Mia sits on the front porch every day, seemingly indifferent to the bitter cold. She stares at the snow that surrounds our home like the moat of a castle. She watches the dormant trees lurch back and forth in the wind. But she doesn’t notice the police cars, the four men who study her all hours of the day. I’ve begged her not to leave the porch and she’s agreed, though sometimes she makes her way across the snow and onto the sidewalk, where she strolls by the homes of Mr. and Mrs. Pewter and the Donaldson family. While one of the cars crawls along behind her, the other sends an officer to get me, and I come running out the door with bare feet to snatch up my wandering daughter. “Mia, honey, where are you going?” I’ve heard myself ask countless times, gathering her by the shirtsleeves and reeling her in. She never wears a coat and her hands are ice-cold. She never knows where she’s going but she always follows me home and I thank the officers as we pass by, on our way into the kitchen for a cup of warm milk. She shivers as she drinks it and when she’s through she says she’s going to bed. She’s felt unwell for the past week, always longing to be in bed.
But today for some reason she sees the police cars. I pull out of the garage and onto the street, en route to Dr. Rhodes’s office for Mia’s first round of hypnosis. It’s a moment of lucidity that passes by as she gazes out the window and asks, “What are they doing here?” as if they had arrived right then and there in that single lucid moment.
“Keeping us safe,” I say diplomatically. What I mean to say is keeping you safe, but I don’t want her to fear the reasons she’s not.
“From what?” she asks, turning her head to watch the policemen through the back window. One starts his car and follows us down the road. The other lingers behind to keep an eye on the house while we’re gone.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I respond in lieu of an answer to her question, and she gratefully accepts it, turning around to watch out the front window and forgetting altogether that we’re being trailed.
We drive down the neighborhood street. It’s quiet. The kids have returned to school after two weeks of winter break and no longer loiter in their front lawns building snowmen and tossing snowballs at one another with high, shrieking laughter, sounds that are foreign in our uncommunicative home. Christmas lights remain on homes, those inflatable Santas unplugged and lying dead in mounds of snow. James didn’t take the time to decorate the exterior of the house this year, though I went all out on the inside just in case. Just in case Mia came home and there was cause to celebrate.
She’s agreed to hypnosis. It didn’t take much coaxing. These days Mia agrees to most everything. James is against the idea; he thinks hypnosis is a bogus science, equivalent to reading palms and astrology. I don’t know what I believe, though I’ll be damned if I don’t give it a try. If it helps Mia remember one split second of those missing months, it’s worth the exorbitant cost and the time spent in the waiting room of Dr. Avery Rhodes.
What I understood of hypnosis a week ago was negligible. After awakening at night to research hypnosis on the internet, I became enlightened. Hypnosis, as I’ve come to understand it, is a very relaxed trancelike state similar to daydreaming. This will allow Mia to become less inhibited and tune out the rest of the world to allow herself, with the doctor’s help, to arouse the memories she’s lost. Under hypnosis, the subject becomes highly suggestible, and can recall information that the mind has locked in a vault. By hypnotizing Mia, Dr. Rhodes will be dealing directly with the subconscious, that part of the brain that’s hidden Mia’s memories from her. The goal is to put Mia into a state of deep relaxation so her conscious mind, more or less, goes to sleep and Dr. Rhodes can deal with the subconscious. For Mia’s sake, the goal is to regain all or some part—some minute details even—of her time in the cabin so that, through therapy, she can come to terms with her abduction and heal. For the investigation’s sake, however, Detective Hoffman is desperate for information, for any details or clues that Colin Thatcher might have aired in the cabin that would help police find the man who did this to Mia.
When we arrive at Dr. Rhodes’s office, I, at James’s insistence, am allowed inside. He wants me to keep an eye on the nutcase, what he calls Dr. Rhodes, in case she tries to screw with Mia’s head. I sit in an armchair out of the way while Mia, squeamishly, sprawls out on the couch. Textbooks line floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on the southernmost wall. There is a window that faces the parking lot. Dr. Rhodes keeps the blinds closed, allowing in only a scant amount of light, so there’s an abundance of privacy. The room is dark and discreet, the secrets revealed inside the walls absorbed by the burgundy paint and oak wainscoting. The room is drafty; I pull my sweater tightly around my body and hug myself as Mia’s conscious mind begins to get drowsy. The doctor says, “We’ll start with off with the simple things, with what we know to be true, and see where that leads.”
It doesn’t come back chronologically. It doesn’t even come back sensibly and, to me, long after we escape into the piercing winter day, it’s a puzzle. I had imagined that hypnosis would be able to unlock the vault and there, in that very instant, all the memories would topple onto the faux Persian rug so that Mia, the doctor and I could hover over and dissect them. But that’s not the way it happens at all. For the limited time Mia is under hypnosis—maybe twenty minutes but no more—the door is open and Dr. Rhodes, with a kind, harmonious voice, is trying to pry away the cookie’s layers to get at the cream filling. They come off in crumbs: the rustic feel of the cabin with the knotty pine paneling and exposed beams, static on a car radio, the sound of Beethoven’s Für Elise, spotting a moose.
“Who’s in the car, Mia?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Are you there?”
“Yes.”
“Are you driving the car?”
“No.”
“Who’s driving the car?”
“I don’t know. It’s dark.”
“What time of day is it?”
“Early morning. The sun is just beginning to rise.”
“You can see out the window?”
“Yes.”
“Do you see stars?”
“Yes.”
“And the moon?”
“Yes.”
“A full moon?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “A half moon.”
“Do you know where you are?”
“On a highway. It’s a small, two-lane highway, surrounded by woods.”
“Are there other cars?”
“No.”
“Do you see street signs?”
“No.”
“Do you hear anything?”
“Static. From the radio. There’s a man speaking, but his voice...there’s static.” Mia is lying on the couch with her legs crossed at the ankles. It’s the first time I’ve seen her relax in the last two weeks. Her arms are folded against a bare midriff—her chunky cream sweater having hiked up an inch or two when she laid down—as if she’s been placed in a casket.
“Can you hear what the man is saying?” Dr. Rhodes asks from where she sits on a maroon armchair beside Mia. The woman is the epitome of together: not a wrinkle in her clothing, not a hair out of place. The sound of her voice is monotonous; it could lull me to sleep.
“Temperatures in the forties, plenty of sun...”
“The weather forecast?”
“It’s