“It’s for you.”
She glances at the notebook on the counter. A sketch book. And ten mechanical pencils.
“That’s all the lead there is. Don’t use it all at once.”
“What’s this?” she asks stupidly. She knows what it is.
“Something to pass the time.”
“But—” she begins. She doesn’t finish right away. She takes the notebook into her hands and runs a hand across the front of it. She flips through the blank pages. “But...” she stammers. She doesn’t know what to say. I wish she wouldn’t say anything. We don’t need to say anything. “But...why?”
“It’s Halloween,” I say for lack of a better answer.
“Halloween.” She mutters it under her breath. She knows it’s more than that. It isn’t every day you turn twenty-five. “How did you know?”
I show her my secret, the tiny 31 on a watch I stole from some schmuck.
“How did you know it was my birthday?”
Time spent on the internet before I took her, that’s the honest answer. But I don’t want to tell her that. She doesn’t need to know how I tracked her for days before the abduction, following her to and from work, watching her through her bedroom window. “Research.”
“Research.”
She doesn’t say thanks. Words like that—please, thank you, I’m sorry—are signs of peace and we’re not there yet. Maybe we’ll never be. She holds the notebook close to her. I don’t know why I did it. I was sick of watching her stare out the damn window, so I spent five dollars on paper and pencils and it seems to have made her fucking day. They don’t sell sketch pads at the local outfitters, so I had to drive all the way back to Grand Marais, to some bookstore while I kept her tied to the bathroom sink.
Eve
Before
I plan a party for her birthday, just in case. I invite James and Grace and my in-laws: James’s parents, and his brothers with their wives and children. I make a trip to the mall and buy gifts I know she would adore: clothes mostly, those peasant blouses she likes and a cowl-neck sweater, and the big bulky jewelry the girls are wearing these days. Now that Mia has been on the television news, I can barely leave home without everyone wanting to know. In the grocery store, women stare. They whisper behind my back. Strangers are better than friends and neighbors, those who want to talk about it. I can’t talk about Mia without being reduced to tears. I hurry through the parking lot to avoid news vans that have begun to stalk us. At the mall, the saleslady looks at my credit card and wonders if Dennett is one and the same with the girl on TV. I lie, feign ignorance because I can’t explain without coming unglued.
I wrap the gifts in Happy Birthday paper and stack the boxes with a big red ribbon. I make three pans of lasagna and buy loaves of Italian bread to make garlic bread. I make a salad and pick up a cake from the bakery, with chocolate buttercream icing, Mia’s favorite. I get twenty-five latex balloons from the grocery store and dribble them around the house. I hang an infamous Happy Birthday banner we’ve hung on to since the girls were kids and fill the CD player with relaxing jazz.
No one comes. Grace claims to have a date with the son of some partner, but I don’t believe it. Though she wouldn’t dare admit it, she is on pins and needles these days, knowing that what she swore was only a ploy for attention is likely something more. But Grace being Grace disengages herself from the situation rather than acknowledging it. She puts on a casual display, as if unaffected by Mia’s situation, but I can tell, by the sound of her voice when we speak, when Mia’s name slips from her tongue—and she lingers there, appreciating it—that she is truly afflicted by her sister’s disappearance.
James insists that I can’t plan a party when the guest of honor isn’t here. And so, without my knowledge, he called his parents and Brian and Marty and told them the whole thing was a farce, there was no party. But he didn’t tell me, not until eight o’clock, at least, when he finally strolled in from work and asked, “Why in the hell is there so much lasagna in here?” while staring at the display on the kitchen island.
“The party,” I say naively. Perhaps they’re only late.
“There is no party, Eve,” he says.
He makes himself a nightcap as he always does, but before retreating to his office for the night, he stops suddenly and looks at me. It’s rare that he does, actually look at me. The look on his face is unmistakable: the rueful eyes, the pleats of his skin, the taut mouth. It’s in the sound of his voice, in the secretive, sedate speech.
“Do you remember Mia’s sixth birthday?” he asks and I do. I had sat down earlier today and looked through photographs: all those birthday parties that came and went in the blink of an eye.