She’s standing in the hallway. I can see her shiver, but she doesn’t whine about being cold. Not this time.
“He was a litigation lawyer before becoming a judge. He got involved in a number of class-action suits, asbestos cases. He never protected the good guy. People were dying of these horrible things—mesothelioma, asbestosis—and he’s trying to save the big corporations a buck or two. He never talked about his work. Attorney-client privilege, he said, but I know he just didn’t want to talk. Period. But I’d sneak into his office at night when he was asleep. At first I was snooping because I wanted to prove he was having an affair in the hopes my mother might actually leave him. I was a kid—thirteen, fourteen. I didn’t know what mesothelioma was. But I could read well enough. Coughing up blood, heart palpitations, lumps under the skin. Nearly half of those infected died within a year of diagnosis. You didn’t even have to work with asbestos to be exposed—wives and children were dying because their fathers brought it home on their clothes.
“The more successful he was, the more we were threatened. My mother would find letters in the mail. They knew where we lived. There were phone calls. Men hoping Grace, my mother and I would die as painful a death as their wives and children had.
“Then he became a judge. His face was all over the news. All these headlines with his name. He was harassed all the time, but after a while we stopped paying attention to these unsubstantiated threats. He let it go to his head. It made him feel important. The more people he pissed off, the better he was doing his job.”
There’s nothing to say. I’m not good at this kind of crap. I can’t handle small talk and I certainly can’t handle sympathy. The reality is that I know nothing about the scumbag who thought it would be in his best interest to threaten some bastard’s kid. That’s the way this business works. Guys like me, we’re kept in the dark. We carry out an assignment without really knowing why. That way we can’t point fingers. Not that I’d try. I know what would happen to me if I did. Dalmar told me to nab the girl. I didn’t ask why. That way, when the cops catch me and I’m in the interrogation room, I can’t answer their underhanded questions. I don’t know who hired Dalmar. I don’t know what they want with the girl. Dalmar told me to get her. I did.
And then I changed my mind.
I stare up from my bowl and look at her. Her eyes beg me to say something, some grand confession that’s going to explain it all to her. That’s going to help her understand why she’s here. Why her instead of the bitchy sister. Why her instead of the insolent judge. She’s desperate for an answer to it all. How is it that in the blink of an eye everything can change? Her family. Her life. Her existence. She searches in vain, thinking I know the answer. Thinking some lowlife like me might be able to help her see the light.
“Five grand,” I say.
“What?” This wasn’t what she expected to hear.
I stand from the chair and it skids across the wooden floors. My footsteps are loud. I rinse the bowl with water from the faucet. I let it drop to the sink and she jumps. I turn to her. “They offered me five grand.”
Eve
Before
I let my days go to waste.
Oftentimes it’s hard to get out of bed and when I do, the very first thought on my mind is Mia. I wake up sobbing in the middle of the night, night after endless night, hurrying downstairs so I don’t wake James. I’m stricken with grief at all waking hours; in the grocery store, I’m certain I see Mia shopping the cereal aisle, stopping myself only moments before throwing my arms around a complete stranger. Later, in the car, I go to pieces, unable to leave the parking lot for over an hour as I watch mothers with their children enter the store: holding hands as they cross the lot, mothers lifting small children into the basket of the shopping cart.
For weeks I’ve seen her face flash across the TV screen and a sketch of that man. But now there are more important things happening in the world. It’s both a blessing and a curse, I suppose. The reporters are less intrusive these days. They don’t hound me in the driveway, follow me on my errands. The harassing phone calls and interview requests are on sabbatical; I can open my curtains without seeing a flood of reporters line the sidewalk before our home. But their withdrawal worries me as well; they’ve grown apathetic to the name Mia Dennett, tired of waiting for a front-page headline that may never come: Mia Dennett Returns Home, or maybe, Dennett Girl Found Dead. It settles upon me, like dark clouds descending on a winter day, that I will never know. I think of those families who are reunited with their loved one’s remains, ten, sometimes twenty years later, and wonder if that will be me.