Free Moving Day: A Thriller by Jonathan Stone Page A

to begin again.
    Peke. From Pecoskowitz. Not everything is what it seems, after all. The big, white, sparkling moving van. The crisp uniforms.
    The American-sounding name. A bent-over, harmless old man.
    No, not everything is what it seems.

    Rose Peke is mesmerized by the occasional blink of the light on the device that Peke has set between the seats. It is as blindly mesmerizing as her husband in sum has proved to be. Just as steady, yet just as oblique. As obvious as it is mysterious. As charming as it is twinkling on its surface. Its hardwiring, its purpose, less ascertainable, less knowable. He is like that blink of light. Charming but formal. Modest but insistent. Simple but transfixing. And like him, it leaves little choice, it seems, but to follow.
    And she has followed him as blindly, as trustingly, as he is following the blinking light. Because he is like a beacon, a lighthouse, against the wild shoals of her emotions, her longings, her ambitions.
    Nowadays, of course, it’s unfashionable, incorrect, to follow a man like that. Back then, it was considered virtuous, and today itis considered weak. But even then, even in that world of half a century ago that largely accepted it, her sophisticated friends, her cultured parents, her colleagues at the architecture magazine were surprised. So independent a woman. With so independent a spirit. How could she?
    No one understood that it was a choice. Eyes wide open. Because her fierce independence, the independence that she prided herself on, seemed to be nothing, withered and pale, compared with his. In truth, she has found that she does not need a full accounting of his life. Of what has happened to him. It is obvious from his capacities. From his resolve. She has gone along with his life, partly in wonder, partly to observe, to see how far his independence can go. The facts, the tragedies of his life before, he has never offered, but she has never pressed for them. And oddly—ironically—it is nevertheless
their
secret. The secret that they share. The secret that, in fact, she doesn’t know anything about, when everyone of course assumes she does.
    The secret that is still a gulf of mystery, that they have tacitly agreed to leave intact. For her to look across the canyon at him with that terrifying gulf between them. And find him—in that unknowing, in that distance—continually attractive. Alluring as the distance—as the far side of the canyon across the gulf—always is.
    “It’s a long ride. Perhaps this is the time to tell you what happened to me,” he says. A little miracle of mind reading that ceases to seem miraculous—that indeed they have each started to expect—after fifty years of marriage.
    She smiles. “You must feel pretty guilty about dragging me along. Because you feel the need to offer something substantial in return.” Her eyes narrow slightly in thought, and then their edges turn up in mild amusement. “And as of right now, that’s the only gift you can give me. The only thing you still own, isn’t it?” She looks out. “But give it when you really want to. Not when you’re offering it because you’re in a corner.”
    She smirks. He sees her expression and smirks in return. In each of their expressions is some indivisible quotient of annoyance and affection. Both of them melt slightly into smiles—thin, conspiratorial—in recognizing it.
    Of course, there was always one other thing: something not evident or explicable to her cultured parents or sophisticated friends. Something that should have been obvious to them, in their sophistication, but perhaps was not. Something so obvious to her. How he looked at her. And how she could see in that look what she meant to him. How to this survivor of unspeakable events, she was everything. How there was nothing and no one else. How despite all their possessions, their friends, their children, their lives, there seemed for him to be nothing else but her. Even after all this time, he still