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“A map is a simple way to look at the geography of a place to understand the way it is,” she is saying. “But that isn’t necessarily the way it is.”

  She moves the map and light over to his lap.

  “A map is beautiful and full of a predictable order,” she says. “But unrecorded history has occurred on any map of any place and that changes the geography.”

  Thomas doesn’t want to know any more about maps, especially if what he is going to learn includes bad news.

  Just in the hours since this trip began, Georgie has actually changed. She isn’t the same woman full of high spirits she was when they left on the plane to Chicago.

  “Remember Gettysburg?” Georgie is asking. “Maybe three years ago when we went to Gettysburg? You were ten and I told you what had happened there, and you said it could not have happened because you didn’t see the evidence.”

  “I don’t remember,” Thomas says.

  But he does. Of course he does.

  His father, Dr. Richard Davies, had just been diagnosed with brain cancer. Thomas had been told his father was sick, although he had never been sick before.

  Then Thomas was sent by plane to stay with Georgie at the Home for the Incurables while the doctors in Chicago decided what to do.

  “I remember that I threw up on the battlefield and we had to go home.”

  “I think you made yourself throw up so we could go home,” she says.

  She is trying to be lighthearted but this is not a funny trip.

  “Do you think something terrible is going to happen here tonight?” Thomas asks.

  “Like any minute? Doesn’t it seem particularly creepy?”

  She wraps her arms around him, rests her chin on his head.

  “I’m sorry Thomas. I’m very sorry to frighten you.”

  He lets Georgie hold him even though what he wants to do is shake himself free of her grip, to run down the hill and wake up his mother and Uncle Nicolas and even Venus, who at least would be able to read the alignment of the stars announcing trouble if trouble is in the air.

  “What I’m thinking now is this,” Georgie points her flashlight at the map. “Here are the tents, and my father’s tent with my mother was closest to where we are now sitting. Which means of course that my father could have been the one to kill her since he was so close to the place where her body was discovered. Or she could have left their tent to walk around because she couldn’t sleep and someone, my guess is James Willow, because who is to know that James actually discovered her when he could easily have strangled her and dragged her here.”

  “Not Roosevelt?” Thomas asks.

  “Of course not. He was eleven years old,” Georgie says. “Don’t listen to Uncle Nicolas. He doesn’t want to be on this trip.”

  She’s looking now at the larger map of the river, tracing it north, a light pencil line to the top, where the river seems to stop just short of Camp Minnie HaHa.

  “The one thing I remember about camp is breakfast. Someone would ring a bell and we’d leave the cabin, all of us, and I’d be holding my mother’s hand,” she is saying. “I don’t have a picture of my mother in my mind, but I have photographs and I do remember her sweet-smelling hand and how I used to kiss it as we walked to breakfast. Except …”

  She stops, her hand on Thomas’ wrist.

  “Actually, Thomas, I think I remember nothing about my mother except what I’ve seen in photographs.”

  They sit quietly, her arm draped around his shoulders, squeezing his arm a little too tight, and Thomas is beginning to feel he will jump out of his skin, as Georgie likes to say. Then they hear a rustle in the brush behind the tents—not a small disturbance, the kind a beaver or a skunk or badger might create.

  But heavier.

  “Bear?” Georgie asks.

  They listen.

  The sound travels through the reeds, moving away. Only the rustle of high grass disappearing into silence except for the wind and the pine trees ringing like chimes above them.

  “You think it’s a bear?” Thomas asks.

  “Whatever it was, it’s gone,” Georgie says. “I didn’t ask the outfitters about bears in these woods.”

  “Maybe we should go to sleep.”

  “I can’t,” Georgie says. “I’m not at all tired.”

  It is clear to Thomas that they are going to be together on the bank until she is ready to go to bed, if she goes to bed at all, and Thomas will have to stay with her because she wants him to be there.

  He feels less trapped when they lie on their backs, side by side, their arms stretched out above them, the high pines barely lit by the slender moon, the current of Bone River slapping water over the bank.

  “I don’t believe in forgiveness,” Georgie says.

  Out of the blue she says it, and Thomas’ stomach tightens the way it does when he senses an expectation that he will fail to meet.

  He is silent, hoping she will change the subject or stop talking or go to sleep, but she isn’t in the mood.

  He lies very still.

  She has turned on her side and is resting her chin in her hand, the way she likes to read in bed at the Home for the Incurables, the lampshade tilted so she can better see.

  “Thomas?” she asks, peering over at him. “Are you sleeping?”

  He rubs his eyes as if she is waking him up, but she isn’t since he hasn’t been sleeping.

  “I’ve been wondering whether you were aware of being angry when your father died?”

  “I was angry,” Thomas says. “I am still angry.”

  “At him for leaving?”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Thomas says. “He would have done anything not to leave us.”

  “Then who are you angry at?”

  “I don’t believe in God,” Thomas says, “if that’s what you’re asking me.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking.”

  There had been no mention of God when his father was ill or dying or even at the funeral in Chicago.

  Only of science.

  Besides, Thomas would never believe in one god. It only makes sense that there would be many gods like the Greeks believed and the Egyptians and the Romans, all the ancient civilizations. And the gods are half-human and half-god, superheroes who can live ordinary and extraordinary lives at the same time.

  His father, Richard Davies, is that kind of god.

  SOMETIME IN THE MIDDLE of the night, they fall asleep.

  When Thomas wakes up with a sense of dread, suddenly as though from a dream, which he cannot remember, Georgie is curled on her side facing away from him.

  The sky is just beginning to lighten, not even dawn, but he can make out the shape of tents around the crescent of land, a light wind cold on his dew-damp skin, the river splashing against the bank, no sound but the river.

  No one else seems to be awake.

  He pushes up from the ground, brushes off his shorts, the back of his sweater as far as his hand can reach behind him, checks to see if his glasses are still in his back pocket and heads down the path to his tent.

  He wonders if he had dreamt while he was sleeping—if it had been a bear they heard making his lumbering way through the forest and whether Oona curled up in his sleeping bag is awake yet.

  At the tent, he holds on to one of the poles for balance, opens the flap that must have closed in the night and peers in the triangle of space. It’s too dark to see. He gets down on his hands and knees and crawls to his sleeping bag, running his right hand across the soft quilted material, balancing with his left. He moves his hand and arm from the bottom of the sleeping bag to the top feeling for the body of a little girl.

  He does it twice, reaching more slowly the second time, feeling for a shape in the sleeping bag, a small bottom, the solid bones of a child’s skull.

  But the sleeping bag is empty.

  Completely empty.

  He falls across it on his stomach, banging his forehead on the hard ground over and over and over and over and over.

 
Oona is gone.

  MISSING LAKE

  June 17, 1941

  William

  William returned to his tent, angling up the hill, his ankle twisting on the roots of so many pines crowding the periphery of open land, their roots curling across the landscape.

  The damp air was pungent with the smell of mushrooms.

  Josie was gone.

  No longer in the folding chair where he had left her. A flashlight, the light pointing into the sky, lay where she had been sitting.

  The blood rushed to his head.

  When he had seen Clementine leaning against a tree next to her tent, he had gone down the hill. He needed to speak with her.

  Back in just a minute, he’d said to Josephine.

  Now he stared through the darkness beyond the tents, into the forest, suspecting Josie might have gone to the edge of the woods to pee.

  Fastidious Josephine.

  But why wouldn’t she have taken the flashlight?

  Or perhaps she had walked down to the tents pitched closer to the water to check on Georgianna, although he was surprised she had been able to get up from the low folding chair without his help.

  He stood next to their tent the way he often stood, his arms folded across his chest, his back straight, surveying the river. Two tents, side by side, swallowed the dark—one with Georgianna, the second, closer to the water, with Roosevelt.

  Where Clementine would sleep should she ever decide to go to bed.

  He doubted Clem was afraid in this geography, the way another woman might be. But she was angry and didn’t hide the heat of her anger in a soft cushion of innuendo the way Josephine was inclined to do. She spoke her mind. William liked that about her.

  When he had called Clem about camp for Roosevelt that summer, they hadn’t seen each other for several years. First Georgianna was born in the icy December of 1937. Then the stillborn boy in the fall of 1940 and Josephine’s steady retreat.

  The long absence from Clementine followed years of visits to his uncle for a weekend every June after school let out, sometimes for New Year’s or before school started up after the holiday. Never with Josie, who went home to Ann Arbor. On those visits, he only saw Clem in the kitchen of his uncle’s house, where he sat at the long table watching her cook. She didn’t linger after work. But he would take Roosevelt out to Rock Creek Park to skip stones in the creek and hike the hills, or downtown to walk the mall or canoeing on the Potomac. During occasional phone calls with his uncle, usually for news from Lithuania, he would ask Irving about Clementine as if in passing.

  The campground was eerie with scattered silence. River sounds, a breeze over the wet leaves and low brush. And then what sounded like a soft hum in the distance by the water, coming from one of the tents.

  Voices?

  He could not be sure.

  Earlier in the evening when William caught sight of Clementine, he and Josie had been arguing about food. Whether the new cook would make the fresh peach pies the former cook had made for Sunday supper—“or just fried chicken and mashed potatoes and ice cream.”

  “You’re going to be in Ann Arbor, Josie, so what does it matter whether she makes peach pies.”

  “Just wondering, that’s all,” Josie said. “The new cook is from the South, where all they eat is fried food or so I understand. And that’s not good for these boys.”

  “I used to eat her meals at my uncle’s house,” William said. “They were delicious. And seldom fried.”

  “Then I’ll miss these delicious meals since, as you have pointed out, I’ll be in Ann Arbor. A loss,” Josie said, her voice low in her throat, emanating gloom. “And there she is now. The cook. Almost midnight and she’s still awake.”

  William looked down the hill toward the water following his wife’s line of vision, and there was Clem leaning against a tree, her back arched, her head resting on the trunk.

  Something about the strength and boldness of her pose. Her blackness against the dark night, her body outlined black on black. He got up and headed down the hill.

  “I’ll be right back,” he called to Josie. “I need to warn Clementine about the river.”

  “What about the river?” Josie had asked.

  But William had headed down the hill as if he hadn’t heard her.

  He did not linger, did not wish to cause himself more trouble than he already had. Gone just long enough for Josie to disappear.

  SQUINTING TO MAKE OUT the tents in the near distance, walking close to the line of trees, he was overtaken by thoughts of home—deep in his stomach, spreading with a weight greater than his body weight.

  Tonight would be tomorrow in Lithuania. The Nazis could be arriving now in his village outside of Vilnius, gathering the Jews, all the Jews in the village of Jews—executing the ones who would not follow orders. His own father would likely resist—the village physician, the caretaker of his people. It was in his father’s temperament to quietly stand his ground. He would not likely be collected like the others, the women and children, the more compliant or fearful men, rounded up, off to wherever they were taken. Hard labor. Worse.

  William had spoken to his uncle Irving about home the week before he left Chicago for Minnie HaHa.

  “There is nothing to be done,” Irving had said, resigned, but not without a thin skein of hope, which was a kindness that William understood for what it was.

  “Only right to tell you what I suspect.”

  All William knew was what his uncle told him. He didn’t ask questions because he didn’t want to know any more. He didn’t think about home often—and if he did, it was in terms of his dead mother, who wouldn’t have to suffer what Irving referred to as the inevitable.

  He had a vision of his mother in the kitchen shortly before he left for the United States. When he thought of her, she was singing as she seared the meat for lunch, chopped the vegetables, lay out the cutlery for the kitchen table, singing in spite of the encroaching dangers, in spite of her youngest son leaving for America the Beautiful, as she bravely called it.

  She had her own kind of beauty, his mother. Not physical, but a beauty inside out, and he liked to think of her singing and cooking, liked to think that with her death he had assumed a part of her spirit.

  At the beginning of June just after school let out, a letter arrived from Josie’s mother, who seldom wrote. William took it from the mailbox and left it on the dining room table with the rest of the mail. Days later, he found it in the trash. Pale pink stationery torn into pieces, the pieces too small to put together, too small to read although he tried.

  “From your mother?” he asked, stating the obvious, the wide swooping script of privilege on the torn paper.

  “It is,” Josie had replied.

  “And you tore it up?”

  “I did,” she said. “My mother …” she began, dropping the rest of the sentence, but William knew what it was on her mind to say.

  They were at breakfast in the kitchen of their Chicago apartment, a pale early summer sun over the lake. Josie, her chin resting in her fist, looking out the window.

  “You lied to my parents, William.”

  “Otherwise you could not have married me. We have spoken about that.”

  “I should not have married you. We are made from different cloth.”

  “Cloth? Because I’m Jewish?”

  “Because you lied.”

  A KIND OF DESPERATION overtook him as he headed down the hill toward the river. He tried to take in air enough to settle his nerves, to slow the rapid beating of his heart, but there was not enough air.

  He needed to be with Josie.

  Tonight.

  For weeks, months, he had felt an accumulating rage, bouts of quick, explosive temper, his jaw locked, his teeth grinding even when he was awake.

  It had been more than a year since he had been with Josephine.

  Then one afternoon when the regular camp cook, a woman from Chicago, called to say she could not work the coming summer, William inst
inctively picked up the phone and dialed his uncle for permission to ask Clementine.

  His uncle agreed it would be a good break for Roosevelt, and William called her—the first time in months that they’d spoken. Certainly he knew it was likely a bad decision as soon as Clem reluctantly agreed to come.

  For the sake of Roosevelt, she said.

  BY HABIT OR inclination William tended to move forward in his life, confident of his instincts day to day. Not unreflective, but reactive. Drifting as he had through a childhood that seemed to promise a predictable future, he left for America with a sense of adventure. Not fear of what might happen in his absence to the people he loved and left behind. Nothing had happened when he lived in the village where he grew up, only whispers among the dependable grown-ups to which he paid little attention any more than to the ordinariness of their quotidian life.

  At his uncle’s house, especially after the news of his mother’s death, Clementine McCrary became a touchstone—her generosity of spirit, her beauty and certainty and strength. The kitchen had been the sacred place of his childhood, watching his mother cook, and in America, with Clem, it became again the center of his days. What he remembered at night, often sleepless and alone in the dark, was Clem’s constancy in an unpredictable new life.

  “Why can’t we be real friends?” he had asked her once, although it should have been perfectly clear even to an immigrant from Eastern Europe living in segregated Washington, D.C. “Just do things together. Normal things.”

  “We are friends.”

  “But why should a matter of color make such a difference?”

  “All the difference,” she had said.”

  WILLIAM LEFT FOR graduate school in Michigan.

  And married Josephine, fathered Georgianna—etcetera, etcetera, as he said to his uncle. A regular American life infused as if by a slow drip of poison in his veins, befuddling his brain.

  That was how he felt this night on the Bone River as the Nazis were surely by now entering his village.

  WILLIAM NEEDED SOMETHING to happen with Josie this night. He wanted to make that clear to himself.

  His Wife.

  The Camp Director’s wife. The wife of a Doctorate in Physics from the University of Michigan for what that was worth.