“It’s just...it’s been so busy,” she says. “With all the arrangements...the funeral and packing up her home.” She saw the mail. In fact she’s walked past it about a million times, every time she goes into or comes out of her mother’s home, stacked on a wooden end table beside the front door. She just never got around to returning it to its rightful owner.
I follow the lady in her minivan back to the street on which Kathryn Thatcher lives. We pull into the drive of Ruth Baker’s house and the woman runs in to retrieve the mail. I thank her and snatch it from her hand, and there, in the driveway, I scramble through the mail. Chinese takeout menu, a water bill, grocery store ad, more bills and a pudgy envelope made out to Kathryn Thatcher with no return address. The handwriting is sloppy. I rip open the envelope and find, tucked inside, a crapload of cash. No note, no return address. I turn it over and over in my hands. I read the postmark. Eau Claire, WI. I toss the mail in the passenger seat of my car and speed away. Back at the station I pull up a map online. I track the route from Chicago to Grand Marais. Sure enough. Right where I-94 heads west to St. Paul/Minneapolis and U.S. Highway 53 heads north and then west into northern Minnesota is the Wisconsin town of Eau Claire, just about five hours shy of Grand Marais.
I contact an Officer Roger something-or-other from northeastern Minnesota. He assures me I’m barking up the wrong tree, but he says he’ll look into it nonetheless. I tell him that I’m faxing a sketch, just in case. Colin Thatcher’s face has made the news only in the tri-state area. TV stations throughout Minnesota and the rest of the world don’t have a clue who he is. But they will.
Colin
Before
The antibiotic kicks in and she starts to feel better overnight. While the cough continues to rage, the fever drops significantly. She looks alive, no longer a zombie.
But as she feels better, something begins to change. I tell myself that it has to do with the antibiotic. But even I know that’s not true. She’s quiet. I ask if she’s okay and she says she still doesn’t feel good. She doesn’t want to eat. I try and convince her to take a few bites, but she sits and stares out the window. Silence fills the cabin, uncomfortable silence, bringing us back to a place we used to be.
I try to make small talk, but her only responses are one-word answers. Yes, no, I don’t know. She says we’re going to freeze to death. She says she hates the snow, that if she has to eat chicken noodle soup again she’ll vomit.
Generally I’d get pissed. I’d tell her to shut up. I’d remind her how I saved her life. I’d tell her to eat the damn soup before I shove it down her throat.
She wants nothing to do with drawing. I ask if she wants to go outside—the day is nicer than we’ve seen for a while—but she says no. I go anyway and she doesn’t move an inch while I’m gone.
She can’t make a decision. She doesn’t want the chicken noodle soup. I know that. So for dinner I give her the option. I rattle off the name of everything in the cabinet. She says she doesn’t care. She’s not hungry anyway.
She says she’s tired of shaking all the time. She’s tired of the crap we eat, cans of glop masquerading as food. Just the scent of it makes her want to vomit.
She’s tired of the boredom. She’s tired of having absolutely nothing to do for hours on end, day after day after unending day. She doesn’t want to go for another walk in the godforsaken cold. She doesn’t want to draw another picture.
Her nails are a jagged mess. Her hair is greasy from the inside out, a tangle that will never come undone. We can’t escape our own smell, though we force ourselves to bathe nearly every day in that dirty tub.
I tell her that they’d send me to jail if I was ever caught. I don’t know how long. Thirty years? Life? It’s not about this, I tell her. But the number of years mean nothing. They’re pointless. I’d never live to see them. Every criminal knows someone on the inside. I’m as good as dead inside the pen. They’d make sure of it.
It isn’t a threat. I’m not trying to make her feel guilty. That’s just the way it is.
I don’t want to be here, either. I spend every waking moment wondering when Dan is gonna come through with the passports, how I’m gonna get them without the cops finding me. The food is always sparse, the nights getting colder so that one morning we won’t wake up. I know that now is the time to go. Before the food runs out, before the money runs out. Before we freeze to death.
She lets me be the one to worry. She says there’s never been someone to worry about her before.
I think of all the things that could go wrong. Starving. Freezing. Being found by Dalmar. Being found by the police. There’s danger in returning home. There’s danger in staying here. I know it. She knows it. But my bigger concern now is not having her with me.
Gabe