"She didn't say anything?" Louie went on. "She seemed okay?"
"She seemed," her mother began, "she seemed like Angelina. It was right after the evening we were all together, Louie. You saw her same as me. How'd she seem to you?"
"To me?" he murmured. But he could not put into words how Angelina seemed to him. "I guess she seemed fine."
There was a helpless pause.
"Look," he resumed, "if she comes home, if you hear from her, will you call me, please, Maria? I really wanna know."
She said fine, she would. They hung up. Louie poured himself a few more sips of coffee, stared out his Bronx window at the next building's mystic pattern of shades pulled up and shades pulled down. He went to the bedroom, looked in on his sleeping wife. A lousy cook, a grouchy and critical companion, he yet doted on her, when she let him; he stole a moment of a lover's secret joy, seeing her head half off the pillow, faded lipstick still visible beyond the natural outline of her slightly parted lips. Then he went downstairs, started his car, got on the highway and headed for the plumbing store in East Harlem.
He turned the radio on, but he could not get Angelina off his mind.
How did she seem? She seemed like a dear sweet kid with something missing, or maybe she was just still waiting for her life to begin, her youth leaking away as she moonily listened for the starter's gun that everybody else had heard a long time before. She seemed like one of those polite untested children who stayed too long in the nest, getting softer, odder, nerve eroding day by day until the normal fright of flying off became an overwhelming terror.
Except that now she had flown off, thought Louie. Either that, or something unthinkable had happened.
Why had she flown off? he wondered. Why now? Where to? He drove; he thought; he was oblivious to the people who cut around him and gave him dirty looks for going slow.
He tried to recollect the other evening at his brother Paul's. In all, it had been for him a painful evening, but for the sake of his niece he tried to reconstruct it. They'd had drinks; they'd eaten. Thanks to Angelina's quiet intercession with her father, he'd gotten to show his video. He recalled the faces of his relatives—uninterested, impatient, condescending. Among them, one wide-eyed and attentive face, one person who asked questions, who seemed to share his fascination with this place that was different and loose and new.
A horn honked; Louie slid over a lane.
Then there was the weird intensity of the way she'd said goodbye. Thank you, Uncle Louie, thank you. She'd said it twice, her eyes a little glassy, her voice a little breathless, like he'd given her some wildly extravagant and unexpected gift. When she hugged him, it was not a normal good-night hug, it was the kind of hug you give someone at a wedding or a funeral, a hug that marks, and eases someone through, a passage.
Louie drove. Ahead, Manhattan poked up at the sky, cloud shadows put gloom on unlucky buildings, left misty sunshine on others. A hunch was growing in him, simmering: Angelina was a kindred spirit after all, was seduced by the Keys as he had been seduced, but she was nuttier and younger and therefore readier to act.
His meekness tried not to notice the hunch; his unconfident mind shushed what his heart was making bold to whisper. He didn't know where his niece had gone, he told himself; he didn't know, and in any case it was not his place to track her down.
But she had always been his favorite.
He drove. Above the cluttered, crumbling roadway hung a huge sign that offered monumental choices in the form of big white arrows. To the left, New England. Manhattan, straight ahead. To the right, the George Washington Bridge, New Jersey, and points south.
Louie's car was in the center lane and he had no intention of turning the steering wheel; he held his long-accustomed course. But then the steering wheel seemed to turn itself, he could swear he didn't do it, but was only carried helplessly past dashed lines and honking commuters by some freakish whim of rods and gears and tires.
His heart thumped as the runaway vehicle wound around the cloverleaf that put him on a strange new road that was not the highway he took to work each day. His balding head was burning, not from sunburn now but inside, as he veered from home and habit, as the bridge stanchions loomed up in the distance, high above the old brick buildings of the Bronx.
Then he was crossing the river, making the leap from the skyline to the Palisades. Vertiginous and giddy, he let himself imagine that he would find his niece, rescue her, and call up Paulie, call up everybody, with the epic news. Imagining that, his eyes smarting, he remembered an archaic fantasy, a fantasy so old and unweeded and unwatered that until that moment he was sure that it had died. The fantasy was that there would come a time when he would be a hero to his brothers, when he, Louie, would show himself as brave and wise, would be the one who saved the day.