Free Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates Page A

abyss of information, she believed.
    So many “lost” children! Their wide-eyed faces stared at her, pleading.
    Some of the children’s photos have been posted for years.
    It was a shock to discover photos of young children who’d been abducted as long as ten years ago.
    Among them
Robbie Whitcomb, five years old, Ypsilanti, Michigan. Abducted from Libertyville Mall, April 11, 2006. Witnesses reported “battered beige minivan.” If you have information about this abducted child please call this toll-free number
…
    There was a fantasy you might inhale from the Internet, that all these children—abducted, kidnapped, “lost”—were together in one place, waiting to be brought back home.
    As soon as she’d been discharged from the hospital and could see clearly enough to use her computer, Dinah was obsessedwith typing in Robbie’s name. Her own name, and Whit’s. A dozen times a day.
    Checking e-mail. A hundred times a day.
    Whit had cautioned her. Take care, Dinah.
    You don’t know what you’re going to see online. There are sick people out there.
    It was a risk Dinah took. Daily, hourly.
    Though once she’d been appalled, sickened—she’d clicked onto some sort of public-forum Web site and there were (anonymous) individuals busily discussing the abduction of her son.
    Seems like the mother lost him at the mall. Bitch told this itty-bitty child to wait for her while she goes for a smoke and when she comes back, some guy with dreadlocks is dragging the kid into a van.
    The bitch should be arrested—“negligence.”
    Hey the mom almost got killed—got dragged under the van. She’d run after it and tried to stop it.
    Bitch should’ve been killed. Neglecting her son like that.
    Dinah had struggled up from the computer, half-fainted falling to her knees.
    “God forgive me! I know—I have been a bad mother.”
     
    “Do you know where he is—really? Have you ever known?”
    Her mother came to see her. Her mother had the air of a Fury of ancient times, perching on a chair in Dinah’s living room. Her talons shone red.
    “Your husband. Your—‘exotic’—‘DJ’—husband.”
    Dinah said nothing. The ache behind her eyes and in the region of her heart was too painful.
    Her mother blamed her, Dinah knew. The loss of the grandson was Whit’s fault somehow, and so it was Dinah’s fault too, for sleeping with Whit before they’d been married, and then for marrying him.
    Dinah’s mother had long held a grudge against Whit Whitcomb who’d failed to flatter and to adore his mother-in-law as she believed she deserved. And she’d never entirely succeeded in resisting speaking reproachfully to Dinah, that Dinah had taken up with a
mixed-race individual.
    “Not that I am a racist, Dinah. I hope you know that.”
    Dinah nodded. Oh yes, Dinah knew.
    “It’s just that Whit is—well, a certain kind of person.”
    Not our kind, Dinah thought. That’s right.
    Dinah’s father had been a midlevel executive at Ford Motors in Dearborn, Michigan. They’d lived in a whites-only gated community called Bloomfield Vistas in Birmingham, Michigan. Geraldine and Lewis McCracken and their little daughter Dinah who’d been sent to Birmingham Day School, not the public school. In her class there were two Chinese-American children, both brilliant; no Hispanic children, no African-American children, no
mixed-race
children.
    Not our kind
Dinah thought, smiling.
Thank God.
    Six years before, Geraldine McCracken had happened to observe Whit Whitcomb smoking a joint in the backyard of the little rented Ypsilanti house. Dinah’s mother, who drank whiskey,and whose words sometimes slurred when she came to visit her convalescent daughter, had been incensed, outraged. Marijuana is illegal. It’s a
controlled substance.
    Whit had said, mildly, Not in Ypsilanti–Ann Arbor, it isn’t.
    This was a joke. But Dinah’s mother didn’t laugh.
    After the abduction, after Dinah returned home from rehab, her mother’s visits became