The Perfect Liar
Page 16
FREDDY MADE A MENTAL NOTE of the exit off I-91 in Connecticut and it was all he needed when he stepped into the bathroom—ostensibly to brush his teeth—to text Max and tell him where they were. They could have been anywhere, a sad hotel off a sad highway exit. He texted Max the exit, the hotel, and the room number. He also wrote, She’s acting cray cray, please come.
Max wrote back instantly. Hang tight, buddy. On way. Don’t say a word. Be there in five hours or less. Go to sleep. Delete this message, k?
K, Freddy wrote back.
Susannah had some old movie on, something he was supposed to be fired up about, according to her, but it looked ancient, practically black-and-white, with boring old people doing stupid shit and the spaceship that came roaring over the road in the first half didn’t even look real. Learn some special effects, will you?
He still couldn’t sleep, though. Movie or no movie, Freddy was all jacked up. He knew Max was a long way away, but in his mind he worried that Max was going to come barreling through that door any moment and it would all be Freddy’s fault. Wasn’t this what children feared more than anything else, that it would all be their fault?
Freddy looked over at his mom in the other bed. She hated sleep. He knew this about her. Sleep meant losing control. Susannah was all about control—make the world tiny and you could run it, right? What you going to do now, Mom? It’s just you and me, isn’t it?
Susannah gave him a thin smile. “You like that movie, honey?”
Freddy nodded. “It’s cool.”
“You sure?” Susannah yawned.
Freddy looked at the small television. A sad-looking family was having dinner and the dad was going batshit all of a sudden, pressing huge amounts of mashed potatoes into a tower on his plate with his hands while everyone watched with horror, which was the part Freddy sort of liked. If it had been cool, it would have been almost funny.
Soon he heard Susannah snoring softly. He reached over and turned off the light between them and he muted the television but kept it on. The only light in the room was the yellowish glow of the television, and Freddy lay there as if Max would be there any minute, picturing him coming through that door, though Freddy knew Max was hours away. Outside Freddy could hear the sound of the highway, the rumble of trucks in the night, and listening to this he fell asleep.
It felt as if moments later Max was there. Freddy bounded out of bed before Susannah had time to know what was happening, opened the door, and gave Max a hug. Freddy saw the look Susannah shot him when he copped to texting Max, but Freddy didn’t care. Max would fix it. Max would make it right.
The ride home was a shit show. Max had a rental car, which he left in the parking lot of the motel, stopping long enough to call Avis and tell them where it was, but refusing to do anything beyond just leaving it there with the keys in it. Badass, Freddy thought, but he didn’t say anything, instead watching as Max, gently, frog-marched Susannah to the front seat of the family Volkswagen, opened the door, put her in there, their bags in the trunk, and climbed in the front, sleepless but looking fresh, and started the engine. The sun was just beginning to rise in the gray dawn.
They rode in silence and Freddy fell asleep once the drone of the tires on the highway began. He slept through Connecticut and much of Massachusetts, but woke when Max stopped at a McDonald’s not far from the Vermont border.
Max turned toward the backseat and handed Freddy a twenty. “Run in and get some egg sandwiches and coffee.”
Freddy nodded.
“I have to pee,” Susannah said.
Freddy sensed it was the first words they had spoken since they left the motel two hours ago. Susannah could be crazy stubborn; she was going to win most blinking contests.
“Okay,” Max said. “We all go then.”
“Stop treating me like a fucking prisoner.”
“Language,” Max said.
“Fuck you.”
Max waited for Susannah outside the ladies’ room while Freddy went and ordered the egg sandwiches and the coffee.
Back in the car, they ate and drank in silence. Freddy put his headphones back on and leaned his face against the window and watched the land go by, giving way from honky-tonk and suburbia to rolling green hills the closer they got to Vermont.
The coffee jolted Freddy a little bit—he was new to it—but he liked the buzzy feeling it gave him, like the opposite of weed, which he had also recently discovered. He looked up at the two of them in the front seat, the back of their heads, and he smiled a little bit to himself. It isn’t just the two of us, Mom, thought Freddy. Not anymore and no matter what you say.
MAX HAD COME HOME TO an empty house and found evidence everywhere of disarray. Clothes scattered upstairs, toiletries gone from the bathroom, a stray toothbrush on the floor. It was like walking into a crime scene, but a banal one, where the only missing things were clothes and things people cleaned themselves with. In his mind he saw Susannah sweeping their marble bathroom countertop with her hands, filling a plastic bag or something, too urgent to pack carefully.
It occurred to him when he headed up the hill to the university that flight was on her mind, but he thought it far more likely that she would spend the day nervously smoking and seeing boogeymen approaching the door.
He called her: straight to voice mail. He texted, then he texted again. He wrote Freddy. Nothing. He started to panic a little bit.
What if she had gone to the cops? What if she had told them she was in danger, Freddy was in danger, that he had killed David Hammer and she was convinced that Max would kill them, too?
Stop being fucking paranoid, he told himself. That wasn’t Susannah’s style, and even if it were, nothing evidentiary had changed when it came to David Hammer. Other than that she could tell the police he wasn’t born Max W, and that could open a rabbit hole that, if they went down it, would not end well for him. One thing at a time, Max told himself. Don’t get ahead of yourself. You just have to find her. In the meantime, stick to facts, goddammit.
That was when he thought of pulling up his bank account on his phone. They had credit cards, but they generally used the debit, and if Susannah had used it, it might give a clue to where she was. That’s when he knew she had fled, really fled, for when he pulled up the app, all the money, every fucking cent of it, was gone. The debit card didn’t matter a whit. There was no cash.
Jesus, Susannah.
Max spent that afternoon pacing around the kitchen and ransacking the house like a cop looking for clues to her whereabouts. In her closet, buried under a pile of sweaters, he found a shoebox, and it had some heft to it as he lifted it up and brought it down and carried it over to the bed. He had an odd feeling about opening it, as if he were about to discover a trove of things he wasn’t supposed to see, items that belonged to former lovers, gifts she had never returned, letters he shouldn’t see, but an image came to him then, far more ominous: a severed head.
Get it together, Max.
But when he opened the box, he just as quickly dropped it with a start. He recoiled from what he saw. The eyes of the fox staring back at him. What the fuck? It was on the bed now and he reached down and felt the fur, and it felt prickly and real to his fingers and those marbled eyes looked up at him as if they might blink. Max was not the only one who harbored secrets.
IT WAS A LITTLE AFTER nine when the text from Freddy lit up his phone. Max felt the energy coming back into his body, the optimism that fueled him, and he called a cab and took it out to the small international airport that sat outside the city on a piece of flat land. He wanted to throttle the fat kid in the bad suit behind the counter of the car-rental place who moved as if he were stuck in cement.
“I don’t care,” said Max. “As long as it runs. Seriously.”
Max put it on his credit card, a reminder that that was, for the moment, the only money he had outside of what was in the market and hard to access, credit and debt and not a ton of either. Soon he was out and on the highway and speeding south.
When he pulled off the highway, it was two a.m. He came into the motel parking lot and circled around the back, and the lot was well lit and there, parked facing the building, was the family Volkswagen. Max pulled in next to it and killed his engine.
He ran his eyes up the building—moving forward in his seat so he could see directly up the windshield—to the door numbers until he saw the one they were in, up on the second floor, their large window, like every motel window at this time of night, blackened and blinded.
Max was suddenly bone tired. It was as if the ride had completely deflated him now that he was here. He had nothing left. The thought of barging in there now and pulling them out and knowing he would have to get right back in the car and drive four hours back the way he had come had almost zero appeal. He pulled out his phone and set the alarm on it for five. He then put the driver’s seat back as far as it went and closed his eyes against the light of the streetlamps, and in what felt like seconds, he was fast asleep.
Three hours of sleep helped. Being at the door was a blur, knocking on it, Freddy opening it, Susannah slowly trying to rise in bed but Max seeing in her face her disappointment in herself for not being fast enough, though Max knew she hadn’t adequately gamed what she would do because she hadn’t anticipated her own son dropping a dime on her. Not that she had a lot of options. She could have called 911 and presented him as the abusive husband. They would have taken her word.
But the door opened and Max smiled.
The jig was up.
By the time they got home—the not talking more exhausting than the talking—Max just wanted to lie down, close his eyes, and rewind the clock four days to the time when they seemed past all of this, and in front of them was the summer, and the first grown-up vacation the three of them had ever taken together.
But that was a luxury he didn’t have. He also didn’t know where to go from here. His goal was to get them back, and now that that was done, he knew there had to be some reckoning and then a path forward. But that path wasn’t clear.
First thing he did when they got into the house and were in the kitchen, Susannah refusing to make eye contact with him, was to slide the shoebox he had found across the counter toward her. “What is this?”
“It’s mine.”
“I gathered that. But what is it? Open it.”
“No.” Max saw her glance at Freddy.
“Open it.”
She did.
Freddy leaned forward and then back. “What the…?”
“It’s a fox. I found it.”
“Where?”
“On the street. Nearby.”
“And you brought it home?”
“I wanted to keep it. Leave me alone, please. I just want to sleep.”
Susannah took the box, covered it, and marched out of the room, heading to the stairs.
“Where’s our money?” Max called to her.
“In my bag.” Her tone surprised him, suddenly casual, as if he had asked her what time dinner was.
IT ALL FELT OVER TO her. Drop the curtain now, Susannah thought, for it was hard to imagine how they came back from any of it. Even if they could, would she even want to? She had been here before, hadn’t she?
She left Freddy and Max in the kitchen and went up the stairs. She wanted her phone, but he wouldn’t give it to her, not yet. Time was muddled and confused. It was late morning, she thought, though she couldn’t be sure of that even. It was sunny outside and warm and the blinds were up in the bedroom and she went to the bed and fell onto it fully clothed and she didn’t care about the sun coming in and beaming on her face and she didn’t care about anything. She thought that she should cry but she couldn’t do that either.
She saw how tired Max was. She had never seen him that tired before. His eyes were blank tiles. She had time. She had time to rest. She needed to rest. She needed to rest before she figured it out. Before she decided what to do next, if she had any moves she could make. Or was it already checkmate?
Joseph was old at the end, not super-old, but Susannah knew he was dying before she knew he was dying, if that makes sense. He had a smell about him in the month or so before, like fruit that had aged past its time in the bowl. She had grown restless and impatient with him: his words, his metronomic voice, no longer slowed her and they no longer soothed her. She didn’t want to see his wrinkled face, his sunken eyes, though she never told anyone that. She longed for other men, though that, too, she carried close to her chest, like the fox she had picked up off the road and carried home.
She considered herself a dutiful wife. Her transgressions, such as they were, were limited to brief moments on the street, a handsome man coming up from the subway in his suit adjusting himself on the last step, pushing his hair back and moving into the Manhattan street. Moments that stirred her and suggested that other women lived other lives. That not everyone felt the walls closing in, that the world didn’t end when you had a child, that death wasn’t yet knocking on the door for everyone’s husband.
Max was not Joseph. Despite how tired he looked this morning, he was young, virile, and strong, and they would have had a long life together, right?
The air was close and stale in the room. Susannah got out of bed and went to the window and opened it. She looked out into the backyard differently from how she ever had, suddenly a prisoner in her own house. A small ledge outside the window ran around the house. It wasn’t that high. She imagined climbing out there, then hanging off it to get as close to the ground as she could before letting go. It would hurt, but if she landed right, she’d be just fine. She could run through the backyard and onto the next street. Find a house where someone was home. A woman in distress is a powerful thing. They would let her in. But then what?
She returned to bed. She moved to her side and pressed her face into the pillow. For the next several hours, she slept fitfully, moving in and out of dreams, vague dreams that scared her but that she didn’t remember and then woke her up hot in the still room before she fell back half-asleep again.
A few hours later, Susannah gave up. She rolled over on her back and stared at the ceiling. She looked to the window and it was still light out, though she had no idea what time it was. She did not have her phone and she did not wear a watch and it was funny how she felt so unmoored by not having her phone. She listened for sounds but the house was silent.
She rose out of bed, her jeans and her T-shirt crumpled, and she could smell herself, like onions, the need for a shower, the blur the last twenty-four hours had been. She went to the door and out into the hallway. Freddy’s door was closed and she passed it, and at the top of the stairs she stopped and listened again, but she heard nothing and she lightly padded down the stairs.
Turning the corner to the living room, she saw Max. He was on the couch, on his back, fast asleep. He was snoring, his head to the side, his mouth slightly agape.
Susannah quickly and quietly moved through the downstairs, looking for Freddy. But Max was the only one downstairs. Freddy had to be in his room, unless he left to go somewhere else.
Susannah made her way back upstairs, stepping on each step carefully, not remembering whether they creaked since she had never had to consider this before.
In the upstairs hallway she made her way to Freddy’s door. Normally, she would knock loud enough to overcome headphones or video games and wait for a response before opening the door. It was an acknowledgment of his teenagerhood, the right to privacy that appears as suddenly as puberty.
But today she didn’t want to wake Max. She needed Freddy alone for a moment and she
needed to explain to him the urgency she felt. This was her failure yesterday: she didn’t take the time to explain to him why it was so important they escape. She had treated him like a child. Give me a do-over, she wanted to say, and I know why you texted Max. It’s okay, it really is.
Susannah turned the knob and slowly opened the door. She whispered, “Freddy? It’s Mom.”
He had his back to her, headphones on, of course. He was at his desk, more of a table, one normally covered with all his junk, whatever he needed for school, skateboard magazines, the small detritus a teenage boy collected in his pockets every day and dumped out like runes.
He was busy, working on something, schoolwork? Some newfound academic interest? Drawing?
She felt disoriented by this, the headphones made sense but the rest of it was foreign.
Susannah walked across the room, still whispering his name, and she didn’t want to be loud but she was also worried about startling him.
She put her hand on his shoulder at the same time she screamed, though she didn’t remember screaming but she must have, for Max, a few moments later, came flying through the door to see what had happened.
For what Susannah saw when she put her hand on her son’s shoulder was what he was doing, the pen poised in his hand, the cardstock note in front of him, finishing the first word in a script she now instantly recognized. All he had written was YOU.
Freddy, for his part, almost jumped out of his skin when he felt her touch. “You can’t just come in here.”
But they were past that, far past that.
Then Max was there, behind her, he, too, taking it in, a moment for him to absorb it all, to see what she saw, and suddenly, for a second anyway, she and Max were on the same team again. They were parents.