“I don’t know. She has a job. She gets paid. She supports herself. I don’t ask questions.”
“Mrs. Dennett?”
“She loves her job. She just loves it. Teaching is what she always wanted to do.”
Mia is an art teacher. High school. I jot this down in my notes as a reminder.
The judge wants to know if I think that’s important. “Might be,” I respond.
“And why’s that?”
“Your Honor, I’m just trying to understand your daughter. Understand who she is. That’s all.”
Mrs. Dennett is now on the verge of tears. Her blue eyes begin to swell and redden as she pathetically attempts to suppress the tiny drips. “You think something has happened to Mia?”
I’m thinking to myself: isn’t that why you called me here? You think something has happened to Mia, but instead I say, “I think we act now and thank God later when this all turns out to be a big misunderstanding. I’m certain she’s fine, I am, but I’d hate to overlook this whole thing without at least looking into it.” I’d kick myself if—if—it turned out everything wasn’t fine.
“How long has Mia been living on her own?” I ask.
“It’ll be seven years in thirty days,” Mrs. Dennett states point-blank.
I’m taken aback. “You keep count? Down to the day?”
“It was her eighteenth birthday. She couldn’t wait to get out of here.”
“I won’t pry,” I say, but the truth is, I don’t have to. I can’t wait to get out of here, too. “Where does she live now?”
The judge responds. “An apartment in the city. Close to Clark and Addison.”
I’m an avid Chicago Cubs fan and so this is thrilling for me. Just mention the words Clark or Addison and my ears perk up like a hungry puppy. “Wrigleyville. That’s a nice neighborhood. Safe.”
“I’ll get you the address,” Mrs. Dennett offers.
“I would like to check it out, if you don’t mind. See if any windows are broken, signs of forced entry.”
Mrs. Dennett’s voice quavers as she asks, “You think someone broke into Mia’s apartment?”
I try to be reassuring. “I just want to check. Mrs. Dennett, does the building have a doorman?”
“No.”
“A security system? Cameras?”
“How are we supposed to know that?” the judge growls.
“Don’t you visit?” I ask before I can stop myself. I wait for an answer, but it doesn’t come.
Eve
After
I zip her coat for her and pull a hood over her head, and we walk out into the uncompromising Chicago wind. “We need to hurry now,” I say, and she nods though she doesn’t ask why. The gusts nearly knock us over as we make our way to James’s SUV, parked a half-dozen feet away, and as I reach for her elbow, the only thing I’m certain of is that if one of us falls, we are both going down. The parking lot is a sheet of ice four days after Christmas. I do my best to shield her from the cold and the relentless wind, pulling her into me and wrapping an arm around her waist to keep her warm, though my own petite figure is quite smaller than her own and I’m certain I fail miserably at the task.
“We go back next week,” I say to Mia as she climbs into the passenger seat, my voice loud over the clatter of doors slamming and seat belts locking. The radio shouts at us, the car’s engine on the verge of death on this bitter day. Mia flinches and I ask James to please turn the radio off. In the backseat, Mia is quiet, staring out the window and watching the cars, three of them, as they encircle us like a shiver of hungry sharks, their drivers meddlesome and ravenous. One lifts a camera to his eye and the flash all but blinds us.
“Where the hell are the cops when you need them?” James asks no one in particular, and then blares the horn until Mia’s hands rise up to cover her ears from the horrible sound. The cameras flash again. The cars loiter in the parking lot, their engines running, vivid smoke discharging from the exhaust pipes and into the gray day.
Mia looks up and sees me watching her. “Did you hear me, Mia?” I ask, my voice kind. She shakes her head, and I can all but hear the bothersome thought that runs through her mind: Chloe. My name is Chloe. Her blue eyes are glued to my own, which are red and watery from holding back tears, something that has become commonplace since Mia’s return, though as always James is there, reminding me to keep quiet. I try hard to make sense of it all, affixing a smile to my face, forced and yet entirely honest, and the unspoken words ramble through my mind: I just can’t believe you’re home. I’m careful to give Mia elbow room, not quite certain how much she needs, but absolutely certain I don’t want to overstep. I see her malady in every gesture and expression, in the way she stands, no longer brimming with self-confidence as the Mia I know used to be. I understand that something dreadful has happened to her.
I wonder, though, does she sense that something has happened to me?
Mia looks away. “We go back to see Dr. Rhodes next week,” I say and she nods in response. “Tuesday.”
“What time?” James asks.
“One o’clock.”
He consults his smartphone with a single hand, and then tells me that I will have to take Mia to the appointment alone. He says there is a trial, which he cannot miss. And besides, he says, he’s sure I can handle this alone. I tell him that of course I can handle it, but I lean in and whisper into his ear, “She needs you now. You’re her father.” I remind him that this is something we discussed and agreed to and how he promised. He says that he will see what he can do but the doubt weighs heavily on my mind. I can tell that he believes his unwavering work schedule does not allow time for family crises such as this.
In the backseat, Mia stares out the window watching the world fly by as we soar down I-94 and out of the city. It’s approaching three-thirty on a Friday afternoon, the weekend of the New Year, and so traffic is an ungodly mess. We come to a stop and wait and then inch forward at a snail’s pace, no more than thirty miles per hour on the expressway. James hasn’t the patience for it. He stares into the rearview mirror, waiting for the paparazzi to reappear.
“So, Mia,” James says, trying to pass the time. “That shrink says you have amnesia.”
“Oh, James,” I beg, “please, not now.”
My husband is not willing to wait. He wants to get to the bottom of this. It’s been barely a week since Mia has been home, living with James and me since she’s not fit to be on her own. I think of Christmas day, when the tired maroon car pulled sluggishly into the drive with Mia in tow. I remember the way James, nearly always detached, nearly always blasé, forced himself through the front door and was the first to greet her, to gather the emaciated woman in his arms on our snow-covered drive as if it had been him, rather than me, who spent those long, fearful months in mourning.
But since then, I’ve watched as that momentary relief shriveled away, as Mia, in her oblivion, became tiresome to James, just another one of the cases on his ever growing caseload rather than our daughter.
“Then when?”
“Later, please. And besides, that woman is a professional, James,” I insist. “A psychiatrist. She is not a shrink.”
“Fine then, Mia, that psychiatrist says you have amnesia,” he repeats, but Mia doesn’t respond. He watches her in the rearview mirror, these dark brown eyes that hold her captive. For a fleeting moment, she does her best to stare back, but then her eyes find their way to her hands, where she becomes absorbed in a small scab. “Do you wish to comment?” he asks.
“That’s what she told me, too,” she says, and I remember the doctor’s words as she sat across from James and me in the unhappy office—Mia having been excused and sent to the waiting room to browse through outdated fashion magazines—and gave us, verbatim, the textbook definition of acute stress disorder, and all I could think of were those p
oor Vietnam veterans.
He sighs. I can tell that James finds this implausible, the fact that her memory could vanish into thin air. “So, how does it work, then? You remember I’m your father and this is your mother, but you think your name is Chloe. You know how old you are and where you live and that you have a sister, but you don’t have a clue about Colin Thatcher? You honestly don’t know where you’ve been for the past three months?”
I jump in, to Mia’s defense, and say, “It’s called selective amnesia, James.”
“You’re telling me she picks and chooses things she wants to remember?”
“Mia doesn’t do it—her subconscious or unconscious or something like that is doing it. Putting painful thoughts where she can’t find them. It’s not something she’s decided to do. It’s her body’s way of helping her cope.”
“Cope with what?”
“The whole thing, James. Everything that happened.”
He wants to know how we fix it. This, I don’t know for certain, but I suggest, “Time, I suppose. Therapy. Drugs. Hypnosis.”
He scoffs at this, finding hypnosis as bona fide as amnesia. “What kind of drugs?”
“Antidepressants, James,” I respond. I turn around and, with a pat on Mia’s hand, say, “Maybe her memory will never come back and that will be okay, too.” I admire her for a moment, a near mirror image of myself, though taller and younger and, unlike me, years and years away from wrinkles and the white locks of hair that are beginning to intrude upon my mass of dirty blond.
“How will antidepressants help her remember?”
“They’ll make her feel better.”
He is always entirely candid. This is one of James’s flaws. “Well hell, Eve, if she can’t remember then what’s there to feel bad about?” he asks and our eyes stray out the windows at the passing traffic, the conversation considered through.
Gabe
Before
The high school where Mia Dennett teaches is located on the northwest side of Chicago in an area known as North Center. It’s a relatively good neighborhood, close to her home, a mostly Caucasian population with an average monthly rent over a thousand dollars. This all bodes well for her. If she was working in Englewood I wouldn’t be so sure. The purpose of the school is to provide an education to high school dropouts. They offer vocational training, computer training, life skills, et cetera, in small settings. Enter Mia Dennett, the art teacher, whose purpose is to add the nontraditional flair that’s been taken out of traditional high schools, those needing more time for math and science and to bore the hell out of sixteen-year-old misfits who couldn’t give a damn.
Ayanna Jackson meets me in the office. I have to wait a good fifteen minutes for her because she’s in the middle of class, and so I squeeze my body onto one of those small emasculating plastic school chairs and wait. This is something that certainly does not come easy to me. I’m far from the six-pack of my former days, though I like to think I wear the extra weight well. The secretary keeps her eyes locked on me the entire time as if I’m a student sent down to have a chat with the principal. This is a scene with which I’m sadly accustomed, many of my high school days spent in this very predicament.
“You’re trying to find Mia,” she says as I introduce myself as Detective Gabe Hoffman. I tell her that I am. It’s been nearly four days since anyone has seen or spoken to the woman and so she’s been officially designated as missing, much to the judge’s chagrin. It’s been in the papers, on the news, and every morning when I roll out of bed I tell myself that today will be the day I find Mia Dennett and become a hero.
“When’s the last time you saw Mia?”
“Tuesday.”
“Where?”
“Here.”
We make our way into the classroom and Ayanna—she begs me not to call her Ms. Jackson—invites me to sit down on one of those plastic chairs attached to the broken, graffiti-covered desk.
“How long have you known Mia?”
She sits at her desk in a comfy leather chair and I feel like a kid, though in reality, I top her by a good foot. She crosses her long legs, the slit of a black skirt falling open and exposing flesh. “Three years. As long as Mia’s been teaching.”
“Does Mia get along with everyone? The students? Staff?”
She’s solemn. “There’s no one Mia doesn’t get along with.”
Ayanna goes on to tell me about Mia. About how, when she first arrived at the alternative school, there was a natural grace about her, about how she empathized with the students and behaved as if she, too, had grown up on the streets of Chicago. About how Mia organized fundraisers for the school to pay for needy students’ supplies. “You never would have known she was a Dennett.”
According to Ms. Jackson, most new teachers don’t last long in this type of educational setting. With the market the way it is these days, sometimes an alternative school is the only place hiring and so college grads accept the position until something else comes along. But not Mia. “This was where she wanted to be.
“Let me show you something,” she says and she pulls a stack of papers from a letter tray on her desk. She walks closer and sits down on one of the student desks beside me. She sets the mound of paper before me and what I see first is a scribble of bad penmanship, worse than my own. “This morning the students worked on their journal entries for the week,” she explains and as my eyes peruse the work, I see the name Ms. Dennett more times than I can count.
“We do journal entries each week. The assignment this week,” she explains, “was to tell me what they wanted to do with themselves after high school.” I mull this over for a minute, seeing the words Ms. Dennett splattered over almost every sheet of paper. “But ninety-nine percent of the students are thinking of nothing but Mia,” she concludes, and I can hear, by the dejection in her voice, that she, too, can think of little but Mia.
“Did Mia have trouble with any of the students?” I ask, just to be sure. But I know what her answer is going to be before she shakes her head.
“What about a boyfriend?” I ask.
“I guess,” she says, “if you could call him that. Jason something-or-other. I don’t know his last name. Nothing serious. They’ve only been dating a few weeks, maybe a month, but no more.” I jot this down. The Dennetts made no reference to a boyfriend. Is it possible they don’t know? Of course it’s possible. With the Dennett family, I’m beginning to learn, anything is possible.
“Do you know how to get in touch with him?”
“He’s an architect,” she says. “Some firm off Wabash. She meets him there most Friday nights for happy hour. Wabash and...I don’t know, maybe Wacker? Somewhere along the river.” Sounds like a wild-goose chase to me, but I’m up for it. I make note of this information in my yellow pad.
The fact that Mia Dennett has an elusive boyfriend is great news for me. In cases like this, it’s always the boyfriend. Find Jason and I’m sure to find Mia as well, or what’s left of her. Considering she’s been gone for four days, I’m starting to think this story might have an unhappy ending. Jason works by the Chicago River: bad news. God knows how many bodies are pulled out of that river every year. He’s an architect, so he’s smart, good at solving problems, like how to discard a hundred-and-twenty-pound body without anyone noticing.
“If Mia and Jason were dating,” I ask, “is it odd that he isn’t trying to find her?”
“You think Jason might be involved?”
I shrug. “I know if I had a girlfriend and I hadn’t spoken to her in four days, I might be a little concerned.”
“I guess,” she agrees. She stands from the desk and begins to erase the chalkboard. It leaves tiny remnants of dust on her black skirt. “He didn’t call the Dennetts?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Dennett have no idea that there’s a boyfriend in the picture. As far as they’re conce
rned, Mia is single.”
“Mia and her parents aren’t close. They have certain...ideological differences.”
“I gather that.”
“I don’t think it’s the kind of thing she’d tell them.”
The topic is drifting, so I try to reel Ayanna back in. “You and Mia are close, though.” She says that they are. “Would you say that Mia tells you everything?”
“As far as I know.”
“What does she tell you about Jason?”
Ayanna sits back down, this time on the edge of her desk. She peers at a clock on the wall, dusts off her hands. She considers my question. “It wasn’t going to last,” she tells me, trying to find the right words to explain. “Mia doesn’t become involved too often, never anything serious. She doesn’t like to be tied down. Committed. She’s markedly independent, perhaps to a fault.”
“And Jason is...clingy? Needy?”
She shakes her head. “No, it’s not that, it’s just, he’s not the one. She didn’t glow when she spoke of him. She didn’t gossip like girls do when they’ve met the one. I always had to force her to tell me about him and then, it was like listening to a documentary: we went to dinner, we saw a movie.... And I know his hours were bad, which irritated Mia—he was always missing dates or showing up late. Mia hated to be tied down to his schedule. You have that many issues in the first month and it’s never going to last.”
“So it was possible Mia was planning to break up with him?”
“I don’t know.”
“But she wasn’t entirely happy.”
“I wouldn’t say Mia wasn’t happy,” Ayanna responds. “I just don’t think she cared one way or the other.”
“From what you know, did Jason feel the same?” She says that she doesn’t know. Mia was rather aloof when she spoke of Jason. The conversations were nondescript: a checklist of things they had done that day, details of the man’s statistics—height, weight, hair and eye color—though remarkably, no last name. But Mia never mentioned if they kissed and there was no reference to that tingly feeling in the pit of your stomach—Ayanna’s words, not mine—when you’ve met the man of your dreams. She seemed upset when Jason stood her up—which, by Ayanna’s account, happened often—and yet she didn’t seem particularly excited on the nights they planned a late-night rendezvous down by the Chicago River.