Dana felt Bridger's hand go to the binoculars and she let go of them-he was playing the mime too, jerking the instrument back and forth as if following the imaginary birds, but what his lips said was, “Who is that? The wife, you think?”
Still focused on the patch of water that lay just beyond the faded redwood deck of #109, she could only nod. “I guess,” she said. “If this is the right place.”
Bridger's eyes shot to the deck and then went back to the binoculars. “Did you see anyone else? A man? Is “he” there?”
In the end, the tension was too much for her to bear. She gently extracted the binoculars from his grip, let her gaze rove over the surface of the bay a moment, and then swung him round by one arm and led him off in the opposite direction, two bird lovers on the track of something elusive. When they'd gone fifty paces, she leaned into him and they both halted, looking out to the water. “What now?” she asked, and if she could have heard herself-if she were a character in a novel-she might have described her tone as forlorn. Certainly she felt that way. The woman had looked right at her-or had seemed to. There was a face to it now, another face, flesh and blood, dark eyes, dark hair, capris.
Bridger loomed into her field of vision. “I say we ring the doorbell.”
He was right. She knew he was. “Couldn't we just… wait? To see, I mean. If he shows up, gets out of his car-we could see his car and get the license plate…”
“And then what?” His mouth was drawn so thin it was like a paper cut. He was determined, she could see that. A breeze came up then, clean and sweet, and blew the hair across her face so that for a moment she was hidden and what he said next didn't register. But his fingers were there, gently probing, and he brought her back with a sweep of his hand. “Come on,” he urged. “We'll go together. Just ring the bell, that's all. We're visiting. Looking for the Goldsteins. Ask her do you know where the Goldsteins live and just see what happens, see if the son of a bitch is there-maybe he'll answer the door himself, and that's all we need. Just that.”
She didn't argue. All at once they were strolling again, following the gravel path as it looped back across the gentle grassy undulations and neatly recessed flowerbeds the landscaper had thought to provide so the denizens of Shelter Bay Village could delight in the contrast as they gazed out over the property to the flat shining void of the water and the hills beyond. A woman in jeans and a windbreaker emerged from behind the bank of buildings and jogged toward them, a small black dog scrambling ahead of her on the tether of its leash. Someone was getting out of a car in the lot-another woman, dipping forward to retrieve her purse and a bag of groceries. Dana felt as if she were about to lose consciousness. Something flitted before her eyes, but it wasn't palpable, and then they were on the doorstep-a deep-pile mat, two pots of begonias, brass knocker-and she was glad she couldn't hear the sound the buzzer made in response to the weight of Bridger's index finger.
The door pulled abruptly open and the woman was there, prettier even than she'd looked at a distance, and there was a child there too, four or five years old, a girl, tugging with all her weight at her mother's wrist-her mother, this was her mother, and anybody could have seen that. The woman gave them a blank look. “Yes?” she said. “Can I help you?”
Bridger said something then and for a moment it seemed to immobilize her: “Is Dana here?”
The child kept tugging, chanting “Mommy, Mommy,” and something else Dana couldn't read, and the woman's face changed in that instant, the eyes retreating, lips hardening round the bitter savor of the lie. “No,” she said, “you must have the wrong house.” She glanced away to shoot her daughter an admonitory look and then came back to them. “There is no one of that name here.”
Two
“WHAT DO YOU MEAN they asked for me? By “name”?”
He'd just come through the front door, feeling harassed, his shirt soaked under the arms, and he hadn't had a drink yet or anything to eat either and the first thing she said to him was that somebody had been there looking for him. That snapped him to attention, all right. That froze him. Right there in the front hall, the three white plastic bags of takeout Chinese dangling from his fingertips and the unread newspaper pinned to his chest. He'd spent the better part of the afternoon and well into the evening hassling over things, the little details that prick you like multiple beestings till your flesh is scored and bleeding and you barely have the energy or will to do what you have to do-like take three carloads of Natalia's clothes and accessories to the storage unit in Larkspur she'd insisted on renting and FedEx six cardboard cartons of dresses, handbags, shoes and kiddie toys to Sandman's place in Croton-and now she'd sprung this on him. He stood there, stupefied.
She was wearing her martyred look, the look she'd put on two nights ago and hadn't taken off since, the savage dark strokes of her eyeliner crushing the life out of her eyes, her mouth set in a permanent pout, her nostrils flaring with self-pity. “No,” she said, “not you,” throwing it over her shoulder as she turned away from the door, padded across the room on bare feet and flung herself down on the couch that was strewn with the chaos of her packing. “Not you,” she repeated in a withering voice. “Da-na. They want Da-na.”
For two days and nights it had been going on like this, the aftermath of his confession a rain of ashes, the village gone and all the people in it, no-man's-land, and he'd had it. Enough. Enough already. Before he knew what he was doing he'd dropped the bags to the floor-and he didn't give a shit if the war wonton soup leaked into the Szechuan scallops and leached right on through to the carpet and if the carpet was ruined and the floorboards underneath and everything else all the way on down to the goddamn basement-and he was there and he had her by the arm, all the rage in him concentrated in the grip of the five fingers of his right hand. “Don't fuck with me,” he said, low and hard, tuning his voice to the register of violence the way he'd learned to do when he was inside, when people were holding their breath and listening and the whole place went suddenly quiet. “You just tell me, you understand? No more of this shit.”
She looked alarmed-scared-her eyes flaring up and then dwindling down to nothing, and that made him feel bad, but not enough to loosen his grip. He jerked her arm, shook her like one of the big fifty-pound sacks of flour stacked up on the shelves in the back room at Pizza Napoli. She didn't cry out. Didn't protest. She said, “A man and a woman. For you, they ask for you.”
Still he held her and he could feel the pressure beating at the sclera of his eyes as if it was too much to contain, as if it would all blow out of him like spew. “How old?” And when she tightened her mouth, a second's hesitation, he jerked at her arm again. “I said, how old?”
“You are leaving a mark.” Her voice was cold, distant, as if she were alluding to an arm that was attached to someone else in another apartment altogether. He became aware then of the constricted burst of cartoon voices emanating from Madison's room, a sudden crazed drawn-out cackle of a laugh, crepitating music. He let go. Natalia gave him a look of resentment, as if he were the one at fault. She wouldn't rub at her arm-she wouldn't give him the satisfaction. She was going to suffer. She was a martyr. “The man maybe twenty-five, I don't know,” she said finally. “The woman thirty. Tall, pretty. Blue jeans she was wearing and a tan jacket from bebe, one hundred and thirty-nine dollars on special sale. Okay?”