The Escape Artist (19 page)

She remembered Jessie’s affection toward Cody. “She seems like she’s cut out to be a mother.”

Adam opened his mouth as though he were about to say something but then changed his mind.

“What happened with her boyfriend?” Kim asked. “Noel, is it?”

“Nice guy, but he drinks too much,” Adam said.

“Oh.” Kim nodded. “Say no more.”

Adam waved and turned to leave, and Kim carried their plates and mugs upstairs, anxious to return to her sketchbook.

SHE PUT CODY TO
bed at quarter to eight that night, turned on the radio on the shelf behind her bed, and crawled under the covers to wait.

Linc was her one source of pain, and she’d made a decision this week. She would not allow herself to think of him except on Sunday nights from eight to ten. Otherwise, those thoughts would take over her life. She had to remind herself that she had her son; that was the most important thing. And she had a few friends.

Even Lucy was not so bad. Having Lucy next door would be a bit like having a mother to turn to for advice. She certainly had never had that when she was growing up, although Linc’s mother had filled that role for a long time. She’d actually lived with Geri after her own mother kicked her out of the house. Geri had gotten her a job waitressing at the coffee shop where she worked, and on weekends the two of them would visit Linc in prison. Linc and Geri became her family. She’d grieved when Geri died. Now Linc was dead to her, too.

Immediately after Simon and Garfunkel sang “Song for the Asking,” Linc played a recording of Pete Seeger singing “Froggie Went a-Courtin’,” and Kim knew that was his birthday present to Cody. Or rather, to Tyler. Linc sang that song to him often. She thought of waking Cody up to hear it, but what could she say to him? “Listen, Cody, Linc’s playing one of your favorite songs!” She never mentioned Linc to Cody anymore. It could only confuse him. So she gave up on that idea, got comfortable under the covers, and figured she would be the first person in the universe to listen to “Froggie Went a-Courtin’” with tears in her eyes.

She waited to hear if Linc would say anything after “Froggie” ended, but he moved right on to another Seeger song, and her mind began to drift.

Linc had moved in with his mother when he got out of prison, and Kim—Susanna—had been overjoyed by his long-awaited freedom. She’d always blamed herself for his incarceration. If it weren’t for her, he never would have been at her house that night her father went crazy. He would not even have known where her father kept his gun.

Susanna had married Jim the summer before Linc’s release from prison, and she’d wanted Linc and Jim to get to know one another. She had visions of the three of them doing things together. Linc would need friends, she told Jim. He’d need family. But Jim was not only cool to the idea, he was dead set against it.

“I don’t want an ex-con as my best buddy,” he told her. “I’m going for a law degree. I need to keep clean.”

There was no way she could cut off her own long-standing friendship with her former neighbor, though, and she asked Jim if he would mind her seeing Linc every once in awhile. She could visit him at Geri’s, she suggested, or go out to dinner with him some night when Jim had class. Jim forbade it, flat out, and she was too afraid of fighting with him to try to negotiate a compromise. So she saw Linc on the sly. She nurtured that old friendship. She encouraged Linc when he was looking for a job in radio, listened to the trials and tribulations of his relationships with other women, and called him when she was troubled about something and Jim was not around to listen. It had been a mistake, though, trying to keep that relationship a secret from Jim, and when Jim finally realized she was seeing Linc, he assumed there was more between them than friendship. “Your father was right!” he’d yelled at her one night, after spotting them together in a restaurant. “You’ve probably been fucking him since you were fifteen!”

She’d tried to reassure him that her relationship with Linc was as pure and platonic as that of a brother and sister. Linc even called Jim to talk to him about it, but Jim could not be reasoned with. She knew later that reason was not what Jim was after. He was looking for an excuse to leave their marriage.

The beginning of the end came when she attended a bank conference in Denver. She checked into the hotel on a Friday evening, locked herself in her room, and pulled out a home pregnancy test she’d bought earlier that day. Her period was ten days late, and she was hopeful and excited. She’d said nothing to Jim about it, in case she was wrong, but she was not surprised when the test bore out her suspicions.

She thought of calling Jim, but decided against it. She wanted to celebrate with him by her side, not alone in a hotel room an hour from home. Besides, if it hadn’t been for the conference, this weekend would have been their first together in their new house. She could zip home, spend the night with her husband, and return to Denver before the meetings began in the morning. Within a few minutes of making that decision, she was on the road back to Boulder.

There was a strange car in their driveway when she pulled up to the new house in Wonderland. She figured Jim was showing the house to one of his friends and hoped she’d be able to get him alone long enough to tell him her news.

When she walked in the front door, the living room lights were dim, and soft music played on the stereo. She called out Jim’s name, but there was no response, and she started up the stairs to their bedroom.

When she opened the bedroom door, she was greeted with gasps of surprise and a flurry of sheets being drawn up, covering flesh. Susanna stared at her husband and the woman in her bed, unable to speak. They seemed equally frozen, Peggy watching her from beneath her tousled dark hair, Jim open-mouthed in shock.

She was finally able to step out of the room and close the door. Walking numbly down the stairs, she wondered how she had failed him. She had not been good enough for him. Not pretty enough or smart enough. The image of that beautiful woman in bed with Jim would never leave her mind.

She had to escape, from the scene upstairs as well as from the pain in her heart. She drove to Linc’s house, where he held her and let her cry, let her curse. What he wouldn’t let her do was blame or belittle herself.

“Jim’s done enough of that,” Linc said. “You don’t need to do it to yourself.”

Jim came over the following day—he’d had no problem figuring out where she’d gone. He explained that he wanted to end their marriage, that he was sorry, he hadn’t wanted her to find out that way. He’d buy her out of the house, he said, but it would take him a few years to pay her off. He went on and on about financial details while she pretended to listen.

When he finally paused for breath, she told him about the pregnancy and he reacted with anger. She’d stopped the pill too soon, he said. Yes, he’d said they could start a family when he was done with law school, but he hadn’t meant right away. She would have to have an abortion.

He began badgering her about it, calling her several times a day at Linc’s to try to persuade her, and she slipped deeper and deeper into a pit of despair. She couldn’t go to work, couldn’t even get out of bed in the morning. Permanent escape began to sound like a wonderful idea, but when she confided that thought to Linc, he called Valerie, who arranged to have her admitted to a psychiatric ward. She was bitter about that for a few days, but as she began to feel better, she became grateful for their intervention.

While in the hospital, she decided she couldn’t have an abortion. She had no family. Her father was dead, her mother was as good as dead, and she no longer had a husband. She wanted her child above all else, and it was concern for her baby that finally got her well. She would have to be strong and healthy to take care of a child on her own.

Linc told her that if Jim wouldn’t be there for her, he would be, and he meant it. He called Jim and told him to stop harassing her about an abortion. He went to her doctor’s appointments with her. He was there for her first sonogram, and he never missed any of the childbirth classes. The woman he’d been dating broke up with him because of his “obsession” with Susanna and the baby, but he didn’t seem to care.

He was with her every minute of her labor, and he was there during those frantic moments in the delivery room when it became obvious that something was terribly wrong. But it was when she saw Linc weeping over her baby’s tiny, gray body that, in her mind, he became Tyler’s father. Jim was nothing to her after that. Less than nothing. As though they shared her feelings, everyone at the hospital treated Linc as if he were indeed Tyler’s father. The nurses. The social worker. After all, Jim was nowhere to be found.

“He was anxious to be there,” Peggy had said on the witness stand, “but he stayed away out of consideration for Susanna. He knew what a difficult time that was for her and didn’t want to make things harder for her.”

Tyler was four months old when she and Linc became lovers. She’d been sleeping in his guest room for over a year by then, and one night he simply came into her room, woke her up, took her by the hand, and walked her back to his own bedroom. And there he made love to her, and it felt so rational, so simply
right
, that she wondered why they had put it off for so long. The commitment between them had been forged a long, long time ago, and they both knew it.

“Pete Seeger created this next song when he set a biblical passage to music.” Linc’s slow, soft radio voice floated in the air behind Kim’s head, “It’s sung here by the Byrds.”

There was a lump in Kim’s throat as the music started for “Turn, Turn, Turn.” Linc’s voice had sounded so close. She could shut her eyes and pretend he was lying next to her on the bed. Eyes closed, she reached out and touched the other pillow, imagining that she was stroking Linc’s cheek with her fingers, touching his lips. She rolled away from the pillow with a sense of defeat. How could she go on this way, living for Sunday nights, when she could lie in the darkness, listening to Linc’s voice, imagining she was with him? And all the while she would know that the morning would reveal the truth: her lover would be gone, leaving in his place only the impersonal hum of a stranger’s voice on the radio.

WHAT DO YOU WANT
on your sub?” Peggy asked her brother. She was talking to Ron from the phone in her Legal Aid office.

“The works,” Ron said. “Except hold the raw onions. I still have some patients to see today.”

“All right. I’ll be over in a little while.” She hung up the phone and picked up the one remaining chart on her desk before walking down the hall toward the waiting room. She would see her last client for the day, Bonnie Higgins, the woman whose husband wanted a divorce, then grab a couple of subs and drive to Ron’s office to have lunch with him. There were a few things she wanted to talk to her brother about.

Bonnie stood up as soon as she saw Peggy at the door of the waiting room. Once again, she looked as though she’d been doing more than her share of crying.

“Everything’s changed,” she said as she followed Peggy back to her office.

“For better or worse?” Peggy asked, although the answer was obvious.

“A thousand times worse.” Bonnie sat down in front of Peggy’s desk and pulled a tissue from her purse. “I found out he’s been having an affair,” she said, blowing her nose.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Peggy said, although she was not surprised.

“It’s been going on for years.” Bonnie still looked stunned by the news. “It’s his secretary. He’s not even original. I’ve talked to that woman on the phone a million times a week. She’s one of those…trashy looking women, you know what I mean? Tight clothes, too much makeup. I never thought he’d be interested in someone like that.”

“Do you have evidence?” Peggy started making notes on a legal pad. “How did you find out?”

“She called me and told me all about it. She asked me to please let him go. ‘Don’t make it so hard on him,’ she said. Is that enough evidence for you?”

“Has he denied it?”

“No. He told me everything. He’s feeling guilty.”

“Okay.” Peggy leaned forward. “This changes your case, but only slightly. It gives us something to use against him if he gives us a hard time, and we’d better get to work immediately on a property settlement. We need to take advantage of his guilt.”

She spent another forty-five minutes with Bonnie, then left the Legal Aid office and headed for the sub shop.

Ron was waiting for her in his sunny office when she arrived.

“Hi, sis.” He kissed her cheek and sat down behind his desk.

She took a seat herself and handed him his sub and a can of root beer.

“How are you doing?” Ron popped the top on his soda and took a sip.

“All right.” She unwrapped her sandwich slowly. “This whole thing with Tyler is dragging on way too long, though.”

“How long’s it been now?” Ron asked. “Three weeks?”

“Three and a half. And babies change so quickly.” She peered uninterestedly inside her turkey sub. She really wasn’t hungry. “I worry that Tyler won’t look like his picture very much longer. His birthday was two days ago, you know. He’s a year old now.”

Tyler’s birthday had been a sad day for her, made even sadder by the fact that Jim did not remember the date until she reminded him of it at dinner. Even then, Jim had looked perplexed. “His birthday is October eighth?” he’d asked. “I guess I never knew that.”

“A year already, huh?” Ron said. “Doesn’t seem that long ago that I did his surgery.”

“I was thinking,” Peggy said. “We should probably send some information about Tyler to general practitioners around the country, in addition to the cardiologists. You said yourself that he wouldn’t need to be seen regularly by a cardiologist now. But Susanna will have to take him to a doctor at some point.”

Ron had already helped Bill Anderson put together a medical report on Tyler, which they’d sent to hospitals and pediatric cardiologists around the country. But that no longer seemed like enough to Peggy.

Ron sighed. “I’m not going to write another report, Peggy. You can use the one I already wrote if you think it’s so important.”