The Good Girl

  Mia shakes my head no. “Jason,” she says. But she’s shaking her head. “It’s been months since I’ve been with Jason.” She counts them on her fingers. September. October. November. December. January. “Five months,” she concludes. The math simply does not add up.

  But of course I know Jason is not the father of that child.

  “You have time to decide what you’d like to do. There are options.” The doctor is producing pamphlets for Mia: adoption and abortion, and the words are coming at her so fast that she can’t possibly keep up.

  The doctor sends for James, allowing Mia a few minutes to get dressed before the nurse brings him in. While we’re waiting, I ask Mia if I can see the ultrasound. She hands it to me, her lifeless words repeating...it just can’t be. It’s then, taking that photograph in my hands and laying eyes on my grandchild, my own flesh and blood, that I begin to cry. As James enters the room, the crying turns into a moan. I try to suppress the tears but simply can’t. I yank paper towels from a dispenser on the wall and blot my eyes. It’s just as Dr. Wakhrukov returns that I can no longer hold it inside and I wail, “He raped you. That bastard raped you.”

  But still, Mia feels nothing.

  Colin

  Before

  Winter has arrived. It was snowing when we woke and the temperature in the cabin had dropped by what felt like twenty degrees.

  There’s no warm water. She layers on all the clothes she can find. She puts on two pairs of long johns and that gangly maroon sweatshirt. She slips on a pair of socks, complaining that she hates to wear socks, but without them her feet would freeze. She says that she’s always hated socks, even when she was a baby. She would rip them from her feet and throw them to the floor beside her crib.

  I haven’t admitted to being cold before, but it’s fucking freezing. I started a fire the moment I woke up. I’ve already had three cups of coffee. I’m sitting with an old, torn U.S. map spread across the table. I found it in the glove compartment, along with an all but dried-up pen and I’m circling the best routes to get us the hell out of here. I’ve got my mind set on the desert, somewhere between Las Vegas and Baker, California. Somewhere warm. I’m wondering how to make a detour to Gary, Indiana, first, without highway patrol spotting the truck. I figure we’d have to ditch the truck and swipe a new one, somehow, and hope it doesn’t ever get reported. That or hop a freight train. Assuming people are looking for us there could be roadblocks in our honor, especially around Gary, just in case I have the nerve to go home. Maybe the police are using her as bait. Maybe they’ve got a surveillance team lined up around the old Gary home, waiting for me to call or make a stupid move.

  Damn.

  “Going somewhere?” the girl asks, looking at the map as I fold it up and push it away.

  I don’t answer her question. “Want some coffee?” I ask instead, knowing we couldn’t stay in the desert for long. Squatting in the desert nixes any chance of a quasinormal life. It would all be about survival. We can’t go to the desert, I decide, then and there. The only chance we stand is somewhere abroad. We don’t have enough cash for a flight anymore, so the way I see it, there’s two choices: up or down. North or south. Canada or Mexico.

  But of course to get out of the country, we need passports.

  And that’s when it hits me: what I have to do.

  She shakes her head no.

  “You don’t drink coffee?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “I don’t drink caffeine.”

  She tells me that she did drink caffeine, for a long time, but it made her agitated and jittery. She couldn’t sit still. Eventually the caffeine high would fade, only to be replaced by extreme fatigue. So she’d have another cup of coffee. A vicious circle. “And when I tried to avoid caffeine,” she says, “I’d succumb to debilitating headaches, only to be soothed with Mountain Dew.”

  But I pour her a cup anyway. She takes the warm mug into her hands and presses her face to the rim. The steam rises up to meet her. She knows she shouldn’t but she does it anyway. She raises the mug to her lips and allows it to sit there. Then she takes a sip, burning every bit of her esophagus on the way down.

  She chokes. “Be careful,” I say too late. “It’s hot.”

  There isn’t a damn thing to do but sit and stare at each other. So when she said she wanted to draw me I said okay. There isn’t anything else to do.

  To be straight, I don’t want to do it. At first it’s not a big deal, but then she wants me to hold still and look straight and smile.

  “Forget it,” I say. “I’m done.” I stand up. I’ll be damned if I’m going to sit here and smile at her for the next half hour.

  “Okay,” she concedes, “don’t smile. Don’t even look at me. Just sit still.”

  She places me beside the fire. She presses her frigid hands to my chest. She lowers me into place, on the floor. My back all but touches the stove. The flame nearly burns a hole in my shirt and I begin to sweat.

  I think of the last time she touched me. The desperation of her hands as she tried to undress me. And the last time I touched her, smacking her across the face.

  The room is gloomy, the dark pine logs of the walls and ceiling blocking any light. I count the log walls, stacked fifteen high. There is no sun to pass through the small windows.

  I look at her. She isn’t all that bad to look at.

  She was beautiful that first night, in my apartment. She watched me with these unsuspecting blue eyes, never thinking for a minute that I had it in me to do this.

  She sits on the floor and leans against the couch. She pulls her legs into her and rests the notebook on her knees. She takes a pencil from the pack, extracts the lead. She tilts her head and her hair falls clumsily to one side. Her eyes trace the shape of my face, the curve of my nose.

  I don’t know why, but I feel the urge to knock the guy who was with her before me.

  “I paid him off,” I confess. “Your boyfriend. I gave him a hundred bucks to make himself busy for the night.”

  He didn’t ask why and I didn’t say. The coward just grabbed the money from my hand and disappeared into thin air. I don’t tell her I confronted him in the john with my gun.

  A hundred bucks can buy a lot these days.

  “He had to work,” she says.

  “That’s what he told you.”

  “Jason works late all the time.”

  “Or so he says.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Sometimes. Maybe.”

  “He’s very successful.”

  “At lying.”

  “So you paid him off. So what?” she snaps.

  “Why’d you come home with me?” I ask.

  “What?”

  “Why did you come home with me that night?” She forces a swallow and doesn’t respond. She pretends to be lost in her work, the fury of her lines as she sketches manically across the page. “I didn’t realize it was a hard question,” I say.

  Her eyes well up. A vein in her forehead protrudes through the skin. Her skin becomes clammy and her hands shake. She’s mad.

  “I was drunk.”

  “Drunk.”

  “Yes. I was drunk.”

  “Because that’s the only reason someone like you would come home with someone like me, right?”

  “Because that’s the only reason I would go home with you.”

  She’s watching me and I wonder what it is she sees. What she believes she sees. She thinks I’m numb to her indifference, but she’s wrong.

  I take off my sweatshirt and drop it to the floor beside my clamorous boots. I’ve got on an undershirt and jeans that she’s probably never seen me without. She scribbles my face on the page, delirious lines and shadows to describe the demon she sees before the
fire.

  She had a few drinks that night, but she was lucid enough to know what she was doing, to welcome my hands on her. Of course, that was long before she knew who I really was.

  I don’t know how long we’re silent. I hear her breathe, the sound of lead striking the paper’s surface. I can almost hear her thoughts in my mind. The hostility and anger.

  “It’s like cigarettes or smoking pot,” I finally say to her.

  The words startle her and she tries to catch her breath. “What is?”

  She doesn’t stop drawing. She pretends, almost, like she’s not listening. But she is.

  “My life. What I do. You know they’re bad for you the first time you try. Cigarettes. Pot. But you convince yourself it’s okay—you can handle it. One time, that’s it, just to see what it’s like. And then all of a sudden, you’re sucked in—you can’t get out if you want to. It wasn’t because I needed the money so bad—which I did. It was because if I tried to get out I’d be killed. Someone would rat me out and I’d end up in jail. There was never the option of saying no.”

  She stops drawing. I wonder what she’s going to say. Some smart-ass comment, I’m sure. But she doesn’t. She doesn’t say anything. But the vein in her forehead fades away, her hands stand still. Her eyes soften. And she looks at me and nods.

  Eve

  After

  I watch from the hall as James thrusts himself into Mia’s bedroom with great gusto. The sound of his footsteps outside the door, loud and clamorous, approaching quickly, startles her from sleep. She jumps upright in the bed, her eyes wide with fear, her heart likely thrashing about inside her chest as happens when one is scared. It takes a second for her to become aware of her surroundings: remnants of her high school wardrobe that still hang in the closet, the jute rug, a poster of Leonardo DiCaprio she hung when she was fourteen. And then it settles. She remembers where she is. She’s home. She’s safe. She drops her head into her hands and begins to cry.

  “You need to get dressed,” James says. “We’re going to see the shrink.”

  I enter the bedroom once he leaves and help Mia pick a matching outfit from the closet. I try to appease her fears, to remind her that here, in our home, she is perfectly safe. “No one can hurt you,” I promise, but even I am not sure.

  Mia eats in the car, just a piece of dry toast I brought along for the trip. She doesn’t want a thing to do with it, but from the passenger’s seat, I turn around every few minutes and say to her, “Take another bite, Mia,” as if she is four years old again. “Just one more bite.”

  I thank Dr. Rhodes for squeezing us in so early in the morning. James pulls the doctor aside for a private word, as I help Mia out of her coat, and then I watch as Mia and Dr. Rhodes disappear behind closed doors.

  Dr. Rhodes will be speaking to Mia this morning about the baby. Mia is in denial about the fetus growing in her womb, and I suppose I am as well. She is hardly able to say the word. Baby. It gets lost in her throat and every time James or I breach the subject, she swears that it can’t possibly be real.

  But we thought it would be helpful for Mia to talk with Dr. Rhodes, as both a professional and as an impartial third person. Dr. Rhodes will be discussing Mia’s options with her this morning, and already I can imagine Mia’s response. “My options about what?” she will ask and Dr. Rhodes will again have to remind her of the baby.

  “Let me make this clear, Eve,” James says to me once Mia and the doctor have left the room. “The last thing we need is for Mia to be carrying the illegitimate child of that man. She will have an abortion and she will do it soon.” He waits, thinking his way through the logistics. “We’ll say the baby didn’t make it, when people ask. The stress of this situation,” he says. “It didn’t survive.”

  I don’t comment. I simply cannot. I watch James, with a motion in limine spread across his lap. His eyes scan through the motion with more regard than he gives our daughter and her unborn child.

  I try to convince myself that his heart is in the right place. But I wonder if it is.

  It wasn’t always this way. James was not always this disinterested regarding his family life. In the quiet afternoons, when James is at work and Mia napping, I find myself unearthing fond memories of James and the girls: old photographs of him holding baby Grace or baby Mia in their swaddling blankets. I watch home videos of James with the girls when they were babies. I listen to him—to a different James—sing them lullabies. I reminisce on first days of school and birthday parties, special days that James chose not to miss. I excavate photographs of James teaching Mia and Grace to ride their bikes without training wheels, of them swimming together in a lovely hotel pool or seeing the fish at the aquarium for the first time.

  James comes from a very wealthy family. His father is a lawyer, as was his grandfather and perhaps his great-grandfather; I honestly don’t know. His brother Marty is a state representative, and Brian is one of the best anesthesiologists in the city. Marty’s daughters, Jennifer and Elizabeth, are lawyers, corporate and intellectual property, respectively. Brian was bestowed sons, three of them, a corporate lawyer, a dentist and a neurologist.

  There is an image for James to maintain. Though he wouldn’t dare say the words aloud, he’s always been in competition with his brothers: who is the most affluent, the most powerful, the preeminent Dennett in the land.

  For James, second best was never an option.

  In the afternoons I slip into the basement and sift through old shoeboxes of photographs to prove to myself that it was real, those twinkling moments of fatherly love. I didn’t imagine it. I find a picture that five-year-old Mia drew with an inelegant hand, her childish block letters adorning the illustration: I LOVE YOU DADDY. There’s a taller figure and a shorter figure and it appears that their fingerless hands are clasped. Their faces are embellished with enormous smiles and all around the periphery of the paper she’s placed stickers, nearly three dozen red and pink heart-shaped stickers. I showed it to him one evening after he’d come home from work. He stared at it for I don’t know how long, a minute or more, and then took it into his office and placed it, with a magnet, on the black filing cabinet.

  “It’s for Mia’s own good,” he says, breaking the earsplitting silence. “She needs the time to heal.”

  But I wonder if that’s truly the case.

  I want to tell him there are other ways. Adoption, for example. Mia could give the child to a family who is unable to have their own child. She could make some unfortunate family very happy. But James would never see it that way. There would always be what-ifs: what if the adoption fell through, what if the adoptive parents chose not to take the child, what if the baby was born with a birth defect, or what if, when the baby turned into a young adult, it searched for Mia, ruining her life all over again.

  Abortion, on the other hand, is quick and easy. That’s what James has said. Never mind the guilt that will haunt Mia for the rest of her life.

  When Dr. Rhodes finishes her session with Mia, she walks her into the waiting room and before we leave, she lays a hand on Mia’s arm and says, “It’s not like you have to decide today. You have plenty of time.”

  But I see in James’s eyes that he has already decided.

  Colin

  Before

  I can’t sleep, and this isn’t the first time. I tried counting sheep, pigs, whatever, and now I’m pacing the room. Every night is hard. Every night I’m thinking about her. But tonight it’s worse because the date on my watch reminds me that it’s her birthday. And I’m thinking about her all alone back home.

  It’s pitch-black, when all of a sudden my feet aren’t the only ones in the room.

  “You scared the shit out of me,” I say. I barely make out her profile, my eyes not accustomed to the dark.

  “Sorry,” she lies. “What are you doing?” she asks. My mom always nagged me abou
t how heavy I walked. She said I could wake the dead.

  We don’t turn on a light. In the dark we run into each other. Neither of us offers an apology. We shy away and retreat in our own direction.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” I say. “Trying to clear my head.”

  “About what?” she asks and at first I’m silent. At first I’m not going to tell her. She doesn’t need to know.

  But then I do. It’s dark enough in the room that I pretend she’s not there. But that’s not it. That’s not why. It’s something about the way she says, Never mind, and her footsteps start to leave the room that makes me want to tell her. Makes me want her to stay.

  I say that my father left when I was a kid, but it didn’t matter anyway. It’s not like he was ever there to begin with. He drank. Went to bars and gambled. Money was already tight without him wasting it away. I say that he was a womanizer and a cheat. I tell her that I learned about life the hard way: how there wasn’t always food on the table or warm water for a bath. Not that there was anyone to give me a bath anyway. I was three, maybe four years old.

  I tell her how my father had a temper. I say that he scared the shit out of me when I was a kid. With me it was a lot of screaming and not a lot more. But he hit my mother. More than once.

  He worked, sometimes, but he was usually between jobs. He was always getting fired for not showing up. For showing up drunk. For telling off the boss.

  My mother, she worked all the time. She was never home because she’d work twelve hours in the grocery store bakery, up at 5:00 a.m., then moonlight as a bartender where men hit on her and touched her and called her names like sweetie and doll. My dad called her a slut. That’s what he said: You good-for-nothing slut.

  I say that my mom got my clothes from resale shops, that we’d drive around town on garbage day loading Ma’s station wagon with whatever we could find. We got evicted more than once. We’d sleep in the car. We used to run to the gas station before school so I could sneak into the bathroom and brush my teeth. Eventually the attendants got the idea. They said they’d call the cops.