what happened,” Georgie says. “Or Oona. Some things you have to see for yourself to understand.”
Thomas pulls himself up to the dock holding the branch of a tree.
“This trip is turning out to be perfect,” he says. “So far I have four stories to tell at Alice Deal in September. We even had a storm and the canoe capsized.”
“Is that why Georgie looks like a drowned possum?” Venus asks.
“Are you okay?” Rosie asks, tousling his hair.
“I’m great!” Thomas says. “I’m going to meet Roosevelt, the only surviving witness to the murder of my grandmother.”
“I need to catch my breath,” Georgie says quietly—looking over at Roosevelt, who has not moved from his place on the hill, although from this angle, he appears to be tall and thin. Not wide.
“What do you two think?” she asks her daughters.
“He’s reserved,” Venus says. “I like him, but there’s not much to know yet.”
“He’s accessible and dignified,” Rosie says. “After two days with our family I was grateful to be with him. My blood pressure went down to zero.”
“And I read his chart,” Venus says. “Not perfect but pretty good. Born January 2, 1930. Kind and strong and stubborn. Something like that.”
Georgie senses Roosevelt watching her walk along the bank beyond the dock and climb the slippery hill to the place where he is standing.
She is shivering—cold air on her wet clothes—shivering with nerves until she reaches the top of the hill and he takes her hand in his large rough hand and says, “Hello, Georgianna,” in a voice so deep she can feel it in her body.
“Hello, Roosevelt McCrary,” she says.
They both laugh—infectious, easy laugher as though they have known each other always.
Which they have, as Georgie imagines her world. Even before his letter and the postcards and the hours she has spent thinking about him, they have been in touch.
As she understands experience, they occupied the same space at a moment of great catastrophe.
They will always be in touch.
Handsome.
That pleases Georgie.
He has rich copper-colored skin unlined by so many years in the weather, strong bones, white curly hair partly hidden by a baseball cap. A quiet demeanor.
Just as she has imagined him.
At his feet, one paw crossed over her nose, is the black and white long-haired dog, her eyes half open.
“Mercy,” he says. “My girl.”
She can feel silence in the stillness of his body, as if the smell of his reserve is on his breath.
Cigarette breath, she notices.
“You’re freezing,” he says.
“We capsized on the river.”
“I was afraid there might be one of those quick storms we get especially on the water.”
He takes off the crew neck sweater he is wearing and puts it over her head, rolling up the sleeves.
“You look familiar,” he says. “I’ve seen your photograph on the back of your books.”
“You’ve read my books?”
“I have the one called Home about the tribe in Botswana.”
She climbs up the short distance to the top of the mound.
“In the photograph on the book jacket, you have short hair.”
He steps away from the tree.
“I was only thirty-nine in that photograph.”
“But you look the same except your hair.”
Georgie is seldom at a loss for conversation, but she is quiet now.
Perhaps if they walk into the camp together, away from her family, into the woods beyond the lodge, the weight of finally meeting after all of these months will disappear.
Maybe he has been thinking of her in the same way that she has been thinking of him.
He lives a solitary life.
Or not.
Linda McCrary.
Could she possibly be his wife?
Not likely, Georgie thinks not—too young for him. Too shattered. Nevertheless.
They walk up the hill to the lodge and stop.
“You found the child.”
“She was on the path behind the campsite almost to the town of Missing Lake with a woman named Linda.”
He stops, looking up as if to see the top of the stand of pines, his cane under his arm, his hands in the pockets of his jeans.
Considering.
“Do you know her?” Georgie asks.
They slip into the woods beyond the lodge onto a path to the cabins. The air is damp, the ground cover muddy, a light wind carries the smell of fungi and pine.
“I do know her,” he says.
“She took Oona from the tent where she was sleeping before dawn, and we found them on the path just before we got to the town of Missing Lake,” Georgie says. “Linda told me that she had a gun.”
“She did not have a gun,” Roosevelt says.
“She said later that she had lied,” Georgie says.
“I should tell you about Linda.”
“She told me she had a baby girl who died.”
“The baby girl was stillborn and Linda has never recovered,” he says. “It’s …” He stops short of completing what he was going to say. “It’s too complicated for tonight.”
They walk along the path—Roosevelt just ahead, holding up low branches for Georgie to walk under. They come into a clearing, Mercy ambling between them.
The woods open to log cabins lined along the pine needle path.
“Named for Indian tribes,” he tells her. “Chippewa and Cherokee and Iroquois and Navajo.”
“Twelve cabins in all. Ten boys and a counselor to each cabin.”
There are metal beds with thin striped mattresses, wooden flap windows held open in the good weather with a narrow board, a single electric light on the ceiling, pitched roof, a wooden porch.
Georgie peers in the screen door of Navajo …
Bleak.
The smell of damp wood, the weight of pine and darkness.
The sun is low in the sky, a heavy, bronze sun, and the light shimmers across the cabin logs, a splash of dark yellow on the door.
“This is the cabin where you lived with your parents.”
Georgie walks up to the steps and stops.
“I haven’t been here since I was three,” she says.
She doesn’t have a visual memory of camp, but when she thinks of Minnie HaHa, what she remembers is light and open air, rolling grassy hills and space.
Not how it is. Not how she has wished for it to be.
Too old and dank and cold.
Does sunlight ever filter through the trees or is the day as dark as night all summer long?
Here is the cabin pushed up against the forest in northern Wisconsin where she lived at the beginning of her life.
Happily?
What does she remember of happiness, or is there any definition to happiness when you’re very young.
“Is it familiar?”
Roosevelt’s warm voice fills the silence.
“It’s … I don’t know … but not exactly familiar to my memory of it.”
What Georgie does have is a sense of returning to the long empty days of a northern summer sun in Michigan with her grandparents sitting in the living room, silent and together. Georgie on the rose velvet couch with a Nancy Drew mystery waiting for her life to begin.
“I seem to have imagined it better than it is.”
Roosevelt goes up the steps, pushes open the screen door and holds it for her.
“You’re disappointed?” he says.
“It’s more like homesick for this place as I have always thought of it.”
“That’s the trouble,” Roosevelt says. “We want to make our childhood better than it was. Why not?”
“But I’m not disappointed,” she says, her arm brushing his woolly sweater. “Just surprised.”
They step inside a small room with a dark blue couch and two deck chairs in need of new canvas covers. A fireplace, smelling of burned wood.
“It can be cold in summer,” he says.
Two bedrooms, one very small.
“So I must have slept in the small one.”
“I was told by the camp nurse—she was still here when I came—that you slept in the big bedroom with your mother and that your father slept in this small one alone.”
“Maybe I was afraid by myself.”
Georgie opens the door to the smaller bedroom and peers in.
She knows little of her parents’ habits of being. All her grandmother had to say of their life together was that Josephine had never been depressed until she married William Grove.
Georgie closes the door to the small bedroom and checks the larger one where she would have slept with her mother, but she doesn’t go in.
“I have a picture in my mind of walking in the dark to the latrine with my father,” she says. “He let me carry my own flashlight and swing it around in circles in the sky. That’s not the kind of thing you make up, is it?”
“I don’t know about memory. It’s tricky,” he says. “When I think about what I remember, I seem to make the bad things worse and the good things better.”
“Do you remember my mother?”
“I don’t,” he says. “I was only on the river the first day. After the police boat took your father, we left for home.”
“Was there a lot of talk at the campsite after she was killed?”
“There was confusion and I was frightened. That I remember.”
She follows Roosevelt back to the main room, leans against the cabin wall, her hands in the pockets of her shorts.
“Were you going to be a camper that summer?”
“I was hired by William to work on buildings and grounds.”
“At eleven years old?”
“Young kids worked in 1941. Poor kids and black ones. But William had his eye out for me and wanted me out of the heat of Washington, D.C. So I came.”
They are standing next to the fireplace, Georgie resting against the stone mantel.
“Why weren’t you a camper?”
“There were no black campers,” he says. “There still aren’t more than a very few, from Chicago.”
He leans down to brush off ash scattered on the rug, and when he stands, wiping the remaining ash on his jeans, he puts his hand on her arm for balance.
Georgie takes a breath, her pulse beating in her throat. She feels more urgent than awkward, which is what she had expected to feel.
So little time. Already it’s late and they will be leaving Camp Minnie HaHa at dawn.
“Can you tell me about my father?” she asks. “Anything.”
“I can,” he says, his voice dropping as if there are others in the room besides Georgie he does not wish to hear. “ I know the things you know about a person when you’re young. I know he was strong and fit and took me places and told me stories,” he says. “That was later, after he had moved to Ann Arbor and he’d come back to his uncle’s to visit. Often, until he married.”
“What kinds of stories?” Georgie asked,
“Wonderful stories about himself as a wild boy in Lithuania. Devilish, not bad.”
He takes off his baseball cap, sticking it in his back pocket.
“That’s all you remember?”
“All I remember but not all I know,” he says. “Before Clementine died of cancer, she told me things about William that I had never heard.”
“I never saw him again after that day when he left with the police,” Georgie says.
“Your grandparents never took you to the prison?”
“They did not,” she says. “I understand why they didn’t want me to see him again.”
“They never talked to you about him?”
“Very little and mostly to remind me that he was a Jew.”
“I do know what happened at the campsite,” Roosevelt says. “At least the morning after your mother’s body had been discovered.”
“James Willow found her,” Georgie says. “I read that.”
“When the police arrived, William confessed,” Roosevelt says. “I was sitting down the hill from your father’s tent. He sat cross-legged outside his tent, sat very still waiting for the police to come. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.”
“The story of his confession was in the Chicago Tribune,” Georgie says. “What I’m hoping you’ll tell me is that his confession was not the real story. That possibly he was protecting someone else who had killed my mother.”
Roosevelt shakes his head. “Certainly not James. He was a timid man who loved your father.”
Georgie slipped into a chair across from him, her feet on the low table.
“We have a list from the newspaper of the nine who were at Missing Lake. What about a stranger?” she asks.
“A stranger out of nowhere could not have found his way by land from the town of Missing Lake to the river. That path wasn’t cut through until the sixties.”
“No one among the nine at the campsite who might have had a reason?”
Roosevelt leans against the stone wall of the fireplace, his arms folded across his chest.
“There is information about William that I do know,” Roosevelt says. “I went to see him before he died.”
“You went to the prison?”
“Clem and I went out by train to Illinois—it took forever. We went on a bus to the prison and got off at this big cement building surrounded by a high fence and sat in metal chairs in a large room and they brought William out. We pulled the chairs up to a kind of counter and there was a screen between our faces, but we could hear him and see him.”
“How did he look?”
“He was very ill. Normally he had dark skin, but his face had turned yellowish and bony. By the time we got back to Washington, Clem got a call from the prison to say that he had died. And we sat at the kitchen table and drank a lot of beer and cried our eyes out.”
He brushes debris off the couch, cleans one of the deck chairs.
“My real father left when my mother got pregnant with me,” he says. “So I was two years old when I met William.”
Roosevelt takes a chair across from her.
“
Am I making you anxious?” he asks.
“I’m anxious,” Georgie says.
Butterflies in her stomach, her face hot for the chilly room, she is thinking what to ask Roosevelt, what to say.
Linda?
Or not.
“Almost seven,” he says checking his watch, using the cane to get up from the chair. “It’s time for dinner.”
He puts out his hand to help her up from the couch.
“On the way back to the lodge I’ll tell you about Linda.”
He pushes open the screen door, slips his cane under his arm and Georgie follows him down the steps.
Dusk, the skies clear, the air light. The forest alive with sound.
He reaches over and for a moment rests his large hand on her cold, wet head, and she feels his touch as heat through her body.
“I’m a mess,” she says. “Because of that quick storm on the river we capsized.”
“Lucky that’s all that happened.”
“It’s been a lucky day,” she says.
They walk slowly, Roosevelt preoccupied with his cane on the uneven path.
“You were going to tell me about Linda.”
“I am,” he says.
He takes her hand, and for what seems forever to Georgie, they walk in silence.
“Linda is mine,” he says finally, his deep voice breaking on her name.
“What do you mean, she is yours?”
“My lonely mentally ill daughter, and she is the reason I have stayed through the godforsaken winters in northern Wisconsin. Because I must.”
“You were married?”
“I was never married.”
“Did Linda live here with you?”
“She did not. When her mother left Missing Lake, I took over watching out for her. She’s unstable and promiscuous and has never had a long-term boyfriend except for Ray, the pharmacist in Missing Lake, who was the father of her baby. He stayed with her awhile after the baby girl and then he couldn’t take it.”
They walk side by side, their hands swinging.
“Hear the owl?” he asks.
“The hoot?”
“It’s not dark and owls are only supposed to hoot in the dark, but that impertinent guy hoots whenever he damn well pleases.”
“I know nothing about owls.”
“They’re my favorite of all the feathered creatures,” he says. “Somehow they seem to have integrity and wisdom and reserve.”