The Railroad (14 page)

“She won’t,” Eileen answered sleepily. I didn’t pursue it; I knew instinctively that she knew her child, though I didn’t know how. Men are not always intelligent about these things.

She finally gestured for me to turn around. I’d barely gotten comfortable when she began working on my shoulders. “I never did this for Bob, believe it or not. It wasn’t that kind of marriage. There was a boy back in college. He was sweet and artistic but he was too much of a space cadet. But I shared a lot with him. I learned things about myself from him. I used to do this for him. I think he needed it.” Her hands continued to work, down across my shoulders and down the arms. I was already sleepy from being woken up and I felt myself going into sort of a trance. Her hands were surprisingly strong as they worked on the

muscles in my back and kneaded months of tension out of them. I hadn’t realized how messed up my body had become.

Then I felt her fingers working at the buttons on my shirt. A little voice in my head was telling me to stop and slow this down but I knew that neither of us wanted that. Putting her arms around my shoulders she started to work at my chest, pulling slowly at the muscles over my heart. “Men always get tense around here. It’s called armoring by some. A pretty common male reaction to emotions”.

“Where did you read that?”

“A text book on body work. I did a little bit of that for a while.”

Obviously she had, or so it seemed to me in my needy condition. Everything she did felt wonderful. “On your stomach," she directed. I complied and soon she was working on my lower back, moving in circles with her fingers, paying special attention to the area around my spine. By the time she got to my feet, I was half in a stupor. I turned over obediently when she asked me to.

I would have fallen asleep then and there except for what came next. She began to unbutton my pants and pull them off. “Is this part of the new age treatment?” I muttered.

“Therapy differs for each person,” she said, smiling.

“Umm...” I thought I should say something cautionary, but it didn’t come to me. I’d been asking for this for a few weeks and here it was.

She worked until my pants were off, then reached over to the night table and took a healthy sip of wine. I looked up to see tears in her eyes. “One of the drawbacks to living with a monster is that you lose your ability to be intimate. I didn’t want you to think that this was the way I am, just jumping into bed with men because my life is barren and I’m living on the edge.”

“I’m scared too”.

She nodded as if that explained everything. “I’d wondered what you looked like down there,” she told me. “Of course I could get some idea from seeing you every day but…” then she ran her finger slowly down the underside of my penis and my whole body jerked. “Ah, that seemed to get a reaction,” she said, laughing.

“I’m a little out of practice.”

“Didn’t Barbara ever do this to you?” she asked teasingly.

`I’d made the mistake of discussing Barbara with her once or twice and now I was getting it back at the worst time. “She wasn’t very inventive.”

“Oh.” She continued to stroke, very gently and I lost my interest in conversation. I had become so used to my drunken exile that I’d forgotten what it was like to feel passion. When she put her mouth on me I almost fell off the bed.

What happened afterward was a blur. I know that we made love; I remember some biting and some kissing. I remember a moment when Eileen was below me and she grasped my shoulders. Maybe I was afraid or maybe I was just tired and that drove some of the experience out of my mind. But I do remember that I came with the power of loss and desperation and fear.

*

When I woke up, she was gone. It immediately made sense; she wasn’t going to have her child wake up alone. It was after noon as I pulled on a robe and went out to see what was going on.

`I found them both in the kitchen and for a moment I felt that Megan somehow
knew
. But then I saw it was my own paranoia and I relaxed. Her mother had made breakfast for all of us and a plateful of eggs, bacon, and home fries lay waiting for me on the table.
This is certainly what a family is like
, I mused.

`In the next few weeks, Eileen and I made love a few times, stolen guilty moments while Megan slept. I felt like I was already the head of the household and that it made sense. But, at the same time, I knew that it would have meant explaining to Megan why her mommy was sleeping in another room and doing what she used to do with her real daddy.

Chapter Eight

The end of the world came for me, as it had before, in Manhattan. Somehow, looking back, it doesn’t seem so ironic.

We’d made it five months and it was spring. I had been worried that the girls might get cabin fever but, to my surprise, even Megan didn’t seem to react badly to confinement.

Five months. I had come to think that the thing that had saved us was the fact that only Elena knew where we were. The fact that my house wasn’t visible from the street probably helped as well.

I had decided on a small town in Oregon as my destination. What had finally capped it was a suggestion from an unlikely source. One day we’d been sitting at the breakfast table, talking about where we might go.

“Will we run to Canada like Uncle Paul if they come to arrest us?” Megan had asked suddenly.

Her mother had stared at her oddly. “Where did you hear that Megan?”

“I heard Daddy talking to Uncle Paul. He told him that he’d been ready to run from the cops and he would have gone to Canada if they tried to arrest him.”

Eileen had laughed. “That was years ago honey, during the war. That’s what he was going to do back when he was young. Not now.”

“Oh,” Megan had answered, considering what she’d heard. “Will we ever do that?”

It had gotten me thinking. It’s not that hard to get into Canada, especially if you go as a family. We all had our passports and I could explain away the discrepancy in the last names by saying we were going to Canada to get married. It would be a desperate measure, but perhaps we could get a lawyer there if we were found out and fight extradition.

So Oregon it was, close as it was to Canada. Still, somehow, I hadn’t done anything to find us a place to live. It still seemed in the future and there was no rush. I supposed that the reality of turning my entire life upside down permanently was a little more daunting than I had considered.

The morning everything came to an end, things were good. We were all happy at the possibility of moving and it seemed only appropriate that we make one more visit to Manhattan; I might never see it again and I wanted Megan to see the Museum of Natural History. I’d told her about the dinosaurs and she’d become fascinated with it, mentioning it a least once a day. Somehow I felt it was my fatherly duty to give her the opportunity to see it at least once.

The mood was good as I drove into Manhattan. After being gone for months it seemed like an almost unreal place, somewhere I’d been in a dream. Megan and her mother sang songs and ate cheddar flavored Goldfish the whole way in. Despite my happiness, I still scanned the road for police cars.

The museum was a resounding success; Megan practically shrieked when she saw the big dinosaur in the atrium of the museum, running toward it and shouting, “It’s big!” Her eyes were wide as we paraded her past the exhibits of early man, the wooly mammoths and the pterodactyls. I expected that she’d get bored somewhere in the second hour but she was just as excited at three o’clock as she had been at noon. Whenever we sat down to take a rest, she would pull our arms, urging us to go on. The only sad note was when she asked if they had a Museum of Natural History in Oregon. After a glance at Eileen I told her, “We’ll have to see.”

She was equally wired on the way back to our parking garage, pointing at her cardboard dinosaur hat and growling at us at each intersection we passed. She’d stop and look in any store window that interested her, commanding us to stop and see what she was seeing. By the time we made it back to the garage, she was holding both our hands, guiding and directing us.

The elevator to the third level creaked and groaned, eliciting shrieks of laughter from Megan. Everything was perfect.

As I worked absently at getting my keys out of my pocket, Megan chattered endlessly about the things she’d seen. She wanted a dinosaur of our own, it seemed, and it would be perfect to have one in our backyard in Oregon. I wasn’t quite paying attention as I worked my keys slowly from beneath my wallet. I’d just gotten them free from my pocket when I heard an unfamiliar voice.

“Eileen?”

I turned and saw Eileen stiffen; her mouth opened slightly. The woman who’d spoken stepped forward and stared. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “I thought it was you. Did you think that dying your hair blond would keep anyone from recognizing you?”

Eileen tried to turn away but the woman grabbed her arm. “You think you can just leave! All I have to do is call the cops!”

Eileen pulled her arm away. “Goodbye, Carol. I’m leaving. This has nothing to do with you.”

“Bullshit!” Carol hissed.

Just at that moment a man trotted from behind one of the dividers and pulled up short. He gave us all a belligerent stare, something that I sensed came naturally to him; he looked vaguely like a pit bull. “What the hell is happening?” he asked Carol.

Carol smirked. “Look who I found. It’s Eileen, the perfect mother.”

Pit bull digested that bit of information and his eyes got piggy and hard. “Where the hell have you been?” He took in her brassy blond hair. “You look like a whore,” he said, laughing.

“Nowhere,” Eileen told him.

As he moved toward her I felt myself moving forward. “Don’t touch her.” I heard myself say.

He smiled stupidly. “Who the fuck are you?”

I stared him down. “Get in the car, guys,” I told my family.

“That’s not the way it goes,” Carol chimed in. “She’s wanted by the police.”

“In the car,” I repeated.

Eileen and Megan began to move. Pit bull stepped forward only to find me in his way. “I still don’t know who you are,” he told me.

“We’re leaving,” I answered, steel in my voice.

Carol laughed. “Do you know that you’re helping a fugitive? The cops have been looking for her for months. She stole Megan away from Bob.”

By this point Eileen and Megan were in the car. I started moving back toward the driver’s door. Carol and her pet drifted toward me. “She’s a kidnapper,” Carol screeched.

“And Bob is a child molester,” I said.

That seemed to stop them in their tracks for a second. “I see you’ve been listening to her bullshit,” Pit said. “She’s always been good at fooling people.”

“I think you should just go away, now.”

He showed his teeth again in a canine parody of a smile. “You do. I don’t give a fuck what you think. She’s a criminal and Bob is our friend and it’s our duty to bring his daughter back to him.”

“So she can be terrorized and hurt?”

Carol finally lost whatever bit of control she had left. “That fucking bitch told you that he had sex with Megan? I’ve known Bob for ten years! Who the fuck do you think you are? You don’t know Eileen and you don’t know what she’s like. All I have to do is call the cops and she’s going to go to jail which is exactly where she belongs.”

Pit bull nodded his agreement; his wife’s words seemed to have puffed him up with righteous indignation. “Get out of my way,” he told me, his hand reaching for the back door handle. Megan sat only inches away, staring in horror.

I had gotten the driver’s door open and I casually bent down and pulled out the tire iron that I’d put under the seat for just such an occasion. Pit bull’s eyes went wide and he backpedaled a couple of feet.

“Phil! Don’t let him take her!” Carol shouted at her husband.

Phil watched the tire iron move menacingly like a snake. He licked his lips. “It doesn’t matter,” he said softly, not able to meet any of our eyes.

“What do you mean it doesn’t matter?” his wife spat.

He moved his eyes meaningfully at my license plate. I watched them for a few more seconds before I got in the car and gunned the engine. They stood staring dumbly at the back of our heads until my car jerked out toward them. Then they ran.

As I swung around the corner to the next level I caught a final glimpse of them arguing. The car squealed its way down two levels. The attendant was mercifully quick as he took our money. Finally we shot out into Upper West Side traffic, heading for the West Side Highway.

I was breathing so hard that it took me a couple of minutes to hear Megan crying. As Dad, there should have been something for me to say to her, but I couldn’t think of that right then. Possible futures crowded my mind, none of them good. It would take only a day or so before the police had my license number and my address and they’d be at my house. And I realized suddenly that I had a decision to make that I’d been avoiding for weeks. If I were to go with my new family it would have to be immediately, with no preparation. I didn’t want to use my credit card which means that I’d have to get as much cash as possible and hope that it would last until I could get more. Would they put a hold on my bank account?

Had I been fooling myself all these months? Did I really want to be a father at all or was it the circumstances of this sudden setback that were making me balk at leaving. I suddenly felt like a phony, a complete son of a bitch. I had told these two that I loved them; I had become their savior, the center of their lives. And now I was feeling…

It seemed that I was feeling resentment, resentment at suddenly having to flee into the night with nothing, to live a half-life because of their past. I felt like the scum of the earth for thinking that, but there it was. I was being backed into a corner.

No one had said anything since we’d left Manhattan and I had to wonder what Eileen and Megan were thinking. I finally stole a glance at Eileen, but her face was stone. Did she sense my mood?

The silence lasted for the rest of the two hour ride. When I pulled into the driveway, the two of them simply left the car without a word. I had the feeling that they had exchanged something non-verbal; Megan didn’t try to talk to me; she simply followed her mother. I followed them into the house and watched their retreating backs as they made their way into the bedroom. I heard only hushed conversation for a few minutes before I heard someone pick up the phone.

I walked into the bedroom to find Eileen holding the phone to her ear. Seeing me, she held up her finger to silence me. She spared only a glance at me and listened intently to the phone.

“Eileen Benoit,” she said quickly. “It’s urgent. Tonight. It has to be immediate. No, I can’t wait.” There was another pause and I assumed someone was discussing the situation with someone on the other end. “I’m at the same place. How far is that? I can make that. Okay. Thanks.”

She hung up the phone and put her hand over her face. Then she jumped up and grabbed their suitcases. I watched her pack for a second before I started feeling anger. No, it was more like impotence. I wanted to be able to do something but the one thing I could do was something I didn’t want to do. I’d be cut out of their lives because of circumstances and what seemed to be my own weakness.

I felt stupid and dirty and left out and I couldn’t stand it. “You’re leaving tonight?” I said finally, feeling I had to say something. It was a silly question.

“I have no choice,” Eileen answered, though she didn’t look at me.

“Is that the only answer?”

Then she did look at me and her eyes were fiery; there was no love for me in them. Had I ever really known this woman? “What do you suggest I do, Mike? Wait for the cops to come? Call my lawyer? I’ve already been through the legal system and we know where that got me. If I don’t leave here now Megan will go back to Bob and I’ll be in jail.” She looked away from me and continued to pack, shutting me out.

“I could go with you. I just need to get some money together. If we had...”

“We don’t have shit!” she screamed and I knew that there was more depth to her pain then our comfortable situation had let me see. It made me want to go with her even less. Before I could speak, she cut me off. “Don’t even go through the exercise, Mike. I know that you love us. But you can’t just go off like this and throw your life away on a half promise. This changes everything. I know that you don’t want to go. All that stuff about moving, well maybe it would have worked, for a while at least. But this is the reality of my life right now. I’m going to have to live out of suitcases and depend on the charity of other people for months, even years. I won’t be able to go out except to move Megan around. Life will be awful and tense and dangerous. There is no light at the end of tunnel. Can you live with that for months at a time? Can you give up everything you’ve worked for on something uncertain?”

“I can go with you. I don’t know what will happen either but I can go.”

“That sounds very fucking committal, doesn’t it?”

I stood there awkwardly. After a moment she sighed. “Look. I have to go. I don’t want to leave here with you hating me. You did more than most men would have. You gave us a head start. You gave us some hope. You gave Megan a father for a little while.” A tear slid down her cheek.

“You’ve been wonderful. But you can’t come with us. It would ruin everything we’ve had and I don’t want that.” With that she turned back to her packing.

Megan had listened to the whole conversation in silence. She simply stared at the floor and held her hands together. She was back in combat mode it seemed. At least distancing herself from what was happening was some comfort for her.

I stood there for another minute and then left the room. I sat on my couch, listening to the sounds of packing, an empty, awful feeling in my stomach. It was like I was in my living room for the first time; things seemed so vivid. The flood of feelings was almost unbearable. Perhaps ten times I resolved to grab a bag and pack quickly. I could probably get a good chunk of money from a cash machine. Maybe it would be a few days before they shut my account down. Maybe.