The Good Girl

  “Look at all the stars,” she says. She knows the names of the constellations. Aries. Fornax. Perseus. She says that in Chicago she used to wish on airplanes because there were far more of those floating around in the night sky than stars.

  There are times she’s too far away, even when she’s in the same room.

  She teaches me to count to a hundred in Spanish. I teach her the fox-trot. When the lake freezes completely over, we ice fish. We never stay out long. She doesn’t like to watch. So she walks on the lake as if Moses has parted the waters for her. She likes the newly fallen snow. Sometimes there are animal prints. Sometimes we hear snowmobiles in the distance. When she’s frozen solid she goes in. And then I feel alone.

  * * *

  I take her outside. I bring the gun with me. We walk through the woods for a while, to a place so desolate I’m sure no one will hear the sound of a bullet exploding from the muzzle.

  I tell her that I want her to know how to shoot the gun. I give it to her flat, on both hands, like a piece of fine jewelry. She doesn’t want to touch the damn thing.

  “Take it,” I say lightly.

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Just in case.”

  I want her to learn to shoot it so she can protect herself.

  “That’s what you’re here for.”

  “What if one day I’m not?” I ask. I tuck a strand of her hair behind a raw ear. I watch as the wind frees it again. “It isn’t loaded.”

  She loops her thumb and forefinger through the trigger guard. She lifts it from my hands. It’s heavy, the metal cold in the freezing temperatures. The ground is coated with snow.

  I place her finger on the trigger, wrap her palm around the grip. I move her thumb downward. I pull her left hand up to meet the right. My hand on hers assures her that she will be all right. That this will be all right. Her hands are cold, like mine. But they come to me without reserve like they used to, pulling away when we touched.

  I tell her about the parts of the gun: the barrel and muzzle and trigger guard. I pull a magazine from the pocket of my jeans and show her how to attach it to the gun. I tell her about the kinds of guns there are: rifles and handguns and semiautomatics. This is a semiautomatic. When one round is fired, another round is loaded from the magazine into the chamber. All with the pull of the trigger.

  I tell her never to aim the gun at something she doesn’t intend to kill.

  “I learned this the hard way,” I say, “when I was seven. Maybe eight. Some kid in the neighborhood. His old man owned a gun. He used to brag about it all the fucking time. I called him a liar. He wanted to prove it to me, so we went to his house after school. No one was home. His dad kept the thing in a bedside table, unlocked and loaded. I grabbed it from the drawer like it was a toy. We played a round of cops and robbers. He was the cop but I had the gun. The kid said, ‘Hands up,’ and I turned and shot him.”

  And then we stand there in the freezing cold. We remember the times she stared down the barrel of the gun. There’s guilt. And sorrow. I’m sure she sees it in my eyes. I’m sure she can hear it in my voice when I say, “I wouldn’t have killed you.”

  I’m clutching blindly to her hand.

  “But you might have,” she says. We both know it’s the truth.

  “Yeah,” I admit. I’m not one to say I’m sorry. But I’m sure the look on my face says it all.

  “But that was different,” she says.

  “How so?” I ask.

  She lets me shadow her from behind. I raise her arms and together we aim at a nearby tree. I part her legs and show her how to stand, and then we cock the hammer and pull the trigger. The sound is deafening. The release of the bullet nearly knocks her off her feet. Bark explodes from the tree.

  “Because if I’d have had the chance, I would have killed you, too,” she says.

  This is how we settle all those things that happened between us in the early days. This is how we make up for all the mean words that we said, for the horrible thoughts that ran through our minds. This is how we annul the violence and the hate of our first days and weeks in the cabin, inside the log walls that have now become our home.

  “And your friend?” she asks. I’m nodding to the gun in her hands. This time, I want her to try by herself.

  “Luckily for him, I had no aim when I was a kid. The bullet grazed the outside of his arm. A scratch.”

  Eve

  Christmas Eve

  Gabe called early in the morning to tell me he was on his way. It was just after 5:30 a.m. when my cell phone rang, and unlike James, who slept like a baby, I’d been awake for hours, plagued by another sleepless night. I don’t bother to wake him. I find my robe and slippers and step outside.

  There’s news. I stand on the front step, shivering from the cold, waiting for Gabe’s car to pull into our snow-covered drive. It’s after six o’clock and still dark outside. Neighbors’ Christmas décor lights the night sky: decorated trees glittering through bay windows, icicle lights hanging from gutters, candles flickering in every single double-hung window that faces the street. From the chimneys, clouds of smoke swirl into the frosty air.

  I pull my robe tight around me and wait. I hear a train in the distance, rumbling through town. No one waits beside its tracks, before dawn on a Sunday morning, Christmas Eve.

  “What is it?” I ask when he parks his car and climbs out. He comes right up to me. He doesn’t shut the door.

  “Let’s go inside.” He takes my hands and leads me where it’s warm.

  We sit on the plush white sofa, pressed close together. We’re hardly aware that our legs touch. It’s dark in the house; only the stove light in the kitchen is turned on. I don’t want to wake James. We whisper.

  There’s a look in his eye. Something new.

  “She’s dead,” I concede.

  “No,” he says, but then he revises his statement and, staring down into his own hands, humbly admits, “I don’t know.

  “There’s a doctor in a tiny town in northeastern Minnesota, a Dr. Kayla Lee. I didn’t want to get your hopes up. We received a call a week or so ago—she saw Mia’s picture on the news and recognized her as a patient. It had been weeks, maybe a month since Mia was in. But she’s sure it’s her. Mia was using a pseudonym: Chloe Romain.”

  “A doctor?”

  “Dr. Lee said that she was with a man. Colin Thatcher. She said that Mia was sick.”

  “Sick?”

  “Pneumonia.”

  “Pneumonia.”

  Without treatment, pneumonia can lead to blood poisoning. It can lead to respiratory distress, the inability to breathe. Without treatment, a person can die.

  “She was given a prescription and sent home. The doctor asked to see her back in a week; Mia never returned for the appointment.”

  Gabe said he had a nagging feeling about this Grand Marais. Something in his gut told him she might be there.

  “What made you think of Grand Marais?” I ask, remembering the day he showed up at my home, asking if I’d ever heard of it.

  “A postcard I came across at the Thatcher home. Sent by Colin to his mother. For a boy who rarely left home, it caught my eye. A good place to hide.

  “There’s more,” he says.

  “What?” I beg.

  She was given a prescription, but that doesn’t mean it was ever filled. That doesn’t mean the pills were ever taken.

  “I’ve been talking to Kathryn Thatcher and doing some research into the Thatcher family. Turns out there’s a cabin up in Grand Marais that’s been in the family for years. Kathryn says she doesn’t know much about it. She’s never been there. But her ex brought Colin there when he was a boy. It’s a summer home, so to speak, inhabited only for a few months of the year. I sent an officer to check on the home and when he did, he found a
red truck with Illinois plates parked outside.”

  “A red truck,” I repeat. Gabe reminds me that Mrs. Thatcher’s neighbors were sure Colin drove a truck.

  “And?” I ask anxiously.

  He stands to his feet. “I’m on my way. Driving there. This morning. I was going to take a flight, but there’s no good way, no direct routes and between layovers and connections—”

  I rise up to meet him. “I’m coming. Let me pack a—”

  I try to step past him. His hands seize me by the shoulders.

  “You can’t come,” he says in a gentle voice. He says this is only a hunch. There’s no proof. The home is under surveillance right now. He’s not even certain that Mia is there. Colin Thatcher is a dangerous man, wanted for much more than this.

  “I can,” I cry. “She’s my daughter.”

  “Eve.”

  My voice is uneven. My hands shake. I’ve waited for months for this moment, and now that it has arrived, I’m not certain I’m ready. There’s so much that could go wrong. “She needs me right now. I’m her mother, Gabe. It’s my duty to protect her.”

  He embraces me, a burly bear hug. “It’s my duty to protect you,” he says. “Trust me. If she’s there, I will bring her home.”

  “I can’t lose her now,” I cry.

  My eyes stray to a family photograph we had done years ago: James, Grace, Mia and me. Everyone else looks as if they were forced to be there, with artificial smiles plastered to furrowed brows and rolling eyes. Even me. But Mia simply looks happy. Why? I wonder. We never gave her a reason to be happy.

  Gabe lowers his lips to my forehead and holds them there, pressed tightly against the creased skin.

  This is how we stand when James comes hobbling down the steps, dressed in a pair of tight-fitting tartan pajamas.

  “What the hell is this?” he demands.

  I’m the first to pull away. “James,” I say, hurrying to meet him in the foyer. “They found Mia.”

  But his eyes brush past me and he evades my greeting. “And this is how you break the news?” he challenges, deriding Gabe. “By putting the moves on my wife?”

  “James,” I say again, reaching for his hand so that he’ll understand: our daughter is coming home. “They found Mia.”

  But James replies with a patronizing look in Gabe’s direction. He doesn’t look at me. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he says, and walks out of the room.

  Colin

  Before

  There are lights on the Christmas tree. I won’t tell her how they got there. I said she wouldn’t like it. I said that someone else’s loss is our gain.

  She says they look absolutely gorgeous at night when we turn off the lights and lay side by side in the dark, with just the lights from the Christmas tree and the fire.

  “This is perfect,” she says.

  “This isn’t good enough,” I say.

  “What do you mean?” she asks. “It’s perfect.”

  But we both know it’s far from perfect.

  What is perfect is the way she looks at me, and the way she says my name. The way her hand strokes my hair, though I don’t think she knows she’s doing it. The way we lay together night after night. The way I feel: complete. What is perfect is the way she sometimes smiles and she sometimes laughs. The way we can say anything that comes to mind, or sit together for hours in absolute silence.

  The cat lies by us during the day. He sleeps with us at night, on her pillow where there’s an ounce of warmth. I tell her to shoo him away, but she won’t. So she moves closer to me. She shares mine instead. She feeds the cat table scraps, which he devours. But we both know that as the cabinets empty, she will have to decide: us or him.

  We talk about where we would go if we had the chance.

  I list everywhere I can possibly think of that’s warm. “Mexico. Costa Rica. Egypt. The Sudan.”

  “The Sudan?”

  “Why not? It gets hot.”

  “You’re that cold?” she asks. I pull her on top of me.

  “I’m getting warmer,” I say.

  I ask where she’d want to go—if we ever got out of here.

  “There’s a town in Italy,” she says. “A ghost town—it’s all but abandoned, lost in olive trees, a nearly nonexistent town of only a couple hundred people, with a medieval castle and an old church.”

  “This is where you want to go?” I’m surprised. I expected Machu Picchu or Hawaii. Something along those lines.

  But I can tell she’s been thinking about it.

  “It’s the kind of place we could slip in. It’s a world apart from TVs and technology. It’s in Liguria, this part of Italy that borders the south of France—we’d be only miles from the Italian Riviera. We could live off the land, and grow our own food. We wouldn’t have to rely on others. We wouldn’t have to worry about being caught or found or...” I’m giving her a look. “You think it’s stupid,” she says.

  “I think fresh vegetables would be a nice change from stewed tomatoes.”

  “I hate stewed tomatoes,” she admits.

  I say that I hate them, too. I only got them because I was in a rush.

  “We could find a rustic old home, one of those granite monstrosities, one, I don’t know, maybe two hundred years old. We’d have breathtaking views of the mountains, maybe the coastline if we’re lucky. We could raise animals, grow our own food.”

  “Grapes?”

  “We could have a vineyard. And change our names, get a new start.”

  I sit up on my elbows. “Who would you be?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your new name.”

  The answer seems obvious. “Chloe.”

  “Chloe. Then that’s who you’ll be,” I say. I consider the name. Chloe. I remember the day, months ago, when we’re driving in the truck back to Grand Marais. I forced her to pick a name, and she came up with Chloe. “Why Chloe?” I ask.

  “What do you mean?”

  “That day. When I told you you couldn’t be Mia anymore. And you said Chloe.”

  “Oh,” she says and she sits up straight. There are creases on her face from my shirt. Her hair is long. It goes halfway down her back. Maybe more. I’m waiting for a simple answer. I just like it, something like that. But what I get is more. “Just some girl I saw on TV.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She closes her eyes. I know she doesn’t want to tell me.

  But she does anyway. “I was six or seven years old. My mother was in the kitchen, but she left the TV on, the news. I was coloring. She didn’t know I was paying attention. There was a story, a high school band trip from some school, Kansas or Oklahoma, something like that. There was a group of kids in a bus traveling to a competition or something. I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention to that. The bus skidded off the road and went down a ravine. Half a dozen kids were killed, the driver.

  “Then this family appears, a mom, a dad and two older boys, maybe eighteen or nineteen. I can still see them—the dad gaunt with a receding hairline, the boys, both of them, tall and lanky like basketball players, with burnt-orange hair. The mother looked like she’d been run over by an eighteen-wheeler. They’re crying, every single one of them, standing before this little white house. That’s what made me pay attention. The crying. They were heartbroken. Destroyed. I watched the father, mostly, but all of them really, the way they openly wept for their dead daughter. Their dead sister. She’d been killed in the accident, plunged down the ravine when the driver fell asleep at the wheel. She was fifteen but I remember her father gushing about his baby girl. He went on and on about how amazing she was, though the things he said—that she was kind and silly and born to play the flute—were not necessarily amazing. But to him they were. He kept saying, ‘my Chloe,’ or ‘
my baby Chloe.’ That was her name. Chloe Frost.

  “All I could think about was Chloe Frost. I wanted to be her, to have someone long for me the way her family longed for her. I cried for Chloe, for days on end. I spoke to her, when I was alone. I carried on conversations with my dead friend, Chloe. I drew pictures of her. Dozens of them, with her own burnt-orange hair and coffee-colored eyes.” She runs her hands through her hair and looks away, in a sheepish sort of way. Embarrassed.

  Then she admits, “I was jealous of her, really. Jealous that she was dead, jealous that somewhere, out there, someone loved her more than they loved me.” She hesitates, then says, “It’s crazy. I know.”

  But I shake my head and say, “No,” because I know it’s what she wants to hear. But I think how lonely she must have been growing up. Longing for a dead friend she didn’t even know. Things weren’t so grand for Ma and me, but at least we weren’t alone.

  She changes the subject. She doesn’t want to talk about Chloe Frost anymore.

  “Who will you be?” she asks.

  “John?” I say. I couldn’t be further from a John.

  “No,” she says, the answer almost as obvious as Chloe had been. “You’ll be Owen. Because it doesn’t matter anyway, does it? That’s not your real name.”

  “Do you want to know?” I ask. I bet she’s thought about it a million times. I bet she’s guessed to herself what my real name might be. I wonder if she ever thought about asking.

  “No,” she says, “because this is who you are to me. You’re Owen.” She says that whoever I was before this doesn’t matter.

  “And you’ll be Chloe.”

  “I’ll be Chloe.”

  And in that moment, Mia ceased to exist.

  Eve

  After

  I consult with Dr. Rhodes. She agrees under one condition: that she is allowed to go along, too. I purchase the three airplane tickets with a credit card that James and I share. The police department pays Gabe’s fare.

  We will be revisiting the cabin in which Mia was held prisoner all that time. The hope is that being there will help jog her memory and make her remember something about her time in captivity. If the cat alone can trigger memories of Colin Thatcher, then I wonder what that cabin will do.