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A Journey of Heart and Spirit
Place Last Seen
by Charlotte McGuinn Freeman
Picador USA, 2000. 294 pages.
Reviewed by Vicki Wilt
The birth of their second child, Maggie, was a crisis for Anne and Richard Baker. Maggie was a Down syndrome child with all the special needs that label suggests. Unwilling to accept the limitations predicted for Maggie by many "experts," however, the Bakers have fought fiercely to give their younger child a "normal" life – with the same challenges and adventures they also want for their older child, Luke. And they have succeeded beautifully.
Now Maggie is six, and she is special in many ways – lovable, mischievous, charming, and often willfully demanding. Managing her life is a daily challenge for her parents and her brother, but it is challenge that has brought out the best in all of them. Over the years, Maggie has become "the heart and soul" of the Baker family. They have all come to see that Maggie, like all of us, is – with all her imperfections – "perfectly herself." She wouldn’t have become her own unique, wonderful self if she had been born "normal." And when, during one careless moment on a family outing, Maggie disappears into the woods, her family is torn apart.
How does a family cope when their worst nightmare comes true? That is the question that drives Charlotte McGuinn Freeman’s hauntingly realistic and beautifully written first novel.
Each member of the Baker family is a recognizable individual, and each responds to the tragedy by retreating into their own personal hell. Anne, with a mystical sense of the indestructible bond between herself and Maggie – the love of her life – is convinced that she alone can find her daughter. She resents and feels shamed by the intrusion of the strangers on the search and rescue team that Richard calls in to find Maggie.
Richard finds Anne’s response incomprehensible – and infuriating. How can his wife persist, against all logic, in alienating the only people who can help them? And why does she cling to her firm belief that she and Maggie have a relationship that no one else – not even Richard and their son Luke – can really penetrate or even understand?
Big brother Luke blames himself for Maggie’s disappearance. He knows her best, he feels, and he should have known that she was in a dangerously mischievous mood when they began their game of hide-and-seek in the woods. At the same time, he feels abandoned by his parents, whose concern for Maggie leaves him – as so often has been the case – emotionally isolated in the Baker family.
Luckily for all of them, Richard’s mother, Martha, arrives on the scene to hold the family together--by shopping for groceries, serving meals, and doing laundry. Martha is a woman of faith and a woman of doubt, but she believes, above all else, in life:
She knows there’s nothing to do with grief, except live
through it, try your best to get up and go through the
motions of being alive, because eventually, somehow,
you actually do come back to life.
As the hours and days slip by with few traces of Maggie, as a glorious fall gradually subsides into winter, a family waits and hopes. A deeply committed team of rescue workers struggles desperately to predict the movements of a little girl whose mind they cannot analyze. And readers share a truly special journey of the heart and spirit – one full of suspense, hope, grief, and, finally, consolation.
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