Ransom

“You take care of it,” Peter said, sounding worried. He told him about the house then, and Waters agreed with him. It sounded perfect. They were all set now. All they needed to do was pick a date in July. And go for it. It all seemed so simple, but as soon as Peter hung up, he had the now familiar pain in his stomach. He was beginning to think it was his conscience. Following her around from ballet to baseball games was one thing. Taking her children away from her, using machine guns, and demanding a hundred million dollars ransom for them was another. And Peter knew the difference.

Chapter 11

In the first week of June, on the last day of school, Fernanda had her hands full. Ashley and Sam both had performances at school. She had to help them get all their art projects and books home afterward. Will had a playoff game for his baseball team, and later that night he had a lacrosse game, which she had to miss, in order to attend Ashley's ballet recital. She felt like a rat in a laboratory, running all day, to get from one child to the other. And as usual, there was no one to help her. Not that Allan would have, if he were still alive. But until January, she had had a nanny to help her cover the bases. Now there was no one. She had no family, had lost touch with even her closest friends for a variety of reasons, and realized now how totally dependent she had been on Allan. With him gone, all she had left now were her children. And their circumstances were too awkward for her to want to contact their old friends again. She might as well have been living on a desert island with her children. She felt completely isolated.

Peter had spoken to her twice by then, once in the supermarket on the first day, and another time in a bookshop, when she glanced up at him and smiled, and thought he looked vaguely familiar. She had dropped some of the books she was carrying, and with an easy smile, he handed them to her. After that, he had stood watching her from the distance. He sat in the bleachers at one of Will's games in the Presidio once, but he was behind her, and she never saw him. He never took his eyes off her.

He noticed that she had stopped crying at the bedroom window. He saw her standing there sometimes, looking out at the street vacantly, as though she were waiting for someone. It was like looking straight into her soul, when he saw her there at night. It was almost as though he knew what she was thinking. She was almost certainly dreaming of Allan. Peter thought he'd been a lucky guy to have a wife like her, and wondered if he knew it. Sometimes people didn't. But Peter appreciated every gesture she made, every time she picked up her kids, and every time she hugged them. She was exactly the kind of mother he would have wanted, instead of the one he'd had, who had been an alcoholic nightmare, and had eventually left him unloved, unwanted, and abandoned. Even the stepfather she'd left him with had ultimately left him stranded. But there was nothing abandoned or unloved about Fernanda's children.

Peter was almost jealous of them. And all he could think of when he saw her at night was how much he would have loved to put his arms around her, and console her, and he knew he could never do it. He was confined to watching her, and condemned to cause her more grief and pain, by a man who had threatened to kill Peter's children. The irony of it was exquisite. In order to save his own children, he had to risk hers, and torture a woman he had come to admire, and who aroused a flood of powerful emotions in him, some of which confused him, and all of which were bittersweet. He had a sense of longing every time he saw her.

He followed her to Ashley's recital that night, and stopped behind her at the florist where she had ordered a bouquet of long-stemmed pink roses. She had bought one for the ballet teacher as well, and emerged carrying both of them. Ashley was already at the ballet school. And Sam was at Will's game, with the mother of one of Will's friends, who also had a son Sam's age and had volunteered to take him. He had announced that afternoon that ballet was for sissies. And Peter realized, as he watched them leave, that if Waters and the others had been planning to hit that night, they could have gotten both boys, if not Ashley.