“Oh, thank heaven,” the woman says as she welcomes herself onto our property.
She’s trespassing. This is our space. No one was supposed to be here. I feel suffocated, smothered. She’s got a water jug in a hand. She looks like she’s walked a hundred miles.
“Can we help you?” The words eject from my mouth before I can figure out what’s happening, what I’m going to do. My first thought: get the gun and shoot her. Drop her body in the lake and run. I don’t have the gun anymore, don’t know where the girl is keeping it. But I could tie her up while I ransack the cabin for its hiding place. Under the mattress, in the bedroom, or along some crevice in the log walls.
“I’ve got a flat. About a half mile down the road,” she says. “You’re the first cabin that wasn’t deserted. I’ve been walking....” she says, and then stops, to catch her breath. “Mind if I sit?” she asks, and when the girl manages a nod, she drops to the bottom step and guzzles from the water jug like someone who’s been stranded in the desert for days. I feel my hand reach out and clutch the girl’s, feel myself crush the bones of her hand until she lets out a whine.
We forget all about our dinner. But the woman reminds us. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she says, motioning to the plates on the floor. “I was just wondering if you might be able to help me fix the tire. Or call someone, maybe. My phone has no reception around here,” she says, holding it up for the girl and me to see. She says again that she’s so sorry to interrupt. Little does she know what she’s intruding on. It’s not just our dinner she’s disturbing.
My eyes drift to the girl. Now’s her chance, I think. She could tell the woman. Tell her how this crazy person kidnapped her, how he’s holding her captive in this cabin. I hold my breath, waiting for any number of things to go wrong. For the girl to tell, for the lady to be part of a ploy to catch me. She’s working undercover, maybe. Or for Dalmar. Or maybe she’s just some lady who watches the news and sooner or later she’s gonna realize that that girl is the one she’s been seeing on TV.
“We don’t have a phone,” I say, remembering how I dropped the girl’s cell in the garbage can in Janesville, how I cut the phone lines when we arrived at the cabin. Not that I can have her stepping foot inside our cabin, seeing the way we’ve been living for weeks: like two convicts on the run. “But I can help you,” I say begrudgingly.
“I don’t mean to be a bother,” the woman says, and the girl, simultaneously, says, “I’ll just stay here and do the dishes,” as she squats to the ground to retrieve our plates.
No chance in hell that’s gonna happen.
“You better come with,” I say to her. “We might need your help.”
But the old lady says, “Oh, please. I don’t want to drag you both out tonight,” and she pulls her flannel shirt around herself and says that it’s cold.
But of course I can’t leave her alone, though the woman promises to be an excellent assistant. She begs me not to drag my girlfriend out on a night like tonight. It’s cold out, she says. Nightfall is coming soon.
But I can’t leave her. If I leave her here, she might just run. I picture her, tearing through the woods as fast as she can, a mile or so away by the time I manage to fix the flat and get back. It would be dark by then, and there’d be no chance in hell I’d be able to search the woods in the dark and find her.
The woman apologizes for doing this, for being such an inconvenience. I picture my hands, closing in around her neck, compressing the jugular vein to stop the flow of oxygen to the brain. Maybe that’s what I should do.
“I’m just going to do the dishes,” the girl objects, quietly, “so we don’t have to worry about it later,” and she gives me a playful look, as if implying intimate plans later tonight.
“I think you should come,” I say gently, laying a hand on her arm as if I can’t possibly stand the idea of being apart.
“Romantic getaway?” the woman asks.
I say, “Yeah, something like that,” and then turn to the girl and whisper roughly, “You’re coming—” I lean closer and add, “Or that lady doesn’t leave here alive.” She’s deathly still for a split second. Then she sets the plates on the ground and we head for the truck and climb in, the woman and me in the front seat, the girl smashed in back. I swipe remnants of rope and duct tape from the passenger’s seat, hoping the woman didn’t see. I thrust them in the glove compartment and slam the door, and then turn to her and smile. “Where to?”
In the truck the woman tells us how she’s from southern Illinois. How she and some girlfriends stayed at some lodge and went canoeing in the Boundary Waters. She pulls out a camera from her purse and shows us digital images of the four old ladies: in the canoe, with sun hats on, drinking wine around a fire. This makes me feel better: not a trap, I think. Here’s the proof, the pictures. She was canoeing with girlfriends in the Boundary Waters.
But she, she tells us—like I give a shit—decided to stay an extra couple days. She’s a recent divorcée, in no rush to return to an abandoned home. A recent divorcée, I think. No one at home waiting for her return. There would be time before she was reported missing—days, if not more. Enough time for me to run, to be far enough away when someone stumbled upon her body.
“And then, there I was,” she says, “making my way back to civilization when I got a flat. Must’ve hit a rock,” she says, “or a nail.”
The girl responds impassively. “Must have,” she says. But I can hardly listen. We pull up behind a compact car. But before we get out, my eyes survey the thick woods that surround us. I peer through the tangle of trees for cops, binoculars, rifles. I check to make sure the tire is flat. It is. If this was an ambush, no one would go to such elaborate measures to trap me. By now, as I step from the truck and approach the abandoned car, I’d be facedown on the ground, someone on top of me with a pair of cuffs.
I see the woman, watching me, as I grab some tools out of the bed of the truck, and remove the hubcap and loosen the nuts, as I jack up the car and switch the tires. The ladies are talking, about canoeing and the northern Minnesota woods. About red wine and a moose, which the lady saw on her trip, a male with enormous antlers strolling through the trees. I make believe she’s trying hard to connect the dots, trying to remember whether or not she saw us on TV. But I remind myself that she’s been in the middle of nowhere with girlfriends. She was canoeing, sitting around a campfire, drinking wine. She wasn’t watching TV.
I thrust a flashlight in the girl’s hands and tell her to hold it. It’s getting dark out by now, and there isn’t a streetlight around. My eyes threaten her when they meet, reminding her to avoid words like gun and kidnap and help. I’ll kill them both. I know it. I wonder if she does.
When the woman asks about our trip, I see the girl turn to stone.
“How long are you staying?” the woman asks.
When the girl can’t answer, I say, “Just about another week.”
“Where are you all from?” she asks.
“Green Bay,” I say.
“Is that right?” she asks. “I saw the Illinois plates and thought—”
“Just haven’t gotten around to changing them, is all,” I say, cursing myself for the mistake.
“You’re from Illinois,” she asks, “originally?”
“Yep,” I say. But I don’t tell her where we’re from.
“I’ve got a cousin in Green Bay. Just outside, actually. In Suamico.” I’ve never heard of the damn place. But still, she’s talking. How her cousin is a principal at one of the middle schools. She’s got this dull brown hair, short like an old lady’s hair. She laughs when the conversation goes quiet. Nervous laughter. Then looks for something else to say. Anything else. “Are you all Packers fans?” she asks and I lie and say that I am.
I thrust on the spare as fast as I possibly can, then lower the car and tighten the lug nuts and stand, looking a
t the woman, wondering if I can just let her go—back to civilization where she might just figure out who we are and call the cops—or if I need to smash her head in with the wrench and leave her in the woods for good.
“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it,” she says, and I think of my own mother, lying in the abandoned woods to be eaten by bears and I nod and say it was okay. It’s dark enough out that I can barely see her and she can barely see me. I grip the wrench in my hand, wondering how hard I’d have to hit her to kill her. How many times? Wondering if she’d have it in her to fight or if she’d just drop to the ground and die.
“I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t found you.” And she steps forward to shake my hand and says, “I don’t think I caught your names.”
I clutch that wrench in my hand. I can feel it shake. It’s far better than killing her with my bare hands. Much less personal. I don’t have to stare into her eyes while she struggles. One good hit and it will all be done.
“Owen,” I say, clutching her cold veiny hand in mine, “and this is Chloe,” and she says that she’s Beth. I don’t know how long we all stand there, on the dark street in silence. My heart is beating fast as I eye a hammer in the toolbox. Maybe a hammer would be better.
But then I feel the girl’s hand on my arm, and she says to me, “We should go.” I turn to her and know she sees what I’m thinking, sees the way I’ve got that wrench gripped in my hand, ready to strike. “Let’s go,” she says again, her nails digging into my skin.
I drop the wrench into a toolbox and set it in the bed of the truck. I watch as the woman climbs into her car and drives away, slowly, headlights swerving through the thick trees.
I’m gasping for air, my hands a sweaty mess as I open the truck door and step inside and try to catch my breath.
Eve
After
We sit in the waiting room, James, Mia and me, Mia sandwiched in the middle like the cream filling of an Oreo cookie. I sit in silence with my legs crossed and my hands folded on my lap. I stare at a painting on the wall opposite her—one of many Norman Rockwells in the room—of an old man holding a stethoscope to a little girl’s doll. James sits with his legs crossed as well, ankle to knee, flipping through the pages of a Parents magazine. His breathing is loud and impatient; I ask him to please stop. We’ve been waiting more than thirty minutes to see the doctor, the wife of a judge friend of James’s. I wonder if Mia considers it odd that every magazine cover in the entire room is cloaked with babies.
People size her up. There are whispers and we hear Mia’s hushed name escape from the tongue of strangers. I pat her hand and tell her not to worry; just ignore them, I say, but it’s hard for either of us to do. James asks reception if they can hurry things along, and a short, redheaded woman disappears to see what is taking so long.
We haven’t told Mia the real reason why she’s here today. We didn’t discuss my suspicions. Instead we told her that we were worried that she hasn’t been feeling well lately and James suggested a doctor, one whose Russian name is nearly impossible to pronounce.
Mia told us she had her own doctor, one in the city who she’s been seeing for a half dozen years, but James shook his head and said no, Dr. Wakhrukov is the best. It never occurs to her that the woman is an ObGyn.
The nurse calls her name, though of course she says Mia and it takes an elbow from James to get her attention. She sets her magazine on the chair and I look at her with indulgent eyes and ask if she wants me to keep her company. “If you want,” she says, and I wait for James to disapprove but he is silent.
The nurse stares strangely at Mia as she weighs her and gets a height. She eyes poor Mia like she’s a celebrity of some sort, instead of the victim of a horrible crime. “I saw you on TV,” she says. The words come out sheepishly, as if she isn’t quite sure whether she said them aloud or managed to keep them in her head. “I read about you in the paper.”
Neither Mia nor I am quite sure what to say. Mia has seen the collection of newspaper articles I clipped during the time she was away. I tried to hide them in a place where she wouldn’t see, but she did anyway when she was looking for a needle and thread in my dresser drawer, to replace a button that had fallen from a blouse. I didn’t want Mia to see the articles for fear of what they might do to her. But she did nonetheless, reading each and every one until I interrupted her, reading about her own disappearance, about how the police had a suspect, about how, as time went on, it was feared she might be dead.
The nurse sends her to the bathroom to urinate in a cup. Moments later, I meet her in the examination room, where the nurse takes Mia’s blood pressure and pulse then asks that she undress and put on a gown. She says that Dr. Wakhrukov will be with us in a few minutes and as Mia begins to undress, I turn my back.
Dr. Wakhrukov is a somber, subdued woman who must be approaching sixty. She comes into the room quite abruptly and says to Mia, “When was your last menstrual period?”
Mia must find the question terribly odd. “I...I have no idea,” she says, and the doctor nods, remembering only then, perhaps, of Mia’s amnesia.
She says that she is going to perform a transvaginal ultrasound and covers a probe with a condom and some sort of gel. She asks that Mia sticks her feet into the stirrups and without an explanation, she plunges the device into her. Mia winces and begs to know what she’s doing, wondering what this has to do with her overwhelming fatigue, with the listlessness that makes it nearly impossible to rise from sleep in the morning.
I remain silent. I long to be in the waiting room, beside James, but I remind myself that Mia needs me here and let my eyes wander around the room, anything to avoid the doctor’s very intrusive examination and Mia’s obvious confusion and discomfort. I decide then that I should have told Mia about my suspicions. I should have explained that the fatigue and the morning sickness are not symptoms of acute stress disorder. But perhaps she wouldn’t have believed me.
The exam room, I find, is as sterile as the doctor. It’s cold enough in here to kill germs. Perhaps that is the intention. Mia’s bare flesh is coated with goose bumps. I’m certain it doesn’t help that she’s completely nude with the exception of a paper robe. Bright fluorescent lights line the ceiling, revealing every graying hair on the middle-aged doctor’s head. She doesn’t smile. She looks Russian: high cheekbones, a slender nose.
But when she speaks, she doesn’t sound Russian. “Confirming the pregnancy,” the doctor states, as if this is common knowledge, something Mia should know. My legs become anesthetized and I sink my way into an extra chair, one placed here for elated men who are soon to be fathers.
Not me, I think. This chair is not meant for me.
“Babies develop a heartbeat twenty-two days after conception. You can’t always see it this early, but there is one here. It’s tiny, hardly noticeable. See?” she asks as she turns the monitor to Mia. “That little flicker of movement?” she asks as she points a finger at a dark blob that is practically still.
“What?” Mia asks.
“Here, let me see if I can get a better look,” the doctor says and she presses on the probe, which delves farther into Mia’s vagina. Mia squirms in apparent pain and discomfort, and the doctor asks her to hold still.
But Mia’s question was something other than what the doctor interpreted it to be. It wasn’t that Mia couldn’t see where her finger was pointing. I watch as Mia lets a hand fall to her abdomen.
“It just can’t be.”
“Here,” the doctor says as she removes the probe and hands Mia a tiny piece of paper, a whimsy of blacks and whites and grays like a lovely piece of abstract art. It’s a photograph, much like the one of Mia herself long before she became a child. I clutch my purse in my shaking hands, ravaging its insides for a tissue.
“What’s this?” Mia asks.
“It’s the baby. A printout from t
he ultrasound.” She tells Mia to go ahead and sit up, and pulls a latex glove from her hand, which she tosses into the garbage can. Her words are lifeless as if she’s given this lecture a thousand times: Mia is to come back every four weeks until she reaches thirty-two weeks; then biweekly and a few weeks later, every week. There are tests they need to run: blood tests and an amniocentesis if she wants, a glucose tolerance test, a test for Group B Strep.
At twenty weeks, Dr. Wakhrukov tells Mia, she can find out the sex of the baby if she’s interested. “Is that something you might want to do?”
“I don’t know” is all Mia manages to say.
The doctor asks if Mia has any questions. She has only one, but she can barely find her voice. She tries, and then, clearing her throat, tries again. It’s spineless and faint, little more than a whisper. “I’m pregnant?” she asks.
This is every little girl’s dream. They begin thinking about it when they’re too young to know where babies come from. They carry around their baby dolls and mother them and dream of baby names. When Mia was a girl it was always overtly flowery names that flowed off the tip of a tongue: Isabella and Samantha and Savannah. Then there was that phase where she thought everything should end in i: Jenni, Dani and Lori. It never crossed her mind that she might have a boy.
“You are. About five weeks.”
This is not the way it’s supposed to be.
She rubs a hand against her uterus and hopes to feel something: a heartbeat or a small kick. Of course it would be too early and yet she hopes to feel the flutter of movement inside her. But she feels nothing. I can see it in her eyes when she turns and finds me weeping. She feels empty. She feels hollow inside.
She confides to me, “It can’t be. I can’t be pregnant.”
Dr. Wakhrukov pulls up a swivel stool and sits down. She drapes the gown over Mia’s legs and then says, her voice softer now, “You don’t remember this happening?”