As it turned out, the women were more willing to do so; and so it was their voices that echoed throughout the woods. All of them were mothers. All of them regularly set aside their innate sense of propriety to holler with abandon for their children.
Around the Preserve, they could hear others doing the same, the boy’s name resounding like an echo.
An hour went by. Two, three. The day wasn’t hot, but Carl found himself sweating nonetheless. Something about Bear’s name being called tugged at his conscience, made his heartbeat increase, triggered the same memory that had been bobbing at the outside of his mind since yesterday afternoon.
“Bear Van Laar,” the boy’s grandfather had called out. And Bear had jumped, startled, unhappy to leave Carl’s side.
One foot in front of the other now. The crunch of the pine-needled forest floor. If Carl had been by himself, he would have taken off his shirt. He worked to focus on the ground, as he’d been told to do—as he knew to do. But the landscape was beginning to blur before him. He took a sip from the canteen of water that hung from his neck.
Maryanne generally noticed such things, quickly observed when he or one of the children was ill or nervous or otherwise out of spirits. But today she was focused on the task at hand. Early on she had tied her dress up into a knot at her knees. Now she was stepping high with her booted feet, calling out for the boy.
Suddenly Carl stumbled, and fell to the ground. The whole chain stopped.
He was feeling a sort of pain in his stomach and chest, something viselike and twisting. He could say no words.
The name they had been calling changed now. Carl, they were saying. Carl. Carl.
It was the last thing he heard before losing consciousness.
III
When Lost
Tracy
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
She was afraid to use the word, to even think it, but sometimes Tracy felt like she was falling in love with Barbara Van Laar.
She was fascinated by the details of Barbara’s face and body, her eyes—long-lashed and perennially sleepy—and the shape of her strong legs, and the nails she bit down to nothing, and the very light hair of her forearms and thighs, which looked like spun gold in the sunlight, and which emphasized the artificial black of her hair. If she caught Tracy staring—which she must have—she said nothing, only smiled vaguely in her direction, as if accustomed to being the recipient of such gazes.
More important: Barbara was the first friend she’d ever had who seemed to like Tracy as much as Tracy liked her. She told Tracy she was funny, for one thing: she laughed loudly and often at things that Tracy said, drawing interested gazes from those around them. She told Tracy she was smart. She harbored a disdain for the mainstream without disdaining the people who partook in it. Indeed, she was the least judgmental person Tracy had ever met.
Barbara’s position at Camp Emerson was an interesting one: she had the glamour of an outsider, that summer being her first at camp, and yet she was also an insider in ways the rest of them could never be. She had frequented the grounds in the off-season; she had seen into closets and back rooms and kitchens that were off-limits to other campers.
Most intriguingly, she was apparently quite close with T.J. Hewitt, the camp director, who was essentially a mystery to every other camper on-site. Yes, she led them all in outdoorsmanship lessons; but even then she was serious and standoffish. The only things Tracy knew about her personal life centered on her history on the grounds. She was the daughter of the former longtime director of the camp, Vic Hewitt, a legend whose likeness hung in a place of prominence in the commissary. Said to be ill in some way. Other than this fact, they knew nothing at all about T.J.; the counselors revered her, never gossiped about her. She seemed more like a mascot than a living person: someone to be greatly respected, but never spoken to directly.
The first time, therefore, that Tracy passed T.J. while walking with Barbara, she was surprised to hear her new friend call out the director’s name brightly.
“What’s happening?” Barbara said.
Unlike everyone else on the premises, T.J. did not wear a uniform. Instead she wore cutoffs—corduroy or jean—and a T-shirt or a plaid flannel, and high socks, and brown Danner hiking boots laced tightly to the top. On her head was a hairstyle so laughably askew that on anyone else it would have been ridiculed. But on T.J., the cut seemed simply to indicate a lack of concern for earthly matters. It functioned, like a monk’s tonsure, to separate her from the laypeople at the camp.
She’d been kneeling before one of the small bridges that spanned the creek separating the boys’ cabins from the girls’. She was hammering a row of nails with frightening speed. Now she looked up and frowned.
“Where’re you supposed to be?” she said.
“Can’t remember!” said Barbara. Teasing. She turned to Tracy. “Can you, Tracy?”
“Lunch,” Tracy said quickly. “We’re walking to lunch right now.”
“Ah, that’s right. Sorry, T.J., I’m new here.” Barbara grinned. T.J. didn’t. But it was clear she was fighting a smile.
“Get out of my hair,” she said, and, raising her hammer in the air again, turned back to her work.
They continued on their way. At a certain point Barbara noticed Tracy’s expression: wide-eyed, waiting for an explanation.
“What?” she said.
Tracy glanced back over her shoulder.
“Oh, T.J.?” said Barbara. “She’s harmless. I don’t know why everyone’s so intimidated by her.”
“What does she do the rest of the year?” asked Tracy.
“Takes care of her dad. Takes care of the grounds. Comes to stay with me in Albany when my parents have to go someplace.”
Tracy looked at her. “She—babysits you?” She couldn’t imagine it. The long silences, she thought, would be unbearable.
Barbara laughed. “I wouldn’t call it that. She just stays with me, makes sure I stay out of trouble. The Hewitts are like family.”
Tracy shrugged. “If you say so,” she said.
• • •
When Tracy was not with Barbara, she was making attempts to learn about her. For one thing, she was becoming increasingly curious about her history. If her bunkmates knew the full story of Barbara’s brother’s disappearance, the arrival of Barbara herself had precipitated a sort of respectful silence on the matter.
Only once was Tracy privy to anything of substance.
