Big City Eyes

Big City Eyes
Delia Ephron

Second novel by the author of HANGING UP about a woman’s attempt to deal with passion, guilt, murder and motherhood when she moves herself and her teenage son out of Manhattan to what she assumes will be a safer life on Long Island.In a state of near panic because of the night-time activities of her teenage son Sam, Lily Davis decides to uproot him and herself from Manhattan to a small town on the coast of Long Island. She becomes a reporter for the weekly paper, Sam enrolls in high school, and for a while life proceeds as expected. But then through unexpected and unnerving circumstances, with a cop, in a house where she’s not supposed to be, Lily spies a naked woman asleep on a bed. This is a murder. Or is it? And the cop is married, and Lily is guilt-ridden about her own divorce. Friendship and love relationships unravel or threaten to. But are people and events really as they seem, or is Lily just perceiving her small town through big city eyes?

FOR

JERRY,

WITH

LOVE

CONTENTS

Cover (#ua7333928-1FFF-11e9-bcb1-0cc47a5203ba)

Titlepage (#ua7333928-2FFF-11e9-bcb1-0cc47a5203ba)

Dedication (#)

Chapter 1 (#)

Chapter 2 (#)

Chapter 3 (#)

Chapter 4 (#)

Chapter 5 (#)

Chapter 6 (#)

Chapter 7 (#)

Chapter 8 (#)

Chapter 9 (#)

Chapter 10 (#)

Chapter 11 (#)

Chapter 12 (#)

Chapter 13 (#)

Chapter 14 (#)

Chapter 15 (#)

Chapter 16 (#)

Chapter 17 (#)

Chapter 18 (#)

Chapter 19 (#)

Acknowledgments (#)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#)

Also by the Author (#)

Copyright (#)

About the Publisher (#)

CHAPTER 1 (#)

I MOVED to Sakonnet Bay to save Sam. I woke up with the idea. It had been one of those problem-solving nights. Having fallen asleep in a state of intense distress, I awakened with the notion that if I uprooted my life for three years, I could avert disaster.

I’m a journalist, a small-time, freelance magazine writer, and there is no telephone number I can’t wheedle out of someone, no tidbit I can’t unearth. If the front door is locked, I know how to sneak in the back. Now I would simply apply my creative doggedness to the problem of keeping my teenage son safe.

Once I made this decision, I rented a car and drove out of Manhattan. I felt virtuous, even noble. I turned on the radio and was able to listen. For the first time in weeks my mind was at rest, which is to say lying in wait for the moment when it could become agitated once again. Agitation is normal for me, calm is unexpected. I veer toward agitation, list naturally in its direction. Taking action, almost any action, calms me, regardless of whether or not it is the correct action. I assume this is true for everyone, a small measure of peace secured when one goes from worrying a thing to death to doing something about it.

I felt noble and virtuous because I love Manhattan, and even before finding my new town, I had committed to giving up New York. To sacrifice. For a time. I had moved there originally from Los Angeles to attend Barnard College. I don’t remember my first sighting of a New York City street, or my first glimpse of its magical skyline, but I fell deeply in love. Every single time I left my dorm, later my apartment, and walked outside, I felt a rush: I live here. I get to live in this amazing place. It’s very strange when a city can do more for you than a husband or a lover, but for me, that was always the case.

I drove 495 east, then cut south and prowled the Long Island coast, trusting that someplace would strike me as the solution. On one of those roads that jumped to fifty mph between towns and then abruptly announced thirty mph as it became a main street, I found myself in Sakonnet Bay. It felt like Brigadoon, a village that came to life for only one day every hundred years, so perfectly was it a dream come true.

Sam needed order and this town was orderly. Main Street, which formed a T with the only other commercial stretch, Barton Road, was lined with charming nineteenth-century buildings of clapboard construction—a visually comforting style, each narrow strip of wood tucked obediently under another, everything painted in refined grays, whites, and blues. Awnings shaded display windows, giving shops a proper, well-mannered look. There were no chain stores, no outlets that felt transient or common.

In my present condition, I was willing to leap to many conclusions to believe this move was right. Still, Sakonnet Bay’s harmonious façade appeared to be a statement not just about its architecture but about its inhabitants. I had read Sherwood Anderson, knew that odd behavior could fester beneath the surface of small-town life, but that did not seem relevant. “Pretty” was the word for this sweet place. It was immensely pleasing and at the same time innocuous. This town could not possibly attract or foster trouble.

I stopped at a real estate office and in one afternoon located a house to rent and a future best friend. In my mind, meeting Jane Atkins, my realtor, elevated the discovery of Sakonnet Bay from luck to destiny. The first person I met was simpatica. A former New Yorker, sharp and witty. I would not be lonely.

Jane toured me through town to see the sights that would make a New Yorker happy: the perfect food—doughnuts (plain and powdered-sugar), deep-fried and flipped automatically for everyone to see on the old-fashioned doughnut machine in the window of LePater’s Grocery; a produce stand featuring local goods, which reassured me that Sakonnet Bay was country, not suburbs; and the bookstore, selling new and used—this was no intellectual wasteland—owned by an ancient sparrow of a woman, as quaint as the doughnut machine, whose thinning white hair was twisted into a tiny knot.

White hair. In one day, I noticed more than I had seen in a year in Manhattan. And permanents. Curls all over heads, turning older women into lambs. Fashions dating back in time. No, that’s not quite accurate. No sense of fashion. A sort of immutability in women’s looks. But not Jane’s. While her approaching middle age might be visible in a certain widening about the waist, her hair remained a flashy honey yellow, a color that could be created only artificially. Hair dye alone identified her as a transplant.

In Sakonnet Bay, people aged and looked it. I had auburn hair and there was no way I was going to let nature take its course. At this time of my life, age thirty-seven, the only thing I had to do about gray hair was extract one strand at a time, but I already had plans to eradicate one irritating vertical crease between my eyebrows. I’d read in Elle about this magical remedy, Botox. A little shot of botulism. No beau of mine would ever boast, Lily doesn’t wear a lick of makeup. But many women here didn’t wear a lick, and I found it cozy. Sam and I were moving into a village of grandmas.

After we walked the business district, Jane took me on a ride through the pricey area. “The ocean-side of Maine,” she called it. An elegant landscape of groomed gardens and sprawling houses, but deserted, lifeless. It was late April, a month before the weekenders and summer residents from Manhattan would begin their occupation. Then we went north into my future neighborhood.

Here locals lived on tree-lined streets in two-story shingled dwellings on identical quarter-acre lots. The houses appeared to have been built at the same time, because they resembled one another like members of a large extended family. Jane said they dated from between 1875 and 1920. Each had a bit of personality—a path bordered in whitewashed rocks, dormer windows edged with gingerbread—but only personality, not eccentricity, and that was further confirmation of solidity, of a world that fads passed by.

I wrote about our move for Ladies’ Home Journal, in a cheerful upbeat piece, which was what the magazine always wanted. I described my going-away party at a SoHo bar, claiming that my friends had sworn to visit. They did promise—that was true—and we all kissed and cried; but they were like me, diehard Manhattanites. To leave the city, unless it was to go someplace thrilling like Paris, they would have to be towed. I said that the traffic, crowds, and noise were driving Sam and me away. In fact, I thrived on chaos. It was unlikely we’d be back, I insisted, neglecting to mention that we’d sublet our rent-stabilized apartment month to month, to a writer friend who needed an office. I also enthused about how glorious it would be to see stars at night, when actually a grand sparkling night sky would turn out to be intimidating. Fodder for my overactive fearful imagination. Until I moved to a quiet place, I didn’t understand how fears and fantasies could expand to take up all available space. So in this article, I was as inaccurate in projecting my tranquil future as in describing my troubled present. I omitted that my fifteen-year-old son was sneaking out to Manhattan clubs. Several times I’d caught him returning at four in the morning. And I certainly didn’t mention the incident that had triggered my panic and subsequent break with the city: I had found a knife in Sam’s underwear drawer. A steak knife, imitation-wood handle and blade with serrated edge. I’d been hunting for drugs, been prepared to uncover a baggie full of grass, when I discovered the knife instead.