Dr. Rhodes is instructing Mia in visualization and repetitive affirmations: I can do this. I can hear James now, mocking the woman for her irrational techniques.
“Do you recognize anything now?” Gabe asks. He’s turned around in his seat, and she shakes her head. It’s late afternoon, three, maybe four o’clock, and already the sky is becoming dark. Clouds fill the sky, and though the heat runs steady, my hands and toes begin to numb. The heater cannot compete with the subzero temperatures outside.
“Damn good thing you got out when you did,” Detective Hammill says to Mia. “You never would have survived the winter.”
The thought sends a chill through me. Had Colin Thatcher not killed her, Mother Nature would have done the job herself.
“Ah,” Gabe says to lighten the mood. He sees something pass through me that he doesn’t like. “You’d be surprised. Mia is quite a fighter. Isn’t that right?” he asks with a wink. And then he mouths the words that only she and I see: you can do this, as the tires of the SUV hit a mound of snow and we all turn and find ourselves face-to-face with a bleak log cabin.
She’s seen the pictures. There were so many times I found her sitting lethargically, staring at images of this very cabin, or staring into the vacant eyes of Colin Thatcher and seeing nothing. But now she sees something. Detective Hammill opens the door, and like a magnetic force, Mia emerges from the car, and I have to stop her. “Mia, your hat,” I say, “your scarf,” because it’s so cold out here the very air will freeze her flesh. But Mia seems completely unaware of the cold and I have to force the gloves onto her hands like she’s a five-year-old child. Her eyes are lost on this cabin, on the stack of steps that lead from the snow-covered drive to a door that’s been barred with yellow caution tape. Snow covers the steps, though footprints remain, and tire tracks in the drive suggest that someone has been here since the last snowfall. The snow is everywhere: on the roof, the porch, the uninhabited world around the home. I wonder how Mia felt arriving at this home, so remote one might believe they are the last inhabitants on earth. I shiver at the thought of it.
There’s the lake that I’ve seen in Mia’s pictures, frozen over a thousand times, unlikely to thaw before spring.
I’m overwhelmed with such feelings of loneliness and despair that I don’t see Mia making her way up the steps with comfort and familiarity. Gabe reaches her first and offers to help. The steps are slick and more than once her feet slip.
At the top they wait for Detective Hammill to unlock the door. Dr. Rhodes and I follow close behind.
The detective presses the door open, and it creaks. The rest of us fight for a look inside, but it’s Gabe, with his general decorum, who says to Mia, “Ladies first,” though he follows close behind.
Gabe
Christmas Eve
Somewhere in Minnesota it begins to snow. I drive as fast as I can, which isn’t fast enough. It’s hard to see through the windshield though the wipers go as fast as they can. This is every six-year-old’s dream: snow on Christmas Eve. Tonight Santa will come, his sleigh loaded with gifts for every girl and boy.
Detective Hammill calls. He’s got a couple of guys keeping the cabin under surveillance. He told me about it, a little cabin lost out in the woods. But they haven’t seen anyone come or go; they haven’t gotten a visual of anyone on the inside.
By the time I arrive he plans to have a team assembled: ten or so of his best guys. This is a big deal around here. It’s not every day that this kind of thing happens.
I think of Eve. I go over it a thousand times in my mind: what I will say, the words I will use, to convey the good news. And then I consider the possibility that there isn’t good news: that Mia isn’t in the cabin, or that she doesn’t survive the rescue. There are a million things that could go wrong.
By the time I make my way up the coast of Lake Superior, Roger’s guys are getting antsy. He’s got a half dozen of them headed out to the woods. They set up a perimeter. They’re armed with the department’s best firepower.
Detective Hammill is a man on a mission. Seems he has something to prove.
“No one takes a shot until I get there,” I say as I gun the engine along a narrow, snow-covered road. The tires skid and I struggle to regain control. Scares the shit out of me. But what worries me more is the brassiness in the detective’s voice. Even more than me, he’s a guy led into the line of duty by the prospect of carrying a gun.
“It’s Christmas Eve, Hoffman. My guys have families to see.”
“I’m doing the best that I can.”
The sun sets and it’s dark out here. I floor it. I fly through the narrow pass, nearly decapitating myself on branches that hang low from the weight of the snow. I don’t know how many times I come to a near standstill, the tires kicking up snow and going absolutely nowhere. This piece-of-shit car is going to get me killed.
I’m going as fast as I can, knowing I need to get to Thatcher before Detective Hammill does. There’s no telling what that guy might do.