The Narrows Read Online Free PDF

vibe.
    Eleanor Wish had withheld the ultimate secret from me. A daughter. On the day she finally presented Maddie to me, I thought that everything was right in the world. My world, at least. I saw my salvation in my daughter’s dark eyes, my own eyes. But what I didn’t see that day were the fissures. The cracks below the surface. And they were deep. The happiest day of my life would lead to some of the ugliest days. Days in which I could not get past the secret and what had been kept from me for so many years. Whereas in one moment I thought I had everything I could possibly want from life, I soon learned I was too weak a man to hold it, to carry the betrayal hidden in it in exchange for what I had been given.
    Other, better men could do it. I could not. I left the home of Eleanor and Maddie. My Las Vegas home is a one-room efficiency across the parking lot from the place where millionaire and billionaire gamblers park their private jets and head by whispery limos to the casinos. I have one foot in Las Vegas and one remains here in Los Angeles, a place I know I can never leave permanently, not without dying.
    After saying good night my daughter handed the phone to her mother, who was on a rare night at home. Our relationship was more strained than it had ever been. We were at odds over our daughter. I didn’t want her to grow up with a mother who worked nights in the casinos. I didn’t want her eating at Burger King for dinner. And I didn’t want her to learn about life in a city that wore its sins on its sleeve.
    But I was in no position to change things. I know that I run the risk of seeming ridiculous because I live in a place where the randomness of crime and chaos is always near and poison literally hangs in the air, but I don’t like the idea of my daughter growing up where she is. I see it as the subtle difference between hope and desire. Los Angeles is a place that operates on hope and there is still something pure about that. It helps one see through the dirty air. Vegas is different. To me it operates on desire and on that road is ultimate heartbreak. I don’t want that for my daughter. I don’t even want it for her mother. I am willing to wait, but not that long. As I spend time with my daughter and know her better and love her more, my willingness frays at the middle like a rope bridge crossing a deep chasm.
    When Maddie handed the phone back to her mother neither of us had much to say, so we didn’t. I just said I would check in with Maddie the next time I could and we hung up. I put the phone down, feeling an ache inside I was not used to. It wasn’t the ache of loneliness or emptiness. I knew those pains and had learned how to live with them. It was the pain that came with a fear for what the future holds for someone so precious, someone you would lay your own life down for without hesitation.

6

    T HE FIRST FERRY got me to Catalina at 9:30 the next morning. I had called Graciela McCaleb on my cell while I was crossing, so she was waiting for me at the pier. The day was sunny and crisp and I could taste the difference in the smogless air. Graciela smiled at me as I approached the gate where people waited for travelers from the boats.
    “Good morning. Thanks for coming.”
    “No problem. Thanks for meeting me.”
    I had half expected Buddy Lockridge to be with her. I had not seen him on the ferry and figured that maybe he had gone across the night before.
    “No Buddy yet?”
    “No. Is he coming?”
    “I wanted to go over things on the boat with him. He said he would be on the first boat but he didn’t show.”
    “Well, they’re running two ferries. The next will be here in forty-five minutes. He’s probably on that. What would you like to do first?”
    “I want to go to the boat, start there.”
    We walked over to the tenders dock and took a Zodiac with a little one-horsepower engine on it out into the basin where the yachts were lined in rows, tied up to floating mooring balls and moving