The Good Girl Quotes
"I’m not ready for this, I think, wondering where in the world the time has gone. Seems like just yesterday we were welcoming spring and then, moments later, summer."
"I relish the last few hours of silence I have before James comes thundering through the front doors and intrudes upon my world."
"The children are my clock; when they appear in the backyard I know that it’s late afternoon, school is through."
"I’m worried that Mia will get in trouble. I’m worried that she will be fired."
"The more she drinks, the more open she becomes."
"I try not to think about it. About later. I try not to think about forcing her into the car or handing her over to Dalmar. I listen to her go on and on, about what, I don’t really know, because what I’m thinking about is the money."
"She thinks I’m worried about her. Little does she know. I couldn’t care less."
"But since then, I’ve watched as that momentary relief shriveled away, as Mia, in her oblivion, became tiresome to James, just another one of the cases on his ever growing caseload rather than our daughter."
"What if she wasn’t okay? What if she was okay but we never found her? What if she was dead and we never knew? What if she was dead and we did know, the detective asking us to identify decaying remains?"
"Good morning," I say, and Grace interrupts me curtly with "Think we can get started? I have things to do today."
"I don’t see how she can help," Grace says. She reminds me of the amnesia. "She doesn’t remember what happened."
"I’d like to try and jog her memory. See if some pictures help."
"You drew this, you know," she states, compelling Mia to have a look at the page.
"Does anything ring a bell?" I ask, sipping from my mug of coffee.
"I don’t know," she says, her voice on the verge of being inaudible.
"This is a mistake," she barks. "You’ve got this all wrong."
"I’ll make the chicken," I say. "Your father would like chicken."
"The envelope." I motion toward it and it’s then that she remembers.
"I drew this," Mia says to me, but I slip the drawing from her hands.
"You didn’t draw this," I say with absolute certainty.
"It’s all wrong," Mia replies. She’s disoriented, her visions cluttered, random memories running adrift in her mind.
"It’s my fault. It’s all my fault," and it takes every bit of willpower I have not to rush from my seat and embrace my child.
"What are they doing here?" as if they had arrived right then and there in that single lucid moment.
"From what?" she asks, turning her head to watch the policemen through the back window.
"There’s nothing to be afraid of," I respond in lieu of an answer to her question, and she gratefully accepts it.
"No one gives a damn that I’m missing. When I don’t show up at work, they’ll assume I’m lazy. It’s not like I have friends."
"Maybe you don’t plan to kill me right away," and I say no, not until we’ve eaten the cream corn."
"I’m reminded of my daughter’s dissolution with every breath I take."
"I lie awake at night wondering: what if I never have a chance to make it up to Mia?"
"I wasn’t going to hit you," I say, reading her thoughts, but she doesn’t speak."
"Once you get into this kind of mess, there’s no getting out."
"People begin calling the hotline to say that they’ve seen our John Doe. Except to some people he’s Steve and others he’s Tom."
"There isn’t any one factor in a person that causes violent or antisocial behavior. It’s an accumulation of things."
"He probably never felt like he was quite in control. He didn’t learn to be flexible."
"It’s fear that keeps her within my line of sight."
"I’m not good at this kind of crap. I can’t handle small talk and I certainly can’t handle sympathy."
"Oftentimes it’s hard to get out of bed and when I do, the very first thought on my mind is Mia."
"The reporters are less intrusive these days."
"When I tire of the crying, I let the fury take control."
"I spend an entire afternoon watching the robins en route to places south."
"But mostly I think of the things I didn’t do."
"The ducks and geese fly overhead. Everyone is leaving me."
"What we have is time to think. And a lot of it."
"I’m not one to be sentimental. I just need to know that she’s okay."
"I was waiting to talk to the Dennetts until I had some hard facts."
"It’s just one of those days, a day to lie around in pajamas and watch TV."
"We sit in the waiting room, James, Mia and me."
"I watch from the hall as James thrusts himself into Mia’s bedroom with great gusto."
"It wasn’t always this way. James was not always this disinterested regarding his family life."
"I can’t sleep, and this isn’t the first time."
"I try to convince myself that his heart is in the right place. But I wonder if that’s truly the case."
"The dull sound of off-tune humming from the kitchen puts me at ease."
"Nobody should have to work so hard to eat a damn TV dinner."
"God knows the day someone has to spoon-feed me is the day I’d rather be dead."
"The tremors are hard to watch. It makes me uncomfortable, to be honest."
"But he does everything. But he hasn’t been here for a while, has he, Mrs. Thatcher?"
"This isn’t something I do. I’ve never done this before."
"She’s nearly devoid of her English upbringing, having been in the United States since she was younger than me."
"What did people think when her birthday passed. When she wasn’t at Thanksgiving dinner."
"There is time. We could wait weeks, even more. But James doesn’t think so. He wants this done now."
"He said he’d pay for it because he didn’t want the bills submitted to the insurance company for coverage; he wanted no record that this had ever happened."
"I see her smiling, I hear her laugh. She loved me," she says. "She just didn’t know how to show it."
"I try not to imagine the things I can’t see. I try not to think about the color of her pale skin or the curvature of her spine."
"I tell her that they’d send me to jail if I was ever caught. I don’t know how long. Thirty years? Life? It’s not about this, I tell her."
"She holds me at an arm’s length and asks what happened and I tell her about James."
"But at night when I retire to my own apartment, I drink to help me sleep, and when I do, I fall asleep to the image of Mia Dennett on video surveillance."
"As soon as Mrs. Thatcher is fully stabilized, she’ll go to live with a sister nearby."
"She says it seems like a million years ago, long before someone glued us to the lid of an empty baby food jar and filled our world with glitter."
"No," I say. "It’s for you. So you stop looking so damn sad."
"Millions of people live in Chicago." "But maybe?"
"The first time I saw you, you were coming out of your apartment... I’d never seen anything so beautiful in my life."
"Your silhouette. I imagined what you might be doing inside. I imagined myself in there with you, what it would be like if it didn’t have to be like this."
"The sky was the color of persimmon and sangria, shades of red only God could make."
"Something is missing, though it wasn’t that long ago that there was nothing there."
"I can’t remember the last time anyone told me I was beautiful," she says.
"We stare at each other across the room, taking it all in. Reminding ourselves to breathe."
"Our hands and fingers memorize what our eyes could not."
"There is nothing frivolous about it. We don’t flirt. We’re beyond that."
"There are times she’s too far away, even when she’s in the same room."
"Never mind," she says after time passes. "I’ll do it myself."
"I’ll do it myself," she says. Her voice trembles. Tears fall from her eyes. She knows what’s wrong.
"All I could think about was Chloe Frost. I wanted to be her, to have someone long for me the way her family longed for her."
"Jealous that she was dead, jealous that somewhere, out there, someone loved her more than they loved me."
"You look beautiful," I say and she does. But she reiterates in a whisper: Liar.
"One day," I promise, "you’ll wear perfume and all that."
"It’s a frigid Sunday, the kind you long to spend in bed."
"I’m leaving him," I disclose, my eyes never rising from the road ahead.
"The grief and the morning sickness send her running to the bathroom three, sometimes four times a day."
"The Chicago winter is harsh. But every now and then God blesses us with a thirty-or forty-degree day to remind us that misery comes and goes."
"She sees him everywhere: in her dreams, when she’s awake."
"She admits to me in confidence that she can’t go on."