Talk Talk

One

HE WAS SO BOUND UP in the moment, so intent on the faces at the open door and hyper-aware of Natalia preening and swelling at his side, so busy struggling with the stuffed toy and the candy and the flowers and fumbling toward the semi-coherent murmur of the half-formed phrases on his lips, that he didn't see it coming. Didn't look over his shoulder. Didn't clear his sight lines. Didn't watch his back. “Hi, honey,” he was going to say, “remember me?” And would she come to him? Would her face open up the way it used to when he was the heart and soul and dead glowing center of her universe or was she going to freeze him out? And his mother. His mother with her new haircut and big swaying gauzy blouse that bunched at her hips and gave way to the trailing skirt and the pipestems of her legs. “Hi, Mom,” he was going to say, “this is Natalia. My fiancée. My fiancée, Natalia.” And Natalia would be giving Sukie the fish eye, putting two and two together, working herself up over her own daughter's exile at that overpriced camp at the end of the dirt road that left a tattered blanket of dust clinging to the car every day and yet drawing all her strings tight to make a good impression in front of his mother and still riding high on the current of those three soaring syllables, “fiancée.” There was all that. All that and the heat too.

He'd just shifted the toy from his right arm to his left-it was ridiculous, the biggest thing in the store, a life-size stuffed replica of a sled dog, replete with the blue glass buttons of its eyes-to take hold of Natalia's hand and lead her up the walk, when there was another face there, two faces, hovering suddenly at the margin of his peripheral vision. His and hers. He cut his eyes right and there was a single lost beat in there somewhere before he felt the shock knife through him. It was as if he were fen years old all over again, thrilling to his first slasher flick, no children under sixteen allowed without parent or guardian, the theater gone silent, the maniac loose-and then the scream, stark, universal, collaborative. Rising.

The stuffed dog fell to the ground. He let go of Natalia's hand even as she said, “What, what is it?” and turned to follow his eyes and see them there sprung up out of the concrete walk not twenty feet away like figures out of a dream, a bad dream, terminally bad, the worst, and though he was cool, always cool-Peck Wilson, never ruffled, never at a loss, never weak-he couldn't help himself now.

He didn't stop to think how they'd come to track him here, how they were like parasites, how they wouldn't let go and could never learn no matter how many times he taught them, because this moment was beyond thought or resentment or fear, a moment that broke loose inside of him in a sudden ejaculation of violence. Ten steps, too quick to blink, the heart of the panther his tae kwon do instructor always talked about beating now in place of his own, his hands doing their thing independent of his will, perfect balance, and the fool was actually coming to him, flailing his arms like a fairy. And cursing-“you motherfucker” and the like-as if he had breath to waste. The first blow-the “sonnal mok anchigi,” knifehand strike to the neck-rocked him, and then two quick chops to drop his arms, ride back on the left foot and punch through the windpipe with the right.

Somebody screamed. The heat ran at him, all-encompassing, a sea of heat at flood tide. Another scream. It wasn't Natalia screaming, it wasn't his mother or Sukie either. This was like nothing he'd ever heard, ugly, just ugly. And there was the bitch emitting it, right there watching Bridger Martin jerk on the grass and clutch at his own throat as if he wanted to throttle himself, two quick kicks to the ribs to make it easier on him, and it was just the two of them now. Just him and Dana Halter, in her shorts and T-shirt, her face twisted with the insoluble conundrum of that unholy voice wedded to that hard moment. And then, as if it had all been decided beforehand, he went for her and she dodged away and they were both running.

There was nothing in his mind but to lash out, hurt her, bring her low, crush her, and he almost had her in the first furious rush, a snatch at her trailing arm and the fine articulated bones of her flashing wrist, but she was too quick for him, and the fury of his failure-“the bitch, the bitch, the relentless bitch”-burst behind his eyes in a pulse of irradiated heat so that he was blind to everything but the tan soles of her pumping shoes and the fan of her retreating hair. He burned, burned. Every cord in his body snapped to attention. He was in shape, good shape, but so was she, running for her life, running to beat him, humiliate him, wear him down, and they'd gone the length of the block and she was still ten feet beyond him.

Up ahead, the light was turning red. He saw it and calculated his chance because she would have to pivot to go left or swing right and cross the street with the green and that would slow her a fraction of a second, just long enough-but she surprised him, hurtling straight through the intersection without even turning her head, and the blue pickup, coming hard, had to swerve to avoid her and he was the one who lost a step, dodging round the rear bumper while the driver cursed and the horn blared. What he should have done, if he'd been thinking, was double back and pack Natalia in the car and make scarce before somebody called the cops, but he wasn't thinking. She was fleeing, he was chasing. He was going to run her down by the end of the next block, that was what he was going to do, run her down and have his sixty seconds with her, payback, and then he'd be gone.

He could hear the torn sheet of her breathing, the slap of her feet pounding at the concrete walk. Her shoulders rocked, her hair jogged as if it had come loose from her scalp. And more: he could smell her, the torched ashes of her fear, the sweat caught under her arms and running like juice between her legs. He gained a step, but the heat rose up to put two hands against his chest and push at him even as he tried to close the gap and slam her to the pavement from behind. Faces drifted by behind the windshields of the cars easing down the street, there was somebody on a porch, the thump of the bass line from a hidden boom-box, voices, music, the buzz of a cicada. The blood shrieked in his ears. He wasn't even winded.

At the next corner, the car-a white Chevy van-was moving too fast, gunning on the yellow to make the light, and the woman at the wheel hit her horn, laid into it, but this was a game of chicken now and he never hesitated. He had her, actually had his hand locked in her hair, the van sliding by like a bull brushing the cape, when the other car, the one he hadn't seen, plunged in on the bumper of the van. That put an end to it. Where there had been nothing but air the strangest sudden act of prestidigitation interposed a plane of steel, chrome and safety glass, and they both hit it and went down to the smell of scorched rubber.

Two black dudes. Young, angry-looking, scared. People had run crazy right into the side of their car, and they were smelling the scorched rubber too, slamming out of both doors while the traffic froze and Dana Halter jumped up like a rabbit and he jumped up too, absolutely capable of anything, “anything.” But then the siren whooped and the lights flashed and the patrol car was right there, sliding in to block off the intersection, and there was nowhere to go. For one instant he stared into her eyes, brown eyes, the black irises dilated with her fear and now her hate and now her triumph, and the cops were getting out of the cruiser, a tight-assed woman in schoolteacher glasses and an old guy, looking grim. Peck just stood there, sweating, trying to catch his breath. His left arm stung where he'd slammed it against the car and his pants were torn at the knee. He could have run, and wound up in jail-or shot. But he didn't. He went deep and he focused and the cool descended like a long sheet of windblown rain because he saw the look on the lady cop's face when she saw Dana, the flash of recognition there, and already one of the black dudes was starting in, overexcited, hysterical, his voice rising up and rising up until you could hear nothing else.

“What's the trouble here?” the lady cop said, ignoring the black guy, looking from Dana to Peck and then settling there, on him. She had both her hands on her belt, as if it weighed more than she did. He knew the type. All bluff. And bullshit.

“I don't know, Officer,” he heard himself say over the jabber of the black dude, “it was this lady”-he indicated Dana-“I think she's crazy or maybe retarded or something? She ran out into the street like she was out of her mind and maybe she was trying to commit suicide, I don't know, and I just tried, well, I grabbed for her, I mean, just out of instinct-”

The bitch cut in now. Her hair was stuck to her face, both her knees scraped and bleeding. She looked the part, looked demented, looked like they'd just let her out of the pyscho ward. She talked too fast, too loud, spinning out something unintelligible. “He, he-” was all he got. She was pointing at him. “Chase me,” she said. “I mean, “chased” me.”

“Crazy lady ran right into the side of my car-they's a dent there in the back door, you can look for yourself, Officer, and, I mean, it's not me. She ran right through the light and she didn't even look one way, I mean, she never even turned her neck-”

“He's a thief,” the bitch said, jerking her arms and stamping her foot in emphasis. “He, he-” and the rest was gone, just gibberish.

The old cop was there now, fumbling with his little pad and tamping his ballpoint pen against his open palm as if it held the key to the situation. Peck waited for him to look up, then glanced from him to the lady cop and shrugged, as if to say, “Hey, she's a mental case, can't you see that? Could it be any clearer? Just listen to her.”

He had maybe sixty seconds, two minutes max, and then there'd be somebody coming up the street from two blocks down, from his mother's house, and he prayed it wouldn't be Natalia, prayed she'd have the sense to get in the car and disappear. He listened as the bitch went on, her voice settling now, getting clearer, and he gave the lady cop an indulgent smile. “Maybe she's on drugs or something,” he said. “I don't know. I'm just a guy on my way down to get the paper-I mean, if she wants to die… And you know something else,” he said, and he pointed at the black dude now, the driver, “this guy was running the red light. Yeah, what about that?”

That stirred the brew. This man-he was in his twenties, wearing a basketball jersey and a doo-rag-was clearly not going to take this kind of shit, and his voice went up an octave and his buddy joined in even as the lady cop focused on the bitch and a whole crowd of people materialized. He saw his chance. Everyone was shouting, even the policewoman, trying to assert herself, apply some order, and he took two steps back and found himself on the fringe of the crowd. Two more steps and he was a bystander. Then he turned his back and ducked down the driveway of the nearest house and went up and over the fence in back, dropped down into the alley and took off running.

He must have gone three or four blocks, the change ringing in his pockets and his lungs on fire, before he slowed to a walk. A walk was better. A walk was just right. Because nobody would have mistaken him for a jogger in his taupe silk suit and checkerboard Vans and if he wasn't a jogger then why was he running? Especially with that siren coming in over the trees like a jet plane on fire and caroming off the windows and spoiling the ball game on the radio? He forced himself to keep it under control, though his heart was banging and he'd sweated right through his clothes and he must have looked like shit with his eyes staring and his pants torn at the knee and his arms swaying as if he was some moron going door to door with magazine subscriptions or vacuum cleaners. But he didn't have a vacuum cleaner or a briefcase or a sheaf of order forms or anything else. Just sweat. And torn pants.

People were sitting on their front stoops or in little patches of yard with their cooking grills and plastic lawn chairs, and what day was it, anyway? Saturday. Cookout, clambake, cold beer in the cooler. Two kids squatted in the shade of a street tree, cupping a cigarette. They both glanced up and gave him a look-they knew who belonged on their block and who didn't-but he just put his head down and kept walking, angling toward the river, one block south, one block west, repeating the pattern till the sirens began to fade. He guessed somebody must have called the ambulance for Bridger Martin-and the cops too, because there'd been another siren going there for a while, and once they sorted things out they'd be looking for him. Without breaking stride, he fished out his shades, then shrugged out of the jacket and threw it over one shoulder. When he turned the next corner, he was on a street that dipped steeply down toward the train station-there was a bar there he knew, an old man's bar in an old hotel that had been around forever-and he figured he'd slip in there where it was quiet and dark and nobody would even look up from their drinks. Order a beer. Sit at the bar. He'd be safe there and he'd have time to think things out.

He needed to call Natalia's cell, that was his first priority, but when he patted down his pockets his own cell was missing and it came to him that he'd left it on the dash of the car-he could see it there, just as if he were re-running a video. And why was it there on the dash and not in his pocket? Because he'd called her from the car in the parking lot at the mall to tell her he was going to run into the toy store a minute because he had to get something and she'd said, “For Madison?” and he'd said, “Maybe,” and she'd said, “That's sweet. You're sweet. And I am sorry to be so late for you and I will be only one minute more.”

Right. But where was she now? Did the police have her? Were they asking her for ID? Asking about her immigration status? Asking who had assaulted Bridger Martin even while she told them it was Bridger Martin as if she were reliving some sort of Abbot and Costello routine? And who was the car registered to? And where did she live? And then there was Sukie. And his mother. Madison at camp. It was a nightmare, and he couldn't see any way out of it, because even before this bitch had showed up on the scene and sent everything into orbit he'd been wondering how he was going to cover himself when his mother called him Peck, or worse yet, Billy, and Natalia locked those caustic eyes on him.

He glanced up and there was the river, indented along the near shore by the roofs and projecting angles of the buildings spread out below him, the train station coming into view now, a line of cars creeping up the hill as if hauled on an invisible cable. The sidewalk here had been lifted by the roots of the trees, slabs of concrete shuffled like cards all the way down the long hill, and he felt the strain in the back of his calves and the long muscles of his thighs as he worked his way over the rough spots. Then he was down in the flat, at river level, crossing against the light and moving along the walk in the lee of a restaurant he'd never seen before-upscale Italian, it looked like, and even in the fever of the moment he felt the sting of the irony-and then finally, with a glance in both directions, he pulled back the door of the old man's bar in the old hotel that had been converted to efficiency apartments and Rooms by the Week Only, and let the cool sweet mid-afternoon funk of the place suck him in like a vacuum.

The last thing he wanted was to get hammered or even the slightest bit discomposed, but the first two beers went down like air, and then he had a glass of water and ordered another beer-all in the first five minutes. “It's a bitch out there, huh?” the bartender observed, working his hands in a bar rag, and a couple of the patrons looked up long enough to hear Peck confirm it. The Mets were on the TV. The jukebox was going. It could have been the most ordinary day of his life. He took a sip of the third beer, his thirst waning now-he'd never been so thirsty-and then he drifted back to the men's to clean himself up and get some purchase on things.

The light and fan went on when he opened the door, the smell of the place barely masked by the urinal cake and the gumball deodorizer. His knee was scraped where he'd gone down in the street, but he didn't bother with it, just dabbed at the dried blood on his pantleg and then threw some water on his face. When he looked up, he didn't like what he saw in the mirror. What he saw was not Peck Wilson but some soft scared pukeface whose mind couldn't stop running up against the bared teeth of the moment. What if they searched the car? What if they got his phone? They'd have Sandman's number then and Sandman wouldn't like that. And the house, what if Natalia gave up the address and they searched the house? The key documents were in a safe-deposit box, his bankbooks, passports and the like, but there was plenty there for them to find-the list of names and account numbers in his notebook, for one thing, though there was nothing incriminating in that because nothing had happened yet. They'd find papers though, utility bills, credit card receipts-M. M. Mako, Bridger Martin, Dana Halter. The lease. The car. And they'd trace that back to Bob Almond and the condo and the real estate lady. The fan clacked and stalled and clacked again. The deodorizer hissed. For a long moment he stared at a yellow streak on the wall where somebody had smashed a roach.

But maybe he was getting down over nothing. Maybe Natalia had done the smart thing and got out of there. They had his mother, of course, and his real name and his record now, but she didn't know where he lived, and the thought of that-of where he lived-just opened up a hole in him till he couldn't look at himself in the mirror. There was no chance of keeping the place now-or was there? If he stayed strictly away from Peterskill, just as he'd intended to do in the first place, and made some real money so he could keep it for a weekend retreat or something… But then there was Bridger Martin. There was Dana Halter. And how in Christ's name had “they” found him?

He was so wound up he jumped when the door pushed open and some old man with shoulders the width of a straight rule brushed past him to use the urinal, but then the sound of the jukebox-just a snatch of a tune, Marley, “No Woman, No Cry”-came to him and he caught his own gaze again in the mirror and he was Peck Wilson and he was all right. Very slowly, very carefully, all the while holding his own eyes, he washed his hands in a tight clench of powdered soap and lukewarm water, then took his time with the paper towels as the old man spat in the urinal and waited for his bladder to give it up. When he was finished, he went to the pay phone bolted to the wall in the narrow hallway just outside the men's room, and dialed Natalia's number.

While he listened to it ring, he gazed down the tunnel of the hallway to the deeper tunnel of the bar and his half-empty beer glass sitting there on the counter above the vacant barstool as if he were already gone, already wearing a different face in a different life in a different town. Three rings, four. And then there was a click and he got her voice mail: “This is Natalia, I am not here now, please. Leave a message. Once the beep.” He cursed, hung up, dialed again. “Pick up,” he kept saying under his breath, “pick up,” but she didn't pick up. He must have tried five or six times in succession, pinning the heavy molded plastic receiver to his ear and getting progressively more frustrated and angry and scared each time he dialed, and then the old man blundered out of the bathroom and clipped him on the elbow with the edge of the door and he lost a quarter to the machine and felt as winnowed down and barren and empty as he'd ever felt in his life.

He went back to the bar, drained his beer and ordered another, and that was brilliant-get shit-faced. Sure, why not order a shot to go with it? Fuck up. Get loud. Stumble out into the street and take a cab straight to Greenhaven. “On second thought, cancel that,” he said, raising his voice so the bartender, who was already at the tap, could hear him. The man-forties, bald, chinless-looked over his shoulder and gave him a pained look. “I'm too bloated,” he said in apology, and the guy next to him, some fish-faced clown who might have looked familiar, glanced up, “you know what I mean?” He heard himself then, heard his voice taking on the local color, his accent coming back the way it did when he talked to Sandman on the phone from the coast. “Just gimme a Diet Coke, huh? Diet Coke, yeah. Lots of ice.”

Every five minutes for the next hour he went to the phone, trying her number over and over without success, and he was stalled, checkmated, because there was nothing he could do until he got hold of her and gauged the extent of the damage. He tried to think positively, tried to picture her backing out of the driveway and making her way through the grid of streets till she found Route 9 and went home and buried the car in the garage and waited for him to call. But if she was waiting for him to call, then why wasn't she answering? And would she have taken the initiative to get out of there in the first place-or would she have just stood there, horrified, worrying about his mother and rehearsing his sins and watching Bridger Martin twist and kick on the grass while the sirens started in and people began to stick their heads out the door? Would she have waited for him, thinking that was the thing to do? Maybe. And in that case they were fucked, both of them. But he could also see her exploding in a fury of depilatory Russian curses, jerking round to stamp the flowers into the walk with her heel and then tearing off down the street in the car and everybody-him, especially-be damned. How he hoped that was the case, how he hoped…

The clown next to him-he could have been the bartender's twin-kept saying, “You know, you look familiar,” and Peck kept denying it. Now the man leaned in till they were shoulder to shoulder and said, “I could swear-didn't you go to Peterskill High?”

Peck shook his head.

“You have a brother, maybe?”

“No, no brother. I'm from California. Just trying to get hold of my wife-we're going into New York, catch the sights. Times Square, that sort of thing, you know?”

He looked dubious. “But you grew up here, right?”

Peck made a show of shooting his cuff to glance at his watch. “No,” he said. “San Francisco. But my wife, you know?” he said, pushing himself away from the bar and making his way back to the phone. He dialed again, staring at the dirty buff-colored wall and the graffiti he'd already committed to memory, and it rang once, twice, and then she picked up.

“It is Natalia.”

“It's me.”

Silence. Nothing. He heard the low buzz of the transmission, staticky and distant, and behind him the jukebox starting up and a sudden shout of laughter from somebody at the bar. “Natalia?”

“I hate you. You son of a bitch. I “hate” you!”

He shot his eyes down the length of the bar, cupped the speaker in his hand. “Where are you?”

“You are a liar. And a-a crook. Just like the crooks on TV-bad TV, daytime TV. You are-” and she began to cry in short drowning gasps.

“Where are you?”

“You lie to me. And to your mother. Your own mother.”

“Listen, it's all right, everything's going to be fine. Did they-did you drive home?”

Her voice came back at him, strong suddenly, fueled with outrage. “Drive? Drive what? They have taken the car. No, they have impounded, they say. And I am a sweated woman. I am hungry. And who is to pick up Madison from camp, tell me who?”

“What did you tell them? Where are you now?”

She said something in Russian then, something grating and harsh, and broke the connection. He felt himself sinking. It was all over. Everything was over. That was when he felt a pressure on his arm, somebody poking him, and looked up into the face of some bloated loser in a black motorcycle T-shirt and a whole regalia store's worth of rings, pendants and armbands. “You done, man? I mean, can I-?”

“Jesus!” He had to restrain himself here, because things could get very dark, very quickly. “One minute,” he said, redialing. “I got disconnected.”

But this clown wouldn't take a hint. He just stood there, arms folded. “Don't I know you?” he said.

“You don't know me,” Peck said, and maybe he did. Was there a motorcycle involved here someplace? “Fuck off.”

“It is Natalia.”

He turned his back on the guy, cradled the receiver-and if he made a move, touched him, anything, he was dead-and tried to control his voice. “Take a cab,” he said. “Wherever you are, take a cab and meet me-”

“Wherever I am? I am in some, some ugly place in your ugly town where you grew up to be a liar and I do not even know your own name. Bridger Martin? The policeman says you are not Bridger Martin. You are not Da-Na. William, does that ring a bell? Huh, William?”

“Hey, man, listen-” The loser was there at his back, but he was nothing because he understood what was going down here, what Peck was radiating, and the discussion was over. “I mean, this isn't your fucking living room, man-give somebody else a chance, you know? “Public.” It's a “public” phone.”

One look for him, one look over his shoulder, the Sandman look, and the guy backed off, taking his fat-laden shoulders and fat wounded ass back to the bar, putting on as much of a show as he could muster. Settling himself on a barstool now, picking up a glass of whatever shit he was drinking and scowling into the mirror in back of the bar as if to remind himself what a badass he was underneath his fat exterior. “Never mind about that, not now. I'll make it up to you, I will-”

“No, you won't.”

“I will.”

“No, you won't.” She paused to draw in a breath. “Do you know why? Why is because I will not be here. I am leaving. I am picking up Madison in the taxi and I am going to my brother because he is not a liar and a crook. You hear me?”

“What did you tell them?” he said. “Did you tell them where we live?”

There was a silence. He thought he could hear her breaking down again. The smallest voice: “Yes.”

“Oh, fuck. Fuck. What's wrong with you? Huh? Tell me. Why would you tell them where we live?”

“I was scared. They are threatening. They say they will-” Her voice fell off. “My green card. They will take my green card.”

He felt cold suddenly, the air-conditioning getting to him, the beer weakening him till he could barely hold the phone to his ear. “What did you tell them about me?”

“What I know. That you are a liar. And a thief.”

He wanted to get a grip on this, wanted to command her, but he couldn't find the right tone of voice and he felt the control slipping away from him. “Please,” he heard himself say. “Please. I'll tell you where to meet me-you can be here in ten minutes. We'll pick up Madison together and-”

“I am going now,” she said, very softly, as if it were a prayer. And then she broke the connection.

He dropped the phone. Let it dangle on its greasy cord. Then he turned and walked the length of the room as if he were walking the gauntlet and when the loser at the bar tried to block his way, tried to say something about a Harley Electra Glide, he just set him down hard and went out the door and into the heat, and if he slammed a shoulder into some drunk in an aloha shirt who was trying to light a cigarette and negotiate the door at the same time, well, so what? He wasn't responsible, not at that moment. Not anymore. And how he managed to wind up with the guy's cell phone tucked away in the inside pocket of his jacket, he couldn't have begun to imagine.

Two

IN THOSE FLEETING FURIOUS SECONDS Peck Wilson spoke to her without words, spoke as clearly and unambiguously as if he were tapped into her consciousness, his internal voice wrapped round her own till it shouted her down and made her quail. He'd lost control. She could see it in his eyes, in his movements, in the look that passed between them like the snap of a whip, and Bridger had lost control too. No matter that he'd lectured her over and over on keeping their distance, keeping their cool, identifying the man and his car and staying clear till the danger had passed and the police could move in and handle the situation-when it came down to it, the sudden proximity was too much for him. They were walking hand in hand through the pall of heat radiating up from the saturated earth, trying to look casual and pedestrian, and then the car appeared right in front of them, pulling into the drive and sliding to a stop just clear of the walk. The engine died. Both doors swung open. And there he was, Peck Wilson, emerging from the car, the rigid barbered slash of hair at the back of his neck and the tapering dagger of a sideburn, his summer suit and open-necked shirt. He had the stuffed toy under one arm and he was looking straight ahead, his eyes on his mother and the little girl standing there on the porch. And then his wife the liar got out too, dressed as if she were going to a cocktail party. Dana froze in mid-step.

That was when Peck Wilson swung his head reflexively to the right and the look passed between them, the first look, the look that went from shock to fear to rage in an instant, and before she could think or act Bridger was rushing him. The toy fell to the ground. The sun stabbed through the trees. There was the sudden clash of their bodies, a dance Peck Wilson knew and Bridger didn't, balletic and swift. And then Bridger was down and thrashing from side to side and Peck Wilson stood over him, aiming his deliberate kicks, and she was screaming, all the air inside her compressed and constricted and forcing its way through the squeeze box of her larynx. He glanced up at her, and there was the whipcrack of that second look so that she knew what he would do before he did, and when he came for her, when he snatched at her wrist, she wasn't there. She ran. She had no choice. Bridger was on the ground. Her blood recoiled and she was gone.

In that moment, she was cleansed of thought: there was nothing in her head but to run. She had no plan, no focus or rationale. Escape, that was all. Get away. Run. Suddenly she was running, and she'd never run harder or faster in her life, unable to hear the ragged tear of his breathing and the propulsion of his footsteps or to gauge where he was, afraid to look over her shoulder, afraid of everything, and why wouldn't somebody stop him? She wanted to cry out but she had no breath to spare. Her arms pumped, her legs found their rhythm and she went straight through the intersection, snatching a glance over her shoulder finally to see him right there, right behind her, sprinting for all he was worth and no quit in him, his eyes cold and dead, his lips drawn tight. She didn't dare look again. Her gaze ran ahead of her, scanning the uneven slabs of concrete for the fatal snag, looking to the old woman shuffling toward her with her shopping bags strung over both arms, calculating her chances at the next light and then the next one beyond that, because there was no stopping no matter what, no hope but to out-run him, out-maneuver him, out-last him. If he caught her he was going to hurt her, swiftly, deeply, without quarter or restraint. He'd told her that much already. And there was no mistaking his meaning.

The van-the white van, the moving wall of it that appeared and stretched and snapped till it was gone-cost her a step, a beat, and his fingers tore at her hair and she felt her head jerked back and she couldn't have stopped if she'd wanted to. Then there was the other car, the force that slapped her, stung her, knocked her to the pavement, his body flung there beside hers and the heat of him rising to her nostrils like some toxin. She was up again, bewildered, dazed, both knees scraped and bleeding and her palms and forearms on fire-“Run!” a voice screamed inside her, “Run!”-but she didn't have to run, didn't have to do anything, because the police cruiser was sliding into the intersection and Peck Wilson was done.

For one long thundering moment she held his gaze, saw the vacancy there, the fear, the retreat, and she trembled all over, the most ridiculous thing, as if she'd caught a chill on the hottest day of the year. She didn't know where she was. Didn't know what was happening to her. “You go to hell,” she said, feeling the triumph surge up in her.

They stood there side by side, not two feet apart, as the men from the car, the black men, came at them, flailing their arms and working their mouths, people gathering, the door of the police cruiser catching the light as it flung open and everyone looked to the blue-black uniform, the nightstick and revolver and the visored cap. He was going to run, she knew it. He was going to run and she had to stop him. She jerked round, too wrought up to notice who was inhabiting that uniform and fingering that nightstick or to see where this was going, where it had been going all along, inevitably, one long downward spiral from the day the microbes invaded her body and she stopped living in the world of the hearing. She watched his face change. Watched his eyes settle. And then the cop stepped between them and she was looking into a face she recognized, fury there, fury and disbelief, and she knew she was on trial all over again.

What she remembered most, what she would always remember, was the way they failed her. She tried to marshal her words but she was overwhelmed, heaving for air-“Him,” she kept saying, jerking a finger at Peck Wilson, “he's the one, arrest him”-but P. Runyon wasn't listening, and at some point in the silent shuffle of bodies and faces and the shock of the way P. Runyon seized her arm and held it in a tight unyielding grip, she looked up and saw that Peck Wilson wasn't where he'd been a moment before. He wasn't in the cruiser or in the custody of the other cop, the older one with the drooping face, who was busy with the two black men and their windmilling arms and snapping teeth. She felt the panic rising in her and she jerked her arm back. She looked wildly round her, spinning once, twice, the crowd giving back her stare out of indifferent eyes, the trees whirling overhead, shirts, blouses, jeans, shorts. Officer Runyon laid a hand on her again and again she jerked back. Couldn't they see what was happening here? “Peck Wilson,” she shouted as if it was the only name she knew, and she shouted it again and again, till all the air had gone out of her.

By the time the interpreter arrived, it was too late. She'd tried to tear away, burning with her urgency, tried to thread through the crowd and fling herself back down the street to that house and the silver-haired woman on the porch-“Ask her, she'll have the answers, ask her”-but P. Runyon wouldn't hear of it. Only then did she think of Bridger. Was he hurt? Or was it just bruises, aches, something he could shake off the way people did in the movies? She felt a flutter of fear rise in her throat: why wasn't he here, why wasn't he adding his voice to the mix? He could explain. He could tell her, this lady cop with the starved lips and grabby hands and the eyes that started at zero and went down from there. Where was he? Where? She had her answer a moment later when the ambulance nosed up to the curb, lights flashing, and P. Runyon waved the driver angrily on, releasing her grip on Dana's arm to point down the street in two quick chops as if she were flinging something away from her. “Who-?” Dana asked, but couldn't finish the thought.

Officer Runyon actually had her handcuffs out-she was shaking them in Dana's face, warning her to calm herself down or she'd have no choice but to take her into custody-when the interpreter pulled up in a nondescript black car with the city logo on the door. She was small, neat, young, her features already in motion as she crossed the street and stepped between the two of them. “What's the matter?” she asked and signed it simultaneously.

“He was chasing me. He wanted to hurt me. Peck,” Dana said, “Peck Wilson.”

The interpreter looked to P. Runyon and she just shrugged. “That's all she can talk about. She's hysterical.”

“Who is Peck Wilson?” the woman signed, turning to Dana and shutting out the officer.

“The thief. He stole my identity. And he chased me, he”- “Where is he?”

Where is he? The question cut right through her. She couldn't help herself, couldn't pull away from it, the rage and frustration and the sick irony that was like some sort of cosmic joke, and suddenly she was sobbing. The interpreter dropped her hands to her sides and then lifted them again and embraced her. There was a long suspended moment, the stranger clinging to her in a crowd of strangers, and then she gently disengaged herself. She didn't brush the hair away from her face or dab at her eyes, but instead brought her right hand to her forehead and swept it out, open-palmed: “I don't know,” she signed. “But I know where his mother is.”

At the hospital, she sat in a hard plastic chair in the emergency room with the interpreter on one side and a detective from the Peterskill Police Department on the other. It was evening now, Saturday evening, and there was a momentary lull in the drift of patients pressing bloodied rags to their shins and arms and foreheads as the late afternoon gave way to night and the alcohol-fueled trauma to come. She was feeling jittery-she'd drained three cans of diet cola and was thirsty still-and her right knee was stinging where they'd dug bits of gravel and dirt out of the pad there and cleaned and dressed the wound. She had a matching square of gauze beneath the left knee, but the right seemed to have taken the brunt of it-that was where the pain was, anyway. The interpreter-her name was Terri Alfano, she was twenty-six years old and possessed of a pair of dark wide-set eyes that absorbed hurt and confusion and delivered up absolution in their place, and Dana didn't know how she would have gotten through this without her-had asked for some clarification on the timing of the incident, and the detective who'd posed the question, his pen poised over a pad of paper, seemed to have drifted off as they signed back and forth.

The problem now-the concern, the worry, the fear that was booming inside her with a dull echoing horror-wasn't Peck Wilson or his mother or wife or the wine-red Mercedes the police were impounding until legal ownership could be established, but Bridger. Bridger was somewhere behind the swinging doors in back of the nurse's desk, beyond the expressionless patients slumped in the rows of molded plastic chairs and the TV on the wall that was tuned, in another sick intrusion of irony, to an overwrought drama about emergency room doctors. They hadn't told her much, and what they had told her she wasn't getting at all until Terri Alfano wrote it down for her: Bridger, it seemed, was having trouble breathing and they'd done an emergency tracheotomy. He'd suffered laryngeal trauma and they were going to have to operate in order to clear the air passage and repair damage to the thyroid cartilage. That was the problem. That was why she was sitting here watching the clock and the swinging doors and the face of the nurse every time she jerked her eyes to the phone and picked it up.

An hour crept by, then another. The detective was gone now, long gone, and the waiting room had begun to fill again. Dana paged through a magazine and watched people's faces as they shuffled in and out the door on the arms of relatives and friends, their features tugged and twisted round the flash point of their suffering eyes. There had been no news of Bridger, and as the light failed beyond the windows and the night settled in, she turned to Terri Alfano and told her she might as well go home. “You don't have to sit here and keep me company, you know,” she said aloud, though she didn't mean it. She was glad for the company, desperate for it. She was confused and hurting, crushed with guilt over Bridger-it was her fault, the whole thing, involving him in this in the first place and then dragging him all the way out here, and for what? She shouldn't have been so hardheaded. She should have let it go. Should have left it to the police and the credit card companies instead of playing amateur detective, instead of taking it personally, as if the thief could have cared who she was, as if it mattered, as if “she” mattered. What was she thinking? But the worst thing, the thing that haunted her as she stared at the floor and shifted in her seat and raised her eyes to look at the nurse and the clock and the swinging doors that never swung open and gave up nothing, was leaving him when he needed her most, when he couldn't breathe, when he was clutching at his throat and thrashing on the pavement with the pain that should have been hers. There was a moral calculus here, and she'd failed it.

“It's all right. I'm fine.” Terri was idly turning the pages of one of the magazines Dana had been twice through already. She sat very still, her back arched, exuding calm. She was wearing a gray skirt with a matching jacket and a rose-colored blouse, very professional, prim almost, but she wasn't cold or rigid in the least, unlike so many interpreters-Iverson and his ilk. Little people who wanted to make themselves big at the expense of somebody else, somebody they could dominate in an ongoing psychodrama of mastery and dependency.

“Really,” she said, setting down the magazine. “I know you've got better things to do-”

Terri shrugged, held her palms out, smiled. They'd already talked about her boyfriend, how she could barely think of anything else though it had been six months since he'd moved to the Midwest for a job opportunity he just couldn't pass up and how she was waiting for him to come back for her. They'd talked about her parents, both of them deaf-“mother father deaf,” she signed-and how she'd been interpreting for them all her life, talked about shitty pay and long hours and the obligation she felt to the deaf community. And the guilt. Not to mention the guilt. They'd talked about Bridger, about the San Roque School. About Peck Wilson. “Believe me,” she said, signing under it, “it's okay. I want to stay. What if the doctor needs to tell you something-I don't know, something important? Crucial even?”

“I can read him.”

“Medical terms?”

“He can write them down.”

There was a pause. They both looked up to watch an elderly woman in slippers and housedress navigate the room to the admittance desk like a sad old prow on a breezeless sea. Terri's face bloomed. “Do you really want me to go?” she signed.

Dana shook her head. And then, for emphasis, two quick snaps of the index and middle fingers to the thumb: “No.”

It was past nine when the nurse who'd first spoken with them came through the swinging doors. She was wearing scrubs, replete with the soft crushed hat, and there was a suggestive stain, something dark and blotted, knifing across one hip. They both stood to receive her and as she made her way across the room, Dana could read her expression and her body language-she was satisfied with herself; everything was okay-so that when the nurse was standing there before them with a propped-up smile and telling them that Bridger was going to be fine, she already knew the gist of it. The details were something else. They'd implanted a polymeric silicone stent-“Could you write that down, please?”-to prevent granulation tissue from forming on the exposed cartilage, but he'd be released the following day and the prognosis was good. Full recovery. Though he wouldn't be able to speak for a period of two to three weeks and there might be some residual voice change.

“Residual voice change?” Dana looked from Terri to the nurse.

“He may sound different. That is, he may not have the full vocal range he had before the accident-or the injury, I mean. But maybe not. Maybe he'll recover fully. Many do.” She paused to let Terri catch up with her, though Dana was reading her and leaping ahead. The nurse was middle-aged, with sorrowful eyes and a pair of semicircular lines bracketing her mouth-which vanished when she smiled, as she did now. “He's not a singer, is he?”

“No,” Dana said, shaking her head even as the image of him in the car rose up before her, his lips puckered round the unknowable ecstasy of the tune generated by the radio, sweet melisma, the owl song: who who, who who.

Earlier, with Terri's help, she'd put in a phone call to his parents, people she'd never met. They lived in San Diego. His father had something to do with the military there, that was all she knew. She'd watched Terri's face as she'd translated, watched as she listened and the emotional content of what she was hearing transferred itself to her lips and eyes and the musculature beneath her skin. The parents hadn't heard from Bridger in a month. They were unhappy. The mother was flying out on the next plane. Was there blame attached? Was there ill will, rancor, animosity? “A deaf girl? He'd never mentioned he was seeing a deaf girl.”

And maddeningly, no matter how many times she punched in the number, her own mother wasn't picking up the phone-or she had it off. Terri kept getting her voice mail and each time she left a message to call back. Nothing yet. Dana had tucked her phone deep in the side pocket of her shorts where she'd be sure to feel the vibrator, and now she felt for it, just to reassure herself, and it was still there, still inert, still made of plastic, metal, silicon. A cold thing. All but useless. Maybe she should have brought a couple of carrier pigeons with her.

Terri saw her hand go to her pocket. She smiled, thanked the nurse, who was already shifting her weight to start back toward the swinging doors, and lifted her eyes to Dana's. “Still no luck?”

She shook her head. “I think she was going to go see a show some night this week, but I don't know-”

The moment hung there between them, and then Terri, signing beneath her words, said, “My place is small-and it's nothing really, nothing much-but there's a fold-out couch in the living room. You're welcome to stay. Really.”

She woke at first light, sweating, to an apprehension of movement just beyond the thin grid of the window screen. The atmosphere was heavy, tropical. There was a smell of dampness and mold, the fertile rejuvenate scent of things working in the earth, flowers unfolding, the insect armies stirring in their nests and dens and beneath the leaves of the trees crowded against the house. It smelled like rain, like ozone. For a moment she lay motionless, her eyes on the ceiling-she was getting her bearings, tracing backward through the rosary of events to the hospital and Terri, Bridger, Peck Wilson climbing out of his car and the fear that had exploded in her brain and chased her down the street-and then her eyes went to the screen. There was something there, a shadow, movement. Her heart was pounding. She sat up. And when she felt the door swing open behind her she nearly let out a scream-or maybe she did, maybe she did shout out-until she saw that it was only Terri, her shoulders slumped beneath the quilted fabric of a pale blue robe and her face dull and empty, half-asleep still, on her way to the bathroom. “Are you okay?” Terri signed reflexively.

“Sorry, I must have been dreaming,” Dana lied, each word an abstraction nobody could possibly understand, words lifted from the page and an ancient repository of memory in a hopeful way, in the way Bridger must have dredged up his high school Spanish at the taco stand or the car wash. He always felt relieved, he told her-or no, not just relieved, but amazed-when people understood him, as if they were communicating in a code that was indecipherable except in that one serendipitous moment.

The bathroom door opened and then closed on Terri and it was as if she'd never been there, an apparition faded away into insubstantiality, and there was the movement at the screen again, the movement that had woken her, but it wasn't Peck Wilson, at large still and come to sniff her out and finish what he'd begun, and it wasn't the afterimage of a dream either-it was just a squirrel, bloated with the easy pickings of high summer, dipping its head and manipulating its paws against the dark sheen of the wet and silken grass.

It was still overcast when she woke again. Terri was standing over her with a cup of coffee, a soft muted smile pressed to her lips. She was dressed and made-up, her hair brushed, jade earrings catching what there was of the dull light from beyond the window. “I didn't want to wake you,” she said, handing her the coffee. “There's cream and sugar if you want-I didn't know how you took it.”

“What time is it?” Dana asked, sitting up to cradle the cup in both hands.

“Ten-thirty.”

“Ten-thirty? I can't believe we slept so late-”

“All that running-you were tired.” Her teeth flashed. It was a joke. “But not to worry, it's Sunday, the one day of the week when people can sleep in.”

“What about the hospital? What about Bridger?”

Terri's face-her pretty, mobile, animated face-showed nothing. “I called fifteen minutes ago. No word. He's resting, that's what they said. We can visit anytime.”

The coffee was too hot, bitter-she preferred tea and when she did have coffee she drowned it in cream-but Dana lifted the cup to her lips, blew the steam away and drank, thanking Terri with her eyes. She felt overwhelmed suddenly. This girl, this young sweet-faced confiding girl, a stranger to her twenty-four hours ago, was her best friend in the world, a good person, genuine, caring, compassionate-“mother father deaf”-and for that she was grateful, infinitely grateful, grateful to the point of tears. But Terri was a crutch too, and her own mother would have been the first to point it out to her. “You don't have to babysit me,” she said.

Terri was drinking from a souvenir mug with the words “Fort Ticonderoga” superimposed in red over a wraparound stockade. “It's not a problem. And I'm not babysitting you, don't think that. I want to help, that's all.” Dana couldn't resist a smile. “Above and beyond the call of duty?”

Terri shrugged. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?”

“Nothing better to do?”

“I don't know-you want breakfast? Eggs? Cereal?”

Dana swung her legs away from the mattress, fished her shorts off the floor and slid them on. She needed a shower, her skin prickling with the residue of her sweat-she felt as if she'd been rolled in sugar like a doughnut-but the shower could wait. “No,” she said, looking up from lacing her shoes, “don't go to any trouble”-and she held up a hand to forestall the reply-“but I do need to call my mother. Just to let her know-”

Terri lifted her eyebrows and all the deaf expression flooded back into her features. “You want me to interpret-or are you going to text?”

“If you just tell me when she picks up, that would be great-I can talk and she can text. It's better that way, anyway-I wouldn't want to subject you to all that, because I'm sure you know the way mothers are. And my mother's a hundred times worse.”

Her mother picked up on the first ring. “Hi, Mom,” Dana said into the void.

“Where are you? I was worried.”

“Peterskill. Still. And don't worry, the car's fine, but we had to stay overnight because”-and she stalled a moment, feeling the emotion rise in her-“because Bridger, I mean, Peck Wilson. Peck Wilson came and beat him up and he's in the hospital.”

“Hospital?”

“He's all right. It's his throat. He got hit in the throat.”

There was nothing for a moment, then the LCD flashed across the miniature screen: “Didn't I tell you? You're always”- “He's okay. Everything's okay. We're going to the hospital in a minute and they said they would release him this afternoon so I guess you'll see us tonight.”

“Who's we?”

“Me and Terri. She's the interpreter from the police.”

“Did they catch him?”

Again the hesitation. It was as if she were the one who'd been kicked in the throat. “No. He-he got away.”

“I'm coming up there.”

“No, no-you don't have to. I can handle it, don't worry.”

“What hospital?”

She gave a little speech then, about independence-how her mother had always preached independence and here she was treating her like a child. How she was thirty-three years old and could handle herself. How anybody could have been the victim of a thief like this and it had nothing to do with her difference or her capability or the way she handled her finances and planned for the future or anything else. “Mom, listen,” she said finally, “I'm going to repeat this so you understand: I don't want you to come. Okay?”

“What hospital?”

The first thing she saw when she walked into the room, Terri at her side, was the flowers. A jungle of flowers, dahlias, tulips, lilies, gladiolus, roses-so many flowers it was as if they'd taken the wrong door off the corridor and wound up back outside again. The next thing was the snaking wiry form of a woman she'd never seen before rising up out of the floral riot to throw her a challenging look, and then she saw the bed, the monitors, the IV apparatus, and finally Bridger, reduced there against the null white field of the sheets. There was a bandage at his throat, whiter yet, folds of pristine gauze wrapped to his chin so that his head seemed separated from his body. His right eye was swollen shut. In fact-and she had to catch her breath as she came closer-she saw that the whole right side of his face was damaged, a dark striated cloud of scab scudding across the jaundiced bruise that sustained it. She felt stricken: he was hurt, badly hurt, and he wasn't going anywhere.

The woman-his mother, she knew this was his mother even before she looked in her face and saw his features replicated there, the nose, the eyes, the retreating bone structure and the pale orbicular expanse of the flesh-tried to stand in her way, tried to question her right, assert authority, but she shoved past her and went to him, her hand finding his and her lips pressed to the side of his beautiful ravaged face. “Oh, God,” she said, “oh, God, I'm so sorry,” and the tears were there, burning like acid, while things went on behind her, peripheral movement, gestures, his mother and Terri Alfano, her deliverer, working through the niceties. She lifted her head to look him in the eye, the good eye, the one that was dilated and clear. “Are you okay?” she asked from deep inside her, and the words didn't feel right, too pinched, in the wrong register, but she didn't care.

It was only then-only when he lifted his right hand to reply-that she noticed the cast on his forearm, and the sight of it was like an accusation, a pointed finger, a curse. The closed hand, up and down: “Yes.” And then: “Are you okay?”

She nodded.

“Did they get him?”

She watched his face darken, the color seeping out of the bruise to mottle his jaw, his cheek, the orbit of his open eye. He already knew the answer. Already knew that the pain, the frustration, the anger and hate and obsession-and the fractured ulna and the crushed larynx too-were in vain. He could see it in her eyes.

“He got away,” she said, signing under it. “But they got his car-”

“His car? Is that all? Shit!” He pounded his fist against the cast in a quick violent jerk of the arm and then he tried to say something, his eye glaring and his jaws grabbing at the air, but he wasn't saying anything, she could see that, she could feel it. Bridger. The gauze at his throat, the cast on his arm. He was furious, angry, angrier than she'd ever seen him, and before she had a chance to question it-was he blaming her, was that it? — his mother was there, sweeping her roughly aside to hammer at the nurse's buzzer and then the nurse was propelling herself into the room and doing something to Bridger, to his mouth, his throat, his oral cavity, that Dana didn't want to see. Even as she turned her head, Bridger's mother took hold of the bed curtains and pulled them shut.

For a long while she just sat there beside Terri and stared at the pleated white folds of the curtains on their aluminum track. She felt as if she'd been slapped in the face. She'd felt bad enough as it was-her fault, everything her fault-and now she just wanted to sink through the floor. “Don't worry,” Terri signed. “Hell be all right.”

She didn't respond. She was feeling too low. And tired. As tired as if she hadn't slept in a week. The light drew down suddenly-a cloud passing over the sun beyond the window at the end of the room-and she glanced up and for the first time noticed the second bed there. It was nearly walled off by the masses of flowers Bridger's mother had marshaled round the room, and those flowers represented another level of accusation-she hadn't thought to bring so much as a daisy herself, but then how could she? She was going through this too-she could have been murdered, didn't they know that?

The curtains on this second bed were drawn too, but she could see through a gap at the near end that there was someone there, visible only as a pair of crossed ankles and two bare feet with their canted yellowish soles and ten yellowed toes hanging from their joints like decayed fruit. Those toes fascinated her, those anonymous feet, and her eyes passed over the easy attraction of the flowers to fixate on them-who was back there, she wondered? Some auditory voyeur, silently attuned to the drama playing out round Bridger's bed, the cries of the mother, the gagging of the patient, the wet fleshy wheeze of the nurse's ministrations. Nothing wrong with him at all-you could tell that by the way he'd crossed his ankles. He'd just come here and hidden behind the curtains in witness. That was what she was thinking, watching those feet and letting her thoughts pull her down, when she felt the familiar tactile squirming of the cell in her pocket.

It was her mother. “Peterskill Station,” she messaged, “3:45,” and cut the connection.

Terri was watching her. “Your mother?”

“Yeah. She's coming in at three forty-five.” She shrugged, dropped her eyes. “I guess I'm going to have to pick her up.”

There was a suspended moment, and then Terri tapped her wrist with a single finger to get her attention. “I can drive you to your car if you want. You remember where you parked it?”

She saw the street suddenly, the shade trees, the cracked sidewalk and the kids on their bicycles and it was like the mise-en-scène of a play she'd seen somewhere a long time ago. “Yes,” she said, and she nodded her head for emphasis.

The nurse emerged from behind the curtains then and reached up to draw them open with a brisk snap of her wrists. The mother was there too, rising to her feet from the chair beside the bed, her face strained and eyes leaping out at them as if to say, “What do you want here?” And Bridger-the crisis had apparently passed, and he was watching her, his face flushed beneath the mask Peck Wilson had crafted for him, his scalp so red she could see the individual hairs in relief against the skin. He'd been coughing. Coughing or gagging. The man with the feet would have known as much, Terri and the mother and anybody passing by the door would have known, but not Dana. Because the curtains had been closed.

“Is he all right?” she said now, coming up out of the chair and taking a step toward the bed. The nurse gave her an odd look, ducked her head and left the room on her quick padded feet. Bridger's mother wore her face as if it weighed a thousand pounds, as if it had been hammered out of concrete. She angled away from the bed, moving ever so subtly-perhaps even unconsciously-to interpose herself between Dana and her son. Her mouth was in motion: “What? What did she say?”

She was asking a question, but she wasn't asking it of Dana. She wasn't even looking at her. She was looking at Terri.

Terri said something then, and Bridger's mother said something back. Bridger was flushed. His hands were still, his good eye open and staring.

She felt Terri's hand on her arm and turned to her. “Mrs. Martin says he's having trouble breathing,” she said. “They think maybe it's just an adjustment to the surgery, but it's possible maybe a suture”-she finger-spelled it-“came loose, inside, and they might have to reinsert the breathing tube, but it's probably not that and it's nothing abnormal, really-”

“Tell her,” Bridger's mother said, waving her arms as if she were flagging a cab, “that they're going to have to run some tests and he'll be here overnight, one more night at least-”

Dana reached for the woman's arm, a simple gesture, to take hold of her if only for an instant and tell her that she understood, that she could talk directly to her, that they were both involved in the same struggle, the same hope, the same love, but Bridger's mother shrugged her off and gave her a look she knew only too well. Dana watched the pale blue eyes, Bridger's eyes, focus on Terri. “Tell her he needs to rest now,” she said, and Dana read her perfectly.

And Bridger? He never raised his hand-no, he didn't so much as lift a finger.

*

Then they were out on the pulsing streets with the heat in their faces and the too-green trees closing in overhead, the hateful oppressive trees and denunciatory shrubs and the screaming lawns, and she was back in the conduit of the nightmare, hurting all over again. There was the intersection, the first one-“No,” she said to Terri, directing her, “turn right here. Yes, that's right, and at the end of the block hang a left”-and the sidewalk scrolled by and the cars parked along the street announced themselves one by one until she saw the Jetta, right where she'd left it, front wheels turned into the curb, the windshield black with the shade of the trees.

Three

HE WAS IN HIGH GEAR NOW, pedal to the metal, any last vestige of cool blown right out the tailpipe when he took that moron down in the bar, and he might as well have sent up one of those balloons they float over the used-car lots with a big inverted arrow pointing to the bull's-eye on the back of his head. Another mistake in a day full of them. But he had no choice except to back down and he never backed down, no matter what the cost. And he was angry, he'd admit that. Angry at himself, at Natalia, at Bridger Martin and Dana Halter and the whole sad scary circus he'd somehow got himself involved in. He'd gone low on the guy, for the knee, because the big blowhards with the flabby tits and bowling-ball heads were always top-heavy and they went down fast. The only problem was the guy was swinging as his knee buckled and he'd grazed the side of Peck's face with the plane of his fist and his assortment of biker rings, the silver swastika and the death's head and the like, and now there was blood there.

Head down, walking crisply, with purpose, he crossed in the middle of the block and came down the street toward the station, past the outdoor cafe with a bunch of people chewing as if their lives depended on it and the area reserved for taxis-and when he saw the cabs idling there and the northbound train sitting at the platform the idea came into his head to slide into one of the cabs and hustle out of there, but he dismissed it. The police would arrive in a matter of minutes, once the clown got himself up off the floor and the wreckage settled and the bartender dialed emergency, and the cab would have to go right by them. He saw all that, moving forward, never breaking stride, though people were looking at him-blood on his face, his pants torn and dirty-and he mounted the platform and stepped onto the train, taking a seat on the far side. A minute later he was in the restroom, dabbing at his face with a wet paper towel, hearing sirens-or was he imagining it? A minute after that the train jerked forward, the wheels taking hold, and then the car was swaying as if under the influence of two competing and antithetical forces and the rattling started and they were under way, heading north.

The cut-it was a scrape, really, with a thin slice down the middle of it-traced his right cheekbone all the way to one very red ear and it was bleeding more than it should have, and that was inconvenient. There was little chance that whatever cop responded to the scene at the tavern would connect him with the incident and even less that they'd bother with the train because it was just a bar fight, after all, one of a million, but still he didn't want to draw attention to himself unnecessarily. If they had the Mercedes they'd be at the house with a warrant and there'd be somebody there for a few days at least waiting for him to turn up, but he wasn't going to turn up, he had no intention of turning up-at the house or anywhere else. He wasn't that stupid, though he was getting there. When he'd stanched the bleeding, he took a fresh wad of paper towels, soaked them through, and waded out into the lurching car, taking an empty seat on the near side now, so as to present his left profile to the conductor when he came round taking tickets.

They were making the big sweep round the base of Anthony's Nose when the conductor came up the aisle behind him. “Beacon,” Peck said, turning to him, the wadded-up towels pressed to his cheek. The conductor-a black man, older, with distant eyes and a fringe of processed hair hanging limp under his cap-didn't ask, but Peck said, “Hell of a toothache,” and he handed him a bill and the man punched his ticket and gave him his change and that was that. For the moment, at least. But what next? And why had he said Beacon and not Buffalo? Or Chicago?

When they stopped at the Garrison station-a little nothing of a stone building, a row of houses, the flat hand of the river and a big empty parking lot-and there was nobody waiting for him, no cops and no Natalia, he began to understand. There was unfinished business here, and the thought of it twisted at him and soured the contents of his stomach, the flat beer out of the twelve-ounce glass, stale bar mix, the Coke that ate right through him like battery acid. Natalia had left him. She was gone. It was over. For all he knew she could be on this very train, connecting to Toronto. But no, that wasn't her style, and he tried to picture her, the little moue of a kissing mouth she would make when she was concentrating on something, doing her eyes or working a crossword puzzle, Natalia, stepping out of the bath or tipping back a glass of Beaujolais Nouveau or worked up and fuming at him, as capable of action as anybody he'd ever met. She would take a cab to Hertz or Enterprise, rent a car, pick up Madison and go back to the house. Where she would brood and fling things on the floor and swig vodka, squat and murderous and stomping around in her bare feet till she passed out and the cops came in the morning with their warrant and turned the house upside down. And then she'd suck down more vodka and take Madison out to lunch and go shopping and eventually she'd find herself back in the house, sorting out the damage. She'd look out the window and see the rental car there, something nice, something sporty-a Mustang, maybe, or a T-Bird, because why would she deny herself as long as the credit cards still worked? — and before long she'd start packing the car with everything she could carry. And then she'd be gone.

As the train rattled through the remnants of the day, the declining sun striping the looping arc of tracks ahead and picking out individual leaves in the treetops while the rest faded to gray, his mind began to close a fist over that picture of Natalia and he found himself getting angry all over again. The house. He hated to lose the house as much as he hated losing her-and the things he'd collected. The car. The names in the notebook, pure gold, every one of them. His business. And Sukie. That was over too. And that was another thing: how quickly it had all turned on him. This morning he was on top of it, waking up in a mansion, six months paid in advance and a lease to buy, climbing into an S500 and taking his fiancée to meet his mother and his daughter he hadn't seen in three years. That was when the image of Dana Halter rose up before him and he saw her there on the sidewalk, the look in her eyes, knowing what he was going to do before he knew it himself, and then the way she'd run, making a chump out of him, a fag, somebody's girlfriend. He wanted to hurt her. Hurt her the way he'd hurt Bridger Martin. Even the score. One parting shot. And out.

It was still light when he got off the train at Beacon, a real shithole of a place, crap blown up along the tracks, crap floating in the river, graffiti all over everything as if nobody cared about anything, not even their own human worth, and where were the cops when you needed them? Why weren't they nailing the little punks with their spray cans instead of busting his ass? For that matter, why weren't they out here cleaning up the trash and painting over the gang signs and obscenities instead of burning up the taxpayers' gasoline to drag their bloated carcasses from one doughnut shop to another? Oh, he was in a mood. He recognized that. What he needed was a car, a change of clothes, something in his stomach. He hadn't eaten all day, not since breakfast-too wired, too scared, too outraged even to think about it-but now, suddenly, he was starving.

The streetlights began to make themselves visible, an amber glow bellying out into the shadows, and already the insects were there, drifting like snow. There were a couple of people milling around, white T-shirts faintly glowing against the fade of the light. He heard a girl laugh aloud and turned to see a knot of teenagers perched on the concrete abutment, passing a bottle in a brown paper bag. He didn't see any cabs and so he started walking up the hill toward the lights of the town-always look as if you have a purpose, that was a rule-and before he'd gone three blocks he saw a yellow cab pulled up in front of a tavern and crossed the street to it and leaned in the driver's side window. A Puerto Rican kid with a heavy scruff of acne was behind the wheel, the radio spitting up a low-volume spew of hip-hop. “You waiting on somebody?” Peck asked.

The kid's eyes, naked and too big for his face, skirted away from him. He mumbled something in reply.

“What?”

“Supposed to be.”

Peck jerked a finger toward the tavern. “Somebody in there?”

The kid nodded, his eyes flashing white in the dark vacancy of the interior.

“Forget about them,” Peck said, fishing a twenty out of his wallet and handing it to him. “Here, this is for you. I need you to take me someplace where I can rent a car at this hour on a Saturday night. What about the airport? You know the airport on the other side of the river? They got to be open twenty-four/seven, right?”

More mumbling. Something about Hertz in Wappingers.

“But they're closed at this hour, right? On a Saturday?”

“I don't know.” An elaborate shrug, the eyes ducking away. “I guess.”

The door of the tavern swung open then, a rectangle of light with two people in the center of it, a couple holding on to each other as if they were wading into the surf at Coney Island, and Peck ended the discussion by easing round the hood of the car and sliding into the seat next to the driver. The people at the door-they were twenty feet away, sallow-faced, drunk-made a move toward the cab, but Peck just gave the kid a look to focus him, to let him know what was going down here, and then he said, “Hit it,” and the cab pulled away from the curb with an apologetic little chirp of the rear wheels.

The girl at the desk ran his platinum Visa card without even looking up and he showed her his California driver's license decorated with his own smiling photograph and M. M. Mako's name and address, and filled out the rental agreement. He chose a black GMC Yukon because the seats folded down and he was thinking he might wind up sleeping in it-there were dirt roads up in the hills in back of Beacon that might as well have been in Alaska for all the traffic they took and nobody would bother him there-and when the girl asked him if he wanted the supplemental collision insurance, a by-the-book standard rip-off, he just smiled and said, “Sure.” Then he went to a diner and had a Greek salad and two burgers, alternately thumbing through one of those freebie real estate magazines and watching himself chew in the reflection of the darkened window. His face floated there in the void, disembodied, a handsome face, a face that could have belonged to anybody, and he chewed and watched himself and let the tension drain out of his eyes. All things considered, he didn't look too bad, the cut drawn pink and thin at the edge of his cheekbone and fading into the sideburn there-for all anyone knew it might have been a scratch he'd got while picking raspberries in the woods or playing with his cat. Or his girlfriend's cat.

The thought of her started up the whole process all over again, one thought butting up against the next till the momentary calm the food had given him burned off like vapor and he had to stand up, throw a bill on the table and stalk out the door without bothering with his change. Cash he had-he always carried a thousand in hundreds, against the unforeseen and unfortunate, against moments like this, like this godforsaken interlude in a parking lot in New Windsor, New York, under a sky that was black to the molars of the universe and no forgiveness anywhere-but it would begin to be a problem in a few days, because he couldn't risk going into a bank for a cash advance, but that wasn't his immediate worry. His immediate worry, he realized, as he started up the car and put it in gear, was Sandman. He had to call Sandman and warn him about what was coming down, and the thought of that made his stomach churn. It wasn't so much that Sandman was going to be upset in a major-league way about the risk he'd put them both in and the hundreds of thousands of dollars he'd just extracted from their mutual pockets because he'd given in to the impulse to run down that bitch and everything was unraveling like a big ball of concertina wire, but that he'd have to admit to it in the first place. He'd have to squirm and he didn't like squirming. He'd have to breathe into the phone and tell Sandman how weak and stupid and shortsighted and amateurish he'd been and then he'd have to say goodbye, permanently, to maybe the only friend he had left in the world.

Yes. And he actually had the cell out, looking to punch in the number as he cruised down the dark street toward the highway and the bridge back across the river, when he stopped himself. He heard his own voice playing in his head-“Hey, Geoff, it's me. Hey, I fucked up. Don't. Don't say anything because I just got to warn you”-but then he folded up the phone and slipped it back in his pocket. He would call him later. Once he got where he was going-but where was that?

Without even realizing what he was doing, he'd turned south on Route 9 once he crossed the river, idly punching through the stations on the radio while the trees rose up on either side of the road in a vast black continuum broken only by the occasional gap where there was a restaurant or gas station or a business with its lights muted and parking lot empty. He'd passed North Highland some time back, a line of cars behind him, headlights coming at him in intervals, and he was in no hurry, floating there in the dash-lit cabin as if that was all that was expected of him. When he came to the places where the road opened up to an extra lane he hugged the dark shoulder and let the whole line of them pass. The musical selection wasn't much-oldies, mainly-but he found a station playing reggae, a Black Uhuru tune followed by Burning Spear and then, who else but Marley? His spirits lifted. He felt almost human. And when he spotted a deli open alongside the road he swung into the lot and went in and bought a bag of barbecue chips and a six-pack.

He had no intention whatever of going anywhere near the house, but when he came to the turnoff that would take him down to 9D and the run along the river from Cold Spring to Garrison, he found himself flicking the right-hand turn signal and then he was in the deeper precincts of the continuous forest, the blacker road, the less-traveled path, listening to reggae till the station faded out and tipping back his second beer. And then he was sweeping past the old church and the cemetery with its ancient stone markers, everything quiet, under wraps, the moon showing now over the trees, quarter of eleven on Saturday night and only the occasional car running toward him and shuddering on by. It was quiet out here, which was why he'd chosen the area in the first place, and he slowed to just under the speed limit and rolled down the window to feel the glutinous air on his face and come alive to the roar of the insects. When the headlights picked out the black sheen of his mailbox and the flitting sparkle of the gravel drive, he felt a sensation of loss so immediate and immitigable it was like a physical blow that reverberated from his brain on down through his torso to his legs and the foot that hit the brake and brought the car to a near standstill before he came to his senses and speeded up again even as a car swung out behind him with a tap of the horn and shot on past.

What was he doing? He didn't know. But he pulled in at the next road, a driveway servicing half a dozen houses that showed now only as vague scatterings of light through the black-hung trees, and he swung up on the shoulder and cut the engine. He fought the impulse to crack another beer-beer, he didn't even like the taste of it, and it bloated you, slowed you down-and pulled out his cell. For a moment he thought he was going to call Sandman, but then he thought he wouldn't. Maybe he wouldn't call at all. Maybe he'd just let it go. Vanish. Fuck everybody. It wasn't his fault that this woman-this deaf woman, this freak-was like a bloodhound. That was one in a thousand, one in a million. All right. Fine. He was sitting in the dark a quarter mile from his own house, feeling the effects of two beers and refusing himself the third, his fingers grainy with the residue of the potato chips, every flag waving and every buzzer going off in his head-“Get out, get out now!”-and so what he did was hit Natalia's number for the hundredth time that night.

The insects roared. The moon cut through the trees like a laser and sliced the hood of the car in two. And suddenly her voice was there with him, the sweet bitten breathy words: “This is Natalia, I am not here now, please. Leave a message. Once the beep.” The rage came up then, a violent impulsive hot cautery of rage burning through him till it was all he could do to keep from pounding the phone against the dash till there was nothing left. He was breathing hard. His eyes felt like they were about to crystallize. And then, as if it were foreordained, as if it were what he'd come to do all along, he cracked the door of the car, eased out into the night, and started through the trees for the house.

He told himself he was only reconnoitering, only trying to gauge the extent of the damage, to see if they were there yet. Moving deliberately, one slow step at a time, he felt his way through the patch of woods that separated his property from the near neighbor's and emerged from the trees in a hurricane of mosquitoes, angling silently along the edge of the lower lawn, the lawn he'd mowed himself, his Vans wet with the dew, his eyes fixed on the looming vacancy of the house. There were no lights, everything quiet, brooding, ordinary, and in the dark, with the moon draped over the roof, he could see the cool green glow of the LED display on the alarm panel in the kitchen. For a long while he just crouched there in the shadows, thinking how he could slip in through the window in the basement without activating the alarm and get the notebook with the names and anything else he could find that might be incriminating, credit card bills, Dana Halter, Bridger Martin, but if they were watching he wouldn't have a chance, what with the moon and the pale outline of his suit-if he'd thought ahead he could have gone to Kmart and bought himself a black sweatsuit, with a hood, but he hadn't thought ahead. That was the problem. That was what had got him here in the first place.

He was just about to step out onto the lawn when the faintest noise cracked open the night, a mechanical wheeze feeling its way along the dense compacted air from the direction of the driveway out front to fan across the individual blades of the grass and find surcease in the baffle of the woods at the edge of the lawn. To his ears, fanatically attuned, it sounded like the stealthiest all-but-silent easing open of a car door, the hand at the latch, dome light switched off, nothing but the unlubricated protest of the hinges to betray it. “Jesus! What was he doing?” He sank back into the shadows. On hands and knees, aware of every stick and fallen branch that might betray him, he crept along the inside verge of the lawn, heart thundering in his ears, determined now to see for himself-because it could have been Natalia, in his fantasy anyway, Natalia unwilling to leave without him, and waiting there for him so they could pack up the essentials in the dark and make for the next town before the pigs showed up in the morning with their search warrant.

Another sound. So distant and muted he couldn't be sure he was hearing it. He froze. Strained his eyes to see across the moon-dappled lawn and into the dark clot of shadow that was the driveway, the shape there, a deeper shadow, denser, the blackest hole of the universe. What was it-a car? A car pulled up under the trees where nobody could see it? And then that sound again, faint but distinct, the further protest of pea stone compacted underfoot, one stealthy sole down and then the next, and the flaring itch of a zipper worked and finally the sound of water hitting the gravel in a fine directed stream. That told him all he wanted to know. That hardened him. The alcohol burned through his system and evaporated as if it had never been there, replaced in that instant by the adrenal discharge that fueled him to fight, kill, run, and there was no creature of the night, no opossum or coon or copperhead snake, that faded as silently away.

When he reached the car, he slipped into the driver's side without a sound, turned over the engine and made his way up the neighbor's drive to the highway. He waited there a moment with his lights off till he saw the headlights of a single car approaching, and then he flicked on his lights and eased out onto the road in its wake, heading south.

What he dreamed that night, if he dreamed at all, he couldn't remember. There was a void, and he arose out of it to the sharp sudden stab of a column of sunlight that had worked its way up the rear panel of the car, through the back window and onto his face. For a moment, he didn't know where he was, and then it all locked in, the gray carpet and leather seats, the still life of the dash and the arc of the steering wheel, an intense, almost painfully articulated world of sharpedged leaves pressed against the rolled-up windows. He was sprawled out in the back of a rental car-an SUV, gas hog, four-wheel drive-his throat dry, bladder full, a six-hundred-dollar Italian silk suit filthy in the knees and elbows and clinging damply to him as if it were made of Saran Wrap. There was a bad taste in his mouth. He had no toothbrush, no clothes, no house or fiancée or daughter. For a long while he just lay there, the sun on his face, considering his options, but then he heard voices, a dog barking, and sat up.

Outside the window, on the near side of the car, was vegetation, dense and Amazonian, and on the far side, just beyond a little white house set in the exact center of a square of lawn, was the river, right there, not a hundred feet away, driving down against the tide. The sun gave a shout. A bird shot past the window, folded its wings and plunged into the green. There were two people, a couple, the man in a sun-bleached shirt and the woman in an ankle-length hippie dress with bare shoulders, walking a black Lab down the dirt road and lifting their eyes periodically to throw a shy curious look at the car and then dropping them again to pat the dog and fling something over the charging wedge of its head and four scrambling paws-a stick, sailing out and coming back to them again in the wet grip of the animal's jaws.

He hadn't gone back to Beacon to hide himself along the back roads and he hadn't gone into Peterskill either, to cruise past his mother's house and snatch a quick glimpse of the place, just to see what it looked like, to see if the lights were on, to hope against reason that the sight of it would turn a key in the tumbler inside his head and let him know what was coming next. He hadn't done any of that, because when he left that driveway in the dark the full weight of the day suddenly hit him, a crushing glacial forbidding weight he couldn't begin to lift, and he'd gone no more than three or four miles and found himself winding through a dark turning that took him across the railroad tracks with a slow grinding bump and down this one-lane dirt road laid flat against the river and then on up the shoulder of it and into the bushes. Which was where he was now, dry-mouthed, needing to piss, watching these people and their dog watching him.

It took him a moment to come to his senses-he didn't need them calling the police on him, “Officer, I don't know, there's a drunk or something in a dirty suit crashed in his car out front of the house”-and then he was in the driver's seat and wheeling the SUV across the road in a broad pitching humping U-turn that took a bite out of the lawn and the people looked up at him out of unsmiling faces and he didn't wave. There was fast food in Peterskill, crap in a bag and crap in a waxed cup with a plastic top and flexible straw. He pulled into the drive-up lane because he really didn't want to show himself in public if he didn't have to, and he ate mechanically, without tasting it. Afterward he drove around without purpose, just to feel the wheels roll under him, and he worked his way to the outskirts of town and ducked into the bushes along Croton Reservoir to release the pressure on his bladder and move his bowels. Squatting there in the woods, with the mosquitoes at him, and using the paper napkins from the fast-food place in lieu of toilet paper, he couldn't stop punishing himself. The shit smell rose to his nostrils. There were burrs or seedpods flung like drift across both sleeves of his jacket. Mud on his shoes. The crystal of his watch was cracked. What was wrong with him? What had he come to? He gave himself a quick once-over in the rearview-the reddened ear, the thin crust of the scab, the black stubble coming in so that he looked like a cartoon bum-and before he could think the car was moving and he had the cell phone out, dialing information for Peterskill Hospital.

The road was narrow here, climbing now, and he was so focused on the phone he nearly ran a little Japanese car into the bushes, but then he had the number and for an extra charge they connected him and he was talking to the receptionist.

“Peterskill Hospital. How may I assist you?”

“You have visiting hours today?”

“All day till nine p. m., for all patients except intensive care.”

“And can you tell me if someone's been admitted-if he's there. Or still there, I mean?”

“One moment, please.” A pause, the sound of keys tapping. “And what was the name?”

“Martin,” he said. “Bridger Martin.”

He picked up a newspaper on the way and a cheap bouquet of flowers, the stems wrapped in tinfoil under a cone of plastic, just in case anybody should wonder what he was doing there parked in the lot amongst the sunstruck chassis and glinting windshields of a hundred other vehicles. It was hot, eternally hot. The radio gave him nothing, classical, talk, a garble of Sunday devotion, hallelujah and amen. Very slowly, with infinite patience, he read through the paper, section by section, keeping one eye cocked on the front entrance. And when he saw her there, finally, at half past two in the afternoon, her features working and her hands jumping in the face of the woman beside her as she came out the double doors and into the sun, it was no less than he'd expected. And when she ducked into a rust-streaked yellow Volvo with New York plates, the other woman at the wheel, there was nothing he could do but crank up his rented SUV, with all its ominous high-riding authority, and follow her out of the lot.

Four

SHE STOOD AT THE DOOR of Terri's car, the smell of the exhaust running at her in the humid breeze that had come up suddenly to agitate the branches of the trees and lift a scrap of paper from the gutter and fling it down the street. There was rain coming, yet more rain, one of the late-afternoon thunder showers that blew up this time of year to douse the streets for half an hour before the sheen of water evaporated and the air grew dense and hot all over again. “Thanks again, thanks for everything,” she was saying for the second or third time, leaning into the window frame as Terri, her hair bound up in a black scrunchie to keep the weight of it off her shoulders, said it was her pleasure and that she hoped they'd keep in touch.

“Oh, definitely,” Dana said. “I've got your phone and e-mail, and you've got my cell-we want to have you down for the day. I'll treat you to dinner. We can go shopping or something.”

“Or something?” Terri said, showing her teeth in a smile that radiated up to her eyes and pulled the skin tight along her cheekbones. This was a genuine smile, real and spontaneous, not like the pained contortion of the lips most people gave her. And the term came to her then out of her storehouse of odd bits of vocabulary-this was what physiologists called a Duchenne smile, in which two different facial muscles fired simultaneously, a smile that couldn't be faked.

Dana glanced up the street and back again. She was smiling too, feeling good, feeling liberated, the whole thing over now, out of her hands. “Shopping,” she said. “Definitely shopping.”

“Okay then”, Terri signed.

“Yeah, okay.”

She was turning away to cross the street to her own car, when she felt a tug at the back of her T-shirt and turned round again. “Here,” Terri was saying, and she was holding something out to her-a scrunchie, lime green, with crimson polka dots. “So you can put your hair up for the ride home,” pointing to the side of her own head in illustration. “For the heat.”

“Are you trying to tell me something?” Dana said, and she felt so good suddenly she was clowning, making a show of raising her arms to sniff at the armpits of her T-shirt and then dropping them to smooth out the fabric as if she were trying on an evening gown. “I'm not reeking that much, am I?”

Terri laughed-the flash of her teeth, her head rocking and chin dipping, and here came the breeze again, an ice cream wrapper spinning out from under the car and cartwheeling down the street. “Not yet,” she said, “but you're pushing it.”

And then she was waving goodbye and working her hands through the thick mass of her hair to pin it back in a ponytail, the sweat cooling already on her neck and around the collar of her shirt. She stood there a moment, watching Terri's car-the hand-me-down Volvo she'd got from her parents after her teenage brother had put it through some rough use-as it moved off down the street, shedding light. Then she looked both ways, crossed the street to her car, unlocked the door and slid into the driver's seat.

The station was no more than five minutes away, and though she got turned around and went down the wrong street-a dead end-she still got there with fifteen minutes to spare. As she pulled into the parking lot, the sun dimmed suddenly and she glanced up through the bug-flecked skin of the windshield to see a torn patch of cloud trailing past; beyond it, across the river, the thunderheads rose up out of the mountains in a dark unbroken band. There were flashes of lightning-no streaks or tendrils, just random swellings of light as if there were a bombardment going on in the next county over. The air through the open window smelled fecund and rich, as if it had been pumped up out of a deep well. Or a cavern. “Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea,” she chanted to herself, just to feel the words on her tongue, the small solace of the beat. Then she eased into a parking spot, shut down the car and began to sift through her purse for change for the meter.

She didn't know what she was going to do with her mother. She'd thought of treating her to lunch at the cafe at the depot, sitting outside under one of the umbrellas, off in a corner by themselves with the view and two glasses of chilled white wine and a grilled ahi sandwich or a salad, something to pick at-but the storm would ruin that. Her mother was going to want to go see Bridger before they drove back down to the city, but there was some part of her-a large and growing part-that resisted the notion. She didn't want to go back there. Not yet. She really didn't think she could take it, the whole symphony of her guilt building to a crescendo all over again, the look on the face of Bridger's mother, the smells, the nurses, the man with the feet, Bridger. Bridger lying there in his plaster and gauze, settling into his bruises, “having trouble breathing,” and who'd given him the trouble?

For a moment the picture of the two mothers squaring off rose up before her, but almost as soon as it came to her, she changed the channel. She wasn't ready for that. She wanted to be selfish now, purely selfish. She wanted to hook her arm through her mother's the minute she stepped off the train, lead her to the car and drive directly back to the city, the trees dwindling behind her and the road narrowing in the rearview mirror. She wanted to be in the cluttered room with the door shut behind her, her hair washed and wrapped up in a towel, the air conditioner breathing its mechanical breath as she settled into a corner of the bed and pulled the shades and let this new feeling bloom inside of her, the feeling of release, of letting go absolutely and completely and without regret, as if she were standing on the ledge outside the window on the nineteenth floor and letting go of every hand held out to her till she just floated up and away or dropped hurtling into the vacuum.

She got out of her car. Shut the door, clicked the remote to lock it. She was thinking she might walk a bit, stroll along the platform as far as it would take her in either direction and feel the wind on her face. There weren't many people around, Sunday afternoon, midsummer, the deep charcoal bank of clouds crowding closer and the boats on the river changing color as the light failed overhead. She walked past the cafe, the ticket office and waiting room, mounting the steps to the platform, and only then did she feel the seismic shift through the soles of her feet, the furious contained irruption of power, and there it was, her mother's train, pounding into the station five minutes early.

Looking back on it, what remained most vivid in her mind wasn't the way the storm broke almost at the instant the train lurched to a stop, as if the weather were adhering to a timetable too, or how many people appeared out of nowhere with their tennis rackets and backpacks and fishing rods to swarm the platform, but the expression on her mother's face. At first, what with the sudden press of people, Dana didn't see her there in the crowd and wondered if she'd got the right train. The initial random drops of rain had surprised her, spattering her shoulders and running two cold fingers along the base of her neck where she'd put her hair up, and she'd moved in under the long narrow metal canopy that ran the length of the platform and everyone else moved in too. Then she felt the air concuss and glanced up to see the water falling in metallic sheets from both sides of the canopy. She felt something else too, a sudden chill, the sixth sense of the deaf, and she was about to turn around, to look over her shoulder and confront whatever it was, real or imaginary, when she spotted her mother. There she was, squeezing between two men with suitcases, coming toward her, overdressed in slacks and heels and a turquoise blouse cinched at the waist with a trailing scarf. And she had that expression on her face.

Her mother wasn't there to comfort her, not with that face, or at least not until she'd let her disapproval and disappointment and heartbreak be felt and acknowledged, because here was her daughter, her highly educated deaf daughter whom she'd taught to be responsible and independent, in trouble again, her clothes dirty, her knees bandaged like a child's and her fiancé-if he still was her fiancé-in the hospital. Beaten up-or no, beaten down-because of her. Because she wouldn't listen. That was the expression on her mother's face, that was what she saw in that sliver of a moment as her mother compacted her shoulders to move between the two men jockeying for position with their suitcases and the rain fell in sheets and the earth gave off its immemorial saturate smell. But then it all changed-her mother's mouth dropped open and her eyes leapt out at her-and Dana was hit from behind, hard, a shoulder digging into hers as if someone had stumbled into her, and she caught her balance and swung round and there he was. For an instant, the rain sheeting down, her mother on the periphery, everyone on the platform arrested in mid-stride, she stared into his face, so close she could smell the raw ammoniac charge of his breath and the sweat bleeding through a lingering taint of aftershave. He was right there, right in her face, and there was nowhere to run now. A tremor coursed through her. She tried to swallow but couldn't. She saw the thin whip of the slash on his cheek, the unshaved stubble, the thrust of his chin and the two strips of muscle wadded in his clenched jaws. He didn't say a word. Didn't move. Just breathed his ammoniac breath and let his eyes burn into her.

He didn't know what he was doing, he really didn't. It was as if he'd been disconnected, as if someone had pulled the plug on him and the laptop of his brain was running on auxiliary power, the battery getting weaker and the connections ever harder to make. He hadn't been to prison, hadn't lived underground for the past three years, hadn't been tutored by Sandman or developed his street smarts or learned anything at all. She moved, he moved: that was all he knew. And when the yellow Volvo turned right out of the hospital lot and rolled down Route 202 into the heart of town and bore left on Division and headed for his mother's house, he followed.

They were two blocks away when the Volvo, without signaling, suddenly nosed in at the curb up ahead. He saw the black Jetta then, parked across the street in a line of cars, and he let the forward momentum of the SUV carry him on past to the corner and then back around the block. “No hurry,” he told himself, and he realized he was talking aloud-and how pathetic was that? But he repeated himself, as if his voice were coming from the radio, as if everything he was thinking was being broadcast to the world and people were crowding into rooms and standing in doorways to hear him, “No hurry at all.” When he came down the street a minute later she was standing there on the pavement, leaning into the driver's side window, her T-shirt hiked up in back so that he could see the smooth run of her lower back and the flare of her hips, and he flicked his signal and slid in behind a panel truck. He was blocking somebody's driveway, but that wouldn't matter because any minute now she was going to get in that Jetta-alone-and everything would fall into place. He backed up five feet and eased out just enough to be able to see round the truck. He left the car running, in gear.

They were talking, the two of them, back and forth, and now she was using her hands, parting words, goodbye, and he saw the other woman tug at her shirt and pull her back to slip her something. What was it: drugs? A cigarette? Some deaf thing? Maybe it was a hearing aid, maybe that was it. But no, she was putting her hair up in one of those flexible bands, snaring the mass of it in both hands and flicking back her head the way Natalia did, the way Natalia used to, the characteristic gesture, the dip and fall. And then another goodbye and she crossed the street and got into her car as the other woman pulled away. What he'd thought was that she'd be trapped there, that it would be nothing to pull up beside her and block her in and do what he had to do, but he didn't move. She was studying herself in the mirror, both her arms Ved above her head, doing something with her hair, smoothing and adjusting it beneath the tight clench of the band, and he watched, transfixed, thinking of Natalia, of Gina, her slim pale arms moving in unison as the car gently rocked and she dug out her lipstick and her eyeliner and made herself up as if she were going out on a date. Which, in a way, she was.

That was a hard thought. And she was a bitch, never forget that. But there was something in the way she exposed herself so unconsciously-the way all women did-looking for beauty in a compact or a tube of lipstick, needing it, needing to be beautiful and admired for it and reaching always for grace, that hit him with the force of revelation and he let the car idle beneath him till she put the Jetta in gear and pulled out into the street and he had to duck down out of her line of sight as she wheeled past with her shining eyes and the drawn bow of her composed and glistening mouth. When she got to the end of the block, he swung a U-turn and followed in her wake.

It wasn't hard to catch up to her. She drove like somebody twice her age, utterly oblivious, crowding the middle of the street one minute and weaving toward the curb the next. Riding the brake. Going too fast round the curves and too slow on the straightaways. He put the sun visor down and kept four or five car lengths between them-he wouldn't want her to recognize him, not yet-but he could have been right on her bumper and she wouldn't have known the difference. She never glanced in the rearview, not once, except to adjust her makeup and watch herself compress her lips and run the tip of a finger along the fringe of her eyelashes. But where was she going? Back to the hospital?

The light was red up ahead and she drifted to a stop and flicked on her left-turn signal. He slowed, then pulled over to let the car behind him pass, and all the while he could feel that wire dangling loose inside him, that slow fade to nothing. The second car nosed in behind her at the light, father, mother, three kids in the back, the mother's hair wet and hanging thin as tinsel round her collar. There was a rumble of thunder. The sky closed in. Both his hands were on the wheel, but he couldn't feel a thing. When the light changed, he let the car carry him back out into traffic and he hit the left-turn signal and followed her down the hill toward the train station, wondering if that was where she was going and if it was, where he could trap her.

He was trying to visualize the place-cafe, depot, northbound platform and the overhead walkway to the southbound tracks, rails and crossties stapling the ground, the river, everything out in the open-when suddenly she veered left again, no signal, just a jerk of the wheel, and he had no choice but to keep going straight. Had she seen him, was that it? The thought made his blood surge and he was jerking at the wheel himself, cursing, the big hurtling front end of the SUV thumping so violently into the first driveway he spotted it nearly left the ground and for the briefest fraction of a moment he was staring into the eyes of a numb-faced little kid on a tricycle who was that close to being meat and then he was lurching back, jamming the thing into gear and whipping round the corner, down the street she'd taken.

It was a dead end. And that was perfect, or would have been, except that there were kids everywhere, shouting in Spanish and chasing a ball that ran from one foot to another so fast you couldn't follow it, and there she was, coming toward him, her eyes locked straight ahead, signaling left, left again. He could have run into her, could have slammed the SUV into the grille of that tinny little shitbox of a car and put an end to it right there, but he didn't, he couldn't, all the power leaching out of him and the world shifting in front of his eyes till he didn't know where he was or what he was doing or why. “Da-na,” that was what Natalia called him, and he heard her voice echoing in his ears, “Da-na, Da-na.” He cursed aloud and the curse brought him back. And as soon as the Jetta was past him he spun the wheel and veered for the opposite curb, abbreviating the soccer game even as the ball thumped against the back fender and skittered across the street as if all the air had gone out of it. “Hey, motherfucker!” some kid shouted. ““Pendejo!”” and he didn't give a shit if he ran them all down, every one of them and they had eyes, didn't they? And ears? He hit the horn. Wrestled the wheel. Up on the curb, back across the street-““Puta! Puta!””-and she was at the end of the block now, swinging out onto the main road and heading down the hill, for the station.

He watched her park. Watched her make a final appraisal of herself in the mirror and then slide out of the car and lift her face to gaze up at the sky and the bunched bruised clouds squeezing down the light. Very slowly, as if he weren't driving at all but floating up off the ground on some untappable current, he drove past her and swung into a parking spot two cars down and just sat there a moment, watching her shoulders and the way her hips rotated over the tight unhurried muscles of her legs and buttocks as she walked toward the station. She didn't have a clue. The bitch. The bitch didn't have a clue and he did, he had the whole puzzle worked out, the final piece in place, and he shut down the ignition and left the car where it was. He didn't bother to lock it. Didn't bother with the keys. And the meter-the meter was a joke.

The air seemed to boil around him suddenly, the heat exploding in his face, and then the breeze and the deadfall of the thunder and here was the train, punishing steel and crowding the scene, and when the rain hit he didn't try to duck it or quicken his pace, because he was focused now-focused on her, on her back and shoulders and the flash of color caught in her hair-and he was walking. With purpose. Up the steps and onto the platform, his face wet, his hair wet, the structure gone out of his jacket with the sudden assault of the rain, and he crowded in with the others, smelling the ferment of their bodies, colliding, shifting, touching. The thunder rolled out and shook the platform. Lightning broke the sky.

That was when he hit her. That was when he lowered his shoulder and struck her from behind, not hard enough to knock her down, not hard enough to do anything other than communicate the one inescapable truth that tore her face out of the crowd and gave it to him as if he were its maker and shaper. He had her. She was in his power. The two of them were face to face, occupying the same square foot of the universe, united, wedded, and he was the one, the only one, who could break the connection.

There was movement behind her, some woman crying out. Another peal of thunder. He watched her eyes, watched her lips, heard the flat toneless echo of her voice, no fear in her, not anymore. “What do you want?”

Everything beat down to that instant, to that question, to her lips moving and the scent of her breath, the heat of it in his face, the actual and the real: “What do you want?” The question took him by surprise. It froze him. Stopped him dead. Because he hadn't really thought beyond the moment and it was weakness and weakness only that had brought him here. He saw that now. Saw it clearly, as truth, the new truth of his life. And he saw that she wasn't afraid and that none of this mattered, not anymore. “Da-na,” Natalia had called him. He thought of Mill Valley, the condo there, the house in Garrison, the face of his daughter stranded on the porch. “Da-na. Da-na. Da-na.” People were jostling, staring at him, at the two of them, and he had the smallest fraction of a second to contemplate the question before the answer came to his lips, and the answer didn't involve her at all-it had nothing to do with her, but with him, Peck Wilson, a jerk, a clown, an imposter in a torn silk suit, worth nothing, worth less than nothing.

He shook his head. Dropped his eyes. “Nothing,” he said, and he didn't know whether she could read that or not and he didn't care. Then he was moving, squaring his shoulders and tugging at the wet lapels of his jacket, pushing through the crowd, striding across the platform and up onto the train. He didn't bother to look back.