Escape (9 page)

“So did Jude.”

“Jude’s one of ours. You’re not.”

“But if Bell Valley is a refuge, shouldn’t everyone be welcomed?”

Maybe it was my words, maybe the sound of my need. Looking chastened, he set down his fork and pulled me close. “Just a warning, kiddo. I know how Bell Valley thinks. Once burned, twice shy.” The phone rang. The arm that had held me let go to stretch past for the handset. “You’ve reached the Red Fox. May I help you? Oh. Good God. No, we need decaf, too. That was s’posed to have been an automatic delivery. We’re almost out.”

Leaving him to business, I opened the fridge. It was stuffed in ways my own had never, ever been. For James and me, eating in was about bare essentials. I might blame that for my being a lousy cook, but I had been a lousy cook well before James and New York. My mother was a great cook. There had been no need for me to learn. I didn’t have to serve breakfast to upwards of twenty people a day, like Vicki did. Nor did I serve tea, and though I guessed that cookies and cakes would be baked fresh that afternoon, the plastic bins in the fridge said that the fruit tray would be huge.

I didn’t want fruit now. I
lived
on fruit—no, that was wrong. I lived on
salad
. Which meant I didn’t want salad now, either. Studying my options, I realized that I craved good, old-fashioned comfort food, which made Rob’s mac and cheese too tempting to ignore. Removing
the container, I heated a small dish. Rob was still on the phone. Catching his eye with a tiny wave, I pointed to the backyard.

With other guests likely gone to the Refuge for the day, I had my choice of seats. Not wanting to be too close to the woods, I headed for the Adirondack chair that sat at the trunk of the Norway maple I had seen from my room. Setting the dish on one of its wide arms, I sank into it, but had barely tucked up my legs when I saw a small, dark-haired figure scurry from the parking lot to the back steps. This would be Vicki’s baker, here to make those cookies and cakes. Head down, she looked like she didn’t want to be seen any more than I did.

She disappeared inside, leaving me alone with the woods.

The sun had shifted, shedding light on the face of the trees. I saw the broad, tri-tipped leaves of the sugar maple, the single, soft-green ones of the beech, and the paper birch, standing out not for its leaves but for its peeling white bark. At their feet were a bed of last fall’s leaves, as packed down as the winter snows had been heavy. There were spruce here, conically shaped, and more evergreens behind. I picked out the graceful arms of the hemlock, the blue-green needles of the balsam fir, and, towering above, the white pine. All would be rising from beds of moss, which I couldn’t see from here. Nor could I see the boulders that were strewn about in the forest, whether standing alone or guiding the brook.

These woods were dense. Level for a short stretch before starting to climb, they grew increasingly rugged the higher they went, eventually giving way to a bald granite peak that was easily fifteen degrees colder than the air where I sat.

And no, these woods weren’t for wimps. They held black bears with ferocious claws and fisher cats with ferocious screams. They held owls and the occasional eagle. And coyotes. Yes, there were those. They might not have been here lately, but I had seen one myself, first in the flesh, then in my dream.

Lest I’ve built it up into something it’s not, let me say here that the dream isn’t earthshaking. There’s no action, simply two creatures staring at each other, one human, one not. I see gold eyes that simmer,
though reflecting what in the pitch black of night, I don’t know. It’s always the same. We watch. We wait.

In time I wake up. And that’s when the heart of the dream takes hold. In those woods, I feel haunted. I awake to a stark loneliness, and I feel a yearning.

The feeling always fades, forgotten in the rush of my life until the dream recurs—and I do yearn for something. I don’t think it’s Jude. I love James. But Jude is wild and unchained, like the coyote. How not to envy that, when my life is the opposite? Particularly now. I had a decision to make. It wouldn’t wait much longer.

I needed another sign. A sign would tell me which way to go without my having to make the decision myself.

So I waited, keeping to myself as I vegged the afternoon away. Was I bored? Surprisingly not. Into my third day of escape, my limbs were starting to relax on their own. I sat, I walked, I read a magazine. I worked on the communal jigsaw puzzle in the living room, and when Charlotte wandered in, I coaxed her onto my lap and guided her hand to fit in a piece.

This was what people did with leisure time. I wasn’t entirely comfortable with it, partly because it lacked direction, partly because, much as I pushed it to the back of my mind, the weight of decision was there. Stay or go? It wasn’t a simple choice. There would be consequences either way.

As the afternoon stretched on, the air grew warmer. A dog barked, a robin hopped across the lawn. I watched guests return for tea. Not a one held a cell phone to his ear.

By the time Charlotte was in bed, the backyard was alive with a chorus of crickets. Charmed, I ate dinner on the back porch with Vicki while Rob mingled in the parlor with guests. She wanted to talk about Jude, grilling me about his letter until I finally brought it down from my room and let her read it herself. We talked about sobering experiences in life—Vicki’s dad’s death when she was sixteen, my grandmother’s when I was twelve, Jude’s friend’s when he was forty. We talked about Jude’s conscience having to be newly dreamed up,
since he hadn’t had much of a conscience at all when he was here. But if I was hoping for a personal ah-hah moment in which she said something that would shed new light on my dilemma, it didn’t come.

I went to bed in my room in the clouds, no closer to a decision. Then came the dream. It was late and very dark when it began.

Have you ever heard a coyote howl? It’s an eerie sound that undulates from high to low in pitch. The sound is often broken by barks or yips, but the howling is what makes you shiver. In some instances, multiple voices join in. Though coyotes mate for life, they often travel with others that help rear their pups. I had used the word “pack” when Jude had first told me this, but he quickly objected. Wolves ran in packs, he explained, and though coyotes were descendants of wolves, they banded more for domesticity than power.

In the darkness this night, I heard only one. Its howl wasn’t prolonged, but since my dream didn’t usually have a soundtrack, it was enough to jolt me awake.

I was lying in bed wide-eyed when the sound came again.

Incredulous, I held my breath. When a third howl pierced the night, I flew to the window and pushed it as high as it would go.

Vicki swore there had been no coyotes here since Jude, but either she was wrong or one had suddenly returned. More than one? I couldn’t tell. I heard a few yips and another howl, then nothing but the bark of a dog from a house on the green, and the resumption of cricket chirps in the woods.

I sat back on my heels. Maybe I was grasping at straws, but the coincidence was too great. There had to be some meaning to the fact that the coyotes had returned to Bell Valley just when I had. Could I leave until I knew what that meaning was?

Here was my sign.

Now came the tough part.

Chapter 6
 

I had to tell James what I’d decided. But a basic premise of trial work is that you don’t plea-bargain until you know the strength of your case. So I called Walter first.

I knew that losing my job was a distinct possibility. Associates were sometimes asked to leave Lane Lavash, usually for lack of productivity but occasionally for crimes as simple as sending an e-mail to another associate criticizing an equity partner. The firing was done nicely, with the associate simply told that he had “no future with the firm” and ought to look elsewhere, but the end result was the same.

What’s the difference between a dead dog in the road and a dead lawyer in the road? There are skid marks in front of the dog
.

Unfortunately, one dead lawyer in the road meant twenty live ones panting for his job. And my finding a job I liked better would be harder with this on my record. Lane Lavash would have little good to say about me.

Still, I was ready to take the risk. That was how strongly I felt about this all-wrong life I had built. I had to take it apart and rebuild. I had to salvage what was good.

James was good. At least I thought he was, assuming he wasn’t having an affair, which I desperately wanted to believe. He didn’t have the commitment problem Jude did. And though he and I had
barely seen each other in recent months, I did miss him. Tall and solid, he had a way of looking at me that made my toes curl, a middle-of-the-night way of pulling me into his body to spoon that made me feel protected. And the intellectual connection? When it was good, it was
good
.

Was Walter good? I resented his impatience and his nose-to-the-grindstone mind-set, but he did have one good feature—predictability. Since he always e-mailed me at 6:30
AM
, I knew I could reach him then. Lacking a clock, I turned my BlackBerry on and off three times Tuesday morning before the time on it was right. Walter picked up after a single ring.

“Yeah,” he said distractedly.

I cleared my throat. “Walter?”

After only the seconds it took for him to recognize my voice, he erupted in barely restrained anger. “Well, thank you very much for returning my calls, Mrs. Aulenbach. Would you care to tell me what you’re doing? Better still, would you like to tell me when you’ll be back, because there’s a shitload of work here, and you’ve left me one man short. I have a computer that’s going to waste. If you don’t value this job, there are plenty of others who do.”

Contritely, I said, “I value it. But I’ve been struggling with some personal issues.”

“Serious enough for you to walk out in the middle of a workday without a word to anyone?” he went on, and I didn’t interrupt. If I were to look at it from his point of view, he had a right to be annoyed. “That was Friday morning, Emily. I’ve been calling you ever since. Did you even check your messages?”

“No.” I had made a point to ignore all those dings on the few occasions when I’d turned on my BlackBerry. It was actually easy to do in the sky and clouds of this attic room, where the intrusion
really
grated.

“
No?
Well, I guess that tells me where I am on your totem pole.”

“It isn’t just you, Walter. It’s everyone. I’ve had my BlackBerry off.”

“Why?” he asked, as if I’d lost my mind.

It would have been easy to say that a family member was sick, but I couldn’t. I might be irresponsible, but I wasn’t dishonest. Besides, sitting on the edge of the bed in nothing but my nightshirt, I felt exposed. “I’m trying to figure out who I am and what I want.”

“Aren’t we all? That doesn’t mean we bail out on people who depend on us. I’m fifty-eight, and I’m
still
trying to figure out what I want, but I come to work every morning, and I do what I’m being paid to do.”

Maybe it was his personal work ethic, or his having three kids in college. Maybe it was just
different
for men.

“I see burnout all the time,” he lectured. “I’ve felt it myself. You can’t just quit. You have to work through it.”

I’d heard that one from the guy who taught my spinning class. “This isn’t a charley horse.”

“Okay,” he said shortly. “When will you be back?”

I cleared my throat. “That’s what I need to talk with you about. I have to be away from New York for a little while, and I fully understand the position this puts you in. I also understand that you may need to hire someone in my place.”

“But you’re one of my best workers,” he whined, and gentled a bit. “What if I gave you the week off? Can you be back next Monday?”

“No. I need more time.”

“How much?” he asked, but I knew how he worked. I had seen him bargain up the fee a client would pay. He knew the art of negotiation. I had learned from the best.

“Three months,” I said, knowing that I would never get that much but that if I started higher, I would lack credibility. Four months would have been beyond the pale in Lane Lavash time. Three months was an opening bid.

He was silent for a beat. “Are you seeing a shrink?”

“No.”

“Then who says three months?”

“Me.”

“I can give you two weeks. You have that coming.”

Uh-huh. Two weeks of unpaid leave. They called it personal time, and it covered vacation days, sick days, and family days. I would have had more than two weeks if personal time could build from one year to the next. I rarely used my two weeks; a day off was a day with no billable hours at all.

“I need more than two weeks,” I said. Four minimum, I thought.

“Three, then.”

“Nine,” I countered.

“Bring me verification from two independent doctors that you need nine weeks, and I’ll give you that.”

I was silent, trying to choose my next move, when he said on a surprisingly compassionate note, “Four. That’s my best offer. We never do this, Emily. The only reason I’m even considering it is that I like you, and that I trust that you can work through this and return to be one of the firm’s leaders. You know how to handle people. You could be our managing partner someday, and that makes what you and I decide right now crucial. We’ll call it an administrative leave, but four is the best I can do. I’ll hold your job that long.”