Chapter 65
SHAY
She had to wait until all of the children were silent in their cots.
Until Cleo was sleeping so deeply that her body occasionally forgot to breathe, and Susan had clicked off the bathroom light that crept into the hallway.
Until Jim rested in the garden, Riverside left unattended, resting for ten minutes like any other house on the street, a house where you could open the front door and not be threatening to burn the entire structure to the ground.
Shay did not know what had happened to the clothes she wore when she arrived—it was a miracle her wallet and keys remained pressed beneath her mattress—and so she quietly latched her overalls in the dark.
Boots were lined up by the back door, so they would have to be abandoned.
She rolled three sets of socks over her callused feet.
She knew which floorboards to skirt, which stairs to avoid.
For that entire day, she’d acted as if nothing were amiss, sanding the bench Jim had built for the entryway in long, smooth strokes.
Simon’s mistake had been to try to remain honest, to cling to the moral fabric that had stitched them all so tightly together.
The only way Shay knew how to escape was to lie, and so it was only when her soles alighted on the sidewalk that she began to run.
In the early morning, the park was empty except for men sleeping on benches, men smoking the stubs of cigarettes, men looking furtively for other men, their hands shoved in their nylon jacket pockets.
Her body seized as they approached, but she quickly realized—with her shaved head and stockinged feet—that they were as frightened of her as she was of them.
She could simply walk and listen to the night song of mockingbirds and whippoorwills.
The rumble of taxis and garbage trucks was so muffled they ceased to exist. She was no longer in a city.
She was just a young girl alone in a forest. A white figure surrounded by the dark.
The books from her father she had loved most as a child, the ones she’d read to William, were about children finding their way in the wilderness.
Children lapping water from streams and sleeping beneath a crown of stars.
She had felt a kinship with these orphans, with their cunning and self-reliance, but she realized now what made them heroes and heroines.
They chose survival. They chose to keep living, even after such loss, even if that meant fresh pain and strife and learning the ways of a new world.
Walking through Central Park, Shay realized she wanted to survive as well, to not ruminate on past mistakes and regrets.
To become only herself, a beating heart, hungry and alive.
This must have been what her father wanted for her, even if he could not will it for himself.
She decided to run again, her soles a steady drum on the path, and she thought of Joel’s apartment in the Village, and for a few beautiful moments, before she felt her body’s complete and utter exhaustion, her eyes became sharp as emeralds, and she felt she could run and run and run.