Authors: Mary Kubica
Colin
Before
There are lights on the Christmas tree. I won’t tell her how they got there. I said she wouldn’t like it. I said that someone else’s loss is our gain.
She says they look absolutely gorgeous at night when we turn off the lights and lay side by side in the dark, with just the lights from the Christmas tree and the fire.
“This is perfect,” she says.
“This isn’t good enough,” I say.
“What do you mean?” she asks. “It’s perfect.”
But we both know it’s far from perfect.
What is perfect is the way she looks at me, and the way she says my name. The way her hand strokes my hair, though I don’t think she knows she’s doing it. The way we lay together night after night. The way I feel: complete. What is perfect is the way she sometimes smiles and she sometimes laughs. The way we can say anything that comes to mind, or sit together for hours in absolute silence.
The cat lies by us during the day. He sleeps with us at night, on her pillow where there’s an ounce of warmth. I tell her to shoo him away, but she won’t. So she moves closer to me. She shares mine instead. She feeds the cat table scraps, which he devours. But we both know that as the cabinets empty, she will have to decide: us or him.
We talk about where we would go if we had the chance.
I list everywhere I can possibly think of that’s warm. “Mexico. Costa Rica. Egypt. The Sudan.”
“The
Sudan?
”
“Why not? It gets hot.”
“You’re that cold?” she asks. I pull her on top of me.
“I’m getting warmer,” I say.
I ask where she’d want to go—if we ever got out of
here
.
“There’s a town in Italy,” she says. “A ghost town—it’s all but abandoned, lost in olive trees, a nearly nonexistent town of only a couple hundred people, with a medieval castle and an old church.”
“This is where you want to go?” I’m surprised. I expected Machu Picchu or Hawaii. Something along those lines.
But I can tell she’s been thinking about it.
“It’s the kind of place we could slip in. It’s a world apart from TVs and technology. It’s in Liguria, this part of Italy that borders the south of France—we’d be only miles from the Italian Riviera. We could live off the land, and grow our own food. We wouldn’t have to rely on others. We wouldn’t have to worry about being caught or found or...” I’m giving her a look. “You think it’s stupid,” she says.
“I think fresh vegetables would be a nice change from stewed tomatoes.”
“I hate stewed tomatoes,” she admits.
I say that I hate them, too. I only got them because I was in a rush.
“We could find a rustic old home, one of those granite monstrosities, one, I don’t know, maybe two hundred years old. We’d have breathtaking views of the mountains, maybe the coastline if we’re lucky. We could raise animals, grow our own food.”
“Grapes?”
“We could have a vineyard. And change our names, get a new start.”
I sit up on my elbows. “Who would you be?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your new name.”
The answer seems obvious. “Chloe.”
“Chloe. Then that’s who you’ll be,” I say. I consider the name. Chloe. I remember the day, months ago, when we’re driving in the truck back to Grand Marais. I forced her to pick a name, and she came up with Chloe. “Why Chloe?” I ask.
“What do you mean?”
“That day. When I told you you couldn’t be Mia anymore. And you said Chloe.”
“Oh,” she says and she sits up straight. There are creases on her face from my shirt. Her hair is long. It goes halfway down her back. Maybe more. I’m waiting for a simple answer.
I just like it,
something like that. But what I get is more. “Just some girl I saw on TV.”
“What do you mean?”
She closes her eyes. I know she doesn’t want to tell me.
But she does anyway. “I was six or seven years old. My mother was in the kitchen, but she left the TV on, the news. I was coloring. She didn’t know I was paying attention. There was a story, a high school band trip from some school, Kansas or Oklahoma, something like that. There was a group of kids in a bus traveling to a competition or something. I don’t know. I wasn’t really paying attention to that. The bus skidded off the road and went down a ravine. Half a dozen kids were killed, the driver.
“Then this family appears, a mom, a dad and two older boys, maybe eighteen or nineteen. I can still see them—the dad gaunt with a receding hairline, the boys, both of them, tall and lanky like basketball players, with burnt-orange hair. The mother looked like she’d been run over by an eighteen-wheeler. They’re crying, every single one of them, standing before this little white house. That’s what made me pay attention. The crying. They were heartbroken. Destroyed. I watched the father, mostly, but all of them really, the way they openly wept for their dead daughter. Their dead sister. She’d been killed in the accident, plunged down the ravine when the driver fell asleep at the wheel. She was fifteen but I remember her father gushing about his baby girl. He went on and on about how amazing she was, though the things he said—that she was kind and silly and born to play the flute—were not necessarily
amazing
. But to him they were. He kept saying, ‘my Chloe,’ or ‘my baby Chloe.’ That was her name. Chloe Frost.
“All I could think about was Chloe Frost. I wanted to
be
her, to have someone long for me the way her family longed for her. I cried for Chloe, for days on end. I spoke to her, when I was alone. I carried on conversations with my dead friend, Chloe. I drew pictures of her. Dozens of them, with her own burnt-orange hair and coffee-colored eyes.” She runs her hands through her hair and looks away, in a sheepish sort of way. Embarrassed.
Then she admits, “I was jealous of her, really. Jealous that she was dead, jealous that somewhere, out there, someone loved her more than they loved me.” She hesitates, then says, “It’s crazy. I know.”
But I shake my head and say, “No,” because I know it’s what she wants to hear. But I think how lonely she must have been growing up. Longing for a dead friend she didn’t even know. Things weren’t so grand for Ma and me, but at least we weren’t alone.
She changes the subject. She doesn’t want to talk about Chloe Frost anymore.
“Who will you be?” she asks.
“John?” I say. I couldn’t be further from a John.
“No,” she says, the answer almost as obvious as Chloe had been. “You’ll be Owen. Because it doesn’t matter anyway, does it? That’s not your real name.”
“Do you want to know?” I ask. I bet she’s thought about it a million times. I bet she’s guessed to herself what my real name might be. I wonder if she ever thought about asking.
“No,” she says, “because this is who you are to me. You’re Owen.” She says that whoever I was before this doesn’t matter.
“And you’ll be Chloe.”
“I’ll be Chloe.”
And in that moment, Mia ceased to exist.
Eve
After
I consult with Dr. Rhodes. She agrees under one condition: that she is allowed to go along, too. I purchase the three airplane tickets with a credit card that James and I share. The police department pays Gabe’s fare.
We will be revisiting the cabin in which Mia was held prisoner all that time. The hope is that being there will help jog her memory and make her remember something about her time in captivity. If the cat alone can trigger memories of Colin Thatcher, then I wonder what that cabin will do.
Mia and I pack one bag. Between us, we don’t have much. I never mention to James where we are going. Mia asks Ayanna to watch Canoe for a few days, and the woman agrees without reservation. Her nine-year-old son, Ronnie, is thrilled to have a cat to keep company. We ask the taxi to drive us to her apartment on the way to O’Hare. It’s with great difficulty that Mia is able to part with Canoe for the second time. I wonder what happened the first time she said goodbye.
The airport is a horrendous place for a person in Mia’s condition. The noise is deafening: thousands of people, loudspeakers, airplanes soaring overhead. Mia is on edge; we all see it, though she’s tucked between Dr. Rhodes and me, and I have her arm looped through mine. Dr. Rhodes suggests a dose of Valium, which she has brought along in her suitcase just in case.
Gabe peers over. “What else have you got in there?” he asks. The four of us are sitting in a row at our terminal.
“Other sedatives,” she replies. “Stronger sedatives.”
He sits back and reaches for a newspaper that someone has left behind.
“Is it safe?” I ask. “For the...”
“For the baby,” Mia finishes impassively. I can’t bring myself to say the word.
“Yes,” I say, humbled that she was able to.
“It’s safe,” the doctor assures us, “this once. I wouldn’t suggest using it frequently during pregnancy.”
Mia takes the pills with a sip of water, and then we wait. By the time our flight is announced, she is nearly asleep.
We will fly to Minneapolis/St. Paul for a forty-five-minute layover, before continuing onto Duluth, Minnesota. There, a so-called friend of Gabe’s, Detective Roger Hammill, will meet and drive us to Grand Marais. He refers to him as his friend, but even I can hear the disdain in his voice when he speaks of this man. Our flight is early, 9:00 a.m., and as the airplane ascends into the dreadfully cold sky, we know it will be a long day. Our only saving grace is that Mia is asleep.
Mia and I sit side by side. She has the window seat, and me the aisle. Gabe sits opposite the slender aisle and once or twice brushes a hand against my arm and asks if I’m okay. Beside him Dr. Rhodes is lost in an audiobook, the headphones covering her ears. The rest of the plane is oblivious to our situation. They jabber on and on about the weather, skiing conditions and their connecting flights. A woman loses herself in the “Our Father” as the plane takes off, praying we land in one piece. She grips a rosary in her trembling hands. The pilot warns of a bumpy flight and asks that we remain in our seats.
By the time we land in Minneapolis, Mia has come to and is upset once again by the commotion. I ask the doctor when she is due for more medicine, but Dr. Rhodes assures me that we must wait; we need Mia to be lucid for this afternoon. As we wait for our connection, Gabe offers up an iPod for Mia, and finds the least offensive music he can possibly find to drown out the sound.
I wonder what will happen when we arrive. The thought of it is enough to make me sick. I think of Mia’s reaction to the cat. What will her reaction be when we see the place where she was held prisoner all this time? I think of the progress we’ve made since she returned home. Will it be lost?
I excuse myself to use the bathroom and Dr. Rhodes takes my seat beside Mia so that she won’t be alone. When I come out of the bathroom, Gabe is waiting for me. I walk into him so that he collects me in his arms, and says, “Soon, this will all be through. Trust me.”
I do.
In Duluth, we’re escorted to a police department SUV by a man who introduces himself as Detective Hammill. Gabe calls him Roger. Mia says it’s nice to meet him, though Gabe reminds me that it isn’t the first time they’ve met.
He’s a big-bellied man, about my age but to me he looks much older, and I’m made aware than I am getting older by the day. There’s a photograph of his wife taped to the inside of the SUV: an overweight blonde woman, with a circle of children huddled around them. There are six children, each as burly and plump as the next.
Mia, Dr. Rhodes and I slide into the backseat while Gabe takes the front. He offered it to me, but I happily refused, not up to the burdensome task of small talk.
The drive is over two hours. Gabe and Detective Hammill lose themselves in idle banter about police work. They try to one-up one another, and I can tell that Gabe does not like the man. Gabe’s voice is not overly friendly, and at times he is short, though for the benefit of us women, he remains civil. He tries to speak to Mia and me more than our chauffeur, and for much of the drive, the rest of us sit in silence while Detective Hammill gives a soliloquy on two Tiberwolves wins this season against the Chicago Bulls. I have no knowledge of professional sports.
We travel along Highway 61 for the bulk of the journey, riding, in part, along the shores of Lake Superior. Mia’s eyes are steadfast on the waters. I wonder if she’s seen them before.
“Anything look familiar?” Gabe asks more than once. He asks all the questions I don’t have the courage to.
Earlier, Dr. Rhodes made it clear that Gabe should not pry too hard. Gabe made it clear that he had a job to do; hers was to pick up the pieces when they fell.
“Assuming the shortest distance between two points is a straight line,” Detective Hammill says, peering at Mia in the rearview mirror, “you would have traveled this path.”
We pass through Grand Marais and take a path known as the Gunflint Trail. Detective Hammill is a wealth of information, although little he has to offer is new to me, having memorized every detail of the scenic byway in the sleepless nights since Mia returned. We travel along a two-lane road, through the Superior National Forest, surrounded by more vegetation than I believe I’ve ever seen in my entire life. Much of the greenery is dead now, buried under mounds of snow; it will not be unearthed until spring. The evergreen trees embrace the snow in their needles, where they lie heavy from the weight.
What I see in Mia as we continue along our journey is a straighter posture, her eyes more attuned to the outdoors, not a glassy-eyed look like I’ve seen in the past, but an awareness and an interest.
Dr. Rhodes is instructing Mia in visualization and repetitive affirmations:
I can do this
. I can hear James now, mocking the woman for her irrational techniques.
“Do you recognize anything now?” Gabe asks. He’s turned around in his seat, and she shakes her head. It’s late afternoon, three, maybe four o’clock, and already the sky is becoming dark. Clouds fill the sky, and though the heat runs steady, my hands and toes begin to numb. The heater cannot compete with the subzero temperatures outside.
“Damn good thing you got out when you did,” Detective Hammill says to Mia. “You never would have survived the winter.”
The thought sends a chill through me. Had Colin Thatcher not killed her, Mother Nature would have done the job herself.
“Ah,” Gabe says to lighten the mood. He sees something pass through me that he doesn’t like. “You’d be surprised. Mia is quite a fighter. Isn’t that right?” he asks with a wink. And then he mouths the words that only she and I see:
you can do this,
as the tires of the SUV hit a mound of snow and we all turn and find ourselves face-to-face with a bleak log cabin.
She’s seen the pictures. There were so many times I found her sitting lethargically, staring at images of this very cabin, or staring into the vacant eyes of Colin Thatcher and seeing nothing. But now she sees something. Detective Hammill opens the door, and like a magnetic force, Mia emerges from the car, and I have to stop her. “Mia, your hat,” I say, “your scarf,” because it’s so cold out here the very air will freeze her flesh. But Mia seems completely unaware of the cold and I have to force the gloves onto her hands like she’s a five-year-old child. Her eyes are lost on this cabin, on the stack of steps that lead from the snow-covered drive to a door that’s been barred with yellow caution tape. Snow covers the steps, though footprints remain, and tire tracks in the drive suggest that someone has been here since the last snowfall. The snow is everywhere: on the roof, the porch, the uninhabited world around the home. I wonder how Mia felt arriving at this home, so remote one might believe they are the last inhabitants on earth. I shiver at the thought of it.
There’s the lake that I’ve seen in Mia’s pictures, frozen over a thousand times, unlikely to thaw before spring.
I’m overwhelmed with such feelings of loneliness and despair that I don’t see Mia making her way up the steps with comfort and familiarity. Gabe reaches her first and offers to help. The steps are slick and more than once her feet slip.
At the top they wait for Detective Hammill to unlock the door. Dr. Rhodes and I follow close behind.
The detective presses the door open, and it creaks. The rest of us fight for a look inside, but it’s Gabe, with his general decorum, who says to Mia, “Ladies first,” though he follows close behind.