Anonymous Tip: In Which Gwen Contemplates Running

A Review Series of Anonymous Tip, by Michael Farris

Pp. 87-88

If you remember from last week, we have finally reached the end of Tuesday, the day of the hearing. Yes, really—we’re still on Tuesday. We’ve been on Tuesday since March 27th. That’s right, we’ve spent three months on Tuesday.

Now that Peter has left the office and headed home, with a quick phone call to his mentor on the way, we turn to Gwen’s evening.

Gwen’s night had not been pleasant. The empty house worked strangely on her mind. The previous evening she was able to talk with Casey for about three minutes just before the MacArthurs put her to bed. It helped Casey a lot. For Gwen it accentuated her own helplessness.

And that’s it folks. That’s all we get. That is literally all we learn about how Casey is doing with her foster family. Farris tells us that the phone call “helped Casey a lot.” How? Was she not doing okay? Did she feel reassured to hear her mother’s voice? Did Gwen encourage her to try to enjoy her time with the MacArthurs? What did Gwen say? What did Casey say? This entire book pivots on child protective services’ removal of Casey, and yet Casey herself is basically invisible.

But frankly, there’s something else I’m becoming increasingly annoyed with, and that’s Farris’s writing. I’ve tried to go easy on this because writing is hard and I get that being a novelist isn’t Farris’s day job. But at some points things become just plain confusing.

After telling us that “Gwen’s night had not been pleasant” and that “the previous evening she was able to talk with Casey,” Farris tells us that “her responsibility to finish the written narrative of the events of May 11 and May 12 for Peter was good for her spirits” and that “after she finished her assignment, she stepped out on the back porch and fixed her eyes on the swing set.” Then he tells us that she thought of Casey and her mind started to wander (more on that in a moment) and then that “Gwen started and sat straight up in bed when the alarm sounded at 7:00 a.m.”

And so I am confused. Farris first makes it sound like it’s the next morning by speaking of “Gwen’s night” and “the previous evening,” then he makes it clear that the night has not yet happened and Gwen is up late working on writing out the narrative, because directly after the discussion of her writing the narrative and looking at the porch we are introduced to Gwen waking up to her alarm. I’m beginning to suspect that this book did not have a professional proof writer, because I feel like such an individual would have caught things like this.

Anyway, let’s turn back to Gwen’s mind wandering while looking at the swing set.

As she let her mind wander, a plan to kidnap her own daughter began to take shape in her clouded mind. Perhaps we could go to California and live with Pam and Josh, Gwen thought. She quickly rejected that idea, realizing it would put her sister and brother-in-law in jeopardy. She also correctly perceived that it would be one of the first places the authorities would look for her if she became a runaway “child abuser.” A better plan would have to be made.

Okay, first of all, Gwen has a sister?! I’m fairly certain this is the first mention of a sister. And so I’m left wondering, why has Gwen not called said sister? As someone with a sister, I can say for certain that she would be one of the first people I would call for solace should something terrible happen to me. Now maybe Gwen has a bad relationship with her sister, but she doesn’t make it sound like that here. And while I get that novelists sometimes introduce things like this bit by bit, this just seems a bit abrupt.

Note: A reader reminded me that Casey really should have been given to her father, Gordon, who appears to have joint custody. Gordon, of course, was not even brought up by anyone in Tuesday’s hearing—not by Gwen, not by her father, not by the judge, not by Gwen’s lawyer, not by the prosecutor, and not by the social worker. And perhaps in part because of that, I keep forgetting about Gordon myself. 

Besides, wouldn’t a sibling also be someone CPS would look at placing a child with when removing her from her parents’ custody? I mean I get that this sister is out of state and the grandparents are clearly a better option, but still, wouldn’t they at least ask? What other random family members does Gwen have around who are going to randomly pop in over the course of this book?

But anyway, there you have it—Gwen, our heroine, takes time to consider kidnapping her child and running. I suppose on some level this might be natural, but Farris doesn’t present it as a bad option except to state that it is not tenable—that she’d be caught. The idea that kidnapping itself might be bad is absent, as is any consideration that child protective services might have a role to play (albeit in this case, of course, their entire case is built on fraud). In other words, kidnapping is treated as wrong only because Gwen would get caught.

Note that we haven’t been told that Casey is being mistreated in foster care. The only issue here is that Gwen can’t stand to be parted from Casey. And you know what? I’m a mom, I get that. But if I were parted from my children I would worry about them primarily because I would be worried about whether they were okay. And we haven’t seen that!

Gwen hasn’t worried about how Casey is doing, or about whether Casey is upset, or whether Casey is being taken care of. Nope. Nada. Instead, as she looks at the swing set before contemplating running, we’re told only that “Casey’s face and giggle were all too real—memories from the morning when Donna Corliss first invaded her life.” It’s not about Gwen worrying whether Casey’s okay, it’s about Gwen feeling sorry for herself that Casey’s not there. And this is Farris’s heroine and model mother.