Peril полностью

On the way to the marina Tony once again surveyed the world around him. There were good schools and playgrounds, soccer fields and tennis courts. The little malls hummed with shoppers. It wasn’t for Sara, but it was not so terrible a place, he thought. The argument he’d made that they should live here rather than the city seemed valid enough even now. So the problem wasn’t that he’d gotten it wrong about Long Island, he decided. The problem was that he’d gotten it wrong about Sara, never gauged how isolated she would feel, how bored. But there was more than that, he realized. Some part of her had always been withheld from him, buried deep, something inside of her he couldn’t reach. He wondered if all women had this little room they wouldn’t unlock for you. Maybe even Della DeLuria had a room like that, one Mike couldn’t enter but sometimes thought about, wanted to know what Della kept in there.

At a traffic light, a shiny Ford Explorer pulled up beside him. The woman behind the wheel was about Sara’s age, with close-cropped brown hair. She held loosely to the wheel, a thick bracelet on her wrist, a small diamond winking from her finger. There were two kids in the back, but the woman seemed hardly to notice their frantic scuffling or the maddening noise they made. Her eyes were fixed on the road ahead, and she seemed determined to make it to the next light, then the next, until the day had passed, and she was at home again, in her bed, nestled beside her sleeping husband, her eyes open in the motionless dark.

He had to admit that even now he had no idea what thoughts came to Sara when she lay in the ebony silence of their bedroom. Her flight was all the evidence he needed that she must have been desperately unhappy. Years before, his cousin Donny had told him women were always unhappy, and that the only way a man could be happy was not to care. That was what he’d tried to do, he decided now, he’d tried not to care that Sara was bored, lonely, or that he’d broken the promise he’d made that once his business was off the ground they’d move to the city. For a time she’d made the case for returning to New York, but his father had supplied the reasons he’d given her for not doing it (Manhattan was far from his business. Long Island was better for the kids that would be coming along), though to the old man there’d never been any point in giving Sara a reason for anything since it was the man who was supposed to decide where his family lived. He could hear his father’s relentless call to arms, Be a man, for Christ’s sake! And so he’d done that. He’d been a man. And now he was a man alone.

“I’ll do it,” he blurted out suddenly.

Eddie looked at him quizzically.

“I’ll do it,” Tony repeated. “Move to the city, if that’s what she wants. That’s what I’ll tell her if I get to her first.” He stared at Eddie desperately. “But I got to get to her first. Help me, Eddie. Talk to Caruso.”

Eddie seemed to see the depth of his desperation. “Okay, Tony,” he said. “Okay.”

Tony turned his gaze westward and considered the limitless expanse that presented itself to him, his country from sea to shining sea, the vast landscape into which Sara had disappeared, his mind now focused exclusively on one question: Where could she be?

SARA

She sat at the window, the skyline of the city so close she could almost touch it. It was the phone that seemed far away and deadly silent. Perhaps she’d get a call, perhaps she wouldn’t. The guy had said he liked her singing and taken her number, but an odd look had come into his eye when she’d told him that she was living in a hotel. Maybe at that moment he’d figured her for trouble, a woman at loose ends, a drunk, maybe, or worse—anyway, undependable.

She tried to put the bar and the open mike out of her mind, along with whatever hope she’d briefly harbored that she might actually get the job. She couldn’t even be sure that she’d sung all that well. It didn’t matter anyway, because the guy who owned the place had no doubt noticed how jittery she was, the way her eyes darted around like a frightened little bird. Who would want a singer like that, nervous, strung out, probably on the run?

On the run.

She recalled her first days in New York, how she’d waited by the window as she did now. The only difference was that now someone could show up suddenly, Labriola in his big blue Lincoln, pounding on her door, kicking it open, dragging her down the stairs and through the lobby while the little bellhop looked on, aghast, but ready to take the fifty Labriola slipped him, along with the icy command, Keep your fucking mouth shut.