Chapter 8: The Escape Attempt
The fluorescent lights in the grocery store hummed like a nest of trapped wasps. Everything was too bright, too clean, the linoleum gleaming a hostile white. Lisa’s hand was a brand on Susanna’s elbow, not guiding, but anchoring.
“We need rice,” Lisa said, her voice a normal weekend murmur. She tossed a bag into the cart. It landed with a thud beside the wine, the eggs, the coffee. A perfect domestic snapshot. “The jasmine kind you like.” It was a gift, and they both knew it. A tiny restoration of the girl who had preferences, a girl Lisa had curated and kept.
Susanna nodded, her eyes skating over the aisles. She felt porous, like every harsh light and shrill child’s voice passed right through her. The ghost of the rotary phone’s dial tone was still in her ear. 7-3-4-555-0110. It played on a loop beneath the store’s soulless music.
At checkout, Lisa unloaded the cart with efficient snaps of her wrists. The cashier, a bored kid with acne, didn’t look up. This was the moment. Lisa was digging in her leather jacket for the exact change she always insisted on using, her focus a laser on the coins in her palm.
Susanna’s breath hitched. There, across the front lane, past a rack of gum and glossy tabloids, was a payphone. Its yellowed plastic hood was a sanctuary.
“I just… I need the bathroom,” Susanna whispered.
Lisa’s eyes flicked up from her coins. Blue, assessing. She held the look for a heartbeat that stretched into a lifetime. Then she smiled, a thin curve of her lips. “Hurry up. The ice cream will melt.”
Permission. A test.
Susanna walked, not too fast. The bathroom sign pointed left, past the phone. She could smell its old plastic, a scent of public loneliness. She veered right.
Her heart was a frantic bird against her ribs. She fumbled a quarter from her own jacket pocket—hidden money, the shameful five dollars she’d kept from coffee changes for months. The slot ate it. The dial was heavy, real.
She punched the numbers. 7… 3… 4… The mechanical whirl was deafening. Each rotation a cannon shot.
Come on. Come on.
A cold hand closed over hers, crushing her fingers against the number pad. A body pressed close, smelling of leather and Lisa’s cheap, sharp perfume.
“Wrong number again, baby?” Lisa’s voice purred in her ear, intimate as a kiss. Her other hand snaked around Susanna’s waist, a lover’s embrace from behind. With a violent jerk, she yanked the receiver free and slammed it back onto the hook. The connection died before it was ever born.
Lisa’s grip on her hand shifted, fingers intertwining with a brutal tenderness. She turned them both, steering Susanna away from the phone, back toward the checkout where their bags sat, neat and waiting. Her hold was absolute, a bone-deep clamp.
“You’re so predictable,” Lisa sighed, almost laughing. She nodded politely at the cashier as she hauled the bags up. “It’s kind of sweet. Like a little mouse trying the same trap every night.”
The walk through the automatic doors, into the buzzing fluorescence of the parking lot, was a parade. Lisa’s arm was through Susanna’s now, a linked, romantic couple. The asphalt radiated the day’s trapped heat. A shopping cart rattled lonely by the curb.
Lisa unlocked the car, a beat-up sedan that was more hers than theirs. She didn’t open the passenger door. She pinned Susanna against the hot metal of the side, the handle digging into her back. She leaned in, her blonde hair falling like a curtain, blocking out the rest of the world.
“You think that voice on the phone would care?” Lisa whispered. Her breath was warm. “You think she’d come here? Hold you while you shake?” She brought a hand up, not to strike, but to trace the frantic pulse in Susanna’s throat. “I do that. Every time. I’m the only one who’s ever here.”
She kissed her then, hard and possessive. It tasted like claim.
When she pulled back, her eyes were flat. “Get in the car.”
The drive was silent. The grocery bags sat in the backseat like silent witnesses. Lisa drove with one hand on the wheel, the other resting on Susanna’s knee, a weight that was both a comfort and a shackle.
Back in the apartment, the familiar gloom felt different. The air was stale, a closed circuit. Lisa didn’t shout. She didn’t break anything. She started putting the groceries away with a terrifying, methodical calm. The rice went in the pantry. The wine on the counter.
Then she went to the fridge.
She stood before it, staring at the collage of photos. The story was messy, she’d said.
Slowly, deliberately, she began to peel the tape off. Not tearing the pictures, just removing them. Susanna at the park, smiling. Susanna reading on the frayed velvet couch. Susanna looking much younger, her eyes less hollow. Each one came down. Lisa stacked them neatly on the counter.
In their place, she taped up the new grocery store receipt. The long white slip of paper, covered in times and prices and product codes. Then, next to it, a single, crisp twenty-dollar bill from her wallet, sealed with tape at all four corners.
She stepped back, admiring her work. “There,” she said, her voice soft. “A real story. What we did today. And what it cost.”
She turned to Susanna, who stood frozen in the middle of the room. “Your notebook,” Lisa said. It wasn’t a question.
A new, colder dread pooled in Susanna’s stomach. Her notebook. The one with the pigeon poem. The one with the fragments she’d hidden under the loose floorboard by her side of the bed. The only thing that was entirely, secretly hers.
“I’m not angry,” Lisa said, walking toward the bedroom. “I’m just helping you clean up. All this… fictional clutter. It’s bad for you.”
She emerged a moment later with the black composition book in her hand. She didn’t even look at the loose board, still slightly raised. She just knew.
Lisa walked to the kitchen sink. She pulled a cheap plastic lighter from the drawer.
“No,” Susanna whispered, the first word she’d spoken since the store.
“It’s just paper, Susanna,” Lisa said, her voice reasonable. She flicked the lighter. The flame leapt, orange and eager. She held the notebook by its cover, letting it dangle over the metal basin.
She touched the flame to the bottom edge.
The paper caught fast, blackening, curling, glowing red at the seams. Lisa dropped the burning book into the empty sink. They watched it together as the flames consumed the careful, cramped handwriting, the sad pigeon poems, the desperate lists of reasons to stay and reasons to go. The light danced in Lisa’s blue eyes, a reflection of pure, tranquil heat.
The pages turned to fragile, weightless ash. A final piece of charcoal spine crumbled.
Lisa turned on the faucet. A hiss of steam, then a dark, wet paste swirled down the drain. She wiped her hands on her jeans.
“See?” she said, crossing the room and pulling Susanna into an embrace that felt like a burial. “All clean. Now it’s just us. Just the real stuff.”
Over Lisa’s shoulder, Susanna stared at the fridge. The receipt. The twenty-dollar bill. A record of a mundane errand. A receipt for her own extinction. The only story left was the one Lisa told, and it was priced, dated, and filed away. The silence in the apartment was no longer just silence. It was the absence of every word she had ever thought to keep for herself.