No River Too Wide (12 page)

What mattered now were jeans. From what she could tell, she was the only person in Asheville who didn’t own a pair. If she didn’t want to stand out in the crowd, now was the time to remedy that.

She got to her feet, and her knees still trembled, but life was going to be like this. A pair of blue jeans. An afternoon alone in a strange—in more ways than one—city. Participating in a short conversation with someone she’d never met and wasn’t likely to see again.

Life. One step at a time with nobody blocking the way.

And if, for one moment after Taylor had dropped her off, she had yearned for Rex—who had all the answers as well as all the questions—then she supposed she could seek forgiveness for that, as well.

But first, one small thing. A pair of jeans.

This she could do.

Chapter 10

From the audio journal of a forty-five-year-old woman, taped for the files of Moving On, an underground highway for abused women.

Some people believe violence comes directly from the traditional family, when one person is awarded all the power as well as the right, even obligation, to enforce his values or lack of them. Others believe domestic violence is caused by the
disintegration
of the traditional family. Neither view is true. Domestic violence is the result of one family member with sickness in his soul, and the desire to infect those who are weakest and most vulnerable. Sometimes fatally.

And yes, I’ve used the word
he.
The vast majority of batterers are men. Mine certainly was.

And yes, I’ve also used the word
was.
Now that I’ve left the Abuser, I have no doubt that if given the opportunity he’ll cause more and greater pain, perhaps ending our struggle once and for all, as happens too frequently. I’ve been warned that 70 percent of all women who die from domestic abuse die after they leave their abusers, as I left mine.

For now I’m free of him. I have dreams in which he finds me and exacts his final vengeance, but I believe that someday I may have just as many dreams in which I find him first.

* * *

Adam Pryor hadn’t known he could fly. He had spent most of his life on the ground, never realizing that if he flapped his wings he could soar with the eagles and vultures. Today he felt kinship with both, the eagles with their hooked beaks and lethal talons that tore the flesh from their prey, and the vultures, who fed on carrion, destroying evidence so the world could pretend death wasn’t an ugly business. Right now, though, he only wanted to get away, to rise above the clouds, up, up, just high enough that he didn’t lose consciousness and plunge back to earth.

He was especially careful about that. He never wanted to touch the ground again, particularly not the ground just below him. If he could gaze through the clouds, he knew exactly what he would see. A rural bazaar, a brief spot of color against a desolate landscape, with crude wooden sheds lining an unadorned village roadway. Sides of meat hanging from hooks. Yellow plastic jugs with labels in Arabic script. Shelves of cans, some which would have been perfectly at home in an army commissary and probably had been before they mysteriously disappeared.

Children. Boys in their long shirts over baggy white pants, colorful wool
pakol
covering heads. Girls in an array of colors, pants, overdresses, scarves over dark hair, walking or skipping beside their mothers.

He knew better than to watch the children’s progress. He had wings; he could fly away and should. Yet, somehow, he was powerless to do so.

Suddenly, despite struggling to lift himself higher, he realized he was floating downward. He wasn’t above the clouds at all. Now he saw that the clouds were really plumes of smoke. It tickled his lungs, then filled them until he began to cough. His eyes burned as he drifted. Then he picked up speed until he was falling like a meteor streaking toward the earth.

Through the veil of smoke he saw flames below, and then, as the air rushed past him, he could hear screams.

The wailing began.

“No...”

Adam tried to sit up but was only partially successful. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. The answer that left him momentarily paralyzed was this: he was inside a coffin or a crypt.

“No!” He struggled to lift his arms so he could feel something, anything, around him, but his arms were pinned to his sides. A scream gathered inside him, even as he saw light seeping through an unfamiliar doorway, and heard clinking and shuffling just beyond it.

Just in time, he remembered.

The ice machine near the elevator. A cheap motel on the highway. The only room still vacant when he had arrived after midnight two nights ago. The clerk had given him a discount—but not much—because of a bathroom sink that dripped without remorse and a shower nobody seemed able to fix.

He clamped his lips shut and forced himself to lie flat again until he could untangle the top sheet that bound him. Once he was free, he sat up and rested his head in his hands. In the hallway, whoever had needed ice at 2:00 a.m. rattled a bucket one more time, then slammed the lid on the machine. In a moment Adam could hear footsteps die away, then silence, except for a hum as the machine set out to replenish its supply.

Even the dripping no longer kept him company. He had fixed both the sink and the shower on his first morning, although he hadn’t told the guy at the front desk, who probably would have raised the price of the room.

Now that he was awake he wasn’t surprised that the dream had visited again. In the past year he had fought to get away from the same familiar scene a hundred times or more, although he hadn’t had the full-blown nightmare, this Technicolor, stereo version, for weeks. He had known he wouldn’t be lucky enough to evade it forever, but in the secret recesses of his psyche, that was what he had prayed for.

The one good thing about repetition? From past experience he knew that now he wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours. He could toss and turn and pretend all he wanted to, but deep inside lurked a realistic fear that the dream would return. He could try to sleep, but that stronger part of him would win.

He moved to the edge of the bed and turned on the nightstand lamp. These days he was never without a book. The motels he frequented didn’t always have working televisions, and it was too late to prowl...he tried to remember the name of the city...Asheville. North Carolina.

That was right. That’s where he was.

He rose and rummaged through an overnight duffel to find the paperback he had picked up at the grocery store. From experience he’d learned what he could safely read. Cookbooks. Certain biographies. Philosophy. He’d tried a romance novel one night, but that had kept him awake for different reasons.

He opened his selection and began to read about Abraham Lincoln. Like everybody else who’d been to elementary school, he already knew how the story ended, so he would encounter no unwelcome surprises.

His own story was much more a mystery.

* * *

Jan hadn’t slept well in weeks. Her final nights in Kansas had been filled with dread. She had known she would be leaving in the coming weeks, so in the middle of the night she had gone over plans, looking for a flaw or even a reason to forget them.

The devil you know...

Rex always slept soundly, so night was a time when she didn’t have to worry he might turn on her. Small infractions or imagined slights dissolved into dreams. She could lie next to him and let her mind roam. And roam it had—to all the worst outcomes.

What would happen if he found her as she tried to leave? What would happen if he tracked her to New Hampshire and tried to force her to return? What would happen if she refused? Would he make sure she simply disappeared? Even if her body was found, who would suspect that a church deacon and respected business owner had succumbed to his dark side and traveled that far to kill his wife?

After the escape she hadn’t slept well, either, because she still expected to pay a price down the road. All the years she had spent with him had made such deep wounds she would never be completely free of them.

For a change, tonight she had fallen asleep quickly, a deep, dreamless sleep that her exhausted body had insisted on. The shopping trip had been the final straw. Between the panic attack and the struggle to decide which jeans to buy, she had been so tired she had barely stayed awake during dinner.

Now, though, she
was
awake. Wide-awake and terrified.

The house was dark. No light showed under her door. By now Jan knew Taylor’s ritual. The younger woman usually went to bed about eleven, and she turned off the lights, everything except a night-light in the kitchen and another in the hallway bathroom. There were few street lamps in the neighborhood, and the one closest to Taylor’s house was shielded by a maple that hadn’t yet dropped its leaves. Only glimmers of light seeped in through the windows.

Clearly Taylor was asleep. If she was up, she would have turned on a light to make her way through the house. But someone else was creeping slowly down the hallway, or at least making his way through the kitchen. Jan heard someone bumping into furniture, not normal footsteps made by somebody comfortable with the layout, but intermittent thumps, a chair knocked into a table, perhaps, a small collision with a counter stool.

She forced herself to sit up and focus. The noise had been loud enough to wake her, but her head was still fogged from sleep. She could think of no other explanation for the noise. A stranger had to be in the house, and she was terrified she knew who it was. Rex had traced her to Taylor’s. No matter how careful they had been, he’d traced her. He was methodically searching for her room.

And when he found her...

Maddie wasn’t home, and she had Vanilla with her. Taylor was home, though, and if Rex found her room first...

She had to get up. She had forgotten to charge the Moving On cell, and there was no regular telephone in her room to call 911, although there was one in the hall. Taylor had decided that Maddie didn’t need a phone in her room, but the girl could take the one in the hallway if she asked for permission. If Jan could just get to it, punch in those three numbers...

Her body was stiff with dread, but she couldn’t lie still and wait for the worst to happen. She swung her legs to the floor and forced herself to stand. She listened. For now, the house was silent, but she wasn’t reassured. The intruder was probably getting his bearings after the last misstep.

She crept soundlessly to her door. The moment she opened it she might be spotted, depending on where the intruder was standing in the kitchen. Her best bet would be to crack the door just wide enough to slip out, then press her body against the wall. She might be harder to spot that way. It might buy her time to make the call.

The house remained quiet. For a moment she reconsidered. Had she dreamed the noise? If she got to the telephone and made the call successfully, would the police arrive to find Taylor embarrassed and she herself ashamed she’d made a fuss for nothing?

Then another subdued crash echoed from the kitchen, and she knew this was not her imagination. The knob felt slick under her perspiring hand, but she turned it somehow and pushed the door just wide enough to slide carefully through the crack. The night-light in the bathroom warmed the polished cherry floors but didn’t really light the hall. Jan thought if she could quickly slide past that thin puddle of light she wouldn’t even cast a shadow.

Another crash, and she knew she couldn’t wait for even one more breath. Blindly she slid along the wall, judging the distance to the telephone, judging it incorrectly, as it turned out. She nudged the table with her hip well before she thought she would get there. The phone fell out of the cradle to the table, then to the floor.

She might as well have set off a bomb.

With a soft cry Jan fell to her knees and searched for the phone in the darkness. But it wasn’t dark for long.

“Jan? Is that you?”

Jan jumped up. “Get in your room and lock your door!”

Taylor, whose room was on the other side of the kitchen, came out instead and turned on the kitchen light, nearly blinding Jan. Taylor sounded sleepy. “What’s going on?”

Jan searched wildly for the intruder. Taylor walked right past the spot where Jan had imagined him, her sleepy face screwed up in question.

“Are you okay?”

“There’s somebody in the house!”

Taylor looked around, then walked to the wall and flipped a switch, and the hallway, too, was suddenly bright with light.

“Were you dreaming?” she asked.

“No!” Jan took her arm. “I heard—”

Another crash from the kitchen. She stepped forward to shield Taylor, but nobody was there.

“Is that what you heard?” Taylor put her hand gently over Jan’s and left it there. “Listen, that’s our ice maker. It scared me at first, too, until I figured out what it was. Sometimes it’s perfectly quiet, and sometimes like tonight the darned thing sounds like Godzilla trampling Manhattan, but honestly, it’s harmless. I even had the repair guy out to look at it, but he said it’s this particular model and they’re all like that. There’s nothing we can do about it except replace it with something more expensive.”

“Ice maker?”

“It’s awful, I know. I’m sorry. I would have warned you, but I just didn’t think about it. Maybe I ought to disconnect it.” Taylor paused. “What were you going to do out here?”

“Call 911.”

“Glad you didn’t, although it would have made their night, I’m sure.”

Jan felt tears filling her eyes, then, despite her best efforts, slipping down her cheeks.

“Hey.” Taylor put her arm around her. “I’m so sorry. You must have been terrified. Did you think your ex had found you?”

Jan had never thought of Rex that way. Her ex. Not officially, of course. How did you divorce a man without revealing your whereabouts? But in every other way...?

She nodded, as much to her own question as to Taylor’s. “I was afraid.” She sniffed. “He might hurt you.”

“If you believed that, you were beyond brave to come out into the hall and try to make the call.”