The Good Girl (18 page)

I tell Mrs. Thatcher that we’re going to go for a ride. “Please. No,” she begs as I lead her to the car. “Please. I want to stay here. I don’t want to go.”

I have a coat draped over Mrs. Thatcher’s robe. On her feet remain fuzzy slippers.

She’s protesting as vehemently as she possibly can, which isn’t much. I know that she doesn’t want to go. She doesn’t want to leave her home, but I can’t leave her here.

A neighbor steps onto a front porch to see what the fuss is about. I hold out a hand and say, “It’s okay.” I show him my badge.

I help her into the car and reach across her to secure the seat belt. She’s crying. I drive as fast as I possibly can. In a few minutes this will all be through.

I think of my own mother.

An attendant meets me in the parking lot with a wheelchair and lifts Mrs. Thatcher from the car like a stuffed animal in a child’s arms. After I watch him drive the wheelchair into the building, I peel out of the parking lot.

Later I search through the wretched garbage bag with a pair of latex gloves. It’s a bunch of junk with the exception of a gas receipt dated September 29—I can only assume Mrs. Thatcher’s license has been revoked—and a grocery store receipt with the same date, totaling thirty-two dollars. Enough to last a week. Colin Thatcher planned on returning in a week. He didn’t plan to disappear.

I sort through the mail. Bills, bills and more bills. Past-due notices. But that’s about all.

I think of that postcard, of all the trees. I think that maybe Grand Marais would be an amazing place to visit in the fall.

Colin
Before

I tell her that my mother’s name is Kathryn. I show her a picture I keep in my wallet for safekeeping. It’s an outdated photo, taken a decade or so ago. She says she can see my eyes on her, the seriousness and the mystery. My mother’s smile is forced, revealing a crooked eyetooth that drives her crazy.

“When you talk about her,” she says to me, “you actually smile.” My mother’s hair is dark, like mine. It’s straight as an arrow. I say that my father’s is, too. My own curls are a mystery, the result of some recessive gene, I guess. I never knew my grandparents to know if they had curly hair.

I can’t go home for a number of reasons, but the one I never mention is the fact that the police want me behind bars. I was twenty-three when I broke the law for the first time. That was eight years ago. I tried to live the right way. I tried to follow the rules, but life just didn’t work out that way. I robbed a gas station and sent every dollar I snatched to my mom to pay for her prescriptions. A few months later I did it again to pay the doctor bills. I figured out how much money I could make selling dope and did that for a while until I was caught by an undercover cop and spent a few months in jail. After that, I tried to play it straight again, but when my mother received an eviction notice, I became desperate.

I don’t know why luck has been on my side. I don’t understand why I’ve gone so long without getting nailed by the cops, really nailed. Part of me wishes it would happen, so I don’t have to go on like this, on the run, hiding behind fake names.

“Then—” she begins. We’re outside, walking through the vast trees. It’s a milder November day, temperatures lingering in the upper 40s, and she’s wearing my coat, sinking into it and burying her hands in the pockets. The hood envelops her head. I have no idea how long we’ve been walking, but I can no longer see the cabin. We step over fallen logs and I push aside the branches of an evergreen so she can sneak by without having to wrestle the sixty-foot balsam fir. We hike up hills and nearly fall down gulleys. We kick aside pinecones and listen to the call of birds. We lean against a western hemlock, in the midst of dozen similar trees, to catch our breath. “Then you’re not Owen.”

“No.”

“And you’re not from Toledo.”

“I’m not.”

But I don’t tell her who I am.

I say that my dad brought me here once, to Minnesota, to the Gunflint Trail. I tell her that he owns the cabin, that it’s been in his family for as long as anyone can remember. He’d met some lady. “What she saw in the bastard, I don’t know,” I say. “I know it didn’t last.” We hadn’t spoken in years and I’d all but forgotten about him. Then one day he invited me on this trip. We’d rent an RV. We’d drive from the home he owned in Gary, Indiana, to Minnesota. This was long before he moved to Winona to work for the D.O.T. I didn’t want to go, but my mom said I had to. She had some naive idea my father wanted to fix things with me, but she was wrong. “The lady had some prick kid about the same age as me. So he planned some big vacation, as if this was something we
did
. The lady, her kid and me. He wanted to impress her. He promised me a bike if I didn’t do anything to screw it up. I kept my mouth shut the whole time. Never saw the bike.” I tell her that I haven’t spoken to him since. But still, I keep tabs on him. Just in case.

She says that she doesn’t know how I maneuver my way through the woods. I say that it’s second nature. Boy Scouts, for one, and this innate ability to know which way is north and which way is south. That and a lot of time spent roaming the woods—anything to get away from fighting parents—when I was a kid.

She keeps up with me as I hike through the woods. She doesn’t get tired.

How does a girl who grew up in the city know all the names of the trees? She points them out to me—balsam fir and spruce and pine—as if it’s a fucking biology lesson. She knows that acorns belong to oak trees, and those stupid little helicopters fall from maple trees.

I guess it doesn’t take a genius to know that. It’s just that I never cared—not until I watched her hands release the seeds and then watched her eyes as she stared in awe as they spun their way to the ground.

She teaches without meaning to. She points out that those helicopters are samaras and the red cardinal is the male. She’s offended that all the showy animals are male and the females are drab. Cardinals, ducks, peacocks, lions. I’d never noticed the difference. She wouldn’t be so offended if she hadn’t been screwed over by every man in her life.

She says that she could never wrap the words around it, about how her father makes her feel. She says I wouldn’t understand anyway because he’d never hit her and never let her spend one night cold. He never let her go to sleep without dinner.

She has a student named Romain, this black kid who spends most of his nights in a homeless shelter on the north side. He chooses to go to school though no one’s making him. He’s eighteen, working on a high school diploma because he won’t settle for a GED. He spends his days studying his ass off in school and spends his afternoons cleaning city streets. He spends his nights begging for money under the “L.” She volunteered in a homeless shelter to see what it was like. “For two hours I pulled moldy cheese off prepackaged sandwiches,” she says. The rest of the sandwich was salvaged for the tenants to eat.

Maybe she isn’t all that wrapped up in herself as I expected her to be.

I know the feel of dismissive eyes, eyes that look without really seeing a thing. I know the sound of contempt in a voice. I know how betrayal and disillusionment feel, when someone who could give you the world refuses even a tiny piece of it.

Maybe we aren’t so different after all.

Gabe
Before

I check the phone records for Kathryn Thatcher. Not a questionable call in sight. The last time she spoke to her son was when he called from a cell phone registered to Steve Moss at the end of September. The rest were telemarketers, collection agencies, reminders for doctor appointments to which she never went.

I put a call into the nursing home in Gary. The attendant asks if I’m family. I say no, I’m not, and they won’t pay me the time of day. I can hear an elderly man screaming in the background. I try not to imagine Mrs. Thatcher listening to his roar. I know it would make her upset. I remind myself that she’s being fed, bathed, cared for.

I remind myself that I am not her son. This is not my responsibility.

But still I can’t get this picture out of my mind: my mother sitting in her bathrobe at the end of a sunken bed, staring vacantly out a dirty window, hopeless and alone, while an elderly toothless man shouts in the hall. Underpaid nurses ignore her. The only thing to look forward to is the day she will die.

The case of Mia Dennett runs nightly on the evening news, thanks to pressure on the part of Judge Dennett, but still no leads.

I checked with the DMV and there are no vehicles registered to a Colin Thatcher or Steve Moss, or a Kathryn Thatcher for that matter. We’ve been in contact with anyone who knew Colin Thatcher that we can possibly find. Friends are few, only a couple high school pals who haven’t spoken to him in years. There’s an ex-girlfriend in Chicago who I can’t be entirely certain he wasn’t paying for sex. She doesn’t have one nice thing to say about him. She’s a woman scorned; she offers nothing valuable to me other than a quick lay if I’m interested, which I’m not. Some schoolteachers say he was a boy who got the short end of the stick. Others describe him as a misfit. Mrs. Thatcher’s neighbors can only say he visits frequently, he takes out the trash and mows the lawn. Big deal. The neighbors don’t know what goes on inside the home. But they can tell me he drives a truck. Color? Make? Model? No one seems to know. The answers all conflict. I don’t bother with a license plate number.

My mind drifts to the postcard of Grand Marais from time to time. I find myself researching the harbor town on the internet, and ordering travel brochures online. I track the mileage from Chicago to Grand Marais and go so far as to request footage from traffic cams along the route, even though I haven’t a clue what I’m looking for.

I’m at a dead end. There’s nothing to do now but wait.

Colin
Before

Just my luck, the girl’s still sleeping when I hear a scratch on the front door. It about scares the shit out of me. I jump from my bed on the flabby couch and realize I don’t have the gun. It’s dawn, the sun just beginning to rise. I pull aside the curtains for a look but I see nothing. What the hell, I think. I open the front door to discover that the damn cat has brought us a dead mouse. He’s been MIA for days. He looks like hell, almost as bad as the nearly decapitated rodent beside his bloody feet.

I scoop the cat into my hands. I’ll deal with the mouse later. For now, the damn cat is my ransom, divine intervention, if I actually believed in that kind of shit. The cabinets have been cleared out. No food left. If I don’t get to the store soon, we’ll starve.

I don’t wait until she’s awake. I let myself into the bedroom and say, “I’m going to town.”

She sits up at the sound of my voice. She’s confused by sleep and rubs at her eyes.

“What time is it?” she asks, but I ignore the question.

“He’s coming with me.” The cat lets out a cry. This gets her attention. She’s alert. She reaches her hands out to him, but I step back. The little bastard claws my arm.

“How did you—”

“If you’re still here when we get back, I won’t have to kill him.” And then I leave.

I race to town. I go over seventy in a fifty-mile-per-hour zone. I’d bet my life the girl wouldn’t do anything stupid, but then again, I can’t get the image out of my mind: the cabin swarmed by cops waiting for me when I return.

I pass a couple outfitters on the way to Grand Marais. I always try to mix it up. I can’t say I’ve been to the same place twice. Last thing I need is for someone to recognize me.

But right now, food isn’t the only thing on my mind.

I know a guy who specializes in fake IDs, manufactured identities, the works. I find a payphone outside the hardware store and dig a couple of quarters from my pocket. I pray to God I’m not making a mistake. It doesn’t take three minutes or whatever they claim on TV to trace a call. The damn operators can do that the second the line connects. Soon as I dial the number. All it takes is for Dan to tell the cops he got a call from me and by tomorrow, they’re clustered around Hardware Sam looking for me.

It comes down to options. Try our best to survive the rest of the winter—and then what? Then we’re screwed. If we’re still alive come spring, there’ll be nowhere to hide.

And so I drop in the quarters and dial the number.

* * *

When I come back, she’s running down the snow-covered steps to whisk the damn cat from my hands.

She’s yelling about how she wouldn’t have left. She’s cursing me for threatening the cat. “How the hell would I know?” I ask. I take the paper bags of canned food from the backseat of the truck. There must be a dozen bags, each one piled high with ten or fifteen cans of food. This is it, I tell myself. The last trip to town. Until the passports are ready, we’ll get by on condensed soup and baked beans and stewed tomatoes. That and whatever I pull out of the frozen lake.

She grabs me by the arm and forces me to look at her. Her grip is firm. “I wouldn’t have left,” she says again.

I duck away and say to her, “I wasn’t about to take any chances.” I head up the stairs, leaving the cat and her alone outside.

She convinces me to let the cat stay inside. It gets colder every day. He won’t survive all winter.

“No way,” I say.

But she insists. “He stays.” Just like that.

Something is changing.

* * *

I tell her about working with my uncle when I was a kid. It’s with reluctance that I talk at all. But there’s only so much silence a person can take.

I started working for my mother’s brother when I was fourteen. This beer-bellied bum who taught me how to do all his handyman services so that, at the end of the day, I could do all the work and he could take home 90 percent of the pay.

No one in my family went to college. No one. Maybe some distant cousin or something, I say, but no one I know. Everyone is blue collar. Most people work in Gary’s steel industry. I grew up in a world where I, as a white boy, was a minority and where nearly a quarter of the population lived below the poverty line.

“The difference between you and me,” I tell her, “is that I grew up with nothing. I didn’t hope for more. I knew I wouldn’t get it.”

“But you must have dreamed of becoming
something?
”

“I dreamed of maintaining the status quo. Of not stooping any lower than I already was. But then I did.”

My uncle, Louis, taught me to fix leaky faucets and install hot-water heaters. How to paint bedrooms and fish a toothbrush out of a toilet. How to edge a lawn, fix a garage door and change the lock on someone’s house after they’d kicked out their ex. Louis charged a flat twenty dollars an hour. At the end of the day, he sent me home with about thirty dollars to my name. I knew I was getting ripped off. By the time I was sixteen I was working on my own. But the work was unstable. I needed something I could depend on. Unemployment in Gary is high.

She asks me how often I visit my mother. I stiffen at the mention of her and am quiet.

“You’re worried about her,” she says.

“I can’t help her when I’m here.”

And then it hits her.

“The money,” she says. “The five grand—”

I sigh. I tell her that it was for her. She won’t take her medicine anymore, not unless I force her to. She says that she forgets. But the reality is that she doesn’t want to deal with the side effects. I tell her that I would go to her home in Gary every Sunday. Organize the medicine into a pill dispenser, take her grocery shopping, clean the house. But she needed more. She needed someone who could take care of her all the time, not just on Sundays.

“A nursing home,” she says. I wanted to put my mother in a nursing home, and I planned to use the five grand to get her in. But of course now there is no money, because in one impulsive moment I chose to save the girl and ended up screwing over my mother and myself at the same time.

But in the back of my mind, I know why I did it. And it wasn’t about the girl. If my mother found out that I’d been the one to snatch the judge’s daughter, later, when it was all over the news that she’d been found somewhere slain, it would have killed her. The five grand wouldn’t have mattered anymore. She’d be dead. And if not dead, she’d want to be. She didn’t raise me to be like this.

I just didn’t think about all that before the girl was in my truck. When the dollar signs gave way to reality: the girl, crying beside me, the image of Dalmar’s guys tearing her from the truck, the thirty years in prison. My mother would be dead before I was ever released. What good would that do?

I begin to pace the room. I’m mad. Not at her. At myself. I ask, “What kind of person wants to put their mother in a nursing home because they’re so fucking sick and tired of caring for them?”

It’s the first time I let myself be unguarded. I stand at an angle against the pine walls, and I press my hand to a lingering headache. I look at her receptive eyes and ask again, “Seriously, what kind of person would put their mother in a nursing home because they don’t want to take care of them anymore?”

“There’s only so much you can do.”

“I can do more,” I snap. She’s standing before the front door, watching the snow fall. Beside her feet the damn cat roams in circles, begging to be let out. She won’t let him. Not tonight.

“Can you?”

I tell her that some Sundays, when I arrive, I’m surprised she’s still alive. The place is trashed. She hasn’t eaten. The meals I’ve left in the freezer are still there. Sometimes the door is unlocked. Sometimes the oven is on. I asked her to come live with me, but she said no. This was her home. She didn’t want to leave Gary. She’d been there her entire life. She grew up there.

“There are neighbors,” I say. “One lady checks on her once a week, gets the mail, makes sure there’s enough food. She’s seventy-five but she gets along better than my own mom. But everyone has their own life. I can’t expect them to babysit a grown woman for me.” I tell her that there’s also my aunt, Valerie, who lives nearby in Griffith. She helps out, from time to time. I’m hoping that Valerie has figured it out somehow: a call from the neighbor, seeing me on TV. I’m hoping she’s figured out that my mother’s alone and that she’s doing something,
anything,
to fix the situation.

My mother didn’t know about the nursing home, but she never wanted to be an inconvenience. This was the best I could do. A compromise.

But I know that a nursing home is a shitty compromise. Nobody wants to live in a nursing home. But there wasn’t a better option.

I grab my coat from the arm of a chair. I’m upset with myself. I’ve let my mother down. I force my shoes onto my feet, slam my arms into the coat. I won’t look at her. I nearly run her over to get at the door.

“It’s snowing,” she says. She’s not quick to move. She lays her hand on my arm and tries to stop me but I shrug her off. “No one belongs outside on a night like tonight.”

“I don’t care.” I push past her and open the door. She hoists the cat into her hands so it won’t run away. “I need some fucking air,” I say, slamming the door.