Alice looked up with a jolt. How terrible, she thought—how absolutely terrible to name a baby strange.
The book went on. “Barbarian” derives from the same root, it said cheerfully.
Alice shuddered. Did everyone know this about Barbara? She often had trouble discerning what sort of knowledge was common, and what facts were considered obscure.
She closed the book sharply, resigned. She wouldn’t bring it up with Peter—she couldn’t. The name was fixed, the birth certificate issued. She’d just live with it, she thought. There were lots of famous Barbaras, after all.
Alice
1950s | 1962 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975
For two months after Barbara came home, things seemed better. A newborn in the house distracted her from her grief—which to that point had felt all-consuming.
She hadn’t wanted to get pregnant so quickly after Bear. It was Peter who insisted they try. We aren’t getting younger, he said.
Besides, he said, it will give you something to do.
• • •
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.
