Peril

TONY

Tony snapped the cell phone closed and looked at Eddie. “He won’t tell me a thing,” he said.

They had been driving aimlessly for an hour, through a string of Long Island towns, Tony talking to his father, trying to get some idea of who he’d put on Sara. “He just says he’ll find her, and when he does it’s up to me.”

“Up to you?” Eddie asked.

“What I want to do about it.”

“So, what you want to do, Tony?”

“I don’t know,” Tony admitted. “Talk to her, I guess.”

They rode in silence for a time, before Eddie said, “So, what will you talk to her about, Tony?”

“I don’t know.” Tony pulled down the visor to shield his eyes from the bright midmorning sun. “There’s something eating at him,” he said. “My father.” He considered his father’s gruff, angry tone, the spiking rage he seemed to feel at the mention of Sara’s name. “Maybe I should just tell him to pull this guy off, you know.”

“She could come back any minute,” Eddie said consolingly. “Like that aunt of mine.”

Tony stared out at the dull suburban landscape. “She never liked it here,” he said. He tightened his grip on the wheel and shook his head. “I don’t know what I want anymore, Eddie. I mean, what’s the good of her coming back if she can’t be happy?” He thought a moment, then shrugged. “But I don’t think she was ever happy. Except maybe right at the beginning, before-”

“Before what?”

“Before the Old Man started coming over all the time. Always beefing about this or that.”

Eddie nodded silently.

“I don’t want him to find her,” Tony continued. “Him, or some guy he’s got looking. It would scare her, you know? Some goon coming up to her, telling her she’s gotta come with him, maybe grabbing her arm, pushing her into a car.” A scene from his boyhood sliced through his brain, his mother on her knees in the kitchen, holding a bloody cloth to her mouth. A terrible dread seized him, and he suddenly steered the car off the main road and brought it to a halt on a secluded beach. “I got to find her before this goon does,” he said emphatically. He studied the empty expanse of the sea briefly, then turned to Eddie. “I figure it’s Vinnie Caruso that’s looking for her. Who else would my father use for something like this?”

Eddie nodded heavily. “Yeah, it’s probably Vinnie.”

Tony studied Eddie’s doughy features a moment, then said, “You go back a while, right? You and Caruso? I noticed it. When he shows up at the marina, he always says hello to you.”

“We go back, yeah. High school.”

“You were friends?”

“We hung out together,” Eddie said. “Weekends, you know? Over at Buddy’s Grill, with other guys that didn’t have no dates.”

Tony tried to imagine Eddie and Caruso in Buddy’s Grill on a listless Saturday night, both of them losers, no girls in sight, staring at each other over chili dogs and Cokes, two guys without prospects, two of life’s innocent bystanders, dodging stray bullets, getting hit or not, but always and forever within the line of fire.

“Vinnie wasn’t a bad guy back then,” Eddie added. “But he got picked on. Stuart Brock used to beat him up.”

Tony guessed what Eddie had left out. “Until you made him stop, right?”

Eddie nodded silently.

“So Caruso owes you,” Tony said.

Eddie looked at Tony without comprehension.

“He owes you a favor,” Tony explained.

“I guess.”

“Do you think he’d be willing to tell you if he found Sara? Before he told my father, I mean.”

“I don’t know, Tony. Vinnie’s real tight with your father.”

“But it wouldn’t hurt to ask him, right? At least I’d find out if he’s the guy my father has looking for her.”

“No, it wouldn’t hurt to ask,” Eddie said.

Tony touched Eddie’s shoulder. “I won’t forget this, Eddie.” He hit the ignition. “Believe me, I won’t forget.”

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?