Nightwatcher (9 page)

So it was just the two of them, Mack and Carrie, spur of the moment in a far-off town with a justice of the peace.

Later, he realized that his judgment had been clouded by grief over his mother’s illness, both when he proposed to Carrie, and when he agreed to elope.

He should have known it would break his mother’s heart to learn, after the fact, that her only son—yes, a grown son, but still—had run off and married a girl she barely knew. Hell, a girl Mack himself barely knew.

As a result, in the scant time she had left, Maggie MacKenna never warmed up to her new daughter-in-law. She wasn’t unkind to Carrie, but she didn’t embrace her the way she had various friends—or even stray cats—Mack and his sister, Lynn, had brought home over the years. Nor did she immediately consider Carrie one of the family as she had Lynn’s ex-husband, Dan. Even after his sister separated from her ex—headed for an amicable divorce, as she likes to say, and she and Dan are living proof that such a thing exists—Dan remained more a part of Maggie MacKenna’s family than Carrie ever would be.

Mack always thought it was mostly the elopement that upset his mother, but after Maggie died last fall, Lynn revealed that their mother didn’t think Carrie was right for him.

“Mom called her a cold fish,” his sister said matter-of-factly one day as they sorted through mementos in their childhood home back in Hoboken, preparing to move their father into an assisted-living facility. “She said she would have talked you out of marrying her if you’d let her know in advance.”

Those words made him cringe—though he probably always knew on some level how his mother felt about his wife. But hearing the truth especially bothered him because it was too late to change his mother’s mind—or to share with her some of the things about Carrie she didn’t know. Things Carrie had made him swear never to tell anyone. Things that, if he’d dared break that promise to Carrie, might have made his mother feel differently about her.

But Mom is dead, and Dad—who always deferred to his wife anyway—is in his own little world now, slowly losing his mind to Alzheimer’s.

To her credit, easygoing, talkative Lynn doesn’t need reasons to like anyone. On the few occasions Carrie visited her home, Lynn tried to make her feel welcome.

Still, Mack remembers the March day the photo was taken as being particularly uncomfortable, because it was spent surrounded by his sister’s kids, all their cousins, and various relatives amid the easy, happy chaos of effortlessly established families.

Okay, maybe that’s not quite accurate; maybe parenthood is never achieved effortlessly. Particularly when the future holds amicable divorce.

But at the party, Lynn, a teacher, laughed about how she and Dan timed all three of her pregnancies so that she could deliver in March or April for optimum maternity leave. And their cousin Belinda wryly referred to her own youngest children—newborn twins—as “oops” babies. And all Mack could think was that it wasn’t fair, and he knew Carrie was thinking the same thing.

His wife’s melancholy state is clearly evident in the photograph taken that day. Carrie’s mouth is dutifully bent into a smile but her blue eyes are grim. Her brown hair falls limply past the green carnation Great-Aunt Nita had pinned to her lapel without asking. Carrie’s face looks pasty, wearing too much makeup in an effort to conceal her dark circles and blemishes—hormonal effects on her ordinarily clear complexion.

The infertility drugs have since caused considerable bloating to her face and a considerable weight gain. She’s been complaining about it, but until now, Mack hadn’t realized just how drastic the change has been.

Would anyone even recognize his missing wife from this photo?

Possibly. But he chose it only because it’s the one shot of her that fits the bill.

“You need to use a good close-up on your missing persons flier,” he was told by someone—a cop? an orderly? a FEMA volunteer?—over at NYU Medical Center. That was where Mack—along with hundreds of other distraught New Yorkers—converged this afternoon upon hearing that the hospital had received hundreds of injured victims, many without ID or even the clothes on their backs, burned beyond recognition. “For all you know,” a kindly Red Cross worker told Mack, “your wife could be among them. She could be unconscious. Unidentified.”

All day, rumors were flying among the frantic families of the missing. Everyone talked about dazed, dust-covered Trade Center employees wandering the streets in shock, some suffering from amnesia. Carrie could be one of them, people kept telling Mack. Or she could be buried alive in the wreckage. The rescuers were digging feverishly, trying to get to the trapped survivors—surely there were trapped survivors.

Realizing the paper tray is about to overflow, Mack removes the stack of fliers to make room for more. The paper is hot to the touch.

Hot.

Fire.

He puts the fliers aside and thinks of the flames that engulfed the building where his wife works.

Worked
. The building is gone.

Carrie is gone.

Gone . . . gone . . . gone . . . gone . . .

The mantra runs through Mack’s brain in perfect rhythm with the copy machine.

A
llison half expected to find her one-bedroom apartment buried beneath a layer of dust and debris, the windows blown out and smoke billowing in from the night.

Somehow, though, other than the blinking display on the microwave’s digital clock, everything was just as she left it this morning.

This morning, less than twenty-four hours ago—in another lifetime.

She wandered through the rooms, checking, though, just to be sure.

She gazed at the coffee cup sitting in the kitchen sink, its milky beige dregs dried in the bottom.

She drifted into the bathroom and saw the hairspray, brushes, and makeup cluttering the bathroom sink.

In the bedroom, shoes were strewn across the floor in front of her closet, having been hurriedly tugged on in her frenzied, last-minute effort to find the perfect designer heels to wear to the fashion shows. She’d model them before the mirror and then kick them off in frustration, grabbing another pair.

The woman who left here wearing designer stilettos with a four-and-a-half-inch heel never dreamed she’d be hobbling home through a war zone.

On an end table in the catalog-perfect living room, the answering machine light was flashing. There were several new messages. Three were from her brother; he left them before Allison sent him an e-mail from the office telling him she was safe.

Brett’s voice sounded increasingly worried, and in the final message Allison could hear Cindy Lou-Who in the background, shouting something about one of the towers collapsing.

The other messages were from a scant handful of friends. College friends, and New York friends, but none from Centerfield. No one back there would have her number, or care enough to track it down and check on her. Tammy Connolly, the one hometown friend who might have cared, left town long before Allison ever set her sights on New York City, and would have no idea she’s living here.

All of the messages had come in during the first hours after the attacks, before the power went out. As Allison reset the machine, she found herself idly wondering if anyone tried to call while it was out of commission and then worried when they couldn’t get through.

It would have been nice to think that there are lots of people out there who care about her.

Now, as Allison heads wearily back into her bedroom to change her clothes, she thinks about the walls she began constructing back in her childhood; walls she hasn’t been overly anxious to dismantle as an adult.

Maybe it’s time to start taking them down, start letting people in.

She sinks wearily onto the edge of the big mahogany sleigh bed, takes off the shoes at last, and hesitates, eyeing the wastebasket beneath the bedside table, wondering if she should just . . .

Uh-uh. No way
.

For one thing, that would be wasteful. You don’t throw away a perfectly good, extremely expensive pair of shoes.

For another, throwing them away would be like giving up. It would mean she can’t imagine a scenario where she’d ever wear those beautiful shoes again.

Anything is possible. That’s your philosophy, remember?

She carries the shoes to her closet, pulls out the box they came in, tucks them inside wrapped in layers of tissue, and returns it to the shelf. Then she does the same with the pairs she picks up from the floor, all frivolous sandals with impossibly high stiletto heels.

She can’t imagine setting foot outside her apartment in anything but running shoes—or maybe combat boots—but life might get back to normal someday.

It always has, right? No matter how bad things have been. Every time she’s hit rock bottom, she’s told herself that there’s no place to go but up.

This is different, though
, whispers the little voice in her head, piping up like the frightened child she never wanted to be—never allowed herself to be.

This is different from waking up one morning to learn that her father had abandoned his family, different from coming home from school to find her mother unconscious, having OD’d—again.

As far as Allison was concerned, whatever happened back in Centerfield was never anybody’s business but her own.

But this—what happened today—this happened to millions of people. It happened to everyone, really.

We’re all in it together
, Allison thinks, and somehow, somewhere deep down inside, she finds comfort in the idea of camaraderie.

She thinks about her coworkers, her friends, her neighbors . . .

Kristina. Is Kristina okay?

And Mack, and his wife
 
. . .

But it’s too late—too early—to call anyone.

Allison wearily slips out of her dress.

She’s about to toss it over the footboard of her bed. Instead, she finds a hanger, drapes the dress over it, and returns it to the closet, where it can wait until the day when fashion matters again.

“M
ack?”

Startled, he whirls around to see Ben Weber, the director of advertising sales. He’s Mack’s boss—and one of his closest friends.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” Ben says. “Any news?”

“No. Where have you been?” Mack absently notes that Ben is no longer wearing the dark suit he had on earlier. He’s changed into jeans, a Yankees cap, and a hooded Cornell sweatshirt.

“I went home to see Randi and Lexi, remember?”

Mack doesn’t remember—but he nods anyway.

He thinks back to everything that led up to this surreal act—his being here, at his deserted workplace in the middle of the night, printing out a missing persons flier for Carrie—and it’s like waking up and trying to remember the details of a nightmare.

He forces his mind back, back, all the way back to the Tuesday morning alarm clock after a restless couple of hours’ sleep. He remembers hitting the snooze button, then pretending to go back to sleep as Carrie moved around the bedroom getting ready for work, slamming things moodily.

He was going to be late, but he knew that if he got up while she was still there, he’d have to acknowledge what she’d said last night—that she was finished. That she didn’t want a baby after all.

He couldn’t deal with that—with
her
—that morning.

Something clicked in Mack’s brain as he lay there, avoiding his wife. It was as though he’d been looking at his life through a blurry binocular lens for months, and then all at once, things became clear.

He finally knew what he had to do.

And he did it. He did it quickly, impulsively, before he could lose his nerve.

And he didn’t regret it when it was over.

He got dressed, got to work, and just as he was getting ready to go out on his first sales call of the day, Ben burst into his office and told him about the plane hitting Carrie’s building. It was as if someone had abruptly jerked the focus dial in his brain, and everything was fuzzy again.

Still is.

Now, trying to piece together the rest of his day, Mack is dimly aware that Ben was by his side for the duration. Ben walked with him from NYU Medical to Saint Vincent’s Hospital to Bellevue. Ben helped him negotiate chaotic seas of frantic people searching fruitlessly for loved ones at the hospitals and triage centers set up at Chelsea Piers, the Staten Island Ferry terminal, Stuyvesant High School. Ben asked all the right questions, the questions Mack couldn’t seem to articulate, and he gave out information to all the right people.

Through it all, Mack vaguely recalls Ben making furtive, sporadic phone calls to his wife, whenever cell service would allow. And yes, he remembers that at one point, Ben asked Mack if he’d be okay for a little while alone while he went home to check in on his family.

How long ago was that?

Where was I when Ben left?

How did he know to find me here?

Mack rubs his palms against his burning eyes, wondering if he’s suffering from mere exhaustion, or posttraumatic amnesia.

“Did you stop back at your apartment?” Ben is asking.

Mack nods, vaguely remembering going into the apartment, looking around, and leaving again. “She wasn’t there.”

Such a stupid, stupid thing to say. Ben knows she wasn’t there. If she had been
there
, Mack wouldn’t be
here
, printing out hundreds of missing persons fliers.

“Was the power back on yet?”

Was it? Was it?

He puts both hands behind his aching neck and laces his fingers together, pulling, stretching . . . stalling.

“Remember,” Ben prods, “when we stopped there this afternoon, the power was off.”

Everything is a blur, and he’s so tired, but it’s starting to come back to him . . .

“Mack?”

“The power was back on this time—and the phone was working. There was a dial tone . . .”

“Did you check the messages?”

He nods. There were a bunch of calls from his family, his friends, people he’s met in all phases of his life. An old fraternity brother, his high school prom date, a former neighbor, several distant cousins . . .