Escape (11 page)

“Mom?”

She gave a cry. “Thank goodness, Emily! I’ve been thinking of you nonstop since James called! Are you all right?”

The sound of her voice brought a lump to my throat. As brightly as I could, I said, “I’m fine. He said you weren’t worried.”

“Well, of course he said that, because he doesn’t know me. Did he think I would fall apart? Did he think I wouldn’t have a clue where this had come from? Did he not realize I would
know
what you’re feeling?”

Her words startled me. “Actually, no,” I said slowly. “He wouldn’t realize it. I never told him what you did. I wasn’t thinking about it myself. Wow. That’s amazing.”

“Like mother like daughter, your father said.”

“You told Dad about me?” I felt a flicker of fear, which was sad. I was a grown woman, married, a lawyer. I had nothing to fear from my father.

Except his disappointment.

Which was no small thing.

“I had to,” my mother reasoned. “You call him every Sunday. When you didn’t this week, he called me, and then he called three
times yesterday asking if I’d heard from you. As soon as James called me, I knew what you’d done.”

“And Dad blamed you? I’m sorry, Mom.”

“Don’t be! I’m not. I am no longer married to the man, and as far as I’m concerned,
he
was the one who set the bad example, always talking about getting a better job, moving up, leaving a mark on the world. I am ten times happier not having that monkey on my back. And I am leaving my mark on the world, just not in a way that your father would put on a couple’s résumé.”

Claire Scott currently sold underwear at Macy’s, where there was no chance of upward mobility, only the satisfaction of fitting bras properly. As jobs went, it wasn’t on his approved list, which, I had always suspected, was part of its appeal for Mom. She worked only enough hours to pay the bills, not a minute more, since her real love was holding babies. To satisfy that, she volunteered at a local NICU, and to see her work there, which I’d done, you would think she had a nursing degree.

What she did have, after raising two children, was the equivalent of a PhD in mothering and my undying respect. She had infinite patience with babies, an instinctive feel for how to hold this one or feed that one, a calm that children fed off, and a built-in alarm that told her when something was amiss. Mothering was all she had ever wanted to do.

My father had never accepted that. As soon as we were in school, he wanted her working outside the home, and it wasn’t about money, it was the principle of it, he said. He claimed her intelligence was going to waste.

As a woman who wanted a baby and considered it a
luxury
to be a stay-at-home mom, I found that offensive.

On the flip side, despite his myopia, Dad has his strengths. I am a lawyer because of the example he had set practicing law now for thirty-five years. Forever a public servant, Roger Scott never earned much, but he was scrupulously honest—and idealistic. He believed
that even the most heinous criminal had civil rights. When it came to a rapist or serial killer, I had my doubts. But Dad insists that a civilized society has to maintain its civility by rising above.

When I chose law, he had been proud, and when I chose James, even more so. He believed that we would do as a couple what he and Mom had not.

He would not be happy with me now. I felt a pang thinking about that.

“Don’t worry about your father,” Mom said now. “I can handle him.”

“What about Kelly?” I asked cautiously. “Is she driving you nuts?”

“Well, yes, there’ve been lots of calls from her, too.”

“Mom, about this party—”

“I don’t want it, Emmie. You know that. I’d have gone along if you girls were both dead set on it, but big parties aren’t my style. I’d far rather cook dinner for my family.”

“Not on your own birthday.”

“Yes, on my own birthday. Cooking’s my thing. I’m having twelve for dinner tonight.”

That sounded like hell to me. Cooking brought out the worst of my insecurities. “Who are they?”

“Just friends, but life is about people, and people need food to survive, and I do love to cook. I’m good at it. Even your father admits that. Given my druthers, I’d have you all over—children, grandchildren, even your father.” Her tone changed. “Tell me about you.”

“You first,” I insisted. “What were you feeling when you ran away?” I had never asked at the time, not wanting to know the details of my parents’ divorce. And Mom usually avoided bad-mouthing Dad. But she must have known I needed honesty now, because she was blunt.

“I felt inadequate. In your dad’s eyes, I was always that. This particular day, he made a snide remark when he was leaving for work, and I snapped—not at him, but inside me. You kids were all in college, and I suddenly saw that I was stuck alone with a man who, all those years later, was still wanting me to be someone I wasn’t.”

Suddenly saw
. That was what had happened to me Friday morning. I could also relate to
wanting me to be someone I wasn’t
, though James couldn’t be faulted for that. It had been all my doing. The question was whether James would love me if I was someone else.

“Were you thinking of divorce when you walked out?” I asked my mother.

“I’d been thinking about it for years.” She paused, guarded. “Are you?”

“No,” I replied. Fingering my wedding band, I was suddenly weepy. “I love the James I married. It’s our life that I hate.” I began to cry, to sob actually, but this was different from my crying with Vicki. That was from exhaustion. With Mom I was a child, small and confused.

Offering the occasional soothing murmur, she waited me out. When my tears finally slowed, I gave her a sniffly account of my flight from New York. I ended with Walter’s offer.

“Four weeks is something,” she mused. “I only took a week, but my choice was simpler. Stay with your father or not.”

“Where did you go?” Incredible that I had never asked before, but it was another of those details I hadn’t wanted to know, and once she was back, it hadn’t mattered.

“Cape Elizabeth.”

Whoa
. “That’s only twenty minutes from the house.”

She chuckled. “If you want to disappear, Emily, you can do it most anywhere. Truth was, I didn’t have the courage to go farther. I’ve always loved Cape Elizabeth. I felt at home by the sea. How could your father not have guessed?”

“Maybe it was too obvious.”

“Maybe he just didn’t know me well enough.”

I might have said the same about James, only I was the guilty party in this, too. I was the one who had been less than forthright about certain parts of my past.

“Was it important to you that Dad not know?” I asked, because James was most bothered by that. I had never thought him to be controlling, certainly not of me, but he had repeatedly asked where I was.

“Roger’s not knowing made me feel safe,” my mother said. “He was always so quick to judge me. I knew that if I talked with him, he would convince me I was stupid to leave. But I couldn’t think straight at home. Home was so cluttered with memories that I couldn’t see the forest through the trees.”

At mention of the forest, I left the bed and went barefoot to the window. Clouds were drifting, turning the woods darker, but I knew what was there. A coyote had spoken to me last night. It might be hidden away now, asleep—or looking straight at me. I searched beside tree trunks and through ferns for a pair of golden eyes or large, pointy ears. Jude’s coyote had been russet, with a bushy tail long enough to leave a trail in the snow, he said, and I half imagined he had run with it a time or two. Not that I’d seen it in winter myself.

Nor did I see it now. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Coyotes knew how to be invisible.

“I didn’t want him dragging me back until I’d made my decision,” Mom was saying.

My eyes continued to search the forest. “How did you finally make it?”

“The hurricane. There was a bad one that year, do you remember?”

I actually did. “The phones were out. I couldn’t reach Dad.”

“Mmm. The surf was ferocious. Three people died on the Maine coast, but a lot more might have, had they not evacuated and moved inland. I helped with cooking at one of the shelters.” A smile warmed her words. “People kept thanking me, like I was worth something. It was food for my hungry soul—which isn’t to say I wasn’t looking over my shoulder half the time, afraid your dad would have one of his investigators track me down.”

I froze, remembering the charcoal SUV that had been parked by the green. If it was waiting for someone, that someone had been remarkably slow. “Would he do that to me? Ask him not to, Mom. Please? I’m in a totally safe place, a place where
I
feel at home. If he sends someone after me, I swear I will never talk to him again. Tell him that. Tell him I’m
fine
.”

“Are you, honey? I knew this was coming.”

That stopped me. “How?”

“Your lifestyle. There’s a sharp edge to it. James eggs you on.”

My head snapped back. Mom had never said anything negative about James before. Maybe I was being oversensitive, but I couldn’t let the statement stand. “He doesn’t. We don’t compete.”

“No?”

“No
,
”
I argued, feeling betrayed. “He and I have been a team from the start. It’s always been us against them. James is my life,” I insisted.

“What about Jude?” Mom asked.

I barely breathed. “What about him?”

“What part does he play in all this?”

“I haven’t seen Jude in ten years,” I said with perhaps too much force, but she had taken me by surprise. She hadn’t mentioned Jude once since my marriage to James.

“And you’re not with him now?”

“Absolutely not!” I cried.

“Oh dear. I hit a nerve.”

“Mom,” I warned.

She paused, then let Jude go, but not the rest. “Do you know, Emily, this is the longest conversation we’ve had in months?”

I calmed a little. “That’s not true. I was at the house with you in March.”

“With your laptop and your phone. You were never not plugged in.”

“Wrong. Wireless.”

“Emily. You know what I’m saying. We were never not interrupted.”

She might have been right, but this wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “You think James is bad for me.”

“I didn’t say that, Emily. I said he eggs you on, and you buy into it. You create an intensity together.”

“But don’t you see,” I said, desperate to explain it, “the power thing is personal with you. It’s everything Dad wanted and you didn’t. But maybe I do.”

“Do you?”

Yes
, I wanted to say but couldn’t. “I don’t know,” I cried. “That’s what I have to decide.”
Tell me what to do
, I nearly added, wondering if this was what I needed most from her. But she couldn’t tell me what to do. Her priorities weren’t mine.

Not that I knew what mine were. That was a problem.

We let the argument cool. Finally, she sighed and said a quiet “I love you, sweetheart.”

“I love you, too, Mom, which is why I need your support. James is my husband. Are you okay with that?”

“I want what you want.”

“Will you love me if I choose to go back to New York?”

“I want what you want,” she insisted. “I worry, is all. Will you call again?”

I waited, hoping that in my silence she would actually answer what I’d asked. As the silence dragged on, though, the questions receded.

“Yes,” I finally said, “I’ll call.”

“Do you promise?”

“Yes,” I repeated, and only after we’d clicked off realized she hadn’t asked where I was. I kind of figured that she knew, since she’d asked about Jude. Either that, or she didn’t
want
to know, giving her one less thing to hide from my dad.

I moved my thumb to power off the BlackBerry, then paused. Powering off wasn’t enough. I had talked with the three people who truly needed to hear my voice. The rest was trash.

Pulling up my in-box, I erased everything there. Had I erased something important? Possibly. Did I care? No. Looking at that little blank screen, I felt liberated.

In the same clean-slate spirit, I showered and, for the first time since leaving New York, blew my hair dry so that I could wear it down, and put on enough makeup so that I wouldn’t look sick. I did this for me—not for James or for anyone at work—just for me.

When I reached the first floor, breakfast was being served in the dining room, where the large table was set and several guests were
already seated. The Red Fox buffet might have been more modest than the one in the Berkshires, but it was no less appealing. I helped myself to a poached egg and bacon, and put a slice of thick cinnamon bread in the toaster, then poured a glass of fresh grapefruit juice and took coffee from the urn. When the toast was done, I joined the group at the table.

I got smiles from the five people there, the nearest being a woman close to my age, also alone. “Morning,” she said as I settled into a chair. “Are you here for the Refuge?”

“I am.” In the broadest sense of the word. “You?”

She nodded. “This is my vacation, third year in a row. I’ve been at the Refuge every day. I can’t have a dog, no room, so I hang with them here. They’re so needy, they just love you to bits, these dogs do. It’s the best feeling.”

It was. The summer I was here, I had set out to work with dogs, but Kitty City had been two caretakers short. Some things happen for a reason; once I had cat fur on my jeans, I couldn’t leave. Cats are about subtlety and reserve. Since their trust is harder to win, it is that much more precious when it comes.

In the years since that Bell Valley summer, a simple rub by a cat at the home of a friend had me aching to adopt. Though James wasn’t a pet person, he certainly wasn’t allergic.

But to bring a cat into a home where it would be alone for endless hours each day was cruel. Cats might be independent and self-sufficient if given a litter box and a bowl of food, but they remain social creatures. Kitty City proves that. It isn’t that you’re mobbed when you open the door, but spend a week in Kitty City, and you’ll be greeted, in one form or another, by every cat in the place.