“Maybe. Everything after that, though. We were in the business of catching girls who escaped and getting them out. Willa’s parents were on St. Maarten, so we settled on an island close by, where we could hide money and identities. There were bumps. We fight. She can be a fucking bitch, but we’re close. Not husband and wife. We understand each other.”
“You’ve both been living in the same world,” I say. “Under the same laws. Where these scars don’t mean anything. The only reason you learned what they’d mean to me is so you could hurt my family.”
Maybe he’s lying to me. Maybe he’s lying to himself. Maybe he’s expressing a disappointing truth. None of it matters. I want to be his as much as I want to be free, and I don’t know how both can be true.
“You’re crazy not to.”
“Listen to me.” He whispers so softly I have no choice but to listen. “I’m trying to tell you I don’t love her. You have to believe me.”
“No,” I say in the same low whisper, then raise my voice just enough to speak firmly. “I don’t have to believe you. You’re not my husband. You lied to me. I don’t want to want you, but I do. I accept that. I’m not who I was, and I’ll never be again. I was innocent before you came, and I can’t ever have that back. Those rules about obeying you and serving you… those are gone because you broke them. Whatever way I am now, you made me.”
He digs my left hand from under my right and presses on the tender line at the base of my middle finger. “These scars, they’re forever. They’re not meaningless to me. Blood was drawn. Our names are cut into each other’s bodies.”
“Sweet words.” I let him caress my hand, but not responding in kind. There’s no lying left in me. I’m not obfuscating to protect myself from him anymore.
“I don’t expect you to trust me, but you need to.” He looks at me when he says it, and since we’re at a dead stop, he can hold my gaze. “We’re at war. We’re being hunted. I can’t let them find you, and when you run, you turn your back. Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”
I turn away to look out the front. “You want to face them.”
Them.
Sonny was a them and now his throat is opened up into a bloody smile. I have very few memories of him. He was just there. He said hello and asked me if I was having a good day. He drove me places sometimes. I can’t even remember where I went.
“I have to.” He puts my hand in his lap. “But if you trust me, I can show you… teach you the things you need to know.” In the stopped traffic, he faces me again. “I can fight knowing you can live without me.”
“What do you mean, ‘live without you’?”
“War is a risky business. People die. Husbands leave wives behind.”
Arguing about whether or not we’re married seems beside the point. He’s talking about murdering and getting murdered.
“I don’t want that.”
“Let me worry about it then. You just get to learning.”
“I don’t want to learn how to kill someone the way you did.”
The traffic opens up, and he speeds ahead. He’s concentrating. Pensive. One hand rests on the bottom of the wheel, the other on my thigh.
The last time I rode in the front seat was the first time. Armistice Night. I didn’t even appreciate it at the time, but now I like being able to know what’s in front of me.
“I’m sorry you had to see that.” He changes lanes.
“You didn’t have to do it. We could have just run.”
“They need to know I’ll kill for you.”
“I won’t kill for you, Dario, so don’t teach me how.”
There’s an island in the river, between us and Queens. It flicks by at a constantly shifting angle.
Am I a liar? Would I kill for him? Will I ever find out?
The sounds of the world are shut out. Even the engine and the tires under us are muffled. We pass two women jogging abreast in the fog, ponytails swinging. They’re a flash in my sight, then they’re gone.
“What do you want most in the world, Sarah? Not a thing. Any object you want, I’ll get you. That’s a given. Tell me what you want to do. Where you want to go. Who you want to be.”
“No one’s ever asked me that before.”
“I’m asking, and I know you can’t answer.” He slides his hand over mine. “Not yet. But you will when I’m through with you. I’ll teach you everything.”
“But will you?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because then I can leave you.”
“I will.” He slides his hand from mine and drapes it over the steering wheel. “And you won’t. But if I ever leave you, you’ll know how to decide what to do and who to be. You’ll be strong enough to save yourself when I can’t.”
He’s not threatening to leave me. He’s not threatening anything. He’s sharing his reality in all it’s brevity and intensity.
I don’t want him to die, or leave, or break himself off from my love, ever. I squeeze my eyes shut as if that will keep out the pain of the separations I imagine. He didn’t have to touch me to brush away my anger. It wasn’t his dominance or the contrast of his more soothing charms.
He’s placated me with the promise of an education.
CHAPTER 7
SARAH
We leave the waterfront and drive inland. The feeling of being stopped in time wears off with the needs of my body. I’m thirsty and I have to pee. He won’t stop for food or a bathroom break or anything until we’re “out of NYSD jurisdiction.”
I don’t know what that means, but it seems important. I can hold it.
Without being reminded of my increasingly urgent situation, Dario gets off the highway, makes a few turns into a neighborhood that’s quieter and grassier than the one we left, and pulls into a strip mall.
“Stay close.” He puts the car into park. “We’re not safe yet.”
He walks around to my side, eyes everywhere in a heightened state of alertness, waving to an old guy sitting at one of the little tables outside Tommy’s Pizzeria, then he opens my door to help me out.
“You hungry?” Dario checks over his shoulder when a car creeps up behind us.
“I could eat.”
“Good,” he says before greeting the man at the table, who’s stood up. “Tommy!”
They shake hands and fold each other into a back-slapping hug.
“Dario, it’s been too long.”
Tommy is in his fifties with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, a ruddy, clean-shaven face, and thick, gray eyebrows.
“Been busy.” Dario takes my hand, pauses with his eyes on our hands. Maybe it’s the scars, or the snowflake ring, but he takes a moment before turning back to Tommy. “This is my wife, Sarah.”
He and I can argue about the technical truth of that statement, but not about my immediate reaction. My heart doesn’t resist it, nor does my mind shout out against it. Willa or no, for now, I am his wife or something close enough to it. I am comforted. I am accepted.