He walked across the street and past the horses and carriages all lined up waiting for tourists. The horses looked sad and dirty. Max sat on a bench against the granite wall that separated the park from the street and texted Susannah again. More silence.
Now he texted Freddy the same question, and the response came right back. Sleeping over Ivan’s.
Where’s Mom? Max typed.
IDK. Home?
Max relaxed a bit. She hadn’t made another run, for she wouldn’t have gone without Freddy. Still, it wasn’t like Susannah not to respond. Sometimes she would leave her phone charging in the kitchen and go do something, take a bath, say, but that was about it. Otherwise it was always with her and as with him, unless he was in class, an extension of her hand.
Max pulled up his itinerary on his phone. He was scheduled to be on an eleven a.m. flight tomorrow, a nod to leisure that schedule, sleep in and have room-service breakfast and then a car to whisk him to JFK for the hour-long flight to Burlington. Maybe he should just go back tonight, he thought. The idea didn’t have a ton of appeal, but it would only take a minute to pack his bag and leave the hotel. It was still early.
Max called the airline, but the last flight of the night had already left, though if he wanted, they could move him up in the morning.
“What time?”
“Six-fifty a.m.,” the woman said.
“I’ll take it.”
He then called the number for the car service that Goldman provided him and changed his pickup time. With those arrangements done, he returned to his hotel and that high, gilded suite they had rented him. He wrote Susannah again and again—no answer. He lay on top of the bedcovers with only his sneakers kicked off. He rented a movie on the television, some thriller with Tom Cruise, but barely paid attention to it.
Max found himself growing angry with Susannah. Today was an unmitigated triumph and tonight should have been a night of celebration, something he could have told her about over the phone, and maybe they could have done something fun tomorrow night to mark the occasion. Instead he was worried about her, or what she might have done. She could really be fucking selfish, he thought. Unable to escape her own head, she could never see the bigger picture. Look at all he had done for her, and for Freddy. What had she done for him? Introduced him to Lydia? Anyone could have done that.
Max climbed out of bed. He got on the floor and started doing push-ups. Up and down and up and down until his arms ached and his breathing came fast and shallow.
He stood and went to the window, his hands on his hips. He looked out to the park below in the dark, the street in front of it full of people. There was nothing to be done tonight, he decided.
Max slept fitfully, waking at times to look at his phone to see if she’d responded, but there was nothing. He woke at five and had coffee and fruit brought to the room. He then showered and fifteen minutes later he was in a black town car heading to JFK, just another wealthy traveler driving against the traffic to escape town.
Before the flight even took off, Max was asleep. Bright sunlight streaming through the rectangular window on his face woke him somewhere over Vermont. He looked out the window, and below he could see the sea of green and the undulating ridges of the Green Mountains, all of it from this height appearing wild and unspoiled. He rubbed his eyes and felt the down-nose of the descent.
Fifteen minutes later Max was out in front of the terminal. One of the things to love about Vermont: no wait for a cab. He came out the sliding doors and signaled to a half-asleep-looking guy sitting in a green Prius sedan that said GREEN CAB on the side and moments later Max was on his way back to his house. It was eight a.m.
The first thing Max noticed when the cab pulled up front was the Volkswagen parked in the driveway. The angle was such that the car was practically sideways, the tires turned sharply to the left.
Max handed the driver a twenty and said, “That’s all set,” and bounded out of the car with his bag. He came up the porch and he was going to look for his keys but tried the handle first and the door opened.
Max took the bag off his shoulder and came into the foyer, leaving his luggage there, looked into the living room, which appeared unlived in, and then into the kitchen. His eyes took it in. An empty wineglass on the counter but otherwise nothing amiss.
He went back down the hallway and climbed the stairs. Their bedroom door was ajar and he opened it slowly and silently, as if he expected to find a crime scene, which was ludicrous, he knew, but he did it anyway, and as if responding to the slight creak of the wooden door, Susannah stirred where she lay in the bed but did not wake.
Max walked to the bedside. She had the covers half-on, one naked long leg exposed, her panties hiked up and one cheek of her ass out. He felt his anger, his fear, falling away and he reached down for her hair, which was down, and slid his fingers through it. She rolled over.
Susannah looked up at him. She looked confused and jacked up, as if it had been a long night. She had worn makeup, he saw, the smear of lipstick on her upper lip, and this surprised him, since she rarely wore lipstick, unless they were going out for something special. Eyeliner, yes, but lipstick, no.
“Hey.”
“Why didn’t you answer my texts?”
“I lost my phone. I found it right before I crashed. It was late. I didn’t want to bother you.”
“I wouldn’t have been bothered,” said Max, though he didn’t believe her.
She sat up, leaned against the pillows. She pushed her hair out of her face. She was beautiful: the red hair falling around her face, those big, sad eyes, rubbing them with her hands.
“Where were you last night?”
“What?”
“I mean, you went out. Where did you go?”
“Why are you interrogating me?”
“It’s a simple question, Susannah.”
“None of your questions are simple.”
“Well, here’s a simple one then.” Max’s voice rose a little. “Where are the car keys? I need to move it. You left it sideways in the middle of the driveway.”
Susannah waved toward the clothes on the floor, a trail of her undressing. “My pockets, I don’t know.”
Max turned around and stormed over to where her jeans lay on the floor. He thrust his hand in the right front pocket and pulled a business card out of it. His heart sunk when he read it.
Detective Dolores Scott, Vermont State Police.
Max held it to his face, as if not believing what he was seeing. Susannah, in the meantime, had rolled away from him, her face pressed back into the pillow, her body curled up in the fetal position, pulling the covers up and around her, as if by doing so he might go away.
Max went to the bed, grabbed her shoulder, and pulled her toward him, onto her back.
“What the fuck?” Susannah said.
He threw the card at her. “What is this? What did you say to her, Susannah?”
Susannah reached down and took the card off the top of the comforter where it had fluttered to a stop.
She sighed. “I didn’t say anything to her.”
“Why do you have this?”
“She forced it on me.”
“When, Susannah? When?”
“Relax, please, okay? Yesterday, okay? I was in the co-op. I didn’t talk to her. She just gave it to me.”
“She just gave it to you.”
“Yes, she gave it to me.”
Max walked away from Susannah. He went to the window and looked out to the backyard, the majestic peonies lining it, the perfectly green yard in the morning light. He wished he had hair so he could rip it out. He didn’t know what to believe.
“Tell me everything.” He had his back to her. “Every single fucking word.”
Susannah started to cry. “Why are you doing this?”
“Just tell me.” He didn’t turn around.
“It was nothing. I was shopping. She came up to me. ‘I bet you have a story to tell,’ she said. I told her I didn’t tell stori
es, she left me alone.”
“That was it?”
“Yes, I swear. That was it.”
Max sat down on the bed, facing away from Susannah. In a moment, she rose up and her arms draped around his neck and he felt her bare breasts against his back.
“Hey,” she said softly, “I would never do anything.”
Max nodded. “Okay,” he said, coming down from it. “Okay.” As he thought about it further, he did believe Susannah. He believed she hadn’t said anything to Detective Scott. But he also knew that this meant he was right about the detective, about that moment when she got into her car in the parking lot outside his office and squinted up to where he stood. She wasn’t going to quit, not yet. The biggest liability he had was behind him right now, her hands on his chest, her mouth inches from his ear.
In a couple of days they would go to the ocean, to the beautiful house he had rented for the three of them. This will give you time to think, Max told himself. He would know what to do when the time came. The point was not to be rash.
IN THE FOLLOWING DAYS, A simple détente came over them. The vacation was all that they talked about, the seafood they would eat, the long days on the beach, the feel of salt water on skin.
“The sunsets,” said Max, “are spectacular.”
The more they talked, the more normal it all seemed. Susannah surprised herself with how easily she could compartmentalize this experience. How easily she could pretend they were like everyone else in the prime of their lives. Max was acting like his old self, full of life and stories, and while they didn’t fuck, every time she saw him in the kitchen or anywhere else, his hands were on her, knowing and searching, strong fingers on the rise of her hip.
Thirty-six years old and Susannah had never been on a proper vacation. She wasn’t counting a night away with the girls, which she had done a few times back in the city days, some quick get out of town, or the few times she and Max had found a way to slip off, also usually just for one night. It was so amazingly American, all of it, the idea that it was summer and they were going to pack up the car and go to the beach, hot sand between their toes, wet sand stuck to their ankles.
Freddy was bringing his friend Cal, a kid who was even more reserved and sullen than Freddy was. But the prospect of this made the trip palatable for Freddy. Max and Susannah were determined to get the most out of it—they took possession of the rental at noon on Saturday—so that meant leaving at the ass crack of dawn, which Susannah didn’t mind at all. After three days of thinking about it constantly, she really wanted to go.
She surprised herself by how she was feeling. All of a sudden she loved the whole idea of this trip. The house, with all of them in it, had begun to feel like a prison. In the early morning as Freddy and Cal slid into the backseat with their headphones on and their closed eyes, and Max got behind the wheel and backed out of the driveway, she was almost manic with excitement. She was the kid in the car, the one who could hardly wait.
It rained in Vermont, but by the time they reached New Hampshire, bright sun was in the sky, and at a stop to use the restrooms, the heat hit her hard as soon as the car door opened. Summer.
Susannah liked the feeling of driving to the sea. She imagined the road was a river or a tide with an undertow, pulling her to where she was meant to go. Even the heavy traffic they hit in Boston—some construction and a minor accident backing things up for an hour—couldn’t quell her enthusiasm. She did have a moment when the traffic stopped in the tunnel under the city when she felt it coming on, everyone else in the car oblivious of how they were underground and couldn’t move. Everyone, she should say, with the exception of her husband, who looked over and saw the strained look on her face and read it correctly.
“There’s nothing above us,” he said.
“I thought we were under the harbor,” she said, considering all that water rushing in from a sudden breach, how it would consume all the cars and make them rise at once while, paradoxically, or inversely, the occupants would sink. She imagined the four of them tumbling upside down like astronauts, peaceful in the minutes before they died.
“No,” Max said. “Not here. This just goes under a park.”
Susannah took a breath.
But then she could see the mouth of the tunnel and the light, and like that, they were out and south of the city, though the traffic grew heavier, if that was possible. It was stop-and-go. Midmorning.
She tried to remind herself of the lightness she had felt earlier in the morning. What a North Star the very idea of this vacation was, not as much when Max had told her it was happening, but in the last few days, when she began to dream of the beach.
She said to herself, My mind is telling me not to be upset. It’s just my mind, a separate thing. Doing what it does.
But the traffic broke and so did her sour mood. The landscape changed. Now on either side of the two-lane highway were scrubby pine trees, small and bent and growing out of sand. Susannah rolled down the window for a moment and the air was warm and smelled of salt and the sea.
They hit traffic again before the bridge, but now Susannah didn’t care at all, and when they rose on the great arc over the canal and onto Cape Cod, she turned to the boys and said excitedly, “Look at the boats.”
The water below was bluer than Max’s eyes, and big ships moved down the canal and away from them and toward the open ocean.
But her real joy was saved for the house, this splurge of a rental house. In Wellfleet they left Route 6 and drove down this road that ran high above the ocean. They turned off down a sandy path, and there the house sat, perched precariously, it seemed, on top of a dune. The longest staircase Susannah could imagine ran from the deck of the house down to the beach. The beach was far below, at least several hundred feet.
In front of them, as they took it in moments after getting out of the car, was the huge expanse of wide-open Atlantic, sparkling like knives in the bright sun. It might have been the most beautiful view Susannah had ever seen.
After they unpacked the car, the boys ran through the house, which was small, but that didn’t matter because they had the big deck and the whole world outside to play in. Susannah made sandwiches in the kitchen and put them in a small cooler and Max carried this and four chairs out the door.
“I’ll be down in a minute,” Susannah said. “Need to use the bathroom.”
“We can wait for you,” Max said.
“No, no, go ahead.”
From the window, Susannah watched as they all descended the long staircase to the great expanse of national seashore. She pulled out her phone and taking a card out of her pocket, she dialed a Vermont number. Pick up, she thought. Pick up.
On the third ring, a woman’s gentle voice: “Detective Scott.”
“This is Susannah Garcia,” she said breathlessly.
“Susannah. Are you okay?”
“You told me I looked like I might have a story to tell.”
“I remember.”
“Google Maxwell Westmoreland from Charleston, South Carolina. My husband knew him and took his name. My husband’s real name is Phil Wilbur. He says Maxwell Westmoreland is alive in Alaska. I think he’s dead. I think he killed him like he killed David Hammer. And I think he might kill me. I have to go.”
“Susannah, wait. Are you safe? Where are you?”
“For now. I have to go.” Susannah hung up.
They spent the afternoon trying to bodysurf the large waves that crashed onto the beach. Susannah shrieked when each wave came in and she tried to outjump them, only sometimes feeling the brute force of the undertow picking her up and sending her spinning before pushing her up on the shore like driftwood, all of them laughing and sun-kissed and sandy and perfect.
That night they ate dinner outside at Mac’s Shack in the village of Wellfleet, Susannah and Max slurping briny oyster after briny oyster and drinking sparkling wine while the two boys drank root beer and ate avocado rolls by the dozen. Then they had lobsters and corn, dipping the sweet,
succulent meat into the golden butter while the breeze coming off the harbor blew warm and brackish.
After dinner, Max, acting on an intelligence tip from one of the waiters, drove them along the bay side, where the beaches were tidal and the waves nonexistent, but the sunsets spectacular. They stopped at the first beach they found. The boys didn’t want to get out of the car, but Susannah wasn’t having it, not tonight, and she forced them to, and while they weren’t the only ones with this idea—the parking lot was full—it was hard not to love. They walked out into the soft sand and the sun, orange and big and from their perspective about two feet above the horizon.
They sat down on the sand. Freddy was on one side of her, and Max was on the other, Cal off next to Freddy. It was like watching a stop-motion movie, the sun bigger than she’d ever seen it, slowly sinking beyond the curve of the earth, leaving in its wake magnificent stripes of red, yellow, and purple.
She didn’t want to leave. Susannah wanted to stay until the last wisp of light left the sky even though with the sun gone it had instantly gotten cold. Reluctantly, she rose and followed her husband and her son and his friend back the way they had come to the parking lot. If this was going to be her last day, she had picked a good one.
The boys went to their room, as if they were back at home. Susannah knew it would be only moments before they were on their phones or the iPad, doing who knew what. It didn’t matter where they were, and while she wished it did, she felt so completely close to whole tonight, she wasn’t going to let anything get in the way of that feeling. Especially rules.
“Pour me something,” she said lazily to Max in the kitchen. The kitchen was small and dated and campy and smelled like Grandma’s house.
A moment later, he brought her a glass of white wine. He had one, too.
“Take me outside,” said Susannah.
He laughed. “Okay.”
They went out the screen door of the kitchen and it slapped closed behind them. They were on the wooden deck. The moon was out and had risen above the ocean, and when they looked out, it was still low but it was fat and its white light beat a path across the water toward them.
The Perfect Liar Page 20