The Escape Artist (3 page)

There’d been a message from Grace on his voice mail when he got home after dropping Susanna and Tyler off at the apartment. “I heard the verdict,” Grace said. “I hope you and Susanna are okay. I assume you’re over there tonight, so give me a call tomorrow. Love you.”

Linc shook his head at the memory of that message. He took a swallow of coffee and stared out at the lights. He could see nearly all the way to Susanna’s apartment complex on the eastern side of town from here. Was she asleep yet? And why didn’t she want him around tonight? It seemed crazy. She hated being alone. Okay, so tonight was different from any other night. Tonight was her last night as custodial parent of her son. But until now, she’d always included him in Tyler’s life. He’d gone through the childbirth classes with her. He’d been there for Tyler’s birth and held her hand during those first uncertain, unnerving days of Tyler’s life. Susanna had treated him as though he were Tyler’s father, and he’d slipped happily into that role. When it came right down to it, though, she apparently did not think of him that way at all. Maybe she blamed him for the custody verdict after all.

He’d talked with her lawyer about it at length. How much did his involvement with Susanna figure into whether or not she retained custody? Not much, Ann had assured him. “It just doesn’t help her case any.” That struck him as an understatement. Having a relationship with a man who’d served four years in prison for murder hardly made a woman an attractive choice for custody. Early on, he’d asked Ann if he should end his relationship with Susanna. It was too late, Ann had said. Everyone already knew about it, and it would only seem like a calculated move to the judge. Then Linc suggested that he and Susanna get married. He fully intended that to happen one of these days, anyway. And he had money. Jim and Peggy would no longer have the battle won on financial resources. But Ann thought that was a terrible idea.

Linc got up, stepping over Sam who was asleep at his feet, and walked into the kitchen. He pulled out a few of the drawers, hoping one of them might yield an old pack of cigarettes. He remembered cleaning the kitchen well when he quit, but still he couldn’t resist the temptation to see if maybe one lone, stale cigarette existed in an overlooked corner of a drawer. Nothing. He poured himself a second cup of coffee and carried it to his studio, where he pulled out the Leonard Cohen CD with “Suzanne” on it to add to the stack of CDs he’d be using to record his show the following day.

He was opening the jewel box to check the disc when his eyes fell on the framed photograph standing on the table next to the mixing board. It had been a gift from Susanna for his last birthday, an enlargement of a picture she’d had for years: the two of them as children on a swing in his back yard. Susanna was sitting on the swing and Linc was standing behind her, his feet on either side of her. She was just six years old in the picture, a slender child with long white braids. Linc, at twelve, had been wiry and tall, but equally as blond, and in this picture he looked like he might be the older brother of the little girl. Her protector. He had fancied himself that back then, although he had never quite known how to go about protecting her. He only knew that she needed it.

He and his mother had moved next door to the Wood family a few months before that picture had been taken, shortly after his father’s sudden death from a stroke.

His mother had tried to manage the family butcher shop in Philadelphia alone, but her heart had never been in it, and when her sister in Boulder pleaded with her to move to Colorado, she and Linc were easily swayed.

Linc suffered culture shock when he arrived in Boulder. “Fifteen square miles surrounded by reality,” people said of the town. It was filled with natural food stores, head shops, vegetarian restaurants, and counterculture politicians. But Linc quickly found friends who shared his love of music, and his mother found work in her sister’s small coffee shop, which catered to students at the university, and Boulder soon began to feel like home.

The day after they’d moved into their small house near the center of town, Linc’s mother was stacking dishes in the kitchen cabinets when he caught her staring out the window. He followed her gaze to the small, blond waif playing hopscotch by herself in the driveway next door.

“That little one looks like she’ll break in two if you breathe on her,” his mother said, and for weeks Linc couldn’t look at Susanna without picturing the seed ball of a dandelion, delicate and fragile.

Sometimes, if Susanna’s parents were going to be out at night, they’d ask Linc to baby-sit for her. That was how he came to know what life was like in the Wood household. Susanna’s father was mean. Downright cruel. Linc didn’t see it at first, because it was so unimaginable to him that a father could be that way. His own father had been soft-spoken and gentle. Linc had friends whose parents yelled at them or put them down, but this was different. There was always a threat in Paul Wood’s yelling.

“You behave while we’re out or else,” he’d say to Susanna as he and his wife walked out the door, or “you get those toys picked up or you know what will happen, don’t you?” Susanna would nod, and her father would come back with, “Say it. Say it out loud. What will happen if you don’t pick up your toys?” And he’d grip Susanna by the arm until she answered him in a voice as pale as her hair. “I’ll get the belt.” You couldn’t blame someone for having an aversion to conflict when every altercation in her growing up years had led to that sort of pain.

It wasn’t only Susanna who suffered her father’s abuse. Linc saw him kick a neighbor’s dog one day, and Susanna once told him she’d seen her father kill a squirrel. Then there was the incident with the kittens. But that was later, and Linc had worked hard to block it from his mind.

Susanna had liked Linc to read to her when he baby-sat, although she had very few books of her own. She liked to draw as well, and he thought she was pretty creative for such a little kid. Once she drew a picture of a lion, and he suggested they hang it on her refrigerator, but she said they couldn’t. Her parents wouldn’t allow it.

When Linc realized how bad Susanna’s situation was, he told his mother he didn’t think he could baby-sit for her anymore. Being in the Woods’ house made him feel sick, he said. His mother listened to him carefully and then said he needed to go over there more often, not less, even when he wasn’t being paid to baby-sit. “And we need to have her over here, too,” she’d added. “I’m afraid her parents have a serious drinking problem. She desperately needs good people in her life.”

He’d never really known anyone with a drinking problem, and so he’d never thought to notice it next door, but after his mother mentioned it, the smell of booze in the Woods’ house became inescapable. He understood then the reason that Susanna’s father could be almost docile one minute and brutish the next. And he knew why her mother couldn’t hold a job, why she was so often “sick.”

He never actually saw Susanna’s father hit her, but he’d seen the bruises on her legs. He’d seen them on her mother’s face and arms as well. And sometimes in the summer, when everyone had their windows open, he and his mother could hear the battle being waged in the Wood household. His mother called the police a few times, but Susanna’s father always managed to get out of whatever charge was levied against him, and her mother would never stick up for her. That tore Linc’s mother apart, and she’d once again talk about how much Susanna needed their help, their love. She started inviting Susanna to their house after school or for dinner. She’d buy the little girl books and let her hang her pictures all over their kitchen walls. Susanna was a different child, a happy, relaxed child, at his house. He liked thinking that his home had become her haven. So he grew up with a special feeling for his younger neighbor, a bit fatherly, a bit brotherly. At least he’d felt that way for a while.

When he formed his band during his second year of high school, Susanna would sit on the mildewy sofa in his garage and listen to them practice. That went on for years. She might do her homework or, when she got a little older, sketch one of the guys or the instruments or whatever caught her eye that day. She grew into an excellent artist. Whenever her school needed a poster designed for the hallway or for one of the offices, it was Susanna they called on. She won a couple of contests, and she was planning to enter a huge, statewide competition when her father was killed. She dropped out of school then, and her interest in art died when her father did.

Linc had had a string of girlfriends, all of whom were ridiculously jealous of his young next-door neighbor. He’d thought they were crazy at the time, but later he wondered if they’d known more of what was in his heart than he did. Back then, though, the age difference had been so great that it never would have occurred to him to think of Susanna as a potential girlfriend. He hadn’t even realized how startlingly beautiful she was until a new guy joined the band and was unable to take his eyes off the leggy, long-haired blond idly sketching in the corner of the garage. Linc began thinking about her differently after that, but his fantasies about her had a forbidden quality to them after having treated her like a sister for so long. He wondered if things might be different between them after she graduated from high school, when the difference in their ages would not seem so great.

But then prison happened to him. And Jim happened to her.

That little one looks like she’ll break in two if you breathe on her
. Linc still thought that was an accurate description of Susanna. Maybe that wasn’t fair of him. It was true that she would go out of her way to avoid conflict or dissension; she was quick to put her own needs aside if it meant avoiding a fight. Yet, she’d been strong enough to say no to Jim when he wanted her to have an abortion. Strong enough to give birth and to stay by Tyler’s side while he suffered through those horrific medical treatments. Yet he worried about how easily Susanna could be broken in two.

Sam suddenly appeared in the studio. He walked over to the chair and rested his head on Linc’s knee, and with a resigned sigh, Linc stood up. “You’re right, fella,” he said. “It’s time for bed.”

He walked toward his bedroom, wishing he could shake the bitterness that threatened to overwhelm him. It wasn’t fair. Susanna had been so determined to give Tyler the sort of safe, secure, and happy home she herself had never enjoyed. She was a good mother. The best. The first thing she’d felt truly confident about in a long time. Now she’d been told she wasn’t good enough.

In his bedroom, he reached for the phone, cradling the receiver in his hand for a moment. He wanted to call her again, but he feared disturbing her if she’d somehow managed to fall asleep.

On his night table, he saw the note she’d had him write earlier that evening. He saw no point in taping it to his bathroom mirror now that he’d already added the record to his list for the following day, but she had been so insistent about it. So he hung up the phone, read the note through once again, then walked into his bathroom to tape her words to the mirror.

IT WAS STILL DARK
when Susanna got Tyler dressed in the morning. The little boy babbled for a few minutes when she first lifted him out of the crib, then seemed to decide she’d made a mistake about the time and went back to sleep as she changed him from his pajamas to his overalls and tied his blue tennis shoes onto his feet.

The first bus didn’t leave for Denver until 5:50. She hadn’t slept all night, but she’d forced herself to lie still in bed anyway, planning her morning over and over in her head. Now, as she dressed Tyler and poured juice into his bottle and slipped the thousand dollars into the pocket of her jeans, she knew the routine as if she’d done it ten times already.

She slowed down only long enough to groan at her image in the mirror. She looked like an auburn-haired, pale-eyed scarecrow, and she quickly pulled brown mascara from her medicine cabinet and applied it to her eyelashes.

She’d cut her hair to chin length and given herself bangs. She would never find a job as a hair stylist, that much was certain. She’d put the lopped off hair and the empty dye bottle and its package into a garbage bag she planned to take with her. She didn’t want to leave any clues behind.

She glanced at Tyler’s crib as she finished dressing. It would have to be replaced, along with the high chair and—what else? The car seat and—don’t think about it. She couldn’t afford to get overwhelmed right now.

She gathered the duffel bag, the diaper bag, her purse, her son, and their lightweight jackets and, without a backward glance, left the apartment. In the foyer downstairs, she set up the stroller and lowered her sleeping son into it. Poor Ty. Just as well he was asleep, though.

She took a minute to put his jacket on him, then slipped into her own. It would be easier to wear them than to carry them. She shoved the diaper bag under the seat of the stroller and opened the foyer door.

It was cooler outside than she’d expected and she was glad she’d brought their jackets as she walked the four blocks to the nearest bus stop. There were five other people there, four men and a woman, all of them dressed for work. She should have thought of that. She stood out in her jeans and denim jacket, pushing a baby. People smiled at the two of them, and she smiled back and looked away, wishing she were invisible. The first leg of her trip would be entirely too traceable. But what choice did she have?

The bus arrived and she lifted Tyler into her arms, collapsing the stroller with one practiced movement. She was glad she had vetoed any thought of bringing more with her than she already had. Between the stroller, her two bulky bags, and the baby, she had more than enough to manage.

She was last to board, and the driver, a small, gray-haired man who looked too frail to be driving something as big as a bus, did a double take as she climbed up the steps with her cargo.

“Going to Denver?” he asked, as though she’d made an error.

“That’s right.” She smiled at him with such confidence that she was surprised to see her hand shake when she handed him the fare.