Authors: Mary Kubica
Colin
Before
I tell her that my middle name is Michael, after my dad. She still doesn’t know my real name. She calls me Owen when she calls me anything at all. Generally I don’t call her anything. There’s no need. I have a scar near the bottom of my back that she’s seen when I’m coming out of the bathroom after a bath. She asks about it. I tell her it’s from a dog bite as a kid. But the scar on my shoulder I won’t talk about. I tell her I’ve broken three bones in my body: a collarbone in a car accident when I was a kid; my wrist playing football; and my nose in a fight.
I rub my facial hair when I’m thinking. I pace when I’m mad. I do anything to keep busy. I never like to sit for more than a few minutes, and only ever with a purpose: feeding the fire, eating dinner, sleeping.
I tell her how this all started. How some man offered me five grand to find and deliver her to Lower Wacker Drive. I knew nothing about her at the time. I’d seen a photo and for days I followed her around. It wasn’t something I wanted to do. I didn’t know the plan until that night. Until they called me on the phone and told me what I was supposed to do. That’s the way it is; the less I know the better. This wasn’t like the other times. But this was more money than I’d ever been offered. The first time was only for repayment of a loan, I tell her. “So I didn’t get my ass kicked.” After that it was a few hundred dollars, sometimes a grand. I say that Dalmar is only a go-between. The others are all hidden behind a smoke screen. “I don’t have a damn clue who pays the bills,” I say.
“Does that bother you?” she asks.
I shrug. “That’s just the way it is.”
She could hate me for doing this to her. She could hate me for bringing her here. But she’s coming to see that what I did may have saved her life.
My first job was to find a man named Thomas Ferguson. I was supposed to make him cough up a substantial debt. He was some rich, eccentric man. Some technological genius who made it big in the ’90s. He had a fancy for gambling. He’d taken out a reverse mortgage and gambled away nearly all the equity in his home. Then a child’s college fund. Then he moved onto funds his in-laws had left to his wife and him when they died. When his wife found out, she threatened to leave him. He got his hands on more money and headed out to the casino in Joliet to earn it all back. Ironically Thomas Ferguson did make a small fortune at the casino. But he didn’t repay his debt.
Finding Thomas Ferguson was easy.
I remember the way my hands shook when I walked up the steps of the home in Chicago’s Streeterville neighborhood. I just didn’t want to get in trouble. I rang the doorbell. When a teenage girl peeked through the opening, I forced it open. It was after 8:00 p.m. on a fall night and I remember that it was cold. The house was dim. The girl started screaming. Her mother ran into the room and they took cover beneath an old desk when I showed my gun. I told the woman to call for her husband. It took a good five minutes for the coward to show his face. He’d been upstairs hiding. All the necessary precautions had been made: cutting phone lines and blocking the back door. He wasn’t going to get away. And yet Thomas Ferguson waited long enough for me to tie up the wife and girl and stand, with the gun to the wife’s head, when he finally appeared. He said he had no money. Not a penny to his name. But of course that couldn’t be true. Parked outside was a brand-new Cadillac SUV that he’d just given to his wife.
I tell her that I never killed anyone. Not that time, not ever.
We make small talk, to pass the time.
I tell her that she snores when she sleeps. She says, “I wouldn’t know. I can’t remember the last time someone watched me sleep.”
I always wear shoes, even when we know there’s nowhere to go. Even when the temperature plummets into negative degrees and we know we won’t move an inch from the fire.
I leave the water at a trickle in all the faucets. I tell her not to turn it off. If the water freezes, the pipes will burst. She asks me if we’ll freeze to death. I say no, but I’m not so sure.
When I’m really bored I ask if she can show me how to draw. I yank them out page by page because they look like shit. I drop them into the fire. I try to draw a picture of her. She shows me how the eyes go toward the center. “The eyes are generally aligned with the top of the ear, the nose with the bottom,” she says. Then she makes me look at her. She dissects her own face with her hands. She’s a good teacher. I think of the kids, in her school. They must like her. I never liked a single one of my teachers.
I try again. When I’m through she says that she’s a perfect replica of Mrs. Potato Head. I yank it from the spiral notebook, but when I try to torch the page, she takes it from my hands.
“In case you’re famous one day,” she says.
Later, she hides it where I won’t find it. She knows that if I do, it’ll become food for the fire.
Eve
After
He worked on it all weekend, dropping subtle hints here and there, about how fat she would get and about the sinful child who was growing in her womb. He ignored my pleas to stop. Mia has yet to accept the notion that there is life inside her, though I heard her in the bathroom, vomiting, and knew morning sickness had arrived. I knocked on the door to ask if she was okay; James pushed me aside. I caught the door frame so I didn’t fall, staring at him in dismay.
“Don’t you have errands to run?” he asked. “A manicure? Pedicure?
Something?
”
I’m opposed to abortion. To me, it’s murder. That’s a child inside Mia, no matter what kind of madman helped create it. A child with a heartbeat and budding arms and legs, with blood that runs through its tiny body, through my grandchild’s body.
James wouldn’t leave me alone with Mia. He kept her confined to the bedroom for most of the weekend, filling her mind with literature on the pro-choice movement: pamphlets he’d picked up from clinics in the city and articles he’d printed from the internet. He knows my opinion on abortion. We’re generally both conservative in our views, but now that there’s an illegitimate child inside our daughter’s womb, he tossed all rational thinking aside. There’s only one thing that matters: getting rid of the child. He promised to pay for the abortion. He told me that much, or at least muttered it under his breath as if he was talking to himself. He said he’d pay for it because he didn’t want the bills submitted to the insurance company for coverage; he wanted no record that
this
had ever happened.
“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 mumbles 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.