It’s the same baseball cap Mia took from the box, the one that sits beside her bed.
The grief and the morning sickness send her running to the bathroom three, sometimes four times a day.
Gabe arrived this afternoon, fully intent on getting to the bottom of this. Until today, he was content with small visits, with the sole purpose of reconciliation. But he reminds me that there’s a lingering threat out there, and the policemen parked outside her building for security will not be there forever. He set Mia down on the futon.
“Tell me about his mother,” she says. This is called give-and-take.
Mia’s apartment is approximately a four-hundred-square-foot box. There’s the family room with the futon and tiny TV; she pulls out the futon when company comes to stay. I’ve polished the bathroom many times, and still it doesn’t feel clean. The bathtub fills with water every time I shower. The kitchen is only large enough for one person; you cannot stand behind the refrigerator when the door is open without being shoved into the stove. There is no dishwasher. The radiator rarely warms the room, and when it does, the temperature soars to ninety degrees. We eat dinner on the futon, which we don’t often bother to sit up, since night after night I use it for a bed.
“Kathryn,” Gabe replies. He’s perched awkwardly on the edge of the futon. For days now, Mia has been asking about Colin’s mother. I didn’t know what to say, other than that Gabe would know more about Ms. Thatcher than me. I’ve never met the woman, though in a matter of months we will be grandmothers to the same child. “She’s a sick woman,” he says, “with advanced stages of Parkinson’s disease.”
I disappear into the kitchen and pretend to wash dishes.
“I know.”
“She’s as well as to be expected. Ms. Thatcher had been living in a nursing home—she wasn’t fit to care for herself.”
Mia asks how the woman came to be living at a nursing home. As far as Colin—Owen—was concerned, the woman was living at home.
“I brought her there.”
“You brought her there?” she asks.
“I did,” Gabe confesses. “Ms. Thatcher needed constant care.”
This earns Gabe brownie points in Mia’s eyes.
“He was worried about her.”
“He had good reason to be. But she’s fine,” Gabe reassures. “I drove Ms. Thatcher to the funeral.” He pauses long enough to let it settle. Gabe told me about the funeral. It was only days after Mia returned home. We were absorbed in first appointments with Dr. Rhodes and discovering that the hum of the refrigerator scared the living daylights out of our child. Gabe clipped an obituary from a Gary paper and brought it to me. He brought me a program from the funeral, with this polished photograph on the front, a black-and-white set amidst ivory paper. At the time I’d been incensed that Colin Thatcher had such a civil burial. I discarded the program in the fireplace, watching his face go up in flames. I prayed the same thing happen to the real man, that he burn in hell.
I stop what I’m doing and wait for the sound of weeping; it doesn’t come. Mia is still.
“You went to the funeral?”
“I did. It was nice. As nice as to be expected.”
Gabe’s image is growing by leaps and bounds. I hear a change in Mia’s voice, no longer seeping with abhorrence. It softens, and loses a bit of the defensiveness. I, on the other hand, stand in the kitchen, clutching a ceramic plate, imagining Colin burning in hell, and try desperately to recant.
“Was the casket—”
“Closed. But there were pictures. And a lot of people. More people loved him than he’ll ever know.”
“I know,” she whispers.
There’s silence. More silence than I can take. I dry my hands on the seat of my pants. When I peer into the family room, I see that Gabe is sitting close, right beside Mia, and that she has allowed her head to droop to his shoulder. His arm is draped around her back and she cries.
I want to intrude, to be the one whose shoulder she cries upon, but I don’t dare.
“Ms. Thatcher is living with her sister Valerie now. She’s fully medicated and better able to manage the disease.”
I hide in the kitchen pretending not to listen.
“The last time I saw her,” Gabe says, “there was...hope.
“Tell me how you ended up in that cabin,” Gabe asks.
She says that these are the things that are easy to explain.
I hold my breath. I don’t know if I want to hear this. She tells Gabe what she knows, that he was hired to find her and turn her over to a man she’d never heard of. But he couldn’t do it, and so he brought her to a place where he believed she would be safe. I take a deep breath. He brought her to a place where he believed she would be safe. Maybe he wasn’t a madman after all.