No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [125]
Clayton wants out.
But there’s something about Enid, this darkness about her, that to even hint at the subject of divorce, even some kind of separation, there’s no predicting how she’ll handle it.
Once, before leaving on one of his extended sales trips, he says he needs to talk to her. About something serious.
“I’m not happy,” he says. “I don’t think this is working out.”
She doesn’t cry. She doesn’t ask what’s wrong. She doesn’t ask what she could do to help the marriage, to make him happy.
What she does is, she gets up close to him, looks deep into his eyes. He wants to look away, but can’t, as though mesmerized by her evil. Looking into her eyes, it’s like looking into the soul of the devil. All she says is, “You will never leave me.” And walks out of the room.
He thinks about that on his trip. We’ll see about that, he tells himself. We’ll just see.
When he returns, his dog does not run out to greet him. When he opens the garage door to put away the Plymouth, there is Flynn, a rope drawn tightly around his neck, hanging from the rafters.
All Enid says to him is, “Good thing it was just the dog.”
For all she loves Jeremy, she’s willing to let Clayton believe the boy’s at risk should he ever decide to leave her.
Clayton Sloan resigns himself to this life of misery and humiliation and emasculation. This is what he’s signed on for, and he’s going to have to make the best of it. He’ll sleepwalk through life if that is what he has to do.
He works hard at not despising the boy. Jeremy’s mother has brainwashed him into thinking his father is unworthy of his affections. He sees his father as useless, just a man who lives in the house with him and his mother. But Clayton knows Jeremy is as much a victim of Enid as he is.
How can his life have turned out like this? he wonders.
There are numerous occasions when Clayton considers taking his own life.
He’s driving across the country in the dead of night. Coming back from Chicago, rounding the bottom of Lake Michigan, doing that short stretch through Indiana. He sees a bridge abutment up ahead and bears down on the accelerator. Seventy miles an hour, then eighty, ninety. The Plymouth begins to float. Hardly anyone wears seat belts, and even if they did, he’s unbuckled his, thereby assuring that he’ll go through the windshield and perish. The car eases over onto the shoulder, spewing gravel and dust behind it, but then, at the last minute, he veers back onto the highway, chickens out.
One time, couple of miles west of Battle Creek, he loses his nerve, steers back onto the road, but at that high speed, when the front right tire catches the ridge where shoulder meets pavement, he loses control. The car veers across two lanes, right into the path of a semi, plows into the median, coming to a stop in high grass.
What usually makes him change his mind is Jeremy. His son. He’s afraid to leave him alone with her.
He has to make a stop in Milford one time. On the prowl for some new clients, new businesses to supply.
He goes into a drugstore to buy a candy bar, and there is a woman behind the counter. Wearing a little name tag that says “Patricia.”
She is beautiful. Reddish hair.
She seems so nice. So genuine.
There’s something about her eyes. A gentleness. A kindness. After spending the last few years trying so hard not to look into Enid’s dark eyes, to now see a pair so beautiful, he feels light-headed.
He takes a long time to buy that chocolate