Free Fear Itself by Duffy Prendergast Page B

today?”
    “It’s your baby now Mathew. You take good care of her.”
    I squeezed his hand, “You take care now, John.”
    “If I’m gone when you get back…I’ll see you on the other side.” He laughed, and then went into a coughing fit.
    “See you on the other side John.”
    I slipped back into the garage and I opened the door and shuffled down the steps where I lifted the door-latch and tugged at the car cover until it slid off of the shiny blue mustang and then I slipped into the leather bucket driver-seat of my Mustang convertible. The keys were in the ignition where I’d left them. I turned the engine over and it came to life with a low muffled growl. I opened the garage door with the remote and pulled the car down the driveway, closed the garage door, and into the street where I parked it in front of the Crump’s house.
    The street was still quiet and dark but I walked up the Crump’s driveway as though, again, it were my own, so as not to arouse suspicion. Back at my rear sliding glass door I retrieved the three suitcases, the gym-bag beneath my arm and the two large brown leather monstrosities in either hand, and I retraced my steps through the patch of woods and the Crump’s yard once again stepping over dead trees and wooded debris and down the driveway and I heaved the suitcases into the open trunk of the Mustang.
    Back at the house I gathered the few things of value which I’d forgotten, such as Catherine’s pearl necklace and her diamond ear-rings (I wondered if she had worn them the night she had first slept with Uncle Henry), Sarah’s Game-boy and her red pouch filled with games, a picture of Catherine (for Sarah), and the little bit of cash still clasped inside Catherine’s change-purse, forty seven dollars (hardly compensation in my eyes for the wrong she had done me). I peeled back Sarah’s covers and I slipped her little body out of her pajamas without protest as she still slumbered. Her tiny pink feet were warm as I slipped her socks over her toes and up her ankles. I wedged a pair of pink cotton sweat-pants up her legs and lifted her to slide her matching sweatshirt over her head. She was dead-weight still as I slipped her jacket and hat onto her and slung her onto my shoulder. As I slipped down the Crump’s driveway for the final time I felt a sinful tingle of joy come over me at the thought of stealing my freedom from the clutches of tyranny; of leaving an old life behind, like a locust shedding its shell, to start a new life. I was almost giddy as I slid Sarah into her seat and climbed into the driver’s seat and drove slowly away.
    As I pulled onto Erie road, though, I looked back at my yard and my house for what I assumed would be the last time ever. That house had been the only home that Catherine and I had owned. All of my memories were moored to its confines. The yard that I had mowed a thousand times and knew every rut and surface-grown root of; the driveway where I had played ball with Sarah, where Catherine and I had had snowball fights and played one- on-one basketball; soon to be a memory. The house which we had slowly remodeled room by room from the hovel it was when we bought it to the comfortable home we had made; soon to be the property of the bank. And the mortgage only eight years away from being paid in full. The only house that Sarah had ever known would be lost to us forever. I pulled away feeling the melancholy of mourning yet another loss while sensing awkwardly as though I had left something undone.
    I hadn’t any clear plan, but the license plates on the Mustang were still registered to John and the car wouldn’t likely be missed for a long while and other than having to change our appearances, Sarah’s and mine, I didn’t know what I was going to do or where I was going. I only knew that my best chance at a free life with Sarah was to get the hell out; out of Willoughby; out of Ohio; and out of my life. I had read about people who had lived for decades