The Good Girl

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you driving the car?”

  “No.”

  “Who’s driving the car?”

  “I don’t know. It’s dark.”

  “What time of day is it?”

  “Early morning. The sun is just beginning to rise.”

  “You can see out the window?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you see stars?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the moon?”

  “Yes.”

  “A full moon?”

  “No.” She shakes her head. “A half moon.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “On a highway. It’s a small, two-lane highway, surrounded by woods.”

  “Are there other cars?”

  “No.”

  “Do you see street signs?”

  “No.”

  “Do you hear anything?”

  “Static. From the radio. There’s a man speaking, but his voice...there’s static.” Mia is lying on the couch with her legs crossed at the ankles. It’s the first time I’ve seen her relax in the last two weeks. Her arms are folded against a bare midriff—her chunky cream sweater having hiked up an inch or two when she laid down—as if she’s been placed in a casket.

  “Can you hear what the man is saying?” Dr. Rhodes asks from where she sits on a maroon armchair beside Mia. The woman is the epitome of together: not a wrinkle in her clothing, not a hair out of place. The sound of her voice is monotonous; it could lull me to sleep.

  “Temperatures in the forties, plenty of sun...”

  “The weather forecast?”

  “It’s a disc jockey—the sound is coming from the radio. But the static... The front speakers don’t work. The voice comes from the backseat.”

  “Is there someone in the backseat, Mia?”

  “No. It’s just us.”

  “Us?”

  “I can see his hands in the darkness. He drives with two hands, holding the steering wheel so tightly.”

  “What else can you tell me about him?” Mia shakes her head. “Can you see what he’s wearing?”

  “No.”

  “But you can see his hands?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is there anything on his hands—a ring, watch? Anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What can you tell me about his hands?”

  “They’re rough.”

  “You can see that? You can see that his hands are rough?”

  I scoot to the edge of my seat, hanging on to Mia’s every last muted word. I know that Mia—the old Mia, pre-Colin Thatcher—would have never wanted me to hear this conversation.

  This question she doesn’t answer.

  “Is he hurting you?” Mia twitches on the couch, pushing aside the question. Dr. Rhodes asks again, “Did he hurt you, Mia? There, in the car, or maybe before?” There’s no response.

  The doctor moves on. “What else can you tell me about the car?”

  But Mia states instead, “This wasn’t...this wasn’t supposed...to happen.”

  “What wasn’t, Mia?” she asks. “What wasn’t supposed to happen?”

  “It’s all wrong,” Mia replies. She’s disoriented, her visions cluttered, random memories running adrift in her mind.

  “What is all wrong?” There’s no reply. “Mia, what is all wrong? The car? Something about the car?”

  But Mia says nothing. Not at first anyway. But then she sucks her breath in violently, and claims, “It’s my fault. It’s all my fault,” and it takes every bit of willpower I have not to rush from my seat and embrace my child. I want to tell her that no, it’s not. It’s not her fault. I can see the way it grieves her, the way her facial features tense up, her flattened hands turn to fists. “I did this,” she says.

  “This is not your fault, Mia,” Dr. Rhodes states. Her voice is pensive, soothing. I grip the arms of the chair in which I sit and force myself to remain calm. “It’s not your fault,” she repeats, and later, after the session is through, she explains to me in private that victims almost always blame themselves. She says that often this is the case with rape victims, the reason that nearly fifty percent of rapes go unreported because the victim feels certain it was her fault. If only she had never gone to such and such a bar; if only she had never talked to such and such a stranger; if only she hadn’t worn such suggestive attire. Mia, she explains, is experiencing a natural phenomenon that psychologists and sociologists have been studying for years: self-blame. “Self-blame can, of course, be destructive,” she says to me later as Mia waits in the waiting room for me to catch up, “when taken to the extreme, but it can also prevent victims from becoming vulnerable in the future.” As if this is supposed to make me feel relieved.

  “Mia, what else do you see?” the doctor inquires when Mia has settled.

  She’s taciturn, initially. The doctor asks again, “Mia, what else do you see?”

  This time Mia responds, “A house.”

  “Tell me about the house.”

  “It’s small.”

  “What else?”

  “A deck. A small deck with steps that lead down into the woods. It’s a log cabin—dark wood. You can barely see it for all the trees. It’s old. Everything about it is old—the furniture, the appliances.”

  “Tell me about the furniture.”

  “It sags. The couch is plaid. Blue-and-white plaid. Nothing about the house is comfortable. There’s an old wooden rocking chair, lamps that barely light the room. A tiny table with wobbly legs and a plaid vinyl tablecloth that you’d bring to a picnic. The hardwood floors creak. It’s cold. It smells.”

  “Like what?”

  “Mothballs.”

  Later that night, as we hover in the kitchen after dinner, James asks me what in the hell the smell of mothballs has to do with anything. I tell him that its progress, albeit slow progress. But it’s a start. Something that yesterday Mia couldn’t remember. I, too, had longed for something phenomenal: one session of hypnosis and Mia would be healed. Dr. Rhodes sensed my frustration when we were leaving her office and explained to me that we needed to be patient; these things take time and to rush Mia will do more harm than good. James doesn’t buy it; he’s certain it’s only a ploy for more money. I watch him yank a beer from the refrigerator and head into his office to work while I clean the dinner dishes, noticing, for the third time this week, that Mia’s plate has barely been touched. I stare at the spaghetti noodles hardening on the earthenware dishes and remember that spaghetti is Mia’s favorite meal.

  I start a list and begin to archive things one by one: the rough hands, for example, or the weather forecast. I spend the night on the internet rummaging around for useful information. The last time the temperatures in northern Minnesota were in the forties was in the last week of November, though the temperatures toyed around in the thirties and forties from Mia’s disappearance until after Thanksgiving day. After that they plunged into the twenties and below and likely won’t creep up to forty for some time. There was a half moon on September 30th, October 14th and another on the 29th; there was one on November 12th and another on the 28th, though Mia couldn’t be certain that the moon was exactly at half and so the dates are only suggestions. Moose are common in Minnesota, especially in the winter. Beethoven wrote Für Elise around 1810, though Elise was actually supposed to be Therese, a woman he was to marry in the same year.

  Before I go to bed, I pass by the room in which Mia sleeps. I silently open the door and stand there, watching her, the way she is draped across the bed, the blanket thrust from her body at some point in the night where it lies in a puddle on the floor. The moon welcomes itself into the bedroom through the slats on the plantation blinds, str
eaking Mia with traces of light, across her face, down a set of knit eggplant pajamas, the right leg of which is hiked up to the knee and tossed across an extra pillow. It’s the only time these days when Mia is at peace. I move across the room to cover her and feel my body lower to the edge of the bed. Her face is serene, her soul calm, and though she’s a woman, I still envision my blissful little girl long before she was taken away from me. Mia’s being here feels too good to be true. I would sit here all night if I could, to convince myself that it isn’t a dream, that when I wake in the morning, Mia—or Chloe—will still be here.

  As I climb into bed beside James’s blazing body, the bulk of the down comforter actually making him sweat, I wonder what good this information—the weather forecast and phases of the moon—actually does me, though I’ve stuck it in a folder beside the dozens of meanings for the name Chloe. Why, I don’t know for certain, but I tell myself that any details notable enough for Mia to recount under hypnosis are important to me, any scrap of information to explain to me what happened to my daughter inside the log walls of that rural, Minnesota cabin.

  Colin

  Before

  There’s trees and a lot of them. Pine, spruce, fur. They hold on tight to their green needles. Around them, the leaves of oaks and elms wither and fall to the ground. It’s Wednesday. Night has come and gone. We exit the highway and speed along a two-lane road. She holds on to the seat with every turn. I could slow down but I don’t because I just want to get there. There’s hardly anyone on the road. Every now and then we pass another car, some tourist going below the speed limit to enjoy the view. There’s no gas stations. No 7-Elevens. Just your run-of-the-mill ma-and-pa shop. The girl stares out the window as we pass. I’m sure she thinks we’re in Timbuktu. She doesn’t bother to ask. Maybe she knows. Maybe she doesn’t care.

  We continue north into the deepest, darkest corners of Minnesota. The traffic continues to thin beyond Two Harbors where the truck is nearly engulfed in needles and leaves. The road is full of potholes. They send us flying into the air and I curse every single one of them. Last thing we need is a flat tire.

  I’ve been here before. I used to know the guy who owns the place, a crappy little cabin in the middle of nowhere. It’s lost in the trees, the ground covered in a crunchy layer of dead leaves. The trees are little more than barren branches.

  I look at the cabin, and it’s just like I remember, just like when I was a kid. It’s a log home overlooking the lake. The lake looks cold. I’m sure it is. There’s plastic lawn chairs out on the deck and a tiny grill. The world is desolate, no one around for miles and miles.

  Exactly what we need.

  I glide the truck to a stop and we get out. Yanking a crowbar from the back, we make our way up a hill to the old home. The cabin looks abandoned, as I knew it would be, but I look for signs of life anyway: a car parked in back, dark shadows through the windows. There’s nothing.

  She stands motionless beside the truck. “Let’s go,” I say. Finally she climbs up the dozen or so steps to the deck. She stops to catch her breath. “Hurry up,” I say. For all I know, we’re being watched. I knock on the door first, just to make sure that we’re alone. And then I tell the girl to shut up and I listen. It’s silent.

  I use the crowbar to jimmy the door open. I break the door. I tell her I’ll fix it later. I slide an end table before the door to keep it closed. The girl stands with her back pressed to a wall made of red pine logs. She looks around. The room is small. There’s a saggy blue couch and ugly plastic red chair and a wood-burning stove in the corner that doesn’t give off an ounce of heat. There are photos of the cabin when it was being built, old black-and-whites shot with a box camera, and I remember being told by the guy about it when I was a kid, about how the people who built the home a hundred years ago picked this location not for the view, but for the row of pine trees just east of the cabin that shield it from the driving winds. As if he had any way of knowing what thoughts ran through their minds, those people, dead by now, who built the home. I remember, even back then, staring at his greasy receding hairline and pockmarked skin and thinking he’s full of crap.

  There’s the kitchen with mustard-colored appliances and linoleum floors and a table covered in a plastic tablecloth. Dust covers everything in sight. There are spiderwebs and a layer of dead Asian beetles on the windowsills. It smells.

  “Get used to it,” I say. I see the disgust in her eyes. I’m sure the judge’s house would never look like this.

  I flip the light switch and test the water. Nothing. The cabin was winterized before he took off for the winter. It’s not like we talk anymore, but I keep tabs on him anyway. I know his marriage fell through, again, know he got arrested a year or so ago for a DUI. I know that a couple weeks ago, as he does every fall, he packed his shit and left, back to Winona, where he works for the D.O.T., clearing ice and snow off the roads.

  I yank a phone from a phone jack and, finding a pair of scissors in a kitchen drawer, cut the wire. I glance at the girl, who hasn’t moved from the door. Her eyes are fixed on the plaid tablecloth. It’s ugly, I know. I step outside to pee. A minute later I return. She’s still staring at that damn tablecloth.

  “Why don’t you make yourself useful and start a fire,” I say.

  She puts her hands on her hips and stares at me, with that god-awful sweatshirt from the gas station. “Why don’t you?” she says, but her voice shakes, her hands shake, and I know she’s not as fearless as she wants me to think.

  I stomp outside and bring in three logs of firewood and drop them to the ground beside her feet. She jumps. I hand her some matches, which she lets drop to the floor, the carton opening and matches falling out. I tell her to pick them up. She ignores me.

  She needs to understand that I’m the one in the driver’s seat. Not her. She’s along for the ride, so long as she keeps her mouth shut and does what I say. I yank the gun from a pocket and attach the magazine. And I point it at her. At those pretty blue eyes that go from sure to not-so-sure as she whispers to me, “You’ve got this all wrong,” and as I cock the hammer, I tell her to pick up the matches and start a fire. And I’m wondering if this was a mistake, if I should’ve just handed her over to Dalmar. I don’t know what I expected from the girl, but this sure as hell isn’t it. I never figured I’d end up with an ingrate. She’s staring at me. A challenge. Seeing if I have it in me to kill her.

  I take a step closer and hold the gun to her head.

  And then she caves. She drops to the floor and with those shaking hands, picks up the matches. One by one. And drops them in the cardboard box.

  And I stand there with the gun pointed at her while she scrapes one match and then another against the striking surface. The flame burns her fingers before she can start a fire. She sucks on her finger and then tries again. And again. And again. She knows I’m watching her. By now, her hands are shaking so much she can’t light the damn match.

  “Let me do it,” I say as I come up quickly behind her. She flinches. I start a fire without any trouble and brush past the girl, into the kitchen, looking for food. There’s nothing, not even a box of stale crackers.

  “What now?” she asks but I ignore her. “What are we doing here?” I walk around the cabin, just to make sure. The water doesn’t work. Everything has been shut off for the winter. Not that I can’t fix it. It’s reassuring. When he winterized the house, he wasn’t planning on coming back until spring, the time of year he goes underground, lives like a hermit for six months of the year.

  I can hear her pacing about, waiting for someone or something to come barreling through the front door and kill her. I tell her to stop. I tell her to sit down. She stands there for a long time before she finally backs a plastic chair against the wall opposite the front door and drops down in the seat. She waits. It’s apocalyptic, watching her sit there, staring at the front door, waiting for the end to come.
br />   Night comes and goes. Neither of us sleeps.

  * * *

  The cabin will be cold by winter. It was never meant to be lived in beyond November 1. The only source of heat in the cabin is a wood-burning stove. There’s antifreeze in the john.

  The electricity had been shut off. That I fixed last night. I found the main breaker and flipped it back on. I literally heard the girl thank God for the 25 watts given off by an ugly table lamp. I made my way around the periphery of the cabin. I checked out a shed out back that’s filled with a bunch of crap nobody’d ever need, and a few things that might come in handy. Like a toolbox.

  Yesterday I told the girl she’d have to piss outside. I was too tired to deal with plumbing. I’d watched her walk down the stairs as if she was walking the plank. She hid herself behind a tree and slid down her pants. She squatted where she thought I couldn’t see, and then, because she wouldn’t dare touch her ass with a leaf, she opted to air dry. She only peed once.

  Today I find the main water valve and slowly let the water in. It sprays at first, then begins to flow normally. I flush the toilet and run the sinks to get rid of the antifreeze. I make a mental list of things we need: insulation and more duct tape for the pipes, toilet paper, food.

  She’s pretentious. Smug and arrogant, a prima donna. She ignores me because she’s pissed off and scared, but also because she thinks she’s too good for me. She sits on the ugly red chair and stares out the window. At what? At nothing. Just stares. She hasn’t said more than two words since morning.

  “Let’s go,” I say. I tell her to get back in the car. We’re going for a ride.

  “Where?” She doesn’t want to go anywhere. She’d rather stare out that damn window and count the leaves falling from the trees.

  “You’ll see.” She’s scared. She doesn’t like the uncertainty. She doesn’t move, but watches me with fake courage and deluded defiance when I know she’s fucking scared to death. “You want to eat, don’t you?”

  Apparently she does.

  And so we head outside. We get back in the truck and take off for Grand Marais.