But something changed in the middle of Barbara’s third month, when, in the early hours of the morning, Alice woke to the sound of a child calling for her.

Conceptually, she understood that an infant of Barbara’s age could not produce her mother-name, the name Bear gave her. Mamma.

She sat up in bed. Held still. Listened.

There it was again.

Mamma.

•   •   •

The nursery was dark and quiet. She tiptoed into it. The new nurse, Lorraine, was asleep on one side. Barbara was asleep on the other. For two minutes, Alice listened, standing in her nightgown in the center of the room. But there was only silence.

She tiptoed out again, and as she was closing the door behind her, there it came: Mamma.

She pivoted. Drifted back toward the nursery that used to be Bear’s. Put a hand on the doorknob.

“Alice.”

She jumped.

At the end of the hallway was Peter, frowning.

“Go back to bed,” he said.

•   •   •

It kept happening. She heard the voice each night. Sometimes, it seemed to be coming from outside her window. Sometimes, from a lower floor. Often, from the nursery.

Despite the night nurse, she slept very little.

Peter, noticing this, brought in the family doctor—the same elderly physician who’d been treating the Van Laars since Peter’s father was in his twenties.

Dr. Lewis was his name, and the first pill he ever prescribed to Alice was meant to help her sleep.

But the word broke through the pills, inflecting her dreams with dark and anxious images. Mamma. Mamma, came the call.

She couldn’t talk to Peter. She couldn’t talk to her own family. Everyone in her life encouraged her to move on, to move forward on the assumption that Bear would not ever be found.

But this, for Alice, was an impossible task.

Until she had proof to the contrary, she allowed herself to imagine that her son might still exist in the world, someplace just out of sight, an actor in the wings who might at any moment walk onstage.

Alice would wonder, later, whether this notion was what prevented her from fully embracing Barbara. Some part of her feared that Bear—wherever he was, in this world or the next—would sense some division in her motherly heart, would vanish or perish because of it.

And so each night, before she fell under the spell of Dr. Lewis’s pills, she did not pray that the voice she heard would stop, but that it would come to her, again and again. That Bear, in any form possible, would continue to visit her for the rest of her life.

The problem began when Bear’s visits got longer.

Alice

1950s | 1962 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975

It was a nice place, and very discreet.

These were the two words that everyone used when describing it.

Her parents were the ones to take her, presumably at the request of her husband and father-in-law. They were silent, all of them, for the three-hour drive. Not even the radio played.

•   •   •

When imagining the hospital, Alice had pictured something historic—something not dissimilar in appearance, in fact, from Self-Reliance. Set in nature, perhaps. A beautiful old building where she’d be given time to rest. Instead, the building—on the North Shore of Long Island—was brand-new, Brutalist in style, made of yellowy concrete that darkened in the rain. The grounds were treeless and barren. On benches here and there, uniformed employees sat with charges who looked half asleep.

Perhaps they had the wrong place, thought Alice. But no, there was the sign: The Dunwitty Institute. Founded by a friend of Dr. Lewis, who had recommended it.

In the front seat, her father turned his head toward her mother, trying unsuccessfully to catch her eye. Surely they, too, saw what she saw; certainly they’d understand that some mistake had been made. But her mother got out of the car without a word, and her father, after a beat, followed suit. Then he opened the back door for Alice.

•   •   •

She had no roommate. At least there was that. She was granted this privilege, said a nurse, by virtue of her family connection to Dr. Dunwitty. The nurse—a thin frowning woman in her late middle age—had revealed this disapprovingly, clearing her throat after speaking the words as if ridding her mouth of their taste.

No books were allowed. No television.

The only permitted activities were puzzles of various kinds: jigsaw, crossword, acrostic. There was some theory behind this, no doubt; idly, Alice wondered what it might be.

What she hated most was that Bear didn’t visit her here. The first night, she prayed that he would: some company would have been nice.

Instead, she was visited only by nightmares in which she returned to those terrible first days of searching, in which she was thwarted over and over again by forces or people she couldn’t control. When they were children, Delphine had called them can’t-get-there dreams: visions of missed trains and exams, traffic that stopped the car just before the boat departed. They’d happened to Alice all her life, but none of them compared to the ones she had at the Dunwitty Institute.

•   •   •

For one month, she had no visitors, and she was permitted no telephone calls.

On the thirty-first day she was there, a nurse came into her room and retrieved her. Alice followed her, puzzled, down a long hallway she’d never seen before. At its end was a pay phone. The nurse handed Alice a coin.

Alice looked at it.

“Well?” said the nurse. “Go ahead.”

But there was no one, she realized, that she wanted to call.

She fed the coin into the pay phone. Dialed a number she remembered from childhood. On the other end, a woman’s voice.

“Is Geraldine home?” Alice asked. The name of a friend from Brearley, to whom she had not spoken since she’d married Peter.

A pause. “May I ask who’s speaking?”

“This is Alice, Mrs. DeWitt. Alice Ward.”