The Good Girl. Mary Kubica

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      Eve

       After

      Mia sits at the kitchen table, holding a legal-size manila envelope with her name written on the front in a very masculine all-caps script.

      I prepare dinner for Mia and myself. The TV is on in the next room for background noise, but the sound drifts into the kitchen, compensating for the silence between us. Mia doesn’t seem to notice, but these days, it makes me a nervous wreck, and so I make idle conversation to offset the silence.

      “Would you like chicken breast with your salad?” I ask and she shrugs. “Whole wheat rolls or white?” I ask but she doesn’t respond.

      “I’ll make the chicken,” I say. “Your father would like chicken.” But we both know that James will not be home.

      “What’s that?” I ask, motioning to the item in her hands.

      “What’s what?” she asks.

      “The envelope.”

      “Oh,” she says. “This.”

      I set a frying pan on the stove, slamming it down without intent. She starts, and I’m quick to apologize, filled with shame. “Oh, Mia, honey, I didn’t mean to startle you,” I say and it takes a moment for her to settle, to attach the rapid heartbeat and beads of sweat to the sound of the frying pan.

      She says that she doesn’t know why she feels like this.

      She says that she used to enjoy when darkness set in, when the outside world changed. She describes it for me: the way the streetlights and buildings twinkled in the night sky. She says that she liked the anonymity of it, and all the possibilities that developed when the sun went to sleep. But now the darkness terrifies her, all the nameless things on the other side of the silk drapes.

      Mia never used to be afraid. She would wander city streets well after dark and feel perfectly safe. She confides that she often found solace in deafening traffic, obtrusive car horns and sirens that blared at all times of the night. But now the sound of a frying pan rattles her nerves.

      I’m overly apologetic, and Mia tells me that it’s all right. She listens to the television in the other room. The evening news has given way to a seven o’clock sitcom. “Mia?” I ask and she turns to me.

      “What?” she asks.

      “The envelope.” I motion toward it and it’s then that she remembers.

      She turns it over in her hands. “That policeman gave it to me,” she says.

      I’m slicing a tomato. “Detective Hoffman?”

      “Yes.”

      Mia usually only comes downstairs when James is gone. The rest of the time she hides. I’m certain this room must remind her of her childhood. The room is the same as it’s been for a dozen years or more: the paint, the color of butter, the mood lighting. Candles are lit. The track lighting is dimmed. The table is a dark pedestal table with scrolled legs and matching upholstered chairs, where she spent too much time under a microscope as a child. I’m certain she feels like a child, unable to be left alone, having to be cooked for and constantly watched. Her independence is gone.

      Yesterday she asked when she could go home, to her own apartment, and all I replied was in time.

      James and I don’t let her leave the house, not unless we’re going to see Dr. Rhodes or to the police station. Running errands is out of the question. For days the doorbell rang from dawn to dusk, men and women with microphones and video cameras awaiting us on the front stoop. Mia Dennett, we’d like to ask you a few questions they’d demand, forcing their microphones at Mia, until I told her not to open the door, and started ignoring the chime altogether. The telephone rang relentlessly, and those infrequent times I did answer it, the only thing I ever said was, “No comment.” After a day or so, I started letting it go straight to voice mail, and then, when the ringing became too much to bear, I unplugged the phone from the wall.

      “Well, aren’t you going to open it?” I remind Mia.

      She slides her finger under the flap and lifts it open. There’s a single sheet of paper inside. She draws it carefully from the envelope and takes a look. I set the knife on a cutting board and saunter to the table beside Mia, feigning only a little interest when I’m absolutely certain I’m the more attentive of us two.

      It’s a photocopy, a drawing from a sketch pad, with circles lining the top where the original was ripped from its spiral binding. It’s a drawing of a person, a woman, I can only assume from the longish hair.

      “I drew this,” Mia says to me, but I slip the drawing from her hands.

      “May I?” I ask, dropping into the chair beside her. “Why do you say that?” I ask, my hands beginning to tremble, my stomach turning somersaults inside me. Mia has been drawing for as long as I can remember. She’s a talented artist. I asked her once why she loved to draw, why it was something with which she was so enamored. She told me that she drew because it was the only way she could bring about change. She could turn geese to swans or a cloudy day to sun. It was a place where reality didn’t have to exist.

      But this picture is something else entirely. The eyes are perfectly circular, the smile the sort she learned to draw in grade school. The eyelashes are upwardly pointing lines. The face is malformed.

      “It came from the same notebook, the one Detective Hoffman had. The one with my drawings.”

      “You didn’t draw this,” I say with absolute certainty. “Maybe ten years ago. When you were first learning. But not now. This is much too ordinary for you. It’s mediocre at best.”

      A timer beeps and I rise to my feet. Mia reaches for the page to have a second look. “Why would the policeman give this to me then?” she asks, turning the envelope over in her hands. I tell her that I don’t know.

      I’m setting whole wheat rolls onto a cookie sheet that will bake in the oven, when Mia asks, “Then who? Who drew this?” On the stove, the chicken sears.

      I lower the cookie sheet into the bottom of the oven. I flip the chicken, and begin dicing a cucumber as if perhaps it was СКАЧАТЬ