The Escape Artist (34 page)

“Don’t freak out,” she said. “I just want to draw all of you. Let me, please?”

He was uncertain how to react. “Not a good idea,” he said.

She looked disappointed. “I’m so frustrated,” she said. “I mean, when have you ever seen figure drawings of people wearing boxer shorts?”

She had a point. He stood up and dropped his shorts before he had a chance to change his mind. If she wondered why his penis didn’t look like those flaccid organs in her figure drawing book, she didn’t say.

She returned to her seat and started drawing again, a small crease of concentration between her eyebrows, and he wondered how any living, breathing man could tolerate being scrutinized that way without going out of his mind.

She had not been drawing long when she looked up from her pad. There was a small smile on her lips, and she seemed to be struggling to keep it in check.

“I think I want you to make love to me,” she said, and he knew her serious artist routine was not all it was cracked up to be. He could see his own longing mirrored in the pale blue of her eyes.

But he shook his head. “You’re too young,” he said. “I could get arrested for statutory rape.”

She set the sketch pad on her desk and moved over to the bed. She kept her eyes on his as she pulled her T-shirt over her head, and without a moment’s hesitation, she unfastened her bra. Her breasts were small, high, and pink nippled, and her long hair brushed over them, caught on them, hid them and exposed them and drove him crazy as she leaned toward him.

He remembered the conversation he’d had with her a few short weeks earlier about birth control. All those paternal-type warnings he’d issued. And now he was going to make love to her without any protection at all. There was no way he could stop himself. Her lips were on his; she lifted his hands to her breasts. He’d never before thought of her as aggressive, yet there was no other word to describe her behavior. He guessed she’d seen the uncertainty in his eyes and wasn’t about to let it get in her way.

She was a virgin. She had not been lying about that. She was so tight and small around his fingers that he couldn’t imagine how he would get inside her. He could tell that it hurt her when he tried, but still she drew him in.

“I love you,” she said, and he offered the words back to her without hesitation, and with all his heart.

LINC RESTED HIS HANDS
on Cody’s crib as he stared out the window. Dawn light was beginning to filter into the room, and he turned to look at Susanna, still asleep beneath the multicolored bedspread. He would not remind her of that long ago night. He knew she still held the memory inside her, and yet they never spoke of it, never even acknowledged that it had happened. When he told Peggy that he and Susanna hadn’t been lovers until after Tyler was born, he nearly believed it. He and Susanna had turned their backs on that memory because of what happened afterward. They could not recall one incident without the other.

They were so lost in each other that night that they didn’t hear Susanna’s father come home. Not until he began pounding on her bedroom door did they realize he was there. Linc and Susanna flew out of the bed and began pulling on their clothes.

Susanna was reaching for one of her shoes when she suddenly froze.

“Oh my God,” she said. She was staring at the keyhole and she quickly leaped out of its range. “He saw us!” she whispered, and Linc felt as though he had rocks where his stomach should have been.

“Open this damn door!” her father snarled.

White-faced, Susanna began trying to open the window, but it was stubborn and she could only lift it two or three inches.

“What are you doing?” Linc asked her.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she said. “He’ll kill us.”

For a moment, he thought she was right. Escape seemed like the only solution. But he knew better. Maybe they could escape for a few hours or a day, but eventually they would have to face Susanna’s father and his wrath.

Linc grabbed her hands. “You can’t always run away from your problems, Susanna,” he said. He had to speak loudly so she could hear him over the racket her father was making at the door. “You’ll only be putting off the inevitable. We have to face him. I’ll tell him it was my fault, that I coerced you. You’re only sixteen. I should have known better.”

She looked unconvinced. There was terror in her eyes. She looked like a trapped animal, frightened for her life.

“I won’t let him hurt you,” he promised.

He stepped away from her and put his head close to the door. “I’m opening the door, Mr. Wood,” he said. “Stop pounding.”

There was sudden silence from the other side of the door, giving Linc a false sense of safety. He reached for the key and slipped it into the lock, thinking about what he would say when he was face to face with Paul Wood. He could hardly deny what had occurred. But he didn’t have a chance to speak before Susanna’s father burst into the room. He grabbed his daughter by the hair, and yanked her back and forth like a rag doll, cursing at her, spitting his foul, whiskey breath into the air. Susanna screamed with pain.

“Who brought you up to be a whore?” her father boomed at her. “Who raised you to be a slut?”

“Leave her alone!” Linc lunged at him, and Susanna’s father let go of her to take a punch at him. Paul Wood was very drunk though, and his fists were easy to dodge.

“You fucking son of a bitch!” Susanna’s father managed to land a punch on Linc’s shoulder. “How long you been screwing my daughter? I’m going to break your skull!” He raised his fist to strike again, but then suddenly spotted the open sketchbook on Susanna’s desk. “What the hell’s this?”

Susanna tried to grab the sketchbook, but her father was too fast for her.

“Is this the kind of drawing you’ve been doing?” He pulled out the top sketch of Linc and tore it in half. But there were plenty more below that one, and he started shredding them in a fury. “Sixteen years old and a whore already.” He poked one finger in the air toward Linc. “You’re going to jail, boy,” he said. “And your girlfriend there’s going to reform school, if I decide to let her live.”

Linc spotted the other sketch books on Susanna’s desk. Her Garage Band series was in them, and he didn’t know whether to try to grab them or not. Maybe it would be better not to draw attention to them. Just then, he heard footsteps in the hall.

“What the hell’s going on in here?” Susanna’s mother appeared at the door to the bedroom. She was every bit as drunk as her husband, if not more so. “Paul! What are you doing to her pictures?” She reached for the sketchbook in his hands. “You shouldn’t—”

Paul Wood knocked his wife off her feet with one sweep of his arm and she landed like an old, limp washrag against the radiator. Her eyes were closed, her head on the floor, and Linc was not certain she was still alive. Nor did he care.

He pulled Susanna behind him, trying to get her out of harm’s way. She was trembling with fear, but when her father reached for one of the band pictures on the wall, she darted out from Linc’s protection.

“Please, Daddy, please not those!”

Her father yanked her away from the wall with another jerk of her hair. In an instant the picture was down and torn, and he was on to the next.

“They’re for her competition!” Linc grabbed the much bigger man by the shoulder, but although he was drunk and his aim was lousy, Paul Wood was strong as an ox and numbed by booze. He seemed to feel no pain.

Susanna frantically tried to pull the other drawings from the wall in an effort to save them, but her father tore them from her arms and held them in front of her eyes as he shredded them. Helpless tears ran down Susanna’s cheeks. She looked as if she were watching her children drown. She clawed at her father’s hands, but nothing could stop the big man’s destruction. When he’d finished with the drawings on the wall, he reached for her other sketch books, and that’s when Susanna ducked beneath his arm and ran out of the room.

Linc was glad to see her go. He almost called after her, “Run! You were right. Just run!” But he was too busy dodging her father’s wild punches to say a word.

In a few seconds, though, Susanna was back. She stood in the doorway to her bedroom, red-faced.

“Dad!” she called out. “Get away from Linc or I’ll shoot!”

Only then did Linc see the gun she had in her hands. She held it out in front of her, and it bounced and shivered in her trembling grasp.

Paul Wood looked surprised for only a second before lunging at his daughter.

“Gimme that!” He plowed into her, catching her in the rib cage with his shoulder, and the gun flew from her hands across the room. In an instant, Linc had grabbed it. Before he had a moment to think, he aimed it at her father’s back and pulled the trigger.

The next few minutes seemed to happen in slow motion. Paul Wood flung his arms out to his sides. His blood sprayed across his daughter’s white T-shirt, and as he started to fall toward her, Susanna took one small, calculated step to the side to let him land hard on the floor, face first.

Susanna stared at Linc across the broad expanse of her father’s body. Blood was pooling on the floor around her bare feet, and with his stomach churning, Linc realized the bullet must have pierced the man’s heart. He felt his own blood drain from his face, and he sat down on the edge of Susanna’s bed, the gun lying flat on his palms.

He looked at Susanna, and when he spoke, he was surprised by the calmness in his voice. “It happened like this,” he said. “Your father came home drunk. He started beating you and your mother up, for no good reason. I knew where he kept his gun…in his night table, right?” He remembered her telling him about the time she saw her father kill the squirrel.

Susanna nodded.

“I got the gun. He threw your mother down and then went for you, and that’s when I killed him. I killed him to stop him from hurting you and your mother.”

“Yes,” Susanna agreed. “That’s what happened.” She glanced at the shreds of paper at Linc’s bare feet. There was no expression whatsoever on her face. “What about the drawings?” she asked.

Linc got slowly to his feet and moved around the room, picking up the scraps of paper. He opened the bottom drawer of her desk and put the paper into one of the file folders. There would be no evidence of his nudity; there was no witness to their lovemaking. He and Susanna were neighbors. Friends. Nothing more.

His knees shook, and he sat down on the bed again. “Why was I over here?” he asked her.

She looked at the ceiling. “Maybe you wanted to tell me something,” she said.

“Right. I stopped over to let you know that the band would be practicing tomorrow if you wanted to work on your sketches. That’s when your father showed up.”

She let out a small cry and pressed her fist to her mouth. “All my work,” she said.

He could only imagine the depth of that loss. He had never worked as hard on anything as she had on her drawings. He wanted to go to her, hold her, but numbness had settled over him like a sickness. It was only later that he would feel the irony of that moment. Her father lay dead at her feet, her mother lay unconscious on the other side of the room, and the loss she felt was limited to her drawings.

“We need to call the police,” he said.

She nodded, her face once again expressionless. She turned, her feet leaving bloody footprints behind her as she walked down the hall toward the kitchen. And he did not move from his seat on the bed until the police came to take him away.

A PALE SUN CAST
its soft glow on the buildings of Philadelphia, and Linc suddenly became aware of the chill in the air. He turned and went back to the bed. Susanna’s body radiated warmth under the covers, and he lay close to her.

Susanna. He’d thought he’d be able to bring her back with him. Persuade her, somehow. But he could see that wasn’t going to happen. She was settled, she’d said. She was doing okay. He wanted that for her. Wanted her to be happy, to be safe. He was selfish to want her to be happy only with him. Today she would leave him, again. And maybe this morning would be the last morning he’d be able to look at her, feel her close to him. Or maybe he would be able to see her again sometime, and then perhaps that would be the last time. Or the time after that.

He rolled onto his back, wide awake and filled with frustration. He couldn’t live this way. If she was getting settled in her life without him, he would have to get settled in his. He had never thought that he loved her more than she loved him, but right now he wondered. At least until she opened her eyes and gave him a startled smile at finding him next to her. She pulled him closer then, and began to cry.

“Can we stay here longer?” she asked. “Do you have to go back today? Can we stay a few more nights? Please?”

“I have to go back,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders. He feared being gone too long. They’d suspect he was with her, maybe try to look for him. Much as he wanted her back, he would not lead them to her.

Cody began talking to himself, that little soliloquy that could go on for minutes or half an hour. It made Linc smile to hear it again. It felt good to smile after the torturous thoughts of the last half hour.

“Can I ask you about something?” Susanna wiped the back of her hand across her eyes. “Your advice?”

“Of course.”

“Well, something weird happened.” She smoothed her hand over his chest. Her voice was still thick. “I bought a computer,” she said. “I bought it from a store, but it had been used by someone before me, so I got a really good price on it. When I got it home, I discovered that the person who owned it before me had left a file on it. I called the store to tell them, but they didn’t seem to care. So I made a copy of the information in the file and then erased it from the hard drive. And forgot about it. Then a few weeks later, I heard about a bombing at a law firm in…the town where I’m living. I recognized the name as being in the file. I looked at the file again. It was a list of “—she lifted the blankets and started to get up—”here, I’ll show you.”

He watched her walk across the room to the table. Her body looked a little like a stranger’s from the back. She was thinner, and the long pale hair was missing. But when she turned around, the shape of her breasts, the curve of her waist, was completely familiar, and he lifted the blankets to hurry her back to bed.