The Great Escape (47 page)

A brief, censorious pause. “You could live a more authentic life, Panda, if you’d do what I’ve advised and stopped transferring your anger to other people.”

“I’m hanging up now so I can find a window high enough to jump out of.”

But as much as he complained about them, some days it felt as if their intruding phone calls were all that kept him anchored. These women cared about him. And they were his only fragile link to Lucy.

F
ALL CAME EARLY TO
C
HARITY
Island. The tourists disappeared, the air grew crisp, and the maples began to display their first blush of crimson. The writing that had once been such a struggle for Lucy turned out to be her salvation, and she was finally able to send off her completed manuscript to her father.

She spent the next few days biking around the island and walking the empty beaches. She wasn’t sure exactly when it had happened, but through her pain and her anger, she’d somehow figured out how she intended to shape her future.

No more of the lobbying she detested. She was going to listen to her heart and once again work one-on-one with kids. But that couldn’t be all. Her conscience dictated that she keep using her secondhand fame to advocate on a larger scale. This time she intended to do that through something that truly fulfilled her—through her writing.

When her brutally honest newspaperman father read the manuscript and called her, he confirmed what she already knew. “
Luce, you’re a real writer.
”

She was going to write her own book, not about herself or her family, but about real kids in peril. It wouldn’t be some dry, academic tome, but a page-turner full of personal stories from kids, from counselors, all with the goal of shining a brighter spotlight on the welfare of the most vulnerable. Her name on the spine would guarantee plenty of publicity. That meant thousands of people—maybe hundreds of thousands—who knew nothing about disadvantaged kids would gain real insight into the issues they faced.

But having a clearer direction didn’t bring her the peace she craved. How could she have let herself fall in love with him? A bitter knot burned so fiercely in the center of her chest that she sometimes felt as though she’d burst into flames.

With the manuscript mailed off and October fast approaching, she called her mother’s press secretary, who hooked her up with a reporter from the
Washington Post.
On the next-to-last day of September, Lucy sat in the sunroom, her phone pressed to her ear, and gave the interview she’d been avoiding.

It was humiliating … I panicked … Ted is one of the finest men I’ve ever met … spent the last few months working on my father’s book and trying to get my bearings back … going to be writing my own book … advocate for kids who have no voice …

She didn’t mention Panda.

After the interview, she called Ted and had the conversation she couldn’t have had with him before. Then she began to pack.

Bree had been to her old vacation house several times since Lucy had moved back in, and she came over the day after the interview to help her close up. In only a few months, she, Toby, and Mike had become woven into the fabric of Lucy’s life, and she knew she’d miss them. But as close as she felt to Bree, Lucy couldn’t talk to her about Panda, couldn’t talk to anybody, not even Meg.

Bree perched on the counter, watching Lucy clean out the big stainless steel refrigerator. “It’s funny,” she said. “I thought coming inside this house would destroy me, but all it does is make me nostalgic. My mother fixed so many bad dinners in this kitchen, and Dad’s grilling didn’t help. He burned everything.”

Bree’s father had done a lot worse than burn hamburgers, but that wasn’t Lucy’s story to tell. She held up a barely used jar of mustard. “Want this?”

Bree nodded, and Lucy set the mustard in a cardboard box, along with the other leftover groceries she was sending to the cottage.

Bree pushed the sleeves up on the heavy sweater she was wearing against the early fall chill. “I feel like a woman of leisure not having to spend all day at the farm stand.”

“Some leisure. You’ve been working like crazy.” Bree had lost a third of next year’s honey to the vandals, a group of punks who’d been caught as they drove onto the ferry. But thanks to the summer’s dry weather and warm days, she’d still managed to harvest more than a thousand pounds.

“I’ll love Pastor Sanders forever,” she said.

The Heart of Charity minister had arranged a meeting for Bree with a wholesaler on the mainland who supplied a chain of Midwest gift shops. The woman had loved Bree’s samples: the flavored honeys, lotions, candles, and note cards, the beeswax furniture polish, and the one hand-painted Christmas ornament that had survived the vandals.

“The new carousel labels sealed the deal,” Bree said. “She loves them. Said they give all the products a whimsical elegance. But I still didn’t expect such a big order.”

“She has good taste.”

“I don’t know what I’d have done if she hadn’t ordered. Well, I do know, but I’m glad I didn’t have to.” She nodded again as Lucy held up an unopened bag of carrots. “I can’t abide the idea of being financially dependent on Mike. Been there, done that, not doing it again.”

“Poor Mike. All he wants is to take care of you, and all you want is to take care of yourself. You’re going to have to marry him soon.”

“I know. But the thing about Mike Moody …” A dreamy smile came over her. “He’s steadfast. That man is not going anywhere.”

Lucy swallowed her pain. “Other than in and out of your bedroom window every night.”

Bree actually blushed. “I told you about that in confidence.”

“The same way you told me what a lusty lover he is. Something I could have gone to my grave not knowing.”

Bree paid no attention to Lucy’s objections. “I really believed Scott when he said I was the one with the problem, but now all I feel is pity for his poor little nineteen-year-old.” The dreamy smile was back. “Who would have thought a straitlaced, religious guy like Mike could be so—”

“Lusty,” Lucy said, cutting her off.

Bree’s face clouded. “If Toby catches us …”

“Which he’s bound to do sooner or later.” Lucy added a block of Parmesan cheese and—resisting the urge to shatter it against the wall—an unopened jar of Panda’s orange marmalade.

“Mike’s getting more nervous about sneaking around. He actually threatened to withdraw his, uhm, services … until I agree to set a date. Blackmail. Can you imagine?”

Lucy closed the refrigerator door. “What’s holding you back, Bree? Really?”

“I’m just so happy.” She swung her legs, thought it over. “I know I have to get over my aversion to marriage, and I will. Just not yet.” She slid off the counter. “You’ll come back to the island to see us, won’t you?”

Lucy never wanted to come back to the island again. “Sure,” she said. “Now let’s get this stuff over to the cottage. And no long-drawn-out good-byes, okay?”

“Absolutely not.”

But they both knew it wouldn’t be that easy to hold back tears. And it wasn’t.

E
VENTUALLY
P
ANDA STOPPED COUGHING AND
his energy began to return, but he felt as if he had a limb missing. His reflexes were no longer sharp—not bad enough for anyone else to notice, but he knew. At the shooting range, his aim wasn’t as true, and if he went for a run, he lost his rhythm for no reason. He knocked over his coffee mug, dropped his car keys.

He read Lucy’s interview with the
Washington Post.
No mention of him, and why should there be? But he didn’t like the way her face was all over the news again.

He noticed a couple threads of gray in his hair. As if that weren’t depressing enough, his job wasn’t going well. The actress who played the secondary lead in the film had started hitting on him and wasn’t taking no for an answer. She was out-of-this-world beautiful, with a body that almost rivaled Dr. Kristi’s, and tumbling in bed with a new female would be the best way to wipe out memories of the last one, but he couldn’t even think about it. He told her he was in love with someone else.

That night he got drunk for the first time in years. He awoke in a panic. Despite all his care, the ghosts he’d been able to keep at bay for so long were coming back. He called the only person he could think of who might be able to help.

“Kristi, it’s me …”

L
UCY FOUND AN APARTMENT AND
a job in Boston while Nealy’s press secretary dodged an avalanche of calls from the media.
Ms. Jorik is beginning a new job soon and too busy for additional interviews.
Lucy intended to stay too busy until her first book tour.

On her last night at home in Virginia, she sat with her parents on the patio of the estate where she’d grown up. Nealy wore one of Lucy’s old college sweatshirts to keep warm but still managed to look patrician as she sipped from a mug of hot tea, her normally neat honey-brown hair rumpled from the early October breeze.

Her mother’s fair complexion and
Mayflower
lineage provided a marked contrast to her father’s darker good looks and steel-town toughness. Mat put a log on the fire in the new fire pit. “We took advantage of you,” he said bluntly.

Nealy cuddled her warm tea mug. “It happened so gradually, and you were always so cheerful about stepping in, that we were oblivious. Reading what you wrote … It was clearheaded and heart-wrenching.”

“I’m glad you’re going to keep writing,” her father said. “You know I’ll help however I can.”

“Thanks,” Lucy replied. “I’m going to take you up on that.”

Out of nowhere, her mother hit Lucy with one of the roundhouse punches that were her political specialty. “Are you ready to tell us about him?”

Lucy tightened her grip on her wineglass. “Who?”

Nealy didn’t hesitate. “The man who’s taken the sparkle out of your eyes.”

“It’s … not that bad,” she lied.

Mat’s voice dropped to an ominous rumble. “I’ll tell you one thing … If I ever see the son of a bitch, I’m going to kick his ass.”

Nealy lifted an eyebrow at him. “One more reminder of how grateful we all are as a country that I was elected president instead of you.”

P
ANDA WALKED AROUND THE BLOCK
twice before he worked up the nerve to go inside the three-story brown brick building. Pilsen had once been home to Chicago’s Polish immigrants but now served as the heartbeat of the city’s Mexican community. The narrow hallway was covered in bright graffiti, or maybe they were murals—hard to tell in a neighborhood where bold public art figured so prominently.

He found the door at the end of the hallway. A hand-lettered sign read:

I’M ARMED AND PISSED OFF
WALK IN ANYWAY

Where the hell had Kristi sent him? He pushed open the door and stepped into a room decorated in early Salvation Army with a cracked leather couch, a couple of unmatched easy chairs, a blond wood coffee table, and a chain-saw-carved eagle sitting beneath a poster that read:

U.S. MARINES
Helping bad guys die since 1775

The man who emerged from an adjoining room was about Panda’s age, rumpled and beginning to bald, with a big nose and Fu Manchu mustache. “Shade?”

Panda nodded.

“I’m Jerry Evers.” He moved forward, arm extended, his gait slightly uneven. Panda’s gaze inadvertently strayed to his leg. Evers shook his head, then tugged up the leg of his baggy jeans to reveal a prosthesis. “Sangin. I was with the Three-Five.”

Panda already knew Evers had been in Afghanistan, and he nodded. The Marines in the Fifth Regiment had been hit hard in Sangin.

Evers waved the file he was holding in the general direction of an upholstered chair and laughed. “You were in Kandahar
and
Fallujah? How’d you get to be such a lucky son of a bitch?”

Panda pointed out the obvious. “Others had it worse.”

Evers snorted and slumped down on the couch. “Fuck that. We’re here to talk about you.”

Panda felt himself being to relax …

B
Y THE FIRST OF
N
OVEMBER
, Lucy had settled into life in Boston and the apartment she’d sublet in Jamaica Plain. When she wasn’t writing, she was at work, and even though she was tired all the time, she’d never been more grateful for her new job and busy schedule.

“What do you care?” The seventeen-year-old sitting on the couch across from her sneered. “You don’t know nothin’ ’bout me.”

The spicy scent of tacos wafted into the counseling room from the kitchen where, each day, the Roxbury drop-in center served dinner to fifty or so homeless teens. They also offered showers, a small laundry area, a weekly medical clinic, and six counselors who helped the runaways, couch hoppers, and street kids as young as fourteen find shelter, get to school, work on their GEDs, secure Social Security cards, and look for jobs. Some of their clients had substance abuse problems. Others, like this girl with the beautiful cheekbones and tragic eyes, had fled terrible physical abuse. The counselors at the drop-in center dealt with mental health issues, medical issues, pregnancy, prostitution, and everything in between.

“And whose problem is it that I don’t know anything about you?” Lucy said.

“Nobody’s problem.” Shauna sank deeper into the couch, her expression sullen. Through the window in the door, Lucy could see some of the kids pulling down the Halloween decorations: flying bats, black cardboard witches, and skeletons with red glitter eye sockets.

Shauna took in Lucy’s short black leather skirt, hot pink tights, and funky boots. “I want my old social worker back. She was a lot nicer than you.”

Lucy smiled. “That’s because she didn’t adore you like I do.”

“Now you’re just being sarcastic.”

“Nope.” Lucy gently laid her hand on the teenager’s arm and spoke softly, meaning every word. “You are one of the universe’s great creations, Shauna. Brave as a lion, cunning as a fox. You’re smart and you’re a survivor. What’s not to love?”

Shauna whipped her arm away and eyed her warily. “You’re crazy, lady.”

“I know. The point is, you’re a real champion. We all think so. And whenever you want to get serious about keeping a job, I know you’ll figure out how to do it. Now go away.”