Alice Hoffman - The Museum of Extraordinary Things

That was all R could tell me—she did not know the man’s name or address—but it was enough to make me wonder if the image of Hannah I’d been carrying had been distorted by the tide of her father’s love. Perhaps I hadn’t been able find a map of who she was because I’d been misled. She was more independent than I’d thought. More willing to take a risk.

I walked for a long time after leaving R. Without thinking, I found myself outside the building where the Weisses lived. I went upstairs and knocked on the door. I went by nearly every day, though I had little to report. It had become a ritual I felt I needed to complete, even on those occasions when I stayed only a few moments, embarrassed by how little I’d discovered. And yet Weiss never faulted me. He was still hopeful.

“Did you find anything?” he asked after he’d let me in. “The gold necklace? Her shoes? Anyone who saw her?”

I said no. I couldn’t tell Weiss that his daughter had loved some man he’d never heard of or met and that she’d had a rebel’s soul.

“You’ll find her,” he said, sure of himself, sure of me, perhaps desperate to be so.

I stayed for dinner, reciting the evening prayers along with him out of respect. I still remembered them. Hannah’s sister made us a meal of barley soup, stuffed cabbage, then a roast chicken, along with bread, butter, and pavel, a plumlike butter. For dessert there was an apple strudel with sugar sprinkled on top. To me, it was a feast. I was reminded of my mother’s cooking, the way she sang to herself as she went about her chores, her use of herbs to make the meal more appealing. I thanked Ella and said, in return for including me in their dinner, I would help her clean up. The truth was, I wanted to stand beside her out of the old man’s hearing, so we might have some privacy.

“Your sister was in love?” I said.

Ella shot me a look. “What difference does it make?”

“Maybe nothing, maybe everything.”

“If so, she didn’t tell me.”

“She told you everything,” I reminded her.

“He was just a boy. Nothing serious. She’d only just met him. That’s all she said. All I know is that his name was Samuel. She said I would meet him, but that day didn’t come.”

The plates were chipped and the dishwater was tepid. I didn’t blame Ella for leading me astray by not mentioning this Samuel, nor did I berate her for the time I’d wasted searching for a vision that was untrue. I would now have to begin all over again, and think of Hannah as a different sort of person. I was about to let the topic drop when Ella surprised me by gripping my hand.

“I dreamt again that Hannah was in water. She was whirling in a circle, dressed in blue. When I woke up I heard her voice. She told me she couldn’t come back to me. That she’d tried, but it was no longer possible.”

She grasped my hand tightly, and I comforted her as Hochman might have, assuring her this wasn’t an unusual reaction to great loss. I hoped I didn’t sound as pompous as he always had. “It’s normal to have such dreams.”

I didn’t tell Ella that I sometimes heard my own mother’s voice after all these years, when I could barely remember her face and couldn’t bring myself to say her name. Nor did I mention that I often dreamed of my father. Though he was alive, he was lost to me as well. In my dreams, he stood in silence, knee deep in the grass.

“You’re saying this is normal? That I see her clear as day?”

“It is when you love someone,” I said. I didn’t know what I was talking about, but I’d heard Hochman express similar sentiments and I parroted his words. My next statement, however, I knew to be true. “You imagine what you wish for.”

“My pillow was wet,” Ella insisted. “She was there.”

I shook my head. “You wept. It was you.”

On the way home, I stopped across the street from my father’s home. I had to pass nearby. It was dark, and the night was unusually warm. I wondered how it was that we could have slept side by side in the forest at one time in our lives and be complete strangers to each other now. Would he know me if he passed me by on the street, without my black hat and coat, my hair shorn close to my head, or would I just be another citizen of New York? I thought of my younger self, the child who did not understand how a person could be on earth one instant and gone the next. How was it possible that my mother, who had been so alive, had become nothing more than ashes? Surely she must be somewhere. I became a finder because I needed an answer to this question. So perhaps this was my gift.

I did not know Hannah Weiss and, if her sister was correct, I never would, but that didn’t matter.

I could not let her go.

PATHS ALONG the river were rife with swamp cabbage, and sweet peas, and meadow grass. Even the city work crews, most of them ill-paid Irish immigrants, who had arrived at dawn to shore up the banks with huge boulders, could not disturb the larks floating from tree to tree. The clouds in the sky reflected in the river, as if they were stepping-stones that might allow a man to walk across the water, all the way to New Jersey. Eddie fished every Saturday near the same spot. Each time he wished that he would come upon the trout he’d set free. People were said to revisit the scene of a crime, and dogs had been known to find their homes after traveling hundreds of miles, wasn’t it possible for a fish to be driven by memory?

As Eddie trekked through the unfolding ferns, the undergrowth gave off the scent of cinnamon when it was crushed underfoot. He felt the watch inside his vest pocket, beating, as if he had a second heart. He’d brought along another bottle of rye, in case Beck gave him any trouble for again coming onto what he considered to be his land. He found a quiet place and hunkered down. Though it was early in the season, crickets were calling, and there was the hum of mosquitoes as they drifted over the shallows. Eddie had brought along his rod, but today he merely watched the stream, looking for a flash of silver. After an hour, and then two, he still saw only the shimmering water. Clearly, trout were smarter than men, choosing not to return to the site of their previous sorrows.

He went to the shoreline and began to photograph the river, hoping to capture some of the beauty of the place. The air was soft, as it often was in this lovely month, and Eddie inhaled its sweetness. He found himself uplifted as he worked, caught up in something outside himself and his petty wants and needs. The clouds drifted like ice in a tumbler. Through his lens the river seemed made of light, there was the shimmer, and for a moment the world seemed whole to him. As the afternoon lengthened, the light began to fade. The river darkened and shadows cut through the woods. There was a shuffle in the bushes, most likely a covey of quail or a raccoon. Mitts, who had been so well mannered all day, now reverted to his exuberant ways. The dog didn’t wait to find out what his quarry was, or whether it was larger and more dangerous than he, before he leapt into the brush and disappeared. Eddie went crashing after him, calling out and whistling. Once darkness fell it would be all but impossible to find him, and there were said to be coyotes that stalked their prey in these valleys.

Mitts’s bark echoed from the woods. Eddie did his best to catch up, but he was soon hindered by thick mud as he crossed several small rivulets. The land was a cattail marsh, and blue herons had begun nesting, with dozens of enormous nests set into the top branches of the tall, half-dead sycamores circling the wetland. Eddie finally reached firmer ground. The last of the day’s sunlight was a pale yellow drifting through the branches. Mitts was making a serious racket, growling low in his throat. The last time the dog had taken off Eddie had raced to find him in a clearing. Grabbing Mitts by the collar, he’d been struck by an unnerving sense that he wasn’t alone. For an instant he’d thought he spied the figure of a woman. A white shirt, masses of black hair, a slim beautiful form. But there was no one in sight, only the wavering branches.