Escape by Barbara Delinsky

your father admits that. Given my druthers, I’d have you all over—children, grandchildren, even your father.” Her tone changed. “Tell me about you.”
    “You first,” I insisted. “What were you feeling when you ran away?” I had never asked at the time, not wanting to know the details of my parents’ divorce. And Mom usually avoided bad-mouthing Dad. But she must have known I needed honesty now, because she was blunt.
    “I felt inadequate. In your dad’s eyes, I was always that. This particular day, he made a snide remark when he was leaving for work, and I snapped—not at him, but inside me. You kids were all in college, and I suddenly saw that I was stuck alone with a man who, all those years later, was still wanting me to be someone I wasn’t.”
    Suddenly saw
. That was what had happened to me Friday morning. I could also relate to
wanting me to be someone I wasn’t
, though James couldn’t be faulted for that. It had been all my doing. The question was whether James would love me if I was someone else.
    “Were you thinking of divorce when you walked out?” I asked my mother.
    “I’d been thinking about it for years.” She paused, guarded. “Are you?”
    “No,” I replied. Fingering my wedding band, I was suddenly weepy. “I love the James I married. It’s our life that I hate.” I began to cry, to sob actually, but this was different from my crying with Vicki. That was from exhaustion. With Mom I was a child, small and confused.
    Offering the occasional soothing murmur, she waited me out. When my tears finally slowed, I gave her a sniffly account of my flight from New York. I ended with Walter’s offer.
    “Four weeks is something,” she mused. “I only took a week, but my choice was simpler. Stay with your father or not.”
    “Where did you go?” Incredible that I had never asked before, but it was another of those details I hadn’t wanted to know, and once she was back, it hadn’t mattered.
    “Cape Elizabeth.”
    Whoa
. “That’s only twenty minutes from the house.”
    She chuckled. “If you want to disappear, Emily, you can do it most anywhere. Truth was, I didn’t have the courage to go farther. I’ve always loved Cape Elizabeth. I felt at home by the sea. How could your father not have guessed?”
    “Maybe it was too obvious.”
    “Maybe he just didn’t know me well enough.”
    I might have said the same about James, only I was the guilty party in this, too. I was the one who had been less than forthright about certain parts of my past.
    “Was it important to you that Dad not know?” I asked, because James was most bothered by that. I had never thought him to be controlling, certainly not of me, but he had repeatedly asked where I was.
    “Roger’s not knowing made me feel safe,” my mother said. “He was always so quick to judge me. I knew that if I talked with him, he would convince me I was stupid to leave. But I couldn’t think straight at home. Home was so cluttered with memories that I couldn’t see the forest through the trees.”
    At mention of the forest, I left the bed and went barefoot to the window. Clouds were drifting, turning the woods darker, but I knew what was there. A coyote had spoken to me last night. It might be hidden away now, asleep—or looking straight at me. I searched beside tree trunks and through ferns for a pair of golden eyes or large, pointy ears. Jude’s coyote had been russet, with a bushy tail long enough to leave a trail in the snow, he said, and I half imagined he had run with it a time or two. Not that I’d seen it in winter myself.
    Nor did I see it now. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t there. Coyotes knew how to be invisible.
    “I didn’t want him dragging me back until I’d made my decision,” Mom was saying.
    My eyes continued to search the forest. “How did you finally make it?”
    “The hurricane. There was a bad one that year, do you remember?”
    I actually did. “The phones were out. I couldn’t reach