Peril

SARA

She stood at the corner of Eighth Avenue and Forty-second Street, holding tightly to the suitcase. She’d known from the beginning that the moment would come when she would freeze. She’d come to New York with no idea of what to do or where to go. And so there’d have to be a moment when you couldn’t figure out what you were going to do next. That was when you were most vulnerable, most gullible, most willing to take whatever hand reached out to you. Which was what she’d done with Tony, and later hated herself for doing, and would never do again.

A voice inside her head gave the instruction, Just keep moving!

She lifted her hand and hailed a cab.

“Where to?” the driver asked as she settled into the backseat.

“Brooklyn Heights,” she said for no reason other than that she’d sometimes strolled at night on the wide promenade, the radiant gleam of the Manhattan skyline, the great bridge shimmering above the dividing river.

On the Brooklyn Bridge, she glanced out over the harbor, the distant green of Lady Liberty, her torch hefted high. She tried to imagine herself as an immigrant, new to the country, carrying nothing but a single suitcase and some hopeful vision of the future. She labored to find something hopeful too, but her past reached for her like a bony hand thrust up from the ground, and she felt only the dreadful opposite of nostalgia, memory itself a haunted house.

“Anyplace in particular you want to be dropped off?” the driver asked as he turned off the ramp that led to Brooklyn Heights.

“Just near the river.”

The cab came to a halt on Columbia Heights Street. Sara paid the driver and got out and stood, suitcase in hand, facing the river until she recalled a small hotel whose dark little cabaret room she’d once worked.

It was called the Jefferson, and the cabaret room was now just a bar off the lobby. Still, it was a place she knew and so she decided to check in for the night. The man behind the desk asked if she had a reservation. She told him that she hadn’t.

“Very well,” he said a little sadly, as if in recognition that a hotel where a person could just walk in off the street and get a room was a second-rate hotel, and so he must be second-rate too. “The room’s on the fifth floor.” He gave her the key and tapped a brass bell.

A bellhop appeared. He grabbed her suitcase. “This way.”

The bellhop wore a little round cap with a strap beneath the chin, the kind she remembered on bellhops in movies from the forties, and suddenly she felt the sweet, romantic glow of those old films turn sour in her mind. Their promise of a big happy ending was no more than a cruel joke, a Hollywood fantasy in which the ones who hurt you got what they deserved.