The Escape Room

by Megan Goldin

  Vincent put the back of his hand to Sam’s pasty forehead and shook his head, much as the vet had done when he’d examined Prince’s leg.

  ‘His fever seems very high,’ said Vincent. He asked Jules to quickly switch on his phone again for light and rolled up Sam’s left sleeve. Red threads ran up and down Sam’s arm and his skin felt warm and inflamed.

  ‘He has an infection. He needs to get medical treatment soon,’ said Vincent.

  ‘What happens if he doesn’t?’ Jules asked.

  ‘He could die.’ Vincent’s voice was raw with worry.

  Exhausted, hot and desperate for a drink, Jules was struck by the uncharitable thought that things might work out in his favour if Sam died. It would certainly improve the odds of him being selected for Eric Miles’s old job. Without Sam, there would be one less contender.

  I was going through my address book while doing my Christmas correspondence when I came across Cathy’s email address. I’d lost touch with her after she moved to live with her sister. I picked up the phone to call her. It was Sunday evening and I figured this would be as good a time as any to call.

  ‘Hello, is that Cathy Marshall?’ I asked when an older woman answered the phone.

  ‘No, it’s not.’ The woman’s voice sounded like a deeper version of Cathy’s. ‘Who are you, please?’ It must have been Cathy’s sister. She probably thought I was trying to sell her something.

  ‘My name is Sara,’ I said. ‘I was a friend of Cathy’s daughter, Lucy. I called to see how Cathy has settled in and to wish her happy Christmas.’

  A long silence followed. She was still there – I could hear the television blaring in the background – but she didn’t say a word. ‘Is everything alright with Cathy?’ I asked. ‘Can I speak with her?’

  ‘Cathy’s not, er, not here.’

  ‘Is she on holiday?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m sorry to tell you this. Cathy’s dead.’

  ‘Dead?’ I remembered when Cathy almost collapsed while we were packing up Lucy’s apartment. I’d had to find her medication for her. ‘I didn’t realise Cathy’s heart problems were that serious.’

  ‘It wasn’t her heart,’ she responded. ‘Cathy was killed in a hit-and-run. Five days before she was due to move here with me. She was crossing the road by the supermarket near her apartment. The car came out of nowhere, knocked her down, didn’t stop. The coroner said that she was probably already dead before she hit the ground.’

  When I got off the phone with Cathy’s sister I sat down robotically on the nearest chair. The news was incomprehensible. For months I’d been imagining Cathy living happily in Baltimore, enjoying a new life away from the tragedy of Lucy’s death. Except Cathy never even made it there. She’d died a few days after I visited her apartment.

  When Kevin arrived at my place after the gym to join me for dinner he found me curled up in an armchair, staring into space. ‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.

  ‘The mother of a friend died in a hit-and-run. It happened over the summer, but I just found out.’

  ‘That’s awful,’ he said dutifully. He sat down on the arm of the chair and hugged me against his chest. ‘Anyone I know?’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t know her.’ I stood abruptly. I wanted to be alone. I went back to the kitchen and finished cutting vegetables for a salad while I put the pasta in a pot of boiling water. I had never told Kevin about Lucy, it just never came up in conversation.

  After dinner, Kevin booted up his laptop to write emails he needed to send before his early morning flight to San Francisco. I took out my computer as well, but I couldn’t concentrate on my work, even though it was due the next afternoon.

  I was curious about what had happened with Cathy. I vividly remembered the day she invited me to her apartment in Queens; her warmth and then the sudden switch into conspiracy theories when she suggested that Stanhope had been a factor in Lucy’s death. At the time, I chalked it up to grief. But I also remembered all those locks on Cathy’s door and the way she carefully looked through the peephole before opening it.

  I searched for newspaper articles from around the time when Cathy was killed. A few articles came up. One was a front-page story in a local Queens newspaper: ‘Shopper killed in hit-and-run’. The newspaper illustrated the story with a photograph of a shopping bag filled with groceries lying in the middle of the road alongside a carton of smashed eggs. One of the egg yolks was on the dirty grey asphalt, a splatter of red blood running through it.

  One article said the car that killed Cathy was stolen. Another had a still from CCTV footage, showing the car driving away. The driver wore sunglasses and a baseball cap. Between the hat and the tinted windows of the car, the papers said there was no way for the cops to pull together so much as a rough composite sketch of the driver.

  There was something about the driver that reminded me of the man who followed me to the subway when I left Cathy’s apartment.

  I found another article with quotes from a cab driver who’d witnessed the collision close-up. He told the reporter that the driver swerved intentionally and then accelerated in the seconds before he hit Cathy. ‘It was as if he’d chosen to hit her out of all the people crossing the road,’ he said. ‘It seemed personal.’

  I could find no other newspaper articles about Cathy’s death. It was overtaken by other car accidents, other suburban tragedies. I couldn’t find any updates on whether the driver who killed Cathy was ever arrested. I eventually found a five-page coroner’s report on Cathy’s death, which was in the public records on a government website.

  It appeared that a homicide unit was briefly assigned the case. They looked into Cathy’s financial and personal affairs but found no obvious motive. The coroner said there was no indication that anyone would want to kill a woman in her late fifties with no romantic entanglements, no ties to criminals, no involvement in drugs, gambling or the sex industry, and no children to fight over what was anyway a relatively insignificant inheritance. He also noted that there was no indication that it was a thrill killing. In the end, the coroner chalked up Cathy’s death to a gangbanger in a stolen car, driving too fast and not looking where he was going. I stared pensively at my laptop screen.

  ‘What’re you looking at, hon?’ Kevin asked.

  ‘My friend’s mother, the one who was killed – it made me curious. It’s strange that I didn’t know she was dead until now.’

  ‘Were you close?’ Kevin asked. ‘It’s obviously hit you hard.’

  ‘No, we weren’t close,’ I said. ‘But I think we were united by grief. Her daughter, my friend Lucy, she died quite tragically. I felt responsible for keeping an eye on her mother. I did a pretty awful job of it, to be honest. Hell, it took me six months to find out she was dead.’

  ‘Don’t beat yourself up, babe,’ Kevin said. ‘You work longer hours than I do, and I’m no slouch in that department. Ease up a bit.’

  ‘It comes with the territory,’ I said. ‘If I want to move up in the firm then I have to work the hours.’

  ‘Stanhope won’t fire you if you cut back a bit.’ He lifted up my chin so that I was looking into his bottomless hazel eyes filled with intensity and something else that I couldn’t quite decipher. ‘They think the world of you, Sara. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you. The thing is …’ He hesitated.

  ‘What?’

  ‘If things develop between us, it’s just not sustainable that we both work such demanding hours. We’d never see each other.’

  ‘What do you mean “develop”?’

  Kevin shrugged. ‘We barely see each other some weeks.’

  ‘Whose fault is that?’ I asked, defensive. ‘You’re on the west coast two weeks out of four. I try my best to arrange my own travel so that I’m here when you’re in town. I know it doesn’t always work out, but I really do try.’

  ‘I’m not blaming you, Sara,’ Kevin said softly. ‘What I am trying to say – in my clumsy way – is that we should co-ordinate better. I want to spend more time with
you, Sara.’

  He gave me a long kiss. ‘I have a suggestion,’ he said. ‘Let’s have a moratorium on computers and phones when we’re together. I can think of a lot more interesting things to do.’

  ‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ I said, and he closed my laptop with his free hand.

  Later that night, I lay awake in bed listening to Kevin sleeping soundly beside me. I was still reeling from the news of Cathy’s death. I’d met Cathy twice in my life, yet I felt as if I’d lost a close friend. I suppose it was because of the way she was killed, and just as she was trying to get her life back on track.

  I wondered whether I should contact the police and tell them what I remembered from my visit to Queens. The way Cathy had been extra particular about her personal safety. Checking the corridor through the peephole, the locks and security chain on the door.

  Perhaps I should tell them about the hair-raising feeling that I had when I left Cathy’s apartment and walked to the subway. It had felt as if I was being followed, and then someone with similar clothes to the description of the hit-and-run driver seemed to follow me onto the train.

  And on top of all that, there was Cathy’s theory that Stanhope had been involved in Lucy’s death, though she never said how.

  When I woke in the morning, Kevin was gone and I was more rational. If I contacted the police I’d sound just as paranoid as Cathy had sounded to me when she blamed the firm for Lucy’s death.

  I didn’t get the chance to debate the merits further. It quickly slipped my mind as I became consumed in another high-octane deal that took over my life for a month. And just as that deal was being closed, I received a frantic call from my mother in the middle of the night.

  ‘Dad collapsed,’ she said. ‘He’s in intensive care at Chicago General. They don’t think they can save him this time. You’d better come, Sara.’

  Dad’s doctors said his kidneys were failing. They gave him a week to live, two at the most. I immediately arranged to work from the firm’s Chicago office so that I could be with my parents. I didn’t have the luxury of taking unpaid leave, which Vincent suggested when I told him what had happened. My parents’ basic medical insurance didn’t cover the full cost of Dad’s treatment. The hospital bill would run into tens of thousands of dollars. I was the one who’d have to pay the bill.

  I stayed at my parents’ apartment with my mom. Most days I headed to the hospital straight after work, usually in the late afternoon or early evening, to sit with Mom at Dad’s beside or give her a chance to go home and rest while I took on the night duty of being by his side.

  There is nothing pleasant about a death vigil in a hospital. The man in the room’s other bed screamed in pain every time his morphine ran low. Sharp-pitched cries that made my father’s eyes dart in panic even though he was only semi-conscious. I could tell it distressed Dad and it certainly upset my mom.

  I asked the hospital to move my father to a private room. It would balloon the final hospital bill even further, but I didn’t care. My dad deserved a peaceful death.

  It went on for a couple of weeks. Based on all medical rationale, Dad should have been dead. The doctors were amazed that he was still hanging on. They didn’t know my dad. He was a stubborn man to the core; for good and for bad. That’s probably why he lasted so long, over all the years of extensive chronic health trouble.

  In his last days, I barely recognised him. He had a yellow complexion from jaundice and pain-filled milky eyes. He seemed a shrunken shadow of a man who I’d always thought of as larger than life. He had whittled away until there was barely anything left of him.

  My father died on a Tuesday night, during the worst snow storm in Chicago in seven years. It was impossible for me to get from our Chicago office to the hospital in time to be with him before he died. There weren’t any cabs until the early hours of the morning, by which time the orderlies had already removed his body from his room and taken him to the hospital morgue.

  I hated that I wasn’t with him when he died, but most of all that I wasn’t there to support my mother. That really tore me up. I was so single-minded in my dedication to the job that even though my father was close to death, I insisted on going into work that day despite the blizzard that had been forecast.

  It took me a long time to forgive myself. If truth be told, I’m not entirely sure I ever have. It made me reflect on whether I wanted to work at a firm that made such demands on my time that I couldn’t take an afternoon off to hold my father’s hand as he lay dying.

  In the hospital bathroom, washing my tear-stained face after they told me I had arrived too late, I asked my reflection, ‘Who have you become?’ When had making money taken precedence over the people that I love?

  We buried dad in a small ceremony, attended by a smattering of relatives and some old friends going back decades. Kevin offered to fly over for the funeral. I knew that he had to prep for a crucial deposition and told him it wasn’t necessary. That was a bald-faced lie; I needed him so badly that it hurt.

  After Dad died, I insisted that my mother move to special accommodation. Her own health trouble had made her frail and there was a real possibility she might have another stroke from the anxiety and stress of dad’s final illness and death.

  I was living too far away to check in on her. I worried greatly that she might collapse and nobody would know until her body was found days later when the lady I’d hired to help her shop and clean came by. I needed someone to check in on my Mom every day and make sure that she took her medication. Mostly, she needed company.

  I found a place for her at an independent living complex for retirees. Everyone had a small apartment and they all came together for meals and daily activities such as music and cards. It was a tiny unit in a complex with well-tended rose gardens and a games room. The fees were way more than my mother could afford and she tried to use that as an excuse to get out of it. But I’d already told the management that I’d cover her costs and signed documents to that effect.

  My mother remained resistant. She insisted that she was capable of taking care of herself. She told me repeatedly that being in a ‘home’ would kill her. I didn’t see any realistic alternative. I convinced her that she’d enjoy the change and explained that it would give me peace of mind. She reluctantly agreed. All that was left was to pack her belongings and move her out.

  I ended up taking leave the week my father died. There was no other way. I had to help my mother with the arrangements for the funeral and her move to the retirement community. I wanted her settled before I returned to New York.

  We went through old boxes of family photos and talked about childhood memories, and she told me stories about how she and Dad had met and fallen in love. My parents had their share of troubles – they’d separated twice – but a lifetime of pain had mellowed with age and nostalgia.

  On my last night, mom and I packed up the final boxes for her move. Her new unit was a studio apartment with a half-wall that cordoned off a bedroom. It was tiny with no room for a lifetime collection of ornaments, crockery and furniture. We packed away the items that Mom wanted to bring with her and sold the rest.

  All that remained on that last night was for us to go through the garage storage cupboard. We tossed out things like rusty old tools, and dad’s fishing rod and tackle, which he hadn’t used in years. On the top shelf was a box with my name on the label.

  ‘That’s yours, Sara,’ Mom said. I took it out and opened it. It contained my childhood possessions: trinkets, a mother-of-pearl box with some of my milk teeth and cheap silver jewellery that I’d received for birthdays when I was a kid. There were a couple of childhood photo albums and a few of my favourite bedtime story-books. There was nothing of value, it was all sentimental stuff. I put the box straight into my luggage.

  I left the following evening with a gaping sadness in my heart. Seeing my mother settled in her new unit, I felt like I’d lost a lifeline. There was no family home any more. I had nowhere to return to, no safety net. For
the first time in my life, I felt truly alone.

  As time dragged on, they lost hope of a swift rescue. They turned on their laptops and worked on reports and spreadsheets in a bid to block out the claustrophobic reality of their cramped prison. Mostly they did it to portray a confidence that everything would be fine. That they would soon be free. When they recounted the story at a dinner party, they wanted to be able to say cockily: ‘It wasn’t all bad, at least I managed to clear a backlog of work.’

  The light of their screens broke up the darkness enough for them to see each other’s silhouettes over their monitors. Vincent used the opportunity to look around for the gun that had gone missing hours earlier. The problem was that it was hard to see anything in the dark, and harder still with their coats and other possessions scattered across the floor. He told himself it didn’t much matter that he couldn’t find the Glock. He had the ammunition clip in his pants pocket. The gun was useless without bullets.

  They tried to make the best of a bad situation as they worked. Their fingers tapped away on their laptop keyboards and their work was punctuated by occasional sighs when someone had to do a particularly complicated calculation. It was all a facade to allow them to maintain their composure and hide an intense, primal fear that they’d been forgotten. That nobody was coming to rescue them.

  No matter how much they tried to be optimistic, they had to face the harsh reality that there had been more than ample time to rescue them and yet nobody had come.

  ‘Emergency workers would have made contact with us by now.’ Sylvie piped up into the silence. ‘They’d have called out to reassure us, tell us that they’re working on getting us free. We would have heard something.’

  Nobody responded. The silence was their response.

  They felt abandoned. Time passed and the batteries of their devices drained. Eventually, their laptops and tablet screens turned as black as their moods. Once again they were shrouded in a blanket of darkness.