“Hi. I’m trying to get to Seagull Island. Can you tell me how much it costs?”
“Seventy-five. One-forty round trip. When did you want to go?”
“How about tomorrow?”
“Sure. We’re only making one flight a day in the off-season. How about three o’clock? I have to notify Canadian Customs and be sure the runway on the island is clear. They’ve been having some trouble keeping it plowed.”
“A lady told me that I have to have a passport, but my purse was stolen at a gas station in Pittsburgh.” (Lies come easier every day.) “Is there any way around this passport thing?”
The man takes a deep breath. “Not with us. Not with Cullen Airlines in Sandusky either. The Customs guys are real strict. One man, last summer, got on the flight to Seagull without a passport and the Canadian team sent him back. He was kind of a jerk, but he ended up paying round trip for nothing and was mad as hell.”
“So there’s no way?” My eyes tear up and I’m not faking. “I’ve already put down rent on a little cottage over there.”
The man leans across the desk, looking first out the window toward the ice-covered lake, then around the empty waiting room. “I didn’t say there’s no way . . . there’s just no way to fly.”
I tilt my head, not understanding, and he hands me a little yellow piece of paper with a phone number written on it. “My brother-in-law,” he whispers.
Lenny Knight. Snowmobile. 440-555-9123.
Blue Robin’s Egg
Back in the car, I slump down in the driver’s seat, staring at the printed message on the little yellow paper and wonder what I’ve gotten myself into. When I left Torrington, it seemed so easy to disappear into Canada. It was a separate sovereign country, but still felt like the backyard of Michigan. I could drive to Ohio, then get on the ferry! No international flights or airline reservations. Just get in a car and disappear.
I picture my passport, still in the safety deposit box, wishing I had it but at the same time knowing I’m right not to use it. Once it was scanned, my whereabouts would be available to law enforcement everywhere.
At home, I imagine, the noose is already tightening. Richard has contacted the police after realizing I’ve cleaned out his pile of cash and our joint checking account. The sheriff and the hospital are convinced my disappearance proves I was at fault for the death of Robyn Layton. It’s only my friends and colleagues at the clinic who will be worried sick. They will have heard about the home-birth death and, since I’ve disappeared and our friend Dr. Karen killed herself, they’ll be thinking the worst.
KAREN AND I worked out in the gym, talked every day about our interesting patients, our kids and what was going on in the world. I told her my doubts about Richard. She told me she felt blessed that her marriage with her cardiologist husband was as “solid as a rock.” Sometimes we’d bitch about politics or the new health care regulations, but I never thought of her as depressed.
Then one day she left for a cruise to Belize. She did this sometimes, just went off by herself on a white-water excursion in Colorado, a week at an ashram in India, a bike trip around Scotland. I admired her for it.
On the second day of the cruise during rough weather, she jumped off the sixth-floor balcony of the ship and her body was never found. No suicide note, nothing, and so we still don’t know what drove her (literally) over the edge.
After Karen’s death, it was like I could only hobble through my days. I never knew suicide would affect those left behind like that. Never understood that the sin of suicide is not that you took the life God gave you, but that you left those who loved you with a piece of their heart torn out and still bleeding.
As was my way, a few months after her death I researched suicide on the Internet, just to see how common it was. According to the World Health Organization one million people commit suicide each year, one death every 40 seconds or 3,000 per day. One million people dragging their loved ones into their graves behind them.
Only 20 percent leave a suicide note. This surprised me. In the movies and on TV, everyone does.
THE TROUBLE WITH Richard started a few months after Karen jumped, but I couldn’t deal with it and, like an ostrich, just stuck my head in the sand.
What gets me is that I always thought of myself as so strong. I practically raised myself since I was fourteen, but when trouble was piled on top of me, I cracked like a blue robin’s egg, a fragile blue egg.
I stare at the little yellow sticky note and the cryptic words in the pilot’s neat hand. I can’t go back and I can’t go forward, unless I call Lenny, the pilot’s brother-in-law, who apparently has been known to take people without passports across the frozen lake into Canada.
Lenny
The corner rib place called Marty’s, in downtown Lorain, smells like beer and cigarettes and the music’s so loud you can’t hear yourself think. A TV is mounted high up on the wall and black-and-white 1920s photos of the once proud Lake Erie fishing industry cover the walls.
In the mirror behind the curved bar, I see a familiar woman in her late forties, wearing dark red lipstick, a black beret and heavy rimmed glasses. She sports a rainbow scarf and I realize with a shock that the woman is me!
A tall man approaches. Lenny Knight has gray-blue eyes, a long silver and gold ponytail, straight white teeth, a nice smile, a clean-shaven face with a cleft in his chin and tattoos up his arms—a biker, I think, or an aging hippie.
He greets me pleasantly, sits down, orders a beer for both of us and gets right to the point. “Mid-February is a little late to cross the lake, but the surface is still 90 percent frozen and this has been a hell of a cold week. You ever ride a snowmobile?”
I shake my head no, adjusting the reading glasses that I don’t need for reading and watching his face, wondering if he’s a man I can trust. (I really don’t want to die on the cold dark bottom of Lake Erie!)
“You’ll need a snowmobile suit, head gear and a ski mask. You can get all that for around ninety dollars at Walmart, but bring only forty pound of supplies in a backpack. How much do you weigh?”
I’m embarrassed, so I fudge a little. “A hundred and fifty.” By this time lies come so easily.
“Yeah, forty or fifty pounds of luggage, not a bit more. Why do you want to go to Seagull Island so bad anyway? You in some kind of trouble?” He puts it like that, probably thinking I am.
“No trouble. I just need some time alone. I’m a writer and I want to finish my book.”
“Novel or memoir?” Lenny asks, like he’s interested in literature.
“Novel.” (Once you lie, you have to keep going.)
“What about?”
“A woman abandoned on an island . . . Look, Lenny, when could we go and what do you charge?”
“Five hundred dollars.”
“Whew! That’s a lot! The plane only costs seventy-five dollars one way.”
“I’m taking a risk, avoiding customs and crossing on the ice.”
“It’s dangerous then?”
“Babe, life is dangerous. You in or not? We could leave late tomorrow.”
CHAPTER 6
A Plan
I have a little over twenty-four hours to prepare. Lenny already has my money and I just hope he’s honest. I’ve paid him in cash and all I have is his word and his phone number.
My first stop, after leaving the café, is a twenty-four-hour Walmart in Lorain, where I purchase a snowmobile suit, snow boots, thick mittens and a ski mask. Just to be safe, I also throw in sunglasses, two pairs of long underwear, some wool socks, matches, candles and a flashlight.
Food is a problem and I have no idea what to take, so I decide to get things that are light; crackers, tuna in a vacuum pack, pasta, dried lentils, brown rice, powdered milk, granola bars, raisins and cheese; nothing liquid or canned.
It’s when I’m passing through the dairy section that a wild idea comes to me. An exasperated mother and her two whining kids have their heads in the open door of the ice cream freezer. Her purse
is still in the cart’s fold-down child seat, the same place I keep mine. While she’s not looking, I could easily swipe the pocketbook and have a new ID! The trouble is, the woman I’m watching is about six inches taller than me, has red hair and outweighs me by fifty pounds.
For the next hour, I cruise the store, checking out potential victims. Everywhere I look, women are leaving their handbags in the cart while they scurry around. I find at least five I could take with ease . . . if I have the nerve.
The trouble will be finding a woman who looks like me. I decide hair color doesn’t matter; I can change mine to match hers and her weight isn’t critical either. If questioned, I can always say I’ve lost or gained a few pounds. How tall my target is, her age and her eye color are most critical. Still mulling it over, I decide I’d better try a different store. Since I’ve been here so long, security may be watching me.
My next stop is an identical Walmart back in Sandusky and my heart thumps so hard, I’m afraid it must show. Am I really going to do this? I’m usually so honest Richard calls me a Girl Scout.
I HAVE IT all planned. I head for the linen section and toss a few towels in the cart as if I’m going to purchase them. Then I begin to troll the store, trying not to look like a thief. The trouble is, I’ve never done anything like this before.
In the clothes section I find my prey. There’s a blue quilted pocketbook resting in the shopping cart’s child seat and a little girl, around seven, is begging her mom to buy her a sparkly superstar T-shirt. I circle around her, touching a pink dress on the rack, then holding it up to the light, like I’m thinking of buying it.
“Please!” the girl pleads. “You said if I was good you’d get me something!”
The mother looks tired and she’s about my height, five foot four, but she’s probably ten years my junior. Too young? I push my cart nearer to get a better look. A short chin and round nose like mine, but what about the eyes?
“Okay. Okay.” The woman squats down, trying to find the right shirt on a lower shelf and the girl kneels down too. I decide to go for it. If her eyes are the wrong color, I can always just leave her purse and ID in the restroom and find another victim down the road.
Casually I pass her cart. I survey the immediate surroundings. No one else is around. Without missing a beat, I grab the handbag, stuff it under the towels and move calmly into another aisle. Oh my God! I did it!
Thief
Five minutes later, I’m sitting on the john in the Walmart women’s bathroom. It took all my nerve to walk calmly through aisles of the store. Step by step, I pushed my cart through girls’ clothes, boys’ clothes, women’s clothes, school supplies, jewelry and finally made it to the front.
Clara Perry stole a purse! I sit in the last stall of the women’s restroom clutching the quilted handbag to my chest, feeling triumphant and horrible at the same time. My cart with the blue and green towels is parked just outside the restroom door by the drinking fountain and my hands shake so hard, I can’t get the zipper of the stolen bag open.
Slow down, I tell myself. Breathe. I bite my lower lip to get calm. The hard part is over.
But what if someone saw me? What if they’re calling security right now? Slow down. No one saw you.
Inside the handbag is a red leather wallet and I slip out the Ohio driver’s license and then look through the cards. The owner of the purse, Sara Livingston, is an RN and has an Ohio nursing license and a CPR card. That’s a bit of good fortune. I pocket these cards too. Then I hang the purse on the hook on the stall door as planned, but at the last moment, I have second thoughts.
If the next person who comes into the stall takes all Sara’s credit cards and cash, I’d feel terrible, so I decide to do the right thing, even if I’m risking my neck . . . Bold as anything, I walk out of the lavatory and hand the purse to the nearest cashier, a very large pale woman of about thirty who reminds me of one of my patients.
“Excuse me,” I say, trying to look pleasant and normal. “I found this in the ladies’ room.”
The clerk looks surprised and thanks me. “God bless you, honey. There aren’t many honest people anymore.” If she only knew!
BACK AT THE Lakeland Motel, still trembling, I close the drapes, bolt the door and take out the ID to look at the cards again.
Yes, if you squint, the photo looks a little like me. Luckily, Sara Livingston has blue eyes too. If I get my hair cut short like hers and wear the fake specs, I might just pass, and the fact that she’s an RN is a stroke of luck, though there are more than three million of us in the United States.
Resting back on the pillows, I click through the forty cable TV stations, but there’s nothing about a stolen purse and ID. It probably isn’t considered newsworthy, then I see something that is . . . and it takes my breath away.
“THIS JUST IN . . .” a Toledo newscaster with straight blond hair and wide brown eyes announces. “Clara Perry, a West Virginia nurse-midwife, is being sought for medical negligence and second-degree manslaughter for allegedly leaving the scene of a home birth where her patient, a mother of three, died of hemorrhage two nights ago. The midwife, believed to be driving a 2012 dark green Volvo, was last seen in Torrington, West Virginia, at the Mountain Federal Bank. (A short silent clip of the bank security video plays, showing me talking to the teller, and then cuts off.)
“Any information on her whereabouts should be given to local police . . . And now we turn to Michael for the latest on the refugee crisis in Europe . . .” My heart skips a beat as I stare at the black-and-white photo of myself on the screen, then my face fades into a video of chanting angry protestors.
I TRY TO remember who in Sandusky has heard my real name and who’s seen me without the heavy glasses and my hair up in the beret . . . Ivy saw me when I first checked in to the motel at five in the morning, but she was half-asleep. Mrs. Nelson saw me, but she was so distracted, she wouldn’t recognize me if we met at a church social.
When I ran away I never imagined that the news of Robyn’s death would reach this far or this fast. What was the name of that hair salon the desk clerk told me about? The Hair Palace? I’ve seen enough movies to know that when running the first thing to do is assume a disguise.
Exodus
This morning, after my walk around the outside of the motel and a free breakfast of instant oatmeal and yogurt, I stand at the mirror and fluff up my new haircut. I’d asked for a short blond pixie or shag (like the real Sara Livingston was wearing when she had her driver’s license photo taken), and this is what Melissa at the Hair Palace came up with.
For one hundred and fifty dollars and a good tip, she cut and colored my hair and threw in some shampoo and eight bottles of hair dye. I worried that she might have caught the news about Clara Perry of West Virginia who is wanted for manslaughter, but if she did, she kept her mouth shut.
“You’ll have to recolor every month,” she told me, putting the grooming products in a pink plastic bag. “If you go longer, you’ll look like a mess.”
Still staring at the motel mirror, I put on the thick glasses and the bright red lipstick but forget the beret since my new hair color and style have dramatically changed my look. Then I throw the rainbow scarf around my neck, sit down on my hard motel bed and call Lenny. “Hi. It’s me. Are we still on for tonight?”
“Planning on it. You having second thoughts?”
“No, not at all. I just called to find out where we should meet.”
“I was thinking Miller Road Park out highway 6. There’s a lot of guys snowmobiling out there. I’ll meet you at five in the parking lot, just before dark. I’m driving a black 4Runner and I’ll be pulling a green Ski-Doo snowmobile on the trailer. Did you get all your gear?”
“Yeah, I’m set. But there’s one other thing. I want to get rid of my Volvo. I don’t have anywhere safe to park it in Lorain and I won’t need it on the island. When I come back, I can buy something newer.” (Hopefully never.) “Do you know a used-car place where I can sell it for cash?”
“I figured, but there must be someone. I’ll give them a good deal.”
“It’s not hot, is it?” He laughs.
“No! I have the title and everything.”
“Try Bill’s Used Cars on Lake Street in Sandusky. He’s been known to take risks.”
“Should I tell him Lenny sent me?”
“I wouldn’t. We’re on the outs.”
TWO HOURS LATER, a rail-thin used-car salesman named Chester, with a chipped tooth in front, offers me $8,000 for the Volvo, no questions asked. It’s only when I get out the Volvo’s title that I realize I’ve made a mistake. I’ve already destroyed Clara Perry’s ID. I have no way to prove who I am and that I actually own this vehicle, but he doesn’t ask any questions, just gives me the cash and I’m out the door.
I grab a cab back to the motel and by evening I’m packed and ready. To save on the weight of the backpack, I wear as many of my new clothes under the snowmobile suit as I can, and when the yellow taxi shows up, the driver does a double take because I’m the same woman he just brought back from the auto dealer, only now I’m dressed in a puffy snowsuit with three layers of clothes underneath and look twice my size.
He puts my backpack in the trunk. “Where you headed?”
“Miller Road Park outside of Lorain.”
“Whew! It’s gonna cost you.”
“That’s okay. We’re going out snowmobiling on the lake, my fiancé and I.” (I don’t know why I keep embroidering my lies.)
“Kind of late. It will be dark soon.”
“It’s fun to snowmobile on the lake at night. You ever try it?”
“Not me. Those guys are crazy,” the cabbie says. “Two guys went through the ice last week around Middle Island.”
The rest of the way, we are silent. Already the sun is low in the sky and the gray-white Lake Erie stretches out to the horizon. Once I see a broad-winged hawk on a fence post and think of telling Karen, but that’s never again going to happen.
The Runaway Midwife Page 3
