Peril

SARA

When the cab arrived, she opened the door and strode swiftly down the walkway, the click of her heels so loud she felt sure it would alert the neighbors, summon them to their windows, all eyes on her now, intent, quizzical, Where’s Sara Labriola off to?

The driver placed the suitcase in the trunk. “Getting an early start,” he said.

She nodded briskly, then got into the cab, careful to gaze straight ahead as it pulled away, afraid that if she didn’t, the fear would reach out like a grappling hook and haul her back across the lawn and into the house, where the voice would begin to make its hard demand- Kill him! — growing louder with each passing day until, inevitably, she would obey it.

At the station, the driver placed the suitcase on the curb and touched his cap. “Have a nice trip,” he said.

Her fear spiked as the cab pulled away, and she was seized with the irrational suspicion that the driver worked for her father-in-law, that he was even then reaching for a cell phone, Hello, Mr. Labriola, I just dropped your son’s wife at the bus station in Montauk. Her hands were trembling, and she struggled to still them. Her fear had reached the panic stage, so that she had to remind herself that it was the long years of listening to Labriola’s stories that had created this paranoid sense that his henchmen were everywhere, whispering into cell phones, tracking her every move.

But none of that mattered now. The only thing that mattered was that she had to leave. She grabbed the suitcase and marched to the ticket counter.

“New York,” she said.

The woman at the booth wore glasses so thick they magnified her eyes. The frames were bright red plastic, a gaudy splash of color in the gray bus station. “One way or round-trip?” the woman asked.

So that was what it came to, Sara thought, whether you stopped at the brink of action or pressed on against all odds, boldly took the outbound road or the circular one that forever wound you back to the scene of the crime.

“One way,” she said, lifting her head, choking back her fear, pronouncing the words loudly, determinedly, as a soldier might call out Charge!

The woman told her the price. She paid in cash, her credit cards left behind because she knew Leo Labriola would trace her if she used them.

“Bus leaves at ten-fourteen,” the woman said.

She walked to the departing gate and waited for the bus, the fear rising steadily so that she continually glanced about nervously, wondering if Labriola had somehow guessed she was leaving, already assigned people all along the route to keep track of her. She could hear their voices in her mind, Leo Labriola’s minions. Her bus is just pulling out now. She’s headed down Sunset Highway. She just reached Cold Spring Harbor. Her bus just pulled into Port Authority. She’s hailing a cab at Forty-second and Ninth. Looks like she’s headed downtown.

Her eyes scanned the station for her father-in-law’s shadowy agents and she saw them all around her. The teenage runaway flicking her pierced tongue; the soldier snoozing softly, his face concealed behind a newspaper; the old black man reading a tattered Bible; the businessman tapping at his laptop. Could all of them be working for the Old Man?

Of course not, she told herself, think about something else, put him out of your mind. She drew in a long breath. Think about something else. Something before Tony. Before the Old Man. Something good.

She returned to her first days in New York, the small-time cabaret singer she’d invented as herself. She’d even given her a name, Samantha Damonte, then created a person to go with it, a smoky-bar woman with plenty of experience, a burnt-out case at twenty-five. Not a bit of it had been true. In fact, as she’d finally come to recognize, Samantha Damonte was just a young woman who’d been afraid to grow up, afraid to go to college, afraid that she wasn’t really special or all that talented, and so, despite the smoky-bar persona, just another girl who wanted to be taken care of. That was what Tony had dangled before her, a safe life, a chance to quiet the voice in her head, its incessantly murderous demand. She’d gone for it because she was weary of short gigs in out-of-the-way clubs, tired of agents and club owners who saw her as a mark, tired of fingers raking up her thigh, tired of the rage that swept over her like a hot wind every time some boozy customer sidled up to the piano, tossed a twenty in the glass, and nodded toward the room at the back, tired of the voice that kept rising from the smoldering center of herself, Kill him!

She might have gone back to Virginia, she thought now, but that door had closed long ago when her father had thrown her out, told her that her dead mother was rolling in her grave, that a singer was just a slut, that she’d either marry Billy Preston, if she could even be sure it was Billy who’d gotten her pregnant, or never show her face at his door again. She’d screamed, “Never, never, never,” moved in with her cousin Sheila, lost the child three weeks later, then split for New York like a million girls before her. At a bus stop outside Philly, in a greasy diner over black coffee and a cigarette, Samantha Damonte had been born.

Okay, so Samantha Damonte was totally made up, Sara told herself, like a character in a book. But who was Sara Labriola, this woman in this particular bus station? She didn’t know, and that struck her as more frightening than anything else, the fact that she could define herself now only as a woman in a rage, half wishing she had done it long ago, drawn back the hammer, pulled the trigger, given up the foolish fantasy that there had ever been a choice.