Authors: Mary Kubica
Colin
Before
She wants to know how much I got paid for this. She asks too many questions.
“I didn’t get paid a damn thing,” I remind her. “I get paid for finishing a job.”
“How much were you offered?”
“None of your business,” I say.
We’re in the bathroom, of all places. She’s on her way in. I’m on my way out. I don’t bother to tell her the water is ice-cold.
“Does my father know about this?”
“I told you already. I don’t know.”
The ransom was to be collected from her father. That I know. But I don’t have a damn clue what Dalmar did when I didn’t show up with the girl.
She smells of morning breath, her hair a labyrinth of dirty blond.
She closes the door on me and I hear the water begin to run. I try not to imagine her stripping away her clothes and stepping into the piercing water.
When she comes out she’s drying the ends of her hair with a towel. I’m in the kitchen eating granola and freeze-dried milk. I’ve forgotten what it tastes like to eat real food. I’ve got all the cash spread out on the table, and I’m counting what we’ve got left. She eyes the cash. We’re not broke. Not yet. That’s a good thing.
She tells me how she always thought some disgruntled convict would shoot her father on the courthouse steps. In her voice I hear a different story. She didn’t
think
it would happen. She hoped.
She’s standing in the hallway. I can see her shiver, but she doesn’t whine about being cold. Not this time.
“He was a litigation lawyer before becoming a judge. He got involved in a number of class-action suits, asbestos cases. He never protected the good guy. People were dying of these horrible things—mesothelioma, asbestosis—and he’s trying to save the big corporations a buck or two. He never talked about his work. Attorney-client privilege, he said, but I know he just didn’t want to talk. Period. But I’d sneak into his office at night when he was asleep. At first I was snooping because I wanted to prove he was having an affair in the hopes my mother might actually leave him. I was a kid—thirteen, fourteen. I didn’t know what mesothelioma was. But I could read well enough. Coughing up blood, heart palpitations, lumps under the skin. Nearly half of those infected died within a year of diagnosis. You didn’t even have to work with asbestos to be exposed—wives and children were dying because their fathers brought it home on their clothes.
“The more successful he was, the more we were threatened. My mother would find letters in the mail. They knew where we lived. There were phone calls. Men hoping Grace, my mother and I would die as painful a death as their wives and children had.
“Then he became a judge. His face was all over the news. All these headlines with his name. He was harassed all the time, but after a while we stopped paying attention to these unsubstantiated threats. He let it go to his head. It made him feel important. The more people he pissed off, the better he was doing his job.”
There’s nothing to say. I’m not good at this kind of crap. I can’t handle small talk and I certainly can’t handle sympathy. The reality is that I know nothing about the scumbag who thought it would be in his best interest to threaten some bastard’s kid. That’s the way this business works. Guys like me, we’re kept in the dark. We carry out an assignment without really knowing why. That way we can’t point fingers. Not that I’d try. I know what would happen to me if I did. Dalmar told me to nab the girl. I didn’t ask why. That way, when the cops catch me and I’m in the interrogation room, I can’t answer their underhanded questions. I don’t know who hired Dalmar. I don’t know what they want with the girl. Dalmar told me to get her. I did.
And then I changed my mind.
I stare up from my bowl and look at her. Her eyes beg me to say something, some grand confession that’s going to explain it all to her. That’s going to help her understand why she’s here. Why her instead of the bitchy sister. Why her instead of the insolent judge. She’s desperate for an answer to it all. How is it that in the blink of an eye everything can change? Her family. Her life. Her existence. She searches in vain, thinking I know the answer. Thinking some lowlife like me might be able to help her see the light.
“Five grand,” I say.
“What?” This wasn’t what she expected to hear.
I stand from the chair and it skids across the wooden floors. My footsteps are loud. I rinse the bowl with water from the faucet. I let it drop to the sink and she jumps. I turn to her. “They offered me five grand.”
Eve
Before
I let my days go to waste.
Oftentimes it’s hard to get out of bed and when I do, the very first thought on my mind is Mia. I wake up sobbing in the middle of the night, night after endless night, hurrying downstairs so I don’t wake James. I’m stricken with grief at all waking hours; in the grocery store, I’m certain I see Mia shopping the cereal aisle, stopping myself only moments before throwing my arms around a complete stranger. Later, in the car, I go to pieces, unable to leave the parking lot for over an hour as I watch mothers with their children enter the store: holding hands as they cross the lot, mothers lifting small children into the basket of the shopping cart.
For weeks I’ve seen her face flash across the TV screen and a sketch of that man. But now there are more important things happening in the world. It’s both a blessing and a curse, I suppose. The reporters are less intrusive these days. They don’t hound me in the driveway, follow me on my errands. The harassing phone calls and interview requests are on sabbatical; I can open my curtains without seeing a flood of reporters line the sidewalk before our home. But their withdrawal worries me as well; they’ve grown apathetic to the name Mia Dennett, tired of waiting for a front-page headline that may never come: Mia Dennett Returns Home,
or maybe, Dennett Girl Found Dead
.
It settles upon me, like dark clouds descending on a winter day, that I will never know. I think of those families who are reunited with their loved one’s remains, ten, sometimes twenty years later, and wonder if that will be me.
When I tire of the crying, I let the fury take control, shattering imported Italian crystal goblets against the kitchen wall, and when they’re done, James’s grandmother’s dinnerware. I scream at the top of my lungs, a barbaric sound that certainly doesn’t belong to me.
I sweep the mess before James arrives home, tucking a million pieces of shattered glass in the garbage bin beneath a dead philodendron so he won’t see.
I spend an entire afternoon watching the robins en route to places south, Mississippi and such, for the winter. They arrive one day on our back porch, dozens of them, fat and cold, stocking up on whatever they can find for the journey ahead. It rained that day and the worms were everywhere. I watch them for hours, sad when they leave. It will be months before they return, those red bellies that beckon spring.
Another day the ladybugs arrive. Thousands of them, soaking up the sun on the back door. It’s an Indian summer day, warm, with temperatures in the upper sixties and plentiful sun. The kind of day we long for in the fall, the colors of the trees at their peak. I try to count them all, but they scatter away, and more come, and it’s impossible to keep track. I don’t know how long I watch them. I wonder what the ladybugs will do for the winter. Will they die? And then, days later when a frost covers the earth, I think of those ladybugs and cry.
I think of Mia when she was a child. I think of the things we did. I walk to the playground I used to take Mia to while Grace was in school for the day, and sit on the swings. I rake my hand through the sand in the sandbox and sit on a bench and stare. At the children. At the fortunate mothers who still had theirs to hold.
But mostly I think of the things I didn’t do. I think of the time I stood idly by when James told Mia that a B
wasn’t good enough in high school chem, and the time she brought home a breathtaking impressionist painting she’d spent more than a month on at school, he scoffed, “If only you’d spend that kind of time on chemistry, you might have gotten an A.” I think of myself, watching out of the corner of my eye, unable to say a thing. Unable to point out the vacant expression on our daughter’s face because I was afraid he might get mad.
When Mia informed James that she didn’t plan to go to law school, he said she didn’t have a choice. She was seventeen, hormones raging, and she pleaded,
“Mom,”
desperate, just this one time, for me to step in and intervene. I’d been washing dishes, trying my hardest to evade the conversation. I remember the desperation on Mia’s face, the displeasure on James’s. I chose the lesser of two evils.
“Mia,” I said. I’ll never forget the day. The sound of the telephone ringing in the background, though none of us paid it the time of day. The smell of something I’d burnt in the kitchen, cold spring air wafting in a window I’d opened to get rid of the smell. The sun was staying out later, something we might comment on if we weren’t so preoccupied with upsetting Mia.
“It means so much to him,” I said. “He wants you to be like him.”
She stormed out of the kitchen and, upstairs, she slammed a door.
Mia dreamed of studying at the Art Institute of Chicago. She wanted to be an artist. It was all that had ever mattered to her. But James refused.
Mia started a countdown that very day to her eighteenth birthday, and she started packing a box of things she would take with her when she left.
The ducks and geese fly overhead. Everyone is leaving me.
I wonder if somewhere Mia is looking toward the sky, seeing the same thing.
Colin
Before
What we have is time to think. And a lot of it.
That damn cat keeps hanging around now that the girl is sacrificing scraps of her own dinner for it. She found a moth-eaten blanket in the closet and, with an empty box from the back of my truck, created a makeshift bed for the stupid thing. She has it set up in the shed out back. Every day she takes it a few bites of food.
She has a name for the damn thing: Canoe. Not that she bothered to tell me. But I heard her call to it this morning when it wasn’t sleeping in its bed. Now she’s worried.
I sit by the lake and fish. I’ll eat trout every day for the rest of my God-given life if it means I don’t have to eat something that’s been freeze-dried.
Most often I come up with northern pike. Then walleye. Sometimes trout. I can tell from the light spots on the northern, that and the fact that they’re always the first bastards to take the bait. The fish are stocked every year, mostly fry and fingerlings, sometimes yearlings. The smallmouth bass give me the most damn trouble. Until I get them on the ground, I’d bet my life they’re twice the size they turn out to be. Strong bastards.
I spend most of my time thinking about how we’re going to pull this off. About how I’m going to pull this off. Food is running low, which means a trip to the store. I have the money. I just don’t know what it will take for someone to recognize me. And what do I do with the girl when I’m gone? The disappearance of a judge’s daughter—that’s breaking news. I’d bet my life on it. Any store clerk is going to recognize her and call the cops.
Which makes me wonder: have the cops figured out I was with her the night she disappeared? Is my face, like hers, all over the fucking TV? Maybe that’s a good thing, I tell myself. Not for me; not if it means I get caught. But if Valerie sees my face on the TV, sees that I’m a person of interest in the disappearance of a Chicago woman, then she’ll know what to do. She’ll know I’m not there to make sure there’s food on the table and the doors are shut. She’ll know what needs to be done.
When the girl isn’t paying attention, I pull a photo from my wallet. It’s worn with time, shriveled around the edges from all the times I’ve pulled it from my wallet and forced it back in. I wonder if and when the money arrived, the money I swiped from the truck stop in Eau Claire. I wonder if she knew it was from me. She would have known I was in trouble when the money arrived, five hundred dollars or more crammed in an envelope with no return address.
I’m not one to be sentimental. I just need to know that she’s okay.
It’s not like she’s alone. At least that’s what I tell myself. The neighbor comes by once a week, gets the mail and checks on her. They’ll see the money. When Sunday comes and goes and I don’t show, they’ll know. If they haven’t already seen my face on the TV. If Valerie hasn’t already seen my face on TV and gone to check on her, to make sure she’s okay. I try and convince myself: Valerie is there. Everything is okay.
I almost believe it.
Later that night, we’re outside. I’m attempting to grill fish for dinner. Except there’s no charcoal so I’m seeing what else I can burn to start a fire. The girl’s sitting on the porch, wrapped in a blanket that she snagged from inside. Her eyes scan the land below. She’s wondering where the damn cat is. She hasn’t seen it in two days and she’s worried. It’s getting colder out all the time. Sooner or later, the thing won’t survive.
“I take it you’re not a bank teller,” she says.
“What do you think?” I ask.
She takes it as a no.
“What do you do then?” she asks. “
Do
you work?”
“I work.”
“Anything legal?”
“I do what I need to do to survive. Just like you.”
“I don’t think so,” she says.
“And why’s that?”
“I earn an honest living. I pay taxes.”
“How do you know I don’t pay taxes?”
“
Do
you pay taxes?” she asks.
“I work,” I say. “I earn an
honest living.
I pay taxes. I’ve mopped the floors of the john at some Realtor’s office. Washed dishes. Loaded crates into a truck. You know what they pay these days? Minimum wage. Do you have a fucking clue what it’s like to survive on minimum wage? I work two jobs at a time, thirteen or fourteen hours a day. That pays the rent, buys some food. Someone like you works—what? Eight hours a day plus summer vacation.”
“I teach summer school,” she says. It’s a stupid thing to say. She knows it’s a stupid thing to say before I give her the look.
She doesn’t know what it’s like. She can’t even imagine.
I look up at the sky, at the dark clouds that threaten us. Not rain, but snow. It will be here soon. She pulls the blanket tighter around herself. She shudders from the cold.
She knows that I would never let her leave. I have more to lose than she does.
“You’ve done this kind of thing before,” she says.
“Done what?”
“Kidnapping. Holding a gun to someone’s head.” It isn’t a question.
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“You didn’t snatch me with the hands of a virgin.”
I’ve started a fire. I drop the fish on the grill pan and they begin to sear.
“I’ve never bothered someone who didn’t need to be bothered.”
But even I know that isn’t true.
I flip the fish. They’re cooking faster than I want. I move them to the edge of the grill so they won’t burn.
“It could be worse,” I assure her. “It could be much worse.”
We eat outside. She sits on the floor, her back pressed to the wooden planks of the deck rail. I offer her a chair. She says no thanks. She spreads her legs out before herself and crosses them at the ankles.
The wind blows through the trees. We both turn to watch the leaves lose their hold on the branches and fall to the ground.
And that’s when we hear it: footsteps on the shriveled leaves that cover the earth. It’s the cat, I think, at first, but then know that the footsteps are too heavy for the scrawny little cat, too deliberate. The girl and I exchange a look, and I put a finger to my lips and whisper, “Shhh.” And then I rise to my feet and feel the seat of my pants for a gun that isn’t there.