I didn’t think the truck would start. I let out a few fuck-yous while she said a few Hail Marys, but in the end, something worked. It took a while for warm air to come out of the vent, and when it did, we blasted the heat and just sat. I don’t think she ever stopped shivering.
“How long have you had this truck?” she asks. She says my truck must be older than some of her students. The front speakers don’t work. The vinyl seat is torn.
“Too long,” I say. The weatherman breaks for commercial. I spin the dial on the radio, flipping from country music to Beethoven’s Für Elise. No chance in hell. I try again and find a classic rock station. I leave it there and turn the volume low. Outside, the wind shrieks. It pitches the truck back and forth. It must be going sixty miles an hour.
I have a cough and a runny nose. She told me it’s from walking around in the cold the other night, but I tell her you can’t get sick from being in the cold. And then I turn my head and cough. My eyes are tired. I feel like shit.
We watch, out the window. The trees lurch back and forth in the wind. A branch snaps off a nearby oak and hits the truck. She jumps and looks at me. I say, “It’s okay.” It will be over soon.
She asks me what my plan is, how long I intend for us to hide out in this cabin. I tell her that I don’t know. “There are some things I need to figure out,” I say, “before we can go,” well aware that when I go, she’s coming with me. It’s all I can think about these days: when and where we’re going. The dropping temperatures make clear that we can no longer stay here. I’ve got Dan working on phony passports, but he said it would take time. How much? I asked, from the payphone outside Hardware Sam, making sure he knew we didn’t have much time. Call me in a couple weeks, he said. I’ll see what I can do.
So for now we wait. But I don’t tell her that. For now I let her think I don’t have a clue.
The Beatles come on the radio. She says that they remind her of her mom. “She used to listen to their records when Grace and I were kids,” she says. “She liked the music, but more than anything, it was a link to her English heritage. She cherished all things English—tea and Shakespeare and the Beatles.”
“Why don’t you ever talk about your mom?” I ask.
She says she’s sure she’s mentioned her. “But I probably only mentioned her in passing. That’s the way my mother is,” she tells me. “Never in the spotlight. There’s just never anything to say. She’s quiet, submissive. Malleable.”
My hands hover before the vent, trying to absorb as much heat as I can. “What does she think happened to you?” I ask.
I can smell the way our soap clings to her skin like it never does mine. A subtle smell. Like apples.
“I don’t know,” she says. “I haven’t thought about it.”
“But she knows you’re gone.”
“Maybe.”
“And she’s worried.”
“I don’t know,” she says.
“Why’s that?”
She thinks about it. “In the last year, she’s called. Maybe once or twice. But then I didn’t call back, and she didn’t want to be a bother. So she let it go.”
But she says she wonders. She says the thought has crossed her mind a number of times. What did people think when her birthday passed. When she wasn’t at Thanksgiving dinner. She wonders if people are looking for her. If they realize she’s gone. “I wonder if the police are involved or if it’s just gossip. Did I lose my job to another teacher? Was my apartment taken from me when I didn’t pay the rent?”
I tell her that I don’t know. Maybe. But does it matter anyway? It’s not like she can go home. It’s not like she’ll ever return to that job, that apartment. “But she loves you,” I say. “Your mother.”
“Sure,” she says. “She’s my mother.” And then she tells me about her.
“My mother is an only child,” she says. “She grew up in Gloucestershire, in this sleepy little village with old stone cottages, the ones with the steep sloping roofs, with homes that are hundreds of years old. It’s where my grandparents live. Theirs is nothing special, an outdated cottage with so much clutter it always drove me crazy. My grandmother is a pack rat, my grandfather the kind of man who will be drinking beer until he’s a hundred and two. He reeks of it, in an endearing sort of way—his kisses are always slobbery kisses that taste of beer. They’re your typical grandparents—she can bake like no one else in the world, he has hours and hours of fascinating stories about fighting in the war. My grandmother writes me letters, these long letters on sheets of notebook paper, with the most perfect penmanship, this fluent cursive that dances on the page, and in the summer she slips in pressed flowers from a climbing hydrangea I always adored, this amazing vine that’s climbed along the stone wall and now covers the roof of her home.”
She tells me that her mother used to sing “Lavender’s Blue” to her when she was a kid. I’ve never heard of it. I tell her that.
She remembers growing up with her sister, a game of hide-and-seek. After her sister closed her eyes and counted to twenty, she disappeared into her bedroom and put some headphones on. “I was in a closet,” she tells me. “A small, cramped linen closet. Just waiting for her to find me.” She says she sat there for over an hour. She was four years old.
It was her mother who found her in the end, who searched the house from top to bottom when she finally noticed Mia was missing. She remembers the squeak of that closet door sliding open and she, on the floor, half asleep. She remembers her mother’s eyes, deeply apologetic, and the way she cradled her on the floor, saying over and over again, “You’re my good girl, Mia,” letting her mind wonder about that which wasn’t said.
She remembers that her sister was hardly reprimanded. “She had to apologize,” she tells me, “which she did. Albeit like a snob.” She remembers, even at the age of four, wondering what the advantage was of being good. But she wanted to be good. That’s what she tells me. She tried hard to be the good girl.
She says that when she was the only one at home, her sister at school or playing, and her father out, she and her mother would share afternoon tea. “It was our secret,” she says. “She’d warm apple cider for me, and brew herself a cup of tea that she kept hidden for this. We’d share a PB and J that she sliced to finger sandwiches. We’d drink with pinkies raised, and call each other names like dearie and love, and she’d tell me all about life in this magical British kingdom, as if princesses and princes roamed freely down every cobblestone street.”
But she says that her father hated it there. He forced her mother to assimilate. He forced her to become American. To lose any sense of her own culture. She tells me that it’s called imperialism: a relationship based on dominance and subordination.
She grimaces when she says her father’s name. I don’t think she means to. I don’t think she knows she’s doing it, but she does. I think her parents’ relationship isn’t the only imperialistic one.
It’s dark outside, pitch-black without the moon. The truck’s interior lights help us see, but still, there’s just the contour of her skin, the reflection of light off her eyes. She says, “She’s nearly devoid of her English upbringing, having been in the United States since she was younger than me. My father made her stop using words like lorry and lift and flat in place of truck and elevator and apartment. I don’t know when it happened, when chips became French fries to her or when she stopped slipping the word bloody into angry snipes, but somewhere over the course of my childhood it happened.”
I ask who’s looking for her. Certainly someone has figured out she’s gone.
“I don’t know,” she says. But she can assume. “My co-workers are worried, my students confused. But my family? I honestly don’t know. And you?” she asks. “Who is looking for you?”
I shrug. “No one gives a damn that I’m gone.”
“Your mother,” she says
.
I turn and look at her. I say nothing. Neither of us is sure if it’s a question or not. What I know is that I feel something change inside me every time she looks at me. Her eyes no longer look through me. Now, when she talks, she looks at me. The anger and hate are gone.
I reach out and run a hand toasted by the heating vent across her cheek. I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. I feel her cheek press against my hand and linger there awhile. She doesn’t object.
And then I say to her, “We should get inside. It’s only going to get harder the longer we stay out here.”
She isn’t quick to move. She hesitates. I think she’s gonna say something. She looks like she wants to, like she’s got something on the tip of her tongue.
And then she mentions Dalmar.
“What about Dalmar?” I ask, but she doesn’t tell me. She’s mute, ruminating on something or other. Like how it is that she ended up here. At least that’s what I guess she’s thinking about. How is it that the daughter of a rich judge ends up hiding out in a shitty little cabin with me?
“Never mind,” she says. She’s reconsidered. She doesn’t want to talk about it.
I could sweat it out of her, but I don’t. The last thing I want to talk about right now is Dalmar.
“Let’s go inside,” I say instead.
She nods her head slowly and says, “Okay. Let’s go.” And then we push the doors open against the weight of the wind. We retrace our steps back into the cold, dark cabin, where inside, we listen to the wind moan.
Gabe
After
I’m flipping through the sketch pad, desperate for clues, when it comes to me: that damn cat. I personally hate cats. Their elasticity scares the shit out of me. They have a tendency to become cozy on my lap, most certainly because they know it pisses me off. Their fur sheds and they make that bizarre purring noise.
My boss is all over me to wrap this thing up. He keeps reminding me that it’s been weeks since the Dennett girl came home and I’m not one step closer to finding out who did this to her. My problem is simple: Mia is the only one who can help. And Mia can hardly remember her own name, much less the details of the last few months of her life. I need to trigger her memory.
And so I stumble upon the picture of the cat. My mom tells my dad all the time she’d keep the schnauzer over him. I personally have been dumped over a parrot. I see my neighbor smooching her poodle all the damn time. People have a funny relationship with their pets. Not me personally. The last pet I had I ended up flushing down the john.
And so I call a guy up in Minnesota and ask him to do me a favor. I fax him the drawing and tell him we’re looking for a gray-and-white mackerel tabby cat, maybe about ten pounds. He sends a trooper from Grand Marais out to the cabin to have a look around.
No cat, but there are animal prints in the snow. At my suggestion—it didn’t seem like rocket science—he leaves a bowl of food and some water that will probably freeze overnight. Better than nothing. I ask him to check back in the morning and see if the cat ate the food. Can’t be much worth hunting this time of year, and the damn thing has to be cold. My pal suggests that finding stray cats isn’t their sole priority.
“What is?” I ask. “Arresting folks who exceed their daily limit of trout?” I remind him that this is a kidnapping case that’s made national headlines.
“All right, all right,” he says to me. “I’ll get back to you in the morning.”
Colin
Before
I tell her that my middle name is Michael, after my dad. She still doesn’t know my real name. She calls me Owen when she calls me anything at all. Generally I don’t call her anything. There’s no need. I have a scar near the bottom of my back that she’s seen when I’m coming out of the bathroom after a bath. She asks about it. I tell her it’s from a dog bite as a kid. But the scar on my shoulder I won’t talk about. I tell her I’ve broken three bones in my body: a collarbone in a car accident when I was a kid; my wrist playing football; and my nose in a fight.
I rub my facial hair when I’m thinking. I pace when I’m mad. I do anything to keep busy. I never like to sit for more than a few minutes, and only ever with a purpose: feeding the fire, eating dinner, sleeping.
I tell her how this all started. How some man offered me five grand to find and deliver her to Lower Wacker Drive. I knew nothing about her at the time. I’d seen a photo and for days I followed her around. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. I didn’t know the plan until that night. Until they called me on the phone and told me what I was supposed to do. That’s the way it is; the less I know the better. This wasn’t like the other times. But this was more money than I’d ever been offered. The first time was only for repayment of a loan, I tell her. “So I didn’t get my ass kicked.” After that it was a few hundred dollars, sometimes a grand. I say that Dalmar is only a go-between. The others are all hidden behind a smoke screen. “I don’t have a damn clue who pays the bills,” I say.
“Does that bother you?” she asks.
I shrug. “That’s just the way it is.”
She could hate me for doing this to her. She could hate me for bringing her here. But she’s coming to see that what I did may have saved her life.
My first job was to find a man named Thomas Ferguson. I was supposed to make him cough up a substantial debt. He was some rich, eccentric man. Some technological genius who made it big in the ’90s. He had a fancy for gambling. He’d taken out a reverse mortgage and gambled away nearly all the equity in his home. Then a child’s college fund. Then he moved onto funds his in-laws had left to his wife and him when they died. When his wife found out, she threatened to leave him. He got his hands on more money and headed out to the casino in Joliet to earn it all back. Ironically Thomas Ferguson did make a small fortune at the casino. But he didn’t repay his debt.
Finding Thomas Ferguson was easy.
I remember the way my hands shook when I walked up the steps of the home in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood. I just didn’t want to get in trouble. I rang the doorbell. When a teenage girl peeked through the opening, I forced it open. It was after 8:00 p.m. on a fall night and I remember that it was cold. The house was dim. The girl started screaming. Her mother ran into the room and they took cover beneath an old desk when I showed my gun. I told the woman to call for her husband. It took a good five minutes for the coward to show his face. He’d been upstairs hiding. All the necessary precautions had been made: cutting phone lines and blocking the back door. He wasn’t going to get away. And yet Thomas Ferguson waited long enough for me to tie up the wife and girl and stand, with the gun to the wife’s head, when he finally appeared. He said he had no money. Not a penny to his name. But of course that couldn’t be true. Parked outside was a brand-new Cadillac SUV that he’d just given to his wife.
I tell her that I never killed anyone. Not that time, not ever.
We make small talk, to pass the time.
I tell her that she snores when she sleeps. She says, “I wouldn’t know. I can’t remember the last time someone watched me sleep.”
I always wear shoes, even when we know there’s nowhere to go. Even when the temperature plummets into negative degrees and we know we won’t move an inch from the fire.
I leave the water at a trickle in all the faucets. I tell her not to turn it off. If the water freezes, the pipes will burst. She asks me if we’ll freeze to death. I say no, but I’m not so sure.
When I’m really bored I ask if she can show me how to draw. I yank them out page by page because they look like shit. I drop them into the fire. I try to draw a picture of her. She shows me how the eyes go toward the center. “The eyes are generally aligned with the top of the ear, the nose with the bottom,” she says. Then she makes me look at her. She dissects her own face with her hands. She’s a good teacher. I think of the kids, in her school.
They must like her. I never liked a single one of my teachers.
I try again. When I’m through she says that she’s a perfect replica of Mrs. Potato Head. I yank it from the spiral notebook, but when I try to torch the page, she takes it from my hands.
“In case you’re famous one day,” she says.
Later, she hides it where I won’t find it. She knows that if I do, it’ll become food for the fire.
Eve
After
He worked on it all weekend, dropping subtle hints here and there, about how fat she would get and about the sinful child who was growing in her womb. He ignored my pleas to stop. Mia has yet to accept the notion that there is life inside her, though I heard her in the bathroom, vomiting, and knew morning sickness had arrived. I knocked on the door to ask if she was okay; James pushed me aside. I caught the door frame so I didn’t fall, staring at him in dismay.
“Don’t you have errands to run?” he asked. “A manicure? Pedicure? Something?”
I’m opposed to abortion. To me, it’s murder. That’s a child inside Mia, no matter what kind of madman helped create it. A child with a heartbeat and budding arms and legs, with blood that runs through its tiny body, through my grandchild’s body.
James wouldn’t leave me alone with Mia. He kept her confined to the bedroom for most of the weekend, filling her mind with literature on the pro-choice movement: pamphlets he’d picked up from clinics in the city and articles he’d printed from the internet. He knows my opinion on abortion. We’re generally both conservative in our views, but now that there’s an illegitimate child inside our daughter’s womb, he tossed all rational thinking aside. There’s only one thing that matters: getting rid of the child. He promised to pay for the abortion. He told me that much, or at least muttered it under his breath as if he was talking to himself. He said he’d pay for it because he didn’t want the bills submitted to the insurance company for coverage; he wanted no record that this had ever happened.