Calm Sea and Hard Faring
That morning, on a Monday in mid-January, 2015, the traffic did not ease up until they were past Half Moon Bay. Lilian, looking back ten years later, from a New Jersey college town where Tesla Cybertrucks prowled, felt that the Bay Area before the 2016 election had been as innocent as the children in her minivan, as well-intentioned, as ill-prepared. But are we not all like children in Euripides’ plays, about to be murdered or sacrificed? Immediately, Lilian criticized herself for being too bleak, protesting on behalf of those who were inadvertently encompassed by her thoughts.
That morning, having exited a busy Route 92, Lilian relaxed a little and, for the first time, turned her attention to the five fourth graders she was ferrying. Highway 1, stretching underneath a pale winter sun, was almost empty, and she directed the children to look to their right, at the Pacific. The sea glistened colorlessly.
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“Jude’s mom, do you know Georgia’s mom drives a vegan car?” Hazel said when her eyes met Lilian’s in the rearview mirror. Hazel was a petite girl with large, intense eyes. Lilian did not know Hazel and had noticed the girl’s dismissiveness toward the other children she was saddled with on this trip.
“Can a car be vegan?” Lilian asked aloud, inviting into the conversation the other four children: Lilian’s younger son, Jude; Jude’s best friend, Evan; Evan’s twin sister, Freya; and Freya’s best friend, Vanessa. At this age, the children reminded Lilian of those long-legged water insects which gather together at dusk, each connected to another until a secure chain is formed for the night. In daylight, the water insects would scatter, but these children might still have a year or two before their orderly connections were threatened. Lilian had seen things happen in the class of her older son, Oscar. By fifth grade, the interactions among the children had lost their seeming innocuousness: one girl had made a death threat in a note to a friend, vowing to tamper with the friend’s EpiPen; another girl had promised dollar bills to boys if they allowed her to whip them with a tree branch at a far corner of the school’s playground; three boys had written an unsigned letter to a girl, naming the anatomical parts of her body.
Lilian’s children went to a small independent school, its woodsy campus aspiring to be a fairy-tale-like setting. She was one of those mothers who answered every call for parent chaperons, driving the students around the Bay Area to see art, animals, old people immobile in nursing homes, Ohlone farms, Spanish missions, recycling stations. It was a full-time job just to be a mother, but for this excursion—a five-day outdoor-education field trip at a learning center—all the chaperons were working parents. The three fathers included a criminal prosecutor, a seismologist, and a real-estate agent. The three other mothers were lawyers, one working for a state agency, one for a corporate firm, and one for a foundation that supported arts and literacy projects. Each chaperon would be staying with six or seven children in a dorm room outfitted with bunk beds; there were four showers to be shared among the adults and children. The learning center used to be a hostel, its spartan facilities a challenge, a lawyer mom told Lilian, for the stay-at-home mothers who would otherwise have been perfect candidates for the task of chaperoning.
“A car can’t be vegan!” Evan, a skinny child wearing a pair of large glasses, shouted.
“But aren’t all cars vegan?” Vanessa asked.
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There was a thoughtful pause. “Not if you have leather seats,” Jude said.
Freya kicked the back of the driver’s seat. “Is this leather?” she asked.
“Don’t kick,” Lilian said, wishing that Freya could rely on her own powers of observation. “No, this is not leather.”
“Leather costs more,” Hazel said. “Is that why you don’t have leather seats, Jude’s mom?”
The way Hazel insisted on calling Lilian “Jude’s mom” was peculiar. Her children’s friends either called Lilian by her name or treated her as an accessory of anonymity. Lilian did not know how to reply, so she pointed to the California poppies blooming by the roadside, a golden carpet on a slope. “Look!”
The children looked dutifully, but none marvelled, and their attention drifted elsewhere. Jude and Evan started a duet of “Agony” from “Into the Woods,” and Freya and Vanessa jeered and then joined in when the refrain came up. The movie had been a hit a few months earlier, though Oscar and Jude, loyal to the stage production, had quibbles with the screen adaptation.
Hazel leaned forward as far as her seatbelt allowed. “Just so you know, leather seats are easier to clean,” she said.
Lilian had been driving the Honda Odyssey since Jude’s birth. All those years of spilt juice and milk, of sandy or muddy footprints, of hands sticky from snacks and art works—no deep cleaning would make the fabric look new again. “I concur,” Lilian said brightly, and sensed an alarm of incomprehension from the girl. Hazel did not know what “concur” meant, Lilian thought with an unjust pleasure, so she had no way to further her parrying.
The minivan had been donated to a music society when Lilian and her family relocated to New Jersey. She did not know where those children, college-age now, were today. After Oscar’s death, Jude, who was in seventh grade then, had received messages from some of his old Californian friends, but, in adolescence, the children had to set out on their own. Calm sea and prosperous voyage—a dream for Goethe and Mendelssohn, for any parent, and perhaps for all men and women—was but a hearsay.
It was possible to find out about Jude’s friends, but Lilian refrained. Her own best friend from middle school, upon learning of Jude’s death, six years after Oscar’s, had e-mailed, reminiscing about their school days in Beijing. In the hot months, they would buy ice pops from the dining hall for three fen each. The ice pops, colored with yellow food dye, were, in reality, more gray than yellow, offering only a hint of sweetness, and a few times they’d found remnants of vegetable leaves frozen inside. Once, they pooled their money and bought an ice-cream bar in the shape of a snowman, but before they could take a bite the snowman loosened itself from the stick and fell. It had cost sixty fen—twenty ice pops to while away many lunch breaks! They squatted in the sun and watched the snowman melt. Soon, ants congregated.
Lilian’s friend had made a fortune in real estate; still, nothing would take the astonishing sting off that loss. Lilian was touched and replied that she, too, remembered the snowman. Of her children’s deaths, she could say nothing, so she quoted a few lines of a third-century poem from the Jin dynasty: “Those who have accompanied the funeral procession / Are now ready to return home / The sorrow remains for the family / Others have begun to sing / What’s so exceptional about dying / But to entrust your body to the mountain?”
The homebound others, already singing—this always struck Lilian as a comforting aspect of death. But there would inevitably be some who insisted that the bereaved also join in the singing. Mandatory hope and mandatory optimism must be among the bleakest things in life.
When they arrived, the week’s challenge became obvious to the parents. There were two naturalists at the center, both women in their early twenties. The fourth-grade teachers were Ms. A and Ms. Z, capable but young nevertheless, and Ms. Z was six months pregnant.
“We need a game plan. I say we play defense,” Mike, one of the fathers, said to Lilian as her charges unloaded their sleeping bags, suitcases, backpacks, and stuffed animals. Mike was the real-estate agent, an older father of a young daughter; like Lilian, he was a regular chaperon.
Martha, one of the mothers, came over. “Five days, fifty people per meal, three meals a day,” she said. “The cooking and the cleaning are all on us. And the driving and the babysitting. We were crazy to sign up for this.”
The other parents joined them, one or two echoing the incredulity, a mixture of fake consternation, mild indignation, and real pride. The truth was, Lilian thought, every one of them knew why they were here: to insure the children’s safety, health, and happiness (if that was possible).
Within fifteen minutes, Anna, the corporate lawyer, had drawn up a schedule. In shifts of two or three, in a rotating manner—like a dance in which no one was stuck with the same partner for long—and in the spirit of fairness, she had set the battle plan for the week.
Ms. A and Ms. Z gathered the children with their lunchboxes—the last meal packed by their parents, the teachers said, and soon they would be cooking their own. The children made hooting noises of independence, ate, and lined up for a walk to a nearby rocky beach. Martha asked to be let off the hook for the afternoon, and, since no one oversaw the parents, no one opposed this. Anna and Gretchen exchanged looks.
Lilian was paired with Jeremy, the criminal prosecutor; they were to be the rear guard. They had not met before, and he pointed Tony out as his son, and she pointed Jude out as hers. Tony was the tallest boy in fourth grade, and Lilian knew his mother, a petite interior designer, by sight. Jeremy, stooping a little when he spoke to Lilian, was at least six feet two.
Lilian asked him about his work, and he said that his specialty was sex offenses. “Oh,” she said. “Does Tony know that’s your field?”
Jeremy glanced at her, and she wondered if he considered the question impertinent. But Lilian’s least favorite activity was small talk. If she must make conversation, she would rather talk about something that she could ponder later.
“Yes, I talk about my work with Tony, but only in broad strokes,” Jeremy replied carefully. “His siblings are too young.”
Lilian said that a friend’s sister-in-law worked as a psychiatrist for the state prison. Somewhere to the north, Lilian gestured, and Jeremy provided the prison’s name. Yes, that one, Lilian confirmed, and said that the psychiatrist seemed to have a dim view of her clients. For instance, someone who had murdered multiple people would go on talking about his hurt feelings.
“Ah, but that’s only a medium-security prison,” Jeremy said. “Your friend hasn’t seen the worst.”
“Are your cases much worse? Am I allowed to ask?”
The naturalists were gathering the children for a lecture on tidal pools. Jeremy told a few stragglers to catch up. “Did I hear that you’re a professor?” he asked Lilian.
“More or less,” she said. “I write, too. Mostly fiction.”
“Murder mysteries?”
“Oh, gosh, no.”
“If you want stories, we can have coffee sometime,” Jeremy said, nodding to the children around them. It was not an appropriate setting, Lilian knew, but she suspected that the coffee might not happen.
“Hey,” Jeremy raised his voice to call out to two boys who were hopping from one slippery rock to another in a competition. When he walked over to restore discipline, Gretchen joined Lilian. “Not an easy man to be married to,” Gretchen said, raising her chin at Jeremy’s back. “Mimi is pretty much a single mother.”
Lilian thought about how much she disliked people who talked as though everything they said were pregnant with meaning.
“Three times a year, he goes off to hike solo in Oregon and Washington. And leaves the children to Mimi,” Gretchen said. “Imagine!”
From Lilian’s experience, people who exhorted “Imagine!” rarely followed their own advice. “Well, he’s here,” she said, but it sounded as though she were defending Jeremy, who was really a stranger.
“That’s because Mimi insisted that they go to couples therapy!”
“So, it must’ve worked,” Lilian said, putting on a stubbornly obtuse look.
A few rocks away, Evan waved, giving Lilian the excuse to extricate herself. He and Jude had found a pink sea star, their identification confirmed by the naturalists. Children gathered, and many took out their digital cameras. A boy next to Lilian bemoaned the fact that his parents had not allowed him to bring a digital camera. “Just this,” he said, pointing to a disposable Kodak camera hanging around his neck. “You can only take twenty-four photos, and then they have to be developed!”
“Don’t be a crybaby,” Hazel said sternly. Lilian saw that Hazel did not join the children in photographing the starfish.
On the walk back, Lilian noticed a girl, a head taller than Jude, keeping to his side, sometimes bumping into him. The school emphasized that students should express themselves in words, but Jude was not a child who verbalized his feelings. Lilian wondered if she should intervene, but Evan inserted himself between Jude and the girl. Evan was a good friend. In kindergarten and first grade, he had tirelessly explained to any questioning adult that, no, Jude did not want to talk, and he—Evan—could speak for Jude, until a special-ed consultant forbade the practice.
“Who’s that girl?” Lilian asked Anna. “The one walking with Jude and Evan. She’s new.”
Her name was Ginny, and she had been expelled from Kingsley, Anna explained. Ginny’s parents had made a donation, so Ginny joined the fourth grade after the Christmas break. Lilian liked Anna, who was on the school board, knew what was going on, and gossiped matter-of-factly with neither pettiness nor zeal.
Ginny suddenly pounced. Jude, tightly locked in by her arms, struggled to free himself, and she laughed. Lilian did not think there was true malice in that laughter. Nevertheless, Jude would be annoyed. Lilian walked over and placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “Look at that bird,” Lilian said. Ginny released Jude and turned to look, then exclaimed, even though it was only a common red-winged blackbird. She shouted at Jude and Evan to look at the wings of the bird, but the boys had already walked on.
“Listen, Ginny, you need to leave Jude alone,” Lilian said.
“But he’s so cute, like this,” Ginny said, making a kissing sound while holding her cheeks between her hands. Jude had a round and chubby face. “He’s like . . . a Teddy bear.”
Ask your parents to buy you a life-size Teddy bear, Lilian thought. “You need to respect people’s personal space,” she said.
“But Evan doesn’t have to respect Jude’s personal space.”
Evan, a weedy boy, sometimes pretended that Jude was a tree he could climb, and Jude would stand still, letting Evan hang on him. There was a puppylike affection between them.
Ms. Z walked over and gave Lilian a querying look. Lilian said that she was explaining personal space to Ginny. Ms. Z sighed inaudibly. “Ginny, we’ve talked about this, remember?”
“But everybody likes to be hugged,” Ginny said, throwing her arms around Ms. Z’s body. For a split second, Lilian felt an urge to push Ginny out of the way, but the girl was gentle enough with Ms. Z’s protruding belly. “I’m glad you like my hugs,” Ginny said, looking up with a placating smile.
Surely there was malice in that smile, Lilian thought, scrutinizing the girl.
Some years later, Lilian would remember the girl again, and she would ask Jude if he recalled Ginny from fourth grade. It was a sunny day in June, and she and her husband and Jude were on vacation in Denmark, sitting next to the moat of Kronborg Castle—Hamlet’s Elsinore. Hamlet was one of Jude’s favorite characters, and they agreed, after touring the castle, that none of them would have liked to be a prince in that palace.
Jude thought and then replied with his particular precision: “I have no recollection of having known someone with that name.”
Ginny had stayed for only a few months. Once, during a lunch break, Jude had pushed her so hard that she fell and scraped her elbows. Lilian, summoned by the principal, asked the woman if Jude had been provoked and pointed out that he had never been physically aggressive toward anyone. The principal said she understood that Jude did not like having his face cupped or his body hugged by Ginny, but she had confirmed that Ginny had never received a verbal no from him. The woman went on, saying that the school took “male aggression” seriously. But not female aggression? Lilian nearly burst out. She asked if Ginny’s behavior toward Jude—which had plenty of eyewitnesses, including Lilian herself on a school trip—shouldn’t be considered sexual harassment. Lilian felt bad as she said this. Perhaps Ginny was only a nuisance, but America was a litigious country. The principal softened and said that she would just give Jude a warning, and that the school would expect his parents to go on working with him on his communication.
By Hamlet’s castle, Jude did not seem curious about Ginny, and their conversation drifted to Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. Swallows darted in and out of the castle, flitting over the water, sometimes changing directions midair, giving out high-pitched cheep-cheeping.
“I used to sing a Chinese lullaby about spring swallows to you,” Lilian said.
“I remember it,” Jude said, and hummed.
“I sang it to Oscar, too,” Lilian said. After Oscar’s death, on all their travels, they were aware of his absence. The swallows outside Hamlet’s castle made it easy to bring him back; Oscar, Lilian thought, would have remembered the lullaby, too. Unrealistically, she felt that everything would still be all right if they could stay next to that moat forever.
They sat quietly for some time. Then Lilian asked Jude if he remembered a girl named Hazel.
“Vaguely,” he said.
Lilian wanted to say that every time she read “Hamlet,” she saw Hazel as Ophelia, but it would be an odd comment, so she let it drop. That day, they sat next to the moat for a long time, but not forever. After the summer, Jude went to college and died in the middle of his freshman year.
In the late afternoon of the first day, Lilian and Martha were on patrol duty at the back of the learning center. There were two large patios, fenced in and perched on a hill overlooking the Pacific. Below the patios was a sharp slope that ran down to the ocean. Mike and Phillip—the seismologist—were leading a game of touch football on the front lawn. Gretchen and the two teachers patrolled the dorms, while Jeremy and Anna worked in the kitchen with the children on cooking duty.
“Hot dogs and chips for dinner,” Martha said. “Not much cooking to do, if you ask me. And no vegetables.”
Lilian nodded. Martha was not an engaging conversational partner, though no doubt she could say that about Lilian, too.
“Still, we’re luckier, with the million-dollar view,” Martha said, pointing to the ocean.
The sun was setting. Children—mostly girls—took pictures of the splendid colors of the sky and the shining sea. Lilian found an excuse to go around and check that the children were not fighting over the best photo spot. Jude and Evan, neither “material for touch football,” in Evan’s words, were at the end of the patio. Lilian took pictures of them from afar, two bespectacled boys, one chubby, one skinny, both looking comfortable with being the oddballs that they were.
“Is Jude a scholarship kid?” Hazel, who seemed to have appeared from nowhere, asked.
Lilian hesitated, then said that she and her husband paid the full tuition for Jude. She asked Hazel if she would like to sit with her and watch the sunset, partly expecting, or perhaps hoping, that Hazel would decline. But Hazel followed Lilian to a bench. “How about Evan and Freya? Do their parents pay the full tuition?” Hazel, drawing both legs up and placing her elbows on her knees, asked.
“That I can’t answer you,” Lilian said.
“I bet they’re on scholarships. Twins can be expensive.”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to go around asking these questions,” Lilian said. “Or think about these things. You’re too young for it.”
“And parents are too old to understand anything,” Hazel said.
Lilian never liked those parents who talked about their children’s schooling as preparation for the future. Could they not see that the children were living their lives already? But here she, too, had blundered. She apologized for speaking hastily, and Hazel nodded magnanimously. “I’m a scholarship kid, you know,” she said.
Lilian did not know. She had never met Hazel’s parents.
“I went to a public school for three years. Kids there were mean to me.”
“Is this a better school for you?”
“Not really. Kids are mostly stupid, no matter where they go to school,” Hazel said. “The problem is, they don’t even know why they have to be mean to me.”
Lilian studied the girl. “Do you know?”
“They want me to be just like them,” Hazel said, and then gestured at herself, as though to indicate the impracticality of this. There was despair in her eyes, and there was pride, too.
“What about your parents?”
“You know how parents are. You want us to be like the other children, only better so that we can go to Stanford,” Hazel said. “Were you happy when you were a child, Jude’s mom?”
“I thought I was.”
“But were you really not?”
“I once had a student who’d grown up during a war in the former Yugoslavia. That was before your time,” Lilian said. Hazel made a face, warning Lilian not to be tiresome. Indeed, why talk to Hazel as though she were an average child? “This student—he was a college freshman—said that his American classmates asked the most impossible questions about his childhood. He told me, ‘I don’t see why they have to feel bad for me. We had a great time, there was no school, and mostly we played cards in the shelter. When there was no bombing, we went out to play soccer.’ ”
Hazel thought for a moment. “That doesn’t sound bad.”
“It was bad. Only he didn’t know it,” Lilian said. Most children wouldn’t question their childhoods until later, if ever—a blessing for children and parents alike. “But not all children are stupid. And not all of them are mean.”
“How do you know? You’re no longer ten years old.”
Lilian suspected that the Hazels of the world would often be reminded by their elders to be grateful and happy, as though gratitude would guarantee happiness, or else a happy façade would take the sting off that onerous task of feeling grateful. “You’re right. I have no right to make those claims,” Lilian said. “We grownups are not the most thoughtful species.”
Hazel looked unsettled. Perhaps adults in her life did not admit their shortcomings easily.
“But Jude and Evan are not stupid,” Lilian said. “And they are not mean. Shall we go join them?”
Hazel shook her head. “Boys are so . . . immature.”
“Would you like me to take a picture of you with the sunset and the sea?” Lilian asked.
Hazel shrugged, but Lilian could see her gladness at being asked. She positioned Hazel next to the fence. Just as she was about to take the photo, Jude and Evan jumped into the frame. No doubt this was Evan’s idea, but even Jude was laughing. Hazel, feigning annoyance, did not look as morose as she had a minute before.
The picture, and the others taken that week, along with thousands more taken in Oscar and Jude’s lives, were saved in the cloud, but Lilian did not often revisit them. She did not need the images to bring back the memories. There was the hike in the redwood forest where the children circled a giant sequoia tree with linked hands, while Jude and Evan stood aside, studying lichen through a magnifying glass. There was the coastal walk, with the Pacific on one side and the winter hills, greened by the rainy season, on the other. On that walk, the naturalists spotted a mountain lion at the bend and told the children to stay still, and yet they all exclaimed when the mountain lion leaped into midair to catch an unsuspecting bird, and they exclaimed again when they caught sight of a large herd of elk across the valley. There was the breakfast Lilian supervised with Phillip, who approved of Jude and Evan’s scientific spirit when they were tasked with cracking a hundred eggs. The boys tried different methods—one egg in two hands, two eggs in two hands, cracking the egg on a flat tabletop, cracking the egg on the edge of the counter—to see which would lead to fewer broken pieces of shell in the basin. There was the drama competition one evening, each group presenting a skit featuring sea creatures. Jude opted for the nonspeaking part, playing a baleen whale, minding his own business. Hazel, insisting on calling the fisherman character Ahab, earned enough ire from the other children that she decided to sit out the performance, and the fisherman, played by Evan, was satisfyingly and conventionally named Grandpa Joe. There was a night visit to a lighthouse, and even the most unruly of the children climbed the circling stairs with a quiet awe—they were told that it was a privilege to visit one of the few remaining working lighthouses in the area. Perhaps to them the lighthouse was a living thing from the past, like a breathing dinosaur communicating in the darkness with other dinosaurs.
It was on that trip, spending all her waking hours among the children, that Lilian began to study them closely, trying to imagine a future for each one. Some would grow up to be Annas and Marthas and Gretchens, some, Mikes or Phillips or Jeremys. There would never be a shortage of Ginnys, so Ginny might not have to confront loneliness. But some children—Hazel, Evan, and, of course, Jude—baffled Lilian. Was there ever a calm sea for children who could not or would not be molded into an acceptable shape, who did not fit nicely into the safe and inclusive part of the bell curve? Do outlier children meet outlier fates?
One day—some time after Jude’s death—Lilian looked at the pictures taken on that trip. She was surprised by how young the children were: the boys lining up by piling onto one another like bear cubs, the girls with their cloudless faces. And yet pictures could lie. That a picture is worth a thousand words was only an advertising slogan from the nineteen-twenties—those thousand words were not always ones that could stand the scrutiny.
“If there is a wall between the present and the future it is not for us to pull it down,” a character in a Rebecca West novel admonishes. And yet much of living, Lilian thought, was made up of attempts to somehow look through that wall. Fortune-tellers are not the only figures who aspire to clairvoyance. Economists, scientists, writers preoccupied with bringing future disasters and unlived lives into the present as though that can inoculate us—are they not trying to pull that wall down? But none of them is as persistent, as desperate, as helpless as a parent. Few parents can follow the hackneyed wisdom of living in the moment. All parents battle that wall, nearly always in vain.
Unrealistically, illogically, Lilian wished that she had refrained from pondering the futures of the children on that trip.
On Thursday afternoon, they visited a nature reserve to see elephant seals. The sea mammals travel a long way to California, the naturalists explained. They would spend their mating season here on this coast.
Facts about elephant seals—a bull’s responsibility to impregnate his harem of females, birthing and nursing—though presented scientifically, put the children in a state of wild glee that a thousand-year-old redwood tree or a century-old lighthouse could not induce. A pup, by stealing the milk from females that were not its birth mother, could double its size and become a “super weaner”—a term that a boy named David picked up with an astute imagination. For the rest of the day, he and Tony tirelessly told jokes about the “super wiener,” a performance augmented by another hot-dog dinner. Already, there were signs of the men they would grow into. And some girls, laughing with shrill indignation, were miniatures of the women they were to become.
A ditty composed by Tony and David, about a super wiener and a pussycat, led to some children hooting at dinner. Lilian, who was on meal duty with Jeremy, wondered if he would interfere, but he only frowned and told the children to keep the volume down. Jude and Evan, tuning out the chaos, played five-in-a-row on a piece of lined paper. Ginny screamed “super wiener” to them, but they, trained to use their intellectual activities as imperfect armor, pretended not to notice her. Hazel, her eyes taking on a blind look, was pale with rage.
The next day, they would have one last hike and then return home. The adults, sensing that the energy among the children had veered into agitation, conferred and agreed to cancel the barn dance, scheduled for that night. The naturalists proposed a backup activity. The group would gather around a bonfire, meditating and listening to some calming music. And, in pairs, the students would take turns walking quietly in the woods behind the learning center. There was only one circular path, no more than three hundred feet in distance. That night’s moon, nearly full, would be bright enough to light the path, but for safety and comfort the children would be given a hurricane lamp—not a real oil lamp, a naturalist added, but a battery-run one so that there was no fire hazard.
Phillip and Jeremy exchanged a few words and said that they would go check the path. The naturalists smiled tightly. No doubt they, not yet plagued by a thousand parental fears, were judging these helicopter parents. But they were too young to know what many parents understood: no amount of vigilance and attention would guarantee safety, not to mention health and happiness.
The two men—the most levelheaded among the chaperons—soon returned and confirmed that the path was safe. As an extra measure, they offered to station themselves along the path, keeping an inconspicuous watch. What could go wrong?
The answer to the question was bound to be: something, or everything. Never: nothing.
The fire—not an exorbitant one—was lit safely. The moon rose. The music was the kind that functioned as atmospheric wallpaper. Some girls sat back-to-back, leaning onto each other, and some boys lay down. When forty children remained quiet for an extended period, the world took on an eerie quality—natural or unnatural, who could say, but glorious all the same. Years after that night, on a spring morning, Lilian would notice her New Jersey garden covered by newly molted cicadas, immobile. Surely they were not yet alive, or were they already dead? The sun rose, warming the cicadas, drying their wings, and then, as though obeying a mystic signal, they fluttered their wings, hundreds of lives waking simultaneously. Then they flew up together, in slow motion, their bodies still heavy for their inexperienced, virginal wings. The scene reminded Lilian of old Second World War movies in which R.A.F. fighter planes ascended at the end of a runway, a swarm of machines flying across the English Channel. She wanted to exclaim, but the marvel was choked in her throat: neither Oscar nor Jude lived long enough to see a cloud of cicadas, rising, rising, rising, reaching for the tree branches.
But how many people have seen a cloud of cicadas? Or the hundreds of husks left on the ground, brown, semitransparent, upholding the shape of the life that had once been but was now gone?
The children, two by two, walked into the woods solemnly, the hurricane lamp swinging, the light vanishing and then returning. No one spoke, the children waiting for their turns looking eager yet patient, the faces of those who had made the journey taking on a mysterious expression. Lilian watched the children attentively. They were beautiful in the way sculptures from ancient Rome or paintings from the sixteenth century were beautiful, but it was not their beauty that brought tears to her eyes. There were moments in life that one could hold on to as talismans. They would not insure a calm sea and prosperous voyage; nevertheless, they would make some tempests less daunting, some battles less futile, and some pains less overwhelming. Lilian thought that she was witnessing one of those moments. The children, mesmerized, must have sensed the rareness of such a night, too.
Some years after Oscar’s death, his best friend sent a quote from a translation of “The Bakkhai” that she had read, a father’s last message to a daughter—“Farewell to you, unhappy child. Fare well, but you shall find your faring hard”—and said that the line often reminded her of Oscar. Right away, Lilian checked the edition on her shelf, which had a different translation: “Farewell, my poor dear daughter. But you are beyond faring well!”
No matter what the words were, they said the same thing: hard faring for the children, and sometimes harder faring for their parents.
But for a short time, on that night in January, 2015, the magic—the moon, the bonfire, and the children smiling mysteriously—felt nearly real, almost indestructible. Lilian watched Jude and Evan return, the hurricane lamp carried between them in an endearing and awkward manner. She could imagine them walking the entire path that way, as though they were holding hands through the lamp, keeping each other company because they were both odd children. Nine years and a month after this night, Jude would die. Evan—
But Lilian did not know what he would be like as a young man, only that his faring would never be easy.
The night, winding down, promised to be memorable. Then Ginny refused to walk with Hazel. Neither had chosen the other, but they were the two who were left, paired by necessity. Hazel swung the lamp in her hand and looked contemptuously at Ginny, surrounded by the naturalists and the teachers, who whispered encouragement. “No, I don’t want to go,” Ginny shouted, the first loud voice heard that night, waking the children from their reverie.
Ms. A and Ms. Z asked Hazel if it was O.K. that an adult walked with her instead. Lilian, nearby, offered herself. Hazel raised the lamp in a dramatic manner, above her head, so that she could look into the lit face of every adult with her large, intense eyes. Always, after, Lilian would remember that look when she read Ophelia’s words: “There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.”
Then Hazel lowered the lamp and said that all the other children had been allowed to walk without adult supervision, so she, too, should be granted the same privilege. She would walk alone, she said.
None of the adults raised an objection. It was getting late, the children around the bonfire were starting to stir, and the magic of the night was wearing thin. No doubt the other adults, like Lilian, were thinking of Phillip and Jeremy, two guardians in the dark forest. So Hazel was let go, the light swinging as it had been for the other paired children.
But the lamp did not bring Hazel back. When the wait had become alarmingly long, Lilian and Anna hurried into the woods. They ran into Phillip, then Jeremy. Neither had seen Hazel. The girl had disappeared on a stretch of path no more than fifty feet long before the bend that would have allowed Phillip to see the lamplight.
The four parents did a preliminary search in vain. There was an imperative to communicate the emergency to the adults quietly. There was the task of getting the children back to their dorms, and supervising their washing-up, and tucking them into bed. There was the question of whether to call the police. There was incredulity: How could Hazel disappear when such a vanishing trick seemed nearly impossible? There was fear unvoiced: Could there have been a mountain lion or a human perpetrator? But, in either case, why had Phillip and Jeremy not heard anything?
Back at the gathering, there were Martha’s groans and Gretchen’s anger, and there was Mike, clasping his chest—a heart attack? No, simply that he could not breathe for a moment, he said, tears already filling his jolly eyes. Ms. Z turned pale, and the mothers insisted that she go back to her room right away. They could not have a premature birth on their hands, not on this night.
Lilian, Jeremy, and the two naturalists went to search again, while Anna and Phillip were entrusted to get everyone else safely back. As they walked away from the gathering, Lilian could hear Ginny’s shrill protest: “But where’s Hazel? Why is she allowed to stay out longer? It’s so not fair!”
This time, the adults were more thorough, calling out Hazel’s name, four flashlights pointing together at any promising sign. How long did that suspension go on? Forever, but in retrospect no more than twenty minutes. The naturalists, sharp-eyed, spotted a few broken branches and some footprints at the bottom of a bush. Hazel must have turned off the lamp and slipped down the slope without making a sound.
At the bottom of the hill, they found the girl lying under a tree. The adults rushed to her, not touching her in case she’d broken a bone or suffered a head injury. But already Lilian could sense that it was a less alarming but more unsettling situation—and she knew that Jeremy had, too. They knelt next to Hazel, whose face, with a stubborn and harsh look, spoke of her refusal to be coaxed back into the normal life of a normal child. There was no pain or fear, only a steely negation of reality.
Jeremy, in his calm legal voice, told the girl that she should take her time, that they would wait until she felt ready. They could send for a blanket and a pillow, and they—Jude’s mom and he—would stay with her. They had all night and half of the next morning, until eleven o’clock, when they needed to be getting on the road, because all the parents, including hers, would be waiting for the arrival of the caravans at the school by two o’clock. “It’s half past nine now,” Jeremy said. “For the next thirteen hours, we will defer to you. We won’t force you. We won’t abandon you. But by ten-thirty tomorrow, if you cannot make up your mind, I’ll be obliged to carry you back.”
They waited, and perhaps Hazel was waiting, too, but, when neither Lilian nor Jeremy said anything further, Hazel opened her eyes. By breaking down the wall between that night and the next day, Jeremy had annulled the child’s resolution to dissolve life. Lilian could recognize the despair in Hazel’s eyes, just as she would later recognize it in Oscar’s. The unsaid words in those young eyes were what some parents would not understand, and other parents would never hear, but, even if a parent did hear and understand, what could she do? The Hazels and the Oscars and the Judes of the world, children mid-journey in their hard-faring, were asking the same question: How can you mandate hope and optimism when no one can save us from our outliers’ lot? ♦