"You still love him,” he says.
"No- I don't know, I did. Yes, maybe I do. Don't you?" She turns into the snow now, blinking. "Didn't we grow up together?"
"I don't know if that's good enough."
At the open kitchen door there is broken glass and Santos motions for her to stay back. Inside, shadows crisscross the hall, muffled voices, none of them Nathan's. She follows as Santos keeps to the walls, hugging corners. Debris and bags of frozen garbage are piled everywhere. The pristine doors she remembers from years before are scabby and gritty with soot, the room in which she and Nathan once made love charred from disuse.
Sounds of grunts and footsteps in the living room. She follows Santos toward a man cradling a stack of stereo components. Boxes of CD's sit by the front door.
Santos lifts his gun. "Who are you?"
Schreck turns, smiling thinly at the gun. "Errol. And Claire. I didn't expect you. It's been years and years-"
At the sight of Schreck Claire can feel a tic, a reflex, jerk the corner of her mouth. "Oliver," she says, with dread. An ancient memory about him awakes, and she looks up, anywhere, toward the ceiling, out the glass doors where the trees are tossing their bare heads in the wind. Once, when Nathan was in another room, Oliver grabbed her from behind. Another time he'd whispered revolting things in her ear. The dirt returns, those pathetic times of believing bad lies and despising the look of her own reflection. He may not have expected her, but she should have expected him. Hadn't he always chased the ambulance to the scene of some crime?
Ruth emerges from the dark dining room, the hood of her overcoat pitched high like a monk's. "Claire-"
Finally, Santos puts away the gun. "Where is Nathan?" he asks.
Schreck heads out the door with pieces of stereo. Ruth picks the shredded remains of a cushion off the floor, drops it on the empty frame of the couch and sits.
He's gone," she says.
"Where did he go, town?"
Ruth, imperious still, says nothing.
Claire takes in the desolation. "What the hell happened here?"
"Do you want to sit down?"
Schreck returns slapping his hands on his thighs.
"Someone's been searching the house," Santos says.
"Yes," Schreck replies, without hesitation.
"Is all this you?"
"Errol," Ruth interrupts, "as a cop, you're out of your jurisdiction. This isn't Brooklyn."
But he's not here as a cop," Schreck says, "is he? Are you?"
Santos looks from Schreck to Ruth.
Does Nathan know you're taking these things?" Claire asks.
"Why?" Schreck asks. "Do you want something?"
She shakes her head. "Where are you taking it?"
"Where Milton can watch his son's TV, listen to music on his son's speakers-"
Stupidly, she knows, Claire points at a porcelain vase propping open the door. "But I got him that."
"Milton would never know if something small walked out on its own."
"Take it," Ruth suggests.
"You're taking everything," Claire says. "Why is everybody doing this, acting like he's already dead?"
Schreck reaches into his coat and brings out an envelope and offers it to Santos. "I've been holding this for you. This is yours-"
"What is it?" Santos asks, taking the envelope.
"That's your share."
Santos lifts out a sheaf of bills. "You neglected to mention this part last night."
An odd smile crosses Schreck's face. "I never lied to you, Errol. Not last night. And not now. You're here to do a job. A man in your position, a job should be well paid, or else why do it. Do what you've come to do."
Claire is shaking her head, looking from one to the other, but Santos seems to come to an understanding, as if from an old arrangement. He hands back the envelope. "I don't want it," he says.
"We don't have more than a few minutes," Schreck says. "There's no time to argue. Take it."
Claire looks at the money. A wave of nausea washes through her. She lies: "I don't understand."
Santos has backed against the wall. "I'm supposed to finish it."
Schreck nods. "Eye for an eye."
"No one ever accused you of being a sophisticated thinker, Schreck," Santos says.
“Am I wrong?"
“I don't know what you are."
" Let me ask you something," Schreck says, "what would you do with Nathan if you found him?" Santos doesn't answer. "You know, we're a lot alike, Errol. You don't want to admit it, but then again, that always was your problem."
"I don't think so. I'm not like you."
"We are, more than you know."
Santos turns to Claire. "They've set us up. They've set us all up."
Claire, hesitating, stands terrified of moving, as though having reached the edge of an unexpected clearing. She was meant to be here; all these years, all the thousands of days, have led her here. And pointing to the open door of the house, like a road sign, is the feeling, Escape. But another feeling points the other way, back to Nathan, and to Errol and Schreck and Ruth and Milton Stein and a too clean end to something she hadn't known had been begun. She sees clearly where she stands, the two options, the two paths diverging-strange how brilliantly the image comes to her-like the arms of a man being pinned to a cross.
Ruth has withdrawn into the shadows of the adjoining room. Schreck, squatting behind the stereo cabinet to gather wires, calls offhandedly, "Try the beach. Nathan always liked to take Baron to the beach."
Santos is gone before Claire can reach him. At the doorway she catches sight of him zigzagging down the hill, arms flailing. Running Out, calling to him, she feels her footing give way, and slipping, she tries to regain her balance but pitches forward into the snow. Trembling, trying to rise, to turn for the beach, in a brilliant flash of lightning she spots a shadow streaking through the surrounding forest. "Nathan!" she cries, but she can hear it, and it is not Nathan. Something is approaching with a noise that is not the snow or the wind. It is an animal of some sort. She cups her hands over her ears, but her hands, like conch shells, only amplify the half-human panicked whinny of the thunder. The rhythmic thrumping, galloping, it has to have hooves. She scrambles on all fours to get to her feet. Get back. Get away.
"I knew you'd be back. I kept your card."
Breathing hard, Nathan looks back over his shoulder. The drive from East Hampton was fast, an hour and a quarter, the roads mysteriously clear. In spite of the miles out there and back, though, the red sedan ferrying his little friends has pulled up calmly behind him. Generously, though, they stay seated as he slips out and jogs across the street through the flimsy door.
"What a shitty night," the girl says after a volley of thunder. She fingers his damp lapel.
But behind him, miraculously, the black night has turned to a fall day, that crisp molten football sky. He glances over his shoulder at a family strolling past: the mother laughing, opening an umbrella above her head, mocking the bright sunshine, the father off to the side smiling proudly, offering his hands to the two pretty little children who circle his legs, grabbing at their fingers as they skip past as on a carousel. One child, a beautiful little girl with a bow in her hair, turns a series of cartwheels over the pavement. All of them are laughing. Nathan hates the sight of them and they obediently go away, thank god, whisked away and the daylight too-
"I bet you live nice. Manhattan, right?" the girl says.
Nathan can see only her thin legs as she leads him up the creaking stairs, dangling his own pathetic and empty lust up through the narrow stairwell and past the flooded bathroom, the corridor that seems to grow smaller and smaller, darker and darker, past a closed door out of which leaks a sinister cackle.
"Why don't we go back to your place? You can have it all night for a hundred- Hey, you don't look so good."
He can stop it. He won't stop it. They're all down there whoever they are, his people, their people, they all want him-so it is once again him up here in the armpit damp where he knows he belongs. The girl turns her head, moving not in fluid motion but in a broken chain of flinches, as though everything has hit her, and everything will hit her again. He runs his hands over her arms, right over the bruises, stopping on her girlish breasts, her sour pungency, some lingering soap scent drenched with perspiration.