I run the water in the bathtub and let it fill to the top. I have no medicine. I have nothing to bring the temperature down. It’s the first time I’m grateful that the water refuses to warm beyond lukewarm. Warm enough to keep her from becoming hypothermic. Cool enough that she doesn’t begin to seize.
I help her rise to her feet. She leans on me and I carry the weight of her into the bathroom. She sits on the toilet seat as I peel the socks off her feet. She flinches when her bare feet touch the bitter tile. “No,” she begs.
“It will be okay,” I coax. It’s a lie.
I turn off the water and say that I’ll give her privacy, but she reaches out and clenches my hand. She says to me, “Don’t go.”
I watch as a convulsing hand attempts to undo the button of her khaki pants. She becomes weak and reaches for the sink to steady herself before she can finish. I step forward and unclasp the button. I lower her onto the toilet seat and pull her pants to the ground. I peel a pair of long johns from her legs and throw a sweatshirt over her head.
She’s crying as she sinks into the bathtub. She lets the water rise up to her knees as she pulls them into her chest. She drops her head to them and her hair falls one way, the last few inches swimming in the water. I kneel beside the bathtub. With my hands, I cup the water and drop it where it doesn’t reach. I soak a washcloth, drape it over the back of her neck. She doesn’t stop shaking.
I try not to look at her. I try not to look below the eyes as she begs me to keep talking, anything to avoid the freezing cold. I try not to imagine the things I can’t see. I try not to think about the color of her pale skin or the curvature of her spine. I try not to stare at her hair, bobbing on the surface of the bath.
I tell her about a lady who lives down the hall from me. This seventy-year-old lady who always manages to lock herself out of her apartment when she takes the trash to the chute down the hall.
I tell her how my mother cut my father out of all our early family photos. All their wedding photos she stuck in the shredder. She let me keep one photo of him. But after we stopped talking I used it for target practice.
I tell her that as a kid I wanted to play in the NFL. Wide receiver, just like Tommy Waddle.
I tell her that I can fox-trot because my mother taught me. But it isn’t the kind of thing I’d ever let anyone see. On the Sundays when she’s having a good day, she plays Frank Sinatra on the radio and we limp around the room. These days I’m better than her, by a long shot. She learned it from her own parents. There was nothing better to do, growing up when times were tough. Really tough. She always told me I knew nothing about being poor, even on those nights that I snuggled up with a sleeping bag in the backseat of our car.
I tell her that if it were up to me I’d live somewhere like this, in the middle of God knows where. The city isn’t for me, all those damn people.
What I don’t tell her is how beautiful she looked that first night. How I watched her sitting alone at the bar, masked by the faded lights and cigarette smoke. I watched her longer than I needed to for the pure pleasure of it. I don’t tell her how the candle made her face glow, how the photograph I was given didn’t do her justice. I don’t tell her any of it. I don’t tell her the way she makes me feel when she looks at me, or how I hear her voice at night, in my dreams, forgiving me. I don’t tell her I’m sorry, though I am. I don’t tell her that I think she’s beautiful, even when I see her look in a mirror and hate the image she sees.
She tires from shaking. I see her eyes close as she begins to fall asleep. I press a hand to her forehead, and I convince myself the fever has gone down. I wake her. And then I help her stand in the bath. I wrap a rough towel around her and help her step over the side of the tub. I help her dress into the warmest clothes I can find, and then I towel-dry the ends of her hair. She lies on the couch before the fire. It’s beginning to die, so I lay a branch across the logs. Before I can cover her with a blanket, she’s asleep, but she continues to hack. I sit beside her and will myself not to sleep. I watch the rise and fall of her chest so I know that she’s alive.
* * *
There’s a doctor in Grand Marais. I tell her we need to go. She tries to object. We can’t, she says. But I tell her we need to.
I remind her that her name is Chloe. I do everything I can to disguise us. I tell her to pull her hair back, which she never does. On the way, I run into a grocery store for a pair of reading glasses. I tell her to put them on. Not perfect, but it will have to do. I wear my Sox hat.
I tell her we’re paying in cash. No insurance. I tell her not to talk more than she has to. Let me do the talking.
All we need is a prescription.
I drive around Grand Marais for a good thirty minutes before deciding on a doctor. I do this by their names. Kenneth Levine sounds too formal. Bastard probably falls asleep every night to the news. There’s a clinic, but I keep driving—too many people. There’s a dentist, an ObGyn. I decide on some broad named Kayla Lee, a family practitioner with an empty parking lot. Her little sports car is parked out back. Not very practical for the snow on the ground. I tell Mia we don’t want the best doctor in town, just one who knows how to write a prescription.
I help her cross the parking lot. “Be careful,” I say. There’s a layer of ice on the ground. We skate across it to the door. She can’t get rid of the damn cough, though she lied and said she was feeling better.
The office is on the second floor, above a copy shop. We enter and head straight up the narrow stairway. She says that it’s heaven to be somewhere warm. Heaven. I wonder if she really believes in that kind of shit.
There’s a lady sitting behind the desk, this woman who’s humming Christmas crap. I usher Mia into a seat. She buries her nose into a tissue and blows. The receptionist looks up. “Poor thing,” she says.
I get the paperwork from her and sit down in the bariatric chair. I watch Mia fill out the forms. She manages to remember Chloe, but when she comes to last name her hand becomes still.
“Why don’t I do it for you?” I ask. I slide the pen from her hand. She watches me write Romain. I make up an address. I leave the insurance information blank. I bring the paperwork up front and tell the lady we’ll be paying cash. Then I sit beside her and ask if she’s okay. I take her by the hand. My fingers slip between hers and I squeeze lightly and say to her, “Everything’s gonna be okay.”
She thinks it’s all a ruse for the receptionist’s benefit, but what she doesn’t know is that I suck at acting.
The lady leads us to a back room and takes Mia’s vitals. The room is small and there’s an animal mural painted across the walls. “Low blood pressure,” the lady says. Increased respiration rate and pulse, temperature of 104. “Poor thing,” she says again. She says the doctor will be in soon. I don’t know how long we wait. She sits on the edge of the table staring at whimsical lions and tigers while I pace back and forth across the room. I want to get the hell out of here. I say it at least three times.
Dr. Kayla Lee knocks and then lets herself in. She’s chipper—brunette, not blonde as I expected. A blonde bimbo was what we were hoping for.
The doctor is loud and she talks to Mia like she’s three. She sits on a swivel stool and pulls it close to Mia. Mia tries to clear her throat. She coughs. She’s a fucking mess. But maybe feeling like shit helps disguise the fact that she’s scared half to death.
The doctor asks if she’s seen us before. Mia can’t come up with the words so I step in. I’m surprisingly calm. “No,” I say. “New patients.”
“So what’s going on—” she peeks down at the file “—Chloe?”
Mia is growing exhausted from this trip. She can’t hold the doctor’s stare. I’m certain the doctor smells the BO on both our clothes, clothes we’ve worn almost every day so that we no longer smell the stink. She’s hacking up a lung. There’s a barking cough that sounds like
a dozen terriers fighting inside her. Her voice is hoarse. It threatens to disappear.
“She’s been coughing like this for about four days,” I say. “Fever. Chills. I told her we needed to get in to see you Friday afternoon. But she said no, it was only a cold.”
“Fatigue?”
Mia nods. I tell her that Mia is lethargic, that she passed out at home. She writes this down in her notes.
“Any vomiting?”
“No.”
“Diarrhea?”
“No.”
“Let me take a look,” the doctor says and quickly shines a light in Mia’s eye, up her nose, into her ears. She tells her to say ahhhh and feels her glands. And then the stethoscope finds its way to Mia’s lungs. “Take a deep breath for me,” Dr. Lee says. Behind her I continue to pace. She moves the stethoscope around Mia’s back and chest. She has her lie down. Then sit up again as she taps on her chest and listens.
“My suspicion is pneumonia. Do you smoke?”
“No.”
“History of asthma?”
“No.”
I take in the artwork: a polka-dot giraffe. A lion whose mane looks like one of those damn cones dogs wear when they can’t stop licking themselves. A baby-blue elephant that looks like it just crawled out of the delivery ward.
“I hear a lot of junk in your lungs, in layman’s terms. Pneumonia is inflammation of the lungs, caused by an infection. Fluid blocks and narrows your airways. What starts as a cold might decide to settle in your lungs for whatever reason and what you get is this,” she says, sweeping her hand across Mia’s perimeters.
The doctor reeks of perfume. She doesn’t shut up when Mia’s hacking, though we all know she hears.
“We treat it with antibiotics,” she continues. She lists the possibilities. Just give us a prescription. “But first I’d like to confirm with a chest X—”
The color fades from Mia’s face, as if there was any there to begin with. There’s no way we’re stepping foot into a hospital.
“I appreciate your diligence,” I interrupt. I step forward, close enough to touch the doctor. I’m bigger than both of them, but I don’t use my size to change her mind. We’d run into dozens of people in a hospital. Maybe more.
I plaster a fucking smile on my face and confess that I’m between jobs. We’re uninsured. We can’t afford the two or three hundred dollars that a chest X-ray will cost us.
And then Mia starts coughing until we all think she might puke. The doctor fills a little plastic cup with water and hands it to her. And then she stands back to watch her patient gasp for air.
“Okay,” she says. She writes out the damn prescription and leaves the room.
We pass her in the hall on the way out. She’s bent over a countertop, writing notes in Chloe Romain’s file. Her smock hangs low, to the top of leather cowboy boots. There’s an ugly dress beneath. Her stethoscope is wrapped around her neck.
We’re almost to the door when she stops and says, “Are you sure I haven’t seen you before? You just look so darn familiar.” But she isn’t looking at Mia. She’s looking at me.
“No,” I say dismissively. No need to be kind. I got what I need.
We make a follow-up appointment for Chloe Romain, one she’ll never keep.
“Thank you for your help,” Mia says as I gently shove her out the door.
In the parking lot I tell her that we did good. We have the prescription. That’s all we need. We swing by a pharmacy on the way back to the cabin. Mia waits in the truck while I run inside, grateful to find a sixteen-year-old pothead working the register and the pharmacist, tucked in back, never raising his head. I give Mia a pill before we pull out of the parking lot and I watch, out of the corner of my eye, as she falls asleep on the way home. I slip out of my coat and lay it over her so she doesn’t get cold.
Gabe
Before
I spend many days visiting Kathryn Thatcher in her new abode. The first time I showed up I said I was her son. The receptionist said to me, “Oh, thank goodness—she talks about you all the time,” and led me to the woman’s room. I could tell in her eyes that she was disappointed to see me, but so relieved to have company she didn’t bother to tell them I’d lied. She’s well-medicated now and can function minimally on her own. Mrs. Thatcher shares a room with an eighty-two-year-old woman on hospice care; it’s only a matter of time before she dies. She’s so doped up on morphine she doesn’t have a damn clue where she is, and she’s certain Mrs. Thatcher is a lady named Rory McGuire. No one comes to visit the woman. No one comes to visit Mrs. Thatcher but me.
Turns out Mrs. Thatcher likes true crime novels. I go to the bookstore and pick up every bestseller I can find. I sit in on the edge of her bed and read them to her. I suck at reading aloud. I suck at reading at all; I don’t think I quite mastered that in the first grade. Turns out I like true crime novels as well.
I sneak chicken nuggets into her room. As often as we can, we share a ten-piece and a large fry.
I bring an old CD player of mine and borrow Christmas CDs from the library. She says that it doesn’t feel like Christmas in the nursing home; she can see the snow out the window, but inside everything feels the same. When I leave at night, I turn on music so she doesn’t have to listen to her roommate’s troubled breathing.
The days off I don’t spend with Kathryn Thatcher, I spend with Eve. I find some asinine reason to repeatedly show up at her door. As December sets in and winter descends upon us, a fog comes over her. She chalks it up to seasonal affective disorder, whatever the hell that is. I can see that she’s tired all the time. She’s sad. She sits and stares out the window at the falling snow.
I try and devise one small scrap of information—real or not—about the case that will give the impression I’m not at a dead end.
I teach her to make my mother’s lasagna. I’m not trying to turn her into a chef. I’m just not sure there’s any other way to make her eat.
She says her husband is coming home less and less. He works even later, sometimes until ten or eleven at night. Last night he didn’t come home. He claims to have worked all night catching up on motions, something that Eve attests he’s never ever done.
“What do you think?” I ask.
“He looked tired this morning. He passed through to change his clothes.”
I’m trying to hone my great detective skills to figure out why she doesn’t leave her husband. So far, no luck.
“So he was working,” I conclude.
Fat chance in hell he was working. But if it makes Eve feel better, so be it.
We never allude to the kiss. But every time I see her, I imagine Eve’s lips pressed to mine. When I close my eyes, I taste her, and smell everything from her hand soap to her perfume.
She calls me Gabe and I call her Eve. We stand closer than we used to.
Now when she opens the front door, there’s a flicker of happiness and not just a letdown because I’m not the long-lost daughter; there’s a flicker of happiness for me.
Eve begs me to bring her to the nursing home, but I know it would be more than she can handle. She wants to talk to Mrs. Thatcher, mother to mother. She thinks there’s something Mrs. Thatcher might tell her that she wouldn’t tell me. But still, I tell her no. She asks what Kathryn is like and I tell her that she’s a strong woman and defiant. Eve tells me she used to be strong; fine china and haute couture have made her weak.
As soon as Mrs. Thatcher is fully stabilized, she’ll go to live with a sister nearby, a woman who, apparently, hasn’t so much as turned on the evening news for the past few months. I phoned her the other day at Kathryn’s request. She had no idea her nephew had gone AWOL, had never heard a word about the search for Mia Dennett.
I’ve been assigned to other cases. A fire in an apartment building that’s possible arson. Co
mplaints from numerous teenyboppers against a high school teacher.
But at night when I retire to my own apartment, I drink to help me sleep, and when I do, I fall asleep to the image of Mia Dennett on video surveillance, being shepherded from an elevator by the abrasive Colin Thatcher. I imagine a bleak Eve crying herself to sleep. And I remind myself that I’m the only one who can stop it.
* * *
I’m visiting the nursing home one snowy Tuesday afternoon when Kathryn Thatcher turns to me and asks about her neighbor, Ruth Baker. “Does Ruthie know I’m here?” she asks and I shrug and say that I don’t know. I’ve never heard of this Ruth—aka Ruthie—Baker. But she tells me how Ruthie checks on her every week, during the week when Colin can’t be there. She says that she collects the mail every day and brings it with her, to Mrs. Thatcher’s home. I envision the mail in the mailbox nearly tumbling to the ground, stuffed to the point it was impossible to close the door. There was so much mail I needed to drive to the Gary Post Office with a warrant to collect what the mailman couldn’t stuff into the box. I spoke to the neighbors, but there was no Ruth or Ruthie, no Mrs. Baker. Mrs. Thatcher tells me that Ruth lives in the white Cape Cod across the street, and it’s then that I remember the For Sale sign out front. No one answered the door.
I do my research and stumble upon an obituary from the first week of October. I pull up the death records and find that Mrs. Ruth Baker had a stroke and died at 5:18 p.m. on October 7th. Mrs. Thatcher has no idea. Mrs. Baker was supposed to be keeping an eye on Kathryn Thatcher while Colin was away. I’m guessing that wherever he is, he doesn’t have a clue the seventy-five-year-old woman he left in charge of his mother is dead.
My mind reverts to the mail. I pull out the stack of mail I swiped from Mrs. Thatcher’s box and collected from the post office, and sort it by postmark date. Sure enough, there is a gap, from Mia’s disappearance until the bills and past due notices begin. About five days. I wonder who the hell has Mrs. Thatcher’s missing mail. I return to the home of Ruthie Baker and knock on the door. Again, no answer, and so I track down a next of kin, a woman about my own age, Ruthie’s daughter, who lives in Hammond with her husband and kids. One day I knock on her door.