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  Or would a fury come over him and, quite out of his control, he’d metamorphose into an animal.

  What could have made someone in that company with my great-grandfather so angry that he would need to murder Josephine Grove.

  Except this little seed I have in my head about marriage. Something my mother tried to tell me right after my father died.

  We were at dinner. Dinners after he died were silent. I could hardly bear it. Rosie wouldn’t even allow me to turn on music. It hurt her ears, she said.

  “So tell me,” I asked. “Did you and Dad have a happy marriage?”

  “I don’t know if there is such a thing as a happy marriage,” she said. “A marriage is enough to hope for. We had that. And we loved to dance.”

  She had been a good cook before he died, but nights in that first year before we moved to the Home for the Incurables, where Georgie cooks, Rosie would put a bowl of fruit on the kitchen table, a package of cheese, peanut butter, some bread and milk. Sometimes frozen peas or soup from a can, but mostly that year dinner was cold.

  “Your father was a quiet man and I liked that he didn’t need to talk a lot,” she said. “Now what I miss about him most is talking, so we must have talked often and I didn’t realize that until we couldn’t any longer.”

  It seemed particularly sad to me to miss something that was already there.

  I HAVE NEVER been allowed to use the word hate, but I hate Max Rider. Maxmillian, he told me, is his Christian name. Of course it would be Maxmillian!

  I looked up the word hate in the dictionary just to make sure that I won’t die if I use it. And it doesn’t seem like such a bad word—actually convenient—and the meaning I chose was “intense animosity or dislike,” which certainly applies to my feelings about Max Rider, my mother’s new boyfriend who she met at the studios where they both paint.

  Boyfriend? That is too much for me to comprehend.

  In my mind’s eye, Maxmillian is sitting in our dining room next to my mother, touching her wrists, which he has no right to touch, his hand on her shoulder, his face moving in as if he is going to kiss her right at the dinner table, kiss her the way I watched my father kiss my mother when they danced.

  And that is when I know how it feels to hate.

  Do I want to kill Max Rider on behalf of my father?

  Maybe.

  Probably.

  I do want to kill him. But would I?

  I cannot answer that right now.

  Georgianna

  Georgie leans against the pole of the tent where Rosie and Venus sleep, watching the red embers burn to ash.

  No heat.

  All the tents are silent—the air rustling in the pine woods, the hard slap of water against the shore.

  Only Nicolas pacing by the river, backlit by a full moon, dialing without success the sleepless Obama team on the road to the next event. He walks up the bank and squats next to her, speaking in a stage whisper not to wake his sisters.

  “I’m troubled by something you said tonight, Georgie.” His hand is folded over the cell phone, his face close enough that she can feel his breath.

  “You don’t actually believe in some kind of visible resurrection of the past, do you? I think of you as a brilliant anthropologist.”

  “I’m not a brilliant anthropologist,” she says. “I search for evidence and tell a story about what I see. That’s all.”

  “And what do you expect to see tonight?”

  “I don’t know what to expect,” she says. “Maybe nothing. Maybe only a memory will surface in my mind but so far—nothing.”

  “Posttraumatic shock.”

  Nicolas stands, slips his cell phone in his pocket and touches the top of Georgie’s head.

  “Unlikely there’ll be anything to actually see except what’s around right now,” he says. “But who knows?”

  Georgie watches him walk down the bank, at an angle so he won’t slip on the muddy ground. He crouches, takes his phone out of his pocket. The screen lights up.

  Her backpack is on the ground beside her with the mesh bag where Roosevelt’s postcards are wrapped in one of her tee shirts.

  The last postcard arrived the Thursday before they left for Wisconsin.

  Dear Georgianna,

  This is my last note before we meet and I am nervous. I bought new socks today but there’s a sweater I saw in the town forty miles south where I occasionally go and I should have gotten it on the spot. It is the blue color of the night sky just before dark when the stars are almost visible. Love, R

  Georgie is suddenly homesick.

  Homesick—that old familiar visitor, creeps up her body on spider legs like seasickness but worse—nothing to alleviate its presence, nothing but itself, an apparition at the end of her childhood bed in the middle of the night.

  And why now?

  A day away from the place she has always kept in mind as Home. Her family gathered around her as if she were dying. The possibility of a discovery. Of evidence that her father was an honorable man.

  Or not.

  She could be wrong.

  When she was young and because her grandparents made their feelings clear to her, Georgie was his silent protector. Never aloud since rarely was her father’s name brought up, and if there were questions, mainly ones asked by Georgie, her grandmother’s response was You are certainly too young to understand.

  Nights before she went to sleep, she used to say a prayer to William Grove—promising to protect him even though he was dead. Even now she imagines herself under the eaves of her tiny room in Ann Arbor, the lights out, the house silent, saying a prayer to save her father.

  Save him?

  She takes a flashlight and heads up the hill to Thomas’ tent.

  On her knees, the flashlight beside her so the light illuminating Thomas and Oona is sufficiently diffuse not to wake them, she lifts the flap and leans into the tent.

  It is Oona she wants to see.

  Oona on her back, her arms stretched in a V over her head, her black curls a rat’s nest of tangles from settling herself to sleep at night pulling at her hair.

  “Oona is you!” Nicolas had said as if Georgie had been folded like a pop-up doll in Oona’s frontal lobe to make a second appearance. But it wasn’t just her dark hair, or high cheekbones or deep hazel eyes, as if transplanted from a life already lived.

  She was fierce.

  The light from the flashlight resting at a remove skims Oona’s small face—her skin transparent, layered in pastels—pale pink on the cheekbones—a slit of hazel just under the closed eyelids, a single dimple even in sleep.

  Malleable as wet clay or biscuit dough or potting soil.

  A child is someone specific.

  Herself.

  But not fierce. Not yet.

  Who was she at four sleeping in a tent like these tents— not with her parents, but with strangers. Who might she have become if some essential part of her being had not been destroyed by the catastrophe.

  If she were to tell Oona that her mother is dead, alive at night, gone in the morning—that her father is in prison. What then?

  What future history would be set in motion by that news.

  Georgie slips her cold hands into the pockets of her shorts and walks cautiously down the hill to her tent. She is thinking she hardly knows herself, all these years in such a hurry to build a home for strangers as if the needs of others could satisfy what has gone missing in herself.

  “The Home for the Incurables: EVERYBODY WELCOME” was the headline for the September 12, 2004, Washington Post Style piece about Georgie and her experiment.

  From time to time in the months since her seventieth birthday, she writes her own obituary in her head. Never finishing it. Never imagining her funeral.

  Georgianna Grove, Anthropologist, Dead at 75 (or 80 or 84 or 93, depending on her state of mind)

  Dr. Grove, author of HOME: Among the Baos Tribe in Botswana, died on Tuesday —— of ——— after a long illness (or suddenly). A
professor of cultural anthropology at George Washington University, she is distinguished as a storyteller rather than as a scholar says Dr. James Angle, head of the Department of Anthropology and a well-known scholar of the indigenous people of Chile.

  Professor Grove was born December 17, 1937, in Chicago, Illinois, the only child of William Grove, who (falsely) confessed to the murder his wife, Josephine, and died in prison. Georgianna was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, by her maternal grandparents. Later a widow of the Vietnam War following the death of her husband, Dr. Charles MacDowell, she leaves three children and three grandchildren.

  The obituary as she imagines it is short and impersonal. There is no mention of the Home for the Incurables and no way to identify in her particulars the person she was beyond the fact that she is dead.

  “EVERYBODY SLEEPING?” Nicolas asks as Georgie returns to her tent.

  “Sound asleep,” she says.

  “Are you glad you came?” he asks, tucking his phone in the back pocket of his shorts.

  “Of course,” she says. “It’s kind of strange and amazing here.”

  “It’s creepy tonight, Georgie. All these pine trees and the water and the sounds coming from the woods and the smell of mushrooms.”

  “This is what I thought Missing Lake would be.” She readjusts her legs on the rock, resting her chin on her knees. “But it’s not exactly what I thought I’d feel.”

  “Which is how?”

  “Worried. The way I feel at first on site in Botswana, as if I’m disturbing a universe that was perfectly happy in the present before I came along to dig up the past. But also …” She hesitates. “Gloomy.”

  Nicolas steps up on the rock next to her, crouching on his heels.

  “You! Gloomy?”

  THOMAS GETS OUT of his sleeping bag, careful not to wake Oona, and heads down to the tent where Georgie is, making his way across the darkness.

  She is sitting on a wide flat rock facing the river, her knees bent, her arms wrapped around her legs.

  “Can you talk?” he asks.

  Nicolas is on the bank, crouched next to the canoes fiddling with his cell phone.

  “What woke you?” Georgie asks. “You were asleep when I checked your tent.”

  “I was awake,” Thomas says, “but lying in the dark I just couldn’t sleep thinking about that word you told me.”

  Reenactment is the word Georgie had used. As if by their presence at Missing Lake this particular night, the murder could happen again just as it had the first time.

  But this time it would happen with the family watching.

  “Tell me how finding out the truth about your father will erase the trouble that has followed our family since your mother was killed.”

  “It’s called revisionist history just to give it a name,” Georgie says. “You discover the truth and all the facts you have lived by readjust to the discovery.”

  “But you’ve already lived by those facts forever,” Thomas says. “So it’s a little late to readjust, right?”

  “And wrong.”

  They have good talks, Georgie and Thomas. She takes him seriously.

  “I’ve been wondering since we got here whether it’s really wise to go after the truth,” she says. “What might we find that will change the equilibrium of our lives. For the worse.”

  They sit on the bank. Quiet. The night damp and cold.

  “Perhaps it’s better not to know.”

  “I don’t like that conclusion,” Thomas says. “We’ve come all this way.”

  “It is possible that I’ll discover something I don’t want to know,” Georgie says.

  “What then?” he asks.

  “It depends, doesn’t it?” she says. “Being here is different than imagining it.”

  “That’s the trouble,” Thomas says. “Being here is worse.”

  Georgie looks out at the blackness that is the river.

  “Do you think we have more trouble in our family than other families?” Thomas asks.

  “I don’t. We don’t,” Georgie says. “We have our own kind of troubles. But I’ve been thinking—marriage has been a problem. My mother was murdered, my father died in his thirties, my husband killed in his thirties, Rosie’s husband dead; Nicolas is married again but who knows for how long. And Venus with so many men on her credit card, so many abortions she should be arrested.”

  When Thomas had asked Venus, who is happy to talk to him about anything—anything—she told him that abortion was like scooping out the seeds of a cantaloupe.

  A cantaloupe!

  GEORGIE PUTS HER HAND on Thomas’ shoulder and pushes herself back to her feet.

  “Come with me,” she says, touching the top of his head, leading the way between the tents, up the hill which is quite steep toward the sign for Missing Lake.

  “I know this must seem strange to you, knowing me as a more or less sensible older woman, but tonight I want to sit in the dark at a time the murder might have occurred at the place my mother was discovered.”

  “I don’t think of you as older,” Thomas says. “And not really sensible. I mean not unsensible but not exactly sensible either. It isn’t the first word to come to my mind about you.”

  They walk slowly up the hill, her hand on Thomas’ shoulder as if the weight of the day has been too much and she is suddenly aging step by step.

  Thomas asks if she is okay and she says “Not really” and that worries him.

  “You mean unhinged?”

  “Nothing like that,” she says. “I made a plan to come here, certain that it was a good plan, but maybe it’s the wrong one. That’s all.”

  She reaches in her pocket for a caramel, wishing she had a cigarette. She hasn’t smoked for years, not since high school, but she has a yearning.

  “Here we are.”

  She kneels at the top of the hill beside the sign for Missing Lake.

  “You were excited about this trip before we got here,” Thomas says.

  “Nothing is exactly as it seems,” Georgie says.

  “I guess,” Thomas says.

  He is beginning to understand that neither is Georgie exactly as she seems.

  What she seems to be is remarkable. A superhero straight out of a box of action figures but in street clothes—that is how she appears to people who know her at the Home for the Incurables or her job in the Anthropology Department at George Washington University or at the parties she gives, inviting anyone she knows of any age from anyplace—the furniture pushed back, live music usually by students from the university. Dancing.

  She is flypaper especially for “lost souls” as Uncle Nicolas says.

  But also ordinary people who have jobs and houses and children depend on her spirit of generosity.

  The front door to the Home for the Incurables has a sign:

  EVERYBODY WELCOME PLEASE COME IN

  “The thing we need to remember is that Georgie is an orphan,” Rosie said to Thomas after the decision was made to go to Camp Minnie HaHa. “She is an orphan because her father murdered her mother and then he went to jail and died. That is not normal.”

  Not exactly normal, Thomas agreed.

  SOMETIMES THOMAS COMES home from school and catches Georgie standing at the large windows in the living room looking out as though she is looking for someone specific who might be coming to the house or planning to move in with them.

  But no.

  Just looking, Georgie has said.

  Maybe she is looking for her parents to appear on the other side of Upton Street and cross Upton between the giant trees the city had planted, up the steps to their house and, seeing the WELCOME sign, walk in.

  Once when Thomas came in from school, he found Georgie lying on the living room floor, her legs vertical against the wall, her arms crossed on her chest, and he asked her was anything the matter.

  Yes, she said without opening her eyes. It is.

  She wasn’t going to tell him. It was possible she didn’t even know, and if she did te
ll him, there would be nothing he could do about it so he went into the kitchen and opened the cookie jar and didn’t ask any more questions.

  He has never seen her cry.

  THEY SIT AT THE PLACE Georgie has chosen near the Missing Lake sign and wait.

  Thomas is cold and wraps his shoulders in her jacket, buries his chin in his knees.

  “What do you think is going to happen?” he asks with apprehension.

  “I’m waiting to see,” she says.

  “For something like a ghost?” he asks.

  “Nothing like a ghost. Something like weather.”

  The wind is picking up. The pines bending—a whine, a high-pitched song—and something else.

  For the first time since they left Washington, Thomas wants to go home.

  The trip has taken on an aspect of danger. He has never been on a river before except the Chicago River for an architectural tour and the Potomac, and those in daytime.

  But never a river in the wilderness beyond a place where human life exists.

  Just the galloping force of the Bone River in darkness.

  Ever since his father died, Thomas has been afraid.

  When he was very young, monsters congregated under his bed at night, as many as ten. He would call out, and his father would come into his room in his undershorts with bare feet, peer under the bed and invite the monsters to come to the kitchen for potato soup and cheese sandwiches and maybe some sausage.

  Certainly you monsters must be hungry, he would say to them.

  Don’t worry, he would tell Thomas, coming back into his room. The monsters are having a midnight supper in the kitchen. They won’t be back.

  GEORGIE HAS OPENED up the maps and is looking at them under her flashlight.

  On the map of Missing Lake she has drawn the four tents as described in the Chicago Tribune and an X that she has determined is exactly where she is sitting now.