I make a plan in my head: get out of the country, soon. I’ll leave the girl behind. I don’t need her slowing me down. I’ll get a flight to Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia, some place where they can’t extradite me. Soon, I tell myself. I’ll do it soon. I’ll tie her up in the cabin and hightail it to Minneapolis for a flight before she has a chance to spread my face all over Interpol.
I tell her that I can’t call her Mia. Not in public. Soon enough word will leak out that the girl’s missing. I should leave her in the car, but I can’t. She’ll take off. And so she wears my baseball cap and I tell her to look down, don’t make eye contact. It probably doesn’t need to be said. She knows more about the gravel than me. I ask what she wants me to call her. After enough hesitation to start to piss me off, she comes up with Chloe.
No one gives a damn that I’m missing. When I don’t show up at work, they’ll assume I’m lazy. It’s not like I have friends.
I let her pick out chicken noodle soup for lunch. I hate it but I say okay anyway. I’m hungry. We get about twenty cans. Chicken noodle, tomato soup, mandarin oranges, cream corn. The kind of food you find in a survival kit. The girl realizes this and says, “Maybe you don’t plan to kill me right away,” and I say no, not until we’ve eaten the cream corn.
In the afternoon I try to sleep. These days it doesn’t come easy. I get an hour here, an hour there, but most of all I’m awakened by the idea of Dalmar coming after me or the cops showing up at the door. I’m on the lookout, all the time, peeking out every window as I pass. Always looking behind me. I barricade the front door before I sleep, glad to find the windows sealed shut by some idiot with paint. I didn’t think I had to worry about the girl trying to escape. I didn’t think she had it in her. I let my guard down, left the truck keys out in plain sight, and that was all the encouragement she needed.
And so I’m sound asleep on the sofa, hugging the gun, when I hear the front door slam shut. I’m on my feet. It takes a minute to get my bearings. When I do I see the girl fall down the second half of the stairs down to the gravel drive. I run out the door, screaming, irate. She’s limping. The truck door is unlocked. She gets in and tries to start the ignition. She can’t find the right key. I can see her through the driver’s window. I see her pound a fist on the steering wheel. I’m closing in on the truck. By now she’s grown desperate. She slides across the front seat and out the passenger door. She takes off into the woods. She’s fast, but I’m faster. The tree branches reach out, scraping her arms and legs. She trips over a rock and falls face-first into a pile of leaves. She gets up and continues to run. She’s getting tired, losing speed. She’s crying, begging me to leave her alone.
But I’m pissed.
I grab her by the hair. Her feet continue to run but her head snaps back violently. She lands on the hard earth. She doesn’t have time to cry out before I’m on her, all two hundred and some pounds crushing her slender frame. She gasps, begging me to stop. But I don’t. I’m mad. She’s crying wildly. Tears stream down her face, mixing with blood and mud and my own spit. She squirms. She spits on me. I’m sure she sees her entire life float before her eyes. I tell her how stupid she is. And then I hold the gun to her head and cock the hammer.
She stops moving, becomes paralyzed.
I press hard, the barrel leaving a mark on her head. I could do it. I could end her life.
She’s an idiot, a damn moron. It takes every ounce of goodwill I have not to pull the trigger. I did this for her. I saved her life. Who the hell does she think she is to run away? I press harder with the pistol, dig the barrel into her skull. She cries out.
“You think that hurts,” I say.
“Please...” She’s begging, but I don’t listen. I should have handed her over when I had the chance.
I stand up, grab her by the hair. She bawls. “Shut up,” I say. I drag her by the hair through the trees. I shove her ahead of me and tell her to move. “Hurry up.” It’s like her legs don’t work right. She trips, falls. “Get up,” I snap.
Does she have a clue what Dalmar would do to me if he found me? A bullet in the head would be the easy way out. A quick and easy death. I’d be crucified. Tortured.
I push her up the steps, into the cabin. I slam the door shut, but it bounces back open. I kick it shut and throw the table down to keep it closed. I yank her into the bedroom and tell her that if I hear her so much as breathe she will never again see the light of day.
Gabe
Before
I drive downtown again, the fourth time in a week, planning to bitch when I don’t get reimbursed for all the miles I’m racking up on my car. It’s only about ten miles each way, but takes nearly thirty minutes in the damn traffic. There’s a reason I don’t live in the city. I fork over another fifteen dollars to park—robbery if you ask me—because I’ve passed the intersection of Lawrence and Broadway nearly a dozen times and still can’t find an open meter.
The bar doesn’t open for a few hours. Just my luck, I think, knocking on the window to get the bartender’s attention. He’s stocking the bar and I know he hears me but doesn’t budge. I knock again and this time, when his eyes gaze in my direction, I show him my badge.
He opens the door.
It’s quiet in the bar. The lights are dim, few of the sun’s rays making it in through the grimy windows. The place is dusty and smells of stale cigarette smoke, things you wouldn’t necessarily notice when jazz music and candlelight set the mood.
“We open at seven,” he says.
“Who’s in charge here?” I ask.
“You’re looking at him.” He turns and begins a retreat to the bar. I follow and prop myself up on one of the torn vinyl stools. I reach into a pocket for the photo: Mia Dennett. It’s a fascinating picture, one Eve Dennett let me borrow last week. I promised it wouldn’t get lost or hurt, and I feel bad that my shirt pocket has already wrinkled a corner. To Mrs. Dennett, it was the photograph that was all Mia, or so she claimed, this image of a free-spirited woman with dirty blond hair that hangs too long, azure eyes and a straightforward, honest smile. She’s standing before Buckingham Fountain, the water shooting out aimlessly and, in the Chicago wind, spraying the woman who laughs like a child.
“You ever seen this woman before?” I ask, sliding the photo across the bar. He snatches it in his hand to have a look. I tell him to be careful. I see the recognition right away. He knows her.
“She’s here all the time—sits in that booth over there,” he responds, motioning with a nod to a booth behind me.
“You ever talk to her?”
“Yeah. When she needs a drink.”
“That all?”
“Yeah. That’s all. What’s this about?”
“Was she here last Tuesday night? Around eight o’clock?”
“Last Tuesday? Buddy, I can barely remember what I had for breakfast this morning. She’s been here before, that’s all I know for sure.” He hands me back the photo. I hate that he called me buddy. It’s denigrating.
“Detective,” I say.
“Huh?”
“It’s Detective Hoffman. Not buddy.” Then I ask, “Can you tell me who was working last Tuesday night?”
“What’s this about?” he asks again. I tell him not to worry about it. I ask him again who was working Tuesday night, this time with a militant tone that completely goes over his big head. He isn’t too fond of my disrespect. He knows he could kick my ass if he wanted to. Only one problem: I carry a gun.
But he retreats into a back room anyway. When he returns he’s empty-handed. “Sarah,” he says.
“Sarah?”
“She’s the one you need to talk to. She was serving that table,” he says, pointing to a filthy booth at the back of the bar, “Tuesday night. She’ll be here in an hour.”
For a while I sit at the bar and watch him stock bottles of booze.
I watch him refill the ice bins and count money into the cash register. I try to make small talk to throw him off as he tallies up what seems to be thousands of pennies. I lose track at forty-nine. I pace.
Sarah Rorhig appears within an hour, coming through the front door with an apron in her hands. Her boss engages her in a secret exchange, during which her eyes turn to mine. There’s a worried look on her face, a forced smile. I’m at the table, pretending to be rummaging around for clues when all there is is the vinyl booth and a slab of wood masquerading as a table. That and a frilly little green candle I consider swiping for my own home.
“Sarah?” I ask and she says that she is. I introduce myself and ask her to have a seat. I hand her the photo of Mia. “Have you seen this woman?”
“Yes,” she admits.
“Do you remember if she was here last Tuesday, around eight o’clock?”
It must be my lucky day. Sarah Rorhig is a full-time medical assistant and only works Tuesday nights to make a little extra cash. It’s been a week since she was here and so Mia’s image is fresh in her mind. She says with certainty that Mia was here last Tuesday; she says Mia is always here Tuesday nights. Sometimes by herself, sometimes with a man.
“Why Tuesdays?”
“Tuesday-night poetry slam,” she says, “or so I assume that’s the reason she’s always here. Though I’m never entirely sure she’s listening. She always seems to be distracted.”
“Distracted?”
“Daydreaming.”
I ask what the heck a poetry slam is. I’ve never heard of it. I imagine works of Whitman and Yeats being thrown on the ground; that’s not the case. The idea of listening to people recite their own poetry on stage, however, has me even more baffled. Who the hell would want to listen to that? It appears I have a lot to learn about Mia Dennett.
“Was she by herself last week?”
“No.”
“Who was she with?”
Sarah thinks for a minute. “Some guy. I’ve seen him around here before.”
“With Mia?” I ask.
“That’s her name?” she queries. “Mia?” I say that it is. She says that she was nice—the use of the past tense runs into me like a freight train—and always very friendly. She leaves a good tip. She hopes that everything is okay. She can tell from my questions that it’s probably not, but she doesn’t ask to know what happened and so I don’t say.
“This man Mia was with last Tuesday night...they’ve come together before?”
She says that no, they haven’t. This was the first time she’s seen them together. He’s usually at the bar, alone. She’s noticed him because he’s apparently cute, in an enigmatic sort of way—I write that down; I’ll have to look that one up in the dictionary. Mia is always at this table, sometimes alone, sometimes not. But Tuesday night they sat together and they left together in a hurry. She doesn’t know the man’s name but when I ask she can describe him: tall, sturdy, a mound of messy hair, dark eyes. She agrees to meet with a sketch artist later to see if they can come up with something.
I ask again, “Are you sure they left together? This is really important.”
“Yes.”
“Did you see them leave?”
“Yes. Well, sort of. I brought them the bill and when I came back they were gone.”
“Did it seem she was leaving on her own free will?”
“Seemed to me she couldn’t wait to get out of here.”
I ask if they arrived at the bar together. She says no, she doesn’t think so. How did he come to be at Mia’s table? She doesn’t know. I ask again: does she know his name? No. Would anybody know his name? Probably not. He and Mia paid cash; they left a fifty on the table, which she still remembers because, for five or six beers, it was a charitable tip. More than her usual customers leave. She remembers bragging about it later in the night and flashing Ulysses S. Grant’s face for all her co-workers to see.
When I leave the bar, I check up and down Broadway for security cameras outside of restaurants, banks, the yoga studio, anything that will tell me who Mia Dennett was with that Tuesday night she disappeared.
Colin
Before
She won’t eat. Four times I’ve offered her food, dropped a bowl full of it on the floor in the bedroom. As if I’m her damn chef. She lies on the bed on her side, her back to the door. She doesn’t budge when I come in, but I can see her breathing. I know she’s alive. But if she keeps this up much longer she’ll starve herself to death. Now wouldn’t that be ironic.
She emerges from the bedroom like a zombie, her hair— a tangled rat’s nest—hiding her face. She walks to the bathroom, does her thing, walks back. I ignore her; she ignores me. I told her to leave the bedroom door open. I want to make sure she isn’t up to anything in there, but all she does is sleep. Until this afternoon.
I’d been outside, chopping firewood. I worked up a sweat. I was out of breath. I came barreling into the cabin with my mind on one thing: water.
There she stood in the middle of the room, stripped down to a lace bra and panties. She might as well have been dead. Her skin was drained of all color. Her hair was snarled, a bruise the size of a goose egg on her thigh. She had a busted lip and black eye, scratches from her run-in with the trees. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen. Tears seeped from her eyes, down the albino skin. Her body convulsed, goose bumps everywhere my eyes could see. She walked with a limp, moving closer. She said to me, “Is this what you want?”
I stared. At her hair, falling mindlessly over the ivory shoulders. At her pale neglected skin. At the hollow craters of her collarbone and her perfectly shaped belly button. At her panties, cut high, and her long legs. At her ankle, so swollen it might be sprained. At the tears that dripped to the floor before her bare feet. Beside ruby-red toenails. Beside legs that shook when they walked, so that I thought they might give. At the snot that dripped from her nose, her crying no longer containable as she reached out and placed a shaking hand on my belt and started to unfasten the clasp. “Is this what you want?” she asked again, and for the time being I let her get both hands on my belt. I let her take it off and drop it to the floor. Let her undo the button of my jeans and slide the zipper. I couldn’t say that it wasn’t what I wanted. She reeked, as did I. Her hands were like ice when she touched me. But that wasn’t it. That wouldn’t have stopped me.
I gently pushed her away. “Stop,” I whispered.
“Let me,” she begged. She thought it would help. She thought it would change things.
“Get your clothes on,” I said. I closed my eyes. I couldn’t look at her. She stood before me. “Don’t—”
She forced my hands on her.
“Stop.” She didn’t believe me. “Stop,” I said louder this time, with more potency. And then added, “Just stop it already,” as I pushed her away from me. I told her to get her fucking clothes on.
I hurried out of the cabin, grabbed the ax and began chopping the firewood, vigorously, maniacally. I forgot all about the water.
Eve
Before
It’s the middle of the night and, as has been the case for a week now, I can’t sleep. Memories of Mia visit me all hours of the day and night, an image of one-year-old Mia in an olive-colored bubble outfit, her chubby thighs bulging out while she tried, unsuccessfully, to walk; hot-pink toenails on precious three-year-old feet; the sound of her wail when her ears were pierced, but later, watching for hours as she admired the opal gems in the bathroom mirror.
I’m standing in the open pantry of our darkened home, the clock above the kitchen stove reading 3:12 a.m. I grope the shelves blindly for chamomile tea, knowing I’d hidden a box somewhere, but also certain it would take much more than chamomile tea to help me sleep. I see Mia making her First Communion, see the distaste on her face when she first laid the Body of Christ on her
tip of her tongue; I hear her laugh about it later, alone in her bedroom, just she and me, about how hard it was to chew and swallow, about how she almost choked on the wine.
And then it hits me like a load of bricks, this realization that suddenly overwhelms me: my baby might be dead, and there, in the middle of the pantry, in the middle of the night, I begin to weep; falling to the floor, I press the ends of my pajamas to my face to stifle the sound. I envision her in that olive bubble, see her flash a toothless grin as she hangs on to the edge of the coffee table and laboriously makes her way to my outstretched hands.
My baby might be dead.
I’m doing what I can to help with the investigation, and yet it feels entirely trivial and frivolous because Mia isn’t home. I spent an entire day in Mia’s neighborhood, passing out Missing fliers to everyone I passed. I taped the signs to lampposts and in store windows, an image of Mia on hot-pink paper that was impossible to ignore. I met her friend Ayanna for lunch, and together we went through the details of Mia’s last day, desperate for oddities that might explain Mia’s disappearance, of which there were none. I rode into the city with Detective Hoffman, after he had secured a key for Mia’s apartment and checked that it was not a crime scene, and together we sifted through Mia’s belongings, through every circadian object—lesson plans and an address book, grocery lists and to-dos, hopeful for a clue. We found none.
Detective Hoffman phones me once, sometimes twice a day. Hardly a day goes by that we don’t speak. I find his voice, his gentle nature, reassuring and he’s always amicable even when James winds him up.
James says that he’s an idiot.
The detective gives the impression that I’m the first to know any bit of information that crosses his desk, but I’m certain I’m not. He is proofreading the fine points before offering snippets to me. These snippets leave a thousand what-ifs running through a mother’s mind.
I’m reminded of my daughter’s dissolution with every breath I take. When I see mothers holding their children’s hands. When I see children climbing onto the school bus. When I see postings of missing cats taped to the street posts, or hear a mother call her child by name.