The Good Girl Page 10

  But during the day she sits beside the drafty window. She watches the leaves tumble to the ground. Outside the earth is covered in decaying leaves. Nothing remains to block the lake’s view. Fall is almost over now. We’re so far north we can touch Canada. We’re lost in an uninhabited world surrounded by nothing but wilderness. She knows it as well as I do. That’s why I brought her here. Right now, the only thing of concern is bears. But then again, bears hibernate in the winter. Soon they will all be asleep. And then the only concern will be freezing to death.

  We don’t talk much. It’s all of necessity—lunch is ready; I’m taking a bath; where are you going? I’m going to bed. There are no casual exchanges. Everything is mute. We can hear every noise for lack of conversation: a stomach growl, a cough, a swallow, the wind howling outside the cabin at night, deer passing through the leaves. And then there are the imagined sounds: car tires on gravel, footsteps on the stairs leading up to the cabin, voices.

  She probably wishes they were real so she didn’t have to wait anymore. The fear is certain to kill her.

  Eve

  Before

  The first time I laid eyes on James, I was eighteen years old, in the United States with some girlfriends. I was young and naive, and mesmerized with the enormity of Chicago, the sense of freedom that had crawled under my skin the moment us girls boarded the airplane. We were country girls, used to small villages of only a few thousand people, an agrarian lifestyle, a community that was generally narrow-minded and conventional. And suddenly we were whisked away to a new world, dropped in the middle of a roaring metropolis, and at first glance, I was swept off my feet. I was in love.

  It was Chicago that first seduced me, all the promises it had to offer. These immense buildings, the millions of people, the confidence they carried in the way they walked, in the steadfast expressions on their faces when they strut across the busy streets. It was 1969. The world as we knew it was changing, but truly, I couldn’t have cared less. I wasn’t caught up in all that. I was enraptured with my own existence, as is to be expected when one is eighteen: the way men would look at me, the way I felt in a miniskirt, much shorter than my mother would have ever approved. I was dreadfully inexperienced, desperate to be a woman and no longer a child.

  What waited for me at home, in rural England, had been fated by my birth: I’d marry one of the boys I’d known my entire life, one of the boys who, in primary school, pulled my hair or called me names. It was no secret that Oliver Hill wanted to marry me. He’d been asking since he was twelve years old. His father was a rector in the Anglican Church, his mother the kind of homemaker I vowed never to be: one who obeyed her husband as if his command was the word of God.

  James was older than me, which was exciting; he was cosmopolitan and brilliant. His stories were impassioned; people hung on to every last word out of his mouth, whether he was talking about politics or the weather. It was summer where I first saw him at a restaurant in the Loop, sitting around a large circular table with a group of friends. His voice boomed over the sounds of the restaurant, and you couldn’t help but listen. He drew you in with his poise and presumption, with his vehement tone. All around him, eyes waited expectantly for the punch line of some joke, then everyone—friends and strangers alike—laughed until they cried. A few broke out in applause. They all seemed to know his name, those dining at other tables, the restaurant staff. From across the room, the bartender called out, “Another round, James?” and within minutes, pitchers of beer filled the table.

  I couldn’t help but stare.

  I wasn’t alone. My girlfriends, too, ogled him. The women at his table weren’t hesitant to touch him when they could: a hug, a pat on the arm. One woman, a brunette with hair that stretched to her waistline, leaned close to share a secret: anything to be close to him. He was more confident than any man I’d ever seen.

  He was in law school at the time. That I’d later learn, the following morning when I woke up beside him in bed. My girlfriends and I weren’t old enough to drink, and so it was apparently my infatuation that was responsible for my reckless abandon that night: the way I found myself sitting beside him at his round table; the gluttonous expression on the woman with the long hair as he draped an arm around my shoulder; the way James fawned over my British accent as if it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

  James was different then, not the man he’s become over time. His faults were much more endearing, his bravado charming instead of the unpleasant way it’s grown to be. He was a master at flattery long before his choice words became insulting and ugly. There was a time in our lives when we were happy, completely bewitched by the other, when we couldn’t keep our hands to ourselves. But that man, the one I married, has completely disappeared.

  I call Detective Hoffman first thing in the morning, after James has left for work. I waited, as I always do, until I heard the garage door close, his SUV make its way down our drive, before emerging from bed, where I stood in the midst of our kitchen with my mug of coffee, the face of that man who has Mia engraved in my mind’s eye. I stared at the clock, watched as the minute hand crawled its way around the circle and when 8:59 gave way to nine o’clock, I dialed the numbers that are becoming more familiar with each passing day.

  He answers the phone, his voice professional and authoritarian as he announces, “Detective Hoffman.” I imagine him at the police station; I hear the bustle of people in the background, dozens of officers trying to solve other people’s problems for them.

  It takes me a moment to gather myself and I say to him, “Detective, this is Eve Dennett.”

  His voice loses its edge as he says my name. “Mrs. Dennett. Good morning.”

  “Good morning.”

  I envision him standing in our kitchen last night; I see the vacant look on his kindhearted face when James told him about Mia’s past. He left in a hurry. I hear him slam the front door over and over again in my mind. I hadn’t attempted to withhold a thing about Mia from Detective Hoffman. To me, in all honesty, her past behavior didn’t matter. But the last thing I need is for the detective to have misgivings about me. He’s my only link to Mia.

  “I had to call,” I say. “I had to explain.”

  “About last night?” he asks and I say yes.

  “You don’t need to.”

  But I do anyway.

  Mia’s teenage years were difficult, to say the least. She wanted so desperately to fit in. She wanted to be independent. She was impulsive—driven by desire—and lacking in common sense. Her friends made her feel accepted, whereas her family did not. Amongst her peers, she was popular, she was wanted, and for Mia, this was a natural high. Her peers made her feel like she was on top of the world; there was nothing she wouldn’t do for her friends.

  “Maybe Mia fell into the wrong group of friends,” I say. “Maybe I should have been more vigilant about whom she was spending her time with. What I noticed was that B-plus book reports more commonly became C-minus papers, and she no longer studied at the kitchen table after school, but retreated to her bedroom, where she shut and locked the door.”

  Mia was in the midst of an identity crisis. There was a part of her desperately yearning for adulthood, and yet the rest of her remained a child, unable to think and reason like she would later in life. She was often frustrated and thought little of herself. James’s insensitivity only made things worse. He compared her to Grace relentlessly, about how Grace, now in her twenties and away at college—his alma mater, of course—was going to graduate magna cum laude; about how she was taking courses in Latin and debate in preparation for law school, to which she’d already been accepted.

  Initially her misbehavior was typical teenage slips: talking out in class, not completing her homework. She rarely invited friends to our house. When she was picked up by friends, Mia would meet them on the drive and when I peeked out the window for a glance, she’d stop me. Wh
at? she’d ask with a harsh tone that had once belonged only to Grace.

  She was fifteen when we caught her sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night. It was the first of many escapes. She’d forgotten to turn off the house alarm and so, in the midst of her escape, the house began to scream.

  “She’s a juvenile delinquent,” James said.

  “She’s a teenager,” I amended, watching as she climbed into a car parked at the end of our drive, not bothering to look back as the alarms blared and James cursed the darn thing, trying to remember our password.

  Image meant everything to James. It always had. He’d always been worried about his reputation, about what people would think or say about him. His wife had to be a trophy wife. He told me this before we were married, and in some crooked way, I’d been happy to fill that role. I didn’t ask what it meant when he stopped inviting me to work dinners, when his children no longer needed to attend firm Christmas parties. When he became a judge it was as if we didn’t exist at all.

  So one can imagine the way James felt when the local police dragged a sloppy, drunken sixteen-year-old girl home from a party, and he, in his robe, stood at our front door all but begging the police to keep this under wraps.

  He screamed at her even though she was so sick she could barely hold her own head over the toilet while she vomited. He bellowed about how insatiable reporters love this kind of thing: Teenage Daughter of Judge Dennett Cited with Underage Drinking.

  Of course it never made the paper. James made sure of that. He spent an arm and a leg making sure that Mia’s name never graced the pages of the local paper, not this time or the next. Not when she and her unruly friends attempted to steal a bottle of tequila from the local liquor store, not when she and these same friends were caught smoking pot in a parked car behind a strip mall off Green Bay Road.

  “She’s a teenager,” I said to James. “This is what they do.”

  But even I wasn’t so sure. Grace, with all her difficulties, had never been in trouble with the law. I had never had so much as a speeding ticket, and here was Mia, spending time in a holding cell at the local precinct while James begged and blackmailed local law enforcement not to press charges or to have allegations removed from her record. He paid off parents not to mention Mia’s misadventures with their similarly disobedient children.

  He was never worried about Mia and the source of her discontent and, therefore, misbehavior. He was only worried about what impact her actions would have on him.

  It didn’t occur to him that if he let her pay the consequences like any normal child, Mia’s havoc might cease. As it was, she could do anything she liked and not suffer the consequences. Her misdeeds irked her father like nothing else; for the first time in her life she had his attention.

  “I overheard telephone conversations between Mia and her friends about earrings they’d stolen from the mall—as if we couldn’t have just paid for them. My car would smell of cigarette smoke after Mia had borrowed it for this or that, but, of course, my Mia didn’t smoke. She didn’t smoke or drink, or—”

  “Mrs. Dennett,” Detective Hoffman interrupts. “Teenagers, by definition, are in a class all of their own. They give in to peer pressure. They defy their parents. They talk back, and experiment with anything and everything they can get their hands on. The goal with teenagers is simply getting through it alive, with no permanent damage. Your description of Mia is not that far from normal,” he admits.

  Though I sense he’d say anything to make me feel better.

  “I can’t tell you how many stupid things I did when I was sixteen, seventeen,” he concedes. He rattles them off: drinking, fender benders, cheating on a test, smoking pot, he whispers into the telephone’s receiver. “Even the good kids have the urge to lift a pair of earrings from the mall. Teenagers believe they’re invincible—nothing bad can happen. It isn’t until later that we realize that bad things do, in fact, happen. The kids that are flawless,” he adds, “those are the ones that worry me.”

  I assure him that Mia has changed since she was seventeen, desperate for him to see Mia as more than a teenage delinquent. “She’s matured.” But it’s more than that. Mia has blossomed into a beautiful young woman. The kind of woman that, as a child, I’d hoped to one day be.

  “I’m sure she has,” he says, but I can’t leave it at that.

  “There were two, maybe three years of utter carelessness, and then she turned herself around. She saw a light at the end of the tunnel—she would be eighteen and could be rid of us once and for all. She knew what she wanted. She started making plans. A place of her own, freedom. And she wanted to help people.”

  “Teenagers,” he says and I’m silenced because, without having ever met her, I see that he knows my daughter more than me. “Those who were troubled and feeling misunderstood. Like herself.”

  “Yes,” I whisper. But Mia never explained it to me. She never sat me down and told me how she could relate to these children, about how she, more than anyone, knew the difficulties that juveniles faced, all those mixed-up emotions, about how hard it was for them to swim to the surface to breathe. I never understood. To me it was all skin-deep; I couldn’t fathom how Mia could communicate with those kids. But it wasn’t about black and white, rich and poor; it was about human nature.

  “James has never gotten that image out of his mind—his daughter in the holding cell at the local precinct. He dwells on all those years he fought to keep her name out of the paper, about how disappointed he was in her. How she wouldn’t listen. The fact that she refused law school was the icing on the cake. Mia was a burden for James. He’s never gotten past that fact—he’s never accepted her for the strong independent woman she is today. In James’s mind—”

  “She’s a screwup,” Detective Hoffman remarks, and I’m grateful the words came from his mouth and not mine.

  “Yes.”

  I consider myself at eighteen, the emotions that overcame all common sense. What, I wonder, would have become of me if I hadn’t been in the little Irish pub in the Loop that July night in 1969? What if James hadn’t been there, hadn’t been giving a soliloquy on antitrust law, if I hadn’t hung on desperately to every last word, if I hadn’t been so consumed when his eyes turned to me, not only with the Federal Trade Commission and mergers and acquisitions, but also with the way he could make something so mundane sound arousing, the way his mahogany eyes danced when they met mine.

  Without a mother’s instinct to tell me otherwise, there’s a part of me that could see James’s point of view.

  But I’d never admit it.

  My intuition, however, tells me something has happened to my daughter. Something bad. It screams at me, awakens me in the middle of the night: something has happened to Mia.

  Colin

  Before

  I tell her we’re going outside. It’s the first time I let her out of the cabin. “We need sticks,” I say, “for the fire.” Soon it will snow. Then they’ll all be buried.

  “We have firewood,” she says. She’s sitting cross-legged in the chair beside the window. She’s staring outside at the oppressive granite clouds that hover just above the tops of the trees.

  I don’t look at her. “We need more. For the winter.”

  She stands slowly, stretching. “You plan to keep me around that long?” she asks. She slips that ugly maroon sweatshirt over her head. I don’t satisfy her with a response. I’m right behind her as we head outside. I let the screen door slam shut.

  She makes her way down the steps. She begins to gather sticks from the ground. There are tons of them, tossed from trees during a storm. They are wet. They cling to the muddy ground and moldy leaves that cover the earth. She tosses them into a pile at the bottom of the steps. She wipes her hands on the thighs of her pants.

  Our laundry hangs over the deck rail. We wash our clothes in the bathtub
and then hang them out to dry. We use a bar of soap. It’s better than nothing. They’re cold and stiff when we slip them on, and sometimes they’re still wet.

  A thick fog hangs over the lake and drifts toward the cabin. The day is depressing. Rain clouds fill the sky. Soon it will begin to rain. I tell her to hurry up. I wonder how long these sticks will last. There’s already a wall of firewood lining the cabin. I’ve been out here day after day with an ax, splitting fallen trees and taking the limbs off the rest. But we gather sticks anyway so we don’t get bored. So I don’t get bored. She isn’t going to complain about it. The air is fresh, and so she makes the most of it. She doesn’t know if she’ll ever get another chance like this.

  I watch her gather sticks. She carries them in one arm as the other bends down to swipe more from the ground. It’s one swift, graceful movement. Her hair is draped over a shoulder so it stays out of her eyes. She gathers until her arms can hold no more, then stops to catch her breath. She arches her back to stretch. Then down again. When her load is full she brings them to the cabin. She refuses to make eye contact with me, though I’m certain she knows I’m watching. With every passing load she ventures farther and farther away, her blue eyes locked steadfast on the lake. Freedom.

  It begins to rain. It’s one torrential downpour: one minute, nothing, the next, we’re soaked. The girl comes running from the far end of the property with a bundle of sticks in her arms. She’d been working as far away as I let her. I kept my eyes on her the entire time, making sure I could catch her if I needed to. I don’t think she’d be that stupid. Not again.

  I’ve already begun to haul the sticks upstairs and into the cabin. I dump them into a pile beside the stove. She follows me inside, drops her load, and then down the stairs again. I didn’t expect such cooperation. She moves slower than me. Her ankle is still healing. It’s only been a day or so since I haven’t seen her limp. We brush past each other on the stairs and it’s without thought that I hear myself say sorry. She says nothing.