Bisbee

Bisbee is a small town in Arizona that the Barber family imagines as a place to begin again beyond the publicity and social suspicion left by Jacob’s case. It never becomes their home; instead, its recurrence turns it into a measure of how far they hope to get from their past, and of the future Jacob is ultimately denied.

A Possible Place to Start Over

After Jacob’s release, the family considers moving to places where they might reinvent themselves. Among the possibilities, Bisbee stands out to Andrew because he has heard that it is easy there to disappear and remain lost. The idea belongs to a broader fantasy of escape that also includes Florida, California, Wyoming, and even leaving the country. Andrew is eager to go elsewhere, while Laurie doubts that relocation could outrun the publicity and says that her life is in Boston. Their discussions go nowhere, and Bisbee remains an imagined refuge rather than a plan put into effect.

Jacob’s Preference for Distance

Jacob, by contrast, is the family’s most enthusiastic supporter of moving. The farther away and more remote the destination, the better it suits him; Bisbee seems acceptable to him for precisely that reason. At home in Newton, the family keeps him out of school and continues his homeschooling, while he settles into a solitary routine and says that he does not miss school or his friends. Bisbee therefore represents not only distance from public attention but a life in which Jacob might avoid the social complications he says he prefers to be without.

The Future Imagined After Loss

Later, Andrew imagines the future Jacob might have had. He pictures him wandering before settling somewhere far away, where few people knew the Barber name or cared about the family story; Bisbee is again one possibility, alongside California and somewhere in the West. In that imagined future, Jacob would have become a father and wondered about his own child as Andrew had once wondered about him. The repeated place-name gives the family’s unrealized wish for escape a specific geography, while Andrew’s imagined future makes clear that this life is now only a possibility he can narrate, not one Jacob can live.