The Betsybob

This is one of my absolute favorite--and most misunderstood--stories. I have no idea where it came from other than a very deep place. It's about magic, memory, and hope.

The Betsybob

Dogwood leaves nod with falling dewdrops, the fern fronds, too. The forest appears to be motioning its approval—or reproach—as the low-lying branches part. A dim, humid morning alive with bug buzz, the undergrowth stirring with efts. Mist like a fabric unraveling. Dried twigs crackle, switches hiss until the thicket gives way to a clearing. Scattered boulders and stumps, and at the far end, a knoll. Inside, there’s a cave of sorts or a grotto, its entrance curtained by vines. But even then, a presence emerges, an energy and a song. And light. Clarified beams that pierce the ivy and turn the moss incandescent, but then, once unveiled, explode. Blinding, searing, redeeming. The light that reveals all secrets, promising to fulfil any wish.

* * *

Flinching awake in her chair, squinting and shielding her eyes, Randy mutters, “No.”

“Sorry,” the night nurse assures her. “Routine check.” She turns a switch and the room again darkens. “If you’re having trouble sleeping, I can give you something...”

“No. No, it’s okay.” The hand that had been saluting now fluttered, shooing the RN away.

“Alright, then,” she says, merely one of many shadows, “goodnight,” and exits the sterilized room.

Randy groans to her feet. Approaches the bed with its tubes and monitors, blinking like the controls of some alien ship. And lying there, resting after celestial flight, hairless and gray, the visitor from the planet Cancer. The creature who is also her son.

She feels his forehead. Clammy and hot all at once, a single vein pulsing beneath her fingers. Onion-skinned eyelids flitting. Emaciated, his features are thrown into relief, the deep-set eyes, the blunt-tipped nose, the mouth that obstinately remains fleshy. His father’s face, not that she entirely remembers it. A man she met in a bar and then in her bed for a fitful week eleven years earlier, but who then vanished without ever knowing the life he left inside her. Randy did not follow him, never tried to track him down. It wasn’t her way, a woman unaccustomed to asking. Believing it best to accept whatever the world gave her, convinced that she deserved little more, fearful of receiving less.

So it was with her son. The child she didn’t dream of, much less demand, but who seemed nothing short of miraculous. T.J., she called him, as though unwilling to waste time on his name, knowing he wouldn’t wait for it as he ran around and out of her apartment. Restless, rambunctious, he both frazzled and astonished his teachers, their report cards reading like tributes. Any day he might return with either a gold-starred math test or an eye swollen from some spat, but Randy hardly cared. To her, T.J. was the gift she wouldn’t have dreamed of, a wish never made come true. Catching him as he burst through the door, she kissed his beaded forehead and buried her face in his curls. “T.J.,” she sighed, inhaling his bubble-gum breath. “T.J.,” short for the love a universe might not contain.

Strange, then, the way he murmured “Mom” at the dinner table and pointed to his scoop of potatoes. There, on the crown beside a dollop of butter, was a bright red dot. Then another, on the lamb chop, and several stippling his plate.

“Nothing, hon, a nosebleed.” But there was no stopping the flows, no explaining the pallor, the bruises, and weight-loss. No preventing the doctor from pronouncing the word that made that very same universe shatter.

And now in the night she stands over him, the patient who never complains, the darling of doctors and nurses, who snorts “Jesus, Mom,” every time she cries. Who, even in sleep, reminds her that there is more to lose than life itself and that she is helpless to save it.

It’s then that she remembers the dream. Or the memory—she’s not sure which—only that it recurred to her for a reason. Somehow she knew it would, was yearning for it. The scrunch of mulch and the rich scent of duff. The clearing and the knoll. And the light, most desperately the light. There, in the antiseptic ward, by the glow of her son’s vital signs, she decides to act on the impulse she’s had now for weeks. Stepping out into the corridor, cupping her phone so the medical staff won’t overhear, she makes three improbable calls.

* * *

The first forces her to distance the phone from her ear. Hooting, applause, a whistle or two, followed by Marla’s laugh, part honk, part thunderclap. She’s backstage at a comedy club, about to go on, but can’t ignore the name on her cell.

“Randy! Sweetie! Whaaat?”

Another of Marla’s signatures, that whaaat. Depending on the tone, it could mean “how are you? or “is this for real?” or “holy shit.” In this case, though, it stands for “why is my camp friend from a zillion years ago suddenly calling?”

She tells her, trying to sound serious as she shouts.

“Jessie. Sweetie. That really sucks.”

She imagines Marla bulging out of that too-tight, too-short outfit she wears performing, an essential prop in an act about the fat frizzy redhead trying to get laid, about sagging breasts and desiccated vaginas, her fans alternatively tantalized and repelled. Randy has seen her on cable TV and might have been disgusted if not for the memory of Marla going into sixth grade, overweight and outrageous. Marla, who could never be surprised by anything, no matter how weird, responding as she now does to Randy’s request with another ear-splitting laugh. Another “whaaat?” this time meaning “are you nuts?”

Randy admits, “Yeah, I know,” then explains how all the therapies have failed and that this is her final option. “It happened, Marl. You saw it. We all did. And now we have to go back.”

“We?”

“I don’t think I can find my way alone. It might not appear just to me.”

“And why exactly?”

“The wish. I didn’t make one...” The silliness of this, once spoken, embarrasses her. Randy considers hanging up but instead breaks out sobbing. “Don’t make me beg!”

Weeping is the last thing a stand-up needs to hear right before going up, yet it somehow triggers a laugh. “Hey, it’s me, sweetie, who begs.”

On stage, Marla’s name is announced and instantly the audience erupts. The phone again flies from Randy’s ear but not so far that she can’t hear Marla’s final whaaat. “Don’t be an idiot,” this one says. “Of course, I’ll come.”

The next call, made mid-morning in a time zone only one hour behind, catches Jane in the sanctuary. Here, too, there is background noise but a different kind, softer, sacred. A children’s choir, tremulous voices singing a prayer of some kind, to the tune of Scarborough Fair. Normally, Jane lets nothing interfere with her duties, certainly not an incessantly vibrating phone. But the name on the screen tells her that this interruption is justified. Though she hasn’t spoken with Randy for some time, her attention sapped by professional and personal demands, social media has kept her informed. Laying her guitar on the nearest pew, she steps to the rear of the hall, away from the singing, and summons her tone of condolence.

“I am so sorry…”

“Hold on, Jane, nobody’s died,” Randy stammers, resisting the urge to add “yet.”

“Thank God.”

“And nobody might if you help.”

Unlike with Marla, there is no need to explain Randy’s reasoning—or lack of it. Jane already inhabits the world of faith, dwelt in it even as a teenager as infused with spirituality as were others with hormones. The only one of their foursome to actually say the sabbath prayers and attend the voluntary services, to succor the weak and befriend the unpopular, and to try to understand what she, Randy, was going through that summer. An infinitely caring soul, Jane’s, but encased in an inadequate body. Even now, Randy imagines her swamped in her robes, a wispy woman bowed by the weight of her skullcap, fragile-featured and wan. And yet, she totally expects Jane to say yes to her proposal, even to coordinate the trip. What she doesn’t anticipate is the cracking voice in her ear, that all but mutes the canticle.

“I’m going through some stuff in my life just now. Difficult stuff.”

Randy’s reaction, too, is surprising. “I am going through difficult stuff,” she snaps. “My son’s stuff is difficult.”

“I understand, of course.”

Understanding, Randy knows, is the first step to conceding, to acknowledging that a person of her piety cannot ignore the prayers of a half-crazed mother, the pleas of her old Willowbrook friend. That a believer in mana from heaven or the parting of the Red Sea cannot doubt the power of one little marvel in the woods. Randy knows that, without saying so, Jane has already agreed, even as the singing stops and another voice intrudes. Some woman reminding her, “the children are waiting for you, Rabbi Jane,” with cloying petulance. “Our children.”

A twang of strings escapes the phone as Jane accepts the outstretched guitar. “Coming, love. Sorry,” she apologizes but not to Randy. To her, she whispers, “Just tell me when,” before clicking off. “I’ll be there.”

That leaves Danielle. Who should have been her first call, seeing as she was always the leader, the captain of their team in color war, the fastest runner, swimmer, thinker. Convince Danielle and the others would have followed willingly, just as they did as children. But Danielle was no longer sleeping in a bunk next to them or plotting their course through the trees. Her cabins are now first-class and her planning fiscal. The head of a multi-national firm, she sits in an office high above the city surveying its forest of skyscrapers, handily navigating through.

Reaching her at that altitude proves exasperating, though. It means wading through pools of secretaries and administrative assistants, all of them asking who she is and why she needs to speak to the president. And how should Randy answer? Tell them that their boss is needed for a reunion with three of her friends, searching for the vision they glimpsed only once but that changed their lives forever? That the life of a boy exactly the same age they were back then might very well depend on it?

Instead, “Just want to reconnect,” Randy lies. “Five minutes, no more.”

Finally, she hears her name on the phone. Broken into two even syllables, each one pronounced like a sentence. “How are you?” she inquires and then, when told, says “Dreadful.”

“Oh, my God, no!” would be the reply of a fellow-mother, but Danielle’s never had kids. Unlike Marla, twice-divorced, and Jane with her longtime wife and their adopted Dominican daughters, Danielle had no time for marriage and easily intimidated men. Most emotions she keeps at a distance—as much an asset in the corporate world as in relationships susceptible to loss. Rather, she stands aloof as Randy once saw her posed on a waiting room magazine, in a custom-made suit and clipped bronze coiffure and an expression both imperious and knowing. A hard, handsome woman with a face devoid of curves, only angles, jagged as broken glass.

For that reason, though, Danielle is the least likely to agree. Even Randy finds it difficult to picture her plying through the woods today in jeans and sneakers, leading them as she once did with aplomb. Not unexpectedly, she hears, “I can’t be away from the firm.”

Unlike with Marla there is no sense of empathy to appeal to, none of Jane’s mystical bent. But there is another route. “You be firm,” Randy assuages her, “Show them who’s the boss.”

“I am the boss,” Danielle declares, seemingly to herself, before coming back to Randy. “Besides, that camp was knocked down ages ago. The forest probably, too.”

“And if it wasn’t?” Randy persists, “we need you to guide us again.” Subtly, her I has morphed into we. “We can’t do it without you.”

“No, you couldn’t…”

Someone enters Danielle’s office, a secretary or junior exec. She’s wanted in the boardroom, he says. Not a request. “Send me the info,” she rasps to Randy. “I’ll schedule it.”

The line goes dead but for minutes she remains at the nurse’s station, stunned. Randy has won something yet she’s unsure what. An irrational hike through non-existent woods to a cave that most likely mythic? To recreate a moment most likely produced by their prepubescent imaginations, that probably never happened at all?

Orderlies whisk by and downcast visitors shuffle, but Randy’s still staring at her phone. At the screen with its photo of T.J., healthy and beaming in his baseball cap. His smile, alone, suffices to remind her why she’s doing this. And superimposed over her son’s image is her own, shockingly haggard, and behind that, yet another. A palimpsest of an eleven-year-old confused and frightened by the harshness of the world and yet open to the possibility of wonder. Who gazes out across the years and imparts the secret words that not even Randy dared utter. With a finger to her lips and the wink of one innocent eye, the young girl whispers, “the Betsybob.”

* * *

There were many secret words that summer. “Puke fest” for the bowls of Sloppy Joes served every Wednesday night for dinner and “Gold-digger” for the girl in their bunk fond of nose-picking. “Dartboard,” described their sadly-acnied counselor while the captious unit head was “Godzilla.” Willowbrook’s owner, Samantha Shapira, the gauntly elegant Auntie Sam who first interviewed them in her mid-town apartment and now oversaw them from the camp’s highest hill, was, simply, “God.”

This was their fourth summer together and their last, though they could not have known the financial crisis the camp was in or their lives’ divergent paths. Rather, they existed in the present, unaware of the date as they were of dangers, reveling in a friendship that had no origin they remembered—no common interests or hobbies—only that they were and always would be a team.

An anomalous team comprised of the reticent, reflective Jane and Marla, a wisecracking butterball, and at its head, Danielle, long-limbed and flaxen-braided, giraffe and gazelle-like in height and speed. And Randy. Like the others, born into a well-to-do home with maids and piano lessons, vacations on capes and ski slopes, but a home that was breaking up. Her father had moved out, leaving her mother in the company of bottles and their daughter alone, fearing that her tiniest mis-move, the merest slip, could collapse the remains of her world.

So she was happy just to tag along, silently for the most part, to witness and keep their secrets. Not yet interested in boys, these focused mainly on nicknames and pranks, short-sheeting bunks and rearranging footlockers, and disseminating rumors both comical and cruel. In impermeable circles, they giggled, they snickered and shared. Girlish in a way that girls can be just before they become women. And feeling inestimably special.

Randy needed that feeling just then, the summer of her worthlessness, and never questioned Danielle when proposing even the most devious schemes. Even when she told them about the cave.

“It’s in the woods. Not too deep. Near the dining hall, there’s a trail…” Danielle’s features, even back then, were razor-like, lacerating the air as she spoke. Her sky-blue eyes seemed to darken. “We follow it, far, but we can’t be afraid ‘cause at the end of it there’s a place with no trees only this cave and inside the cave…”

Marla was already bouncing on her pudgy feet and Jane, if incredulous, was too in love with Danielle to question her. Randy merely listened, feeling both privileged and afraid but saying nothing, nodding as Danielle spoke.

“Inside the cave is…the counselors’ hideout! Empty beer cars, dirty pictures, maybe even some drugs. We find it,” Danielle declared, “and we will be queens of Willowbrook!”

Stridently, braces flashing, Marla laughed, and Jane nervously chortled. Randy imagined herself crowned. But when could they do this, how, what with every minute taken up with activities and Auntie Sam observing them from her porch, with a cigarette in one hand and the other, reportedly, binoculars? “No problem,” Danielle assured them. “I’ve got it all planned.”

They’d get up the next morning and go through the usual routine—breakfast, flag-raising, inspection—until first period. Then, slipping away from whatever they were doing, archery or crafts, and rendezvousing behind the dining hall, they could hurry to the cave, peep inside, and be back in time for lunch.

Marla might have objected—first period, drama, was her favorite—and Jane hated to skip guitar lessons, but Danielle’s decision was made. Only Randy relished the hour, her daily swim in Willowbrook pond, icy and metallic-tasting. She wouldn’t have to wear the bathing suit that displayed her body in all its formlessness, lustreless hair plastered around a face she judged nondescript. In the forest, rather, she’d be feather-like, as graceful and shimmering as the fairies her father used to tell her about, night times while putting her to bed.

And like all of Danielle’s schemes, this one began auspiciously. Each managed to sneak off undetected and meet up at the rear of the dining hall, between the concrete loading dock and cast-iron boilers. From there they embarked. Four girls—lithe and blubbery, diminutive and professedly bland—in their yellow Willowbrook t-shirts and shorts, filed through a break in the woods.

The trail was not well-trodden. Brambles crisscrossed it, prickling their knees, and sumac that would later inflame their ankles. Mosquitos whined, the deadwood shifted, and for seconds all of them, even Danielle, pictured getting lost or worse, with no trace of them ever found. But forebodings faded the deeper they penetrated the bush. The sun, sluicing through the treetops, backlit the butterflies and bejewelled a single web. Breezes applauded in the leaves. Dripping with dew, the foliage waved them inward.

But an hour passed, or so they felt, and they could no longer hear the camp’s shouts and whistles, only their sneakers’ crackle. The trail all but disappeared. “Maybe there is no cave,” Marla hazarded, airing the other two’s thoughts. “Maybe we should turn back.”

But Danielle, supple arms folded, dug in. “It’s here, I know it. Just keep quiet,” she insisted. “Follow me.”

They followed until the trees converged around them and the day grew unnaturally still. Yet Danielle keep thrashing, snapping off branches as she plunged. The others stumbled after her, panicky, when suddenly they heard her bellow, “Eureka!”

The clearing they entered was perfectly round, as if deliberately carved from the wild. As though the forest, itself, had recoiled—out of reverence, perhaps, or fear. Once inside the circle, though, they felt a strange sensation, half-tingle, half-kiss, on their skin, and a dizzying intensity of air. Then they heard the music. A high-pitched hum, neither electronic or human. Angelic.

“There!” Danielle announced. “It’s coming from there.”

She was pointing at a knoll rising from clearing’s center, a heap of rock slightly taller than their heads and ivy-draped. This was it, the home of the cave and its many dirty secrets, the beer cans and cigarette butts. They’d found it! Giddily, they broke into a run, slaloming around half-buried boulders and tree stumps, only to stop abruptly. Shooting through the vines were rays of light so cylindrical they almost looked solid and brighter than any flash.

Marla exclaimed, “Whaaat?” and the rest of them gasped. But Danielle pressed on. She thrust her hands between the creepers and pulled them apart as a blast of light sent her reeling. They all did, hands thrust over their faces, with hollers of “Jesus!” and “holy shit!”

But, as in darkness, their eyes grew accustomed to the light. They stood, blinking but otherwise frozen, before a mossy opening smaller than a cave—a grotto, though they would not yet know the word—and inside, a being. That was the only way to describe it, an entity, a presence, for while vaguely flame-shaped with a cowl-like taper at the top, it had no body to speak of, only luminance. And no face except for darker patches, like sun spots, where the eyes could have been, and a translucent line for a mouth. Even those patches seemed to gleam at them. The line curved upward in a smile.

Randy shuttered and Jane audibly prayed. Marla started chuckling, anxiously, until Danielle told them all to calm down. “I think it wants us to do something.”

In unison, “Like what?” they replied.

“I don’t know. Make a wish.”

“In that case,” Marla chimed. “I want to be famous!” and Jane mumbled something about love.

“Rich!” Danielle announced and then turned and glared at Randy. They all did, but all she could do was shrug.

What could she possibly wish for? That her father would come back home, that her mother abandon her bottles, make up and be a family again? No, she couldn’t ask for that, not out loud in front of her friends.

“Come on, Randy. Wish!”

She shrugged again and ogled the being in the cave. It seemed to be glimmering right at her. That’s when she remembered the pony. The frisky Shetland she’d always wanted, that would follow her around and nuzzle her, rubbing its velvety nose on her neck. That she would ride, clutching its silvery mane, across beaches and fields of tulips. The pony she fantasized about as a younger child and now ached for. The dappled pony of hope.

“Don’t be like that, Ran-dy…”

But she was too old to wish for a pony, and too young to ask for peace. Randy said nothing and finally Danielle gave up.

“None of us speaks of word of this. Ever,” she commanded, and three heads dutifully shook. “It’s our secret. Only ours. For life.”

Already she was about-facing, about to head back to the forest. But her best friends dallied for a moment, glazed in unalloyed light.

“But what do we call it?” Marla wondered.

“Bob.” Came Danielle’s answer, definitive as always. “We’ll call him Bob.”

“Why him?”

This was Jane and everyone glared at her, unaccustomed to such assertiveness. “Why not…” she retreated, “Betsy?”

Marla bounced and clapped. “The Betsybob!” she proclaimed, and her laughter echoed through the woods.

* * *

When it comes to planning, Randy’s hopeless. With schedules and budgets, too. Never the professional type, she was happy with a string of low-demanding jobs—retail buyer, real estate broker, receptionist—that gave her the time and flexibility for T.J. But then he got sick and there were specialists to consult, hospitals to grapple with. Bills mounted, trash cans overflowed. Way beyond overwhelmed, the last thing Randy needed was to organize a trip to a wilderness up north and for and women who, though close childhood friends, had long grown up into strangers.

Secrets can do that to people. Bind them tighter or nudge them apart. A source or sapper of strength, secrets can be borne in any manner of ways, with pride, humility, or dishonor. Somehow they knew that back then, slipping into the dining hall and taking their places for lunch, barely exchanging a look, that their relationship was forever altered. That each of them, as people, had changed. By the light of the Betsybob, they’d ­­­seen themselves for what they really were and wanted. That knowledge, those desires, would soon bear them far from Willowbrook, across the country and to lives propitiously different. Accomplished women, they’d have little time to spare for Randy’s whims and even less for traipsing through forests.

And so she plans, meticulously. Reservations at the hotel their parents used to stay at the nights before visitors’ day, flights for Jane and Marla, and a conversation with Danielle’s driver, giving him pinpoint directions. Dinner that evening, perhaps some drinks, and the next day, at dawn, setting out. The entire excursion will take an hour or two, she figures, and then they’ll say their goodbyes. By evening, Marla will be back to her stand-up and Jane to her congregation, Danielle restored to her heights. And Randy will return to the hospital, to the sanitized room with its instruments bleeping like a rocketship’s and T.J., strapped in and tube-fed for blast off.

Only now she will not merely watch. Doctors could pump him with antibodies and nurses might lessen his pain, but Randy will provide him with what none of them ever possessed. A wish. No longer for a pony, dappled or otherwise, but for the miracle he needs to survive.

But first she must find that forest, the clearing, the cave. Stand once more in the energy and the music and beseech that being with the sunspot eyes and smile. She must let the light envelop her and assure her that, if only she’ll make it, this time her wish will be granted.

Yet time is what she lacks. The reunion must take place this week, the last in October. Any later and the snows will begin. Later, she knows, is too late. Feverishly, Randy completes the schedule, addressing every question but one. Will they again meet the Betsybob?

* * *

At least the hotel is unchanged. Decorated in faux-New England colonial, powderhorns and muskets on the walls, its anaemic light brings out their weariness as they enter. Randy can see that, greeting them, not only the fatigue of their trip but a depleted look, vitality drained from their faces. Danielle in a mauve cashmere coat, Marla in pink lamb’s wool, and Jane in an oversized ski jacket, all looking like refugees, but from what Randy won’t guess. She only imagines how she must seem to them, a husk. Yet none of them lets on. They hug one another, girlishly scream and fuss, as if arriving at another summer in camp.

But summer is over and Willowbrook’s closed down, and the reason for the reunion is too painful to mention. Instead, they learn about Marla’s gigs around the country, about the redneck crowds that squirm at words like boobs and vagina, and the college kids waiting to pounce on any heresy. About Jane’s work with interfaith groups and the homeless, assisted by Sarah, her wife. Over a dinner in which everything, even the appetizers, are fried, they hear stories of private equity, of IPO’s and M & A’s and the markets that Danielle manipulates. Randy listens as attentively as she can, nodding and smiling and doing her best not to think about tomorrow’s trek. Struggling against the sense that not every wish, even her friends’, gets granted.

But the intuition intensifies through two martinis and a snifter of local cognac. Inexorably, the truth seeps out.

“Boobs and vaginas are funny on twenty-year-olds, less so at forty.” Marla runs meaty hands through redder curls. “And campuses today are courtrooms.” Turns out, she hasn’t had a major contract in over a year, not even a nibble, and even her agent’s stopped calling. She’s had her fame, her late-night appearances and specials, but the world belongs to younger comedians, fatter and dirtier. For once she doesn’t say “whaat,” doesn’t laugh, but downs the remains of her cognac.

Danielle, too, opens up, confessing between anxious peeks at her phone that her entire world is imploding. She’s still statuesque, coldly beautiful and dominant, with eyes reflecting the sky, but success has made her a target. At this very moment a coup is underway—the terms “by-out” and “take-over” are spat—a plot to push her out of top-floor window. “Let ‘em try,” she rallies, raising both fists in defiance, but briefly. “The ceiling’s not glass, it’s the floor,” she laments. “Step on it with your heels and”—her ringless fingers unfurl—“bam!”

This leaves only Jane, vying with Randy for silence.

“And you?” Marla prods her. “What could go wrong, with all that God on your side?””

Danielle addresses her glass. “I could use a bit of your God…”

The dessert, churros and crullers, is set on the table but Jane merely stares at it. “I have my community. My choir. They swear I’m a good guitar-player, the liars.” The women, even Randy, titter, then issue collective “awe” as the rabbi adds, “And I’m in love.” But she says this joylessly as the others dig in, her pale, brittle face growing more vulnerable, her sloping shoulders stooped. “With Seth.”

The name is repeated, rapid-fire, with puffs of powdered sugar. “A member of your temple?”

“Worse,” sighs Jane. “It’s president.” Pinching the bridge of her nose, she shifts her head ruefully, back and forth. “They’ll fire me when they find out. My daughters will disown me. And Sarah, who converted for me, gave up her career, she’ll kill me. Already, she suspects…”

The conversation staggers after that, with Danielle reminiscing about her wildcat days on Wall Street and Marla badmouthing Hollywood. Jane goes on about this Seth—bald, skeletal, a CPA—who’s upended everything she thought about herself and believed, and all the while Randy’s thinking, “This is a terrible mistake.”

A stupid, unconscionable mistake, bringing together women who no longer have anything in common, scarcely a mythic past. Who are preoccupied enough with their own problems without chasing some chimerical solution for hers. Better to call it off now when she can, apologize profusely to each of them and thank them all for trying. Speed to the hospital that very night and sleep by T.J.’s bed, holding his frigid hand for as long as they’d let her, until they tear her away.

“Well, this has been enlightening,” Danielle states suddenly, “and nutritious, but I think we’d better get our rest.” She is once again the boss, their captain, leading the way through the woods. “It’ll be dawn in a few hours and we can’t keep the Betsybob waiting.”

Jane and Marla gawk at her, Randy, too. It’s first time any of them has spoken that name in decades, since that day they snuck back into the dining hall. The first time anyone admits, remembering it.

“To the Betsybob!” Marla raises a toast.

“To the Betsybob!” Jane and Danielle join in.

Only Randy hesitates. For the first time, she’s wondering if her friends have really come to help her but rather themselves, bearing new wishes of their own. And questioning whether she is still that little girl too timid to ask for a pony, but an adult now, a mother, asking for the life of her son. “The Betsybob,” she says finally, uncertainly, and clinks her empty glass.

* * *

The sign says “Willowbrook Condominiums—Buy Now and Save $$$,” and behind it there is only mud. Bulldozers and backhoes line the entrance, waiting for their drivers and the day’s construction. Dawn breaks over what had once been their camp but is now unrecognizable. The playing fields, the archery range, the cabins—all are erased, the pond scum-covered. The silence of the birdless sky is matched only by that inside the rented SUV where Danielle’s hands turn white on the wheel and Jane wraps an arm around Randy. “Aw, Sweetie,” Marla mewls, but Randy remains silent. All she says is “Drive on” to Danielle who, for once, seems open to instructions.

Through puddles and debris, the vehicle waddles but to where none of them can tell. Shorn of landmarks, they might be in the middle of the parade ground, where once they raised the flag. A consensus is gathering within the car that this is a huge waste of time, that it’s better to turn around now before the tires sink. Danielle is already circling when Randy calls out “look!”

She’s pointing to what is still the area’s only hill, to the half-demolished country house and its off-kilter porch. That is where Samantha Shapira used to watch them from, Auntie Sam with her cigarette and binoculars, sallow and godly.

“Go forward. Straight ahead.”

Danielle frowns in the rearview mirror but does as Randy insists. Past a slag heap and a pile of rebar toward tree trunks emerging from the mist. The forest. And in front of it, rusted and chipped, the remains of a boiler and loading dock. “It’s still here!” Randy cries. “We’re here!”

Stiffly, grunting, they pull themselves from the car and stand in the late-autumn chill. “What now?” Marla shivers, but Jane, even in her parka, is too cold to speak. Randy looks at Danielle who, after a regretful glance at her coat, relents and says “follow me.”

They do, along the treeline to the remnants of what once was a trail. Danielle turns inward, tripping and cursing, while Marla worries out loud about hunting season. Jane, struggling in the rear, distracts herself by telling Randy a story. The four sages who went into the woods.

“Nobody knows what they saw there—the Talmud doesn’t say—only that one of them looked on it and died. Another became crazy and the third lost his faith.

“And the fourth?”

“Became the greatest scholar of all time. A genius”

“Sounds like they found what they were looking for,” Randy says while impatiently peering through the trees, as the forest thickens around them. Multi-colored leaves still cling to the branches, painting the sun as it climbs. The ground, pressed by loafers and hiking shoes, emits a musky fragrance, and a woodpecker sounds a tattoo. For a moment they’re campers again, pre-teen and carefree, far from fathoming the immeasurable depths to which any life can cast them. Even Randy, an early initiate to pain, later its priestess, feels lightheaded.

But the giddiness soon passes as the thread of a trail dwindles to a fiber and brambles, once knee-high, tear across their chests. “I think we’re lost,” Marla ventures and Danielle doesn’t disagree. Jane’s arm is on Randy’s shoulder again, hugging as she puffs, “we tried…”

They did—Randy can’t deny it, took off time that they could least afford, traveled, and shlepped, and all to indulge her delusions. Because of her, they can’t find their way out. Disappointment and guilt bandy in her brain as she flails behind the others. And anger. For she knows now that she would have made that wish. If only they’d reached the clearing, she would have demanded it. Plunged into the cave and grabbed the Betsybob or whatever it was, throttled it if necessary. Anything for T.J.

Anything and yet she’s abandoned him. How could she have left him like this, Randy agonizes, alone, and for what purpose? Just to prove to herself that for once she wouldn’t be passive?

“Help!”

Suddenly, Jane is rushing past her around Marla’s bulk that largely obscures Danielle no longer looming before them but down and clutching one knee.

“It’s twisted,” she growls. “That fucking stump…”

She points at the guilty obstacle but there is more than one. There are many, in fact, interspersed with partially-submerged boulders. The trees have retreated in perfectly-formed arcs and in the center of the clearing, a knoll. A cairn, ancient perhaps or older, composed of craggily, moss-encrusted rocks and densely cloaked in ivy.

Randy runs. Danielle, too, oblivious to her knee as Marla is to her weight and Jane to her frailty. They sprint, scarcely aware of the absence of energy in the air, of music. No bolts of radiance beaming. They reach the knoll and pause for a moment, winded and gaping at one another, deciding non-verbally who. Randy steps forward, clutches the vines and yanks them apart. And then falls back in horror.

In grief. The cave is there, the grotto—they now know the word—littered with broken whiskey bottles and moldy cigarette butts, the remains of what might have been a magazine. Otherwise, it’s empty. The Betsybob, if it ever existed, is gone.

Danielle explains, “We probably made it up,” and Jane consoles, “Hell, we were only kids.”

Marla sighs a decrescendoing “Whaat,” followed by an acerbic laugh.

Randy says nothing, but her body begins to shake. Shoulders, hips, uncontrollably heaving as someone, maybe her, sobs. She can’t feel the embrace of the women who were once her friends and are now something different, her mourners. And she’s unaware of those around her peeling away before the crunch of approaching feet.

Not feet, it’s soon revealed, but hoofs. Trotting out of the bush and into the clearing to brush a dappled flank on her arm. To tickle her neck with a silky mane and nestle a soft, moist nose on her cheek. Randy strokes it as the others look on enchanted. She caresses it and weeps, this messenger of a wish. Her magical pinto of hope.