Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(22)
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.
Allison 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.