After
I sit in the opaque office across from Dr. Rhodes and tell her about that night. The rain was pouring down, thick and heavy, and Owen and I sat in the dark room listening to it batter the roof of the log cabin. I tell the doctor how we’d been outside, collecting firewood, and how the rain saturated us before we could make it inside. “That,” I tell her, “was the night something changed between Owen and me. That was the night I understood why I was there, in that cabin, with him. He wasn’t trying to hurt me,” I explain, recalling the way he looked at me with those dark, austere eyes and said, No one knows we’re here. If they did, they’d kill us. Me and you, and suddenly I was part of something, no longer alone as I’d been my entire life. “He was saving me,” I say. And that’s when everything changed.
It was then that I wasn’t scared anymore. That’s when I understood.
There are things I tell Dr. Rhodes, about the cabin, about our lives there, about Owen. “Did you love him?” she asks, and I say that I did. My eyes fill with sadness and the doctor stretches a tissue across the coffee table that separates us, and I hold it to my face and cry.
“Tell me what you’re feeling, Mia,” she prompts, and I tell her how I miss him, how I wish the memories hadn’t returned so that I could remain in the dark, completely unaware of Owen’s passing.
But, of course, it is much more than that.
There are things I can never tell the doctor.
I can tell her how the sadness haunts me day in and day out, but I can never tell her about the blame. The knowledge that I put Owen in that cabin, that I put the gun in his hands. If I had told him the truth, we could have come up with a plan. We could have figured it out together. But in those first minutes, in those first days, I was too terrified to tell him the truth for fear of what he might do to me, and later, I couldn’t tell him the truth for fear of how it would change things.
He wouldn’t be the one protecting me from my father and Dalmar, even if it was all bogus, all a sham.
I spent my entire life desperate for someone to take care of me. And there he was.
I wasn’t about to let that go.
I rub a hand over an ever-growing midsection and feel the baby kick. Out the hazy windows, summer has come, the heat and humidity that make it hard to breathe. Soon the baby will arrive, a keepsake from Owen, and I will no longer be alone.
*
There’s an image I carry in my mind. I’m in junior high when I proudly carry home an A-book report that my mother hangs to the refrigerator door with a lame Bee Happy magnet I’d gotten her for Christmas that year. My father comes home and sees the assignment. He gives it a quick once-over, and then says to my mother, “That English teacher should be fired. Mia is old enough to know the difference between there and their, don’t you think, Eve?” He uses the paper as a coaster, and before escaping the room, I watch the water stain seep into the fibers of the report.
I was twelve years old.
I think back to that September day, as I walked into the gloomy bar. It was a beautiful Indian summer day but inside the bar it was dark, nearly vacant, as a bar should be at two in the afternoon, just a handful of patrons sitting quietly at their own tables, drowning their sorrows in straight-up bourbon and whiskey shots. The place was a hole in the wall, the corner unit of a brick building with graffiti on the side. Music played in the background. Johnny Cash. I wasn’t in my own neighborhood, but farther south and west, in Lawndale, and as I looked around the bar, I saw that I was the only one who was white. There were wooden barstools pulled up to the bar, some cracked along the seat or missing spindles, glass shelves of alcohol lining the back wall. Smoke infused the air, drifted to the ceiling, making the place hazy, opaque. The front door was propped open with a chair, but even the fresh fall day—the sunlight and warm air—was hesitant to enter. The bartender, a bald man with a goatee, nodded to me and asked what he could get me to drink.
I asked for a beer and made my way to the back of the bar, to a table closest to the men’s bathroom, where he told me he’d be. When I saw him, my throat rose up inside me and I found it hard to breathe. His eyes were black, like coal, his skin dark and rubbery, like tires. He was sunken in a slat-back chair, leaned over a beer. He wore a camouflage coat, which he didn’t need on a day such as that, my own coat removed and tied around my waist.
I asked if he was Dalmar and he watched me for a minute, those anthracite eyes perusing my wayward hair, the conclusiveness in my eyes. They drifted down my body, down an oxford shirt and jeans; they appraised a black bag crisscrossing my body, the parka tied around my waist.