“No.” She shakes her head. It’s not that she doesn’t remember. It’s that she’s certain I’m wrong. She leans in close, as if divulging a secret, and says to me, “My name is Chloe.”
Detective Hammill passes by and lets out an obnoxious sound. “Told you it was good.” He sneers as he barks out to his guys, “Hurry up so we can call it a day.”
Gabe
After
In the town of Grand Marais, we check into a hotel, a traditional little inn on Lake Superior, with a sign boasting Free Continental Breakfast that catches my eye. Our return flight is not until morning.
Dr. Rhodes has given Mia a tranquilizer that knocked her out. I carried her to the double bed in a room she shares with Eve. The rest of us stand in the hallway and talk.
Eve is a jumble of nerves. She knew this whole thing was a mistake. She goes almost as far as to blame me, but stops short. “Sooner or later it would have all come out,” she decides, but I can’t tell if she believes it or if she’s only trying to appease me.
Later I will remind her of the case, that Colin Thatcher was not the one who ordered a hit on Mia. There is someone out there looking for her, and we need Mia as cognizant as possible to track this someone down. He must have told her something. Colin must have told her what this was all about.
Eve leans against a hallway wall covered in pastel wallpaper. The doctor has changed into a pair of lounge pants and slippers. Her hair is tied into a stringent bun that makes her forehead look huge. She stands with her arms crossed and says to us, “It’s called Stockholm syndrome. It’s when victims become emotionally attached to their captors. They bond with them in captivity and when it’s all said and done, they defend their captors and become fearful of the police who came to their rescue. It’s not unusual. We see it all the time. In domestic abuse situations, abused children, incest. I’m sure you can relate, Detective. A woman calls the police department to say her husband is beating her, but when the police arrive at her door, she turns on them and comes to the defense of her spouse.
“There are a number of conditions that aid in the development of Stockholm syndrome. Mia would have needed to feel threatened by her aggressor, as we know she did. She would have needed to feel isolated from others besides her aggressor. We know this to be the case, too. She needed to feel an inability to escape the situation. This goes without saying. And finally, Mr. Thatcher would have needed to show a minimal amount of humanity to her, such as—”
“Not letting Mia starve to death,” I offer.
“Precisely.”
“Giving her clothes to wear. Shelter.” I could go on and on. It makes perfect sense to me.
But not Eve. She waits until Dr. Rhodes has said good-night and retreats down the hall—out of hearing range—before uttering, “She loved him,” in that mother-knows-best tone.
“Eve, I think—”
“She loved him.”
I’ve never seen Eve so sure of anything as she is this. She stands in the doorway watching Mia sleep on the bed. She watches her like a new mother might watch her infant child.
Eve sleeps in the bed beside Mia. I sleep in the second double bed though I have my own room. Eve begs me not to leave.
Who am I to talk, I think as I slide between the sheets. I don’t know a damn thing about being in love.
Neither of us sleeps.
“I didn’t kill him,” I remind Eve, but it doesn’t matter because someone did.
Eve
After
The entire flight home, she’s lost. She takes the window seat and presses her forehead against the cold glass. She’s unresponsive when we try to speak to her, and at times I hear her cry. I see the tears she sheds drip down her cheeks and fall to her hands. I try to console her, but she pulls away.
I was in love once, so long ago that I can barely remember. I was enraptured by this handsome man I’d met in a restaurant in the city, this alluring man who made me feel like I walked on air. Now he’s gone and all that remains in the space between us are hurt feelings and despicable words. He wasn’t taken from me. I drifted away, far enough that I can no longer see that youthful face or persuasive smile. And still it hurts.
Dr. Rhodes leaves us at the airport. She wants to see Mia in the morning. The doctor and I decided amongst ourselves that we would increase her sessions to two times per week. Acute stress disorder is one thing, grief another.
“This is a lot for someone to handle,” she says to me, and we look over to watch as Mia’s hand drops to her abdomen. This baby is no longer a burden, but a last trace of him, something to hold on to.
I think what it would have done to Mia if she’d had the abortion. It would have pushed her over the edge.
We find Gabe’s car in long-term parking. He has offered to drive us home. He tries awkwardly to manage all of our bags; he won’t let me help. Mia walks faster than the rest of us so that we struggle to keep up. She does it so she won’t see the uneasy countenance on my face, or have to look into the eyes of the man she believes shot her lover.
She rides the entire trip in the backseat in silence.
Gabe asks if she’s hungry; she doesn’t respond.
I ask if she’s warm enough; she ignores me.
The traffic is light. It’s a frigid Sunday, the kind you long to spend in bed. The radio is turned on, the volume low. Mia lies down in the backseat and, in time, she falls asleep. I watch the clumsy hair fall across her rosy cheeks, numb still from the winter air. Her eyes flutter, her body asleep while images fill her mind. I try to make sense of it all: how someone like Mia could fall for someone like Colin Thatcher.
And then my eyes wander to the man sitting beside me, a man so unlike James it’s almost comical.
“I’m leaving him,” I disclose, my eyes never rising from the road ahead. Gabe says nothing. But when his hand closes over mine, he says everything he needs to say.
Gabe drops us off at the door. He offers to help us up, but I decline, telling him we can manage.
Mia is making her way inside the building without me. In silence, we watch her go. Gabe says that he’ll be back in the morning. He has something for her.
And then, when the heavy door closes and she is no longer in view, he leans in to kiss me, altogether ignoring the commuters who walk home along the busy sidewalks, the cabs passing by on the boisterous street. I place my hands on his chest and stop him. “I can’t,” I say. This pains me more than it will Gabe and I watch as he studies me for an explanation, his soft eyes wondering why, and then gradually he begins to nod. It has nothing to do with him. But it’s time to get my priorities in order. They’ve been out of sync for so long.
* * *
Mia tells me that there is the sound of breaking glass. She watches him struggle for breath. There’s blood, everywhere, as he reaches out his hands and she can do nothing but watch him fall.
She wakes up in her own bed, screaming. By the time I make my way in, she’s fallen from the bed and to the floor, poised above someone who isn’t there. She whispers his name. “Please don’t leave me,” she says, and then proceeds to tear apart the bedding, looking for him. She tosses aside the blanket and rips sheets from the bed. “Owen,” she cries. And then she pushes past me where I’m standing in the doorway watching the heartbreaking scene, barely making it to the toilet before she throws up.
It’s like this every day.
Some days the morning sickness isn’t so bad. But those days, Mia says, are the hardest. When she’s not preoccupied with the constant sense of nausea, then she’s constantly reminded that Owen is dead.
I hover in the doorway. “Mia,” I say. I’m willing to do anything to make the pain go away. But there’s nothing I can do.
When she’s ready, she tells me about the last moments inside the cabin, the way the gunshots sounded like f
ireworks, the way the window broke, glass shattering to the floor, the winter air welcoming itself in. “The noise terrified me, my eyes darting outside before I heard Owen begin to wheeze. He whispered my name. Chloe. He struggled to come up with enough breath. His legs began to collapse. I didn’t know what had happened,” she cries, shaking her head, reliving the moment as she does a hundred times a day in her head, and I lay a hand on her leg to stop her. There’s no need to go on. But she does. She does because she has to, because her mind can no longer keep the flashbacks contained. They lay dormant in her mind, like a volcano about to burst.
“Owen?” she utters aloud, trapped in a moment that isn’t the present time. “The gun dropped from his hands. It dented the floor. He reached his hands out to me. There was blood, everywhere. He’d been shot. His legs began to give. I tried to catch him, I did, but the weight was too much. He crumbled to the floor.
“I fell to him. ‘Owen! Oh, my God. Owen,’” she sobs.
She says that she envisioned the jagged coastline of the Italian Riviera. In that last moment, that’s what she saw. The boats floating lazily in the Ligurian Sea, and the abrupt peaks of the Maritime Alps and the Apennines Mountains. She saw a rustic stone cottage lost in the hillside, where they toiled in the lush green countryside until their backs broke. She and the man known as Owen. She imagined that they were no longer on the run. They were home. In that last moment, Mia saw children running through the thick grass, dodging between rows of unvarying grape trees. They had dark hair like his and dark eyes like his and they inserted Italian words into their departing English. Bambino and allegro and vero amore.
She tells me how the blood spilled from his body. How it spread across the floor, how the cat ran through the room, his tiny paws spreading bloody prints across the floor. And again, her eyes dart through the room, as if it’s happening here, in this moment, though the cat sits perched on the bedroom windowsill like a porcelain statue.
She says that his breathing was slow, that he took shallow breaths with great effort. There was blood everywhere. “His eyes became still. His chest still. ‘Wake up. Wake up.’ I shook him. ‘Oh, God, please wake up. Please don’t leave me,’” she sobs into the sheets of her bed. She tells me that his limbs stopped fighting as the front door pushed open. There was a blinding light and a masculine voice telling her to step away from the body.
“Please don’t leave me,” she cries.
She wakes up every morning screaming his name.
She sleeps in the bedroom; I roll out the futon and sleep in the family room. She refuses to open the curtains and accept the world into the room. She likes it dark, where she can believe it’s nighttime twenty-four hours a day and succumb to her depression. I can barely get her to eat anymore. “If not for you,” I advise, “then do it for the baby.” She says it’s the only reason she has to live anymore.
She admits to me in confidence that she can’t go on. She doesn’t say it when she’s lucid, but when she’s sobbing, lost in despair. She thinks about death, of all the ways to kill herself. She lists them for me. I tell myself that I’ll never leave her alone.
Monday morning Gabe showed up with a box of things he’d brought from the cabin. He’d been saving them as evidence. “I planned to return them to Colin’s mother,” he said, “but thought maybe you’d like to have a look.”
He was hoping for a ceasefire. What he got was a reproachful look as she muttered, “Owen,” under her breath.
When I drag her from her bedroom, she sits and stares mindlessly at the TV. I have to mind what she watches. The evening news tears her apart, words like death and murder and convict.
I tell Mia that Gabe was not the one to shoot Owen but she says it doesn’t matter. It means nothing. He’s dead. She doesn’t hate Gabe for this. She feels nothing. There’s a vast emptiness filling her soul. I justify what he did—what we all did. I try to make her understand that the police were there to protect her. That what they saw was an armed convict and his prey.
More than anything, Mia blames herself. She says that she put the gun in his hand. She sobs at night that she’s sorry. Dr. Rhodes talks to her about the stages of grief: denial and anger. One day, she promises, there will be an acceptance of the loss.
Mia opened the box Gabe had brought for her and raised a gray hooded sweatshirt from the cardboard. She brought it to her face; she closed her eyes and smelled the cotton. It was clear that she planned to keep it. “Mia, honey,” I said, “let me wash it.” There was a horrible stench to it, but she refused to let me take it from her hands.
“Don’t,” she insisted.
She sleeps with it every night, pretending that it’s his arms that hold her tight.
She sees him everywhere: in her dreams, when she’s awake. Yesterday I insisted on a walk. It was a bearable day for January. We needed fresh air. We’d been cooped up in this apartment for days. I cleaned the apartment, scouring a bathtub that hadn’t been used in months. I snipped at her plants with a pair of pinking shears, dropping the dead foliage into a trash can. Ayanna offered to pick up some items for us at the market—milk and orange juice and, at my request, fresh flowers, something to remind Mia of all the things in the world that are alive.
Yesterday Mia sunk into the wide arms of a jacket she collected from the same cardboard box, and we went outside. At the bottom of the steps, she paused and stared at an imaginary place on the opposite side of the street. I don’t know how long she stared, until I pulled her gently by the arm, and said, “Let’s walk.” I couldn’t quite figure out what she was staring at; there was nothing there, only a four-flat brick building with scaffolding out front.
The Chicago winter is harsh. But every now and then God blesses us with a thirty-or forty-degree day to remind us that misery comes and goes. It must be thirty-eight, thirty-nine degrees, when we head out for our walk, the kind of day that teenagers foolishly rush out in shorts and T-shirts, forgetting that in October we were aghast at temperatures like this.
We stayed on the residential streets because I thought there would be less noise. We could hear the city not so far away. It was the middle of the day. She dragged her feet. Rounding the corner onto Waveland, she and a young man ran right into one another. I may have prevented it had I not been staring at outdated Christmas décor on a nearby balcony, out of place beside puddles of snow that melted on the sidewalk, reminding me of spring. The man was handsome with a baseball cap pulled low, his eyes gazing at the ground. Mia wasn’t paying attention. She nearly doubled over in disbelief.
He couldn’t make sense of the crying. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said. I begged him not to worry.
It’s the same baseball cap Mia took from the box, the one that sits beside her bed.
The grief and the morning sickness send her running to the bathroom three, sometimes four times a day.
Gabe arrived this afternoon, fully intent on getting to the bottom of this. Until today, he was content with small visits, with the sole purpose of reconciliation. But he reminds me that there’s a lingering threat out there, and the policemen parked outside her building for security will not be there forever. He set Mia down on the futon.
“Tell me about his mother,” she says. This is called give-and-take.
Mia’s apartment is approximately a four-hundred-square-foot box. There’s the family room with the futon and tiny TV; she pulls out the futon when company comes to stay. I’ve polished the bathroom many times, and still it doesn’t feel clean. The bathtub fills with water every time I shower. The kitchen is only large enough for one person; you cannot stand behind the refrigerator when the door is open without being shoved into the stove. There is no dishwasher. The radiator rarely warms the room, and when it does, the temperature soars to ninety degrees. We eat dinner on the futon, which we don’t often bother to sit up, since night after night I use it for a bed.
“Kath
ryn,” Gabe replies. He’s perched awkwardly on the edge of the futon. For days now, Mia has been asking about Colin’s mother. I didn’t know what to say, other than that Gabe would know more about Ms. Thatcher than me. I’ve never met the woman, though in a matter of months we will be grandmothers to the same child. “She’s a sick woman,” he says, “with advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease.”
I disappear into the kitchen and pretend to wash dishes.
“I know.”
“She’s as well as to be expected. Ms. Thatcher had been living in a nursing home—she wasn’t fit to care for herself.”
Mia asks how the woman came to be living at a nursing home. As far as Colin—Owen—was concerned, the woman was living at home.
“I brought her there.”
“You brought her there?” she asks.
“I did,” Gabe confesses. “Ms. Thatcher needed constant care.”
This earns Gabe brownie points in Mia’s eyes.
“He was worried about her.”
“He had good reason to be. But she’s fine,” Gabe reassures. “I drove Ms. Thatcher to the funeral.” He pauses long enough to let it settle. Gabe told me about the funeral. It was only days after Mia returned home. We were absorbed in first appointments with Dr. Rhodes and discovering that the hum of the refrigerator scared the living daylights out of our child. Gabe clipped an obituary from a Gary paper and brought it to me. He brought me a program from the funeral, with this polished photograph on the front, a black-and-white set amidst ivory paper. At the time I’d been incensed that Colin Thatcher had such a civil burial. I discarded the program in the fireplace, watching his face go up in flames. I prayed the same thing happen to the real man, that he burn in hell.
I stop what I’m doing and wait for the sound of weeping; it doesn’t come. Mia is still.
“You went to the funeral?”
“I did. It was nice. As nice as to be expected.”
Gabe’s image is growing by leaps and bounds. I hear a change in Mia’s voice, no longer seeping with abhorrence. It softens, and loses a bit of the defensiveness. I, on the other hand, stand in the kitchen, clutching a ceramic plate, imagining Colin burning in hell, and try desperately to recant.