The Good Girl. Mary Kubica

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      Eve

       After

      I’ve gotten used to the sight of police cars stalled outside my home. There are two of them there, day and night, four uniformed guards keeping an eye on Mia. They sit in the front seat of the police cruisers, drinking coffee and eating sandwiches that they take turns picking up from the deli. I stare from the bedroom windows, peering between the plantation blinds that I’ve split apart with a hand. They look like schoolboys to me, younger than my own children, but they carry guns and nightsticks and peer up at me with binoculars and just stare. I convince myself that they can’t see me when, night after night, I dim the lights to change into a pair of flannel pajamas, but the truth is that I don’t know.

      Mia sits on the front porch every day, seemingly indifferent to the bitter cold. She stares at the snow that surrounds our home like the moat of a castle. She watches the dormant trees lurch back and forth in the wind. But she doesn’t notice the police cars, the four men who study her all hours of the day. I’ve begged her not to leave the porch and she’s agreed, though sometimes she makes her way across the snow and onto the sidewalk, where she strolls by the homes of Mr. and Mrs. Pewter and the Donaldson family. While one of the cars crawls along behind her, the other sends an officer to get me, and I come running out the door with bare feet to snatch up my wandering daughter. “Mia, honey, where are you going?” I’ve heard myself ask countless times, gathering her by the shirtsleeves and reeling her in. She never wears a coat and her hands are ice-cold. She never knows where she’s going but she always follows me home and I thank the officers as we pass by, on our way into the kitchen for a cup of warm milk. She shivers as she drinks it and when she’s through she says she’s going to bed. She’s felt unwell for the past week, always longing to be in bed.

      But today for some reason she sees the police cars. I pull out of the garage and onto the street, en route to Dr. Rhodes’s office for Mia’s first round of hypnosis. It’s a moment of lucidity that passes by as she gazes out the window and asks, “What are they doing here?” as if they had arrived right then and there in that single lucid moment.

      “Keeping us safe,” I say diplomatically. What I mean to say is keeping you safe, but I don’t want her to fear the reasons she’s not.

      “From what?” she asks, turning her head to watch the policemen through the back window. One starts his car and follows us down the road. The other lingers behind to keep an eye on the house while we’re gone.

      “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” I respond in lieu of an answer to her question, and she gratefully accepts it, turning around to watch out the front window and forgetting altogether that we’re being trailed.

      We drive down the neighborhood street. It’s quiet. The kids have returned to school after two weeks of winter break and no longer loiter in their front lawns building snowmen and tossing snowballs at one another with high, shrieking laughter, sounds that are foreign in our uncommunicative home. Christmas lights remain on homes, those inflatable Santas unplugged and lying dead in mounds of snow. James didn’t take the time to decorate the exterior of the house this year, though I went all out on the inside just in case. Just in case Mia came home and there was cause to celebrate.

      She’s agreed to hypnosis. It didn’t take much coaxing. These days Mia agrees to most everything. James is against the idea; he thinks hypnosis is СКАЧАТЬ