• • •
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.”
“Oh, Alice,” said Mrs. DeWitt. “Alice, I was so sorry to hear—”
Swiftly, she hung up the phone.
• • •
A week after that, she was told she had a visitor.
If she had known who it would be, she wouldn’t have emerged from her room. But she didn’t ask, and this was how she came to find herself face-to-face, across a table set for checkers, with her sister, Delphine.
Alice turned to the nurse. “I want to leave,” she said. “I don’t want to be here. I’d like to go back to my room, please.”
But the nurse said: “Come now, that’s your sister, and she’s driven such a long way.”
Delphine smiled tightly, first at the nurse and then at Alice. “I won’t keep her long, Nurse,” said Delphine, using her grandest and airiest voice. And the nurse, obedient, practically bowed her way out of the room.
• • •
For some minutes, they sat in silence. The only way to survive this, thought Alice, was to imagine herself into a different world. And so, just as she had done in childhood, she closed her eyes, sitting quite upright, and left the earthly world.
You’re outside Bear’s room, she thought. He’ll wake up shortly. He’ll call for you.
“Alice,” said her sister.
Mamma, thought Alice.
“Alice. Can you hear me?”
Mamma.
“I’m sorry,” said Delphine.
V
Found
Judyta
1950s | 1961 | Winter 1973 | June 1975 | July 1975 | August 1975: Day One
