I don’t know how many days we do this. I’ve lost track. I tried to remember when it was Monday and when it was Tuesday. Eventually the days began to blur. Every day is the same. She lies in bed until I make her get up. We force down breakfast. Then she sits on a chair she pulls up to the window. She stares outside. Thinks. Daydreams. Longs to be anywhere but here.
I’m thinking all the time about how to get out of here. I’ve got enough cash to catch a flight somewhere and then it will be gone. But of course I don’t have a passport on me, so the farthest I can go is Tecate or Calexico, California, but the only way I’m getting out of the country is if I hire a coyote or swim across the Rio Grande. But getting myself out of the country is only half the problem. It’s everything else I can’t quite figure out. I pace the cabin, wondering how in the hell I’m gonna get myself out of this mess, knowing I’m safe here, for now, but the longer we hide out, the longer I hide out, the worse it’s gonna be.
We have rules, spoken and unspoken. She’s not to touch my shit. We use only one square of toilet paper at a time. We air-dry when at all possible. We use as little soap as possible so we don’t reek of B.O. We can’t let things go to waste. We don’t open windows. Not that we can anyway. If we run into someone around the cabin, she’s Chloe, I tell her. Never Mia. In fact she might as well forget that was ever her name.
She gets her period and we learn the literal interpretation for being on the rag. I see the blood in a garbage bag and ask, “What the fuck is this?” I’m sorry I ask. We collect our garbage in some white plastic bags that got left behind. From time to time we drive and drop them off in a Dumpster behind some lodge, late at night when we’re certain no one will see. She asks why we don’t just leave them outside. I ask if she wants to be eaten by a fucking bear.
There’s a chill from the window, but the heat from the stove helps keep us warm. The days are getting shorter. Night falls earlier and earlier until darkness takes over the cabin. There is electricity, but I don’t want to draw attention to us. I only turn on a small lamp at night. The bedroom becomes nothing but blackness. At night, she lays and listens to the silence. She waits for me to appear from the shadows and end her life.
But during the day she sits beside the drafty window. She watches the leaves tumble to the ground. Outside the earth is covered in decaying leaves. Nothing remains to block the lake’s view. Fall is almost over now. We’re so far north we can touch Canada. We’re lost in an uninhabited world surrounded by nothing but wilderness. She knows it as well as I do. That’s why I brought her here. Right now, the only thing of concern is bears. But then again, bears hibernate in the winter. Soon they will all be asleep. And then the only concern will be freezing to death.
We don’t talk much. It’s all of necessity—lunch is ready; I’m taking a bath; where are you going? I’m going to bed. There are no casual exchanges. Everything is mute. We can hear every noise for lack of conversation: a stomach growl, a cough, a swallow, the wind howling outside the cabin at night, deer passing through the leaves. And then there are the imagined sounds: car tires on gravel, footsteps on the stairs leading up to the cabin, voices.
She probably wishes they were real so she didn’t have to wait anymore. The fear is certain to kill her.
Eve
Before
The first time I laid eyes on James, I was eighteen years old, in the United States with some girlfriends. I was young and naive, and mesmerized with the enormity of Chicago, the sense of freedom that had crawled under my skin the moment us girls boarded the airplane. We were country girls, used to small villages of only a few thousand people, an agrarian lifestyle, a community that was generally narrow-minded and conventional. And suddenly we were whisked away to a new world, dropped in the middle of a roaring metropolis, and at first glance, I was swept off my feet. I was in love.
It was Chicago that first seduced me, all the promises it had to offer. These immense buildings, the millions of people, the confidence they carried in the way they walked, in the steadfast expressions on their faces when they strut across the busy streets. It was 1969. The world as we knew it was changing, but truly, I couldn’t have cared less. I wasn’t caught up in all that. I was enraptured with my own existence, as is to be expected when one is eighteen: the way men would look at me, the way I felt in a miniskirt, much shorter than my mother would have ever approved. I was dreadfully inexperienced, desperate to be a woman and no longer a child.