Though I sense he’d say anything to make me feel better.
“I can’t tell you how many stupid things I did when I was sixteen, seventeen,” he concedes. He rattles them off: drinking, fender benders, cheating on a test, smoking pot, he whispers into the telephone’s receiver. “Even the good kids have the urge to lift a pair of earrings from the mall. Teenagers believe they’re invincible—nothing bad can happen. It isn’t until later that we realize that bad things do, in fact, happen. The kids that are flawless,” he adds, “those are the ones that worry me.”
I assure him that Mia has changed since she was seventeen, desperate for him to see Mia as more than a teenage delinquent. “She’s matured.” But it’s more than that. Mia has blossomed into a beautiful young woman. The kind of woman that, as a child, I’d hoped to one day be.
“I’m sure she has,” he says, but I can’t leave it at that.
“There were two, maybe three years of utter carelessness, and then she turned herself around. She saw a light at the end of the tunnel—she would be eighteen and could be rid of us once and for all. She knew what she wanted. She started making plans. A place of her own, freedom. And she wanted to help people.”
“Teenagers,” he says and I’m silenced because, without having ever met her, I see that he knows my daughter more than me. “Those who were troubled and feeling misunderstood. Like herself.”
“Yes,” I whisper. But Mia never explained it to me. She never sat me down and told me how she could relate to these children, about how she, more than anyone, knew the difficulties that juveniles faced, all those mixed-up emotions, about how hard it was for them to swim to the surface to breathe. I never understood. To me it was all skin-deep; I couldn’t fathom how Mia could communicate with those kids. But it wasn’t about black and white, rich and poor; it was about human nature.
“James has never gotten that image out of his mind—his daughter in the holding cell at the local precinct. He dwells on all those years he fought to keep her name out of the paper, about how disappointed he was in her. How she wouldn’t listen. The fact that she refused law school was the icing on the cake. Mia was a burden for James. He’s never gotten past that fact—he’s never accepted her for the strong independent woman she is today. In James’s mind—”
“She’s a screwup,” Detective Hoffman remarks, and I’m grateful the words came from his mouth and not mine.
“Yes.”
I consider myself at eighteen, the emotions that overcame all common sense. What, I wonder, would have become of me if I hadn’t been in the little Irish pub in the Loop that July night in 1969? What if James hadn’t been there, hadn’t been giving a soliloquy on antitrust law, if I hadn’t hung on desperately to every last word, if I hadn’t been so consumed when his eyes turned to me, not only with the Federal Trade Commission and mergers and acquisitions, but also with the way he could make something so mundane sound arousing, the way his mahogany eyes danced when they met mine.
Without a mother’s instinct to tell me otherwise, there’s a part of me that could see James’s point of view.
But I’d never admit it.
My intuition, however, tells me something has happened to my daughter. Something bad. It screams at me, awakens me in the middle of the night: something has happened to Mia.
Colin
Before
I tell her we’re going outside. It’s the first time I let her out of the cabin. “We need sticks,” I say, “for the fire.” Soon it will snow. Then they’ll all be buried.
“We have firewood,” she says. She’s sitting cross-legged in the chair beside the window. She’s staring outside at the oppressive granite clouds that hover just above the tops of the trees.
I don’t look at her. “We need more. For the winter.”
She stands slowly, stretching. “You plan to keep me around that long?” she asks. She slips that ugly maroon sweatshirt over her head. I don’t satisfy her with a response. I’m right behind her as we head outside. I let the screen door slam shut.
She makes her way down the steps. She begins to gather sticks from the ground. There are tons of them, tossed from trees during a storm. They are wet. They cling to the muddy ground and moldy leaves that cover the earth. She tosses them into a pile at the bottom of the steps. She wipes her hands on the thighs of her pants.