Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(20)

It seemed everyone in the company was connected, by varying degrees, to someone who worked in the twin towers or for the FDNY or NYPD. Everyone but Allison.

She wasn’t from this area; she didn’t have a firefighter uncle or a cousin in food service at Windows on the World or a high school boyfriend who worked at a trading desk.

While she had lived in the city long enough to have made a network of friends, those relationships weren’t close enough—or meaningful enough—or maybe it was just the Xanax—for her to be frantic over their whereabouts today. Operating under the assumption that none of them would have reason, in the course of a Tuesday morning, to have been down at the World Trade Center, she was pretty sure they were all safe.

And if she was wrong about that . . .

I don’t want to know was her initial reaction. Not yet. Not today.

The phones were down, but e-mail was working, and she found several worried inquiries in her in-box. There were repeated e-mails from her brother, a few from friends, and even one from Justin, her ex. As she typed out reassuring replies, she thought about all the people whose queries to loved ones in New York would remain forever unanswered.

When, mid-afternoon, word came that the commuter trains were running again out of Grand Central and Penn Station, some of Allison’s suburban colleagues left the office. Presumably, they made it home to their leafy bedroom communities in Westchester and Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey, away from the death and the danger.

Allison stayed on, huddled in the conference room with Luis and a couple of others who lived in lower Manhattan and beyond.

No one spoke of trying to get home until well after the sun had gone down, and even then, it took a long time for anyone to actually venture out there.

“Are you leaving?” people would ask Allison, who at some point that evening had swallowed a couple more Xanax tablets to maintain the numbness.

“I’m going to wait a little longer,” she told her coworkers as, one by one, they slipped away into the strange, terrible night.

She was going to wait . . . for what? She had no idea. For another attack? For some kind of all-clear? For daybreak?

Only when everyone else had gone did Allison realize that she had no desire to spend the night alone in a strange place. The news was reporting that there were pockets of downtown neighborhoods where the power had been restored. Hers was reportedly one of them. She forced herself to go.

Out on the street, she immediately spotted a cluster of camouflage-clad, machine gun–carrying National Guard soldiers. That was when it hit her: no matter where she spent this dreadful night—in her office or in her apartment—she would be alone in a strange place.

She took a cab as far south as she could—to a roadblock at Union Square. She got out of the cab, tossed the driver a twenty-dollar bill without asking for change, and watched him speed away.

Feeling like she’d wandered onto the set of a World War II movie, she approached the soldiers and police manning the barricade.

“I live down there,” she said.

“Do you have ID?”

She handed over her New York driver’s license, grateful she’d even bothered to get one. No one drives in New York City; it’s been years since she got behind a steering wheel. But she was eager, when she first moved here, to sever her connection to Nebraska and become an official New Yorker. Thank goodness she’d endured the endless wait at the DMV on that long-ago day.

“Okay—you’re clear,” the national guardsman told her, after checking her address on the license. He waved her past the barricade.

She faltered. “But . . . what do I do?”

“You’re clear,” he repeated. “You can go home.”

“How?”

He looked down at her feet, and she got the point. There was no other way.

She started walking. Breathing smoke and dust and jet fuel fumes, she searched for the comfort of familiarity, but found nothing. Life as she knew it was over.

After the first block, she stopped to lean against a pole and take off her shoes. She removed one, set down her foot to balance on it while she took off the other, and found herself stepping on a shard of glass.

It was most likely a piece of a beer bottle. But as she picked the glass out of her flesh, a cavalry of refrigerated trucks rattled past her on their way downtown. In that moment, the horrible reality hit her all over again and she immediately put the shoe back on.

God only knew how far the wreckage of buildings and airplanes—and human remains—had scattered.

As she limped all those blocks, her skin rubbed raw against the unforgiving leather straps.

Now she’s home, her heels and toes blistered and bleeding.

In some perverse way, she welcomes the pain. Physical suffering—she can deal with that. Physical pain—that can heal.

But the other pain, the pain inflicted by catastrophic loss—that pain is seared deeply into her soul. The Xanax may be a balm, but it’s only temporary. She’ll make sure of that. She can’t—she won’t let herself—go down that self-destructive road. Not after what drugs did to her mother.

Memories are good for nothin’. . .

Right.

Just over twenty-four hours ago, she stood in this very spot on the street in front of her building, doing exactly what she’s doing right now: hunting through her purse for the keys to her apartment.