Nightwatcher (20 page)

But at Mo’s, the lights are on and the door is propped open. He prides himself on being open round the clock; he reminds his customers of that whenever he hands back their change and their bagged purchases.

“You come back anytime,” he always says in his thick Middle Eastern accent. “I am here twenty-four-seven, all the time, weekends, holidays . . . all the time.”

He means it literally. Unless he has an identical twin, Mo himself is perpetually at the cash register, ringing up cigarettes, newspapers, and lottery tickets; soda cans, coffee, toilet paper . . . like all good New York bodegas, Mo sells a little of everything.

“Don’t you ever go home to sleep?” Jamie sometimes wants to ask Mo, but never does.

Tonight, Mo utters the usual “Hello, hello,” but he glances up only briefly from the open
New York Post
on the counter in front of him.

The two small aisles of grocery are picked over—the canned goods and bottled water shelves completely bare. People must be stockpiling supplies, fearing the end of the world.

Funny—everyone thought that would happen last year, when the millennium dawned. There was a collective sigh of relief when it passed uneventfully. No one ever imagined the Armageddon that lay ahead.

Jamie plucks an Entenmann’s box from the shelf, taking it as a good omen that there’s one kind of cake left—and it happens to be Jerry’s favorite—chocolate, with chocolate frosting.

Back at the counter, Mo’s newspaper is open to a bold headline stretching across the top of both pages:
BIN LADEN’S SICK BOAST NOW REALITY
.

“That is it?” Mo asks, glancing down at the Entenmann’s cake.

“That’s it.”

Mo rings it up, takes the bills, hands back coins, puts the cake box into a slippery white plastic bag, and hands it over. “Thank you.” Tonight, that’s all Mo says before he goes back to reading his paper, his round black eyes fretful behind his wire-rimmed glasses.

Out on the street, Jamie backtracks to the apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.

Funny how some parts of the city are teeming with security, and others are completely deserted. Even where there is security, the soldiers and cops don’t always bother to ask for ID. If you don’t look like their idea of a Muslim terrorist, you can pretty much skirt the barricades.

Don’t they know you should never judge a book by a cover?

Stupid. They’re so stupid. They think they know everything, and they don’t know anything at all.

Jamie walks past Ladder 21, the neighborhood firehouse, with its growing shrine of flickering candles and flowers in memory of its many missing men. Jamie used to see them, laughing and joking around beyond the wide open doors, or clinging to the sides of the big red trucks as they raced off to fight a fire somewhere. A fire that could be conquered, unlike the still raging inferno that swallowed the men of Ladder 21 and hundreds of others who were sent to battle it.

Sirens wail in the night even now, and a military jet roars through the sky, tracing a path along the Hudson River just a few blocks west of here.

Jamie doesn’t like it. Any of it. This day—this night—hasn’t unfolded the way it was supposed to.

Allison Taylor was supposed to be taken care of, before she could go blabbing to the police about seeing Jerry in the hall the night Kristina was murdered.

But it’s too late. Before Jamie could get to Allison, she found Kristina. There’s a certain pleasure in imagining Allison’s reaction to the meticulous, bloody handiwork left behind in Kristina’s apartment. But that pleasure doesn’t come without a price.

With a sinking heart, Jamie watched from the shadows as the police took a pale, shaken Allison away for questioning. Of course she was going to tell them she’d seen Jerry at the scene of the crime.

By now, they must know.

By now, they’ll be looking for him.

He shouldn’t be easy to find, but still . . .

“You have to stay home for a while, Jerry,” Jamie told him earlier. “You can’t go anywhere without asking me first.”

“But I have to go to work.”

“No, you don’t. Mr. Reiss called and told you not to come in for a few days, remember?”

Jerry shook his head.

“Sure, he did. He called, and you talked to him.”

“I don’t remember,” Jerry protested.

“Think about it. He told you not to come to work for a while, and then I told you I’d get you some chocolate cake. Remember?”

Jerry thought hard, then shrugged and nodded. “I guess so. Sometimes I forget things.”

“We all do, Jerry. It’s okay.”

Sometimes, it’s frightfully easy to plant “memories” in Jerry’s poor, damaged brain.

But it’s for his own good. It always is.

Poor Jerry.

Apparently, he met a woman today, made a move, and the woman turned him down. “All I did was ask her to have cake,” Jerry blubbered, “and she said no.”

Surprise, surprise.

But it’s Jamie’s job to take care of Jerry now.

You never should have left him alone ten years ago.

Why did you go? What were you thinking?

I thought it was all over for Jerry. How could I know he’d survived?

And as soon as I found my way back to him, I did what I could to make it right.

Jerry has suffered enough in his life. And now he’s hurting again.

I have to make this right, too.

“Maybe this girl is married,” Jamie told Jerry, “or—”

“She’s not married. She lives by herself. She just doesn’t like me.” Jerry let out a moan. “I don’t want to be alone anymore. No one wants to be with me. Mama’s gone and now . . .”

“But you’re not alone. You have me.”

“No—not that. I want a girlfriend. I want love.”

Who doesn’t?

We all want love.

Some people find it over and over again. Some people never find it at all.

“It’s not fair,” Jerry wails.

“No. It isn’t.”

“It hurts so much. Make it stop hurting. Make someone love me.”

“I can’t do that, Jerry. You know that.”

“Yes, you can. You said when you came that you’d make things better.”

Yes. Better for Jerry.

And better for me.

“Are you sure this woman lives by herself?”

“Yes.”

“What’s her name?”

“Marianne.”

“Last name?”

“I . . . I don’t know. I just know where she lives.”

“That’s great, Jerry. That’s perfect. Don’t you worry about a thing. You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to go out and get you that cake I promised you. I’ll take care of you, just like I promised.”

And I’ll take care of Marianne.

And then I’ll take care of Allison.

It might be too late to keep her from telling the police about Jerry . . . but it’s not too late to punish her for what she did. No, it’s never too late for that.

Jamie’s mouth curves into a smile.

“M
a—it’s me,” Marianne says into the phone.

“Who?” her mother asks, as she always does. As if any other female voice would call her Ma. As if anyone else in the world calls her every single night, at ten on the dot.

“Me! Marianne!”

“Oh—Mare-Mare.”

Oh, for the love of . . .

Marianne hates the childhood nickname, but her mother clings to it as fiercely as she clings to Marianne herself.

“I’m just making sure you’re okay, Ma. Are you getting ready for bed?”

“Not yet. I’m watching the news.”

“Still? I told you earlier, you have to turn that off. It’s only making you more nervous.”

“I like to know what’s going on.”

“Nothing is going on. It’s over. You’re safe.”

Her mother doesn’t believe that. She frets, for a few minutes, about the terrorists and what they did and what they might do next. Then she asks Marianne what she ate for dinner.

“Soup,” she lies.

“From a can?”

“It was fine, Ma.”

“If you had come here, you could have had kakavia. Homemade.”

After all these years, her mother still thinks she enjoys fisherman’s stew. Rather than point out—yet again—that it’s her brothers who like it, not her, Marianne says simply, “I couldn’t come. I’m sorry. I told you, I had the repairman here, and I couldn’t leave.”

“I know. I’ll see you tomorrow. I still have leftover lamb from when you were here Monday night.”

Of course you do.

Her mother still hasn’t learned how to cook for just one person, or two. Everything she makes would easily serve a dozen people. That’s never going to change, Marianne thinks with weary affection.

“Don’t forget to call me in the morning,” her mother says.

“Do I ever?”

“All last week—”

“Ma, I was on a ship. Out at sea. Remember? I couldn’t call.”

“But now you’re home.”

“And your phone will ring at seven-thirty. Same as always. Okay?”

“Okay. I love you, Mare-Mare. You sound tired. Get some sleep.”

“I will,” she tells her mother glumly, and hangs up the phone.

No, she won’t. She’ll be lucky if she sleeps at all, with everything that’s gone on. The terror attack . . .

The move . . .

The nut job handyman who spooked her into barricading herself into the apartment—even closing and locking all the windows despite the polyurethane fumes . . .

Rae stuck halfway across the country . . .

And God only knows when—or
if
—she’s coming back.

Marianne looks at the sunrise photo they had taken on the cruise ship just days ago—arms around each other, laughing, in love. They spent their whole vacation talking about moving in together. How could things have changed so drastically since then?

The twin towers in the background are now, more than ever, a harbinger of disaster. The whole world has changed since Sunday morning. Everything about it. Everyone in it. Even Rae.

“I really do think you should move in with me when you get back,” Marianne told her earlier on the phone, before she called her mother.

“I don’t know, Marianne,” Rae said. “I’ve been thinking . . . I’m not sure I want to come back to New York.”

“What? What do you mean? You love it here. You
moved
here! You said you’ve been dreaming of living here since you were a little girl!”

“I know, but things are going to be different now. The city is a target. It’s not safe. I’m thinking maybe I should move back home.”

“To Ashtabula?” Dumbfounded, Marianne reminded her, “You left there for a reason. You said it was too conservative, there was never anything exciting to do, your neighbors were homophobic—”

“But there aren’t any suicide bombers in Ohio, Marianne.”

“That’s ridiculous! You can’t—”

“Listen, right now, I don’t know what I want to do, okay? Except go to bed and forget about all this horribleness. And you should do the same.”

Marianne spent a futile couple more minutes trying to convince her girlfriend that New York is where she belongs; that if Rae could just come back here, she’d feel at home again.

But in her heart, she doesn’t believe that. Even she herself doesn’t feel at home here now. Life in New York is never going to be the same. But will life anywhere else in this country ever be the same?

“We’re all targets, Rae,” she pointed out. “It’s not just New York. They hate Americans. Ohio is in America, too.”

“Well, I’d feel a hell of a lot safer there than I would in New York—and so would you. Admit it.”

“No way.” Marianne isn’t giving up on New York, no matter what’s happened—or what
might
happen. Her family and friends and memories are here, she was born here, and she’s going to die here—of old age, God willing, and not at the hands of terrorists.

She climbs into bed, furious at Rae. How can she be such a coward?

Then she turns off the light, sinks back onto the pillow, and wonders . . .

How can
you
?

Just this evening, she canceled her dinner at her mother’s, afraid to leave the apartment because the handyman gave her the creeps. Not only did she upset her mother, but she now hasn’t eaten all day—there’s not a crumb of food in the apartment—and the combination of low blood sugar and varnish fumes has given her a ferocious headache.

This is crazy.

I’m
crazy.

Marianne sits up, climbs out of bed, and marches over to the bedroom window. She hesitates only a moment before unlocking the latch and raising it.

Immediately, a cool night breeze gusts into the apartment and she sucks it into her lungs gratefully. Maybe the wind has changed direction since this morning, because the air doesn’t even smell smoky anymore. Or maybe it does, but she just can’t tell because it’s still fresher than the stale, varnish-laced air she’s been breathing for the last six hours or so.

The ever-present sirens are louder now, but that’s okay. She already feels better.

She opens the windows in the living room, too, and notices that the one that had been painted shut earlier now rises easily, courtesy of the creepy handyman.

Just beyond its screen is the fire escape.

For a moment, Marianne considers climbing through the window and sitting outside for a little while, to clear her lungs
and
her thoughts.

But she dismisses the idea. It’s late, she’s tired . . .

And sad.

Is Rae really going to leave New York?

For a moment, she toys with the idea of going with her.

Ashtabula . . .

No.

It isn’t just about leaving her hometown and her mother—her family, her roots—behind. It’s about fear.

Rae is leaving New York because she’s afraid.

If Marianne follows her, it would be for the same reason. Not that she’s afraid to live in New York, because she isn’t. Bad things happen everywhere.

But it would mean she’s afraid to let go, afraid to go back to being alone, afraid to start over . . . again.

Fear is what took hold of her mother after her father died. She had let herself become so dependent on him that she had no idea how to live without him.