She tried to shower it away. She smoked in her spot under the eaves, looking at the leafy backyard. The panic grew and grew like a plant. And this one, Susannah couldn’t stop. Soon it was as big and blooming inside her as the peonies pushing up against the house.
Upstairs, Susannah hastily threw things into a suitcase. As many clothes as she could fit. Shoes and underwear and pants and skirts and toiletries just all piled into the biggest suitcase she had.
She went into Freddy’s room. His clothes were everywhere, and Susannah picked them up and smelled them. If they seemed clean, she stuffed them into a duffel bag. In the bathroom, she grabbed him a toothbrush and deodorant.
Twenty minutes later, Susannah buzzed herself into the high school, on the next-to-last day before the start of summer. At the principal’s office, the receptionist in the large room looked at her with obvious alarm.
Susannah knew that it showed in her face, the shattered look of a woman who’d just discovered someone she loved had died, or that her husband might kill her.
Somehow she got out the needed words. She decided to go with a sick grandparent. Freddy needed to be pulled from school. His papa was dying, she said. It was just a matter of time.
A phone call was made to his classroom. A brief conversation Susannah didn’t pay attention to. Behind the receptionist, she could see the principal himself, a tall man in his forties with a hipster haircut and reading glasses, looking at papers in his hands. His office was sad, she thought, with one of those iron-blue metal desks that seemed to exist only in public schools.
Then in front of Susannah was Freddy, with his backpack and his skateboard, looking at her with something that bordered on disgust. “What is it?”
“We can talk about it on the ride.”
“What ride?”
Susannah had no patience for this now. “Let’s just go, Freddy. Come on.” And to the receptionist: “Thank you.”
“Of course,” she said, barely looking up.
“Where are we going?” Freddy said when they had left through the heavy doors, out onto the scoop of driveway in front of the school, then across the lawn toward the parking lot.
“We’ll talk in the car, Freddy. Please.”
She practically frog-marched Freddy to the car. He threw his skateboard and backpack into the backseat, and when he did, he saw the suitcases there. “Mom, seriously. What is this?”
Susannah ignored him until they were inside and she’d reversed out of the space, driving quickly out of the school grounds and heading toward downtown.
“We are going away for a while. It’s not safe.”
“What’s not safe?”
“Our house.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Freddy! Language.”
“Well, you’re acting like a crazy person.”
“I need you, I need you just to do this with me right now, okay? Please.”
“Why isn’t it safe?”
“Max isn’t safe, okay? He’s not. He could hurt us.”
“What? What happened? Did you get in a fight?”
“I need to focus,” Susannah said.
“Did he hurt you?”
“No, he didn’t. But I am worried. And my first responsibility is to you and me.”
Freddy slumped in his seat. He looked out the window.
They drove in silence for a bit, toward downtown, where Susannah pulled into the parking lot of the bank. “Wait here.”
Inside, Susannah waited her turn behind a small line until a teller opened up. She was a woman about Susannah’s age, big glasses, heavy and lots of hair.
Susannah said that she wanted to close her account, that she was moving.
“Account number?”
Susannah gave it to her.
She clicked away on the keyboard in front of her. “Is Maxwell Westmoreland with you?”
“Right now?”
“Yes. There are two names on the account. Both of you need to be here to close it.”
Susannah forced a tear. It fell out of her eye and down her cheek. She leaned forward and looked the woman in the eyes.
The woman looked up with a soft and kind face at Susannah. “Are you okay?”
“I’m leaving him. He beats me. And my son. I need to go today. I need to go right now. Can’t I just close it?”
“I’m so sorry.” Susannah could tell the woman meant it. “But I can’t close it without him signing as well.”
“I need the money. It’s mine.”
“Well, that’s different. Hang on. Let me look.” The woman’s fingers clicked away again, took a pause, clicked again. “There’s no limit on what you can withdraw, though. Other than fifty dollars you need to keep in the savings account.”
“Oh. What’s the balance?”
“Let me see.” More clicking. “Looks like twenty-three thousand four hundred and sixty-two in savings. A little over six thousand in checking.”
“Give me all of it.” Susannah smiled at her conspiratorially. “Minus the fifty dollars.”
“Bank check okay?”
“Cash.”
It felt as if it took forever, but it was probably no more than fifteen minutes. The manager came out and supervised, a fat guy with an overly sculpted thin beard who kept looking at Susannah suspiciously as if this were illegal, but when they finished counting, she was out the door with close to thirty thousand dollars in cash in fat stacks of envelopes. It wasn’t all their money. Whenever Max sold something, he put it into securities. They might have a few hundred thousand there, but Susannah had never paid attention to it.
So Freddy wouldn’t see it, when she reached the car she opened the back door and took the stack of envelopes, more money than she had ever thought possible for one person to have at once, and slid them into the mouth of her bag that rested on the backseat and pressed it closed.
Freddy looked at her wearily when she climbed into the car. “What are we doing?”
“I told you, we’re going away for a while.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Freddy, please. No questions for now, okay, baby? I need to concentrate.”
Under his breath he muttered something. Susannah heard the words “fucking” and “crazy” and she let it go. She wasn’t a natural driver and she needed to focus.
“Just let me drive.”
Freddy glared at her but didn’t say anything. He took his earphones out of his backpack and slid them onto his ears, then Susannah heard the steady thump of the bass and he closed his eyes and looked toward the window and she gripped the wheel tight and led them out of town.
SUSANNAH DIDN’T HAVE A PLAN—OTHER than a nonplan to drive as far as she could away from Burlington and from Max. She went south on Route 7, following the shores of Champlain, past the rolling green of Shelburne and the small city of Vergennes, visible across fields in the distance. She deliberately chose not to get on the interstate because of some kind of misguided paranoia, imagining Max figuring out they were gone, borrowing a car or, more dramatically, jacking one from an unsuspecting student, pushing his way into the driver’s seat at a red light and pursuing them at high speed down I-89.
So she drove. The farther they got away from Max, the better Susannah started to feel, and soon she was breathing, deeply and normally, in a way that made her realize that she had probably not done so for hours. Freddy was lost in the world of his headphones and it occurred to her—the mom part of herself rising to the surface—that he was probably hungry and that she herself hadn’t eaten since breakfast.
“Are you hungry?”
Freddy lifted one ear on his earphones. “What?”
“Are you hungry?”
He shrugged.
When they reached Middlebury, she stopped at a small sandwich place that had a big OPEN sign on the side of the road, and when Freddy didn’t want to come in, Susannah went and got them both sandwiches, a hummus-and-veggie one for her, and a roast beef for him.
They ate in silence as she drove, Freddy drinking a bottle of root beer, and Susannah water. The road was pretty. It was Vermont in summer, lush and endlessly green, mountains sometimes visible to either side, the Greens on their left, and the Adirondacks blue-gray rising up beyond the opposite shore of the lake.
At a gas station outside Manchester, they stopped to pee and Susannah thought of the money. It was more money than she had ever had on her before. But it suddenly made her sad because even though it was so much money, it was also finite. There was an end to it. Eventually it would run out, but maybe it was enough to get them started.
Susannah had begun again before; she knew how to begin again. She hated to toss and turn poor Freddy when it seemed as if they had finally landed. But she remembered the burn of her wrist after Max let go, and what choice did she have?
Coming out of the bathroom, Susannah took her phone out of her purse. Max had been blowing her up for the last hour. Seven new texts: Where are u? You and Freddy somewhere? Is your phone off? Shouldn’t Freddy be home????????
Susannah looked over at Freddy, Snapchatting away on his phone. “Turn off your phone.”
“Why?”
“Just turn it off.”
“You’re acting cray cray.”
Susannah pleaded with him. “Please, Freddy. Max isn’t who you think he is. And phones can be tracked. He could find us if we have our phones on. Look, I am shutting mine off.”
Freddy rolled his eyes at her but did what she asked.
They moved through the afternoon and down the highway as if it were a river leading to New York. She could have gone west, she could have gone east, and she could have gone north, to Montreal maybe. But like a migratory bird, Susannah only ever went in one direction, back toward the only city she had ever truly known. She could get lost in New York.
For the first time in a long time Susannah had pangs that she didn’t know she could feel anymore: a longing for her parents, for childhood, for the smell of her mother’s cooking and a shared bed with her sister. She even missed her gruff father with his narrow views, his Old World Catholicism, and his paranoia about America. She didn’t even know if they were alive, or if anyone would have told her if they weren’t. But in that moment she wanted to go back to a time when she didn’t have to make any decisions, but just did what she was told.
IN THE EARLY EVENING SHE stopped aside the highway near Watertown, Connecticut, and found a Best Western where they could lay their heads for the night. Across the street was a chain that served breakfast all day, and they had breakfast for dinner, French toast and bacon for Freddy and an omelet and a sad excuse of a salad for her, iceberg lettuce and a few tomatoes and a thick, sweet dressing. But Susannah didn’t mind because eating was a chore. She wanted a cigarette. She wanted wine. She wanted something to steady herself, but instead in her head she kept saying the word Mom, like a mantra, Mom, Mom, Mom, as in this was what she was doing, this was her purpose. She said to herself, There are things bigger than you, Susannah. Be grateful for what you have. Be grateful for this boy.
This was how she kept down the white bear.
After dinner, back in the motel room, Susannah felt something she hadn’t felt in a while. She felt that she was of use. It was just the two of them, sharing a room, as they had not done since Freddy was tiny. There were two beds and a TV, the same setup as at any of these places.
It didn’t matter to her that Freddy didn’t want to be here. It didn’t matter that he was acting like a petulant child who had been told he had to go to his grandmother’s house when he didn’t want to. None of that mattered. All that mattered was that, for the moment, things were suddenly simple again: the two of them against the world, as they were so many years ago when she nursed him on a curb in Queens.
SUSANNAH SURFED CHANNELS ON THE television until she found a movie she thought they both would like, no easy chore. Close Encounters of the Third Kind was on, and she remembered it fondly and told Freddy enthusiastically how much he would love it, thinking about Richard Dreyfuss losing his mind and molding all those mashed potatoes into Devils Tower.
But it started slower than she remembered, the kind of movie they don’t make anymore, where the build increases the more you invest in it, and it demands your attention. Freddy had no patience. Soon he was curled away from her on his bed, immersed again in his headphones and his music, leaving her to the film that suddenly seemed dated, as did she.
Susannah didn’t know who fell asleep first. It was probably her because the last thing she remembered was watching the part where Dreyfuss and the blond woman ride the beat-up old station wagon past the military roadblocks.
But then in the middle of the night, Susannah woke with a start. The television was still on, and Freddy was on his back, breathing deeply with sleep.
Susannah was disoriented at first—the motel, the glow of the television, and the sounds of the highway outside.
It took her a minute to get her bearings. It all came roaring back: pulling Freddy out of school, emptying the bank account, leaving town as if a wildfire were about to swallow it.
Susannah took a deep breath and looked toward the big plate-glass motel windows that the shades covered but where the pale yellow light of the parking lot and the highway beyond it still seeped in. She had no idea what time it was. It must have been close to dawn by her read of the quality of the light. She imagined everything outside was a fog about to be burned off by the sun. Which was exactly how her mind felt when someone started pounding on the door.
“Susannah,” Max’s voiced bellowed from the other side. “Open up.”
Susannah rose up in the bed. She didn’t have time to think. Then Freddy was a blur, out of the bed and past hers and heading toward the door.
“Freddy, no,” she said, but it was too late.
Before she could move, he had unlatched the door and Max filled the doorway, the bland early morning light behind him.
“Max,” Susannah said.
“Time to go home, Susannah,” he said calmly.
“How did you find us?”
“I texted him,” Freddy said.
FREDDY TRUSTED MAX. HE THOUGHT maybe it was because everything used to seem screwed up before Max. Susannah would have good days and she would have bad days and everything in between. Before Max, Freddy would come home from school and have no idea what was waiting for him. Some days their whole apartment was a shithole, clothes all over the floor, the sink full of dishes, no food in the fridge or the cabinets, and his mom wouldn’t get out of bed. Rolling over and with no clothes on, which he didn’t need to see, and pointing him to some wadded-up bills on the end table and telling him to go down to the bodega and get whatever he wanted.
But then other days he’d come home and the place would be crazy clean, like so spotless you could eat off the floor and a fridge full of food. Her energy was high and she wouldn’t stop talking and she seemed so happy, but it never seemed real, her happiness, a helium kind of happiness that would float away if you let go of the string.
Susannah couldn’t handle being alone, Freddy realized. She liked to say to him, “It’s just me and you, Freddy,” and she said it as if it were the most important thing in the world to say and Freddy wanted to believe her when she said it but he didn’t. It felt like one of those things people said when they were out of things to say because everything around them was crappy and uncertain.
When Freddy’s dad was alive, Joseph knew how to handle her business, how to take her temperature when she overheated and talk her out of her tree. They say you don’t remember things before you are five, but Freddy remembered his dad’s voice. His voice stayed with Freddy. His dad’s voice was like music, low and steady and always on pitch, the voice of a jazz singer. His words could put you to sleep or they could wake you up, depending on what Joseph wanted to accomplish.
In Freddy’s earliest memory, Susannah and Joseph were having an argument. Well, Susannah was yelling at Joseph. And Joseph was talkin
g to her in that voice. Freddy was too young to have any idea what it was about. Freddy drifted out of the bedroom because he didn’t like the fighting; it upset him and no one seemed to notice. Freddy went into Joseph’s office and turned his swivel chair behind his desk around so that it faced the wall.
Freddy cried. He could hear Susannah shouting, then Joseph’s murmur of a voice, her name, “Susannah,” he kept saying. Freddy was too young to know anything but that’s the thing about kids: just as dogs and bees can sense fear, kids can tell when things are sour and sick.
His dad found him. Freddy felt his dad’s hand on his shoulder and his voice in his ear. Freddy didn’t turn around, and he didn’t lift his head. He was ashamed of his tears.
“Ferdinand,” Joseph said in his ear, for he refused to call him Freddy. “It’s over now, okay? Your mother, she is better. You can come out.”
So Freddy did, and he did over and over, come out after an episode, though he didn’t always want to. Then Joseph was gone: a puff of smoke.
THERE HAD BEEN OTHER MEN before Max. Men that Freddy remembered as a bunch of fools, men he came across in the kitchen the morning after, men who scratched their asses and searched for coffee and seemed flummoxed when Freddy walked in and went through the cabinets as if they weren’t there, checking the cereal boxes trying to find the ones that still had something in them.
What made Max different, for Freddy, was that he didn’t seem like a poser. Freddy could tell that the others who stuck around for more than one night had no interest in him, none whatsoever, but that didn’t stop them, he thought, from ladling bullshit on him.
Max, by contrast, never looked down on Freddy. He also didn’t blow smoke and sunshine at Freddy. He didn’t try too hard. But he also seemed to genuinely care, as if he wanted to know who Freddy was.
And, important, he never tried to be Freddy’s dad. That was the big thing. Even after they all moved in together, Max treated Freddy as if he were someone else who lived there, a roommate, a friend. Sometimes Max played the grown-up role, but he didn’t overstep it. Kids know if it’s fake, and to Freddy there was nothing fake about Max, ever.
The Perfect Liar Page 15