Suddenly Louise’s stomach grumbles so loudly that the sound fills the room.
“Hungry,” says the man. A statement, not a question.
He stands, walks into the other room. Returns with an apple and a little knife. He pares the apple from its skin, and then slices it, and then hands her pieces one at a time, which she doesn’t decline.
“Why are you asking me about John Paul?” she says, after the apple is nearly gone.
“You can’t figure it out?”
Louise says nothing.
“You know why you’re here, right?” the man says. Trying again. But again, Louise says nothing.
“You’re being held right now for a minor crime. We’re getting a bail hearing scheduled as we speak. That’ll happen tomorrow, probably, at the earliest. But you’re here for another reason, too.”
Silence. She waits. The man watches her, measured. She does not like his expression: he believes her to be impressionable, credulous, a local who never left home. If he only knew, she thinks; if he only knew the restaurants she’s gone to with John Paul, the movies she’s seen. The books she’s read, on John Paul’s recommendation and on account of her own curiosity. I’m different from what you think, she wants to tell him. But Denny’s warning—don’t talk without a lawyer—remains at the front of her mind.
The man leans forward.
“We know,” he says, “that you know what happened to Barbara Van Laar.”
It catches her off guard.
“I don’t,” says Louise, before she can stop herself. But for some reason, even to her, the words sound false: high-pitched, a note of complaint in their intonation.
“That’s different too,” says the man.
“Than what?”
“Than what your boyfriend said.”
Alice
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
This, thought Alice, was what Self-Reliance had been built for. At ten in the morning, she stood in the center of the great room and turned in a slow circle as, all around her, the house was resurrected. They had not held a party—the Blackfly Good-by, or any other—since Bear’s disappearance. But the house’s one hundredth anniversary seemed to Peter to be an auspicious occasion to restart the tradition. “Good for business,” he said. He had several potential clients he wanted to invite.
The obstacle was the amount of work that had to be done. Most of Self-Reliance’s bedrooms had been closed for longer than Barbara had been alive. Now they were being unsealed, the dust coverings pulled from the furniture, the windows opened. Cut flowers were driven up from the florist they used in Albany. Wildflowers, at Peter’s command: bunches of wood sorrel and dewdrops and jack-in-the-pulpits, in vases all over the house, on nightstands in every bedroom. Peter had had the sofa and chairs in the great room reupholstered, and had bought new furniture, too: three dozen Adirondack chairs, locally made, now stood at attention in a neat semicircle on the lawn leading down to Lake Joan. The old ones, splintered and ancient, had been scrapped for firewood by someone on staff.
• • •
It wasn’t only the house that had been remade. For the past weeks, ever since Barbara’s departure for camp, Alice had been attending to herself, her physical person, for the first time in years. It was a welcome turn. This party and its planning had reignited some fundamental part of herself, her character. Certainly she had never let herself go, not all the way—but she had also not been quite as careful with her clothing, her skin, her nails. She used to wear her hair in a sort of voluminous bob that ended at the nape of her neck. Very chic, she had always been told. But after Bear’s disappearance she had stopped going to her normal hairdresser, not wanting to answer questions again and again. Her hair had grown long, shamefully so. To hide its length, she pinned it into a low twist.
A week after Barbara’s departure for Camp Emerson, she had asked one of the staff to drive her down to Albany for a hair appointment. She returned with her hair in a long straight sheet down her back, freshly dyed to conceal the gray at her temples. In her hand was a bag from Whitney’s, and inside it were seven new outfits, including two miniskirts and a bikini. The salesgirl, impossibly young, had egged her on: “You’ve got the figure, after all,” she said.
• • •
Now it was Saturday morning—the day the party was set to begin—and Alice stood before her closet, deciding which new outfit to choose.
“Mrs. Van Laar,” someone said.
She turned. It was a young man she did not, at first, recognize. One of the temporary staff Peter had hired, she guessed. He was wearing a uniform, anyway.
“What is it?”
“Someone’s at the front door,” the boy said.
“A guest?” Alice asked—horrified. Surely not yet, she thought. It was only eleven in the morning. The guests were not due until late afternoon.
“I’m not sure,” said the boy. “It’s a couple. They’re—” he hedged.
And just then, Alice heard her mother’s voice, familiar and terrifying at once, impatient and out of sorts.
Alice blinked, frozen. She was in no way ready for their arrival.
“Thank you,” she said to the boy, who retreated. And then, with reluctance, Alice pulled from her closet a mock turtleneck and a corduroy miniskirt, and put them both on.
• • •
“Good heavens, Alice,” said her mother, in the great room. She took Alice in with a sweep of her eyes, from top to bottom: her flat-ironed hair, her short skirt, her bare legs and feet. And then she pronounced: “You’re gaunt.”
It was and was not an insult.
“Mother,” said Alice. “You’re early.”
“Well, I thought you’d need the help,” said her mother, casting her gaze around the room, her implication clear.
At times, Alice was impressed by the creativity of her mother’s criticisms, the poetry of the language she used to describe all that she found lacking in the world around her. A different sort of daughter would have distanced herself from her mother long ago, or at least made the decision to laugh about it all. But at more than forty years old, Alice still—embarrassingly, she realized—strove to successfully anticipate and ward off the complaints that emanated from her, a deluge of observations designed to sound neutral, each more cutting than the last.
“You go off and get ready,” said Mrs. Ward. “I’ll direct the others.”
Alice froze. Ordered herself to say it: I am ready.
“Thank you, Mother,” she said instead. She avoided meeting her father’s gaze. If she did, she might have cried, for she knew he would be looking at her with something like pity. Why did she let it all bother her? At this point in life? Peter had been telling her for years—well, never mind what he said. He was part of the problem.
Alice retreated down the hallway, self-conscious now about her body, her bare legs. She could feel her mother’s gaze, still, burning into her.
• • •
In the bedroom, she opened her closet door and stood there for too long, staring at but not processing the visual field before her. Colors were there, and textures, and garments of various lengths.
And then, above the clothing rack, another swath of fabric drew her attention, and she reached for it.
During Alice’s time away—the only term that was ever used to describe her stay at the Dunwitty Institute—Dr. Lewis had urged the rest of the Van Laars to remove all hints of Bear from their Albany house and from Self-Reliance, too. And so his two rooms had been stripped to the studs. The walls—once covered, to Bear’s delight, in wallpaper designed to look like maps of the world—had been painted white. His clothing, gone. His toys and books. This, Dr. Lewis said, was the way to let Alice heal; and in the Van Laar household, the advice of Dr. Lewis—a friend of Peter II’s from his Yale days—was taken.
But there was one possession of Bear’s that they had not seen.
When Bear was born, someone had given her a blanket for him, blue with a silk ribbon trim in a moon-and-star pattern. As he grew, he was rarely without it. But when, at four, he was still trailing it about the house, Peter had issued a command that it be taken from him. And Alice had complied, had kept it hidden from him here on this shelf of her closet, though the boy had wept pitifully for it each bedtime for a week.
