“You can’t make her do this, James,” I said Sunday night. Mia wasn’t feeling well. James had brought crackers into the bedroom. He’d never paid her this much attention in her entire life. She didn’t join us for dinner. It was no coincidence. I was certain James had locked her in the bedroom so she couldn’t be influenced by me.
“She wants to do it.”
“Because you told her she has to.”
“She’s a child, Eve, who doesn’t have the slightest memory of creating the bastard. She’s sick—she’s been through enough. She’s not capable of making this decision right now.”
“Then we’ll wait,” I suggested, “until she is ready. There’s time.”
There is time. We could wait weeks, even more. But James doesn’t think so. He wants this done now.
“Damn it, Eve,” he snapped, skidding his chair out from the kitchen table and standing up. He walked out of the room. He hadn’t finished his soup.
This morning he had Mia up and out of bed before I’d finished a cup of coffee. I’m sitting at the kitchen table when he all but pulls her down the stairs. She dressed in a mismatching outfit I’m certain James has ripped from her closet and forced her to put on.
“What are you doing?” I demand as he yanks her coat from the front closet and insists she get it on. I hurry into the foyer, my coffee cup slipping from the edge of the table and shattering into a thousand pieces on the hardwood floor.
“We’ve talked about this,” he says. “We’re in agreement. All of us.” He stares at me, compelling me to agree.
He had called his judge friend and asked that the man’s wife, Dr. Wakhrukov, do him a favor. I heard him on the phone early this morning, before 7:00 a.m., and the word disbarred stopped me outside his office door midstride. Abortions are done at clinics throughout the city, not reputable obstetricians’ offices. Dr. Wakhrukov is in the practice of bringing babies into this world, not taking them out. But the last thing James needs is for someone to catch him walking into an abortion clinic with his daughter in tow.
They will sedate Mia until she’s so calm and content, she can’t say no if she wants to. They’ll dilate her cervix and reach in to suction the baby out of its mother’s womb, like a vacuum.
“Mia, honey,” I say, reaching out for her hand. It’s as cold as ice. She’s in a fog, not yet awake from sleep, not yet herself. She hasn’t been herself since before her disappearance. The Mia I know is outspoken and forthright and strong in her convictions. She knows what she wants and she gets what she wants. She never listens to her father because she finds him cold and reprehensible. But she’s numb and emotionless and he has used this to his advantage. He has her entranced. She’s under his spell. She cannot be allowed to make this decision. This decision will remain with her the rest of her life. “I’m coming,” I say.
James backs me against a wall. With a finger pointed at me, he orders, “You’re not.”
I push him away and reach for my coat. “I am.”
But he won’t let me get in the way.
He rips the coat from my hands and throws it to the floor. He’s clinging to Mia with one hand, dragging her through the front door. The Chicago wind rushes into the foyer and grips my bare arms and legs, twirling my nightgown around me. I try to pick up the coat, calling out, “You don’t have to do this. Mia, you don’t have to do this,” but he’s holding me back and when I don’t stop, he pushes me hard enough that I fall to the ground. He slams the front door closed before I can catch my breath and rise to my feet. I get the strength to stand and peer out the window as the car pulls out of the drive. “You don’t have to do this, Mia,” I still say, though I know she can no longer hear me.
My eyes drift to the cast-iron key holder to see that my keys are missing, that James has taken them in an attempt to keep me at bay.
Colin
Before
It only took a day or two and the damn cold was gone. I felt like shit the first day. But around the time I started to feel sorry for myself, my nose opened up and I could breathe. That’s me. For her it’s something different. I can tell by the cough.
She started coughing shortly after me. Not a dry cough like mine, but something much deeper. I’m forcing her to drink tap water. I don’t know much—I’m not a doctor—but it might help.
She feels like shit. I can see it in her face. Her eyes droop. They water. Her nose is raw and red from wiping it with scraps of toilet paper. She’s freezing her ass off all the time. She sits before the fire with her head pooled over the arm of a chair, and she sinks to a place where she hasn’t been before. Not even when I held that gun to her head.
“You want to go home?” I ask. She tries to hide it. But I know that she’s been crying. I can see the tears run their course down the length of her cheeks. They drip to the floor.
She lifts her head. She wipes at her face with the back of a sleeve. “I just don’t feel good,” she lies. Of course she wants to go home. That cat doesn’t leave her lap. I don’t know if it’s the warm afghan she has or the fact that she’s cooking before the fire. Or maybe it’s pure devotion. How the hell would I know?
I picture myself holding that gun to her head. I imagine her lying on the rocky earth surrounded by leaves. These days I can’t get that image out of my head.
I press a hand to her head and tell her that it’s hot.
She says she’s so tired all the time. She can barely keep her eyes open, and when she comes to, I’m always there with a glass of water for her to drink.
She tells me that she dreams of her mother, of lying on their family room sofa as a kid, when she was sick. She dreams of being huddled under a blanket she carried around all the time. Sometimes her mom would toss it in the dryer for a few minutes to heat it up. She’d make her cinnamon toast. She’d wait on her while they watched cartoons and when the soap operas came on, they’d watch them together. There was always a glass of juice to drink. Fluids, her mother would remind her. Drink your fluids.
She tells me that she’s certain she sees her mom standing here in the cabin’s kitchen in a silk nightgown, and slippers the shape of ballet shoes. There’s Christmas music, she says: Ella Fitzgerald. Her mother is humming. The scent of cinnamon fills the air. She calls out for her mommy, but when she turns, she sees me and starts crying.
“Mommy,” she sobs. Her heart races. She was sure her mother was there.
I cross the room and press a hand to her head. She flinches. My hand is like ice. “You feel hot.” And then I hand her a glass of lukewarm water.
I sit down beside her on the couch.
She presses the glass to her lips but doesn’t drink. She lays sideways, her head set on a pillow I brought from the bed. It’s as thin as paper. I wonder how many heads have been here before her. I reach for the blanket that fell to the floor and I drop it to her. The blanket is rough, like wool. It scratches her skin.
“If Grace was my father’s favorite, then I was my mother’s,” she says suddenly. Like it hit her right there, a moment of clarity. She says that she sees her mother running into her bedroom when she’d had a nightmare. She feels her arms around her, protecting her from the unknown. She sees her pushing her on the swing when her sister was at school. “I see her smiling, I hear her laugh. She loved me,” she says. “She just didn’t know how to show it.”
In the morning she complains that her head hurts and her throat and God knows she can’t stop coughing. She doesn’t bitch about it. She tells me because I ask.
There’s pain in her back. At some point she moves to the couch, where she falls asleep facedown. She’s as hot as hell when I touch her, though she shakes as if at any moment she might freeze into a chunk of ice. The cat moves onto her back until I shoo it away. Then it takes refuge on the back of the couch.
No one’s ever loved me so much.
She mumb
les in her sleep about things that aren’t there: a man in a camouflage coat and graffiti on a brick wall, sprayed illegally with aerosol paint, wild-style, with an illegible tag. She describes it in her dreams. Black and yellow. Fat, interwoven letters in 3D.
I let her take over the couch. I sleep on a chair, two nights now. I’d be more comfortable on the bed but I don’t want to be that far away. I’m kept awake half the night by that fucking cough, though somehow she manages to sleep through it. It’s the stuffed-up nose that generally wakes her up, that terrifying inability to breathe.
I don’t know what time it is when she says she has to use the bathroom. She sits up and when she thinks she can, she stands. I can tell from the way she moves that everything aches.
She’s only gone a few steps when she starts to fall.
“Owen,” she manages to whisper. She reaches a hand out to the wall, misses and tumbles toward the ground.
I don’t think I’ve ever moved so fast in my life. I didn’t catch her, but I did stop her head from hitting the hardwood floors.
She isn’t out long, only a couple seconds at best. When she comes to she calls me Jason. She thinks that I am him. And I could get pissed, but instead I help her to her feet and together we go into the bathroom and I pull down her pants and help her pee. And then I carry her to the couch and tuck her in.
She asked once if I had a girlfriend. I told her no, that I tried it once and it wasn’t for me.
I asked her about this boyfriend of hers. I met him in the bathroom stall and hated the guy the minute I laid eyes on him. He’s the kind of bastard that acts tough. He thinks he’s better than everyone else but inside he’s a coward. He’s the kind of Thomas Ferguson that would let a man hold a gun to her head.
I watch her sleep. I hear the cough rattle from her lungs. I listen to the shallow breathing and watch as her chest rises and falls irregularly with each breath.
“What do you want to know?” she’d said when I asked her about the boyfriend.
Suddenly I didn’t want to talk about it.
“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”
“Because,” she said, “I believe what you said.”
“What?”
“About paying him off. I believe you.”
“You do?”
“It doesn’t surprise me.”
“Why do you say that?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It just doesn’t.”
I know that I can’t let this go on. I know that every day she gets worse. I know that she needs an antibiotic, that without it she could die. I just don’t know what to do.
Eve
After
She certainly can’t be alone. I leave the house as soon as James arrives home without Mia in tow. There’s nothing more important than Mia. I am positive she’s standing alone on a street corner, deserted by her own father, and certainly lacking the resources to get back home.
I’m screaming at him. How could he do this to our child?
He let her walk out of that doctor’s office alone, into the cold January day, knowing full well she isn’t able to make herself breakfast, much less find her way home.
And he told me that she’s the one who’s being stubborn. That Mia is the one being unreasonable about this damn baby. He said that she refused the abortion, that she walked out of the obstetrician’s office just as the nurse called her name.
James stomps into his office and slams the door, unaware of the suitcase I pack and quietly walk down the stairs before I leave.
I don’t give her enough credit. By the time I pry my car keys out of James’s hands and circle the doctor’s office many, many times, she’s tucked safely in her apartment with a can of soup warming on the stove for lunch.
She opens the door and I fall into her and hold her as tight as I possibly can. She’s standing in the small apartment she used to call home. It’s been a long time since she was here. Her houseplants hold on to life by a thread, and there’s dust everywhere. It smells like a new home, that scent that says no one’s been here for quite some time. The calendar on the kitchen refrigerator is stuck on October, the image ablaze with red-and-orange leaves. The answering machine beeps; there must be a thousand messages waiting for her.
She’s cold, frozen from all that time walking and waiting for a cab. She says that she didn’t have a dime on her for the fare. It’s freezing cold in the apartment. She’s slipped her favorite hooded sweatshirt over a thin blouse.
“I’m so, so sorry,” I say over and over again. But she has it all together. She holds me at an arm’s length and asks what happened and I tell her about James. It’s me who’s losing it, who’s falling apart. She takes the suitcase from my hands and brings it into the bedroom.
“Then you’ll stay here,” she says. She sits me down on the couch and covers me up with a blanket, and then walks into the kitchen to finish the soup—chicken noodle, she says, because it reminds her of home.
We eat our soup, and then she tells me what happened at the obstetrician’s office. She runs a hand across her abdomen and curls into a ball on a chair.
Everything was going as planned. She said that she had talked herself into it and it was only a matter of time before it was all going to be through. James was sitting there, reading from some law journal and waiting for the appointment. In just a few minutes the Russian doctor was going to get rid of the baby.
“But,” she tells me, “there was a little boy and his mother. He was barely four.” She tells me about the woman, with her belly the size of a basketball. The boy played with his Matchbox cars up and down the legs of the stiff waiting room chairs. Vroom, vroom, vroom... He dropped one at James’s feet and the bastard had the nerve to push it away with his Italian loafers, his nose never rising from the book. “And then I heard his mother,” Mia says, “dressed in these cute denim overalls and looking as uncomfortable as could possibly be, say to the boy, ‘Come here, Owen,’ and he ran for her and zoomed a car over her protruding belly and climbed into her lap, saying, ‘Hi, baby,’ to the unborn child.”
She stops to catch her breath, and then admits to me, “Owen. I didn’t know what it meant, but it meant something. I couldn’t take my eyes off the little boy. ‘Owen,’ I heard myself say aloud and both the boy and his mother looked at me.”
James asked Mia what she was doing and she related the feeling to déjà vu. It was as if she’d been there before. But what did it mean?
Mia says that she leaned forward in her seat and told the little boy that she liked his cars. He offered to show Mia one, but his mother laughed and said, Oh, Owen, I don’t think she wants to see them, but Mia did. James scolded her and told her to give the kid his toys back. But she wanted to do anything to be close to the boy. She says that the sound of his name made it hard to breathe. Owen.
“I took one of the cars in my hand, a purple van, and told him how much I liked it, and then drove it over the top of his head and he laughed. He said that he was going to have a baby brother soon. Oliver.”
And then the nurse was there in the doorway calling her name. James rose to his feet and when she didn’t he told her that it was her turn.
The nurse called her name again. She looked right at Mia; she knew who she was. James said her name more than once. He tried pulling on her arm and got in her face to discipline her as only James would do. He reminded her again that it was their turn.
Mia tells me, “Owen’s mother called to him and I saw myself reach out and stroke that curly hair and I don’t know who was the most aghast, the boy’s mother or Dad, but the boy liked it and smiled and I smiled back. I placed the two Matchbox cars back in the boy’s hands and stood from my seat.” She tells me that James sighed: Thank God—it’s about time. But it wasn’t time. She reached for her coat and whispered to him, “I can’t do this.”
She slipped out into the hall. He ran after her, of course, full of condemnation and criticism and threats. He urged her to reconsider, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know what any of it meant. Owen. She didn’t know why that name meant so much to her. All she knew was that it wasn’t time for her baby to die.
Colin
Before
It’s 2:00 a.m. when I’m woken up by her scream. I stand from the chair and see her pointing across the pitch-black room at something that isn’t there.
“Mia,” I say. But I can’t get her eyes off it. “Mia,” I snap again. My voice is firm. I must look at the spot five times because she’s scaring the shit out of me. Her eyes, filled with tears, are locked in place on something. I reach for the light and turn it on, only to reassure myself that we’re alone. Then I drop to my knees before the couch. I take her head into my hands, and force her to look at me. “Mia,” I say and she snaps out of it.
She tells me that there was a man at the door with a machete and a red bandana tied around his head. She’s hysterical. Delirious. She can describe everything about him down to a hole in the right thigh of his jeans. A black man with a cigarette pinched between his lips. But what concerns me the most is the heat coming off her face when I press my hands to it. The glazed-over look of her eyes when she finally looks at me and her head drops to my shoulder and she begins to cry.