NOS4A2(31)

Vic slid her hand down between the mattress and the wall, and reached beneath her bed, and found the earrings and the folded piece of paper. She had possessed the presence of mind to hide them the afternoon she came home, and they had been under the bed ever since.

In a flash of psychological insight, uncommon for a girl of thirteen, Vic saw that soon enough she would recall all of her trips across the bridge as the fantasies of a very imaginative child and nothing more. Things that had been real—Maggie Leigh, Pete at Terry’s Primo Subs, finding Mr. Pentack at Fenway Bowling—would eventually feel like nothing more than daydreams. Without her bike to take her on occasional trips across the Shorter Way, it would be impossible to maintain her belief in a covered bridge that flicked in and out of existence. Without the Raleigh, the last and only proof of her finding trips were the earrings cupped in her palm and a folded photocopied poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

F U, the earrings said. Five points.

“Why can’t you come up to the lake with us?” Vic’s mother was saying through the wall—the sound of a whine creeping into her voice. Linda and Chris had moved on to the subject of getting out of town for the summer, something Vic’s mother wanted more than ever, in the aftermath of Vic’s illness. “What could you have to do down here?”

“My job. You want me to spend three weeks up on Lake Winnipesaukee, get ready to stay in a tent. The goddamn place you have to have is eighteen hundred bucks a month.”

“Is three weeks with Vic all by myself supposed to be a vacation? Three weeks of solo parenting, while you stay here to work three days a week and do whatever else you do when I call the job and the guys tell me you’re out with the surveyor. You and him must’ve surveyed every inch of New England by now.”

Her father said something else, in a low, ugly tone that Vic couldn’t catch, and then he turned the volume up on the TV, cranking it loud enough that Mr. de Zoet across the street could probably hear it. A door slammed hard enough to make glasses rattle in the kitchen.

Vic put on her new earrings and unfolded the poem, a sonnet that she did not understand at all and already loved. She read it by the light of the partially open door, whispering the lines to herself, reciting it as if it were a kind of prayer—it was a kind of prayer—and soon her thoughts had left her unhappy parents far behind.





As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme


As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies dráw fláme; As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name; Each mortal thing does one thing and the same: Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells, Crying Whát I do is me: for that I came.

í say móre: the just man justices;

Kéeps gráce: thát keeps all his goings graces; Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is— Christ—for Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.





—GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS





DISAPPEARANCES

1991–1996





Various Locales


THE RUSSIAN GIRL WHOM MAGGIE LEIGH HAD MENTIONED WAS named Marta Gregorski, and in Vic’s neck of the woods her abduction was indeed big news for several weeks. This was partly because Marta was a minor celebrity in the world of chess, mentored by Kasparov and ranked a grandmaster by the age of twelve. Also, though, in those first days after the fall of the USSR, the world was still adjusting to the new Russian freedoms, and there was a feeling that the disappearance of Marta Gregorski and her mother should’ve been the stuff of an international incident, an excuse for another Cold War showdown. It took a while to realize that the former Soviet republic was too busy disintegrating to even take notice. Boris Yeltsin was riding around on tanks, shouting until he was red in the face. Former KGB agents were scrambling to find good-paying jobs with the Russian mafia. It was weeks before anyone thought to denounce the decadent, crime-ridden West, and the denouncing wasn’t very enthusiastic at that.

A clerk working the front desk of the Hilton DoubleTree on the Charles River had seen Marta and her mother exit through the revolving door a little before six on a warm, drizzly evening. The Gregorskis were expected at Harvard for a dinner and were meeting their car. Through the rain-smeared window, the clerk saw Marta and then her mother climb into a black vehicle. She thought the car had running boards because she saw the little Russian girl take a step up before sliding into the back. But it was dark out and the clerk was on the phone with a guest who was pissed he couldn’t open his mini-fridge, and she hadn’t noticed more.

Only one thing was certain: The Gregorski women had not climbed into the right car, the town car that had been rented for them. Their driver, a sixty-two-year-old named Roger Sillman, was parked on the far side of the turnaround, in no condition to pick them up. He was out cold and would remain parked there, sleeping behind the wheel, until he came to at nearly midnight. He felt sick and hungover but assumed he had simply (and uncharacteristically) nodded off and that the girls had caught a cab. He did not begin to wonder if something more had happened until the next morning and did not contact the police until he was unable to reach the Gregorskis at their hotel.