The Escape Artist

by Helen Fremont

  I forced a smile, and in a fit of friendship, I stood and embraced the love of my life. I was stunned with grief.

  “That’s wonderful,” I said. “I’m so happy for you.”

  I was happy for her. It was me I felt sorry for. “Let’s have some champagne.” I searched the refrigerator, although I knew we had nothing but a heel of white table wine.

  “H, you have to come out next summer, okay? It’ll be our last time together, just you and me, before the wedding in August.”

  “But I have to get a job,” I said. “With a law firm or something.”

  “My dad knows tons of lawyers in Sacramento,” she said.

  This was encouraging. I could spend the summer with her, and maybe then I’d just move out to the West Coast myself. Maybe I’d get a job there after law school, and I could be near her all the time. My heart opened to the possibilities.

  But the fact was, Emma was going to leave me. In three weeks she would be gone, and I’d be alone with my equity and evidence notes and Greater Boston Legal Services. I didn’t really understand what I was losing, but I knew that the loss was almost too much to bear.

  When Travis arrived a few weeks later, Emma seemed to burst into flower. She wore a goofy grin on her face all the time. She was unbearably happy. So was Travis. They were in love, they did not even see me, and that was probably a good thing. I helped them pack up the car with her backpack, clothes, books, hiking boots, running shoes, and tennis racket. I waved to them as they backed down the driveway.

  Then I laced up my sneakers and went for a two-hour run. I studied for finals. I went to the legal aid office and helped poor people fight their landlords and the government and their lousy lot in life. I went to therapy and talked about moving to California.

  * * *

  Two weeks later I went home for the holidays. On Christmas Eve, my father and I were sitting around the fireplace reading. Lara flopped into the green sling-back chair next to me, one leg hooked over the chair arm. My father hated it when we didn’t sit properly in a chair. He believed it was bad for the furniture. But Lara was twenty-five years old; he glanced at her swinging foot and said nothing. She’d come home the day before, absorbed in a corona of her own rage after squeaking through her fall semester of medical school on the slimmest margin of mental health.

  “Helen!” She kicked the leg of my chair.

  “What?”

  “Helllenn.… Helllenn.… Helllenn.…” She punctuated each word with a kick.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to go out and do something with you.” Her voice was angry; it sounded like an offer to throw me off a cliff.

  “I don’t feel like going out,” I said. “It’s freezing outside.”

  Mom brought out a tray of cheese and crackers, set it on the coffee table, and sat down to join us. Lara leaned forward as if to take a cracker, but instead picked up a paper napkin. Very slowly, she tore it into small strips, and let the pieces float to the floor. When she reached for another napkin, my mother placed her hand on Lara’s. “Darling,” she said. “Talk to me. I know you’re upset. Please tell me what’s bothering you.”

  Lara yanked her hand away. “Leave me alone! Go cook your precious Christmas dinner!”

  My mother’s eyes welled. She stood and retreated to the kitchen. Soon we could hear her chopping vegetables and preparing the turkey. My father, sitting across from me, said nothing, but his hands tensed on the business section of the Times. I picked up my book and reread the same paragraph.

  Lara started kicking my chair again, and I asked her to stop.

  “Make me,” she snickered.

  I ignored her. The words on the page ran together and I couldn’t concentrate on the sentences. I let my eyes ride the coattails of the words, hoping to pick up their meaning as I went along. Lara kicked my chair harder. I could feel the heat rise in my ears. I closed my book. Night had fallen, and our living room was reflected like a Rembrandt in the floor-to-ceiling windows behind the fireplace. I got up and went to my room, locked the door behind me, and flopped onto my bed. I opened my book and began again.

  Within minutes, I heard a thump on my door. I sat up, and it came again. Thunk. It sounded like Lara was pounding the door with something—her fist? Her foot? I tried to keep reading. The noise grew louder, more rapid. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. I closed my eyes and waited. How many years? My sister was a second-year med student, learning to save lives. Her classmates at school liked her; she was thoughtful and considerate, an ideal roommate in the house she shared with half a dozen other budding doctors. How did she pull it off? Thunk. Maybe the supreme effort of holding herself together in the world was so exhausting, she simply fell apart when she got home.

  Thunk. I fought the urge to scream now, to blast from my room and bash her head against the brick wall. Instead I remained on my bed, book open, eyes closed. The pounding seemed to make a small explosion at the base of my skull every two seconds. I had nine more days of vacation before I was due back at school for the second semester. I wasn’t sure how long I could hold out.

  I finally opened the door and found Lara sitting on the floor in front of it, legs splayed, a tennis ball in her hand. So that’s what she’d been doing—throwing a stupid tennis ball at my door, over and over. I stepped over her legs and returned to the living room, where my mother was picking up the shredded napkin from the rug. I sat in the chair across from my father. Lara followed me and collapsed into the chair next to mine, and started kicking my chair again.

  “Lara,” I said in a tired voice, “cut it out.” It took all my concentration to keep my voice calm.

  She took a balled-up Kleenex from her pocket and tossed bits of it at me, laughing.

  “Come on, Lara, just leave me alone. I want to read.”

  “So read,” she said.

  I glanced at my father, who sat stone-still, holding his book in his lap, pretending to read. His newspaper had already gone up in flames in the fireplace. I returned to my book, resolute. Bits of Kleenex landed in my hair and on my shirt and in my lap. Finally I got up and went into the kitchen. “Can I borrow the car keys?” I asked my mother.

  “Why?” she asked, alarmed.

  “I want to go for a ride,” I said. “I want to see if I can find something.”

  “What?”

  “It’s a surprise.” In fact, I wanted to find a coffee shop where I could sit in peace and read my book. But I knew this would upset my mother.

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” she said. “Stay here with us. Let’s be together as a family.”

  “She’s driving me crazy,” I said.

  A sad look came over my mother’s face, and my heart ached for her. “Oh, Helen. She can’t help it. She’s not well.”

  A wave of guilt washed over me. If my parents had to deal with her, then so should I. After all my parents had been through—the war, the camps, the killings—I owed them my loyalty. The least I could do was be with them now.

  “We all have to try,” my mother said. “We have to do our best.”

  I took the car keys. I drove through the empty streets of town in a snow squall, and headed east toward the shopping mall. I pulled into the Tri-City Diner, open twenty-four hours a day. A glass tower of pies and cakes rotated at the entrance. I slid into a booth near the window and opened my book. And I began to cry.

  * * *

  Years later, during an interval when Lara and I were the best of friends, I sometimes broached the subject of those times when she had acted like this, when she’d soaked our house in her silent rage. The few times I tried to talk with her about it, her body sank as if I’d struck her: her head dropped, face drawn in pain, and she squirmed with such discomfort, I could not bring myself to pursue it further. It was too painful to talk about the damage we had all done to each other in the past. Like our parents, Lara and I left those storms alone, survived them as best we could, and tried to enjoy the moments of reprieve when we got along well.

  * * *<
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  Christmas morning the sun crashed through the woods outside our house. I could hear the coffeemaker gurgling in the kitchen. The news was on the radio: the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. From the living room, I heard a violin sobbing on the hi-fi. I found my mother in the kitchen in her home-sewn bathrobe, her hair standing up in stiff peaks like whipped egg whites. “Oh,” she said, “put on slippers!” Then she tilted her chin up, kissed me on the cheek, and said, “Good morning, how did you sleep?” Before I could answer, she pointed to my feet. “Slippers!”

  The heat came through the floor and felt good on my bare feet. I went back to my room for slippers.

  My father joined us in the kitchen. He’d been up since six, as usual. He’d shoveled the path around the house, filled the bird feeder, brought in another load of wood, and built a fire. Now he pulled out a stool and sat at the kitchen counter as my mother poured us coffee. We stared out the window at the squirrels stealing seeds from the bird feeder. This drove my father crazy. He jumped to his feet and reached for the kitchen door.

  “It’s Christmas,” my mother said. “Let them eat.”

  * * *

  At noon Mom went to check on my sister. I followed quietly. Lara’s bedroom was dark, drapes drawn.

  “Lara?” My mother’s voice sounded tentative. She leaned over my sister. “Lara, darling? It’s noon. Come to the living room. Come join us. It’s Christmas.”

  “Mrrrrmph.” Lara rolled over under the covers.

  Mom waited another minute, then turned and stepped out of the room.

  We didn’t speak until we reached the kitchen. “Let’s have a cup of tea,” she said. Mom and I divided time into cups of tea. She placed the kettle on the stove and we began to fill the kitchen with chatter. We loved to talk, my mother and I. She could be so animated, so funny, so opinionated and lively. We would talk about books and movies and opera singers and people we knew and people we didn’t. She and I were, as they say, verbal. We hid things with words.

  The kettle sang. My mother took a used Lipton tea bag from the saucer by the sink. Its waist was cinched by its string, which had dried and turned rust-brown. We could afford a fresh tea bag, but it was a point of pride for my mother to extend the life of a tea bag from hours to days, so as not to waste even a single leaf. I loved this about her, and I followed the ritual in my own kitchen, much to the horror of my roommates over the years. My mother ceremoniously unfurled the string and let the tea bag drop first into one cup, then into the second. She coaxed a bit of color from the bag, then scooped it up, strangled it with its string, and set it on the saucer.

  “Do you have a bird feeder?” she asked.

  I nodded. Emma had bought us one, and filled it regularly. She cared about living things in a way that I didn’t. Something was missing in me.

  Behind us we heard the soft scuffing of my sister’s bare feet. She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her hand and seemed to be emerging from the bottom of the ocean.

  My mother jumped up. “Darling,” she said. “Sit! Would you like some tea? Stollen?” She bustled to get the coffee cake from the serving tray. “Let me heat it up for you.”

  Lara staggered to the counter and collapsed on a stool. It was too soon to tell what would happen. Would she perk up and decide to open presents? Or would she tear her napkin to shreds? I pretended not to care. Everything depended on not caring in our house. You had to suspend all hope. You watched the signals carefully, and tried to assess her mood from moment to moment.

  Lara let my mother cut her a slice of stollen. That was good. She let her serve her a cup of tea. That was good. She sipped her tea and blew her nose. All good.

  Twenty minutes passed. My father tiptoed into the kitchen. “So are we opening presents?” he asked.

  My mother shook her head and motioned him to leave.

  Lara finished her tea, rose, and walked into the living room where the Christmas tree was drowning in a sea of gifts. She pushed the hair from her face and straightened her back. A light came into her eyes, and her face was suddenly transformed. She leaned over and picked up a gift. “Here, Helen,” she said brightly. “Open this.”

  For the next few hours we opened presents. We burned the wrapping paper in the fire and put on another log and our faces glowed in the warmth. The floor was covered with our spoils: cross-country ski gloves and glacier goggles and lip gloss. My aunt had sent checks; my mother had bought sheets. My father flipped through the pages of the books we got him, and finally settled on the book about quarks and hadrons. The dog, exhausted, lay at his feet, jowls sunk over the arch of his shoe. A miracle had occurred and we had all pulled it off: we had gone from danger to delight. While it lasted, it seemed that our family had always been this way, that we could never be anything else.

  * * *

  Trouble didn’t start until the next day. You could feel it when she walked into the kitchen. It was in her posture, the angle of her head, the scowl on her face. Lara dropped onto a kitchen stool, propped her elbows on the counter and scuttled her fingers through her hair. When I left the room, she followed me into the living room, and demanded that I do something with her. I declined and went to my bedroom, closed the door, and locked it.

  I was a crucial member of this family, and I was expected to do my part. If I took her out hiking or skiing, at least it would give my parents a few hours’ reprieve. But I couldn’t rise to the occasion. I didn’t want to rise to the occasion. I had been through my own semester with my own problems.

  Thunk.

  I sat up with a jolt.

  Thunk.

  The tennis ball again. “Helen,” she called. Thunk.

  I opened the door, stepped over her, and went to the telephone. I looked up Greyhound in the Yellow Pages and called for the schedule of buses. Then I told my parents I planned to take the bus to Boston the following morning.

  My father looked up, alarmed.

  “What?” my mother said.

  “I want to go back to Boston.”

  “But you just got here!”

  “I know,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t take it anymore.”

  “You and Lara should do something together,” my mother said. “Take her skiing.”

  I bit my lip. The realization that I could actually take a bus and leave home was both heady and disturbing. I couldn’t bear to disappoint my parents, and I felt ashamed to leave them alone with Lara. I was shirking my duty as one-third of the family reserve to cope with her.

  The next morning, my father drove me to the bus station. We said little. “Do you need money?” he asked. I shook my head. “She is not well,” he said.

  We hugged outside the bus. He slipped twenty dollars in my pocket.

  * * *

  Boston was bleak after Christmas. The students had disappeared overnight and the streets were empty. My apartment was dark; it accused me of family desertion. Emma was gone. I was alone.

  A day later, the phone rang. It was my mother. “Helen,” she said, “I wish you would come home. Please, darling. Take Lara skiing. Or hiking. It would do her so much good.”

  I listened to my mother with a growing sense of shame. It did seem like very little to ask of me. Why couldn’t I just go home and help my parents out? Last March I’d sped across Massachusetts at midnight, rushing to my sister’s side when she’d called in tears. I’d felt proud of my virtue—the heroic daughter, rushing to the rescue—and had taken a perverse satisfaction in my own sacrifice. The glow from mild martyrdom was not so different from the pride I took in not eating, in pushing myself to run farther and faster than ever before. It was mastery of the self, and it was precisely this self of mine that had always caused me so much difficulty in my family.

  But now I found myself unwilling to sign up for another tour of duty at home. It was hard enough to sort out my own life. I didn’t even begin to understand the depth charge of Emma’s engagement and move to California. At twenty-two, I had about as much self-knowledge as a seedpod.
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  “Mom, I can’t,” I said, trying the words out to see if they would stick. “I’m really sorry.”

  “Why? What are you doing there?”

  The fact was, I was trying to preserve my sanity. “I have some cases I’m working on,” I lied.

  “Please, Helen. Just take the bus. Let us know when you’re coming, and Dad will pick you up. All right, darling? It would be so good for Lara if you could—”

  “Mom, I just can’t,” I said. “I really need to be here right now.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone, and when my mother spoke again, her voice was cold. “All right,” she said. “I’ll tell you what happened!” I was stunned by her sudden anger. “I didn’t want to tell you, but you’ve left me no choice! After you left, I walked into Lara’s room, and do you know what I found? I walked in, and she was lying in the bed, and her arms were covered in blood! Yes! She had cut herself up, and she was bleeding!”

  A chill came over me, and I squeezed my eyes tight. Without even thinking, I could feel my arms outstretched to catch my mother’s perfectly thrown pass of guilt.

  “Do you know what it’s like,” my mother said, “for a mother to walk in and see her daughter like that? Do you have any idea?”

  I was crying now, and rocking myself on the floor. Lara had cut herself up. Because I’d left home. These two thoughts were connected. Proximate cause. Damages.

  “Now, get on the bus,” she commanded, “and you come home.”

  I pictured my sister in the darkness of her room at the far end of the house. Her arms on the sheets, blood oozing from her wrists, streaming over the covers. Had she passed out? Was she conscious? I couldn’t ask.

  “I’m sorry,” I said weakly, squeezing each word out like dots of glue from a tube. “But I can’t come home.”

  “What?”

  “Mom, you can’t ask that of me.” I didn’t dare open my eyes. I was already drowning in guilt, and my mother’s pressure felt cruel.