“Tessie Jo,” he said, when they were alone. “What is it?”
She’d seen the overturned rowboat. Her curiosity had brought her to the south side of the boathouse. From there, she overheard her father speaking with the Peters; had overheard what the Peters wanted to do.
From there, she saw her own father row the red canoe to the other side of the lake, and she saw him return from it, too.
She knew what they had done.
• • •
Now, as Vic made his request of her—to stay silent, forever, about what she had seen; to join him and the Peters in their great untruth—she looked back at him, her large eyes narrowed, her eyebrows furrowed.
Her doubt made him doubtful, too.
But a girl of her age couldn’t understand her own future the way he did. She couldn’t understand how limited her opportunities would be, if they defied the Peters, told the truth.
Their future rested upon this lie.
“Trust me,” said Victor.
Reluctantly, his daughter nodded.
Victor
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
His assignment, overnight, was to keep watch over Mrs. Van Laar, in her temporary residence above the slaughterhouse. It was important to keep her apart from the other guests, said the Peters, until she could be calmed.
At two in the morning, Mrs. Van Laar was asleep again, finally. It had taken four pills—the most they had authorized him to dispense at one time.
On a little chair, he sat across from her, watching her. He didn’t dislike Mrs. Van Laar, though she had never been particularly kind to him. He found her to be pitiable. Someone the Peters had identified as useful.
This was also, no doubt, the way they thought of him. When they didn’t think of him as burdensome.
When Mrs. Van Laar was finally permitted to be conscious—whenever the Peters deemed it safe—she would be broken beyond repair to learn the truth of what had transpired that afternoon.
What she had done.
• • •
Each time she woke—in between doses—Mrs. Van Laar asked the same question, increasingly desperate: “Where’s Bear?” Over and over she asked it, the words blurry at their edges.
For anyone else, it might have been difficult to understand what she was saying. But Victor knew: they were the same words she asked him, daily, whenever she ran into him on the grounds.
“Where’s Bear?” she asked him, anew, and again he spoke the line he was told to speak.
“He went for a walk with his grandfather. We’ll find him soon.”
“But the boat,” she said.
“There was no boat. That was a dream.”
Again and again, the same exchange. Then she would quiet, until: Where’s Bear?
This was the question she would ask for the rest of her life, seeking her son without end. In keeping the truth from her, Victor thought—the truth that they told him she could not abide, that they insisted would send her to an early grave—the Peters were simply taking away the grief of loss and replacing it with the grief of uncertainty.
This, he realized, was the very thing from which he was attempting to protect his own daughter. He believed, on most levels, that he had little to give her, without the Van Laars. And so he bent to their collective will, telling himself that at least, in doing so, he was giving his strange and wonderful daughter the certainty of meaningful work. An income. Freedom from the sort of life the Van Laar women had been assigned at birth.
• • •
Next to him, Mrs. Van Laar now moaned softly in her sleep. A thin film of sweat dotted her brow. He opened a dresser drawer. Took out a towel. Gently, he placed it to her head.
In the morning, he would face a larger crowd of searchers.
He would tell them the same story he had told the firefighters, and his daughter, and himself.
Bear went for a walk with his grandfather.
He turned back for a pocketknife.
He was not seen again.
Alice
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
Each time she surfaced from sleep, she was greeted by the same set of images:
Bear, opening the boathouse door.
