She tells me how the blood spilled from his body. How it spread across the floor, how the cat ran through the room, his tiny paws spreading bloody prints across the floor. And again, her eyes dart through the room, as if it’s happening here, in this moment, though the cat sits perched on the bedroom windowsill like a porcelain statue.
She says that his breathing was slow, that he took shallow breaths with great effort. There was blood everywhere. “His eyes became still. His chest still. ‘Wake up. Wake up.’ I shook him. ‘Oh, God, please wake up. Please don’t leave me,’” she sobs into the sheets of her bed. She tells me that his limbs stopped fighting as the front door pushed open. There was a blinding light and a masculine voice telling her to step away from the body.
“Please don’t leave me,” she cries.
She wakes up every morning screaming his name.
She sleeps in the bedroom; I roll out the futon and sleep in the family room. She refuses to open the curtains and accept the world into the room. She likes it dark, where she can believe it’s nighttime twenty-four hours a day and succumb to her depression. I can barely get her to eat anymore. “If not for you,” I advise, “then do it for the baby.” She says it’s the only reason she has to live anymore.
She admits to me in confidence that she can’t go on. She doesn’t say it when she’s lucid, but when she’s sobbing, lost in despair. She thinks about death, of all the ways to kill herself. She lists them for me. I tell myself that I’ll never leave her alone.
Monday morning Gabe showed up with a box of things he’d brought from the cabin. He’d been saving them as evidence. “I planned to return them to Colin’s mother,” he said, “but thought maybe you’d like to have a look.”
He was hoping for a ceasefire. What he got was a reproachful look as she muttered, “Owen,” under her breath.
When I drag her from her bedroom, she sits and stares mindlessly at the TV. I have to mind what she watches. The evening news tears her apart, words like death and murder and convict.
I tell Mia that Gabe was not the one to shoot Owen but she says it doesn’t matter. It means nothing. He’s dead. She doesn’t hate Gabe for this. She feels nothing. There’s a vast emptiness filling her soul. I justify what he did—what we all did. I try to make her understand that the police were there to protect her. That what they saw was an armed convict and his prey.
More than anything, Mia blames herself. She says that she put the gun in his hand. She sobs at night that she’s sorry. Dr. Rhodes talks to her about the stages of grief: denial and anger. One day, she promises, there will be an acceptance of the loss.
Mia opened the box Gabe had brought for her and raised a gray hooded sweatshirt from the cardboard. She brought it to her face; she closed her eyes and smelled the cotton. It was clear that she planned to keep it. “Mia, honey,” I said, “let me wash it.” There was a horrible stench to it, but she refused to let me take it from her hands.
“Don’t,” she insisted.
She sleeps with it every night, pretending that it’s his arms that hold her tight.
She sees him everywhere: in her dreams, when she’s awake. Yesterday I insisted on a walk. It was a bearable day for January. We needed fresh air. We’d been cooped up in this apartment for days. I cleaned the apartment, scouring a bathtub that hadn’t been used in months. I snipped at her plants with a pair of pinking shears, dropping the dead foliage into a trash can. Ayanna offered to pick up some items for us at the market—milk and orange juice and, at my request, fresh flowers, something to remind Mia of all the things in the world that are alive.
Yesterday Mia sunk into the wide arms of a jacket she collected from the same cardboard box, and we went outside. At the bottom of the steps, she paused and stared at an imaginary place on the opposite side of the street. I don’t know how long she stared, until I pulled her gently by the arm, and said, “Let’s walk.” I couldn’t quite figure out what she was staring at; there was nothing there, only a four-flat brick building with scaffolding out front.
The Chicago winter is harsh. But every now and then God blesses us with a thirty-or forty-degree day to remind us that misery comes and goes. It must be thirty-eight, thirty-nine degrees, when we head out for our walk, the kind of day that teenagers foolishly rush out in shorts and Tshirts, forgetting that in October we were aghast at temperatures like this.
We stayed on the residential streets because I thought there would be less noise. We could hear the city not so far away. It was the middle of the day. She dragged her feet. Rounding the corner onto Waveland, she and a young man ran right into one another. I may have prevented it had I not been staring at outdated Christmas décor on a nearby balcony, out of place beside puddles of snow that melted on the sidewalk, reminding me of spring. The man was handsome with a baseball cap pulled low, his eyes gazing at the ground. Mia wasn’t paying attention. She nearly doubled over in disbelief.
He couldn’t make sense of the crying. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he said. I begged him not to worry.