Saving Meghan

by D. J. Palmer

  “Please, please, Mrs. Gerard, calm down.”

  At that moment, several nurses burst into the room, eyes wide with worry. Joining them were two well-muscled orderlies who looked ready to calm the situation using any means necessary.

  “What’s going on?” asked the nurse who’d done the room check moments ago.

  “This food is what’s wrong!” Becky yelled. “My daughter wanted to try something different for a change, took a bite and got so sick, she threw up all over herself. Now she’s in the shower cleaning herself up.”

  Becky pointed to the bathroom door before waving everyone over to the bed, where they could view the food issue up close. All came willingly, including the orderlies. Loretta stepped to the side to make room. Soon everyone was gathered around the bed, bodies leaning forward, examining the tray as though it were a crime scene.

  “You call this edible?” Becky shouted. “This is absolutely disgusting.” Becky stabbed at the food with a fork. People leaned in even closer to get a better look.

  Becky risked a peek toward the open door. She gave what she hoped was a near-imperceptible nod. A moment later, Meghan slipped out of her hiding place behind the door. She looked briefly at her mother, eyes swimming with fright, before she darted unnoticed into the hallway.

  Almost there, baby, Becky thought.

  She stabbed at the food, yelling and cursing, accomplishing only one thing with her antics.

  A distraction.

  CHAPTER 41

  MEGHAN

  The hallway was empty. Mom was right—as usual. The nurses and orderlies were busy handling my mother, while everyone else on the floor was busy eating. I moved at a brisk walking pace down the quiet hallway, alert for any witnesses. I had the backpack on. I felt the pockets of my sweatpants for the cab money Mom had given me. Check. I made sure I remembered the address where I was going. Check. We wouldn’t have cell phones to communicate. Mom was shutting hers off and throwing it away. That was my suggestion. I saw a CSI episode where the police had tracked down the killer using cell towers to pinpoint his location, even though he didn’t make any calls.

  I stood in front of the food cart. First I looked left, then to my right. All clear. From down the hall, I heard Mom still ranting about the lunch. She sounded like one of those crazy people I’d seen in videos freaking out at a fast food restaurant because of soggy fries or something.

  It was now or never, I thought. Now or never. Pushing all fear aside, I opened the cart’s right compartment, where the mac and cheese was kept. It wasn’t hot inside, not like an oven, but there was plenty of lingering warmth from all the meals that had heated up the insulated space.

  I squeezed my body into the compact opening by pulling my knees to my chest. I had maybe two inches of headspace. My back scraped against the metal slots used for holding food trays. I let the steel bite into my spine without making a sound. I closed the door shut, plunging myself into complete darkness. Eyes open or shut, I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face. The lingering smells of salmon and mac and cheese made my stomach flip.

  Mom’s voice was muffled but intelligible. “You know what, forget it!” she shouted. “Just forget it. Please leave us alone, will you?”

  I couldn’t hear the water running in my room, but I knew that it was. The nurses would think I was in the shower. Even better, this impromptu gathering would count as a room check. It didn’t matter if the nurses saw me or not, because they believed I was in the bathroom—naked, wet, and sick from that gross lunch. It would be good enough for them.

  Timing was critical to our plan. We would have fifteen minutes before the next room check. By that time, I’d be out of the shower and lying in bed, my head turned away from the door so they couldn’t see my face. At least that’s how it would look to the nurse who came to check on me. In truth, there’d be one of my shirts stuffed inside the blond wig Mom had brought to form the shape of my head. The blanket Mom brought and a bed pillow under the sheets would create the illusion of my body.

  Mom would stay in the room until the second room check was over. She’d tell the nurse to let me rest. No reason for her to come inside just to look at my sleeping face. Then, Mom would say she was going to get some coffee in the café and she’d be back soon. But she wouldn’t come back. By the time the staff figured out it was a wig and pillows in the bed, we’d both be long gone.

  Sometime later—maybe a minute, maybe more, it was hard to track time in the dark—I heard footsteps approaching. Terror gummed my thoughts as I tried to concentrate on relaxing.

  Please don’t open the cabinet … please don’t open the cabinet …

  “Que puta,” I heard Loretta mutter. I felt a sudden jolt, followed by a squeak of wheels. The cart was moving. “Que puta,” Loretta repeated. I knew what that word meant and figured she was talking about my mother.

  I worried my weight would be noticeable, that Loretta would have a hard time pushing me out the door, but that wasn’t the case.

  “Bye, Loretta,” I heard a nurse say.

  Bye, all of you, I thought.

  Being cramped up was hard work. My stomach muscles were burning. My legs ached mercilessly. My hip joints started to scream, but I worried about shifting position even a little, so I lived with the discomfort. I heard the elevator doors chime open. Loretta gave a little grunt as she wheeled me inside. Before long, I felt myself going down. I thought of myself finally being free from this place, of going home, but not home. I was going someplace new. I let go of all doubts about my mother. It didn’t matter if she was making me sick or not. It didn’t matter if she was crazy or not. It didn’t matter if I was making myself sick. I was getting out of here.

  I would be free.

  Closing my eyes, I did the rhythmic breathing exercises Mom taught me and began to think of all the good things in my life. I used to keep a gratitude journal, and the entries came back to me vividly.

  My bedroom … my friends … my mother … my soccer … but him? Was I grateful for him? I gave it some thought as we went down, the elevator stopping to let people on and off. Yes, I decided, I was grateful. But could I forgive my father? That was the bigger question. I believed I could. But first, he’d have to own up to what he’d done. If he could do that, then he could join us wherever we were going.

  That’s what I wanted, what I imagined as Loretta wheeled the cart out of the elevator and into a room that smelled like hot soapy water. I heard shouting in a foreign language. The cart stopped moving. I listened for Loretta’s footsteps, but I couldn’t hear anything over the hum of appliances and loud talking. I snapped my eyes open, but it didn’t make a difference. The pain in my joints intensified. I had to get out from under here. But what if Loretta was standing nearby? What if she saw me? I listened as best I could. I had the sense I was in a big, open space, maybe the kitchen. I heard running water and lots of commotion.

  I imagined my freedom. Please, God, I prayed. Please protect me. I asked God to tell me when it was safe to go. I waited for a feeling—a kind of knowing, the sort I’d get on the soccer field when I’d send a ball into open space, believing in my heart of hearts that a teammate would be there to receive the pass. Almost always, I was right.

  I let maybe five minutes go by. By that point, my joints were on fire, but I could block out the pain. I pushed open the cabinet door just a crack. Light flooded the compartment. I peered outside but saw nobody. I pushed the door open some more. I could see now that I was in an industrial kitchen. The floor was lined with square red tiles. The walls were made of beige brick. The room held some stainless steel tables for food prep along with several industrial-size refrigerators. There were tall rolling carts holding trays of cooking supplies. Other carts carried stainless steel mixing bowls. The lights were bright, and the food smells overpowered each other to create an odor that could hardly be called appetizing.

  I crawled out of the cabinet onto my hands and knees. Scurrying like a cockroach, I took shelter behind one of those tall,
rolling cabinets. I poked my head out just a little to see Loretta and a group of kitchen staff all huddled together, not more than fifteen feet away from me. They were talking animatedly in a foreign language—Portuguese, I think—and from the angry look on Loretta’s face, I was pretty sure the conversation was focused on my mom.

  Loretta was doing a great job of keeping everyone distracted. I noticed a lit EXIT sign on the wall farthest away from the kitchen staff. I slipped out from behind one rolling cart and crawled to another, praying I hadn’t made a sound. Nobody looked in my direction. I followed the EXIT sign to a set of swinging doors. Keeping to the ground, I pushed a door open wide enough to slip outside.

  At last, I could stand. I looked for the nearest stairwell. I was dressed normally enough, in sweatpants and a zipped-up sweatshirt, so I wouldn’t attract attention on the upper levels, but I clearly didn’t belong down here. I took the stairs to the main level. There were people now, lots of them, going about their business. For a second, I thought they were all looking at me. I worried they’d recognize me from the news reports, start pointing, calling for the police, but I was invisible to them. I was nothing. They had their own concerns.

  Eventually, I found a bathroom, went into a stall, and moments later emerged a brunette with short hair, tortoiseshell glasses, and a long navy coat. I followed the lit EXIT signs like each was my north star. My legs were still stiff. My heart pounded so hard, I worried I might need to be resuscitated. That would be ironic—having a medical emergency while I was escaping the hospital. I followed the hallway to a revolving door that opened onto a busy street with lots of cabs. The urge to run was overpowering, but I managed to keep my cool and remain inconspicuous.

  I entered the revolving door and began to push. I was like a skin diver on her way to the surface, my lungs quaking with their hunger for air. Before I knew it, I was standing outside, and I took that big beautiful first breath. The air was cool on my skin—familiar and yet strangely new. Clouds covered a slate-gray sky, blocking out the sun, but I knew the smells of a spring afternoon, a fragrant vibrancy that made me feel reborn.

  I stuck out my arm, and a cab pulled curbside. I got in, closed the door, and gave the driver an address in Cambridge. Just like that, we were off, snaking through clogged traffic on unfamiliar streets. I kept my eyes open for the police—every siren was like a needle stabbing me.

  Something happened on that drive to Cambridge, to the Airbnb Mom had rented under a false name, something that brought the doubts I’d been repressing to the surface. For the first time in ages, I was on my own. I wasn’t under the watchful eye of my mother, father, or any of the doctors who were supposedly looking after me. And, finally, I didn’t feel so terrible. No fatigue. No headache. No switches going off. No intense cramping. No sick feeling. In fact, I’d never felt so alive. My body hummed with renewed energy. I felt a hundred times better than before—make that a million. Maybe I wasn’t sick. Maybe it was all in my head. Maybe someone had put the idea in my head.

  There were only two people in the whole world who could have done that—my mom … or my dad.

  CHAPTER 42

  BECKY

  Even with light traffic, the cab ride from the hospital to the rental in Cambridge felt interminable. On her way out of White, Becky had kept on the lookout for clusters of security, or a disturbance of any sort that might be a preamble to her capture, but there was only typical hospital commotion, business as usual.

  As the cab drove on, the next steps of Becky’s plan continued to weigh on her. How would they get new IDs? Would they need more disguises? When could they leave Boston? What about her mother? How would she know if Cora had died or not?

  Without a cell phone and no access to email, there was no easy way to contact her sister to find out. Becky thought she could safely make a call from the landline at the Airbnb, but perhaps the police, who’d soon be working an active Amber Alert, would coordinate resources even across the country. They’d certainly be able to figure out who Becky’s sister was and where she lived. Putting a wiretap on Sabrina’s phone seemed a logical thing to do. Becky had learned quickly that crime was easy to commit but harder to get away with.

  She decided to play it safe and not try to contact anyone. The worst thing that could happen was that Cora passed and Becky would not know. If that was a must, so be it. She could still grant forgiveness to her mother’s spirit, same as she could ask forgiveness for herself.

  The cabdriver, a stout man with a goatee and tweed cap, talked on his phone, earpiece in one ear, not listening to the radio. Becky wondered if they had discovered the ruse yet. Was the hospital going crazy, looking for Meghan? Had the Amber Alert been issued? Sunlight sparkled across the dappled water of the Charles River as the cab traversed the Longfellow Bridge en route to Cambridge. It was during this crossing that a thought came to Becky, another potential pitfall in her plan that she may have overlooked.

  Cameras.

  Becky was sure there were plenty of cameras inside the hospital, but she had no idea if there were any outside. If so, it was possible the police could pick up the license plate of the cab she’d hailed not far from the hospital’s main entrance. And that meant they could do the same for Meghan. Like most Boston area residents, Becky had sat glued to the television during the hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers. She knew how determined and thorough the police could be. The fact that they could identify the bombers in a crush of spectators by piecing together security camera footage from different storefronts was nothing short of astounding. The safe harbor Becky believed she’d steered her and Meghan into no longer felt quite so protected.

  Becky did not let the new worry consume her. Again, no plan was perfect, but this one appeared to be working well despite how quickly she’d put it together. The cab turned onto Memorial Drive, a two-way road that followed the snaking contours of the Charles River. Becky looked out the window at a crew boat tearing through the water, thinking God would keep her and Meghan safe, that there would not be any cameras that would lead the police to their hideout. She’d cash in all those prayers that her online community had sent for so long.

  Eventually, the cabbie dropped Becky off at a three-story apartment building tucked in a quiet street near Inman Square, a populated neighborhood in Cambridge that was within walking distance of the better-known Harvard Square. Becky paid her cabdriver, leaving a generous tip but not one that would stick in his mind.

  At the other end of the street were two grocery stores—a Trader Joe’s and a Whole Foods—but Becky and Meghan might be living off takeout for a while. She could probably shop for food wearing Meghan’s brown wig, but the risk might not be worth taking. During the planning stage, she’d found out that home delivery services like Peapod did not accept cash. Later, Becky would see if she could figure out a workaround so that they could subsist on something other than pizza and pad thai.

  Turning the dials on the portable lockbox attached to a bike rack outside the apartment to the code the owner had sent her over email, Becky retrieved one set of keys. She headed up a short flight of stairs to the second-floor unit. The door at the top of the stairs was closed, but not locked. Becky opened that door with her heart in her throat. Would Meghan be there?

  “Sweetheart?” Becky called out as she stepped inside.

  Meghan jumped up from the living room futon. She threw her arms around her mother, tears in her eyes.

  Becky held on tight, as though Meghan might float away should she let go. “I told you you could do it, baby. I told you.”

  Meghan’s body trembled, but soon relaxed. Becky stepped back so she could peer into Meghan’s eyes, checking her up and down to make sure she was perfectly fine. Both mother and daughter were overcome with an uncontainable giddiness, like a pair of bank robbers who realized they’d escaped with the cash and their lives. They laughed and they cried while fading sunlight filtered through the windows overlooking the quiet street two floors below.

  Becky acclimated hers
elf to her new surroundings. It was one thing to see a place online, but something else to be there in person. True to its description on Airbnb, the apartment was very private, which suited them perfectly. The place was furnished with an eclectic eye—country chic, Becky thought of it, with funky chairs, plenty of houseplants, and interesting art on the walls. Nothing here could be found in a Pottery Barn catalog. For sure it was nothing like Becky’s former home.

  Former. The thought of never going back to where she had once lived, abandoning those memories—including a box of Sammy’s baby pictures and clothes—struck Becky with force. She understood they’d taken but one step in a long journey.

  Becky and Meghan swapped stories from their respective ends of the escape. Meghan recalled crawling out of the kitchen, while Becky described her anxiousness descending the elevator, fearing a nurse would check the room before she made her getaway.

  “Should we see if we’re on the news?” Becky asked.

  Meghan figured out how to turn on the TV. They sat together on the futon, drinking water from tall glasses found in a well-stocked kitchen cabinet. The police had issued an Amber Alert. Becky’s and Meghan’s names scrolled along the bottom of The Ellen Show. At five o’clock, Meghan’s daring escape was the lead story on all the news outlets. Police formally named Becky as a suspect in the kidnapping of her daughter and mentioned that she was a person of interest in the mysterious death of Dr. Peter Levine. Reporters harped on the fact that Becky was also accused of Munchausen by proxy.

  “God, Mom,” Meghan said. “They make you sound like a crazed killer or something.”

  Becky said nothing.

  Both Meghan’s and Becky’s pictures were broadcast on TV. Meghan groaned when she saw hers.

  “Did they have to use that shot?” She rolled her eyes. It was a candid pic Becky recognized from her daughter’s Instagram page. Meghan’s hair was pulled back into a ponytail. Her smile was a little crooked. “And who sent them that anyway?” she hollered. “My account is private.”