Mitchell closed the notebook and settled back in Theo’s chair. Random notes in the margins of his translation, the vagrant thoughts of a troubled mind. Outside his office window, snow was falling, a February snow thick and heavy. The weather report showed the storm’s path wide and long, snow in Québec, snow in Vermont.
The doctor advised him to go slow and easy, not to try to do everything at once when he came back to work, and of course, the college understood fully, granting Mitchell a semester’s sabbatical, considering. If only they knew the whole story. But whom could he tell now? They might think he was still mad.
Love or, as he saw it now, infatuation had made him say and do things out of character. The night nurse, a pretty young woman with whom he was hopelessly smitten, would sit with him after the nightmares those first few weeks. Mitchell would sit up with a start, drenched with sweat, and the nurse would answer his terrors, calm him, while she held his hand as he told bits and pieces of the story.
“I should have gone in right away. Maybe I could have saved him. One or the other.”
“Not your fault,” the nurse said. “You mustn’t blame yourself.”
“They had taken so long, you see. I fell asleep in the car, we’d been driving around all day, and it was two in the morning. They said to wait two hours, but I couldn’t stay awake. I should have knocked on the farmhouse and fetched those two kids. Demanded that they unlock the doors. Or gone into the barn myself.”
“You were tired. The hour was late. What finally woke you up?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know. My memory is shot. It could be that I saw her, I think so. There was a light on in the barn streaming out through a hole in the wall by the silo, and a rope hanging down nearly to the ground. That’s when the puppet appeared.”
The nurse did not judge him but squeezed his hand and brushed the hair out of his eyes.
“A silhouette, really, but it could have been, I think it was one of them. But then I must have been dreaming. I closed my eyes and fell back asleep until the fist beat against the car window.”
“That’s when you first saw the girl?”
“Unless she and the puppet are one and the same. But how can that be? She was a real girl, as real as you are.”
“You need to rest,” the nurse said. “I’ll get you something to help you sleep.”
“No, wait. There was no puppet. They’re not alive. She was a runaway.…”
The girl banged on the glass, pleading for his help. Straw-colored hair, a simple dress but no shoes, no coat on that frozen night. Instinct took over, the chance to be a hero. He rolled down the window and saw the panic in her eyes, the clouds of condensation with every word. “Help me,” she said. “They’re after me. We’ve got to run.”
“Who is after you?”
“The Original must have found them out. Help me.”
“Who is the Original?”
“He will not let me go.”
“Get in the car,” Mitchell had said, and she walked stiff legged to the other side and bent awkwardly into the passenger seat.
She looked over her shoulder at the barn, light streaming through a hole in the wall near the silo. And then she turned to face him, terror in her eyes. “They will kill us. Go, go now.”
He started the engine, turned on the lights, and drove away recklessly down that lonesome road. The girl was hysterical at first, alternating between tears and laughter, at then she started to shiver, her teeth chattering, so he turned on the heat and she was fascinated by the blowing air. Intensely curious about the car, as if she was seeing one for the first time. She seemed to regard him with that same disbelief. Mitchell asked her name, but she said she did not remember, only that she had to get away, far away.
“They will kill him,” she said. “And then come to unmake us.”
Mitchell sobbed and looked into the nurse’s accepting eyes. “I should have stopped the car right then, turned around, seen to my friends. But the only thing that seemed to matter was that poor woman’s safety.”
“She was scared and traumatized. You did the right thing in bringing her to the hospital.” The nurse laid a hand against his chest until he fell asleep.
On that snowy afternoon in Theo’s office, he felt the remembered weight of that hand over his heart and wondered anew what leads some to love and others to miss it altogether. The runaway girl snuck out of the hospital before dawn without a trace, her name an alias, her destination unknown.
One of the policemen told him so. It had taken hours to convince them that his friends had gone missing in the night, but they finally agreed to accompany him back to the farm the following morning to take a look around, ask a few questions.