Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(12)

It isn’t unusual to find her just sitting there, brooding. She does that a lot; always has.

But tonight, her black leather pumps are lying right here by the door, as though she kicked them off on her way in. Her red trench coat is draped over a chair at the dining table.

The old Carrie would never dream of putting damp fabric on polished wood; before she sat down, she would have hung it up, and placed her shoes neatly on the shelf in her half of the closet. She would have towel-dried her wet hair and brushed it.

“Did you go someplace after work?” asks the new Carrie, with a hint of suspicion.

“I stopped off for a beer with Ben,” Mack lies, and turns on another lamp to dispel the rainy evening gloom. “Why are you sitting here in the dark?”

“It wasn’t dark when I sat down.”

“Well, it is now.”

“Well, I guess I didn’t notice.”

Mack digests that as he sits on a chair to untie his black dress shoes.

“Are you okay?” he asks reluctantly, knowing she wants him to, knowing he has to, knowing the answer.

“Not really. Are you?”

He shrugs and stands up again, shoes in hand. His socks are damp from wading through gutter rivers.

“Maybe it’ll happen next month,” he tells Carrie, starting toward her, thinking that if he can just touch her—hug her—it’ll be better between them.

“That’s so easy for you to say,” she snaps, stopping him in his tracks. “You’re not the one who had to give up coffee and wine and sushi and cigarettes—”

“Yes, I did! I quit smoking with you!”

“But you didn’t have to. You chose to.”

Right. Because they were a team, and he was showing her support, and anyway, it was a nasty habit he never should have started. But back in his advertising agency days, pretty much everyone in the bullpen smoked—at work, and in the bars where they went to decompress after long days and nights on the job.

“You don’t have to give up coffee and wine and sushi forever,” he reminds Carrie, but she talks over him.

“—and you’re not the one who has to shoot yourself full of hormones, or have raging headaches because of them, or go to the doctor’s office once a month to be injected with test tube sperm, or sit around waiting to see if you’ll start bleeding fourteen days later or not.”

“No,” he says quietly. “I’m not the one who has to do any of that.”

He’s just the one who has to supply the test tube sperm at the doctor’s office—an experience he can’t help but find humiliating.

“Can’t I just, uh, do it at home and then bring it into the office?” he asked Dr. Hammond early on.

“Theoretically, Mr. MacKenna, that’s possible,” she told him, “but there’s a very small window of time when the semen is viable. How long does it take you to get here from home?”

“By subway? About an hour, give or take . . . and by car, depending on traffic . . .”

Too long, as it turned out.

When you live in lower Manhattan and the clinic is up in Washington Heights, there’s only one way to produce a semen sample: walk past the knowing medical staff into the little room stocked with outdated dirty magazines and porn videos and—thank God—a sturdy lock on the door.

Medical mission or not, the former Irish Catholic altar boy in him can’t help but feel vaguely guilty and embarrassed.

Yes, Mack knows it pales, in the grand scheme of things, next to everything his wife has endured as a precursor to—God willing—nine months of pregnancy and childbirth. He knows because Carrie minced no words in telling him, the one time he dared to complain to her.

“Are you freaking kidding me? You’re actually complaining to me about jacking off into a cup?”

Clearly, he wasn’t allowed to voice his distaste for the process; his feelings didn’t matter. To Carrie, he was, apparently, an insignificant participant.

“Anyway,” she ranted on, “I know you resent me for the move downtown, but you went along with it, so—”

“I don’t resent you. I wanted to make your commute shorter.”

”You’re thinking that if we had stayed where we were, the clinic would have been right around the corner.”

Maybe he was thinking that. But it was beside the point.

He’d embraced the idea of moving downtown—anything to make Carrie happy—and she was the one who’d done all the legwork, choosing the neighborhood, the old brick building, the apartment itself. She said it really did make her life easier—the convenience factor, anyway.

And what about my life?

By far, the most difficult part of this whole process—from where he sits—is putting up with Carrie’s mercurial moods, one of the many unpleasant side effects the doctor had warned them about. Apparently, the fertility drugs can cause everything from nausea to psychosis—with a whole range of symptoms in between.

“You might find yourself touchier than usual,” Dr. Hammond warned Carrie on that long-ago day in the office.

Touchy? Touchy would be a pleasure. Touchy would be the old Carrie on an ordinary good day.

Lately, it’s hard to remember that he was ever drawn to his wife’s strong-willed assertiveness. Hard to remember, for that matter, that she ever smiled, or laughed, or showed affection, or told him how much she loves and needs him . . .