She faces the congregation. The door opens behind her. The rain and snow, she hears, is falling more heavily. A gust of wind pushes at her and she turns to look: across the street, a little playground is empty. Nathan is gone. But something, she senses, is menacingly wrong.
"Where is he?"
Santos stands before her in the doorway, panting for breath.
His car idles at the curb.
"But he just left," she says.
He grimaces, scrapes his fingers through his hair. "And you just let him go?"
"What do you mean just? You know where he's going, Errol. Where he always runs. But why do you need to see him so badly?" Then she looks at him. Her hands come up. "Don't-I don't want to know."
"It's him, Claire. Nathan killed Isabel. His prints are everywhere. The time of death, the place, someone can put them there together."
“There?"
“Coney Island."
"I will not-I refuse- Who is it, Errol, who is the someone?"
"He and Nathan were supposed to meet but Nathan called to cancel. Nathan and Isabel were there. He saw them in the car. He saw them fighting. It was Nathan, Claire."
"Who was it, Errol? Who saw them?"
"I can't tell you that."
"Was it that Krivit? Just give me that. Tell me, was it him?"
Santos says nothing and outside in the horizontal rain, across the street, but only for an instant, Nathan stands in the playground amidst the plastic chutes and tunnels. But only Claire has seen him.
6 P. M.
Like hour hands gone awry, the windshield wipers sweep at the deluge, accelerating the twilight to midnight darkness. Strands of ground fog move with menace along the Long Island Expressway. Across the median the opposing traffic comes steadily down the lanes like a parade of motorboats, passing in clouds of vapor and vanishing in explosions of red mist.
In the mirror a pair of headlights holds at fifty yards, as for the last hour, no closer, then no closer.
But in here, in this hairy and coffee-stained car, the CD changer shifts around and it is the Philharmonic doing the Saint Matthew Passion. It was Maria's favorite piece of music. He remembers her ust months ago as she stood in the living room in East Hampton surrounded by night-blackened glass doors, still beautiful in a seamless black sheath, her lips curled in an impish grin, sweeping her withering arms-the crooks IV-punctured, as bruised as rotting pears-conducting, it seemed, her own march down the Via Dolorosa, her demise; and Nathan sitting immobile in the white leather chair, the music deafening, the floorboards vibrating, pinning him there-
He lifts the remote control and fires, and the brooding ends. Maria slips away. Now Paul Desmond's schmaltzy breeze, big band and all, a clarion call to some greater, unpeopled civility. Safety in here, to do as he likes, this place that he loves, his little space capsule on the go. He has his dog, his music, this sanctuary, his little womb-box of paradise, his past vanishing in the mirror and the objects of his desire pulling into view. And he sees his house perched high on a bluff, dry and safe and innocent with its angelic wind chimes and vaulted ceilings and sunken pool, silent now; a fridge stocked with a family's worth of food; in the morning the hummingbirds will approach the sliding glass doors and, wings ablur, peck pleasantly at their reflections. Another day beside his azure square of water, an evening before his largescreen TV, watching the Philharmonic on laser disc, wrapped in the graces of someone else's genius. The glory, the music, the paradise of his loneliness, the paradise of his despair-
East Hampton is abandoned. A squad car sits against the curb, its wheels splayed, the roadside trees bound with darkened Christmas lights. The antique salons, the boutiques, the Realtors with their posted yearbook photos of dreamhomes, the white flowerboxes-everything lovely and elegant is now encased in ice. In giant display windows, drifts of virtuous cotton, spotlit scenes of nutcracker soldiers and cherubs and iceskating angels. Electric trains orbit toy towns very like this one. The glass before everything taped with giant X's to withstand the storm, though to Nathan they read CANCELLED, and seem to offer as targets w at glitters behind them.
He threads the car through the debris in the streets and is drawn like a moth to the lit windows of a diner. The snow sweetly sifts on a car or two parked in front. But headlights swing into the parking lot, holding him steady. And between the beams, in the diner window, sits Krivit reading the newspaper-the beefy head, the pudgy fingers, half his meal down the front of his shirt. Nathan flicks on his high beams and Krivit turns, squinting outside, shielding his eyes. Baron collapses against the door as Nathan pulls out and the car fishtails across the vast lot. The dog understands the urgency: he hangs his head alongside Nathan's, eyes quivering, hypnotizing himself with the frantic wipers.
Nathan's beeper, like everything else, is quiet now. Even Serena. He snaps open his cell-phone and tries for a dial tone and hears only the dead plastic of the earpiece rustle against his ear. The circuitry, the lifeline, is quiet. Everything is quiet.
Letting his head drop against the headrest, he sees now the Coney Island pier where he and Isabel began to fight. He had wanted to bring her there. He had wanted to show her, tell her about the old times with Milton: This is us, he wanted to say. This is the you you don't know. But he can still hear his bitter accusations, his voice louder than the rest-there seemed to be more people in the car than just the two of them; there seemed three people, five, ten people in the car-he thought he spoke for them all. But one of the voices was Isabel's. Another was Claire's. They were both pleading. But it was Isabel who was kissing him beautifully. Her hand was on his thigh. Why couldn't they be married, have a baby, live like human beings?
He hears his pathetic somethingorother reply.
She went on, her reasons accelerating, making perfect sense: It would be a fairy tale. Like a movie, like one of those operas you always go to see. My mother worked for your father for years. Errol would be so happy, it would bring you two together like the brothers you once were… grew up together… practically family anyway… no one knows you better… husband and wife…
What, again, did he say?
She began to cry.
There are no tracks where he goes now. Slow and solitary, the road out of town is cracked into geometric sections like melting ice floes. In the mirror the streetlights fade behind columns of standing mist. The tires rip through the steady sleet-
After his brilliant arguments in his own defense, he had opened the door and strolled to the boardwalk. She didn't move in the passenger seat. Then she did. She came after him. He stood at the rail, the water below so black, so cold, so still it seemed a sheer drop down to the bottom of a ravine. The heights were terrifying. He held on to the rail. She held on to him. He closed his eyes. How long ago, how strange, how sad, distant as his memory of first love, Claire stood by the window of the printer's shop picking out their wedding invitations; then Claire left his mind and the hands he held to his face were Isabel's and the eyes that met his were Isabel's, were his, really, his father's, actually. Maybe Errol's, too, for all he knew. He saw only faces. Enclosed and surrounded by faces. And the faces seemed to be mirrors in which he saw and watched himself. And he knew them all better than he knew himself, the fear and puzzlement and the fatigue. He was so tired.
In the rear-view mirror headlights dart in and out of the trees, patient, staying back. Blades of light in the corner of his eye, pinlights twirling before him. Closer, they hold steady in ordered pairs. Elfish eyes. The headlights illuminate snouts, racks of antler, breastplates of white fur; a doe's nose no bigger than a rubber doorstop.