Chapter eighteen

we told Charlie where we were going. We swore him to secrecy. We told no one else. We rented a car—I didn’t want to use McGill’s. We put some clothes in two overnight bags. We put the overnight bags on the back seat. I put the pistol in the glove compartment with some maps and a flashlight. And by the time the sun went down that night, we were burning through the Lincoln Tunnel and out of town.

We drove with the radio playing. We drove with the windows down. We drove with the sound of rock ’n’ roll washing over us like the wind. The night grew black around us. The air stank with Jersey. The lights of factories glowed. Then we were in the countryside, and by the time we crossed over into Pennsylvania, there was nothing but trucks and the air and the darkness.

“He always took me places,” Susannah said. “Even when I was little. Baseball games and movies. Can you imagine my father sitting through those movies they make for children? We must have watched Mary Poppins fifteen times one summer. I mean, you know my father, you know what he’s like, Mr. Tough Guy. He took me through the woods, he taught me the flowers. He made things … clean for me. They were always … everything was always so clean. He spoiled me, I guess, but it wasn’t, you know, like a bad thing, it was just, he wanted everything to be nice.… Maybe that’s why he didn’t tell me.”

The rising mountains were all around us, black and frowning against the sky. The road lifted steadily. I could smell her in the seat beside me, her perfume light on the rushing wind.

“Why didn’t he tell me?” I said.

“Maybe he didn’t know. About you, I mean. Maybe he didn’t know about any of it.”

“He knows. He’s in this somehow, Susie. He did try to tell me about it over Christmas. He tried to tell me again before he left, but I wouldn’t let him. He knows. It couldn’t have been a coincidence, his hiring me. He knows, all right.”

We went through a tunnel under a mountain. The music from the radio fizzled and died. We said nothing until we came out the other side. Then the music began again.

Susannah said: “You know, I think … Maybe this is something all daughters think. Still, I think I was all my father had. My mother … I mean, he loved her, but she was, well, it isn’t fair, but … she was never well. You know? I mean, I remember, like, she always looked pale, so I remember asking her, one time when I was little, why she always looked like Casper the Ghost. She had heart trouble. She was always out of breath. She always had to sit down. She could never do anything, go anywhere with Daddy. So I think … I mean, he might have divorced her or cheated on her, but I think … he just had me instead, took me places, did things with me.… You see what I’m saying? He would have told me if he knew I was in danger.”

I nodded. We crossed into West Virginia. It was after one in the morning. We saw the lights of Wheeling in the dark. We crossed the bridge into Ohio.

I said: “If I can’t have you anymore, I’ll die.”

She started crying again.

We found a motel just off the highway: the. usual series of cheesy bungalows fronting on a parking lot. We took two of them. I spent what was left of that night—that morning—staring at the wall and staring out the window. The wall was the wall between us. It was thin as paper. I could hear her shifting around on the other side. Getting undressed. Going to bed. I walked across the room and lay my hand against the wall. I could hear her, still crying.

“Damn,” I whispered..

Then there was the window. The window looked out onto the dark. I stood in front of the window smoking cigarettes. I heard the trucks going by on the highway. I saw the red, then the green, glow of a nearby streetlight on the road into town. I watched the changing color of the glow.

I thought of Manhattan, of the checkerboard simplicity of its streets. The dark is not dark there, never completely. It has a kind of violet glow that is all the light from everywhere convening in the sky. There is no silence in Manhattan. You are never alone. There’s always something rocking, the steady thrum underground, the new beat of the coming music. There are signs on the corners so you know where you are.

The light blinked red, then green, and in the instant of change, when the glow was gone, I saw my own reflection on the glass: a ghostly presence, full of the night, gazing into the silent passing of the hour before dawn.