The Marsh King's Daughter, page 4
Stephen shakes his head again. “I give you all the space in the world, and this is how you . . . Do I say anything when you go bear hunting? When you stay in the woods by yourself overnight? When you disappeared for two weeks when Mari was a baby because you needed time alone? I mean, whose wife goes bear hunting? I would have worked with you on this, Helena. Why couldn’t you trust me?”
It would take a thousand words to begin to answer him fully, but I come up with only two. “I’m sorry.” And even to my ears, the words sound lame. But they’re true. I am sorry. I’d apologize every day for the rest of my life if it would help.
“You lied to me. Now you’ve put our family in danger.” Stephen brushes past me and goes into the kitchen. The side door bangs. I can hear him shifting things around in the garage. He comes back with a suitcase in each hand.
“Pack whatever you need for yourself and for the girls. We’re going to my parents’.”
“Now?”
Stephen’s parents live in Green Bay. It’s a four-hour drive, never mind the multiple bathroom stops you have to make when you’re traveling with two small children. If we leave now, we won’t get to his parents’ until at least three a.m.
“What else are we supposed to do? We can’t stay here. Not with a murderous psychopath on the loose.” He doesn’t say a murderous psychopath who also happens to be your father, but he may as well have.
“He’s not coming here,” I say again—not so much because I believe it, but because Stephen has to. I can’t stand the idea of his thinking I would willfully and knowingly do anything that would jeopardize my family.
“Do you know that? Can you promise your father won’t come after you or the girls?”
I open my mouth, then shut it. Of course I can’t promise. As much as I might think I know what my father will or won’t do, the truth is, I don’t. He murdered two men to escape from prison, and I never anticipated that.
Stephen’s hands clench into fists. I get ready. Stephen has never hit me, but there’s always a first time. Certainly my father never hesitated to hit my mother for less. Stephen’s chest swells. He draws a deep breath. Lets it out. Takes another, then lets that out, too. Picks up the girls’ pink princess suitcase and turns on his heel and stomps off down the hall. Dresser drawers bang open and closed. “Daddy?” Iris says plaintively. “Are you mad at Mommy?”
I grab the other suitcase and head for the master bedroom. Pack everything Stephen will need to stay at his parents’ as long as he has to and carry the case into the living room and put it by the front door. I want to tell him that I understand how he feels. That I wish things could have been different. That it’s shattering me to see him drawing away. But when he comes back with the girls’ suitcase and walks past me to carry both cases to the car like we’re strangers, I don’t.
We button the girls’ sweaters over their pajamas without speaking. Stephen slings Mari over his shoulder and carries her to the car. I follow, leading Iris by the hand. “Be a good girl,” I tell her as I lift her into her booster seat and buckle her in. “Listen to your father. Do what he says.” Iris blinks and rubs her eyes like she’s trying not to cry. I pat her head and tuck the well-loved stuffed animal she calls Purple Bear beside her, then go around to stand by the driver’s side door.
Stephen’s eyebrows go up when he sees me. He rolls the window down.
“Aren’t you going to get Rambo?” he asks.
“I’m not coming,” I say.
“Helena. Don’t do this.”
I know what he’s thinking. It’s no secret I dread going to his parents’ under the best of conditions—never mind showing up with the girls in the middle of the night because my father is an escaped prisoner. It’s not only the effort of having to pretend to be interested in what interests them even though we have absolutely nothing in common; it’s the gauntlet of rules and manners I have to navigate. I’ve come a long way from the socially inept twelve-year-old I once was, but whenever I’m around them, Stephen’s parents make me feel like I haven’t.
“It’s not that. I have to stay here. The police need my help.”
This is only partially correct. Stephen would never accept the real reason I have to stay behind. The truth is, sometime between the officers’ first question and when the door closed behind them, I realized that if anyone is going to catch my father and return him to prison, it’s me. No one is my father’s equal when it comes to navigating the wilderness, but I’m close. I lived with him for twelve years. He trained me, taught me everything he knows. I know how he thinks. What he’ll do. Where he’ll go.
If Stephen knew what I was planning, he’d remind me that my father is armed and dangerous. My father killed two prison guards, and the police are convinced he’s ready to kill again. But if there’s one person who is not in danger from my father, it’s me.
Stephen’s eyes narrow. I can’t tell if he knows I’m not being entirely honest. I’m not sure it would make a difference if he did.
At last he shrugs. “Call me,” he says wearily. The window goes up.
The yard light kicks on as Stephen backs into the turnaround and starts down the driveway. Iris cranes her neck to watch out the back window. I lift my hand. Iris returns my wave. Stephen does not.
I stand in the yard until the Cherokee’s taillights fade into the distance, then walk back to the house and sit down on the porch steps. The night feels empty, cold, and suddenly I realize that in the six years since I got married, I’ve never spent the night at my house by myself. A lump forms in my throat. I swallow it down. I have no right to self-pity. I did this to myself. I just lost my family, and it’s my fault.
I know how this works. I’ve been down this road before, after my mother sank into a depression so deep that she wouldn’t come out of her room for days and sometimes weeks at a time and my grandparents sued her for custody of me. If Stephen doesn’t come back, if he decides my sin of omission is too big to forgive and he wants a divorce, I’ll never see my girls again. Stand me and my dysfunctional childhood and idiosyncrasies and quirks alongside Stephen’s one-hundred-percent normal middle-class upbringing and conventional family values and there’s no way I’ll measure up. I have so many strikes against me, I may as well not go to bat. There’s not a judge on Earth who’d decide in my favor. Even I wouldn’t award myself custody.
Rambo plops down beside me and puts his head in my lap. I gather him in my arms and bury my face in his fur. I think about all of the years and all of the chances I had to come clean about who I am. In hindsight, I think I’d convinced myself that if I didn’t say my father’s name, I could pretend he didn’t exist. But he does. And now, in my heart, I realize I always knew that one day, there’d be an accounting.
Rambo whines and pulls away. I let him go off into the night and stand up and go inside the house to get ready. There’s only one way to fix this. One way to get my family back. I have to capture my father. It’s the only way to prove to Stephen that nothing and no one is more important to me than my family.
5
THE CABIN
A long time passed after the Marsh King dragged the terrified princess beneath the slime. At last the stork saw a green stalk shooting up out of the deep, marshy ground. As it reached the surface of the marsh, a leaf spread out, and unfolded itself broader and broader, and close to it came forth a bud.
One morning when the stork was flying over, he saw that the power of the sun’s rays had caused the bud to open, and in the cup of the flower lay a charming child—a little maiden, looking as if she had just come out of a bath.
“The wife of the Viking has no children, and how often she has wished for a little one,” the stork thought. “People always say the stork brings the babies; I will do so in earnest this time.”
The stork lifted the little girl out of the flower-cup and flew to the castle. He picked a hole with his beak in the bladder skin covering the window, and laid the beautiful child in the bosom of the Viking’s wife.
— HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN,
The Marsh King’s Daughter
I had no idea when I was growing up that there was anything wrong with my family. Children usually don’t. Whatever their situation, that’s what’s normal to them. Daughters of abusers fall in with abusive men as adults because that’s what they’re used to. It feels familiar. Natural. Even if they don’t like the circumstances in which they were brought up.
But I loved my life in the marsh, and I was devastated when it all fell apart. I was the reason everything fell apart, of course, but I didn’t fully understand the role I played in that until much later. And if I had known then what I do now, things would have been very different. I wouldn’t have adored my father. I would have been much more understanding of my mother. I suspect, though, that I still would have loved hunting and fishing.
The papers called my father The Marsh King after the ogre in the fairy tale. I understand why they gave him that name, as anyone who’s familiar with the fairy tale will as well. But my father was no monster. I want to make that absolutely clear. I realize that much of what he said and did was wrong. But at the end of the day, he was only doing the best he could with what he had, same as any other parent. And he never abused me, at least not in a sexual way, which is what a lot of people assume.
I also understand why the papers called our place a farmhouse. It looks like an old farmhouse in the pictures: two stories, weathered clapboard siding, double-hung casement windows so crusted with dirt that it was impossible to see in or out, wood-shingled roof. The outbuildings contribute to the illusion—a three-sided slab-wood utility shed, a woodshed, an outhouse.
We called our place the cabin. I can’t tell you who built our cabin, or when, or why, but I can guarantee it wasn’t farmers. The cabin sits on a narrow, densely forested ridge of maple and beech and alder that juts out of the marsh like an overweight woman lying on her side: one small hump for her head, a slightly bigger hump for her shoulders, a third for her massive hips and thighs. Our ridge was part of the Tahquamenon River basin, 129 square miles of wetland that drain into the Tahquamenon River, though I didn’t learn that until later. The Ojibwa call the river Adikamegong-ziibi, “river where the whitefish are found,” but all we caught were muskies, walleye, perch, and pike.
Our ridge was far enough from the main branch of the Tahquamenon that it couldn’t be seen by fishermen or canoeists. The swamp maples that grew around the cabin make it nearly invisible from the air as well. You might think the smoke from our woodstove would have given away our location, but it never did. If anyone happened to notice during the years we lived there, they must have assumed the smoke came from a fisherman’s dinner or a hunting cabin. At any rate, my father is nothing if not cautious. I’m sure he waited months after he took my mother before he risked a fire.
My mother told me that for the first fourteen months of her captivity, my father kept her shackled to the heavy iron ring set in a corner post of the woodshed. I’m not sure I believe her. I’ve seen the handcuffs, of course, and used them myself when the need arose. But why would my father go to all the trouble of keeping her chained in the woodshed when there was no place for her to go? Nothing but grasses as far as the eye could see, broken only by the occasional beaver or muskrat lodge, or another solitary ridge. Too thick to push a canoe through, too insubstantial to walk on.
The marsh kept us safe during the spring, summer, and fall. In winter, bears, wolves, and coyotes occasionally crossed the ice. One winter, as I was pulling on my boots to go to the outhouse before I went to bed—because believe me, you do not want to leave your bed to go to the outhouse in the middle of the night in the winter—I heard a noise on the porch. I assumed it was a raccoon. The night was unseasonably warm, the temperature almost above freezing, the kind of bright, full-moon midwinter night that stretches the shadows and fools the hibernators into thinking it’s spring. I stepped onto the porch and saw a dark shape almost as tall as me. Still thinking coon, I yelled and slapped it on the rump. Coons can make a real mess if you let them, and guess whose job it would’ve been to clean it up.
But it wasn’t a raccoon. It was a black bear, and not a young one, either. The bear turned around and looked at me and chuffed. If I close my eyes, I can still smell its warm fish breath, feel my bangs flutter as it exhales in my face. “Jacob!” I yelled. The bear stared at me and I stared back until my father came with his rifle and shot it.
We ate bear for the rest of that winter. The carcass strung up in the utility shed looked like a person without its skin. My mother complained that the meat was greasy and tasted like fish, but what would you expect? “You are what you eat,” as my father says. We spread the hide in front of the fireplace in the living room and nailed it to the floor so it would stay flat. The room smelled like rotten meat until the skin side dried, but I liked sitting on my bearskin rug with my toes stretched toward the fire and a bowl of bear meat stew in my lap.
My father has a better story. Years ago, long before my mother and me, when he was still a teenager, he was hiking through the woods north of his parents’ place on Nawakwa Lake near Grand Marais to check his snare line. The snow was extra deep that year, and another six inches had fallen overnight, so the trail and the markers he used to navigate it had gotten buried. He wandered off the path before he realized it, and all of a sudden, his foot broke through the snow and he fell into a big hole. Snow and sticks and leaves fell down with him, but he wasn’t hurt because he landed on something warm and soft. As soon as he realized where he was and what had happened, he scrambled up and out, but not before he saw that he was standing on a tiny wee bear cub no bigger than his hand. The cub’s neck was broken.
Every time my father told that story, I wished his story belonged to me.
—
I WAS BORN two and a half years into my mother’s captivity. She was three weeks shy of seventeen. She and I weren’t a bit alike, neither in looks nor in temperament, but I can imagine what it must have been like for her to be pregnant with me.
You’re going to have a baby, my father would have announced one late autumn day as he stomped the muck from his boots on our back porch and strode into the overheated kitchen. He had to tell my mother what was going on because she was too young and naive to understand the significance of the changes to her body. Or possibly she did know, but was in denial. A lot depends on how good the health classes at the Newberry Middle School were and how closely she paid attention.
My mother would have turned to face him from where she was cooking at the stove. She was always cooking, or heating water for cooking and washing, or hauling water to heat for washing and cooking.
In my imagination’s first version, disbelief spreads across her face as her hands fly to her belly. A baby? she whispers. She doesn’t smile. In my experience she rarely did.
In the second, she tosses her head defiantly and spits out, I know.
As much as I prefer the second version, I’m going with the first. In all the years we lived together as a family, I never once saw my mother talk back to my father. Sometimes I wish she would have. Think about what it was like for me. I was an infant, a toddler, a growing girl, and all I knew of motherhood aside from the perky, aproned housewives in the National Geographic advertisements was a sullen young woman who shuffled through her chores with her head down and her eyes rimmed red in secret misery. My mother never laughed, barely talked, seldom hugged or kissed me.
I’m sure she was terrified at the idea of having a baby in that cabin. I know I would have been. Maybe she hoped my father would realize a cabin in the marsh was no place for her to give birth, bring her to town, and leave her on the hospital steps like a foundling.
He didn’t. The jeans and Hello Kitty T-shirt my mother had been wearing since he snatched her became a problem. Eventually my father must have noticed that her shirt no longer covered her stomach and she couldn’t zip her jeans, so he let her borrow one of his flannel shirts and a pair of suspenders.
I imagine my mother growing thinner as her belly swelled. During the early years at the cabin, she lost a lot of weight. The first time I saw her newspaper photo, I was shocked at how fat she used to be.
And then, when my mother was five months pregnant and really starting to show, an extraordinary thing happened. My father took her shopping. It seems that in all of the preparation for my mother’s abduction and their life at the cabin, my father forgot to purchase clothing for the future me.
His predicament still makes me smile. Imagine, this resourceful wilderness man who could kidnap a young girl and keep her hidden for more than fourteen years overlooked the inevitable consequence of taking her as his wife. I picture my father examining his options with his head tipped to the side as he stroked his beard in that thoughtful way he has, but in the end, there weren’t many. And so, true to character, he selected the most practical and began making preparations for a trip to the Soo, the only city within a hundred and fifty–mile radius of our cabin that had a Kmart.
Taking my mother shopping wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds. Other kidnappers have done it. People stop looking. Memories fade. As long as the victim doesn’t make eye contact or identify herself, the risk is small.
My father cut my mother’s hair as short as a boy’s and dyed it black. The fact that he had black hair dye at the cabin was a key point the prosecution later used to prove that my father acted with knowledge and malice aforethought. How did he know he would need hair dye? Or that my mother would be a blonde? At any rate, anyone looking at them would have seen a father shopping with his daughter. If they also happened to notice that my mother was pregnant, what of it? Certainly the average person wouldn’t have guessed that the man holding tightly to the young girl’s elbow was not her father, but the father of her child. I asked my mother later why she didn’t tell anyone who she was or ask for help, and she said it was because she felt like she was invisible. Think of it: she was only sixteen, and by then my father had spent more than a year convincing her that no one was looking for her. That nobody cared. And so as they walked up and down the baby aisles filling their cart and no one paid any attention, it must have seemed to her like it was true.
