I don’t know how long I’m gone. Hours at least. When I come back, I slam the door shut. I appear in the bathroom doorway with a knife. I see the girl start to panic but I don’t say a thing. I drop down beside her and cut the rope. I reach out a hand to help her to her feet. But she pushes me away. I lose my balance, reaching for the wall. Her legs are weak. She runs fingers across a rope burn on each wrist, raw and red.
“What did you do that for?” I ask, grabbing her hands for a closer look. She sat there all day and tried to get out of the rope.
She pushes me as hard as she possibly can. It isn’t much. I grab her by the arm and block the blow. It hurts, I can tell, the way I seize her and don’t let go.
“You think I could just leave you here?” I ask. I throw her away from me. I’m already walking away. “Your face is all over the TV. I couldn’t bring you with me.”
“You did last time.”
“You’re famous now.”
“And you?”
“No one gives a shit where I am.”
“You’re lying.”
I stand in the kitchen, unpacking. The empty paper bags fall to the floor. Firewood. She eyes the new fishing pole that’s leaned against the door.
“Where were you?”
“Getting all this shit.” I’m short. I’m getting mad. I slam the canned food into the cabinet, bang the doors shut. And then I stop. I stop unpacking long enough to look at her. It doesn’t happen often. “If I wanted you dead, you’d be dead. There’s a lake out there close to freezing. They wouldn’t find you until spring.”
She looks out the window at the frigid lake in the afternoon haze. It makes her shudder, the thought of her own lifeless body submerged below the surface.
And then I do it.
I reach into the cabinet and pull the gun. She turns to run. I grasp her by the arm and force the gun into her hands. It surprises us both. The feeling of the gun, the heavy metal in her hands, immobilizes her. “Take it,” I insist. She doesn’t want it. “Take the gun,” I scream. She holds it in her shaking hands and it nearly drops to the floor. I grab her hands and bind them around the gun. I force her finger onto the trigger. “Right there. You feel that? That’s how you shoot it. You point it at me and shoot. You think I’m lying to you? You think I’m going to hurt you? It’s loaded. So you just point it at me and shoot.”
She stands, comatose, with the gun in her hands. Wondering what the hell just happened. She raises it for a second, the weight of it much heavier than she ever expected. She points it at me and I stare at her, daring her. Shoot it. Shoot the gun. Her eyes are skittish, her hands wobbly on the weapon. She doesn’t have it in her to shoot that gun. I know that. But still, I wonder.
We stand like that, twenty seconds, thirty seconds, maybe more, before she lowers it before herself and walks out of the room.
Eve
After
She tells me about her dream. The old Mia would never do this. The old Mia would never tell me much of what was on her mind. But this dream is really bothering her, a reoccurring dream that she says she’s had night after night for I don’t know how many nights now, but it’s always the same, or so she says. She’s sitting on a white plastic lawn chair inside the all-encompassing great room of a tiny cabin. The chair is pressed up against the wall opposite the front door and she’s curled up on the chair, a scratchy blanket enveloping her legs. She’s freezing cold, shaking to the point of uncontrollable, though she’s sound asleep, her exhausted body toppling over the arm of the chair. She’s wearing a frumpy maroon sweatshirt with an embroidered loon on the front, the words L’étoile du Nord stitched beneath.
In the dream she watches herself sleep. The darkness of the cabin closes in around her, smothering her. She can feel the apprehension and something else. Something more. Fear. Terror. Foreboding.
When he touches her arm she winces. His hand, she tells me, is as cold as ice. She feels the gun on her lap, bearing down on legs that are now numb, having been curled into a knot all night. The sun is up, gleaming through the filthy windows, the outdated plaid curtains that remain drawn. She seizes the gun, points it at him and cocks the hammer. Her expression is cold. Mia knows nothing about guns. Everything she knows, she says, he showed her.
The gun feels awkward and heavy in her shaking hands. But she can feel the resolve in her dreams: she could shoot him. She could do it. She could end his life.
He is unruffled, motionless. Before her his posture straightens until he is upright. He looks rested though his eyes still show distress: the furrowed eyebrows, the pessimism that returns her immovable stare. His skin is unshaven, days of stubble multiplying into a mustache and beard. He’s just rolled out of bed. His face is covered with creases and in the corner of his eyes is sleep. His clothes are rumpled from having been slept in all night. He stands beside the lawn chair and even from the distance she can smell morning breath.
“Chloe,” he says with this tranquilizing voice. She says that it is gentle and reassuring and even though she’s certain they both know he could yank the weapon from her convulsing hands and kill her, he doesn’t try. “I made eggs.”
And then she wakes up.
There are two things that jump out to me: the words L’étoile du Nord on the sweatshirt, and eggs. Well, that and the fact that Mia—nom de plume Chloe—is holding a gun. I find my laptop in the afternoon, after Mia has retreated to her bedroom for one of many daily naps. I find a search engine and type in the French words I should know from a high school class about a million years ago but I don’t. It’s one of the first hits on the page: Star of the North, the Minnesota state motto. Of course.
If the dream is a memory, not a dream at all, a recollection of her time in L’étoile du Nord, then why is she holding a gun? And more importantly perhaps, why didn’t she use the gun to shoot Colin Thatcher? How did this incident end? I want to know.
But I reassure myself that this dream is only symbolic. I search for the meaning of dreams, specifically eggs. I come across a dream-interpretation dictionary and it’s in the definition that everything begins to make sense. I picture Mia at that very moment, lying on her bed, curled up in the fetal position under the covers. She said she didn’t feel well when she went up to bed; I can’t recall how many times I’ve heard that now and I’ve repeatedly chalked it up to fatigue and stress. But I understand now that it may be more. My fingers freeze on the keyboard, I begin to cry. Could it be?
They say that morning sickness is hereditary. I was sick as a dog with both girls, worse so with Grace. I’ve heard that it’s often worse with a first child, and rightly so. I spent many days and nights hunkered down over the toilet, vomiting until there was nothing to throw up but bile. I was tired all the time, the lethargy like nothing I’d ever known before; it exhausted me just to open my eyes. James didn’t understand. Of course he didn’t; how could he? It was something I never understood until I lived through it, though over and over again I wished to die.
According to this dream-interpretation dictionary, eggs in one’s dreams may represent something new and fragile. Life in its earliest form.
Colin
Before
I woke up early. I dragged that fishing pole outside, out to the lake with a tackle box I picked up at the store. I spent a small fortune on fishing supplies—an auger and skimmer, too, for when the lake freezes over. Not that I plan to be here that long.
She pulls a sweatshirt over her head. She hikes out to the lake. Her hair is still wet from a bath and the ends become crisp in the cold air. Until she arrives, it’s quiet outside. The sun is just beginning to rise. I’m lost in thought, trying hard to convince myself that everything back home is okay. Trying to satisfy the guilt by brainwashing myself into believing that there’s plenty of food in the fridge, that she hasn’t fallen down and broken a hip. And just as I start to believe it,
some new fear comes to mind: that I forgot to set the heat and she’ll freeze to death, that she leaves the front door open and some critter lets itself in. And then the rationalization sets in, the excuses: I did set the heat. Of course I did. I spend ten minutes picturing myself setting the damn heat at sixty-eight degrees.
At least by now the cash should’ve arrived, enough money to get her through. For a while.
I brought a lawn chair down from the cabin and sit with a mug of coffee by my feet. I stare at what the girl’s wearing as she approaches the lake. Her pants do nothing to block the wind. There are no leaves left in the trees to slow it down. It drives her frozen hair around her face. It slips up the leg of her khakis and down the neck of her shirt. She’s already shaking.
I did set the heat. Of course I did. Sixty-eight degrees.
“What are you doing out here?” I ask. “You’re going to freeze your ass off.”
And yet, she sits down, uninvited, on the banks of the lake. I could tell her to go back inside, but I don’t.
The ground is damp. She pulls her legs into her and wraps her arms around them to keep warm.
We don’t talk. We don’t need to. She’s just thankful to be outside.
The cabin smells awful, like mold or mildew. It pierces the nose even after all these days when you think we’d be used to it. It’s as cold inside as out. We have to conserve as much wood as we can until winter. Until then, we only light the stove at night. During the day the temperature in the cabin must plummet to the fifties. I know she’s never warm, though she bundles layer over layer. The winter this far north is harsh and unforgiving, cold like we’ve never known before. In days it will be November, the final calm before the storm.
A small group of Common loons soars above the lake heading south. The last few that remain this far north. It’s the chicks who leave now, those who were born this spring and are only now gaining enough strength for the long journey. The others are gone.
I’m guessing she’s never fished before, but I have. I’ve been fishing since I was a kid. I hold the rod, my body still. I watch the bobber on the surface of the water. She knows enough to keep her mouth shut. She knows the sound of her voice will scare the fish away.
“Here,” I say, balancing the rod between my knees. I take off my coat, a big insulated rain jacket with a hood. I hand it to her. “Put it on before you freeze to death.”
She doesn’t know what to say. She doesn’t even say thanks. This isn’t something we do. She slips her arms into crevices that are two times too big for her and after a minute, she stops shaking. She drapes the hood over her head and takes refuge for winter. I’m not cold. If I was, I wouldn’t admit it.
A fish bites. I stand to my feet and jerk the fishing line to set the hook. I begin reeling, pulling on the line to keep it tight. She turns her back when a fish comes flying out of the water, its fin kicking for dear life. I drop it to the ground and watch its body thrash about until it’s dead.
“You can look now,” I say. “It’s dead.”
But she can’t. She doesn’t look. Not until my body blocks the view. I hover over the fish, and I slide the hook out of its mouth. Then I slip a worm onto the end of the hook and hold the rod out for the girl.
“No, thanks,” she says.
“You ever fish before?”
“No.”
“Not the kind of thing they teach you where you come from?”
She knows what I think of her. Spoiled little rich girl. She has yet to prove otherwise.
She snatches the rod from my hands. She isn’t used to people telling her what to do. “You know what you’re doing?” I ask.
“I can figure it out,” she snaps. But she doesn’t so much as have a clue so I’m forced to help her cast the line. She drops down onto the shoreline and she waits. She wills the fish away. I sit down on my chair and sip from the mug of coffee, cold by now.
The time passes. I don’t know how much time. I go inside for more coffee and to take a piss. When I come back, she tells me she’s surprised I didn’t tie her to a tree. The sun is up, trying hard to warm the day. It’s not working.
“Consider yourself lucky.”
In time I ask about her father.
At first she’s quiet, staring at the water, deathly still. She takes in the trees’ long shadows on the lake, the twitter of birds. “What about him?” she asks.
“What’s he like?” I ask. But really, I know. I just want to hear her say it.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
We’re quiet for a moment. Then she breaks the silence.
“My father grew up rich,” she says. “Old money,” she says and then tells me: his family’s always had money. For generations. They have more money than they know what to do with. “Enough to feed a small country,” she says, but they don’t. They keep it all to themselves.
She tells me how her father’s career is high-profile. I know this. “People know him,” she says. “All this goes to his big head. My father’s never-ending desire for more money has made him corrupt. I wouldn’t put much past him—accepting bribes, for one. He’s just never been caught.
“Image is everything to him,” she says. Then she tells me about her sister. Grace. She says that she, like her father, is pretentious and hollow and hedonistic. I give her a look. Grace is not the only one who’s all these things. She’s the daughter of a wealthy bastard. Her life’s been delivered on a silver platter.
I know more about her than she’d like to think.
“Think whatever you want,” she says. “But my father and I are different people.” Very different, she says.
She tells me that she and her father never got along. Not when she was a child, not now.
“We don’t talk much. Occasionally, but it’s all a ruse. In case someone’s keeping tabs.”
Grace, a lawyer, is her father’s protégée. “She’s everything I never was,” the girl says. “She’s his mirror image. While my father never financed my college education, he put Grace through both college and law school. He bought her a condo in the Loop, which she could have paid for herself. Myself, I pay eight hundred and fifty dollars every month in rent and most months, that about breaks the bank. I asked my father to donate to the school I work at. Start a scholarship fund, maybe. He laughed. But he has Grace working at a top firm downtown. She charges clients over three hundred dollars for an hour of her time. Within a few years she’ll likely make partner. She’s everything my father ever wanted me to be.”
“And you?”
“I’m the other one, the one whose mistakes he had to cover up.”
She says that she was never of interest to her father. Not when she was putting on an impromptu show at the age of five. Not when she was hanging her first piece in a gallery at the age of nineteen. “Grace, on the other hand, her very presence could change his mood. She’s bright, like him, and articulate, her words wrought with efficacy rather than—as my father liked to call it—delusion. These grand delusions I had of one day being an artist. My mother’s deluded sense of reality.”
What pisses me off is that she talks like she got the short end of the stick. Like her life is full of hard knocks. She doesn’t have a fucking clue what tough luck is like. I think of the mint-green trailer home, of sitting out a storm in a makeshift shelter while we watched our home blow over. “I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?” I ask.
A bird begins to warble. In the distance, another returns its call.
Her voice is quiet. “I never asked you to feel sorry for me. You asked a question. I gave you an answer,” she confides.
“You’re just full of self-pity, aren’t you?”
“It isn’t like that.”
“Always the victim.” I’m unsympathetic. This girl doesn’t know a damn thing about tough luck.
&nbs
p; “No,” she hisses at me. She thrusts the fishing rod into my hands. “Take it,” she says. She unzips the coat and cringes at the cold air that envelops her. She drops it to the ground beside me. I let it lay there. I don’t say a thing. “I’m going in.”
And she walks past the dead fish whose eyes stare at her with contempt for letting it die.
She’s not twenty feet away when I say, “What about the ransom?”
“What about it?” she snaps. She stands in the shade of a big tree, her hands on her hips. Her hair whirls around her in the cold October air.
“Would your dad have paid the ransom?” I ask. If he hates her as much as she makes believe, he wouldn’t pay a penny for her return.
She’s thinking about it. I know she is. It’s a damn good question.
If her father didn’t pay the ransom, then she’d be dead.
“I guess we’ll never know,” she says, and then she goes. I hear her feet smashing the leaves on the ground. I hear the squeal of a screen door opening in the distance. And then I hear it slam shut. I know that I’m alone.
Gabe
Before
I’m driving down the world’s most perfect, tree-lined street. Red maple and yellow aspen trees canopy over the narrow street, their leaves raining down. It’s too early for trick-or-treaters, the little misfits still in school for an hour or two. But the million-dollar homes wait for them, tucked behind impeccable landscaping and lawns that actually necessitate a riding lawn mower...though no one around here dares mow their own lawn. They’re all decked out with hay bales and corn stalks and perfectly round pumpkins with the unblemished stalks.
The mailman is closing in on the Dennetts’ mailbox when I pull into the brick drive. I settle my piece-of-shit car beside Mrs. Dennett’s sedan and wave a friendly hello as though I might just live here. I make my way to the brick mailbox, more spacious than my own john.