CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ELIZABETH

Measure twice, cut once, the carpenter’s cliché but a rule of thumb in the Bradford Group, where overlapping divisions do the measuring and Uncle Henry or Father determine the value of their recommendations. For now, I’m content to measure.

Three narrow windows mark the wall farthest from the door, the windows almost at ceiling height and covered with plywood panels. First, I move the table to the wall below the closest window, position the chair before the table, creating what has to serve as a ladder. Then I step onto the chair’s seat, eyes fixed on nothing, my body adjusting to the balance, testing the strength of its sturdy legs. The chair’s rock solid and I crawl onto the table, straightening slowly, fixing again on my balance. The table, with its longer legs, is more unstable than the chair, no surprise, and I’ll have to be very careful.

I slowly rise to my full height, my head now almost centered on the panel covering the window, and I know immediately that my situation could have been a lot worse. Plywood comes in three thicknesses, three-quarter-, half-, and quarter-inch. The first two are quite stiff, with little give. But this pine sheet is quarter-inch and it bows in the center when I wrap my fingers around the top and pull toward me. Not that it’s loose, or about to give way with a tug of my fingers, but the sheet is nailed only at the corners and yanking back will place maximum pressure on the nails as the corners try to follow. And the window frame is aged, the dry pine split in several places by seasonal expansions and contractions. Properly seasoned wood grabs onto a nail, as if trying to restore itself, but the same nail, driven into wood this dry will make a simple hole, the wood pushed aside and unable to spring back.

I’m feeling calmer now as I move the table to the second window, as I climb up and test the panel, as I move on to the third. I feel the urgency, true, but time, I tell myself, is not of the essence. Tashya will not return until she must, her reasons for keeping her distance the same as her reasons for leaving, a risk-avoidance strategy that carries risks of its own.

I decide on the middle panel after examining all three, then position the table and climb aboard, thinking I’d be willing to give up a fair piece of my inheritance for a pry bar. Then it’s right to work, pulling, releasing, pulling, releasing, initially finding no change at all in the panel, no movement. But then a loud screech erupts, reminding me of a door opening on a long-unoiled hinge, as a nail at the top left of the panel moves a fraction of an inch. I’m sweating now, and remembering a side trip to one of our worksites in Egypt. We were touring Spain, visiting one gilded cathedral after another, Sherman predictably obsessed with the gargoyles, when Father escorted us to a small plane. No questions asked or answered.

Though shaded by a canopy, we couldn’t escape the midsummer Egyptian heat. Neither could a long column of laborers carrying hundred-pound bags of cement along a wooden ramp stretching from the ground to the second floor. They wore pants cut off at the knees, no shirts, feet jammed into sandals, torsos glistening, sweat falling from hair to shoulders, faces revealing no expression beyond the patience of broken animals.

I’m trying to emulate that patience, encouraged whenever I feel the panel give, refusing to acknowledge a growing fatigue, failure not on the menu tonight, do or die more than a cliché. I’m succeeding, or so I tell myself, though only the one nail moves and that only by millimeters.

Minutes later (ten, twenty, or thirty, time without meaning here), I call a halt, stymied because I can’t put my weight into each pull, my balance too precarious and nothing to brace myself against.

I climb down, open a bottle of warm water and drain it, as sweaty as any of those Egyptian laborers, hair clinging to my neck, the insoles of my tennis shoes little more than soaked sponges. I can stop here, of course, move table and chair to their proper place, have a candy bar or a bag of stale popcorn soaked in a greasy substance designed to simulate butter. Because the only alternative I can see would, in the event of failure, be a confession of guilt.

It was a Greek named Archimedes who claimed that he could move the Earth if provided with a big enough lever and a fulcrum. At least according to Ms. Delroy, who taught Physics, a class I completed at age thirteen when other girls my age were discussing their training bras. I recall this now as I cool down, as I focus my front brain on the problem at hand. How much time do I have? Enough to manually loosen the panel? Maybe, maybe not, but the only alternative, the only levers, are spoken for. At present, they’re parts of the chair I’ve been using to climb up on the table.

Almost every part of the chair, I now realize, can be used as a lever. The top rail, the stiles, the legs, the seat, the apron, even the backrest, the splat. Disassembled, the heavy chair is a collection of levers that can be jammed behind the panel and worked against the nails. One problem, though, a big one. The chair can never be reassembled, rendering my escape attempt painfully obvious the next time Tashya descends the stairs. And after she told me she would be leaving the cottage, after she advised me to stay calm and right where I was.

There’s another problem as well. There don’t appear to be hinges on the inside of the windows covered by the panels. Do they open outward? Or are they fixed in place, meant never to open? That would leave me to break the glass and very likely cut myself on the way out.

I open a second bottle of water, suddenly imagining Tashya and her companion following my blood trail through the forest, perhaps assisted by a pack of beagles.

I’ve calmed by the time I finish the water and start on a bag of M&M’s. I’m now my father, and not my brash uncle who bullies his way through life. There’s a problem and problems call for solutions. My first thought is for the obvious, the chair’s legs, but they’re too thick to jam behind the panel covering the window. Something else, then, something I might have noticed sooner. The top rail on the chair is narrow and projects a good six inches beyond the side rails. If I can slide a projecting edge of the top rail behind the panel, I can test my leverage without destroying the chair in the process.

Probably.

I put it together as I go, step by step. I will climb onto the table, pull the chair up behind me, lift it upside down, insert the protruding top rail behind the panel until it’s jammed tight. Then I’ll take hold of the two closest legs and pull toward me, a force multiplier that should yank those nails out of the frame, assuming the top rail doesn’t snap, a lever turned back on itself, the tool insufficient, the chair now torn apart. And little Elizabeth? My brain shifts gear without notice, the obvious arriving in bits and pieces: ripping off the top rail will allow me access to the rest of the chair, all those mini-levers.

I surprise myself by hesitating, Quentin suddenly rising into my consciousness, shovel in hand, his ugly smirk abruptly banished. Real, real, real. This is not an exercise, a test of my coping skills, my superior intellect, with only my ego at stake. This is not finishing second in a cross-country race, passed in the final fifty yards, the medal awarded to a prancing competitor.

I climb up on the table, kneel and reach for the chair below, some part of my brain solely concerned with balance, the chair heavier than expected, and all I have to do is stand, lift it above my head and force one edge of the top rail behind the plywood sheet.

My legs shake, the table shakes, my brain shakes when I slowly rise to my feet, and no improvement when I try to raise the chair, slipping twice before I lift it high enough to slide the rail behind the panel.

I manage to catch my breath as I carefully work my hands from the seat to the chair’s legs, reaching up as high as I can to maximize leverage. I’m thinking I should pray, but I don’t, my fate utterly dependent on physical calculations I don’t have the data to make. Then I yank hard, expecting hours of work, but something gives and I fall to the table top, then slide over the edge and crash to the floor, the chair landing on my shins before rolling off.

Dazed for a moment, I finally collect myself and take inventory, finding my body sore but not disabled, nothing broken, no limb that will not move. Only then do I look up to find the panel jutting out, the nail free of the window frame. That leaves three nails still in the frame, but not for long, my escape now assured even if I have to break the glass in the window and crawl over the shards.

I roll onto my knees. The chair next to me has split along the top rail. No big deal. I work the rail off, then the backrest, then a leg, even more frenzied, the prospect of freedom, of standing outside the cottage, as intoxicating as the wine Sherman and I sneak at family gatherings.

I stack my levers on the table, heavy legs on top, then climb aboard, forcing myself to rise slowly, forcing myself to ignore a sharp pain in my lower back. Erect, I jam one of the legs behind the remaining top nail, yank more carefully this time. The nail screeches as it slides back a few centimeters at a time, the progress inexorable, my work relentless. It will come free and it does, only the bottom nails holding the panel in place now. I go to work on the one to my right, sliding the chair leg closer and closer to the bottom of the panel until the nail suddenly pops free and the panel swivels downward on its remaining nail.

I’m looking through a dirty window at a tangle of deep grass rising from pebbled soil. Better still, less than a foot away, a simple hook-and-eye latch holds the window closed and what’s held closed can be opened. I flip the hook to the side and push gently on the window. It’s stuck after years shut tight, but I know what to do. I punch the heel of my hand onto the frame, working around the edge, excitement rising, every calculation essentially correct, freedom denied me only by a pane of glass, that impediment suddenly gone when the window slides up and away, turning on its outer hinges.

The cool air that sweeps across my sweat-soaked face and clothing sobers me. The wind’s up, the temperature dropping, and I can’t know what I’ll face once I’m outside. Yet the urge to crawl through the opening is overwhelming, as if the transition will produce absolute safety, an illusion I finally acknowledge by retrieving one of my blankets, climbing back onto the table and pushing it through the window. I follow a second later.

Still agitated, I rise to my feet, then abruptly shut down, the new world I’ve entered somehow unfamiliar, a dream I’ve just awakened from or fallen into. I’m on one side of the house, facing a stretch of weedy, knee-high lawn bordered by a dense grove of young conifers. A rising wind whistles in the trees’ long needles as it drives ragged clouds past a crescent moon, and for a long moment I can’t make sense of where I am. But then I begin to shiver, the cooling wind on my damp clothes and body insistent and vital, a reminder of a conclusion I reached earlier. Do or die.

I wrap the blanket around me and circle the house, the view no longer unfamiliar, the house on its oval lot forming the center of a tennis racket, the road before me a handle extending for a hundred yards before curving off to the right. I find myself wishing I’d taken a greater interest in my nature class in junior high, that I’d memorized the position of the moon in its phases, the location of the North Star or the sweep of the Milky Way. As it is, I don’t even know the time, can’t measure the hours until daylight, much less chart a path through the forest.

Still, the deep shadows beneath the trees lure me with a promise of absolute safety from Tashya. Given a head start, there’s no way she can find me, or even establish a starting point, if I walk into the forest and keep walking, the danger then turning from my abductors to nature itself. The terrain is flat throughout the forest and certain to be swampy in every modest depression, with me already soaked, already cold. And there’s the real possibility of endlessly walking the same circle through the woods, no landmarks, no convenient cliffs or running rivers to mark the way.

I walk slowly to the edge of the forest, tell myself I’m not a child to be afraid of wolves, bears, or coyotes, of trolls, zombies, or the cottage of the wicked witch, but the dark patches beneath the tallest trees take on the appearance of black holes in the only universe that matters.

My fear is primeval, as elemental as my genes, a tangled line of RNA too essential to be removed. The road beckons now, seeming safe, the eerie glow of a crescent moon enough to light my way. How far to the main road? A half mile? A bit more? I have to decide, indecision my enemy, and where do Tashya and her companion lurk, what refuge have they sought? And there’s Tashya’s parting comment, about having eyes on the house, as necessary to avoid a trap as to prevent my escape. Yet the graveled road continues to beckon.

I don’t get far, only about halfway to the first turn, before the van sweeps into view, coming fast, headlights off, and I’m revealed at the edge of the forest, bathed in moonlight. Then a slight shift and the van’s driving straight at me, the sudden flash of its headlights motivating my feet, Tashya’s threat banishing any fear of ghost or goblin, of wolf or bear. I turn and push my way through the brush at the edge of the forest, ignoring branches that tear at my legs.

Running for my life.