Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

satiation, self-disgust. Then she’d drag herself upstairs to bed.
    Thinking
He will never make love to me again. I am so broken.
    Thinking
I would trade that—all that—for Robbie.
    Dinah’s new friends were mostly women from the rehab clinic. Physical therapists, nurses, other patients. Rehab is a small closed world. You soon learn the language. Her physical therapist was a Jamaican woman named Rachelle whose fingers were soft, soothing, yet strong and deft. If Dinah broke down and cried, in pain and despair, Rachelle said
Now hon you don’t mean that. You just get that out of your system, hon. Three minutes.
    If another patient stared at her raggedy face Dinah didn’t shrink and hide behind her hands as she would have liked to do but smiled and struck up a conversation.
    Hi! It’s “reconstruction,” I was in a pretty bad accident. I have one or maybe two more surgeries to go.
    And:
It isn’t as bad as it looks! I have my eyesight and great new
teeth.
    Quickly the afflicted learns that affliction can be mined to some purpose. No one more popular than the cheerful-afflicted. Dinah had learned: misery does love company.
    She spoke of Robbie, if she was asked. She spoke quietly and calmly and did not hesitate. She knew that, as everyone told her, as the police urged her, the more people who knew about her missing son, the more people who saw his picture, who were prompted to think about him, the more likely there might be a “lead.”
    That was how missing children were often found, police said. You wouldn’t believe how accidental, sometimes.
    Brightly she said
Yes. The search is continuing. This summer we will drive—around Michigan, we think. Just take the search into the rural counties. Of course the police and the FBI are on the case, they’ve promised to never let it rest.
    Her dark desperate moods of wanting-to-die she hid. Her frantic moods of screaming-for-Robbie she hid. She could muffle her crazed mouth in a towel, if necessary. She could cry, cry, cry until her eyes flamed and swelled and her tear ducts were emptied like her heart and not even Whit would know.
    Whit snoring in their bed. Dinah crouched in the bathroom sobbing into a towel.
    Seeing, God!—even her toenails looked misshapen, growing in sideways. Everything about her broken and askew except her knife-sharp memory of the child’s fingers wrenched from hers.
    She knew he was alive. She knew he was yearning for her.
    Yearning for her and his daddy. Wherever he was, she knew.
    How did she know with such certainty,
she just knew.
     
    In this way, and in other ways, they waited.

12
KITTATINNY FALLS, NEW JERSEY JULY, AUGUST 2006
    Gideon? Come here, son.
    On hesitant bare feet the child came.
    The child’s rapt staring terrified eyes.
    The child in pajama bottoms.
    The child’s little chest showing milky-pale skin pulled tight against his ribs.
    Climb onto Daddy’s lap, Gideon. C’mon!
    In a trance the child did not move.
    I’m commanding you, Gideon: climb onto Daddy’s lap.
    They were in the TV den, as Daddy Love called it.
    A leather sofa, a single chair. Rattan rug. A thirty-inch TV. In a window, a rattling air conditioner in the humid midsummer heat of New Jersey. Over both windows, heavy damask curtains as well as black blinds.
    It was cuddle-time. It was bedtime.
    It was
that time.

    * * *
    Darlene? Hi.
    It was OK now, he thought. He could call the woman, and have her do some cleaning. She could meet Gideon.
    The kid was so quiet, might’ve been deaf-and-dumb. No danger he’d begin babbling or crying to Darlene Barnhauser who was a stranger to him.
    Come over to the house, can you? When’s a good time?
    You can meet my little boy Gideon.
    Yeah he’s here with me, the rest of the summer. I drove out to Traverse City to get him.
    Darlene said some wiseass thing about the boy’s mother, some cunt-wisecrack, Chet Cash laughed like kicking sand.
    Yeah. Somethin like that, Darlene. But we don’t talk about her here, OK? Not