The Marsh King's Daughter(64)

“You shouldn’t have left,” he goes on when I don’t answer. “You ruined everything.”

I’d like to point out that I wasn’t to blame for the way our lives fell apart. If my father was capable of the smallest logic, I’d tell him that the life he imagined was always unattainable, that his delusion that he could create a life in the marsh according to his wants and preferences ended the moment I was conceived. I was the chink in his armor, his Achilles’ heel. My father raised me and shaped me into a version of himself, but in so doing he sowed the seeds of his own demise. My father could control my mother. He could never control me.

“She’s dead,” I say. “Mother.”

I don’t know why I’m telling him this. I can’t even say for sure how my mother died. All I know is what I read in the papers: that she died unexpectedly at her home. It seemed an appropriate place for her to pass away. When I lived at my grandparents’, those four pink bedroom walls plastered with butterflies and rainbows and unicorns all but smothered me. Whenever the noise and the turmoil of the world beyond the marsh got too much for me, I had to go outside. As long as I could look up and see the trees moving, I was okay. My mother was the opposite. Looking back, I think the reason she spent so much time in her room after we left the marsh is that it was the last place she’d felt safe.

My father snorts. “Your mother was a disappointment. I often wished I’d taken the other one.”

“The other one”? The other girl she was playing with that day? It guts me to hear him speak so dispassionately of my mother’s abduction. I think about the day he kidnapped her, how she fell for his story about the dog, how terrified she must have been when she realized my father meant to harm her. There had to have been a point when she was helping him look for his nonexistent dog when she realized he wasn’t telling the truth. I should go home now, she would have said. Probably more than once. My parents will be looking for me. Tentatively, like she was asking permission, because back then little girls weren’t taught to be assertive like they are now. Maybe my father promised to get her an ice cream if she’d help him look a little longer. Maybe he tempted her with a ride in his canoe. My father can be convincing when it suits his purpose.

Whatever my mother was thinking or feeling, the moment she got into his canoe, she was done for. For the first few miles east of Newberry, the Tahquamenon River cuts through hardwoods and is relatively narrow. Maybe my mother thought about jumping over the side and swimming to shore once she realized she was in trouble. Maybe she held her breath each time they came around a bend, thinking they’d pass by a fisherman or a family and she could yell for help. But as soon as the river opened out into the marshland, she had to have known it was over. I think the marsh is beautiful, but to my mother the endless waving grasses must have looked as desolate as the moon. Did she realize then that there was no dog? That my father had tricked her? That she would never see her girlfriend, her house, her room, her clothes, her toys, books, and movies, or her parents ever again? Did she cry? Scream? Fight? Or did she slip into the fugue state that was her refuge for the next fourteen years? My mother never shared the details of that day, so I can only guess.

“You planned this from the beginning,” I say as understanding dawns. “You attacked the guards in the Seney Stretch because you knew I’d come looking for you if you escaped close to my home. You’ve taken me hostage because you want me to drive you to Canada and leave you there.” Of course there’s the matter of the four flat tires on my truck, but I’m sure my father has planned a way to get around that.

He smiles. It’s the same smile he used to get when he was teaching me to track. Not when I’d gotten it right. When I’d gotten it wrong.

“Almost. You’re not leaving me at the border, Bangii-Agawaateyaa. You’re coming with me. We’re going to be a family. You. Me. Your girls.”

Time slows to a crawl as this settles in. My father has to know I will never willingly fetch my girls and go away with him, even if I were physically able to form words and sentences to tell him. I’ll die first, and gladly. I can’t believe I wanted to see him again. That I ever loved this man. A man who murders as easily as he draws a breath. Who thinks that because he wants a thing, he should have it. My mother. Our cabin. My girls.

“Yes, your girls,” he says, as if he can see straight inside my head. “Surely you didn’t think we’d leave without them?”

We? But there is no we. This is entirely about him. It always has been. I think about how my mother and I did everything according to my father’s preferences without realizing this was what we were doing—eating what and when he said we could, wearing what he told us to, getting up and going to bed at the times that he decreed. I’ll never subject Mari and Iris to that kind of control. And what about Stephen? Where does my father think my husband will be in all of this? Stephen would go to the ends of the Earth to track down his daughters. Any normal parent would. There’s no way this can end except badly.

Then there is the fact that my father knows I have two daughters. He’s been in prison for thirteen years, and we’ve had no contact during that time. I’m not one of those parents who chronicle their kids’ lives online, and even if I did, prisoners can’t access the Internet. I keep a low profile, don’t do anything that will put me in the public eye for reasons that should be obvious by now to anyone who knows my history. I make my living selling homemade jam and jelly, for God’s sake. And yet somehow, my father knows about my family.