by Diane Cook
I wanted to bring you this Bundt cake, but the wonder twins wouldn’t let me in, Gail yelled through the closed window. She held up a cake wrapped in foil.
Linda sighed as she unlocked the door. I know. I had hoped it could feel a bit friendlier. They throw rocks. People have complained.
Sour grapes. They’re just mad they didn’t think of it first. Gail squeezed one of Lewis’s soapy wet feet. He splashed his hands in the water. Besides, it’s working, isn’t it? He’s still here.
True. But you snuck past, didn’t you?
And of course you’ll talk to them about that.
Of course, Linda murmured, and bit her lip. Sometimes it just feels extreme.
You just keep doing what it takes to keep this little one safe. I wouldn’t worry about what people are saying.
Linda hadn’t considered that people were saying much of anything.
When Gail left, Linda opened the front door and called the guards over. One faced her, while the other remained turned away to watch the man in the yard. The man in the yard strained forward to hear.
Linda whispered, In general, you’re doing great.
The men nodded gravely.
But a friend snuck into the backyard tonight.
Impossible, said the guard facing her. We would never let anyone through.
And we patrol the backyard, said the guard with his back to her. Impossible that we wouldn’t see your friend.
Not possible, said the guard facing her.
The point is, said Linda, one, I want to be able to see my neighbors. You can let them through. This is a neighborhood. And two, people can’t be sneaking around, or you’re not doing the job I hired you for. And I have no problem hiring someone else. She said this in a way that was mean on purpose.
The men were quiet for a moment, sniffed the night air to help them process her threat. Streetlights glowed up and down the block. Leaves wrestled their branches. Sprinklers chugged over far-off lawns. They promised it would not happen again.
It was the men from the block, the neighbor guards, who ultimately let the man inside. One man’s child had broken his leg, was in the hospital, and the father skipped his shift to stay by his son’s side. The other man from the neighborhood worked alone. The day progressed uneventfully. The guard watched the man in the yard and the man in the yard watched the guard. There was no need to patrol the house in the usual way; the man in the yard wasn’t moving. As long as the man never moved, the guards didn’t need to either. There’s no other danger, the guard thought, as the sun spotlighted the man in the yard. He’d never heard of an accomplice. He was sure he would know if the man had one. Though what if the man decided to bring an accomplice one day, and the guards weren’t patrolling? The odds were low. But still. He’d hate to be the one on patrol and not really patrolling on the one day that the man brought an accomplice.
The guard worked this thought over as he turned to urinate into the bushes that lined the house. He watched the man in the window’s reflection. The man still hovered behind the maple. The guard glanced down to aim, and briefly closed his eyes in relief. When he looked again, he no longer saw the man behind the maple. He didn’t see the man anywhere. For a moment, he thought the man might have moved fully behind the tree to give him privacy. But that was only the briefest wishful thought, because he knew better. He’d been through this. He’d comforted his own hysterical wife twice, and the story was always that she’d looked away for only a second. Just one second! And here he had done just that, even though he had promised himself, and Linda, that he wouldn’t.
Inside, Linda and Lewis had relaxed into a nap while he nursed. When the guard burst into the room, Linda startled awake to find a cold spot in the crook of her arm.
Linda felt a warm, damp thing on her cheek. Gail held a compress to her. The ocher of sunset filtered through the blinds. She had slept most of every day since Lewis was taken. She could not leave her bed. She could not rise to lock any doors. Old soiled diapers stewed in the garbage can, and she could not take them to the curb.
Gail pursed her lips. You need to get up, get on with it, she said, a rind of admonishment around the words.
I don’t need to do that, Linda replied.
And how do you tell that to your husband?
I don’t. Linda made a half attempt to sit up. We don’t talk.
Gail shook her head. And how do you intend to make another if you’re not talking? She was trying to tease a smile from Linda.
I don’t think we will. I think we’re done.
She could see that Gail did not understand.
I can’t lose another. I’m not sure I’m going to survive losing Lewis.
This feeling will pass. It always does, Gail tried to reassure her.
How long before you felt normal? Linda asked shyly.
How do you mean?
When were you able to move on?
Why don’t you rest some more, Gail suggested, and grabbed her purse as if she was about to run.
Wait, Linda said, grabbing a fistful of bedsheet. How many children did you lose? She realized she had never asked.
Well, Gail said curtly. None.
How? He didn’t come to your yard! she accused.
Well, of course he did. He comes to everyone’s yard.
Well, then?
Gail looked uncomfortable. He waited, but then just lost interest. He doesn’t want them once they are too old. Then she said, both delicately and proudly, Honestly, I just never made a mistake.
Linda had never heard of a woman not losing any of her children. No one ever talked of such a thing. She had come to believe it was inevitable, like a law of nature, and not a failure on her part. Or she felt like it was a failure on her part—of course it was a failure—but because every other woman had the same failure, failure seemed normal, which made her feel normal, which canceled out the feeling of failure.
It’s not your fault, Gail said, smoothing out the wrinkles in Linda’s sheets, which was her way of saying that it was.
The women of the block association met in Linda’s living room. She distributed coffee in cups, and they passed around a small pitcher of cream and bowl of sugar.
When all their coffee was white and sweet, Helen tapped a spoon against her cup lip. Linda? You called this meeting. So. The women resentfully stopped chatting.
Linda cleared her throat.
I’m going to find the man. I’m going to get my children and any other children who are there.
The women waited for more, like a punch line.
If, she added, the children are still with him.
Finally someone shrieked, To his house?
You can’t just go there.
You can’t just get them.
The women all talked at once.
It’s not done this way, Helen insisted.
What if you go, and, like you said, there are none? And it’s just him? said Lorrie, her voice arcing toward panic. I think I would die.
And what if they’re all there? asked Nell, who had four children at home, and was one of the few who’d had three taken by the man. What if you get me my children back? She looked around at the women. Am I supposed to want them? Because I don’t. I don’t want them anymore. As she spoke, she shook her cup carelessly and coffee sloshed onto the carpet.
Nell’s right, Gail said. Children grow up so fast. You won’t know them anymore. I’m worried you’ll be disappointed with what you find.
Linda thought she saw some women blanch when Gail spoke, and was it her imagination, or had several rolled their eyes? She detected a new chill in the air. There was so much she didn’t know about these women.
Linda cleared her throat, said shakily, I’ll take that risk.
Everyone deflated in her chair. Were the women having the same thoughts she’d had? Could they handle knowing for certain where their children had been? Could they handle having them back? Or were they thinking something else entirely? Perhaps that Linda was a fool.
Linda prepared a snack to take with her. She placed it in her purse with her biggest kitchen knife, wrapped in a tea towel so she wouldn’t cut herself if she reached for anything.
Like in a fable, the man’s house was easy to find. It was the kind of place children told each other about at sleepovers, crowded under blankets, their faces lit by flashlights.
Linda followed the man’s well-worn trail, which ran like a scar through her neighbors’ yards and into the dense, dark woods. The man lived behind them. Had anyone ever ventured this way before? Or had it seemed too dangerous, too unknown? Linda gasped with each breath, not from exertion but from fear of what she would find.
At the end of the trail sat a clearing, and in the clearing sat a house. An original wooden shack situated itself humbly in the center, but a maze of crudely built additions snaked out from all sides and corners, with additions attached to those additions. It stretched out awkwardly, like a foldable ruler. Linda was so close to her own house that she could hear the hammering of a neighbor who was putting in a deck. The trees were the same. If she let her yard go wild, these same types of trees would grow. The maple in his yard was the same size as the maple in hers. On both, leaves had turned poinsettia red.
She entered the house, followed the drone of a television down a zigzag hallway, and entered a living room. Several broken-skinned couches sat facing a small television. The walls were a raw wood, as was the floor under a mosaic of small mismatched rugs flung together to form a larger one.
On the rug was a child’s car seat, and in it lay Lewis, asleep. He looked so different from how she remembered him. He was a few months older now, and had already grown too big for the seat. Linda recognized it as hers and was amazed she’d never noticed it was gone. She wondered how many other things the man had taken from her that day besides Lewis.
In an easy chair next to Lewis sat the man, his arm outstretched to rock the car seat. Several children of various ages splayed on the floor, playing a game. They squinted at her, then returned to their game. On the far corner of a sad blue couch, a small girl was curled in a ball, asleep. Her dirty hair was a nest of knots, with some small twigs and mosses tied in.
Linda whimpered.
The man scowled at her. What did you think? he sneered in a voice hollowed by illness. I ate them? Is that what you thought you’d find?
He stood, shaky. I’m not an animal.
The man gathered items into a plastic grocery sack.
I can’t fight you, he mumbled. I’m too sick. In went a brown teddy bear, a painted rattle with many spots worn through to wood.
In a way I’m glad you came. I can’t care for them anymore. It’s a lot of work.
The girl on the couch unfolded as if on cue and stretched like a dog, arching so far she slid off the cushion and onto her head. As Linda watched this, her stomach twisted.
She’s yours, the man said. He peered at Linda’s face, then at the girl. Clear as day.
The girl sat up, rubbed the spot she’d bruised.
Linda counted backward in her head. Beatrice was six.
She likes to walk, he said, as if explaining her hair. He thrust the bag into the girl’s arms and nodded to the child seat. Grab that handle and hold tight. You’re gonna help your mom get your brother home. She doesn’t look like she can walk too steady.
Beatrice and the man stared at Linda, as if waiting for her to speak, or maybe just to leave.
Linda had expected something more dramatic. A struggle, maybe. She tightened her grip on her purse where the knife lay cozy in a rag. Something more than this. This, she imagined, was what it would feel like if she had to pick her kids up from a sitter she hated leaving them with. Aren’t you going to apologize? she finally asked.
The man laughed, but not meanly. For what? It’s just how I am. And I did right by them. He placed a hand on Beatrice’s head and smiled down at her. What does an owl say, girl?
Beatrice cocked her head. Hoo hoo. Hoo hoo, she called, slow and serious.
Correct, the man said, and hobbled past Linda. She followed him into a dining room stuffed with tables made from plywood across sawhorses, a few appliances lining the walls. The tables stretched in rows, benches flanking each. It looked like a cafeteria, and easily could seat a hundred.
Photos of the man with different children covered the plywood walls. In one he was a young man helping a small boy hold up a fish almost as long as the boy was tall. The boy showed hugely gapped teeth, and the man himself was caught midlaugh. In another, the man, older, stood in front of the house, before all the serpentine additions. Gathered around him, in one big hug, were children of all ages, maybe forty in all. Everyone smiled. Between the poster boards were tacked wrinkled, aged letters. Dear Dad, they all began. Taped to some were pictures of other families, and Linda understood that these children had become adults and wrote home to the man as any child would write home to a father. But did the pictures show their own families, or ones they had stolen from whatever neighborhood they now lived behind? Had they grown up to be like the man? Or were they just regular people?
She watched the man stoop into one of the refrigerators and fill a tote bag with apples. He was mostly bald, with drooping ears and gnarled elbows. He looked so much older than he had in her yard, though that was only a few months ago. He creaked back upright and walked the bag of apples over to her.
And of course you’ll take the others, he said. Then, already lost in his own nostalgia, he murmured, My children.
Through the woods, Linda led a procession of strange little faces of varying ages, the bigger ones carrying the crawlers. Each time she tried to count them, they muddled and mixed themselves. She thought there were at least a couple dozen. They were all smudged with dirt and smelled like a horde.
Beatrice walked beside Linda, swinging Lewis’s chair wildly. The girl should look familiar, but Linda thought her the strangest of all. She watched Linda out of the corner of her eye, and seemed ready to flinch should Linda reach for her. So Linda didn’t.
As they left the house, many of the children, crying, had embraced the man, and he had cried too. Most called him Dad, but she heard a few call him Kevin. Kevin, she repeated to herself, and she almost laughed at how ordinary it all began to seem. At the head of the trail the man had worn through the woods, Linda looked back. The man was slumped on the porch, already yellow and dead.
What if the man hadn’t been ill? Would he have fought her for the children? Linda wasn’t sure anymore. Perhaps he’d never intended to keep them, to become caretaker to untold numbers of children throughout his life. Maybe he’d had other plans but long ago had given in to a sick impulse. And the defeated young women thought this must be what motherhood is, and they let it continue. They learned to expect—and so, accept—certain losses. And the man waited a lifetime for some relief.
Linda regarded her sullen brood. They stood expectant, sad and hungry-looking. Her stomach sank.
Linda phoned her neighbors and left messages. The man is dead, and I have all the children. Come and see if any are yours.
Only a few women came, called out names that weren’t recognized, tentatively lifted children, peered at their heads and bottoms as if making sure of something, then left with the ones that most fit what they thought they remembered or what they most wanted. Only one woman teared up with joy. The others emanated a feeling more like confusion. Or resignation. If you could suddenly get back everything you’d already said good-bye to, would you want it? Other women she had called answered with their silence. They never came.
Linda recognized their parents in some of them. Inherited noses, eyes, smiles, temperaments, gave them away. She was certain she could match these children, walk them over to their proper homes. Two children who had earlier been claimed reappeared on her doorstep, apology notes pinned to their jackets. She could have sent them back to their indecisive parents. But she didn’t do it. She kept all the
children.
Linda hired men to build a cramped addition onto the house, and her husband worked extra hours to pay for it and for all their new expenses. Often after work he took long night drives, drank late at a bar, anything to avoid coming home to this new bustling clan. Linda remembered how, when they were newly married and fantasizing about their family to come, he had argued that three was the ideal number of children. Now they had twenty-five.
The new addition covered the footprint of the backyard and left no room for outside play. The children slept in rows on rough-hewn bunk beds that reminded her of a ship’s galley: industrial, sad, adult. She tried not to picture it that way and concentrated instead on how these children were no longer stolen. They had been found. Freed. She had rescued them. But was anything better? Her husband was unhappy; the children who had seemed content in their forest home now seemed lethargic. And though she had her children back, she still felt grief for what could have been, for what would never be. Maybe this is what her neighbors had tried to tell her. Motherhood was naturally replete with loss.
She tried to keep her own children close. She put their beds in her bedroom. For Lewis a crib and then later his own small bed, with a train engine’s face painted onto the foot, covered in conductor-striped sheets. And for Beatrice—a bed with pink sheets and a comforter trimmed with lace. But Beatrice didn’t sleep there.
Beatrice prowled the house at night, looking through cabinets and books. She went for long walks and came back with things that didn’t belong to her. In the morning, Linda would find her curled in a corner under a moldy, yellowed blanket Linda didn’t recognize and couldn’t remember bringing from the man’s house. Beatrice’s socks would be half off her feet in that way socks slide off children’s feet but never adults’.
Beatrice kept her treasures in her corner of the living room, and at night, when the children were in bed, when Lewis was asleep, when her husband was working late to avoid the teeming house, when Beatrice was loping through the halls, Linda explored the collection. Mixed in with the dirty baseballs and lost car keys, Linda found a box of letters she had written to her stolen daughter and hoped one day to give to her. Baby pictures were tucked into a dog-eared grief book heavily marked with Linda’s handwriting. Beneath it, Linda’s hairbrush, full of wiry grays, a sweater she hadn’t worn in years, a swatch of pink snipped from Beatrice’s own lonely bedding doused in an expensive perfume Linda kept on her dresser.
