The Good Girl (25 page)

I don’t go out right away.

I make coffee. I find my coat. I take my time.

“Hey,” I offer as I step outside in my bare feet. I hand her a mug of coffee. “Thought this would warm you up.”

“Oh.” She’s startled. She eyes my bare feet and says, “Your shoes,” but before she can get them off, I stop her. I say that I don’t mind. I like the look of it, her in my shoes. Her lying beside me in bed. I could get used to this.

“It’s cold out here,” I say. It’s fucking cold. Maybe twenty degrees.

“It is?” she asks.

I don’t answer.

“I’ll leave you alone,” I say. Seems to me someone who chooses to freeze their ass off on a day like today wants to be alone.

It’s not as though anything happened, but lying beside her for all those hours just for the hell of it, just to be
close
to her, to feel the softness of her skin and the way her chest rattled when she snored,
that
happened.

“Your feet must be freezing.”

I glance at my feet. They stand on a thin layer of snow and ice. “They are,” I say. I turn to go inside.

“Thanks for the coffee.”

I don’t know what I expect her to say, but I expect her to say something.

“Yep,” I say and let the door slam closed.

I don’t know how much time passes—enough that I start to get pissed. Pissed at myself for being pissed at her. I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t give a shit.

But then she appears. Her cheeks are ruby-red from the cold. Her hair cascades around her. “I don’t want to be alone,” she says.

She drops the blanket at the door.

“I can’t remember the last time anyone told me I was beautiful,” she says.

Beautiful
doesn’t do her justice.

We stare at each other across the room, taking it all in. Reminding ourselves to breathe.

When she comes to me, she moves humbly. Her hands touch with caution. The last time I pushed her away, but the last time was different.

She was a different woman.

I was a different man.

I run my hand the length of her hair. My hands move down her arms. They memorize her fingers and the shape of her back. She stares at me with this look I’ve never seen before, not on her or any other woman. Trust. Respect. Desire. I commit to memory every freckle, every blemish on her face. I learn the shape of her ears and run a finger across the arch of her lips.

She takes my hand and leads me to the bedroom. “You don’t have to do this,” I say. God knows she’s no longer my prisoner. What I want is for her to want to be here.

We pause in the doorway. Her lips find their way to mine, and I hold her head in my hands. My fingers stroke her hair. Her arms are locked behind my back. She doesn’t let go.

* * *

What changes is the way we touch. There’s contact, something that we used to avoid. We graze past each other when we enter a room. She runs her fingers through my hair. I let my hand linger on her back. She traces the lines of my face. We share the same bed.

Our hands and fingers memorize what our eyes could not. An uneven scalp. Patches of dry skin.

There is nothing frivolous about it. We don’t flirt. We’re beyond that. We don’t dredge up past relationships. We don’t try and make the other jealous. We don’t create pet names. We don’t mention the word
love.

We kill time. We talk. We list all the crazy things you see in the city. The homeless pushing shopping carts around. Jesus freaks walking around with crucifixes on their backs. Pigeons.

She asks my favorite color. I say I don’t have one. She asks my favorite food. I let a spoonful of slop drop into a bowl. “Anything other than this,” I say.

She asks what would have happened to her if we didn’t come here. If I’d handed her over and collected my reward.

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Would I be dead?”

We learn things we didn’t know before. That skin-to-skin contact helps keep us warm. That SpaghettiOs and baked beans do mix. That two can fit on the shaky armchair.

We’re eating some meal. What it is, I don’t know. We eat out of necessity. There’s no such thing as breakfast, lunch or dinner. It’s all the same. It all tastes like shit.

She’s staring at me with those eyes of hers. They demand an answer. “I don’t know,” I say again. I see her being ripped from my car and tossed into the van. Her hands bound and her eyes blindfolded. I hear her cry.

I push my bowl away. I’m not hungry. I’ve lost my appetite.

She stands and reaches for my bowl. She says she’ll do the dishes tonight, but I gently clench her wrist when it comes within reach and say to her, “Leave it.”

We settle by the window where we watch the moon, a sliver in the sky. The clouds flicker by and sometimes we see the moon, sometimes we don’t.

“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.