No River Too Wide

“Just let me grab my wallet,” Jan said.

Ten minutes later Taylor pulled into a space beside the curb of a hilly downtown filled—at least from what Jan could see—with restaurants and small shops with colorful, quirky merchandise displayed in their windows.

Taylor must have seen the look on her face, because she laughed. “You’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

Jan’s gaze wandered across the street, and her eyebrows shot up. “Well, if I can’t find anything to wear, I can get a tattoo.”

“Just wander a little.” Taylor pointed. “Go up that way and you’ll run into a few stores with clothes you might like. And if you don’t, we’ll hit the mall later this week.”

For Jan this meant she had to find new things to wear today, because Taylor was already doing too much for her and didn’t need to hold her hand.

“I’ll meet you back here about four-fifteen,” Taylor said. “If you get tired, there are plenty of places to have coffee, and there’s a park just up that way with benches.” She hesitated. “I hate to ask this, but if you need cash—”

“No, no, I’m really fine. I have enough money to see me through until I can find work. It’s a long story. But I intend to pay rent, too, until I find a place.”

“Don’t you dare. Pay rent or find a place. I need you, and I’m not kidding. Maddie’s so much happier now that I’m not dragging her all over the place.”

Jan knew she had to get out of the car, but her arms and legs felt as inflexible as steel girders. She forced herself to open the door, swing her legs to the curb and stand.

“See you back here,” she said, forcing a smile that Taylor returned.

When Jan closed the door, Taylor pulled out into traffic.

And Jan was alone.

She would have been alone in New Hampshire, of course. More alone than this. Here she had Harmony just a phone call away, although she certainly couldn’t call or visit her daughter without advance preparation. Still, just knowing she was nearby helped, and Taylor had told her if anything came up, all she had to do was call her cell phone.

Getting a new phone was on her list of things to do, a phone registered to the stranger Jan Seaton, but she would have to check into what questions might be asked and how she could answer them. The very basic disposable that Moving On had provided had limited minutes remaining, and she needed to save them in case she had to contact her benefactors.

The sidewalks seemed to undulate like ocean waves. It was unlikely there was any place in the Asheville area where she wouldn’t be walking either up or downhill, and for a while her legs were going to feel it. The terrain, like everything else here, would seem strange for some time to come.

She assessed her surroundings. To her right was a shop that sold chocolates. Across the street, beside the tattoo studio, was a café that looked to be closed, either already done for the day or not yet open for the evening. She trudged in the direction Taylor had suggested, to what looked like as major a street as she would find here. Some of the buildings were painted bright colors, and while she didn’t stop to investigate, the shops seemed filled with things she didn’t need. Jewelry, crafts, photographs and exotic statues.

By the time she got to the corner, she could feel unease turning into panic. The feeling was familiar, even if nothing else was. She had felt just this way on the evenings Rex was late coming home, not because she’d worried about his safety, but because trying to keep dinner warm had been nearly impossible. After an hour had passed, she had then been faced with trying to make something new, something quick that would still be fresh when he arrived. Nothing had made him angrier than walking through the door to find his dinner was dried out or just being prepared.

She told herself the kind of panic she had felt back then was finished. She told herself there was no reason to transfer those feelings to a simple shopping excursion. Unfortunately nobody knew better than she that telling herself something helped very little. Because for too many years at the beginning of her marriage she had told herself if she just learned to be a better wife, she would have a happy life.

She needed to sit down. Taylor had said something about a park. She saw a green space to her right and started in that direction.

The little triangular wedge was picturesque, with rocks that mimicked the surrounding mountains and a waterfall running over them. Cantilevered steps, or possibly seats, led to a flat area near the center. People were playing chess at one end, and not far from her a disheveled old man on one of the benches strummed a banjo. In between bursts of discordant music he fed a pointy-eared boxer bites of a sub sandwich.

Had she been snatched by aliens and deposited on Mars, she couldn’t have felt more like a stranger in a strange land.

She headed for a bench without an occupant and gratefully sat before her knees gave way. She closed her eyes. She knew fear. She understood fear. What she didn’t understand was why, now that the person she feared most was hundreds of miles away, she was still trembling.

“Got room here?”

The voice startled her, and her eyes flew open. A young man with dark hair covered by a colorful baseball cap didn’t wait for her reply. He sat on the other end of the bench and stuck his legs out in front of him.

“This is my favorite bench because of the sun,” he said.

She hadn’t chosen the bench for any reason except proximity, but now Jan noticed that she was sitting in a puddle of sunshine.

She wanted to move away. Her stomach was rebelling, and talking to a stranger seemed impossible. She had enough problems thinking of things to say to Taylor and Maddie. So many years had passed when simple conversation had been denied her that sometimes in Topeka, in the hours when she was home alone, she had pretended to be two people.

Nice to meet you, Janine. Tell me about yourself.

Well, thanks for asking. There’s not much to tell except that I hate my life and I can’t figure out how to have a better one and live to tell the story.

“Do you come here often?” the young man asked.

She ventured another glance. He was still sitting exactly where he’d flopped down, his face turned toward the sun and his eyes hidden by sunglasses. He had a strong profile with a nose like a hawk’s beak. Even seated he seemed tall and muscular.

“No,” she said.

“Been to the drum circle?”

“No.”

“You ought to give it a try. Crowd-watching’s a big part of the fun. Lots of different kinds of people come. Tourists... Are you just visiting?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s a good place to live if you’re looking for one.”

“Why?”

He opened his eyes and lifted an eyebrow. “Why is it a good place to live?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Not too many places where so many different kinds of people get along. Nobody stands out much here. You can be whoever you want to be, and nobody thinks you’re strange. At least most people don’t think so.”

“How do you figure out who you want to be?” she asked before she thought better of it.

He looked surprised. “Isn’t that the easy part?”

“No.”

“I guess you figure out who you admire, and you try to be like that.”

She admired people with courage, people who’d had dreams they’d pursued despite obstacles. People who had been able to protect their children.

She blinked back tears. “And if you fail?”

“Aren’t you too young to write off life that way?”

She wondered.

He stretched and stood, long arms reaching out as if to embrace the world. “I say go for whatever it is you haven’t done yet. You’ve got time right up until you draw your last breath.” He gave a quick, final wave, almost a salute, and strolled off.

She asked herself what she hadn’t done yet, and the answer was so overwhelming she could hardly breathe. If she took his advice, where would she start?

She gazed around the park, searching for a clue. Minutes passed and finally her heart rate began to slow. Then she saw the answer was simple.

“Blue jeans.”

It didn’t matter if she was frightened by everyday things that others took for granted. It didn’t matter if she felt alone in the world, something Rex had repeatedly warned her would happen if she ever tried to leave him. It didn’t matter that she no longer knew what a woman like her could actually achieve. Perhaps it didn’t even matter that she had failed at the things she had most hoped to accomplish and was still seeking forgiveness.

What mattered now were jeans. From what she could tell, she was the only person in Asheville who didn’t own a pair. If she didn’t want to stand out in the crowd, now was the time to remedy that.

She got to her feet, and her knees still trembled, but life was going to be like this. A pair of blue jeans. An afternoon alone in a strange—in more ways than one—city. Participating in a short conversation with someone she’d never met and wasn’t likely to see again.

Life. One step at a time with nobody blocking the way.

And if, for one moment after Taylor had dropped her off, she had yearned for Rex—who had all the answers as well as all the questions—then she supposed she could seek forgiveness for that, as well.

But first, one small thing. A pair of jeans.

This she could do.

Chapter 10

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

Some people believe violence comes directly from the traditional family, when one person is awarded all the power as well as the right, even obligation, to enforce his values or lack of them. Others believe domestic violence is caused by the disintegration of the traditional family. Neither view is true. Domestic violence is the result of one family member with sickness in his soul, and the desire to infect those who are weakest and most vulnerable. Sometimes fatally.

And yes, I’ve used the word he. The vast majority of batterers are men. Mine certainly was.

And yes, I’ve also used the word was. Now that I’ve left the Abuser, I have no doubt that if given the opportunity he’ll cause more and greater pain, perhaps ending our struggle once and for all, as happens too frequently. I’ve been warned that 70 percent of all women who die from domestic abuse die after they leave their abusers, as I left mine.

For now I’m free of him. I have dreams in which he finds me and exacts his final vengeance, but I believe that someday I may have just as many dreams in which I find him first.

* * *

Adam Pryor hadn’t known he could fly. He had spent most of his life on the ground, never realizing that if he flapped his wings he could soar with the eagles and vultures. Today he felt kinship with both, the eagles with their hooked beaks and lethal talons that tore the flesh from their prey, and the vultures, who fed on carrion, destroying evidence so the world could pretend death wasn’t an ugly business. Right now, though, he only wanted to get away, to rise above the clouds, up, up, just high enough that he didn’t lose consciousness and plunge back to earth.

He was especially careful about that. He never wanted to touch the ground again, particularly not the ground just below him. If he could gaze through the clouds, he knew exactly what he would see. A rural bazaar, a brief spot of color against a desolate landscape, with crude wooden sheds lining an unadorned village roadway. Sides of meat hanging from hooks. Yellow plastic jugs with labels in Arabic script. Shelves of cans, some which would have been perfectly at home in an army commissary and probably had been before they mysteriously disappeared.

Children. Boys in their long shirts over baggy white pants, colorful wool pakol covering heads. Girls in an array of colors, pants, overdresses, scarves over dark hair, walking or skipping beside their mothers.

He knew better than to watch the children’s progress. He had wings; he could fly away and should. Yet, somehow, he was powerless to do so.

Suddenly, despite struggling to lift himself higher, he realized he was floating downward. He wasn’t above the clouds at all. Now he saw that the clouds were really plumes of smoke. It tickled his lungs, then filled them until he began to cough. His eyes burned as he drifted. Then he picked up speed until he was falling like a meteor streaking toward the earth.

Through the veil of smoke he saw flames below, and then, as the air rushed past him, he could hear screams.

The wailing began.

“No...”

Adam tried to sit up but was only partially successful. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. The answer that left him momentarily paralyzed was this: he was inside a coffin or a crypt.

“No!” He struggled to lift his arms so he could feel something, anything, around him, but his arms were pinned to his sides. A scream gathered inside him, even as he saw light seeping through an unfamiliar doorway, and heard clinking and shuffling just beyond it.

Just in time, he remembered.

The ice machine near the elevator. A cheap motel on the highway. The only room still vacant when he had arrived after midnight two nights ago. The clerk had given him a discount—but not much—because of a bathroom sink that dripped without remorse and a shower nobody seemed able to fix.

He clamped his lips shut and forced himself to lie flat again until he could untangle the top sheet that bound him. Once he was free, he sat up and rested his head in his hands. In the hallway, whoever had needed ice at 2:00 a.m. rattled a bucket one more time, then slammed the lid on the machine. In a moment Adam could hear footsteps die away, then silence, except for a hum as the machine set out to replenish its supply.

Even the dripping no longer kept him company. He had fixed both the sink and the shower on his first morning, although he hadn’t told the guy at the front desk, who probably would have raised the price of the room.

Now that he was awake he wasn’t surprised that the dream had visited again. In the past year he had fought to get away from the same familiar scene a hundred times or more, although he hadn’t had the full-blown nightmare, this Technicolor, stereo version, for weeks. He had known he wouldn’t be lucky enough to evade it forever, but in the secret recesses of his psyche, that was what he had prayed for.

The one good thing about repetition? From past experience he knew that now he wouldn’t be able to sleep for hours. He could toss and turn and pretend all he wanted to, but deep inside lurked a realistic fear that the dream would return. He could try to sleep, but that stronger part of him would win.

He moved to the edge of the bed and turned on the nightstand lamp. These days he was never without a book. The motels he frequented didn’t always have working televisions, and it was too late to prowl...he tried to remember the name of the city...Asheville. North Carolina.

That was right. That’s where he was.

He rose and rummaged through an overnight duffel to find the paperback he had picked up at the grocery store. From experience he’d learned what he could safely read. Cookbooks. Certain biographies. Philosophy. He’d tried a romance novel one night, but that had kept him awake for different reasons.

He opened his selection and began to read about Abraham Lincoln. Like everybody else who’d been to elementary school, he already knew how the story ended, so he would encounter no unwelcome surprises.

His own story was much more a mystery.

* * *

Jan hadn’t slept well in weeks. Her final nights in Kansas had been filled with dread. She had known she would be leaving in the coming weeks, so in the middle of the night she had gone over plans, looking for a flaw or even a reason to forget them.

The devil you know...

Rex always slept soundly, so night was a time when she didn’t have to worry he might turn on her. Small infractions or imagined slights dissolved into dreams. She could lie next to him and let her mind roam. And roam it had—to all the worst outcomes.

What would happen if he found her as she tried to leave? What would happen if he tracked her to New Hampshire and tried to force her to return? What would happen if she refused? Would he make sure she simply disappeared? Even if her body was found, who would suspect that a church deacon and respected business owner had succumbed to his dark side and traveled that far to kill his wife?

After the escape she hadn’t slept well, either, because she still expected to pay a price down the road. All the years she had spent with him had made such deep wounds she would never be completely free of them.

For a change, tonight she had fallen asleep quickly, a deep, dreamless sleep that her exhausted body had insisted on. The shopping trip had been the final straw. Between the panic attack and the struggle to decide which jeans to buy, she had been so tired she had barely stayed awake during dinner.

Now, though, she was awake. Wide-awake and terrified.

The house was dark. No light showed under her door. By now Jan knew Taylor’s ritual. The younger woman usually went to bed about eleven, and she turned off the lights, everything except a night-light in the kitchen and another in the hallway bathroom. There were few street lamps in the neighborhood, and the one closest to Taylor’s house was shielded by a maple that hadn’t yet dropped its leaves. Only glimmers of light seeped in through the windows.

Clearly Taylor was asleep. If she was up, she would have turned on a light to make her way through the house. But someone else was creeping slowly down the hallway, or at least making his way through the kitchen. Jan heard someone bumping into furniture, not normal footsteps made by somebody comfortable with the layout, but intermittent thumps, a chair knocked into a table, perhaps, a small collision with a counter stool.

She forced herself to sit up and focus. The noise had been loud enough to wake her, but her head was still fogged from sleep. She could think of no other explanation for the noise. A stranger had to be in the house, and she was terrified she knew who it was. Rex had traced her to Taylor’s. No matter how careful they had been, he’d traced her. He was methodically searching for her room.

And when he found her...

Maddie wasn’t home, and she had Vanilla with her. Taylor was home, though, and if Rex found her room first...

She had to get up. She had forgotten to charge the Moving On cell, and there was no regular telephone in her room to call 911, although there was one in the hall. Taylor had decided that Maddie didn’t need a phone in her room, but the girl could take the one in the hallway if she asked for permission. If Jan could just get to it, punch in those three numbers...

Her body was stiff with dread, but she couldn’t lie still and wait for the worst to happen. She swung her legs to the floor and forced herself to stand. She listened. For now, the house was silent, but she wasn’t reassured. The intruder was probably getting his bearings after the last misstep.

She crept soundlessly to her door. The moment she opened it she might be spotted, depending on where the intruder was standing in the kitchen. Her best bet would be to crack the door just wide enough to slip out, then press her body against the wall. She might be harder to spot that way. It might buy her time to make the call.

The house remained quiet. For a moment she reconsidered. Had she dreamed the noise? If she got to the telephone and made the call successfully, would the police arrive to find Taylor embarrassed and she herself ashamed she’d made a fuss for nothing?

Then another subdued crash echoed from the kitchen, and she knew this was not her imagination. The knob felt slick under her perspiring hand, but she turned it somehow and pushed the door just wide enough to slide carefully through the crack. The night-light in the bathroom warmed the polished cherry floors but didn’t really light the hall. Jan thought if she could quickly slide past that thin puddle of light she wouldn’t even cast a shadow.

Another crash, and she knew she couldn’t wait for even one more breath. Blindly she slid along the wall, judging the distance to the telephone, judging it incorrectly, as it turned out. She nudged the table with her hip well before she thought she would get there. The phone fell out of the cradle to the table, then to the floor.

She might as well have set off a bomb.

With a soft cry Jan fell to her knees and searched for the phone in the darkness. But it wasn’t dark for long.

“Jan? Is that you?”

Jan jumped up. “Get in your room and lock your door!”

Taylor, whose room was on the other side of the kitchen, came out instead and turned on the kitchen light, nearly blinding Jan. Taylor sounded sleepy. “What’s going on?”

Jan searched wildly for the intruder. Taylor walked right past the spot where Jan had imagined him, her sleepy face screwed up in question.

“Are you okay?”

“There’s somebody in the house!”

Taylor looked around, then walked to the wall and flipped a switch, and the hallway, too, was suddenly bright with light.

“Were you dreaming?” she asked.

“No!” Jan took her arm. “I heard—”

Another crash from the kitchen. She stepped forward to shield Taylor, but nobody was there.

“Is that what you heard?” Taylor put her hand gently over Jan’s and left it there. “Listen, that’s our ice maker. It scared me at first, too, until I figured out what it was. Sometimes it’s perfectly quiet, and sometimes like tonight the darned thing sounds like Godzilla trampling Manhattan, but honestly, it’s harmless. I even had the repair guy out to look at it, but he said it’s this particular model and they’re all like that. There’s nothing we can do about it except replace it with something more expensive.”

“Ice maker?”

“It’s awful, I know. I’m sorry. I would have warned you, but I just didn’t think about it. Maybe I ought to disconnect it.” Taylor paused. “What were you going to do out here?”

“Call 911.”

“Glad you didn’t, although it would have made their night, I’m sure.”

Jan felt tears filling her eyes, then, despite her best efforts, slipping down her cheeks.

“Hey.” Taylor put her arm around her. “I’m so sorry. You must have been terrified. Did you think your ex had found you?”

Jan had never thought of Rex that way. Her ex. Not officially, of course. How did you divorce a man without revealing your whereabouts? But in every other way...?

She nodded, as much to her own question as to Taylor’s. “I was afraid.” She sniffed. “He might hurt you.”

“If you believed that, you were beyond brave to come out into the hall and try to make the call.”

“Please, I’m sorry I woke you. But can we check around a little, just to be sure?”

“We’ll check. Then I’m making us some herbal tea.” When Jan began to protest, Taylor stopped her. “We both need it. Humor me, okay? Grab the phone and get ready to dial if we need to.”

Ten minutes later Jan was sitting on the sofa beside Taylor sipping a steaming cup of chamomile and mint tea. She wasn’t sure what made her feel worse. Believing that an ice maker was an intruder? Waking Taylor from a sound sleep? The knowledge that for the rest of her life every unexpected noise would make her tremble this way?

“My parents were complete opposites,” Taylor said. “My father’s unbelievably tactful and understanding. My mother was blunt to a fault. If she thought something needed to be said, she said it.”

Jan wondered where she herself fit on that spectrum. Her job as a parent had been to soften everything her husband did or said. But if she hadn’t married Rex, who would she be?

“I’m more like Mom,” Taylor continued. “I’ve tried to be more like my dad, but so far I haven’t been too successful. Tonight, though, I’m going to be Mom. You’ve been through so much, Jan. More than most people could handle. I know it’s marked you. You don’t have to tell me. How could it not? I just wonder if you need to talk to somebody who could help you make this transition. Somebody who could listen and guide you through the worst.”