Amuddy dawn spreads through the tent, and there in the place where Oona had been is Freddy, the scruffy pink pig.
Thomas waits, his breath trapped in his throat.
Just up the hill, Georgie is stretched out on top of her sleeping bag, her arms extended above her head, her hands open, palms up. Her eyes are closed, but she is not asleep. In fact, quite awake, lightheaded thinking with actual relief that they have made it through the night. No visitations. No terrible storms galloping down the Bone River. Morning, and soon the sun would break through.
Today, Roosevelt.
She sits up, stretches, spreading her fingers in the chilly air.
Ahead, Thomas’ back is in her line of sight.
Strange.
He is just sitting there on his haunches.
She rolls her sleeping bag, ready to leave for Minnie HaHa, and comes up quietly behind him.
“Are you okay?” she asks, kneeling down beside him.
He is not okay. He can’t catch his breath to speak, his hands are fisted. A sound like a hum in his throat.
“Oona.”
His voice is not his own.
Georgie looks into the tent at the empty sleeping bag where Oona had been.
“Gone?”
Thomas nods.
Georgie moves slowly, stops to gather her wits, settle her racing heart.
“I knew something would happen to Oona on this trip,” he says,
“Maybe she climbed into the sleeping bag with Nicolas.”
Georgie’s mind rushes to solutions.
“Or maybe she’s with Rosie.”
“If she woke up in the middle of the night, she would have come up the hill to find me,” Thomas says. “Not Nicolas or Rosie and not Jesse.”
He takes Georgie’s hand and she pulls him to his feet.
“I think she drowned.”
“No, Thomas. She did not drown. She’s a careful girl and wouldn’t go to the water in the dark.”
“She would do that,” he says. “I know her very well.”
“We’ll check,” Georgie says. “We’ll check the tents to see if she is there. Then check the river and the path along the bank.”
They walk down the hill, Thomas leaning against Georgie, a dead weight at one hundred pounds.
“Everything will be okay, won’t it, Georgie?” he asks. “You think that, don’t you?”
Georgie lifts the flap of Nicolas’ tent.
Nicolas is on his back, the cell phone beside his head. Jesse lying on his side in his sleeping bag, his eyes open.
“Nicolas?” Georgie asks.
“He’s awake,” Jesse says. “He snores when he’s asleep.”
“I was wondering is Oona here?” Georgie asks as though it is the most casual of questions.
Though it is clear that Oona is not.
Jesse shakes his head.
“Oona?” Nicolas sits up and grabs his phone. “She was sleeping with you, Thomas.”
“She wasn’t sleeping with me any longer.”
His voice is barely audible.
“But she was, isn’t that right. She was sleeping with you all night for chrissake.”
“Not all night,” Georgie says quietly.
Since she can remember, she has been able to turn the nerves in her body on low, necessary in the fieldwork she does in Africa.
“Last night, Thomas and I were talking just up the hill and Oona was sleeping in the tent below us so we could see her. We could see very well even in the dark.”
Nicolas pulls up his pants and zips them.
“If you could see, then you should have seen her leave the tent, isn’t that right?” His voice is trembling. He picks up a sweater from the ground and pulls it over his head.
“I didn’t sleep all night. Only some of the night,” Thomas says. “I didn’t really sleep, not hard, but I was up there …”
He points to the hill where most of the night he had been talking to Georgie.
“I was up there with Georgie and we could see everything.”
“What the fuck!” Nicolas heads up the hill, Thomas and Georgie just behind him as he lunges into the tent where Oona had been.
“Freddy’s here,” he says, coming out with the pink pig.
“Right here,” he says, swinging the pig.
“Oona would never leave Freddy behind.” He shakes his fists in the air. “You guys were supposed to be in charge of my daughter, Got it, Thomas?—you were going to be sleeping next to her and she fucking trusted you with everything.”
Nicolas draws back, fists his hands and in an awkward movement, almost like a dance, he hits his head with his own fists.
Blows to his cheekbones and his skull, a long high wail, the sound of an injured animal rising out of him.
Venus is coming from the tent where she has been sleeping.
“What is happening?” She starts up the hill. “Nicolas!”
“We don’t know,” Georgie says.
“We do know,” Nicolas says. “We know that Oona is gone,” he calls out in a loud voice. “My daughter disappeared in the middle of the night in this godforsaken forest.”
“Gone?”
“Thomas was supposed to be sleeping with her,” Nicolas says, bending at the waist as if his stomach is cramping.
“And he didn’t sleep with her. He left her alone. Alone, and she’s four years old.”
“This is not Thomas’ fault,” Georgie says under her breath.
“It is my fault,” Thomas says quietly.
“It is my fault,” Georgie says.
“It is your fault, Georgie, for bringing us on this trip. And so what! So fucking what if we find out who it was that killed your mother. Or why. Or what difference your mother should make to any of us. Or your father.”’
A kind of growling sound from deep in Nicolas’ body as though something inside has erupted and shatters the air.
A sound like the commotion of birds, and he falls to his knees, his forehead on the ground, his arms straight out by his head. Sobbing.
“Nothing has happened yet, Nicolas,” Georgie says, although he cannot hear her. “We need to think. We need to be clear headed and think. What to do next? What to do.”
“Maybe she sleepwalked,” Thomas says quietly. “I know someone at school who sleepwalked in the middle of the night straight down Wisconsin Avenue to the Cathedral.”
“I don’t know about sleepwalking,” Georgie says, moving past the tent where Oona had been, onto what appears to be an actual path beyond the campsite.
“What happened?” Rosie calls.
And then Jesse.
Certainly it is Jesse who is crying.
She must keep calm, she tells herself as she comes to the boundary of land and forest. Settle her mind before it closes in on itself, expand her brain so its narrow roads open to possibility.
So she can think.
But her heart is pounding against her breastbone as if it might fly out of her chest.
If Oona woke in the middle of the night and didn’t know where she was or couldn’t find anyone or couldn’t see in the dark, she would cry out.
Certainly she would call or scream or wail that terrifying breathless sound she made when she was hurt.
But nothing.
If she left the tent, by choice and on her own, in secret, then certainly she would have taken Freddy with her.
Someone must have taken her out of the tent. Someone who knew that she was there. A person hiding in the woods behind their encampment had located the tent where Oona was sleeping and gone after her.
Perhaps it was the bear. The one they had heard last night thumping in the woods.
But not a bear. Not possibly a bear.
She senses Thomas coming up the path behind her like a cat, light on his feet, graceful for a tall, quick-growing boy.
She doesn’t turn around, keeping her eyes ahead. Checking the floor of the wet, black path for information. When Thomas does catch up with her, she will tell him to go back to camp. She needs to be alone.
She will tell him that.
She must have silence to consider the possibilities. To act. Not randomly, the way her mind is scattering in bits, but with intention.
“This is the end of our family,” Thomas says, catching up with her.
“It is not the end of our family,” she says. “Nothing has happened. Nothing conclusive.”
“How can you know?” Thomas leans against her.
“I can’t know, but I can believe we will find her.”
“Will she be alive?”
“Of course she will be alive.”
There is not enough oxygen in the dawn air, and it doesn’t help to have Thomas beside her, leaning into her shoulder, taking up the little air that’s left.
It never occurred to her when she was planning this trip that they would be out of touch with the world. She did not think to ask and didn’t know until they arrived at the lodge, although Roosevelt had told her there was no cell service at camp. Only a land line.
But no cell phone service anywhere?
“Where are we going?” Thomas asks
“We’ll search the campsite, and if we don’t find her, then the rest of you need to go on to Minnie HaHa, where Roosevelt will be able to help. He has a telephone and can call the police.”
“That man at the lodge said the river police patrolled at eight in the morning every day.”
“I heard him say that, but it’s only five-thirty in the morning now,” Georgie says.
“What would you do if something terrible happened in the village in Botswana? You didn’t have communication there.”
“There I’m in a community of people who know the land and each other,” she says. “It’s not the same. Here it is only us in a place we do not know.”
“Really scary.”
“Or maybe not,” Georgie says.
She is searching for a plan.
They could all paddle to Minnie HaHa, but that would take hours, two at least. Hours lost for looking.
Or they could split up. The rest of her family paddle to camp and Georgie remain.
Walk the pine needle path, although it may only lead in a circle or come to an end.
Or the path could end at the town of Missing Lake if such a place exists.
“I’m sure she could have drowned,” Thomas says.
“She didn’t drown.”
“But she could have,” Thomas says. “Anything could have happened. She could be dead.”
“No, Thomas, she could not.”
She takes his hand.
“It is a bad idea to think the worst,” she says. “So don’t.”
Georgie has a way of allowing a place to wash over her like weather. When she arrives, even to be with the Baos in Botswana, where she has been many times, it is always as a stranger. She waits for the place itself to infuse her blood.
What she needs now is footing. A sense of solid ground. Then some combination of what she actually sees and her imagination will deliver clues.
“I am looking for evidence,” she says to Thomas, keeping pace.
“Like what?”
“I’m going back to ask Nicolas to take the canoes to Minnie HaHa. There he can get help from Roosevelt and I will look for Oona.”
“I’ll be able to look with you, won’t I, Georgie?”
“You can come Thomas,” she says, walking into the clearing above the river, “but as a ghost.”
NICOLAS IS CALLING her name—but what she hears is lost in an endless cry… his voice unnaturally high and cracking. She turns toward the river, silver light on the water, the land black, but she can see Nicolas by her tent where she did not sleep—facedown, his fists pounding the ground.
She walks down the hill with care, the ground muddy, slippery with dew, a sudden neuropathy in her feet from nerves or cold.
Slipping down beside him, her hands rest on her thighs—she leans in speaking quietly in his ear, speaking with a kind of certainty, the way she had spoken to him when he was a child.
“I need you to take a canoe with Rosie and Jesse and paddle to camp Minnie HaHa,” she says. “It is just before six in the morning and we have no cell phone service. No possibility of reaching help until the police begin their patrol on the Bone River two hours from now.”
She sits back on her haunches, lets her hand slip gently on the small of Nicolas’ back.
“You will be there in two hours and it won’t even be eight o’clock. Roosevelt can call the police. He will know what to do.”
Nicolas has pushed himself up to a sitting position, his face muddy with tears and dirt, his eyes deep black pools of fear.
“She disappeared right here,” he says. “Here!” He bangs the ground, a low roar in his throat. “I don’t want to leave right here where I am this minute and move further and further away from where Oona might be.” He catches his breath. “I won’t leave.”
“I will stay, Nicolas,” Georgie says. “The woods are too dense to enter, so I’ll walk the path behind the campsite, maybe into the town of Missing Lake. Maybe not. But I’ll be here when the police boats come. It is the most sensible thing to do.”
“This has nothing to do with sensible,” he says.
But he is standing now, brushing the dirt off his pants.
“Rosie?”
Rosie is putting the paddles in the canoe.
“I’m checking the woods, just the ones in this cove, and then we’ll leave,” Nicolas says.
His voice is subdued but steady.
“We can make it to Minnie HaHa before the police cruise the river at the campsite this morning.”
Georgie stands, taking the map of the campsite from Thomas.
There is a road that more or less follows the shape of the river. Not close to the water but the road curves running by what seems to be a town, marked on the map with a tiny brown circle. Not even a name given to the brown circle.
In the distance Nicolas is heading into the forest, his arms raised in surrender above his head as he tries to angle through the trees.
An eerie sound pierces the air like the sound of a loon.
“Nicolas?” Thomas asks.
Georgie nods.
“What are we going to do?” Thomas asks. “Now? Just wait? It’s driving me crazy just standing around like this.”
“We’re going to wait for Nicolas to come back. The woods are so overgrown I doubt he will get far. Then he will leave for Minnie HaHa with the rest and we’ll search along the path for Oona.”
They stand, silently watching the Bone River accumulate a golden color as the sun rises from underneath the world.
“No sign of Oona in the woods,” Nicolas says, “but I’m too nervous to search like that.”
Georgie wants Nicolas to leave. She will be better with him gone.
“So now we’re off to Camp Minnie Haha,” Nicolas says. “Maybe Roosevelt will know something. Maybe he took Oona.”
“Why would he take Oona?” Thomas asks.
“Because she’s a little girl and he’s an old man and he wanted to take her.”
“Nicolas!” Georgie says.
“Well …” he shrugs, “I’m not stupid. Did he know that Oona was coming on this trip?”
“He knew all of you were coming.”
“He knew she was a little girl?”
“He knew she was four years old,” she says.
“Maybe this was Roosevelt’s plan in the first place.”
Nicolas loads in the backpacks.
On the bank above the river, Rosie calls for help decamping and Georgie heads up the hill to pack up the tent where Rosie and Venus slept, slipping Rosie’s backpack over her shoulder. She helps Venus push the second canoe into the water—the river quiet this morning as the sun rises, water lazily slapping the bank.
It is still early, not yet six-thirty.
Long, long summer days in Northern Wisconsin.
She walks upriver where Nicolas is packing his canoe.
“I don’t think I told him Oona’s name,” she says almost to herself. “Or maybe I did. What difference does it make if he knows her name?”
What time had it been last night or early this morning when she and Thomas heard the bear who was not a bear thumping next to Oona’s tent?
It could not have been an animal that took her away. It had to be a human. A thumping human.
Oona would have screamed out and they would have heard her unless something were stuffed in her mouth. Or a hand across her lips.
“Roosevelt knew about everyone who was going to be on this trip with us,” Georgie says to Nicolas, keeping her voice low, slow, so it won’t quiver. “I told him. I told him about you.”
“Great, Georgie. One good fucking idea after the next.”
Nicolas climbs into the stern, slaps his paddle on the surface of the water.
“Get into the boat, Venus, and no woo-woo advice. You’re paddling bow.”
Venus has been silent, but she touches Georgie’s arm as she walks past her.
“Later,” she says.
“You’re going to walk that dirt path behind the wheelbarrow and hope to find town?” Rosie asks.
“I am.”
“You’re sure there is a town?”
“I’m not sure, but there’s a small round brown circle on the map—that has to be town.”
“Are you hopeful, Mama?” she asks under her breath.
“I am hopeful.”
“Missing is the worst, isn’t it?” Rosie says in that way she sometimes has of giving voice to the truth. “Worse than dead.”
She doesn’t cry. Not when she was a child, not even when Richard died and never in the months that he was ill, but she is weeping now and that is more unbearable to Georgie than her own fear.
As if Rosie knows something that she does not.
Jesse lowers himself into the stern of the second canoe, his paddle in the water. Bent over, he puts his head on his knees.
“How will we be in touch?” Rosie calls.
“We can’t,” Georgie says. “We have to count on each other’s good sense.”
“Roosevelt will save our lives,” Nicolas calls. “He’ll be sitting at a picnic table with Oona beside him, and when he sees us pull up, he’ll yell Hi, guys, like a regular run-of-the-mill pedophile.”
He pushes the boat away from the bank with his paddle.
“Two hours, Georgie?” he asks.
“That is what we were told,” Georgie says.
She watches the canoes turn into the current.
“Nobody even asked if I would come along with them,” Thomas says as the canoes head upriver, the water barely slapping the bank.
“We’re the only ones who wanted to come on this trip, Thomas. You and me. Just you and me.”