I’m overly apologetic, and Mia tells me that it’s all right. She listens to the television in the other room. The evening news has given way to a seven o’clock sitcom. “Mia?” I ask and she turns to me.
“What?” she asks.
“The envelope.” I motion toward it and it’s then that she remembers.
She turns it over in her hands. “That policeman gave it to me,” she says.
I’m slicing a tomato. “Detective Hoffman?”
“Yes.”
Mia usually only comes downstairs when James is gone. The rest of the time she hides. I’m certain this room must remind her of her childhood. The room is the same as it’s been for a dozen years or more: the paint, the color of butter, the mood lighting. Candles are lit. The track lighting is dimmed. The table is a dark pedestal table with scrolled legs and matching upholstered chairs, where she spent too much time under a microscope as a child. I’m certain she feels like a child, unable to be left alone, having to be cooked for and constantly watched. Her independence is gone.
Yesterday she asked when she could go home, to her own apartment, and all I replied was in time.
James and I don’t let her leave the house, not unless we’re going to see Dr. Rhodes or to the police station. Running errands is out of the question. For days the doorbell rang from dawn to dusk, men and women with microphones and video cameras awaiting us on the front stoop. Mia Dennett, we’d like to ask you a few questions they’d demand, forcing their microphones at Mia, until I told her not to open the door, and started ignoring the chime altogether. The telephone rang relentlessly, and those infrequent times I did answer it, the only thing I ever said was, “No comment.” After a day or so, I started letting it go straight to voice mail, and then, when the ringing became too much to bear, I unplugged the phone from the wall.
“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” I remind Mia.
She slides her finger under the flap and lifts it open. There’s a single sheet of paper inside. She draws it carefully from the envelope and takes a look. I set the knife on a cutting board and saunter to the table beside Mia, feigning only a little interest when I’m absolutely certain I’m the more attentive of us two.
It’s a photocopy, a drawing from a sketch pad, with circles lining the top where the original was ripped from its spiral binding. It’s a drawing of a person, a woman, I can only assume from the longish hair.
“I drew this,” Mia says to me, but I slip the drawing from her hands.
“May I?” I ask, dropping into the chair beside her. “Why do you say that?” I ask, my hands beginning to tremble, my stomach turning somersaults inside me. Mia has been drawing for as long as I can remember. She’s a talented artist. I asked her once why she loved to draw, why it was something with which she was so enamored. She told me that she drew because it was the only way she could bring about change. She could turn geese to swans or a cloudy day to sun. It was a place where reality didn’t have to exist.
But this picture is something else entirely. The eyes are perfectly circular, the smile the sort she learned to draw in grade school. The eyelashes are upwardly pointing lines. The face is malformed.
“It came from the same notebook, the one Detective Hoffman had. The one with my drawings.”
“You didn’t draw this,” I say with absolute certainty. “Maybe ten years ago. When you were first learning. But not now. This is much too ordinary for you. It’s mediocre at best.”
A timer beeps and I rise to my feet. Mia reaches for the page to have a second look. “Why would the policeman give this to me then?” she asks, turning the envelope over in her hands. I tell her that I don’t know.
I’m setting whole wheat rolls onto a cookie sheet that will bake in the oven, when Mia asks, “Then who? Who drew this?” On the stove, the chicken sears.
I lower the cookie sheet into the bottom of the oven. I flip the chicken, and begin dicing a cucumber as if perhaps it was Colin Thatcher himself lying on the cutting board before me.
I shrug my shoulders. “That picture,” I say, trying hard not to cry. Mia sits at the table, examining that picture, and I see it, clear as day: the long hair, the circular eyes, the U-shaped smile. “That picture,” I say, “it’s you.”
Colin
Before
We’re on the Kennedy before I ever bother to turn on the heat. Somewhere into Wisconsin I turn on the radio. Static blares out of the rear speakers. The girl is watching out the side window. She doesn’t say a thing. I’m certain a pair of headlights has followed us the entire length of Interstate 90, but they disappear just outside of Janesville, Wisconsin.
I exit the interstate. The road is dark and deserted and seems to lead to nowhere. I pull into a gas station. There isn’t an attendant on duty. I kill the engine and get out to fill up the tank, bringing the gun with me.
I’ve got my eyes on her the entire time, when I see a glow from inside the truck, the light from a cell phone that’s come to life. How could I be so stupid? I thrust open the door, scare the shit out of her. She jumps, tries to hide the phone under her shirt.
“Give me your phone,” I snap, ticked I forgot to ditch her phone before we left.
The light from the gas station fills the truck. She’s a damn mess, makeup down her face, her hair a catastrophe. “Why?” she asks. I know she’s not this dumb.
“Just give it to me.”
“Why?”
“Just give it to me.”
“I don’t have it,” she lies.
“Give me the fucking phone,” I yell as I reach over and yank it from beneath her shirt. She tells me to get my hands off her. I check the phone. She got as far as finding the contact list but that’s all. As I go to fill up the tank, I make sure it’s off, then dump it into the trash. Even if the cops trace the signal, we’ll be nowhere around when they do.
I scavenge the back of the truck for something—rope, an extension cord, a piece of fucking string. I bind her hands together, tight enough that she cries out in pain. “Try that again,” I say when I get back in the truck, “and I’ll kill you.” I slam the door and start the engine.
There’s only one thing that’s certain: when I didn’t show up with the girl, Dalmar sent everyone he knows after us. By now they’ve torn apart my apartment. There’s a hit out on both our heads. There isn’t a chance in hell I’m going back. If this girl is dumb enough to try, she’ll be dead. But I won’t let that happen. She’ll tell them where I am before they kill her, but I’ll kill her first. I’ve already done enough good deeds.
We drive through the night. She closes her eyes, only for a couple of seconds, then jerks them open again and searches the truck to realize that it isn’t a nightmare. It’s all real: me, the dirty truck, its vinyl seats torn, cotton falling out, the static on the radio, the endless fields and the dark night sky. The gun sits on my lap—I know she doesn’t have the guts to reach for it—and my hands clutch the steering wheel, as I drive slower now that I know we’re not being followed.
She asks once why I’m doing this, her voice shaking as she speaks. “Why are you doing this to me?” she asks. It’s somewhere around Madison. She’d gone all this time in silence, listening to some Catholic priest ramble on and on about original sin, his voice cutting out every third or fourth word. And then all of a sudden, Why are you doing this to me, and it’s the to me part that really rubs me the wrong way. She thinks it’s all about her. It doesn’t have a thing to do with her. She’s a pawn, a puppet, a sacrificial lamb.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say.
She doesn’t like this answer.