by Jen Waite
“Oh, yeah, ha. I just—” She pushed her chair back and stood, the groaning of the chair’s feet against the linoleum filled the silent room. “I wanted to ask you a question about tonight’s homework. You said to start on page 274, but I looked and the lesson actually starts on the next page, so I wasn’t sure if you wanted us to do the last part from the previous section or maybe you made a . . .” Her face filled with color, she hadn’t gotten this far in her head. She didn’t want to accuse Ted of making a mistake. Shit. “Um, maybe the book is wrong or something?”
Mr. Redmond walked over to her desk, brushing against her shoulder as he peered down at the textbook. He flipped it open and fanned the pages to page 274.
“Look at that. You’re absolutely correct, Thea. Start on the next page.” He turned and looked her straight in the eye. “Good catch.”
“Sure, no problem.” She backed away from him, breaking the contact of their shoulders. Her stomach flipped. She tried to think of something else to say. Do you like me? “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow!” God, she was a loser. She couldn’t even figure out how to flirt with a guy. She walked quickly to the door, her face burning.
“Oh, by the way, Thea, if anyone ever bothers you. If any guy . . . gives you any trouble at all. Please tell me.”
She stopped and turned back. Mr. Redmond’s eyes pierced hers. He was jealous of other guys. He did like her. She was right. Her heart thudded loudly in her ears. The air felt thick with static electricity.
“Of course . . . Thanks, Mr. Redmond.”
“You can call me Ted, remember?” He winked. “See you tomorrow, Thea.”
“See you tomorrow . . .” Do it. Don’t be such a scaredy-cat. Do. It. “Ted.”
Thea shivered and snapped back to the reality of being trapped in a dank, freezing cabin. She tried to imagine that she was back at Disney World with her mom, the sun beating down, sweat pooling under her arms, and her mom asking discreetly at the end of the day, “Sweetie, you know you can borrow my deodorant, right?” Thinking about being warm was not working, if anything it was making her colder. She tried to get Mimi’s eye. They should all charge the man at the same time. Even with Mimi’s hands bound and her mom’s ankles tied, it would still be three against one. She just needed to somehow relay this thought to her Mimi and her mom. Mimi, she thought, staring a hole into her Mimi’s head. She coughed a tiny cough. Mimi. Mimi didn’t budge. Thea tried to see what her grandmother was looking at—from this angle she could only see the side of Mimi’s face, but when she followed her gaze, Thea found her own eyes traveled to the man. Thea looked at Mimi’s eyes again. They were looking at the man but they were angled slightly, not at the man’s body but at what he was holding in his hand. She followed her grandmother’s gaze again. Mimi was staring straight at the gun.
TEN YEARS
BEFORE THE CABIN
ROSE
The first three times Rose asked her husband to teach her how to shoot, he said no. By the fourth time, though, he just looked at her, shook his head, and sighed. Sam knew, and Rose knew, that when Rose wanted to do something, she would do it, one way or another. Sam learned this on their third date. He took her to Echo Lake Aquarium in Burlington. She had mentioned that she’d never been to an aquarium even though at one point growing up she’d lived only an hour away from the Boston aquarium. She said that her mother had tried to take her and her brother once, when she was thirteen years old and her brother eight, but when they got there, the discount coupon her mother tried to use turned out to be expired. Instead of arguing or appealing to the college kid’s sense of compassion, Rose’s mother had turned quickly on her heel. “Let’s go,” she called to Rose and her brother, as they trailed behind her teary-eyed.
On their first date, Rose told Sam that she loved sharks, it was close to an obsession growing up—she’d had a shark lunch box, a T-shirt with a picture of an openmouthed great white across the front, and shark bath toys (all bought in the boys’ section of the Renys in her hometown), and she’d always wanted to see one in real life. When they pulled into the parking lot of the Echo Lake Aquarium, Sam turned to Rose. “Unfortunately, they don’t have sharks here, but the person I spoke with said they have a giant sea turtle, one of the biggest ever found. I thought that might be interesting—”
“Wonderful!” Rose cut Sam off. “I can’t wait. Let’s go.”
They walked through the building slowly, looking at the colorful fish in the tanks lining the walls, stopping to watch how one exhibit mimicked the ocean current, and peering into a touch tank with a starfish suctioned to the glass and minnows shooting through the shallow water.
“Let’s go see the turtle,” Rose said, increasing her pace up the ramp to the next floor. They followed signs pointing to CHARLIE, THE LARGEST SEA TURTLE IN NORTH AMERICA all the way to the top floor of the building.
“I’m sorry, miss,” the attendant in a blue jacket said with genuine pity in his voice. “The last show is just about to finish up and then Charlie’s off duty for the day.”
“Oh no!” Rose exclaimed.
Sam blushed. “I’m sorry, Rose. I should have checked the time.”
“Oh, it’s all right,” Rose said. “It’s not the end of the world. You go ahead. I’m going to use the ladies’. I’ll meet you outside.”
Rose came galloping out of the building fifteen minutes later, right as Sam was about to reenter to look for her. “Where have you been?” Sam asked with a laugh at his date’s expression.
“I was at the sea turtle exhibit!” Rose said with glee. “It was marvelous.”
Sam laughed again. “Rose. How did you—”
“I have my ways,” she said, hooking her arm into his.
Sam looked at the glowing young woman beside him and felt his insides constrict with longing. He had thought she was kind and pretty before, that’s why he frequented her bakery every morning and spent seventy-five cents on coffee that he really should have been saving toward new tools, but that afternoon he saw her sheer force of will come out for the first time.
When Rose found out she was pregnant, three months after they were married, she was thrilled and terrified. She had been told after her miscarriage that it was very unlikely that she would get pregnant again, due to scarring in her fallopian tubes, and even less likely that she would carry a baby to term if she managed to get pregnant. “Look at the positives,” the doctor had told her. “Once you settle down with the right fellow, you won’t need to use protection.” So she had managed her expectations; she took the pregnancy week by week, never allowing herself to truly believe an actual baby would be arriving at the end. Sam, on the other hand, was overjoyed from the day she walked out of the bathroom, pregnancy stick in hand, with a look of disbelief on her face.
“There is a strong, healthy baby girl in there with an iron will. Just like someone else I know,” he’d said and pressed his ear to her still-flat belly. “Yep, there she is, chattering away.”
“I told you what the doctor said two years ago.” Rose placed her hand on his head. “This probably won’t stick.” She knew exactly what was coming; she’d experienced it before.
Rose never quite let her guard down, even when they passed the three-month mark, and then the six-month mark. She didn’t truly believe she was carrying a baby until Anne was placed in her arms, silent with blue eyes wide open. Rose took to motherhood immediately. She commiserated with her next-door neighbor who also had a newborn, nodding her head in agreement when they discussed the exhaustion, the physical toll, and the mental drain, but secretly she loved every moment, even the long nights when Anne seemingly couldn’t get enough to eat and woke every two hours.
As Anne grew up, Rose observed how her husband’s love for their child morphed—Sam loved baby and toddler Anne easily, bursting through the front door after work and swinging her up onto his shoulders, practicing numbers and letters with flash cards befor
e bed, and then, bit by bit, something changed. As she aged into a young woman, his love became muted. The pure joy in his face upon seeing his daughter turned to assessment, as if, in order to mold her into a proper human being, he had to put a barrier between the two of them. Rose understood, though she wasn’t sure that Sam himself did, that he made a choice to steer the course of his relationship with his daughter from a full, deep love to shallow waters, where they stood safely. As Anne grew up, Rose would sometimes catch her husband looking at their daughter, as if he knew a painful truth that she had yet to learn. Rose always wondered what he was picturing when the cloud came over his face. He spoke very little of his time overseas, but Rose could sense that the way physics, or fate, had unevenly distributed the shrapnel weighed on Sam every day. There were things that Sam could not explain to anyone, not even himself, about what he had experienced in Vietnam, and so he distanced himself from Anne, the child he loved so wholly, but also the person who might be able to unearth those unnamed things.
Sam looked at Rose now and sighed again. “Rose, I’ll do this under one condition.”
Rose cocked her head and let out a noncommittal “Hmm?” not giving any indication of agreement or disagreement but encouraging him to continue nonetheless.
“Before you take any action, you come to me first. If we’re going to do this, I need to know in advance.”
“Fine.”
“Rose. I’m serious. With my background, I’ll be the one—”
“Sam.” Rose took his hand in hers. “Think about what life will be like if we can pull this off. Think about Thea.” She watched Sam’s face as he made the calculations. She knew within three seconds that her husband would acquiesce.
“When can we start?” Rose asked.
“Let me talk to a friend. I’ll want you using something that can’t be traced. Give me a couple of weeks.”
Rose’s heart thrummed as the reality hit of what she was asking her husband to do.
“Good.” She nodded and released his hand. “Sam . . . I’ll only . . . take action if there’s no other choice. I just want to be pre—”
“Give me a couple of weeks,” he said again. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it right.”
TEN YEARS
BEFORE THE CABIN
ANNE
She checked Thea all over for marks, bruises, cuts. Nothing. When she asked her daughter what happened at Mama’s friend’s house, Thea’s face crumpled and she asked if she was going back again. “No. No, you’re with Mama now. Everything’s ok.” Anne couldn’t bring herself to tell her daughter that she was going back in two weeks.
The next day she cut over to Ethan’s house after work, before picking Thea up from daycare. A warm breeze followed her up his front walkway, lined with manicured shrubs and white and pink roses. The sweet smell wafted into Anne’s nostrils and she held her breath. Her body shook as she stood on his front porch and rapped on the door. Heavy footsteps sounded and then the white wooden door swung into the house. Ethan stood on the other side of the threshold in gray sweatpants and a dark green sweater.
“Annie.” He said it like she was the last guest to arrive for a dinner party. “Come on in.”
“If you ever touch Thea, if you ever hurt her, I will fucking kill you.” She recited the words she had practiced on the way over, but tears were already forming beneath her anger and she clenched her jaw, determined not to show weakness.
“I will never, ever”—Ethan paused and smiled, taking his time—“leave any marks on Thea. You won’t be able to prove anything. I’ll make sure of that.”
She stared at him, unable to take in what he was saying for a moment. “What are you?” she finally asked.
“Don’t be so dramatic, Anne.” Ethan laughed. “I’m merely a father trying to get to know his daughter. His daughter who has been kept away from him for the first two years of her life. We have a lot of catching up to do. Thanks to you.” He crossed his arms over his chest and waited. “Is there anything else you want to talk about?”
Words flashed into her mind, but she couldn’t form a coherent sentence. She stood there, staring at him, studying him, and oddly a sense of calm flooded her body. She was right about her ex-husband; a tiny part of her had wondered if it was possible that she was misremembering, that perhaps Ethan hadn’t pushed her, that she had, in fact, slipped down the stairs. That part of her was erased as she stood looking at the thing in front of her. Somehow this—whatever this was—felt better than being in limbo.
“No,” she said, the tremor had left her voice. “There’s nothing more to talk about.”
“Right, bye then.” Ethan shut the door.
She walked down Ethan’s perfectly paved path, surrounded by his sprawling, perfectly buzz-cut lawn, and got into her car. She called Rose on the way to daycare and told her mother about the confrontation with Ethan.
“Thea and I have to go, Mom,” she said, one hand gripping the steering wheel. “I’m going to start researching tonight. I probably won’t tell you where, at least for a little while.” She waited and then brought the phone away from her ear, checking to make sure she was still connected.
“Yes. I think you’re right,” she heard Rose’s voice float out of the top of the phone. Anne brought the phone back to her ear.
“What? Mom, what did you say?” She was prepared to list out the reasons why this was her only choice—the slowness of the courts, the broken legal system, the futility of trying to prove psychological abuse. She couldn’t believe that Rose would condone running away with Thea without trying to convince her to examine all of her options.
“I think you’re right,” she heard Rose say again. “Ethan is dangerous, and we can’t wait for him to actually hurt Thea in order for the court to strip his visitations.” Rose’s voice was calm, hypnotic. “Why don’t you start planning, get together the documents you’ll need, money, an extra cell phone, think about changing your physical appearance, just in case. It’s going to take a few weeks, maybe longer, to get everything together, so start now.”
Anne realized with a start that Rose had already been anticipating this—the moment this call would happen. Listening to her mother list out everything she would need to do to disappear made her suddenly hesitant that this was the right choice. She went through the other possibilities in her head, down the other paths they could take, but each time she arrived at the spot where she would be required to wait on a judge to decide Thea’s future. She thought of what Ethan had said, he wouldn’t ever leave marks on Thea, he would never do anything she would be able to prove. No, there was no other choice.
“Thanks, Mom, I’ll keep you updated as much as I can,” she said, pulling up to the small white house where Thea went to daycare every day. “I gotta go. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
* * *
—
That night Anne took Thea’s hands in hers and lifted her daughter’s body slowly into the tub, like a crane plopping down a concrete slab.
“Doop doop doop and you’re in!” she said as Thea’s feet hit the water.
Thea yanked two dinosaurs out of her toy basket and began walking them slowly toward each other on the rim of the tub. “You be him, Mama,” she said, eyes concentrated on the imminent collision of the dinosaurs. “Mama, you be him.” She jerked the pterodactyl toward Anne.
“Give me one second, Thee,” she said, pulling her phone out of her back pocket and bringing up the page she had been looking at before. “Safety Plan,” the website said in red letters at the top. She heard Thea let out a sigh. “Just . . . one . . . second.” Thea chattered in the background as she scrolled down the page. She was so absorbed in trying to memorize the main bullet points on the page that for a minute, maybe more, she didn’t notice that anything was wrong. It was the lack of sound, the silence, that finally broke through her concentration. Anne�
�s head snapped up. Thea’s face jerked in small movements. “Thea?” Her daughter’s eyes were open but glazed, looking down into the water. “Ok. Ok, you’re ok.” Anne grabbed her shoulders and pulled her body out of the water. Thea’s arms lay stiff by her sides and Anne wedged her fingers into her armpits to keep a hold of her. Thea’s body was stiff, frozen, and her head still moved slightly back and forth on repeat. Anne’s first frantic thought was that her daughter was choking, and she thumped her back quickly before realizing Thea hadn’t been eating anything and her face was pale, not bluish-purple. “Thea.” She tried to connect with her child’s eyes but they stayed glazed and down. “Thea, baby, can you talk to me? Can you say something?” she pleaded. Anne reached backward with one hand, searching for a towel on the rack behind her. Her hands touched soft fabric and she yanked the towel down and spread it clumsily on the floor and then placed Thea on it. She wrapped her up, blotting water drops from her face with the edges of the towel, and heaved her daughter into her arms. She got halfway to Thea’s bedroom and then ran back for the cell phone, reaching down, careful to keep one hand secured under Thea’s head, and scooped up the phone from the bath mat. As she jogged back toward Thea’s bedroom, she brought up the keypad and dialed 911. Right as she was about to hit the green call button, she felt her daughter’s body softening in her arms and then “Mama” came from within the bundle.
“Are you ok? Thea.” Anne peered into the towel. “How do you feel?”
“Gud,” Thea replied. “Tired.”
“But, love, what happened?” Anne asked her daughter, knowing she wouldn’t be able to give an answer, that she seemingly wasn’t even aware of the convulsions that had overtaken her for . . . a minute? Twenty seconds?
“Don’t cry, Mama.”
“I’m just happy you’re ok,” Anne said, wiping her face. “These are happy tears.”
“I’m ok.” Thea nodded. “Book and bed.”
