The Escape Artist (7 page)

She worked the crossword puzzle and read about most of the news in St. Louis to try to keep herself awake until eight o’clock, when she thought it would be late enough to call on the cars. She would get as much information as she could over the phone, because she wanted to be sure the car would do before she went to look at it. She would have to take a taxi to the car, and she didn’t want to have to call another taxi to cart her away again.

She fed Cody some oatmeal and a banana, then made her calls from a pay phone in the terminal at exactly eight o’clock. The Corolla sounded good, but it was red. A red car would stand out too much. She told the owner she would call back if she was still interested.

The Celica’s owner was a woman with a deep, rich voice. “It is a stupendous car,” she reassured Kim. “Only has seventy-five thousand miles on it. You’re going to love it.”

“What color is it?” Kim asked.

“Dark blue. Really pretty.”

“Do you think I could make a long trip in it?”

“Oh, sure. You’ve got to try it out. Come over and you’ll see what I mean.”

“All right.” Kim wrote down the woman’s address on the edge of the newspaper. She collected her bags from the locker, then walked outside and approached a waiting taxi. The driver was a burly black man who didn’t bother to hide his scowl when he saw the mishmash of baggage she was lugging around with her. He helped her load the stroller and duffel bag into the trunk before she settled into the back seat with Cody. No car seat, of course. That made her nervous.

The driver had to look up the address on a map. It was ten miles away, he told her.

“Would you mind taking back streets?” she said. “So you could go slowly? There’s no car seat for my baby, and—”

“Geesh!” The driver turned away from her with a shake of his head and she slunk down into the seat, Cody in her arms.

The taxi snaked through residential streets, and Cody whined and rocked against Kim like someone who’d been trapped inside too long and was about to give up hope of ever being free again. She held him tightly, pressing her lips to the soft hair on his head.

The cab finally pulled into the driveway of a small brick house on a quiet street. The driver helped her unload her belongings, piling them on the sidewalk, and Kim paid him before settling Cody in the stroller. Her duffel bag slung over her shoulder, she pushed the stroller up to the front door of the house.

She rang the bell, hoping she didn’t look as desperate as she felt. How could she appear to be anything else? She obviously had no car to take her away from this house. Either she had to buy the car or start walking.

A woman about her own age opened the door and smiled.

“Are you one of the people who called about the car?” she asked.

One of the people? It suddenly occurred to her that the car might already be sold and the thought made her tighten her grip on the stroller. “Yes,” she said. “Do you still have it?”

“Uh huh.” The woman reached behind her to pick up the keys from a table, then walked out the door and led Kim around the side of the house. “You’re the first one to come look at it,” she said.

The car sat at the end of the driveway next to a garage, and Kim understood what the woman had meant by the words “very well-kept.” At least on the outside, the car was in great shape. No dents. The finish on the dark blue paint still had a little shine to it. Through the windows, she could see that the upholstery was torn in a couple of places, but who cared? She could make covers for the seats.

“I’ve kept it in the garage,” the woman said. “It was my first car and I was determined to do everything right with it. Want to take it for a drive?”

“Yes, I’d like that.” She wondered if she should open the hood and act as though she knew what she was looking at, but she opted for driving it instead.

“I’ll come with you,” the woman said. “You can leave the stroller and your bags here.” She opened the side door of the garage, and Kim wheeled the stroller inside. She lifted Cody into her arms and carried him back to the car.

She hated driving without a car seat for Cody. That would have to be her first purchase.

“How would you feel about holding my son on your lap?” she asked the woman. “I don’t have a car seat with me.”

“Love to.” The woman smiled as she took Cody on her lap, and for once Kim was grateful her child was so easygoing with strangers.

“Where’s your car?” the woman asked as Kim carefully backed out of the driveway.

“My cousin dropped me off,” Kim said. “She’s running some errands and then—” Then what? “I’ll call her if I decide not to take the car, and she’ll come get me. I’ve got the plates from my old car, though, in case I decide to buy this one.”

This seemed to satisfy the woman. She pointed out a route for Kim to take around the neighborhood. The car drove well, at least as well as her car back in Boulder. She knew she should see how it handled on the highway, but she didn’t want to go that fast with Cody sitting untethered on the woman’s lap.

“I’d like to buy it,” she said, as she pulled back into the driveway.

“Great! It’s sixteen-fifty, firm.”

“That’s fine.” Kim didn’t want to haggle with her. She stepped out of the car, then got her wallet from her duffel bag and counted out sixteen hundred-dollar bills and a fifty. Her hands were shaking, not because she was handing over so much of her precious money, but because she knew she must seem like a suspicious sort of character to the car’s owner. Here she’d shown up early in the morning, alone, with luggage and a baby in tow. What if her face and Cody’s had been splashed across the country on TV? Would a mother taking her own child merit that sort of attention?

But the woman seemed concerned only with selling her car. She pulled the certificate of title from the glove compartment, took a pen from her shirt pocket, and asked Kim for her address.

Kim had thought this through, but for a moment her mind went blank. She rattled off a fictitious St. Louis address, and was relieved when the woman offered the first three numbers of the zip code. Kim picked a couple of random numbers to finish the code, and the woman jotted them down on the form without batting an eye. Then she helped Kim replace the license plates on the Celica with the stolen ones.

When they had finished, Kim stood up from the bumper, her knees creaking. “Where’s the nearest store where I could buy a car seat?” she asked, then added, “Not expensive.”

“There’s a K-Mart close by. Just turn here, then go about a mile. It’s on your left.”

She thanked the woman, then got back into the car—
her
car—and pulled out of the driveway.

At the K-Mart and the grocery store next to it, she bought more formula, juice, bananas, baby food, animal crackers, and a car seat. Before even setting up the car seat, though, she gave Cody his bottle. She sat with him in the back seat of the car, rocking him and talking to him, apologizing for uprooting him. He seemed soothed by the food and her words and was soon sound asleep. She buckled him into the car seat, then looked up at the sky. The sun was to her left, so that had to be east. Pulling out of the parking lot, she headed in that direction.

She stopped four times that first day on the road. She was not in a rush. There was nowhere she had to be. She and Cody enjoyed a long, welcome nap, parked in the shade in a church parking lot. They stopped to eat at a picnic table and to play in a playground. And each time she got back in the car, she headed east. She didn’t need a map. Every intersection she came to, she took the road heading away from Colorado. She would go as far from Boulder as the highway could take her.

At six o’clock, she decided to stop for the night. They were outside of Henderson, Kentucky, and she found a motel along the road. There was a restaurant next door, and after she’d registered and dumped her things in the room, she walked over to the restaurant with Cody in his stroller.

The hostess sat them next to a window and brought over a high chair. “What’s his name?” she asked, as Kim lowered Cody into the chair.

“Cody,” she said, and then added, “and I’m Kim.” She wanted to get used to saying both their names out loud.

“He’s adorable.” The hostess handed Kim a menu and told her a waitress would be right over.

The waitress, a young blond woman with short curly hair, arrived at the table a few minutes later. She all but ignored Kim as she talked to Cody. “Hi, there, punkin’,” she said. “What can I get for you tonight?”

Kim ordered pasta to share with Cody and was pulling a bib from her purse when two policemen walked past her table. Her hand froze in mid-air. The two men sat down in a booth directly across the aisle from her. The youngest of the two was facing her and he caught her eye. She quickly looked away. She could barely get the bib tied around Cody’s neck, her hands were shaking so hard.

There was a little container of crayons on the table and the placemat was a line drawing of a clown. She put the placemat on the table in front of Cody and filled in the drawing, while he tried to stick the crayons in his mouth. She kept her concentration on her son, but she was keenly aware of the two men across the aisle.

The waitress delivered her spaghetti, with an extra plate for Cody, and Kim began cutting his portion into short pieces.

“So where are you two from?” the waitress asked.

Kim wondered if the policemen had heard the question. The young officer caught her eye again, and she looked up at the waitress.

“Oh, we’ve been visiting my mother in Owensboro.” She remembered seeing a sign for Owensboro on the highway. “But we want to get home to Daddy in St. Louis by tomorrow because it’s his birthday. We still have to get him a present, right Cody?” She was glad that most of what she said to her son went right over his head. She could not imagine living this dishonest sort of life with an older child who would have to be party to the deception.

“What are you getting him?” the waitress asked.

It took Kim a minute to understand the question. “Oh! For my husband, you mean?”

The waitress nodded with a smile.

“I still don’t have any idea, would you believe?” Kim said.

“Well, what does he like?” The waitress seemed to think that helping her pick a gift was part of her job description. “Is he into sports?”

“Oh.” She thought of Jim. Watching back to back football games was his idea of heaven. On the other hand, Linc thought dog-walking was a sport. “No, he’s not really a sports fan. I thought we’d get him some CDs. He loves music.”

“Good idea. There’s a great record store in Henderson. Doesn’t open till ten tomorrow, though. You’ll probably be on your way by then, huh?”

“Right,” Kim said. “We’ll find something, thanks.”

“No problem.”

She watched the waitress walk away. If the cops asked her about the lady and the baby, the waitress would tell them she was on her way home to St. Louis to celebrate her husband’s birthday, and the cops would think to themselves, well she only looks a little like that woman and baby everyone’s looking for.

Paranoid, she told herself.
People are not hanging on your every word
.

Back in the hotel room, she got her first good look at herself since leaving Boulder. No one would recognize her. She barely recognized herself. Except for the road-weary eyes and the unkempt hair, she looked good. Copper glow was a pretty shade. Too pretty, perhaps. She should have picked a mousier color that would let her fade into the woodwork. No wonder that young cop had been looking at her. She didn’t look half bad.

The room had a king-sized bed, and she lay down next to her exhausted son.

She wished she’d thought to pack a few of his favorite books. She sang him a couple of songs instead, “Froggie Went a-Courtin’” and “The Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly,” songs Linc liked to sing to him. Then she sang “The Name Game,” using Cody as the name. “Cody, Cody, Fo Fody…” until the little boy could barely stop giggling. She wanted him to get used to his new name. She needed to get used to it herself.

Toward the end of her pregnancy, she and Linc had often sat up late into the night with the baby name book. They’d usually be at his house, with its spacious rooms and its unobstructed view of Boulder. She’d been feeling stronger about herself then, able to talk about Jim with anger rather than self-recrimination. She’d felt buoyed up by Linc’s strength and caring, two things she had known nearly all her life. They hadn’t started sleeping together yet; that didn’t begin until Cody was a few months old, even though once they started it seemed as if they had always been lovers. But their friendship had been deep and abiding, nonetheless.

Linc had loved the name Cody. He’d leave little slips of paper around his house and hers, “Cody Miller” written on them so she could see how good it looked. But she hadn’t been able to get the name Tyler out of her head. Her son was nearly six months old when she finally realized why she’d given him that name: Jim had once said he liked it. If they ever had a male child, he’d said, he would like to name him Tyler.

“Still trying to please Jim,” Linc admonished her.

Kim stared at the ceiling above her hotel room bed. She did not want to think about Linc. Imagining how he’d felt when he discovered her disappearance this morning was the only thing that could destroy her resolve right now. She could not allow that to happen.

Cody was sound asleep, his beloved monkey tight in his arms, and Kim turned on the television, keeping the volume low. David Letterman was on, and his guest was a musician who looked undeniably like Linc. Kim held the remote in the air between herself and the TV, trying to cover part of the man’s face to see which features most resembled Linc’s. The blue eyes, definitely. Not the eyebrows, though. The hair, of course, was totally wrong.

This was torture. Why was she doing this to herself? She turned off the TV and closed her eyes.

She would never be able to touch him again. Never make love to him, or hold him all night long. Never pick up the phone to hear his voice on the other end, joking with her, making her laugh. Telling her he loved her.

She would be able to listen to him, though. Sunday night. On the radio. At least she could still have that much of him.