The Marsh King's Daughter(14)

She also said my father damaged her when he reached inside to work the placenta loose, and that’s why she never had more children. I wouldn’t know. I don’t have brothers and sisters, so this could be true. I do know that when the placenta doesn’t detach, you have to act quickly if you’re going to save the mother, and you don’t have a lot of options. Especially when doctors and hospitals are out of the picture.

During the days that followed, my mother was out of her mind with fever as the inevitable infection took hold. My father kept me quiet with a rag soaked in sugar water between the times he laid me at my mother’s breast. Sometimes my mother was conscious. Most of the time she was not. Whenever she was awake, my father made her drink willow bark tea, and that broke her fever.

I can see now that the reason my mother was indifferent toward me is because she never bonded with me. She was too young, too sick in the days immediately after I was born, too scared and lonely and collapsed in on herself from her own pain and misery to see me. Sometimes when a baby is born in similar circumstances, she gives her mother a reason to keep going. This wasn’t true of me. Thank God I had my father.





6





Ifetch my rucksack from the hall closet and pack it with extra ammunition and a couple of granola bars and bottles of water, then toss my father’s fishing gear in the back of my pickup along with my tent and sleeping bag. The camping and fishing equipment will provide decent cover if anyone questions where I’m going or what I’m doing. I won’t be anywhere near the search area, but you never know. A lot of people are looking for my father.

I load my rifle and hang it on the rack over the cab window. Technically you’re not supposed to drive with a loaded weapon in your vehicle, but everybody does it. Regardless, I’m not about to join the hunt for my father without it. My weapon of choice these days is a Ruger American. I’ve shot at least a half-dozen Rugers over the years; they’re ridiculously accurate and they sell for a lot less than the competition. For bear, I also carry a .44 Magnum. An adult black bear is a tough animal with thick muscles and bones, and not many hunters can bring down a black bear with a single shot. A wounded bear doesn’t bleed out the way a deer does, either. Bear bleed between their layer of fat and fur, and if the caliber is too small, the bear’s fat can plug the hole while their fur soaks up the blood like a sponge, so the bear won’t even leave a blood trail. An injured bear will run till it’s too weak to keep going, which can be as far as fifteen or twenty miles. Another reason I only hunt bear with dogs.

I load the Magnum and put it in the glove box. My heart hammers and my palms are wet. I get nervous before any hunt, but we’re talking about my father. The man I loved as a child. Who took care of me for twelve years in the best way he knew. The father I haven’t spoken to in fifteen years. The man I escaped from so long ago but whose own escape just destroyed my family.

I’m too wired to sleep, so I pour a glass of wine and carry it into the living room. I set the glass on the coffee table without the requisite coaster and slouch into a corner of the sofa, put my feet on the table. Stephen has a fit when the girls put their feet on the furniture. My father, on the other hand, wouldn’t have cared about anything as inconsequential as scuffs on a table. I’ve heard it said that when it comes to picking a husband, a girl chooses a man like her father—but if this is the rule, I’m the exception. Stephen’s not from the Upper Peninsula. He doesn’t fish or hunt. He could no more break out of prison than he could drive a race car or perform brain surgery. At the time I married him, I thought I was choosing wisely. Most of the time I still do.

I drain the glass in one long swallow. The last time I messed up on this scale was when I left the marsh. I knew two weeks after my mother and I were recovered that the new life I’d envisioned for myself wasn’t going to work out as I’d hoped. I blame the media. I don’t think anyone can grasp the magnitude of the news feeding frenzy that nearly swallowed me whole unless they were at the center of it. The world was riveted by what had happened to my mother, but the person it couldn’t get enough of was me. The wild child who grew up in primitive isolation. The offspring of the innocent and her captor. The Marsh King’s daughter. People I didn’t know sent me things I didn’t want: bicycles and stuffed animals and MP3 players and laptops. One anonymous donor offered to pay for my college education.

It didn’t take my grandparents long to realize that the family tragedy had turned into a gold mine, and they were more than ready to cash in. “Don’t talk to the media,” they admonished my mother and me, meaning the hordes of reporters who left messages on my grandparents’ answering machine and camped out in news vans across the street. If we kept quiet, I gathered, one day we could sell our story for a lot of money. I wasn’t sure how long we weren’t supposed to talk, or how stories were bought and sold, or even why we’d want a lot of money in the first place. But if this was what my grandparents wanted, I’d do as they asked. Back then I was still eager to please.

People magazine turned out to be the highest bidder. To this day I don’t know what they paid. Certainly my mother and I never saw any money from the sale. All I know is that right before it was time to leave for the big welcome-home party my grandparents threw for my mother and me, my grandfather sat us down and told us that a reporter from People magazine was going to interview us at the party while a photographer took pictures, and we should tell her whatever she wanted to know.