The Escape Room

by Megan Goldin

  I knew what she meant. I found it strange that Lucy stocked her fridge with yoghurts and a gallon of milk on the morning that she died. The convenience store receipt was under a magnet on the fridge door. I didn’t want to upset Cathy any further by pointing it out.

  Cathy was visibly relieved to have someone telling her what to do. We threw out most of Lucy’s food and packed away any unopened items for Cathy to donate to a soup kitchen. ‘Especially the spices,’ Cathy said. ‘Lucy would have loved to know that her spice collection went to good use.’

  When we were done in the kitchen, we moved to the bedroom. Lucy’s bed was neatly made, with the pillows perfectly puffed and the mint-striped quilt pulled out flat without a crease.

  Cathy took out all of Lucy’s clothes and put them in a box for charity. On the dresser was a photo of Cathy and Lucy, at a guess she was ten years old. Her hair was long and she wore a straight fringe. Cathy looked like a younger version of herself, with oversized earrings. Cathy wrapped the photo in bubble wrap and put it in her handbag.

  She studiously avoided the bathroom where Lucy had died. It was the only room still taped up with police tape. The door shut. I had no desire to go in there either. ‘The cleaners will take care of it when they come on Friday,’ Cathy said. ‘I’ve told them to throw everything out.’

  We finished cleaning out the contents of Lucy’s bedroom, leaving only the bare mattress and bed frame. After that, we moved on to the living room, where Cathy wrapped Lucy’s personal computer in bubble wrap and packed it away in a box along with a mouse and other computer paraphernalia. The toughest job was Lucy’s bookshelf. The bookshelf had been custom made to house the bulk of Lucy’s extensive book and record collection.

  ‘She has more books at home,’ said Cathy. ‘My spare room is filled with Lucy’s books and records. I don’t know what I’ll do with them all.’

  We made two piles on the floor. There was a pile of books that Cathy wanted to keep and a pile that she would donate. Cathy wanted to keep all of Lucy’s vinyl records. Some of them were collector’s items, she said.

  ‘Why don’t you have a look and see if there are any books that you might want?’ asked Cathy.

  I took a couple of novels that I’d wanted to read for a while and a non-fiction book that Lucy had spoken of highly. I packed the rest of the books in labelled boxes. The last thing to pack was a pile of sketchpads in an assortment of sizes. On the top of the pile was a clear plastic box where Lucy stored her charcoals and other drawing equipment.

  ‘Lucy loved to draw,’ said Cathy, as she flicked through the pictures in a large sketchpad from the top of the pile. I looked over her shoulder. There were sketches of city streets, buskers playing guitar. A man breakdancing – Lucy had captured the essence of his movements with a few strokes of an ink pen.

  In another sketchpad, Lucy had sketched in charcoal animals at the zoo, including a series of the snow leopard looking solitary. It reminded me of what she said that day, how the snow leopards reminded her of Vincent. There was also a sketch of a house cat curled up on an armchair. Cathy explained that it was hers, that Lucy had drawn it during an afternoon visit a few months earlier.

  ‘Lucy was very talented,’ I said, kneeling down to pack a pile of books in a box.

  ‘Oh, she sure was. Lucy was a remarkably —’ I heard a sudden intake of breath followed by a thump as the sketchpad fell to the floor.

  I turned around. Cathy’s face was grey. She looked unsteady on her feet, as if she was about to faint. She slowly lowered herself into an armchair.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked, kneeling next to her. ‘Are you ok? Can I get you some water?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ gasped Cathy, with her hand pressed to her mouth. ‘I have medication in my purse. The inside pocket.’ I unzipped the pocket and handed her an aluminium strip containing blood-pressure tablets. They were wafer-thin tablets and Cathy took one without water. She was still shaking but the colour was slowly returning to her face.

  ‘I’m sorry if I gave you a fright,’ she said in a daze.

  Her eyes were large. Pupils dilated. She looked at me as if she was about to say something important. I saw hesitation flicker in her eyes and knew that she’d changed her mind. I bent down to pick up the sketchpad. Before I could open it, she snatched it out of my hands and slid it into a box.

  Sylvie watched the words flash on the screen until it almost seemed to pulsate with a life of its own. She sensed Vincent’s mind ticking over as he tried to solve the puzzle.

  From her perspective, she had no interest in solving any more escape room puzzles. The only problem she wanted solved was whatever mechanical failure was preventing them from getting out. She should have been in the business class lounge at JFK, preparing to board her flight to Paris.

  Instead they were in what was essentially, when she thought about it, a tin can. Cut off from the outside world. So far nobody from the escape room staff or the building maintenance team had made contact with them. That frightened Sylvie more than the thought they were hanging by steel cables, possibly hundreds of feet above the ground. There was nothing she could do except remain patient.

  Sylvie was familiar with being patient. She’d mastered the art of patience over a lifetime. When Sylvie was a child, her father was posted to New Delhi as a commercial attaché at the US embassy. The heat had been unbearable in the summer. Her mother, Marianne, had been a ballet dancer with some success in a second-tier ballet company in Boston. She never adjusted to the heat or the cloistered life of a diplomat’s wife. She found both oppressive.

  Marianne used whatever excuse she could find to go back home, until she was spending more time in Boston than she was with her family in India. In the end, Marianne ran off with an old boyfriend, leaving Sylvie and her twin brother Carl with their father. The next time that Sylvie saw Marianne, her mother was approaching her at the cemetery after Carl’s funeral. Sylvie turned her back on her mother and walked off.

  Sylvie tried to suppress thoughts of Carl. She’d spent years blocking out the memory of the night her brother died. But in the dark and empty silence of the motionless elevator, there were no distractions. She had no choice but to remember.

  Carl had been sick with a bad cold. He’d wanted to stay home in bed. ‘We had a deal,’ Sylvie cajoled her twin. ‘I went to your party last week. Now it’s my turn.’ Carl had his driver’s licence; Sylvie was still working on getting hers. She needed Carl to drive her to the party.

  Carl relented, as he usually did with his sister. He adored his twin. Sylvie gave him a cold-and-flu tablet to perk him up. Neither of them realised the tablet that she’d given Carl was the night dose. It contained an antihistamine with a side-effect of drowsiness, especially when mixed with alcohol.

  By the time they arrived at the party, there were people swimming in the pool, some still in their clothes after having been pushed in. Others were spread out on loungers, drinking beer from a keg.

  Sylvie looked for Alex in the glare of the bright lights against the navy, starlit sky. Music throbbed loudly and some people danced on the pool deck. Alex was her latest crush and the reason that she’d been so insistent on coming to the party. Eventually someone poured her a beer, and then another. And then a few rounds of shots. She forgot all about Alex.

  When Carl found her she was dancing with a guy called Gary. He was a sleaze who did some petty drug dealing at their school. She wouldn’t have gone near him if she’d been sober.

  ‘Let’s go,’ said Carl, pulling her away despite her drunken protestations. He helped her to the car. She was so messed up by the alcohol that she didn’t realise that Carl was groggy too. He’d drunk two rum and cokes. Along with the antihistamine, it was a fatal combination.

  Carl fell asleep at the wheel on the drive home. Their car veered off the road down a grassy embankment. Sylvie was too drunk to do anything other than vaguely register that they were speeding towards trees. They hit a large oak tree with a loud crack. The collision
totalled the front of the car. Sylvie unbuckled her seatbelt and scrambled out.

  She smelled the fire before she saw it. She assumed that Carl was getting out too. Her shirt caught fire from a spark and she immediately patted out the flames. She didn’t notice that Carl hadn’t made his way out of the car. The crackle of the flames was so loud that, at first, she didn’t hear him scream for help.

  When she turned back to check on him, she saw that he was still in his seat, desperately trying to get out. Flames licked the hood of the car. By the time Sylvie reached Carl’s door, it was too late. The handle was too hot to touch and flames were everywhere. Her last memory of Carl was the way he looked at her through the crackle of orange flames, helpless.

  Her dad and her shrink told her that she wasn’t to blame for Carl’s death. She knew that wasn’t true. If she’d really wanted to, she could have saved him.

  Sylvie spent weeks in the hospital burns unit. Her father initially had the room’s television taken away and banned the nurses from bringing her any reading material other than the pile of books he left her. He didn’t want Sylvie to see the tabloid coverage of the accident.

  ‘Teen model suffers third-degree burns as twin dies in fiery crash.’ One of the more unsavoury headlines said something like, ‘Teen model runs to safety, leaves twin brother to burn alive.’ They always used the same photograph: a magazine cover of Sylvie on the water’s edge in Bermuda, wearing a white bikini and pouting towards the camera.

  It took Sylvie years of therapy to come to terms with what she’d done to Carl. Wittingly or unwittingly. It didn’t matter. That was nuance. She’d killed her brother as good as if she’d put a knife in him.

  Sometimes she thought it was liberating – to know what she was capable of doing. Once a person had killed, surely it wouldn’t be too hard to do it again.

  It was about two months after Lucy died that my flatmate Amanda convinced me to go with her to a party. Amanda was a management consultant at a Big Three consulting firm. She loved the work, but was less enamoured with the travel. She was on the road three weeks out of four. When she did come home, she arrived on a Friday night and flew out on the Sunday evening.

  She knew what she signed up for when she went into management consulting. The travel was notoriously brutal. As with everything in life, she quickly discovered there was a difference between theory and reality.

  ‘It doesn’t take long for business-class airplane seats and five star hotels to lose their novelty,’ she told me when I went on my first business trip for Stanhope. She was right. The gloss wore off quickly.

  Amanda’s constant absences meant that I had the apartment to myself most of the time. It was a luxury that initially I savoured after my awful experience with Stacey, my roommate in Chicago. But after Lucy died, my apartment felt cold and unwelcoming with its assembly-line furniture and mass-produced wall prints that seemed to suck the life out of me.

  I took little pleasure in being home. It was a place to sleep, nothing more. I preferred being at the office, or working out at the gym until I was soaked through with sweat. That way I didn’t have to deal with what had happened to Lucy.

  I refused invitations from colleagues for after work drinks and rarely attended parties. On one occasion, Vincent left tickets on my desk to the opening of the Broadway production of Hair. I had the impression it was his way of thanking me for helping Lucy’s mother. I took the tickets, but changed my mind and gave them to a random couple in the elevator of my apartment building. They looked stunned by their good luck.

  ‘What if?’ questions about Lucy ate into my conscience like sulphuric acid. What if I hadn’t volunteered to go to Seattle to help out on the bid for a mining company in Alaska? What if I’d been around in those last few days before she died? Would things have turned out differently?

  The biggest question related to a call I received a few days before Lucy’s death. I was working to a deadline at our Seattle office and didn’t notice my phone ringing. It was early morning New York time when I checked my phone and saw two missed calls from Lucy one minute apart.

  I fully intended to call Lucy back first thing the next day, but I was caught up fielding one of a dozen minor crises that plagued that deal. When I did find time to call Lucy that evening, she didn’t pick up.

  What if I’d answered Lucy’s calls? Would she still be alive? Lucy wasn’t one for phone calls, she usually texted. That she called me not once but twice suggested that something was seriously wrong. I should have made an effort to get hold of her. If only I’d thought more about my friend than my career.

  I did everything that I could to block out the guilt that gnawed at me. Longer hours. Spin classes or cross-training until I could barely move except to come home, shower and fall asleep from exhaustion.

  One night in the middle of the week I came home and the apartment lights were on. Mellow jazz music was playing in the living room. Amanda was home. I heard the sound of vegetables being expertly cut in the kitchen. One of Amanda’s many talents was cordon bleu cooking.

  ‘I made salmon frittata and salad,’ she called out as I came in.

  ‘Thanks, but I’m not really hungry.’

  ‘Sara, you have to join me. I have enough food here for the cast of a Steven Soderbergh movie.’

  Amanda was a self-confessed film buff with a particular passion for ensemble-cast movies. She was born in Pittsburgh, the daughter of Vietnamese parents who’d emigrated as children during the Vietnam War, via refugee camps. Her dad worked as a stone mason. Her mother managed the business, growing it into a large company that made stone benchtops for kitchens all over the city. Her parents worked hard to send Amanda and her sister to a private Catholic school, where they both graduated valedictorian of their respective classes.

  Amanda had graduated from Columbia Business School. She had a huge group of friends who’d stayed in New York after school. Over dinner, Amanda told me that she’d be back in town for a while. She’d been promoted to associate in record time and had now been assigned to a project three blocks from our apartment.

  ‘How’s that for convenience!’ she said, as if it was a coincidence instead of the product of months of determined lobbying.

  It lifted my mood, having Amanda around. She often made dinner for us both. When she went out with her friends she always invited me along. I usually thought up an excuse quickly enough, but Amanda was nothing if not persistent.

  ‘What are you doing tonight?’ she asked when I arrived home on a Saturday evening, having spent the entire day at the office with a quick stop for a boxing class. I was sticky with sweat. I threw my bag and water bottle into my room before heading for the bathroom.

  ‘Showering,’ I answered. ‘Then I’ll put on a movie and probably fall asleep on the sofa. I’ve had a hell of a week.’

  ‘You’ve gotta be kidding! It’s Saturday night.’

  ‘I would never joke about something as serious as my Saturday night plans.’

  ‘They’re the plans of a geriatric! Come on, Sara, you can do that when you turn eighty.’ She stood in the corridor, blocking my path to the bathroom.

  ‘After the week I’ve had, I feel like I’m eighty,’ I said, circling around her to get to the bathroom.

  ‘Not tonight,’ she said emphatically. ‘Tonight is my birthday and you’re invited to my party. So put on something glamorous and let’s get the hell out of here.’

  ‘Where’s your party?’ I asked, purely out of politeness. I had not one iota of desire to go partying, though I felt a twinge of guilt because Amanda always put herself out for me.

  ‘At my friend Nina’s place,’ she said. ‘In Brooklyn. We’ll take a cab over. It’s a surprise party so … pretend to be surprised.’

  ‘If it’s such a big surprise, how do you know about it?’

  ‘Oh, we’re supposed to go out for dinner. Then Nina calls me this morning, asking me to come by her apartment first. She says she needs advice selecting wallpaper for her new apartment,
’ Amanda laughs. ‘She says she’s desperate for my help. “You have such amazing taste, Amanda.” Yeah right. I wasn’t born yesterday.’ She gave a dramatic eye-roll. ‘Sara, please, you have to help me out here. I hate surprise parties.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ I said, disappearing into the bathroom. I figured I’d come up with an excuse while I showered. I didn’t count on Amanda’s determination – she was waiting for me outside the bathroom with her arms crossed as I exited a few minutes later in a cloud of steam, a fluffy towel wrapped around me and moisturising cream slathered all over my face.

  ‘I won’t take no for an answer, Sara,’ she called after me as I scuttled into my bedroom. I rubbed body lotion into my legs while I decided whether to change into my pyjamas or put on something cute for a party.

  I emerged from my bedroom ten minutes later wearing a short black dress and shoestring heels. I put on a long necklace of coloured beads and top-knotted my hair. Amanda and I arrived at her friend’s house not long after 7 p.m.

  Nina opened the door, barely acknowledging me, and mumbled something about how the wallpaper samples were in the living room.

  ‘Surprise!’ The screams were so loud and sudden that I almost jumped. Even though I’d been well prepped, it scared me silly. Amanda, on the other hand, put on a masterful performance.

  ‘Oh my gosh,’ she screeched, her hand to her mouth in shock. ‘I can’t believe you guys did this! You are so awesome.’

  Gold and silver helium balloons were suspended in the air, spelling out ‘Happy birthday Amanda’. There was a table of liquor and another with chicken wings, sushi and other finger food, as well as bowls filled with the remnants of chips.

  The place was so crowded that people were pressing up against each other, struggling to make space for Amanda, who went through the room hugging her friends and jokingly admonishing them for arranging the party. ‘I had no idea you were so good at keeping secrets! This has to go down as my best birthday ever.’ She was so sweetly sincere that I almost believed her.