descended the stairs as quietly as she could, but each footfall sounded like an explosion because there was no longer a runner to muffle her footsteps. Two weeks ago Rex had stripped the carpeting and refinished the pine stairs himself, ever the helpful family man who took great pride in his prison. She was sure he had removed the runner to better hear her as she came and went.
Downstairs in the front hallway she slipped into her coat and settled the backpack into place. The disposable cell phone that Moving On had given her was zipped into an inside pocket. She slipped it out and hit Redial.
“I’m on my way out,” she said softly when a woman answered.
“The meeting place we discussed?”
Janine calculated how long it would take to cross the neighbor’s field, take the back way behind his pond and over to a dirt road that ran about a mile west to meet her contact at a deserted barn she had discovered on one of her rare trips to the grocery store without Rex. After much uncertainty she had decided that sneaking away from the house alone, unseen by anybody, was the safest course. Her contact could have picked her up at the front door, but even if Rex wasn’t watching, someone else might notice a car on the quiet road, someone getting up for a glass of water or a cigarette. Someone who could give Rex a description and a place to start his search.
“Give me forty-five minutes,” Janine said, factoring in the cloudy skies, the absence of stars and the narrow beam of the penlight.
She slipped the phone back into her pocket and buttoned her coat.
She was ready.
Leaving by the front door was too obvious. Instead, she hurried through the expansive country kitchen, took the stairs to the basement and followed a narrow corridor into the storm cellar. The door opened onto what was little more than a hole. She found the steps up after carefully closing the door behind her.
Outside now, she slipped behind the row of trees that separated this section of their yard from a field and the woods beyond. The night was as thickly black as any she could remember. This was the most dangerous moment of her escape, the one she had been dreading. She had to be careful not to make noise or draw attention in any way. Even if Rex was nearby, he couldn’t look everywhere, be everywhere. If she could get to their neighbor’s property without being noticed, she had a fighting chance.
She had almost made her goal when she realized she had forgotten her son’s scrapbook.
“Buddy.” The sound was more of a sigh than a whisper. She had tried so hard to remember everything, but this golden opportunity to leave had presented itself too soon.
Tears filled her eyes. She had carefully, lovingly, assembled scrapbooks for both her children, old-fashioned scrapbooks crammed with photos and report cards and faded ribbons. Harmony had taken hers when she left Topeka for good after high school graduation, but Buddy’s was still packed away in his bedroom. Janine had planned to retrieve the album and take it with her, the last link to the son who hadn’t been able to find his way out of the morass of his childhood.
If she left the album behind, how long would it be before she could no longer remember his face or his sweet little-boy victories?
She had to go back. If she did, she could still make it to the meeting place in time.
Ignoring the sensible voice that told her to keep moving, she retraced her steps, fear expanding with every one. At the house she slipped back through the cellar, the basement and up the steps to the first floor. She was trembling by the time she reached the downstairs hallway.
She paused in the entryway, which was adorned with a dozen or more family photographs in gold leaf frames. Rex had arranged the little shrine himself. He had chosen an Oriental carpet made of the finest silk and placed it under a massive mahogany table that displayed the photos. Each photo had its own special place, and he always checked carefully after she dusted to be sure she hadn’t rearranged them.
Harmony wasn’t in any of the photos, of course, since she had left home without Rex’s permission, and Buddy was only in a few, because this was supposed to be the Rex and Janine Happy Show, visual proof that she had been under her husband’s control for more than two decades. The photos were taunts meant to humiliate and shame, horrifying reminders of the years she had spent in the prison of this house with a man she despised.
Rex was at fault for everything. Rex was the reason she was sneaking back into her own house, trying to recover memories of the child he had destroyed, trying to save something, anything, meaningful from the twenty-five years of hell her husband had put her through.
She was not so beaten down that she couldn’t feel anger. Now the attempted escape set it free. She grabbed the most hateful photograph of all, the one taken by the justice of the peace on the day of their wedding. There in the hallway of the Shawnee County Courthouse she was smiling up at Rex as if he had all the answers to life’s mysteries.
“What a fool.”
Before she realized what she was doing, she stripped away the cardboard at the back of the frame and pulled out the photo. She tore it into four pieces, then eight, and threw the pieces to the table. In moments she’d dispensed with another frame and mutilated another photo, then another.
Elation filled her as she shredded each photograph and each frame landed on the floor. But once she was finished, the pile of scraps didn’t make the statement she wanted. She needed something more, something bigger, something for Rex to find when he returned.
Something that announced Janine was gone forever.
She strode across the room and grabbed his favorite ashtray and lighter; then she took both to the table and piled the fragments inside the ashtray.
The surge of joy she felt as she lit the first corner was like blood returning to an unused limb.
“So goes our life together, Rex.” She watched the photos catch fire, and then she started up the stairs to Buddy’s room.
The scrapbook was in a box in the closet. She had been the one to pack away all their son’s things, since Rex had wanted nothing to do with that final parting. To her knowledge he had never come into Buddy’s room since his death, so she was hopeful nothing had been disturbed.
She thought she remembered which box the book was in, but when she began to dig through it, she realized she was mistaken. Minutes passed and her elation vanished, replaced again by fear. She needed to leave now. This time for good. Forever and ever, world without end.
She was just about to give up when she saw the shiny blue cover at the bottom of the last box. She unearthed the scrapbook, but she knew better than to take the necessary time to make room for it in the backpack. On her way out she stripped a pillowcase off the bed and slipped the scrapbook inside so nothing would fall out. Clutching the pillowcase to her chest, she was ready.
In the hallway outside Buddy’s bedroom she noted a strange smell, then a noise downstairs. She froze, but from here both the smell and the sound were unfamiliar, not the footsteps of a man returning home, but a crackling that seemed to be gaining steadily in volume.
She edged along the wall toward the stairs and paused, afraid of what she might see, but she had already recognized the smell. Her eyes began to burn, and smoke tickled her lungs.
Below her, flames were shooting from the flammable silk carpet under the entry table. A wall of fire separated the two floors.
As
