Susan Phillips - The Great Escape

“It wasn’t supposed to be locked.” He scratched the back of his calf with the toe of his opposite sneaker. “My gram takes care of this place. She saw your car and sent me over to see who was here.”

She refrained from pointing out that “Gram” was the world’s lousiest housekeeper. From what she’d seen, the floors had been swept only in the middle, and Gram’s dusting hadn’t included more than a few tabletops. “Meet me in the kitchen, Toby. We’ll talk there.” She straightened her twisted pajama shorts and got out of bed.

“I’m calling the police.”

“Go ahead,” she countered. “I’ll call Panda and tell him a ten-year-old kid broke into his bedroom.”

His golden brown eyes grew indignant. “I’m not ten! I’m twelve.”

“My mistake.”

He shot her a hostile glare and sauntered out of the room before she could figure out how to ask him if he happened to know Panda’s real name. By the time she got to the kitchen, he’d disappeared.

THE UPSTAIRS BEDROOMS HAD SLOPING ceilings, mismatched furniture, and a hodgepodge of old draperies. A large dormitory extended the width of the house, the light seeping through its dusty windows revealing four sets of scarred bunk beds with thin, striped mattresses rolled up at the footboards. Sand from long-ago summers still lodged in some of the floorboard cracks, and she imagined wet bathing suits abandoned wherever they’d been dropped. The house seemed to be waiting for the Remingtons to return from their life in Grand Rapids or Chicago or wherever they came from. What had possessed Panda to buy a place like this? And what possessed her to want to stay?

She carried the coffee she’d made in his fancy machine out the back door into the yard. The morning was sunny and the sky clear. The clean air brought back memories of precious mornings at Camp David, the sight of her sisters chasing one another around the stone pool deck at the Aspen Lodge, her parents setting off on a hike, just the two of them. Here an old oak sheltered a splintered picnic table, and a metal stake waited for a game of horseshoes. She curled her fingers around the coffee mug and breathed in the crisp lake air.

The house sat on a bluff with a long flight of rickety wooden steps leading down to an old boathouse and dock, both of them weathered a soft, sea gray. She couldn’t see any other docks jutting from the rocky, tree-lined shore or any neighboring rooftops peeking through the canopy. The Remington house seemed to be the only one on Goose Cove.

The water in the cove was a painter’s palette of colors, dark blue at the center, a grayer blue toward the edges, with streaks of tan marking the shoreline and the top of a sandbar. As the cove emptied into Lake Michigan, the morning sun flung silver spangles over the rippling surface.

A pair of sailboats reminded her uncomfortably of her grandfather, who loved to sail. She knew she couldn’t postpone it any longer. She set aside her coffee mug, reached for her cell, and finally called him.

Even before she heard the patrician voice of James Litchfield, she knew exactly what the former vice president of the United States would say. “Lucille, I do not approve of what you’re doing. I don’t approve at all.”

“That’s a surprise.”

“You know I detest sarcasm.”

She tugged on the orange dread dangling near her ear. “Has it been awful?”

“It hasn’t been pleasant, but Mat seems to have the press under control.” His tone grew even colder. “And I suppose you’re calling me because you want me to somehow aid and abet.”

“I’ll bet you would if I asked you to.” Her eyes stung.

“You are so much like your mother.”

He didn’t say it as if it were a compliment, but she thanked him anyway. And then, before he could light into her, she pointed out what they both knew. “Running away made Nealy a better person. I’m sure it’ll do the same for me.”

“You’re sure of no such thing,” he snapped. “You simply don’t know what to do next, and you don’t want to face the consequences of your actions.”

“That, too.” She said to him what she hadn’t been able to say to her parents. “I dumped the perfect man, and I’m not even sure why.”

“I’m certain you had your reasons, but I wish you’d done it before I was forced to fly to Texas. You know how I detest that state.”

“Only because you couldn’t carry it. The election was almost thirty years ago. Maybe you should get over it?”

He harrumphed around, then said, “How long do you intend for this vacation of yours to last?”

“I don’t know. A week? Maybe more.”

“And I’m sure you won’t tell me where you are.”

“If I told you, you might be forced to lie about it. Not that you aren’t really good at it, but why put an old man in that position?”

“You are the most disrespectful child.”

She smiled. “I know. I love you, too, Gramps.” He hated it when she called him Gramps, but it was payback for that “Lucille.” “I’m staying at a friend’s house on an island in the Great Lakes,” she said. “But then you probably already know that.” If he didn’t, he would soon, since she’d paid for that rental car with her credit card, and her loving parents were almost certainly keeping track.

“Exactly what is the purpose of this call?”

“To tell you I’m … I’m sorry I disappointed you. And to ask you to be nice to Mom. This is hard on her.”

“I do not need reminders from my granddaughter about how to behave with my daughter.”

“Not exactly true.”

That precipitated a bristling lecture about respect, integrity, and the responsibility of those to whom much is given. Instead of listening, she found herself replaying a conversation she’d had with her mother a few months ago.

“You know I’m jealous of your relationship with him,” Nealy had said.

Lucy had looked up from the wedge of coconut custard pie they’d been sharing at their favorite Georgetown restaurant. “He was an awful father to you.”

“And he’s hardly the world’s best grandfather. Except to you.”

It was true. Lucy’s sibs avoided him at all costs, but he and Lucy had hit it off from the beginning, even though she’d been mouthy and rude when they’d first met. Maybe because of it. “He loves me,” she’d said. “And he loves you, too.”

“I know he does,” Nealy replied. “But I will never, ever have as comfortable a relationship with him as you do.”

“Do you really mind so much?”

She remembered Nealy’s smile. “No. I don’t mind at all. The old curmudgeon needs you as much as you need him.”

Lucy still wasn’t quite sure what she’d meant by that.

When her grandfather finally concluded his lecture, she told him she loved him, reminded him to eat right, and asked him not to growl so much at Tracy.

He told her to tend to her own business.

After she disconnected, she tossed her coffee dregs into the weeds and got up. But just as she started to turn back to the house, she heard an odd sound. A human sound. The sound someone makes when they trip and try to catch themselves. It came from the grove of trees that marked the north edge of the lawn where the woods began. As she turned to look, she caught the flash of an electric-yellow T-shirt disappearing into the pines.

Toby had been spying on her.

TOBY RACED THROUGH THE TREES, cutting to the left around the big stump, darting past the giant boulder, hurling himself over the trunk of the red oak that had come down in a storm last summer. Finally he reached the path that led to the cottage. Even though he was smaller than a lot of the other guys in his grade, he could run faster than any of them. Gram said his dad had been a fast runner, too.

He slowed as he reached the cottage. She was sitting on the back step smoking another cigarette and staring out into the yard the same way she’d been doing since she got here two weeks ago. It wasn’t as if she had anything to look at. The yard sloped down to a gully, and except for the tomato and pepper plants Mr. Wentzel had put in, Gram’s garden was nothing but a bunch of weeds. There were a couple of apple and pear trees behind the honey house, but they weren’t near as good as the trees in Mr. Wentzel’s cherry orchard.

The woman blew a long stream of smoke but didn’t even notice he’d come back. Maybe she thought if she didn’t look, he’d disappear, but she was the one who needed to disappear. He wished Eli and Ethan Bayner were still here so he could go to their house. They were his best friends—kind of his only friends—but they’d gone to Ohio for the summer because their parents might be getting a divorce.

She flicked her ashes in Gram’s rosebushes. “It’s going to rain,” she said. “The bees are all heading inside.”

He glanced uneasily toward the hives. Fifteen of them sat on the edge of their yard not too far from the border of Mr. Wentzel’s orchard. Gram had loved the bees, but Toby hated getting stung, so he stayed far away from them. At first when Gram had gotten sick, Mr. Wentzel had taken care of the hives, but then he’d gotten sick, too, and he’d had to go live at this nursing home on the mainland. His son was in charge of the orchard now, and he didn’t even live on the island—he just hired people to take care of the fruit. Nobody had checked the hives since Mr. Wentzel left, and if they got too crowded, the bees would start to swarm, something Toby didn’t even want to think about.

He didn’t want to think about a lot of things.

The lady crossed her legs and took a deep drag on her cigarette, holding the smoke in her lungs like she didn’t know how bad it was for her. She had long red hair, and she was tall and real skinny with sharp bones that looked like they could cut you. She didn’t ask him where he’d been. Probably hadn’t even noticed he was gone. He was like Gram. He hated having strangers around. And now there was also the new lady at the Remington house. She told him her name was Viper. He didn’t really think that could be her name, but he didn’t know.