“Let me do it,” I say as I come up quickly behind her. She flinches. I start a fire without any trouble and brush past the girl, into the kitchen, looking for food. There’s nothing, not even a box of stale crackers.
“What now?” she asks but I ignore her. “What are we doing here?” I walk around the cabin, just to make sure. The water doesn’t work. Everything has been shut off for the winter. Not that I can’t fix it. It’s reassuring. When he winterized the house, he wasn’t planning on coming back until spring, the time of year he goes underground, lives like a hermit for six months of the year.
I can hear her pacing about, waiting for someone or something to come barreling through the front door and kill her. I tell her to stop. I tell her to sit down. She stands there for a long time before she finally backs a plastic chair against the wall opposite the front door and drops down in the seat. She waits. It’s apocalyptic, watching her sit there, staring at the front door, waiting for the end to come.
Night comes and goes. Neither of us sleeps.
*
The cabin will be cold by winter. It was never meant to be lived in beyond November 1. The only source of heat in the cabin is a wood-burning stove. There’s antifreeze in the john.
The electricity had been shut off. That I fixed last night. I found the main breaker and flipped it back on. I literally heard the girl thank God for the 25 watts given off by an ugly table lamp. I made my way around the periphery of the cabin. I checked out a shed out back that’s filled with a bunch of crap nobody’d ever need, and a few things that might come in handy. Like a toolbox.
Yesterday I told the girl she’d have to piss outside. I was too tired to deal with plumbing. I’d watched her walk down the stairs as if she was walking the plank. She hid herself behind a tree and slid down her pants. She squatted where she thought I couldn’t see, and then, because she wouldn’t dare touch her ass with a leaf, she opted to air dry. She only peed once.
Today I find the main water valve and slowly let the water in. It sprays at first, then begins to flow normally. I flush the toilet and run the sinks to get rid of the antifreeze. I make a mental list of things we need: insulation and more duct tape for the pipes, toilet paper, food.
She’s pretentious. Smug and arrogant, a prima donna. She ignores me because she’s pissed off and scared, but also because she thinks she’s too good for me. She sits on the ugly red chair and stares out the window. At what? At nothing. Just stares. She hasn’t said more than two words since morning.
“Let’s go,” I say. I tell her to get back in the car. We’re going for a ride.
“Where?” She doesn’t want to go anywhere. She’d rather stare out that damn window and count the leaves falling from the trees.
“You’ll see.” She’s scared. She doesn’t like the uncertainty. She doesn’t move, but watches me with fake courage and deluded defiance when I know she’s fucking scared to death. “You want to eat, don’t you?”
Apparently she does.
And so we head outside. We get back in the truck and take off for Grand Marais.
I make a plan in my head: get out of the country, soon. I’ll leave the girl behind. I don’t need her slowing me down. I’ll get a flight to Zimbabwe or Saudi Arabia, some place where they can’t extradite me. Soon, I tell myself. I’ll do it soon. I’ll tie her up in the cabin and hightail it to Minneapolis for a flight before she has a chance to spread my face all over Interpol.
I tell her that I can’t call her Mia. Not in public. Soon enough word will leak out that the girl’s missing. I should leave her in the car, but I can’t. She’ll take off. And so she wears my baseball cap and I tell her to look down, don’t make eye contact. It probably doesn’t need to be said. She knows more about the gravel than me. I ask what she wants me to call her. After enough hesitation to start to piss me off, she comes up with Chloe.
No one gives a damn that I’m missing. When I don’t show up at work, they’ll assume I’m lazy. It’s not like I have friends.
I let her pick out chicken noodle soup for lunch. I hate it but I say okay anyway. I’m hungry. We get about twenty cans. Chicken noodle, tomato soup, mandarin oranges, cream corn. The kind of food you find in a survival kit. The girl realizes this and says, “Maybe you don’t plan to kill me right away,” and I say no, not until we’ve eaten the cream corn.