Authors: Mary Kubica
Colin
Before
I tell her we’re going outside. It’s the first time I let her out of the cabin. “We need sticks,” I say, “for the fire.” Soon it will snow. Then they’ll all be buried.
“We have firewood,” she says. She’s sitting cross-legged in the chair beside the window. She’s staring outside at the oppressive granite clouds that hover just above the tops of the trees.
I don’t look at her. “We need more. For the winter.”
She stands slowly, stretching. “You plan to keep me around that long?” she asks. She slips that ugly maroon sweatshirt over her head. I don’t satisfy her with a response. I’m right behind her as we head outside. I let the screen door slam shut.
She makes her way down the steps. She begins to gather sticks from the ground. There are tons of them, tossed from trees during a storm. They are wet. They cling to the muddy ground and moldy leaves that cover the earth. She tosses them into a pile at the bottom of the steps. She wipes her hands on the thighs of her pants.
Our laundry hangs over the deck rail. We wash our clothes in the bathtub and then hang them out to dry. We use a bar of soap. It’s better than nothing. They’re cold and stiff when we slip them on, and sometimes they’re still wet.
A thick fog hangs over the lake and drifts toward the cabin. The day is depressing. Rain clouds fill the sky. Soon it will begin to rain. I tell her to hurry up. I wonder how long these sticks will last. There’s already a wall of firewood lining the cabin. I’ve been out here day after day with an ax, splitting fallen trees and taking the limbs off the rest. But we gather sticks anyway so we don’t get bored. So I don’t get bored. She isn’t going to complain about it. The air is fresh, and so she makes the most of it. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever get another chance like this.
I watch her gather sticks. She carries them in one arm as the other bends down to swipe more from the ground. It’s one swift, graceful movement. Her hair is draped over a shoulder so it stays out of her eyes. She gathers until her arms can hold no more, then stops to catch her breath. She arches her back to stretch. Then down again. When her load is full she brings them to the cabin. She refuses to make eye contact with me, though I’m certain she knows I’m watching. With every passing load she ventures farther and farther away, her blue eyes locked steadfast on the lake. Freedom.
It begins to rain. It’s one torrential downpour: one minute, nothing, the next, we’re soaked. The girl comes running from the far end of the property with a bundle of sticks in her arms. She’d been working as far away as I let her. I kept my eyes on her the entire time, making sure I could catch her if I needed to. I don’t think she’d be that stupid. Not again.
I’ve already begun to haul the sticks upstairs and into the cabin. I dump them into a pile beside the stove. She follows me inside, drops her load, and then down the stairs again. I didn’t expect such cooperation. She moves slower than me. Her ankle is still healing. It’s only been a day or so since I haven’t seen her limp. We brush past each other on the stairs and it’s without thought that I hear myself say
sorry
. She says nothing.
She changes her clothes and hangs the wet ones from a curtain rod in the living room. I’ve already brought in the clothes from outside and draped them around the entire cabin. Eventually the fire will help them dry. The cabin feels wet. Outside, the temperatures have dropped by as much as ten or fifteen degrees. We trekked wet footprints throughout the cabin. The sticks puddle rainwater onto the wooden floor. I tell her to find a towel in the bathroom and wipe what she can. Sooner or later the rest will dry.
I’m making dinner. She moves silently to her chair and stares out the window at the rain. It drums on the roof of the cabin, a steady rat-tat-tat. A pair of my pants, hanging from the curtain rod, disrupts her view. Ambiguity fills the earth, the world smothered by fog.
I drop a bowl and she jumps, glaring at me with an accusatory look. I’m loud, I know that. I don’t try to be quiet. Bowls pound on the countertops; cabinets slam shut. My heavy feet stomp. Spoons fall from my hand and clatter on the burnt-orange countertops. The pot on the stove begins to boil, spilling over onto the stove.
Dusk falls. We eat dinner in silence, thankful for the sound of the rain. I watch out the window as blackness takes over the sky. I flip on the small lamp and begin to feed sticks to the fire. She watches me out of the corner of her eye, and I wonder what she sees.
Suddenly I hear a crash outside and I jump to my feet, hissing, “Shhh,” though she hadn’t said a word. I reach for the gun and grip it in my hand.
I peek out the window, see that the grill has blown over, and feel relieved.
She stares at me, at the way I part the curtains and look out into the yard, just in case. Just in case someone is there. I let the curtains close and sit back down. She’s still watching me, staring at a two-day-old stain on my sweatshirt, the dark hairs on the backs of my hands, the casual way I carry the gun as if it doesn’t have the ability to end someone’s life.
I look at her and ask,
“What?”
She’s slouched in that chair by the window. Her hair is long, rolling. The wounds on her face are healing, but her eyes still hold their pain. She can still feel me press the gun against her head and she knows, as she scrutinizes me from ten feet away, that it’s only a matter of time before I do it again.
“What are we doing here?” she asks. It comes out intentional, forced. She finally gets the guts to ask. She’s been wanting to since the minute we arrived.
My sigh is long and exasperated. “Don’t worry about it,” I say after a long time. Just some offhand answer to shut her up.
“What do you want with me?” she asks instead.
My face is plastered with a deadpan expression. I don’t want anything to do with her. “Nothing,” I say. I poke around at the sticks in the fire. I don’t look at her.
“Then let me go.”
“I can’t.” I remove a sweatshirt and lay it beside the gun on the floor at my feet. The fire keeps the cabin warm, here at least. The bedroom is cold. She sleeps layered, long johns and a sweatshirt and socks, and still she shivers until long after she’s fallen asleep.
I know because I’ve watched her.
She asks again what I want with her. Of course I want
something
with her, she says. Why else would I snatch her from my apartment and bring her here?
“I was hired to do a job. To get you and bring you to Lower Wacker. To drop you off. That’s it. I was supposed to drop you off and disappear.”
Lower Wacker Drive is the bottom part of a double-decker street in the Loop, a tunnel that goes on for I don’t know how long.
I see it in her eyes: confusion. She looks away, out the window into the dark night.
There are words she doesn’t understand:
a job, drop you off and disappear.
It was far more realistic for her to believe that this was random. That some madman chose to kidnap her for the hell of it.
She says the only thing she knows about Lower Wacker is that she and her sister used to love to drive down there when they were kids, back when it was lit with fluorescent green lights. It’s the first personal thing she tells me about herself.
“I don’t understand,” she says, desperate for an answer.
“I don’t know all the details. Ransom,” I say. I’m getting pissed off. I don’t want to talk about it.
“Then why are we
here?
” Her eyes beg for an explanation. She’s looking at me with this blend of complete disorientation and frustration and conceit.
That’s a fucking good question, I think.
I checked her out, online, before I nabbed her. I know a few things about her, though she doesn’t think I know shit. I’ve seen photos of her socialite family in their designer clothes, looking rich and uptight all at the same time. I know when her father became judge. I know when he’s up for reelection. I watched news clips of him on the internet. I know that he’s a prick.
The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
I want to tell her to forget it. To shut up. But instead I say, “I changed my mind. No one knows we’re here. If they did, they’d kill us. Me and you.”
She stands up and begins to traipse around the room. Her feet are light on the floor, her arms tangled around herself.
“Who?” she begs. Those words—
kill us, me and you
—take her breath away. The rain comes down harder, if possible. She leans in to hear my voice. I’m staring at the wooden floorboards of the cabin. I avoid her expectant eyes.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say.
“Who?” she asks again.
And so I tell her about Dalmar. Mostly so she’ll shut up. I tell her about the day he tracked me down and handed me a photo of her. He said I was to find and deliver her to him.
She turns her back to me and asks with this accusatory tone,
“Then why didn’t you?”
I see the hate covering her from head to toe and think that I should have. I should have handed her over to Dalmar and been through. I would’ve been home by now, plenty of money to pay for food and bills, the mortgage. I wouldn’t have to be worrying about what I left behind, wondering how things are going back home, how she’s going to survive, how I’m going to get to her before I run. I find myself thinking about it all the time. It keeps me up at night. When I’m not worrying about Dalmar or the cops, I’m thinking about her, in that old house all alone. If I would’ve just turned the girl over like I was supposed to do, this would’ve all been through. Then the only thing I would’ve been worrying about is if and when the cops were gonna catch me. But of course that’s nothing new.
I don’t answer the girl’s stupid question. That’s something she doesn’t need to know. She doesn’t need to know why I changed my mind, why I brought her here.
Instead I tell her what I know about Dalmar. I don’t know why I do it. I guess so she’ll know I’m not screwing around. So she’ll be afraid. So she’ll see that being here with me is the best alternative, the only alternative.
Much of what I know about Dalmar is hearsay. Rumors about how he’s believed to be one of those child soldiers back in Africa, the ones that are brainwashed and forced to kill. About him beating a businessman in an abandoned warehouse out on the west side because he couldn’t pay a debt. About how he killed a boy, nine, maybe ten years old, when his folks couldn’t pay the ransom for his return, about how Dalmar shot the kid, sent photos to his parents to rub it in, to gloat.
“You’re lying,” she says. But her eyes are filled with terror. She knows I’m not.
“How can you be so sure?” I ask. “Do you have any idea what he would’ve done if he got his hands on you?”
Rape and torture come to mind. He’s got a hideout in Lawndale, a house on South Homan where I’ve been once or twice. This is where I figure he’d keep the girl, a brick home with busted steps leading up to the front door. Stained carpet. Appliances ripped out of the wall when the last owner foreclosed. Water damage and mold creeping along the ceiling, down the walls. Broken windows covered with plastic wrap. Her, in the middle of a room, on a folding chair, bound and gagged. Waiting. Just waiting. While Dalmar and his guys had a little fun. And even after the judge paid the ransom, I figure Dalmar would tell one of the guys to shoot her. To get rid of the evidence. Ditch her in a Dumpster somewhere, or maybe the river. I tell her this and then I say, “Once you get into this kind of mess, there’s no getting out.”
She doesn’t say a thing. Not about Dalmar, though I know she’s thinking about him. Know she’s got that image of Dalmar shooting a nine-year-old kid glued to her mind.
Gabe
Before
The sergeant gives me the green light to air John Doe’s face on the news Friday night. The tips start rolling in. People begin calling the hotline to say that they’ve seen our John Doe. Except to some people he’s Steve and others he’s Tom. Some lady says she thinks she rode the “L” with him last night, but can’t be entirely sure (Was there a lady with him? No, he was alone). Some guy thinks he saw John Doe working as a janitor in his office building on State Street, but he’s sure the man is Hispanic, which I assure him he’s not. I have a couple of rookies answering the hotline, trying to differentiate real leads from the dead ends. By morning, the gist of the calls is this: either no one has a damn clue who he is, or he’s known by enough aliases to send every rookie on wild-goose chases for the remainder of the year. This realization pains me. Our John Doe might be more experienced than I’d like to think.
I spend a lot of time thinking about him. I could guess a lot about him without having ever met him, without even knowing his name. There isn’t any one factor in a person that causes violent or antisocial behavior. It’s an accumulation of things. I could guess that his socioeconomic level doesn’t place him in the same neighborhood as the Dennetts. I could guess that he never went to college, or had trouble finding and keeping a job. I can guess that, as a child, he didn’t have meaningful relationships with many adults. He may not have had meaningful relationships at all. He may have felt alienated. There may have been a lack of parental involvement. There may have been marital problems. He may have been abused. There was probably little emphasis placed on education, and not a whole lot of affection in his family. His parents probably didn’t tuck him into bed at night; they didn’t read him books before bed. They probably didn’t go to church.
He didn’t have to be abusive to animals as a child. Maybe he was hyperactive. Maybe he had trouble concentrating. Maybe he was depressed or delinquent or antisocial.
He probably never felt like he was quite in control. He didn’t learn to be flexible. He doesn’t know what empathy is. He doesn’t know how to solve a conflict without throwing a punch or pointing his gun.
I’ve taken sociology classes. I’ve run across enough convicts in my lifetime, headed down the very same line.
He didn’t have to take drugs, but he might have. He didn’t have to grow up in a housing project, but he might have. He didn’t have to be in a gang, but I wouldn’t put that past him, either. His parents didn’t have to own a gun.
But I can assume he wasn’t hugged a whole lot. His family didn’t pray before dinner. They didn’t go camping or snuggle together on the couch for movie night. I can assume his father never helped him with his algebra homework. I can guess that at least once, someone forgot to pick him up from school. I can guess that at some point in his life, no one was paying attention to what he watched on TV. And I can guess that he’s been smacked across the face by someone who should’ve known better, someone he trusted.
I flip through the stations on the TV: the Bulls have an off day, Illinois just got beat by the Badgers. Not a good TV night for me. Before settling on
It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,
I do a final run-through of the hundred-plus channels on my TV—who says money can’t buy happiness?—and, as luck would have it, come across Judge Dennett’s face, giving a press conference on the six o’clock news. “What the hell,” I snap, turning the volume louder so I can hear. You’d think the lead detective would be there, at the press conference, or at least know the damn thing was going on. But there, in my place, is the sergeant, friends with Judge Dennett ever since the judge’s stint in the D.A.’s office, long before he went into private practice. Must be nice to have friends in high places. The illustrious Eve stands by Judge Dennett’s side, holding his hand—I’m sure that was prearranged since I’ve never seen any hint of affection between the couple—with Grace beside her, giving goo-goo eyes to the camera as if this might just be her acting debut. The judge seems truly pained by his daughter’s disappearance and I’m certain some lawyer or political advisor told him what to say and what to do, down to every last, minute detail: the hand-holding, for example, or brief lapses and efforts to regain composure that I, for one, know was never lost. It’s all a sham. A journalist attempts to ask a question but is denied as the family spokesman steps in and the judge and his family are ushered off the sidewalk and into their stately home. The sergeant steps on air long enough to let the world know he’s got his best detectives on the case, as if that’s supposed to appease me, before the scene jumps to a studio on Michigan Avenue where some news anchor recaps the Mia Dennett case—flashing an image of our John Doe across the screen—before jumping to a high-rise fire on the South Side.