Hillary knew several of the neighbors of course and introduced us. We shook hands as we signed in and picked up our maps from the volunteer table on the patio. If you looked down the sloping property, the creek was not only visible, swollen with rain, but audible. Even over the chitchat, you could hear the water churning, almost riverine as it leapt and fell over the rocks and logs. It was inescapable; it beckoned. Oh, to a child, the magnetic sound of water, rushing, babbling, breaking against rock, seeping into tide pools of treasures. Poor child, I thought. How could she have had any other fate? The creek called, loudly, to anyone who set foot in that backyard.
One of the women, Susan, who I felt was a bit overdressed for searching crime scenes in the woods, in her turtleneck and Barbour coat and suede boots, said that Hannah should think about joining the neighborhood book club. She said they read a variety of books, and there were lots of smart women in it, as if she had to emphasize and overcompensate somehow for this new neighbor who was a writer. She said this directly to Hannah and didn’t include me in the invitation, even though I was standing right next to her, obvious as a bump on a log. Older ladies who don’t live at old lady homes don’t get invited to things much unless we offer some kind of useful skill that is becoming fetishized by the young. Pottery. Quilting. Magic loop knitting. I suppose if I start gathering plants and making my own cocktail bitters or sustainable fabric dyes, I can become popular again. Maybe Morgan could put me in one of her videos dancing to rap, and I’d rise from my early crypt and enjoy relevance once again!
Oh well, who needs ’em. Overdressed, underfed women discussing books to make themselves feel like they were back at college. Who wanted to go back to college and write papers again? Not me. Just let me enjoy the damned book!
I thought I might meet some nice retired male searchers, someone in a yellow vest and hiking boots and a sensible hat. Someone like that would be nice to have coffee with. But Tamsen Creek was the land of the stay-at-home mom. The men had important jobs, meetings in other cities, traveling even over the weekend. They’d chosen this neighborhood partly because of its proximity to the highway that zipped down to the Philadelphia airport, as well as the less obvious but unspoken nearness to the county airport where private jets took off and landed. Depending on what client Ben was serving, he utilized them both, and so, too, did many of his neighbors. Ben certainly was gone on business well over half the time. Hillary pretended she didn’t care, because she was busy and independent and did everything in the household anyway, but I knew she did. Wasn’t that why you got married, so you could share in the triumphs and tragedies of communities? Now, the husbands would hear about this hubbub not over dinner but over text message between their surgeries or presentations. They’d feel terrible, of course, remind their wives to set the alarms and not let their children wander off. How awful that I went immediately to stereotype. But if this wasn’t a stereotypical place, what was? As far as I could ascertain, none of these women held paying jobs except Hannah.
It was only later, when I asked Hillary where Ben was off to, that I would learn many of the men had stayed home, still badly hungover and exhausted from their monthly neighborhood poker game on Friday, and behind on everything else because of it. Hannah said that Mike had offered to come and help but that she’d told him no. I suppose she thought he was just trying to worm his way back into his ex-wife’s and child’s hearts, because when I commented that Mike probably would have been the only person with backcountry skills, the only useful person on the search, she’d glared at me.
“What?” I’d said. “He’s camped outdoors his whole life. He’s tracked animals, hidden from them in stands or dens or whatever you call them. I think it’s fair to say Mike would be an asset.”
And the two of them had stared at me, ganging up the way they still do, two against one, and said that anyone observant and capable of walking in the woods could be helpful! Anyone with a good eye! There was no need for tracking scat or carving a path! And I suppose I was being sexist and stereotypical. And I dared to support someone they’d already cast out.
What was I supposed to do? Just because Hannah said they’d grown apart and had nothing to say to one another, were we to pretend we didn’t like him anymore? Should I forget that Mike was kind to me and had some good qualities I wish I possessed?
As we walked for several hours, adjacent to the creek, heads bent, the sun rose steadily over my left shoulder and landed over my right, so I knew I was at least staying in a straight line. It was boring work, and I had trouble concentrating on what to look for, what was important. Weren’t all the weeds bent? Wasn’t all the earth trampled? Still, I didn’t see any cigarette butts, threads from clothing, buttons, anything remotely human. Someone in another line had a metal detector, and I guess he was looking for shotgun shells or maybe some old heiress’s jewelry, who knew.
All I could think as we continued going single file, walking within three feet of one another, as synchronized as chorus girls, was about the family. Where were they while we were searching? The mother, the father, the siblings? Was someone investigating them? Why couldn’t we be told what kind of family had lost this child?
What kind of people could own this grand and glorious house and have seen fit to give their dog a special bucket? And not their little girl?
And what kind of husband needed to stay home all weekend nursing a hangover?
Well, the answer to that I certainly knew all too well.
Five
Hannah
That first day of school, Hannah tried not to obsess about her son or her lack of regular work and failed at both. She sent out exploratory emails to contacts at other pharma companies and messaged former clients letting them know she was available. Ben would certainly follow up on that meeting about his client, but she didn’t want to pressure him. Then, she settled down at her kitchen table to focus on finishing her final edit of a history professor’s essays about his time in the Peace Corps so she could bill him as soon as possible. But oh, how she’d hated this project. She’d run out of constructive ways to tell him how to make a sentence come alive. Write better! she’d wanted to scream.
The final proofread was endless and tedious, and she was constantly interrupted with thoughts of her son and the realization that her jaw was tense, her neck, her breathing shallow. She kept getting up to pace and refill her water glass and eat half a banana and then, ten minutes later, the other half.
Drop-off at school had gone smoothly, but she kept picturing all the boys lingering outside on the grass, bent over their phones. A variety of sizes, the way boys were at this age. Some as tall and muscled as men, the others half their height and weight. Miles had agreed to be driven to school but insisted on taking the bus home, because Morgan had told him that Hillary was wrong—lots of the boys rode the bus home but the girls not so much. Dirty, smelly, what? She wondered why, but he wanted to belong, so Hannah didn’t question it. One day. One bus ride home. We will see how it goes, she’d thought as she dropped him off and drove through the winding path through campus. With fifteen hundred students, the buildings were sprawling and multistoried, with a pool, sports complex, and climbing wall. The scale of the campus alone would certainly worry some parents. But Miles liked to explore and had a great sense of direction, like his dad. Once, when he was six, he’d wandered from their campsite and gotten lost for almost an hour, the worst hour of Hannah’s life. Mike kept saying that Miles would know to follow the river back. And sure enough, that was exactly what had happened. Mike had been proud: a free-range, capable kid who could navigate the outdoors.