Chapter 16
Downtown by Myself
Kate
I have a secret, Kate typed into the dialogue box. Last year, I ran away from my family.
She stared at the words on the screen. How had she ended up here? After some nearly sleepless nights, and desperate for an outlet for the thoughts chasing her through her days, Kate had discovered IKnowWhatYouDidLastSummer.com, one of those secret-sharing websites, where users could spill their innermost shame in anonymity. I cheated on my husband. I regret having children. I hate my best friend and I don’t know how to tell her. These were the easy secrets to absorb. Some were almost laughable, others criminal. Their combined effect was a white noise and a sense of relativity. What she’d done wasn’t so bad. Not truly. Especially not now that she’d written it down and the comments of support had started flowing in.
I’ve wanted to do that for years!
I think UR brave.
I left my kids when they were babies.
Kate knew she had to add more to the story. That, to actually unburden herself, this was only the beginning. But it had to come out in dribs and drabs. There was no point in setting it all out at once. Let them drag the details out of her, as she’d seen others do. That was part of the experience. The normalization of her immorality.
The wind rattled against the basement window. It was late, almost midnight. Kate should be asleep. Her alarm would sound too soon. But Andrea’s house, once so spacious, was starting to feel claustrophobic. Kate was giving serious thought to running again.
It wouldn’t be a frantic getaway this time. She could simply hand in her notice and scuttle away into the good night. She had some savings. She could last for a while. But where would she go? When she’d left her old life a year ago, that part of the decision had seemed easy. The location. How to get there. Those first steps.
It was frightening, how automatic it had been. The inventory she did of her situation, skipping past the fact that she was leaving her family behind. It was more like she was going through a checklist she didn’t even know she’d been building. All those years of fantasizing, planning coming to fruition.
First, money. She had $600 in cash in her purse to pay her nanny, the woman who took better care of her children than she did. The same miracle that had thrown her to safety left her cross-body bag in place. After a brief hesitation, she risked pulling another $600 out of their bank account when she passed an ATM twenty blocks past her building. Her husband never checked the bank statements; that was her job. Besides, all the statement would say, if he ever looked at them, was that the money had been taken out that day but not at what time. For that, he’d have to go looking. And why would he do that?
Second, walk away from the crowds that had gathered at a safe distance to watch the fire casually so you don’t draw attention to yourself. Pay attention to where the cameras are and try to avoid them. Walk in a crowd with your head down, one of many. Do nothing to stand out.
Third, take the SIM card out of your cell phone and crush it under your shoe in an alley. Leave the phone in a garbage can. Make sure no one sees you do either of these things.
Fourth, get rid of your ID, but not where someone might pick it up and use it, leading to awkward questions. Think about leaving your wedding and engagement rings somewhere, too, but decide instead to keep them to sell later for cash.
When she’d stopped at the ATM, she thought briefly about wrapping her scarf around her head in case the footage was checked. Then realized that might bring more attention to herself. Besides, no one would be looking for her. Certainly not if she didn’t do anything stupid. Didn’t give anyone reason to believe she was anything other than a victim of the day’s events.
Kate’s borrowed iPad chimed with another comment.
Why did you leave? asked Anonymous4Life. He was one of the cheaters who seemed to form the majority of the website’s users. Kate had the impression that many of them were simply looking for other like-minded people for further adventures. As if the site was a coy Ashley Madison. A4L had cheated on his wife twice with the same woman, three years apart, and claimed he’d joined the group as a way of avoiding telling her.
They were better off without me, Kate replied. And given how quickly she’d left them when she had the opportunity, that was clearly true.
Once she had the additional cash, she’d walked to the Greyhound station near the water. By the time she got there, fat blisters had formed on the soles of her feet. Her work shoes were not meant for walking or the running she’d done earlier. She checked her reflection in the glass of one of the stores she passed. She looked disheveled but not entirely out of place.
The bus station was in a bad area of town. But as she watched the weak sun glint off the black water of the lake, she didn’t feel as if she was in danger. She’d survived. She felt insulated, wrapped in bubble wrap.
Lucky.
Inside the cavernous building, she checked the schedule. There was a bus headed to Canada in three hours. She waited in line with twenty others, an impatient group held back by nylon tape barriers. She’d been worried the bus station would be closed. But other than the intense way people were looking at their phones, everything seemed to be business as usual.
When she got to the counter and asked for a one-way ticket, the clerk told her the price and asked for her passport. She reached into her purse for the cash and thanked her continued luck that she had both her passports with her.
That was the key to her success, if she did succeed. Her two passports. Her American one, because that’s where she lived and mostly who she thought of herself as being these days. And her Canadian one, because that was where she was born and where she still traveled to frequently for work. Since she was a citizen, Canada required her to enter on her Canadian passport. But were they linked? She’d never thought to ask. Would the fact that a dead person used a passport hours after she was supposed to be dead raise a red flag somewhere, someday? She’d have to take the risk.
Her passports were still in her purse from a trip to Toronto a few weeks earlier to attend a tech convention. And her Canadian passport still had her maiden name on it because she’d never bothered to make the change when she renewed it after she was married.
The woman at the bus station scanned her passport. She said something about how she’d move to Canada if she could, what with the way the world was these days. Kate smiled and nodded, holding her breath. Nothing happened other than the woman handed her a bus ticket tucked into the pages of her passport. She went to wait for her bus.
There were two hours until it left. She settled into an uncomfortable seat. She rested her purse on her lap and fixed her gaze on the television so she didn’t make eye contact with anyone. She watched the breaking news about her former workplace, wondering what had happened to everyone. There were all kinds of theories. The CNN anchor reminded people to remain calm. Their sources were telling them it was a gas leak. But still, there were rumors of bombs in other buildings. Suspicious packages being left behind. Certain types of people to be rounded up. Civil liberties that needed to be violated.
She watched TV for a while. Then she went to the small store and bought a few things she would need. A toothbrush and toothpaste. A backpack. A T-shirt and sweatshirt with the same logo on them. She needed clean underwear, but that wasn’t available. In the bathroom, she took off her blouse and jacket, stuffing them into the bag. She washed the dirt and sweat off her face and neck. Then slipped the T-shirt over her head and then the sweatshirt, pulling the hood up so she’d have something to retreat inside of. Already she felt different. More like the woman she’d been before she got married. Before . . .
She went into a stall and sat down on the toilet and wept. Was she actually going to do this? Walk away from her children, her husband, her life? Let them think she was dead when she wasn’t? Was the pull of something different so great that she had to take such a drastic step? There was divorce, surely. There were alternatives she hadn’t considered.
She sat there for a long time. Her rear end turned numb, and she felt almost faint from the combination of emotion and shock and not having had anything to eat that morning because she hadn’t been able to swallow her breakfast.
She’d almost talked herself into changing course when an announcement sounded over the PA system, a robotic voice like the one used to make announcements on the “L.”
All departures are canceled until further notice.
The city was on lockdown. And it was only then, with her plans most likely thwarted, that she knew she must press ahead. That the only way for her was forward.
That in order to live, she had no alternative but to die.