Opening
A dying man looks back, and a restless girl looks inward. Across five chapters, the disappearance of four-year-old Ruthie in 1962 fractures a Mi’kmaq family, while a nearby child named Norma grows up haunted by dreams and lies that point toward a stolen past. The chapters braid grief, secrecy, and identity into a story that moves between memory and discovery.
What Happens
Chapter 1: Joe
Joe, in his late fifties and dying of an unnamed illness, remembers the summer his family—Mi’kmaq berry pickers from Nova Scotia—sets up camp in Maine. His parents, Lewis and Joe's Mother, arrive with their children: Ben, Mae, Charlie, Joe, and four-year-old Ruthie. The camp is communal and vibrant, a stark contrast to the rundown local town; Ben and Mae have just been spared the “Indian school,” a small relief that feels like a reprieve.
On the day Ruthie vanishes, the family works the fields and eats bologna sandwiches for lunch. Six-year-old Joe sits with her on a big rock, tosses bread to the crows, and signals Ruthie not to tell their mother. When their mother goes to fetch Ruthie, the rock is empty. Panic spreads through the camp. Lewis goes for the police, but a single officer arrives and shrugs the case off, calling the family “transients” and not “proper Maine citizens,” an emblem of Indigenous Experience and Injustice. As the patrol car pulls away, Lewis hurls a rock at it.
Days pass. Mr. Ellis, the landowner, pressures the workers to pick, not search. Joe’s mother collapses under the strain and is sent back to Nova Scotia with Mae. The others search for six weeks without a trace. As the family leaves Maine at season’s end, Joe feels they are abandoning Ruthie to the fields forever, seeding the novel’s abiding currents of Family, Loss, and Grief and Memory and Trauma.
Chapter 2: Norma
Norma grows up nearby with an overprotective mother and recurring dreams: a “light” dream in a car with a woman who looks like her mother but isn’t, and a “dark” dream of a campfire and a woman beckoning from the shadows. The dreams leave her unmoored in her own home. Her mother, Lenore, smothers Norma’s world with fear and control; her father, a judge, is kind but evasive. Aunt June explains that Lenore lost multiple pregnancies before Norma, setting the stage for a family life built on Secrets and Lies.
Norma notices her darker skin and asks why she doesn’t resemble her parents. Her father produces an “Italian great-grandfather” explanation and says the photos burned in a fire. When Norma wanders into the front yard, Lenore goes frantic, terrified someone will “snatch” her. Aunt June eventually persuades Lenore to let Norma see a therapist, Alice, who treats Norma with respect, gives her a journal, and helps her separate her mother’s anxiety from her own sense of self. Norma marks the shift by burying the baby doll her mother insists she play with—an early claim to Identity and Belonging.
Chapter 3: Joe
In the present, Joe—now 56 and terminally ill—rides with Mae to a medical appointment and slips back to the fall and winter after Ruthie’s disappearance. Silence and sorrow settle over the family. His mother keeps Ruthie’s boots and doll on a closet shelf, certain she will return. Then Mr. Hughes, the Indian agent, arrives with an order to seize the remaining children for “negligence.” Lewis confronts him with a shotgun and forces him off the property. A later letter confirms the family is safe from removal because they own their land and live off-reserve.
To replace the lost berry income, Lewis guides wealthy American hunters. At fifteen, Joe accompanies him and watches his father perform a caricatured “Indian guide” persona—broken English, performed deference—to win better tips. Joe understands, painfully, the compromises his father makes to keep the family afloat. He finishes school and the family prepares to return to Maine the next summer, not knowing it will be their last.
Chapter 4: Norma
As a teenager, Norma pushes for freedom and persuades Lenore to let her attend church camp. In the basement, she finds a hidden drawer of family photos that supposedly burned in the house fire. A picture from when she would have been two shows her parents and Aunt June—but not Norma. When she confronts Lenore, her mother feigns a headache, and the photo disappears.
Suddenly, Norma’s parents loosen the leash: a new bicycle, more independence. Back in the basement, the drawer is empty. Years later, after Lenore moves to a care facility, Norma spots Aunt June sneaking out a hat box—likely the missing photos. Fixated on the inconsistencies, Norma turns to genetics. Her unattached earlobes (dominant trait) don’t align with her parents’ attached earlobes (recessive), making biological inheritance unlikely. She calls Aunt June and Alice with the evidence, but both deflect, further thickening the family’s web of evasion.
Chapter 5: Joe
Fifteen-year-old Joe returns to Maine for the last time. The family still scans the fields for Ruthie, and his mother’s conviction that she’s alive hardens into ritual hope. One Saturday, Joe and his older siblings visit a traveling carnival. There, he and Charlie find Frankie—the camp’s harmless drunk—being attacked by the violent Johnson brothers. Charlie steps in. Joe runs to find Ben and Mae.
By the time they return, Charlie lies unconscious, brutally beaten. The family breaks camp that night. On the drive home, Charlie dies just after they cross into New Brunswick. Their mother curses God, grief erupting into rage. Joe absorbs the blow as a personal failing—if he had stayed and fought instead of running, maybe Charlie would have lived—cementing a lifetime of Guilt and Atonement. The family never returns to the berry fields.
Character Development
The first five chapters chart two lives moving toward each other from opposite directions: Joe’s backward through loss, Norma’s forward through doubt.
- Joe: As a child, he is tender and eager to please; as a teen, he witnesses his father’s compromises; as an adult, he is defined by grief and guilt, measuring his life against two irrevocable moments.
- Ruthie/Norma: Ruthie disappears; Norma grows with a split self—dream-memory versus family myth—until logic, evidence, and intuition push her toward the truth of her origins.
- Joe’s Mother: A sturdy matriarch who becomes a quiet guardian of absence, keeping Ruthie’s boots and faith within arm’s reach.
- Lewis: A fierce protector who defies the Indian agent with a shotgun yet performs subservience for hunters to feed his family—a survival calculus his children witness.
- Lenore: A mother hollowed by prior loss, whose fear curdles into control. Her lies intend protection but breed suffocation.
- Aunt June: Norma’s ally and moral counterpoint; she advocates for Norma’s autonomy while remaining complicit in the family secret.
Themes & Symbols
Fragile truths and enduring scars drive the narrative. The disappearance that opens Joe’s life is both a family catastrophe and a social indictment. Institutional neglect, economic exploitation, and racial bias frame the search for Ruthie and shadow Lewis’s choices. These chapters map how communal harm becomes intimate pain: the indifferent policeman, the Indian agent’s threat, the landowner’s callousness—and a father calculating how to look and act to be paid.
Norma’s chapters mirror Joe’s from the other side. What Joe remembers, Norma senses. Her dreams and bodily difference jostle the story she’s told, propelling a methodical inquiry that moves from feeling to fact: basement photos, genetics, earlobes. Across both threads, grief and identity entwine. Secrets attempt to protect but instead fracture belonging, turning home into a puzzle to solve.
Symbols
- The Rock: The last place Joe sees Ruthie—a fixed point where memory hardens into loss.
- Ruthie’s Boots: Preserved on a closet shelf, they embody a mother’s unbroken hope and refusal to close the door on her child.
- The Fire: In Joe’s world, community and warmth; in Norma’s, a convenient blaze that “destroys” baby photos—a story used to erase a past.
Key Quotes
“transients” … “proper Maine citizens”
- The policeman’s language reduces the family to outsiders undeserving of protection. The words crystallize structural bias and explain the perfunctory search for a missing Indigenous child.
“light” dream … “dark” dream
- Norma’s twin dreams encode her divided life: a surface story that almost fits and a shadow-world that calls her back. They signal suppressed memory pressing against the border of consciousness.
“snatch”
- Lenore’s terror of abduction reveals a secret she won’t name. The word exposes the anxiety that fuels her control and hints at a theft at the heart of Norma’s life.
“negligence”
- The Indian agent’s bureaucratic term recasts parental grief as criminal failure. It shows how state power weaponizes paperwork to fracture Indigenous families.
“Indian school”
- The family’s relief at avoiding the school nods to a wider history of forced assimilation, linking intimate memory to systemic policy.
“Italian great-grandfather”
- The invented ancestry and conveniently lost photos are hallmarks of a cover story—an origin myth meant to soothe questions rather than answer them.
Why This Matters and Section Significance
These chapters establish the novel’s emotional architecture and its dramatic irony: readers recognize Norma as Ruthie long before the characters do. Joe’s recollections anchor the story in lived trauma, while Norma’s investigation shows how buried truths resurface—first as dreams, then as evidence.
By aligning private grief with public injustice, the section sets up the novel’s central concerns: how a single disappearance reverberates through generations; how secrets intended to protect compound harm; and how identity coheres when memory is contested. Charlie’s death closes the door on the berry fields and deepens Joe’s burden, ensuring that the search for Ruthie is not only a plot but a lifelong measure of love, survival, and the cost of silence.