Barbara paused in her walking then, and Tracy stopped beside her.
“I have a favor to ask,” said Barbara.
“Okay,” said Tracy.
“I’m going to leave the cabin some nights,” said Barbara. “After everyone’s asleep.”
Tracy waited. She was confused. The natural question to ask would have been Why, and yet the tone of Barbara’s voice told her the inquiry would not have been welcome.
“Just sometimes. Not always,” she said. “Anyway. Do you think you could keep it between us?”
Tracy nodded, slowly.
“Also,” said Barbara. “Would you mind if I took the bottom bunk? It’ll be easier if I don’t have to use the ladder every time.”
This gave Tracy pause. Would the upper bunk support her weight? But she couldn’t bring herself to raise the issue, and so she said it would be fine.
“I’ll just say I’m afraid of heights or something,” said Barbara, smiling. “If anyone asks why we switched.”
• • •
For the next two weeks, it became clear that Barbara had been lying about one thing: her nocturnal excursions did, in fact, take place every single night. At ten p.m., all the girls in the cabin would climb into bed, and Louise or Annabel would turn off the overhead lights. For thirty seconds afterward, Tracy could see nothing at all; and then the dimmest shapes would begin to appear—furniture and windows and the bodies of her fellow campers—illuminated, she realized, only by the bright stars above the cleared land of Camp Emerson.
At a certain point, when no movement could be heard throughout the cabin, she’d feel the bed shift, ever so slightly, and Barbara’s breathing would change, and then she would hear her footsteps, soft as a cat’s, and then she would open the screen door, holding her breath, and close it behind her, equally quietly. The faintest creak of the hinge, and she was gone.
Tracy was never once awake for her return, so she didn’t know how long she was gone on those nights. She remarked aloud, once, that Barbara must be very tired. In response Barbara insisted that she was a person who needed almost no sleep, and her energetic demeanor each day proved to Tracy that she was telling the truth.
If anyone else in the cabin knew about this routine, they didn’t say. No one asked questions, and Barbara volunteered nothing—at first.
Jacob
June 1975
The idea had come to him in a dream. Limp Jacob, a voice had said, and he’d woken up in his cell with the phrase repeating itself over and over. Limp Jacob. Limp Jacob. Was it taunting him? It bore a passing resemblance to his father’s voice, and it sounded like something he might have said.
It wasn’t until lunchtime that—watching a man he didn’t know drag the dead weight of his leg across the prison’s cafeteria floor—Jacob understood with a jolt the meaning of the phrase.
“Comma,” he said aloud. “Comma.”
And Harold Debicki, next to him, had asked what he was on about.
Limp, Jacob, he thought. But he didn’t say it aloud.
• • •
The next morning, when the guard came to do his morning rounds, Jacob lay in his bed, unmoving. He’d go one step further than limping. He’d be paralyzed.
“Get up, Sluiter,” said the guard.
“Can’t,” said Jacob. “Can’t move my legs.”
He said this calmly; to overact, he thought, would raise suspicion. Instead he said the same phrase in the same calm voice to everyone he met that day, and every day thereafter: Can’t move my legs.
It took some practice, but after a time he really began to believe it. To move from place to place, he dragged himself across floors, even when he did not believe himself to be watched.
He’d never been liked at Dannemora, but after several weeks of this even his cruelest tormentors were advocating for him to the guards.
It isn’t right, was the general consensus. He needed to be seen by a doctor.
The only time he allowed himself to move his legs was in his bed, at night. There, careful to wait until he heard the soft snores of his bunkmate, he cycled his legs, lifted them one after another, conditioning them back to strength.
Within several weeks he’d been transferred to Fishkill, the lower-security prison four hours south.
Within several months, he’d escaped.
• • •
Since that time he’d been moving north, following the Hudson in a straight line.
In terms of destination, he had only one idea: his ancestral land, the Sluiter tract, the place his grandfather used to take him camping. A little series of natural caves formed an easy shelter; inside one, the two of them slept side by side, and his grandfather, a natural storyteller, the only adult who had ever been kind to him, gave Jacob the history of their people.
The caves were close to a populated area, and therefore Jacob knew they would be dangerous to visit. But he couldn’t predict how much longer he’d be loose, or alive—and so sentiment or folly drove him forward.
• • •
He traveled by moonlight or streetlight, along back roads. Most nights, he found one house to enter in a gentle way: a window open, a door easily picked. Most of them were the homes of the wealthy, summer cottages with water views. Inside, he took only what he needed, very quietly, trying not to rouse anyone at home. Only once had he come close to having a problem, and that was when the mistress of a particular house went walking past the kitchen in her bathrobe, moving so quietly he had not heard her approach.
For one whole minute he held his breath while she did her business. He did not hide; he stood still in the middle of the linoleum floor, arms straight, legs at ease. He was holding a knife he’d purloined from an earlier house. If she came out and saw him there in the dark, he would hold up a finger to his lips. He would tell her that to scream would put the rest of her family in danger. He’d have to kill her, that much was certain, a matter of necessity; but the rest of them, assuming there were others, would be spared.
The woman flushed. She washed her hands. She opened the bathroom door, and turned the light off. She walked out of the bathroom, and went down the hallway, most likely to her room.
