Читать книгу No River Too Wide - Emilie Richards - Страница 9

Chapter 2

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

I was a happy child. My father worked in a factory, and my mother was a dressmaker who sewed and made alterations in a corner of the bedroom she shared with my father. She was always home when I returned from school. There were homemade cookies waiting and open arms for my friends.

Most of the money Mama made was turned over to my father, who decided how to spend it, but her wishes were always taken into account. Daddy was a kind man, generous in every way, who found joy in providing for his family and keeping us safe from harm. When our front door was closed at night, love, not fear, was locked inside with us.

Every Sunday we attended a church where God’s mercy was preached from the pulpit. Every Monday I walked through a neighborhood of small, tidy houses to a school where I was expected to do my best. While neither of my parents had gone to college, they saved what money they could to guarantee I did. They wanted to give me the best.

Had they lived, my life would have been different, but in my third year of college, as they were on their way to visit me, a car traveling in the other direction crossed the interstate median directly in their path. The cars exploded on contact, ending a midday drinking binge for the driver and the lives of both my parents.

The accident left me without a compass. My sheltered background left me with little insight into people who were not decent and well-meaning. My parents left me with a yearning for what I had lost, but sadly they left me when I was too young to understand the difference between a marriage based on respect and one based on fear.

By the time nine months had passed, I had learned.

One month after their deaths, the Abuser came into my life.

* * *

Rex had done this before.

At two a.m., as she tossed underwear and socks into a canvas backpack, Janine Stoddard reminded herself this was not the first time her husband had stayed away all night without warning her ahead of time. Keeping her off guard was part of a strategy to keep her from leaving him. Sometimes, by piecing together hints in later conversations, she’d even concluded that Rex had stayed close to the house the whole time to see what she would do in his absence.

It wasn’t enough that she obeyed every whim when he was at home. He wanted to be sure she followed his orders when he wasn’t, too.

While their son, Buddy, was still alive, Rex had never needed to worry. At the first sign of his mother’s defection, Buddy would have called his father. Of course, Rex’s faith in Buddy had never been put to the test. Janine had loved her son too much to put that kind of pressure on him.

She couldn’t think about Buddy. Not now.

It was possible Rex was observing her right this minute. He might be in his car in a vacationing neighbor’s driveway, eyes trained on the road to see if Janine tried to slip away. He might even be camping in the woods behind their house, with binoculars and night-vision goggles. Rex considered himself something of a survivalist, and while he was too much of a loner to drill on weekends or join a militia, he collected survival gear the way some men collected fishing lures or model airplanes. He kept all his equipment under lock and key in the same room where he kept an arsenal that included an AK-47 and an assortment of Rugers and Remingtons.

He liked to tell her exactly what each gun could do. Sometimes he gave his lectures with the gun pointed directly at her.

For a moment she was frozen in place, one hand raised toward the dresser, as she thought about those guns. Was she insane? Did she really believe that after all these years she might be able to pull this off? That Rex had really been fooled by her eager attempts to please him, by her waning interest in anything that wasn’t centered on his needs, by her reluctance to go out in public without him?

For months now she had carefully waged a campaign to make her husband think his efforts to turn her into one of the walking dead had succeeded at last, that there was nothing left inside her except a desire to please him. The masquerade had given her hope and a reason to live. Having a plan, even a sliver of one, had slowly reinfused her with energy and purpose. As she had pretended to sink lower and lower, she had watched his reaction and gauged his state of mind.

Rex had believed her. She was almost certain. After all, not to believe would have been an admission that twenty-five years of his best efforts to subdue her hadn’t borne fruit. He had set out to change his wife to suit his every need, and Rex Stoddard succeeded at everything he set his mind to. He was so superior to those around him that even the possibility he might fail never really entered his mind.

She had known that. She had used that.

But had she really convinced him? If she had, where was he tonight?

One more time, just one more, Janine forced herself to consider other possibilities. Rex wasn’t a drinker. Had he been hurt, the police or the hospital would have called her. If his car had broken down on the way home from work, he would have driven home in a rental car, angry at the world and anxious to take his frustrations out on her.

She squeezed her eyes shut and forced herself to picture the best scenario. Rex had probably gone off on an overnight business trip, as he was sometimes forced to. Truckers and trucking firms in the Midwest were the primary clients of Rex’s insurance agency, and occasionally it was necessary to visit in person to settle claims or sell policies. He hadn’t told Janine he was leaving, because he wanted her to think he was still in town, eyes trained on her from some hidden location.

Janine reminded herself that she had carefully practiced her escape. Her husband’s most powerful weapon was fear. Most likely he would saunter in for dinner in about sixteen hours as if nothing had happened. With luck Rex was sure by now that there was no longer a reason to watch her. As long as she thought she was being watched, she would never leave.

No, even though her escape plan hadn’t been fully activated, even though she still had weeks before every tiny detail was put in place, now was the time to go. She had been given a chance, something she had prayed for back in the days when she believed in prayer. If she let this moment slip by, there was no telling when she might be given another.

Fumbling in the dark with the assistance of a penlight, she continued packing. She didn’t have time to bring much. For months she had made a mental inventory of essentials, knowing it was too dangerous to pack before it was time to go. Instead, she had rearranged her drawers so the important things would be easy to find quickly.

Now she mentally reviewed the list as she stuffed items inside a canvas backpack Buddy had once used for scouting. Her watch. A nightgown that was the last gift her daughter, Harmony, had given her before leaving home. Two T-shirts, one pair of pants thin enough to roll. She finished with two letters her parents had written her when she was still in college. For years she had safely kept them in a county fair cookbook that Rex never opened, only daring to move them recently in preparation for this moment. Rex had “encouraged” her to forget her past. Had he found the letters, he would have destroyed them.

Once she was in the bathroom, packing toiletries was easy. She had moved the items she needed into one drawer in the vanity, and now she removed the drawer and dumped everything into her backpack. Then she knelt, reached through the opening where the drawer had been and peeled away an envelope of cash that had been taped to the wall along with a checkbook linked to a secret savings account.

The cash would help her get out of Kansas. The savings account would help her start a new life in New Hampshire, where she had never been and never wanted to go. New Hampshire, which had one of the lowest number of truck and tractor registrations in the nation.

New Hampshire, where she might be safe.

She rested the backpack against the wall and stepped into the closet to dress. The night air was cool, not cold, but she chose corduroy pants, a black turtleneck that she topped with a heavy black sweater and ankle boots. Nothing fit. As part of her plan, she had lost almost twenty pounds. Now when she looked in the mirror she saw a hollow-eyed woman with lank graying hair and cheekbones so sharp they looked as if they might do damage to the skin stretched over them. She looked beaten and defeated.

It was only steps from the truth and would be completely true if she didn’t leave this house immediately.

She cinched the pants with a belt and pushed the sweater sleeves high. Her coat was downstairs, so for now she slung the backpack over one shoulder.

She was almost ready.

Without a backward glance at the knockoff Louis XV–style bedroom she had always despised, she went into the upstairs hallway and stood quietly to listen. Outside she heard an owl in the woods at the border of their property. While technically the Stoddard house was in a suburb with the unlikely name of Pawnee Parkland, the neighborhood was rural, with houses set acres apart and separated by woods and fields. Rex had chosen the location because of its isolation. Contact with neighbors was limited here, and social events nonexistent. Any friendly overtures had been pleasantly rejected by Rex years ago, and after Buddy’s death, sympathy had been rejected, too. The only communication she had these days was the occasional perfunctory wave as a neighbor’s car sped toward town.

She descended the stairs as quietly as she could, but each footfall sounded like an explosion because there was no longer a runner to muffle her footsteps. Two weeks ago Rex had stripped the carpeting and refinished the pine stairs himself, ever the helpful family man who took great pride in his prison. She was sure he had removed the runner to better hear her as she came and went.

Downstairs in the front hallway she slipped into her coat and settled the backpack into place. The disposable cell phone that Moving On had given her was zipped into an inside pocket. She slipped it out and hit Redial.

“I’m on my way out,” she said softly when a woman answered.

“The meeting place we discussed?”

Janine calculated how long it would take to cross the neighbor’s field, take the back way behind his pond and over to a dirt road that ran about a mile west to meet her contact at a deserted barn she had discovered on one of her rare trips to the grocery store without Rex. After much uncertainty she had decided that sneaking away from the house alone, unseen by anybody, was the safest course. Her contact could have picked her up at the front door, but even if Rex wasn’t watching, someone else might notice a car on the quiet road, someone getting up for a glass of water or a cigarette. Someone who could give Rex a description and a place to start his search.

“Give me forty-five minutes,” Janine said, factoring in the cloudy skies, the absence of stars and the narrow beam of the penlight.

She slipped the phone back into her pocket and buttoned her coat.

She was ready.

Leaving by the front door was too obvious. Instead, she hurried through the expansive country kitchen, took the stairs to the basement and followed a narrow corridor into the storm cellar. The door opened onto what was little more than a hole. She found the steps up after carefully closing the door behind her.

Outside now, she slipped behind the row of trees that separated this section of their yard from a field and the woods beyond. The night was as thickly black as any she could remember. This was the most dangerous moment of her escape, the one she had been dreading. She had to be careful not to make noise or draw attention in any way. Even if Rex was nearby, he couldn’t look everywhere, be everywhere. If she could get to their neighbor’s property without being noticed, she had a fighting chance.

She had almost made her goal when she realized she had forgotten her son’s scrapbook.

“Buddy.” The sound was more of a sigh than a whisper. She had tried so hard to remember everything, but this golden opportunity to leave had presented itself too soon.

Tears filled her eyes. She had carefully, lovingly, assembled scrapbooks for both her children, old-fashioned scrapbooks crammed with photos and report cards and faded ribbons. Harmony had taken hers when she left Topeka for good after high school graduation, but Buddy’s was still packed away in his bedroom. Janine had planned to retrieve the album and take it with her, the last link to the son who hadn’t been able to find his way out of the morass of his childhood.

If she left the album behind, how long would it be before she could no longer remember his face or his sweet little-boy victories?

She had to go back. If she did, she could still make it to the meeting place in time.

Ignoring the sensible voice that told her to keep moving, she retraced her steps, fear expanding with every one. At the house she slipped back through the cellar, the basement and up the steps to the first floor. She was trembling by the time she reached the downstairs hallway.

She paused in the entryway, which was adorned with a dozen or more family photographs in gold leaf frames. Rex had arranged the little shrine himself. He had chosen an Oriental carpet made of the finest silk and placed it under a massive mahogany table that displayed the photos. Each photo had its own special place, and he always checked carefully after she dusted to be sure she hadn’t rearranged them.

Harmony wasn’t in any of the photos, of course, since she had left home without Rex’s permission, and Buddy was only in a few, because this was supposed to be the Rex and Janine Happy Show, visual proof that she had been under her husband’s control for more than two decades. The photos were taunts meant to humiliate and shame, horrifying reminders of the years she had spent in the prison of this house with a man she despised.

Rex was at fault for everything. Rex was the reason she was sneaking back into her own house, trying to recover memories of the child he had destroyed, trying to save something, anything, meaningful from the twenty-five years of hell her husband had put her through.

She was not so beaten down that she couldn’t feel anger. Now the attempted escape set it free. She grabbed the most hateful photograph of all, the one taken by the justice of the peace on the day of their wedding. There in the hallway of the Shawnee County Courthouse she was smiling up at Rex as if he had all the answers to life’s mysteries.

“What a fool.”

Before she realized what she was doing, she stripped away the cardboard at the back of the frame and pulled out the photo. She tore it into four pieces, then eight, and threw the pieces to the table. In moments she’d dispensed with another frame and mutilated another photo, then another.

Elation filled her as she shredded each photograph and each frame landed on the floor. But once she was finished, the pile of scraps didn’t make the statement she wanted. She needed something more, something bigger, something for Rex to find when he returned.

Something that announced Janine was gone forever.

She strode across the room and grabbed his favorite ashtray and lighter; then she took both to the table and piled the fragments inside the ashtray.

The surge of joy she felt as she lit the first corner was like blood returning to an unused limb.

“So goes our life together, Rex.” She watched the photos catch fire, and then she started up the stairs to Buddy’s room.

The scrapbook was in a box in the closet. She had been the one to pack away all their son’s things, since Rex had wanted nothing to do with that final parting. To her knowledge he had never come into Buddy’s room since his death, so she was hopeful nothing had been disturbed.

She thought she remembered which box the book was in, but when she began to dig through it, she realized she was mistaken. Minutes passed and her elation vanished, replaced again by fear. She needed to leave now. This time for good. Forever and ever, world without end.

She was just about to give up when she saw the shiny blue cover at the bottom of the last box. She unearthed the scrapbook, but she knew better than to take the necessary time to make room for it in the backpack. On her way out she stripped a pillowcase off the bed and slipped the scrapbook inside so nothing would fall out. Clutching the pillowcase to her chest, she was ready.

In the hallway outside Buddy’s bedroom she noted a strange smell, then a noise downstairs. She froze, but from here both the smell and the sound were unfamiliar, not the footsteps of a man returning home, but a crackling that seemed to be gaining steadily in volume.

She edged along the wall toward the stairs and paused, afraid of what she might see, but she had already recognized the smell. Her eyes began to burn, and smoke tickled her lungs.

Below her, flames were shooting from the flammable silk carpet under the entry table. A wall of fire separated the two floors.

As she watched, the flames leaped to the stairs and began to lick their way toward her, feeding on the pine boards that had been recently stained and varnished.

She was trapped.

She had done this. For twenty-five years Rex had told her she was worth nothing without him, that her judgment was poor, her abilities second-rate, that every mistake her children had ever made could be lain directly at her feet.

And now, with this blatant act of defiance, she had proved him right.

For twenty-five years she had believed she was going to die in this house. Now she knew it was true. But not by her husband’s hands. Not by Rex’s.

By her own.