Chapter
1
Ten Minutes
How can we know the
dancer from the dance? -William Butler Yeats
Time is
what prevents everything from happening at once.- John Wheeler
“Ten minutes.”
She was really going to do this. This was for real.
“Ten minutes. Ten minutes.
Ten minutes.”
That was her head start. That was the amount of time Marie had. Two weeks ago it was an idle thought, a
dream. Last week it became a plan of
action. In the last three days it was
her focus. She had everything figured
out in her mind. She’d grab her guitars,
suitcases, then her clothes, toiletries, computer, some books, and go. And the coin collection her grandfather had
left her. That was her ticket out of
there.
On the ride home, Marie kept going over the
list of items she would need. She
couldn’t afford to forget anything.
“Ten minutes, ten minutes, ten minutes.”
That’s how far behind Roger was; unless he
left work early too, of course. Could he
sense what she was up to? Did he
know? She had done her best to put her
best face forward, be kind and caring.
Would that tip him off? No. Roger is in Rogerworld. He wouldn’t know. Please, let him not know, she begged the
Universe.
She pulled her Chevy Equinox up the
driveway, running over the grass as she hastily backed up the SUV up. Oops.
She leapt from the car, fumbled with her key ring in search of the house
key. Ten seconds later, she had opened
the door and was inside.
Ten minutes. He would be home in ten minutes.
Marie ran up stairs, grabbed three of her
most valuable guitars, ran down the steps.
Guitar cases banged roughly against the walls of the stair case.
“Sorry,” she apologized to the wall, not
looking to see if any marks were left. Out the front door, she ran towards the
car. She opened the back and tossed the
guitars in. Back to the house. Suitcases next. They were in the messy back room. Hard to get to, but she would probably need
them. She quickly located them and
dashed back down the stairs. This time
she didn’t apologize to the wall for the suitcase dings, as she nearly fell
down the stairs in her haste.
About seven minutes now.
Three trash bags, that was the plan. She pulled them from the box in the laundry
room. One for clean clothes, one for
dirty clothes, one for toiletries. She
pulled down some of her things off hangers that were drying in the laundry
room. Faster, faster. Back up stairs to her room. She turned the hamper upside down and quickly
sorted her dirty clothes from Roger’s.
Into the trash bag. She put the
hamper back right side up and started opening drawers and pulling out
clothes. This. This.
Not that. This. Since she had no idea where she was going,
she wasn’t sure what to take, what the weather would be like wherever it was
she ended up. But, she mostly had only
summer clothes upstairs. Most of her warmer clothing was in the cedar chest in
the basement, and there was no time for that.
Her laptop computer was in their room. Roger had been watching videos on it
again. She unplugged the computer and
stuffed it and the power cord into the bag with the dirty laundry. Marie glanced over towards the unmade bed and
saw the little framed picture of her dad on the nightstand. It was his high school senior photo. He looked so young and dapper even in the
faded black and white. She had always
kept that photo on its little stand next to her bed, since she was little, since
her parents got divorced all those years ago.
No time for reverie, she reminded herself. She tossed it along with the book that was
next to it on the night stand into the bag of clean clothes.
About three minutes. Jesus, Marie, hurry the hell up, she
thought. Faster, faster.
She opened the double closet doors and
reached up to the back of the top self.
There it was: Pop-Pop Brabant’s coin collection, her inheritance from
her beloved grandfather. It was a small
collection in a beautifully carved wooden box that looked every bit of two
hundred years old itself. Into the trash
bag. She had lost track of which was
which.
Carrying the two full bags and the empty
one she flew into the bathroom.
Shampoo. Conditioner. Skin lotion.
Face lotion. Toothpaste and
brush. Hair gel. Deodorant. No time to gather her makeup. Into the empty
bag.
“Faster, faster, he’s going to be here any
second. Go, go, go.”
Lugging the three now full bags back down
the steps, out the door and into the car, she was hyperventilating. Damned asthma, not now.
One more trip inside to fetch her prescriptions
and reading glasses. She just shoved
them into her purse. Okay, that’s
it. Gotta go.
As she reached the door, she looked
fearfully up and down the street. No
sign of Roger yet. She turned and looked
one last time into the house where she was raised, grew up, and eventually
moved into with her husband. Wistfully
and without hesitation she said out loud, “See ya.”
Marie locked and closed the door. She cleared the walk to the driveway in
record time. Shut up the doors of the
SUV, fell into the driver’s seat, and started the engine.
No time left. Please, please, just another few seconds.
Marie put the vehicle in gear, down the
driveway, and up the street, in the opposite direction from which she knew
Roger would be coming home any second.
She did not speed, as she did not want to be stopped by the police in
her haste. She took some deep breaths to
try and calm her asthma, but it did little good.
Next stop: the bank. It was dangerous, because, you never knew
when Roger would hit up the ATM for his fun money. She had to hope, that’s all there was too
it. She passed the Wawa, the Acme
supermarket, her favorite pizza place, developments which had sprung up like weeds
in this once quiet corner of Southern New Jersey. It had been farms and just two developments
when they had moved there when she was four. But now, it was all McMansions,
strip malls, fast food joints, and suburban sprawl. It was a full-fledged suburb of Philadelphia
now, forty years later.
She pulled into the back parking lot. The only available spot right in front of the
main road. Oh well. She parked, and pulled out her inhaler. She took a deep puff, held it in, let it out,
and then took another. She sat there for
a moment and tried to gather herself.
She adjusted her hair in the rearview mirror. She closed her eyes and did a brief exercise
of Pranayama. She inhaled for ten
seconds, held for ten seconds, and exhaled for ten seconds. She felt a little bit of her natural calm
return, but she couldn’t afford much more time.
She pulled out the check she took from the
checkbook the day before. She entered
the newspaper payment into the register, but she never did make out the
check. Now, she did. She wrote, Cash-Marie Brabant as the
payee. The amount? How much was she sure they had in the
account? You could never be sure with
Roger. With Roger money was to be spent
on whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it.
And he rarely bothered to keep track of his ATM withdraws, which, of
course, made balancing the check book rather a Herculean endeavor. They should have had about a thousand dollars
roughly in the account. She wrote the
check for $700. She couldn’t afford to
guess too high, as she wouldn’t be able to cash the check then, and she didn’t
have another check, and Roger had her bank card.
She was shaking as she walked across the
parking lot, making nervous glances at the road and the cars going by. No sign of Roger. So far.
Inside the bank there was a line.
She sighed with mild impatience, which was not like her. Patience was one of her virtues
normally. But, then, normally she wasn’t
running away from her life. The line to
the teller slowly moved forward. In just
a couple of minutes she was facing the teller.
She handed the smartly dressed young woman her check and driver’s
license and smiled. The teller examined
the check and her license carefully.
Marie wondered if the girl could sense her nervousness. She assured herself that it didn’t matter
anyway, as it was after all her money.
Whatever clandestine plans Marie may have had, didn’t matter to the
teller. In another moment the girl
handed her an envelope containing $700.
“Thank you, dear,” Marie chirped as
cheerfully and casually as she could muster.
“You’re welcome, Ma’am.”
The next part of the plan was to go to the
county library to use the computer to figure out where to go next. She had been afraid to even look up local
hotels on her laptop or work computer, because Roger was always checking to see
where she went online the last three months.
He would look at her emails, her forum posts, her Google searches,
everything. She didn’t want to give him
anything to go on. So, she drove the
Chevy Equinox through the country road to the little historic village of
Mullica Hill to the library. It was out
of the way, Roger would never think of looking for her there. However, she quickly discovered that one
needed a library card to use the library computer. And Marie did not have a library card. So that was that.
She got back to the Equinox and sat back
behind the wheel and sighed. She
remembered that the SUV’s navigation system had a points of interest menu. She found hotels, and selected the one she
believed would be the least expensive and most out of the way: the Motel 8 in Gibbstown. She engaged the navigator, which she normally
hated, and obediently followed the voice’s directions. Farms and woods lined the back roads through
that rural part of the state. Marie had
no idea where she was or where she was headed, she simply listened to the
computer’s directions.
“In six miles turn left on Buttercup Road.”
There was something relaxing about it. The computer seemed sure of itself, so Marie
just drove. She felt her tension
lessening the further away she got from home.
Her breathing finally relaxed.
She made the left turn onto Buttercup Road.
“Your destination will be on the left in
one mile.”
The voice of the navigation system was
right again, there after the promised one mile ride was a sign for the
motel. Marie let out her biggest sigh
yet.
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