Nightwatcher (13 page)

She’s so different from Carrie, who always spent so much of her time at home sitting, very still, lost in thought.

When they first met, that made Mack uncomfortable. He’d struggle to think of things to say, trying to draw her out. Sometimes he was rewarded; most of the time, he was not.

Eventually, he learned to just let her be, but he never stopped wishing there was a way to make his wife more . . . less . . .

Hell, he doesn’t even know
what
he ever wanted from Carrie.

But yesterday morning, when he was lying there pretending to be asleep, and she was getting ready to leave for work, he realized what he
didn’t
want.

He didn’t want to talk her into becoming the mother of his child. Even if he could get her to change her mind about what she’d said . . .

It wouldn’t be right.

She was not equipped—not at this stage in her life, anyway—to devote herself wholly to another human being. Not Mack himself, and not a baby.

Every child deserves a mother who will provide unconditional love and nurturing. He won’t provide his own child with anything less.

“Why don’t you just put your feet up and lean back for a while?”

Allison’s voice drags Mack’s thoughts away from Carrie.

He’s grateful for that. He doesn’t want to keep remembering what happened with his wife yesterday morning.

Allison turns off the television. “I’m sorry, but . . . I can’t watch any more of this. They’re not saying anything new right now, and they keep showing . . .”

“I know.” He shrugs. “I feel immune to it now.”

They both fall silent.

“Do you hear that?” Allison asks after a moment.

“Hear what?”

“The music coming from upstairs. I forgot about it, but now that the TV is off, I can hear it again.”

He listens and nods, hearing faint strains of an Alicia Keys ballad.

Allison frowns. “I hope she’s okay—Kristina, I mean.”

“I hope so t— Wait a minute. She told me about a million times that she doesn’t even have a CD player.”

“She told me the same thing.”

“Why would she say that if it wasn’t true?”

“Who knows? Maybe she’s a compulsive liar.”

“Or maybe the music is coming from the television.”

“Same song over and over?”

“Okay, maybe she went out and bought herself a CD player,” Mack says reasonably, and sets the sandwich plate on the coffee table between a stack of fashion magazines and a stack of flyers.

He can’t bear to look at Carrie’s face staring up at him from beneath the word “MISSING.” He turns his head to avoid it and finds himself locking gazes with Allison.

“I’ll go put those up,” she tells him. “You can go lie down, or just stay here if you don’t want to be . . . you know, there.”

“You don’t have to put them up,” he says, “and I don’t mind being . . . there.”

But the truth is, he does. He doesn’t want to be home, alone, thinking about what happened to Carrie.

It’s strange to be here though, too, isn’t it? Just sitting here in unfamiliar surroundings on a weekday afternoon with this barefoot blonde who popped up out of nowhere, offering to help . . .

He’d chatted with Allison in passing around the building. She was hard to miss, with her striking looks and lanky build made taller by the high-heeled shoes she was always wearing.

Only the other night, though, when he was sitting outside and she stepped out of that cab, did they have a real conversation. He can’t even remember much of what they talked about, but he knows he connected with her on some level.

Oh hell. Maybe he was flirting. He’d had a drink—two—and he was pissed at his wife, and—

And let’s face it, Allison is beautiful.

But of course he wasn’t going to do anything about that.

He still isn’t. He’s just here because . . .

“Any port in a storm.”

He looks at Allison in surprise, wondering if she somehow read his mind. “What?”

“Haven’t you ever heard that saying? Any port in a storm,” she repeats. “It means when you’re in real trouble, you accept the help you’re given, even if it’s not what you’d have chosen.”

He finds himself smiling faintly. “So are you the port? Or is your couch the port?”

“The couch is the port for you right now. Go ahead, lie down and rest for a while.”

Carrie wouldn’t have liked this
, he finds himself thinking. She always felt threatened by other women, though he’d never given her reason to think he might stray.

He wouldn’t. Of course not. But sometimes, when he looks at other women, talks to other women, he wonders what his life might be like had he made a different choice.

Kristina Haines—with her dark curls and brash personality—reminds him of his college girlfriend, Sheryl. Whenever he’s talking to Kristina—which is quite often, because he’s always running into her around the building and she’s quite the sparkling conversationalist—he thinks about Sheryl, wondering about the road not taken.

Now, with Allison, Mack finds himself doing the same thing, God help him.
Carrie’s
the one he should be focused on right now. After what happened . . .

What kind of man am I? How am I ever going to live with myself?

Allison picks up the sheaf of flyers from the table. “I’m going to go put some bandages on my blisters, find some comfortable shoes, and go out and take care of these.” If Carrie were here, she’d be sizing up Allison, wondering why she’s being so nice.

But if Carrie were here . . .

Then I wouldn’t be.

No, Mack wouldn’t be here with Allison, letting her feed him and help him.

He keeps protesting, but the truth is, he needs her. Well, he needs someone—and right now, she’s the only one around. It’s that simple.

O
ut on the street, carrying the flyers and a roll of masking tape, Allison takes a deep breath.

Her lungs fill with putrid air; air that reeks of smoke and metallic industrial fumes laced with the stench of burning rubber—like a spatula that’s melted against the dishwasher’s heating coil—and, perhaps, with burning flesh.

She doesn’t know what that smells like. But all those people who died yesterday disappeared into thin air . . . this air. The air Allison is breathing.

Trying to shut out macabre thoughts about microscopic particles that might be invading her lungs, she begins walking down the deserted block. There are parked cars along the curb, but there’s no traffic; there are no pedestrians; there is no distant rumbling of a subway train passing underground.

In the distance, she can hear sirens, and it occurs to her that they might have nothing to do with what happened yesterday. It’s too late for that. But the world is still turning; people are out there living and dying the way they always have been.

But maybe Allison was wrong yesterday. Maybe the optimistic young woman who had just spent a magical evening at an opulent fashion designer party is gone forever. She didn’t burn alive in the jet fuel fireball or disintegrate in the mountain of debris when the towers collapsed, but like all the other lost souls—
hundreds? thousands?
—Allison Taylor, the Allison she used to be, did not survive the attacks.

Nor did New York itself—
her
New York, a glittering playground for beautiful people. It’s as if the city—
her
city—has been transformed into the dust-layered, debris-strewn landscape of a distant planet, populated by wide-eyed, shell-shocked mortals.

She sees more and more of them as she walks a couple of blocks over to Broadway and turns north. People are out on the streets, but they aren’t in a perpetual hurry, as New Yorkers tend to be. They’re wandering, loitering, standing, staring.

Staring at the smoke still rising from lower Manhattan; staring into the pages of the
New York Post
, with its black headline that reads
ACT OF WAR
; staring at the faces that gaze out from a litter of missing flyers like the one Allison is holding.

They’re everywhere, the fliers. Hanging on buildings and poles and the blue plywood walls that shield construction sites. Hanging, some laminated and some not, around the necks of people themselves, like miniature sandwich boards.

Allison walks over to a shuttered deli whose fluted gray metal security gate is papered in flyers. She tapes Carrie’s among them, then steps back to look at the tragic patchwork of names and faces.

Hearing a sob beside her, she turns to see a middle-aged Hispanic woman struggling to reach an empty spot high on the gate. In her hand is a homemade poster with a grainy photo of a smiling young man. It’s written entirely in Spanish, but Allison took enough Spanish in school to recognize a couple of the words.

Mi hijo querido.

My dear son.

“Here,” Allison says gently, “let me help you.”

The woman looks up, her face etched in sorrow and bewilderment.

Allison gestures, and the woman, registering grateful comprehension, hands over the poster.

Standing on her tiptoes, Allison tapes it high on the gate, between a photo of a tanned, smiling twenty-odd-year-old woman grinning and brandishing a margarita, and a close-up of a proud new daddy gazing down at a swaddled newborn.

So many lives shattered, so many people gone forever.

“
Gracias
,” the crying woman tells Allison.

“
Lo siento
.”

I’m sorry.

With a heavy heart, she starts to turn away from the wall—then turns back, having just caught a jarring glimpse of a familiar face in one of the posters.

It takes her a few moments to locate it again—a wedding portrait: glowing bride, grinning groom. He’s the one Allison vaguely recognizes, but she doesn’t place him until she reads the print below the photo:

William A. Kenyon, employed by Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods, last seen on 88th floor of South Tower. If you have any information at all please call wife Stephanie at 718–555–2171.

Wife Stephanie.

Nausea churns Allison’s stomach.

Why don’t you give me a call and we’ll go out sometime?
he’d asked that night in the cab.

She’d been pretty sure he wasn’t her own Mr. Right—but it didn’t occur to her that he might already be someone else’s.

She looks again at the wedding photo, rereads the text below it.
If you have any information at all
 
. . .

For a brief, crazy moment, Allison considers calling Stephanie. She wouldn’t tell her the whole truth . . .

No, she’d just say that Stephanie’s husband had done a good deed and given her a ride downtown on what will most likely turn out to have been his last night on earth. She’d paint him as a Good Samaritan who took pity on a perfect stranger . . .

But maybe Stephanie wouldn’t see it that way. Maybe she’d see it for what it really was—a married man bending over backward for a blonde in a short skirt.

Call me . . . Maybe I’ll let you buy me a drink.

Rest in peace, Bill
, she thinks, turning away from the poster and Stephanie’s phone number.
Your wife has enough pain to deal with. I hope she never finds out what kind of man she really married.

She rounds the corner and is startled to see that the people who are out on the sidewalks are all standing still, facing south toward the World Trade Center wreckage. Turning to look in that direction, she sees the red flashing lights of a police motorcycle escort coming up the avenue. It’s moving slowly, in somber silence, leading a large truck—a refrigerated sixteen-wheeler.

“Bodies,” she hears a bystander murmur, as others sob audibly and someone speculates that the truck is heading to the morgue.

Shaken, Allison watches it pass.

Then she goes back to traveling the bleak streets of this war-torn foreign city, putting up posters on every available surface, fitting them in like puzzle pieces among the others.

MISSING . . . HUSBAND . . . WIFE . . . FATHER . . . MOTHER . . . SON . . . DAUGHTER . . . BROTHER . . . SISTER . . .

So many lives shattered, Allison thinks again, so many people gone forever.

Yesterday, she was so sure she didn’t know any of them personally.

Today, she found out that she did—to varying degrees.

William Kenyon.

Carrie Robinson MacKenna.

What about Kristina Haines? Where is she?

If she still isn’t answering the phone or the door by the time I get back home
, Allison decides,
I’m going to use her key and let myself in.

Chapter Six

“A
re you
sure
you don’t want me to come?” Lynn asks, and Mack clenches the cell phone hard against his ear, frustrated.

Lynn doesn’t really want to be here, in the city. He knows it, and so does she. But her guilt—big sister guilt, Catholic guilt—forces her to keep telling him she’ll be glad to get into her Volvo wagon and drive into the city to be with him in his time of need.

“I’m positive,” he tells his sister yet again as he gets off the couch—Allison’s couch.

He’d taken his shoes off and put his feet up, as she’d suggested before she left, but he hadn’t planned on actually falling asleep here. The next thing he knew, his ringing cell phone woke him.

“You shouldn’t be alone, Mack.”

“I’m fine. Listen, you’ve got the kids to take care of. You don’t need—”

“Dan would come over and stay with them,” she cuts in. “He’s not working today. All of his patients canceled their appointments. ”

“
All
of them?”

“Do you know how many people are missing from there, Mack?”

There
, of course, is Middletown, New Jersey, where Mack’s former brother-in-law is a dentist.

And no, he doesn’t know how many people are missing from that particular place, but before he can reply, his sister murmurs, “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For even bringing that up. Right now, I know, the only missing person who counts is Carrie.”