Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(24)

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 . . .

Everyone wanted to know if he was okay.

A few—those who know Carrie, and know where she works—were concerned about her. Mack’s sister, Lynn; her ex-husband, Dan; and Ben’s wife, Randi, who met her only once or twice—he’s pretty sure those were the only people asking about Carrie.

That, then, is the extent to which he’s cut himself off from all those people who were part of his old life. But what else is he supposed to do? His wife and her needs come before everything else.

“I’m not a social butterfly, like you,” Carrie often says, with a smile that doesn’t reach her blue eyes. She has no close friends or family. After all she’s been through in her life, she’s uneasy in large groups of people, preferring to be alone with Mack. Just the two of them.

And the two were supposed to become three.

We were going to have a baby.

What about our baby?

Mack’s throat aches.

You know it was never going to happen anyway. She told you that. It wasn’t meant to be.

But still . . .

“Randi sent this for you.” Ben is handing him something wrapped in tinfoil.

He takes it. It’s warm. “What is it?”

“Roast chicken. She made it for dinner earlier.”

Mack closes his eyes briefly, imagining Ben’s wife in their kitchen, cooking chicken for dinner.

Such a simple thing.

Chicken. Dinner. A wife.

The regret Mack couldn’t muster this morning engulfs him at last. What he wouldn’t give, right now, for an ordinary night at home. With Carrie.

What he did this morning felt right at the time, but maybe he’d been too impulsive, too drastic.

Maybe?

Jesus, Mack. You don’t get more drastic than that.

“And—here,” Ben says, and Mack opens his eyes to see his friend holding out a sheet of paper—the thin, manila kind little kids use for coloring. “Randi said Lexi made this for you before she went to bed.”

Lexi—Mack hasn’t even seen her in a few years. “How does she know . . . me?”

“I mention you sometimes, or talk to you on the phone. So . . . she knows who you are. And I guess she heard me and Randi talking about . . . what happened.”

Mack takes it from him and sees that it’s a crayon depiction of a pair of stick figures holding hands. Both are smiling and one is clearly female, wearing a triangle of a skirt. The sky above them is scribbled blue and decorated with a big yellow sun that’s the same shade as the long hair on the female stick figure.

That’s all. Just sky and sun, not a hint of black smoke.

“That’s you and Carrie,” Ben tells him.

Mack swallows hard over the ache in his throat and folds the sheet of paper into quarters, then shoves it into his back pocket. He tries to speak, but he can’t find his voice—and anyway, what is there to say?

“If anyone could have gotten out of that tower, Mack, it was Carrie. She was a strong person, right? I mean—is. She is strong.”

Mack nods, ignoring Ben’s slip. Ben knows that Carrie works—worked—at Cantor Fitzgerald, on the 104th floor of the north tower, ten or twenty floors above where the plane hit. As far as Mack knows, no one who was up there at the time has been accounted for.

At one of the hospitals, he ran into the weeping wife of one of Carrie’s colleagues. She said her husband had called her to say they were trapped and there was no way out.

She sobbed hysterically when she described to Mack how she’d hung on until the phone went dead. Mack hugged her and murmured words of hollow comfort.

“At least you have that,” he told her. “At least you had a phone call.”

“You didn’t?”

No, Mack said, Carrie didn’t call from the burning tower, and she didn’t pick up her desk phone or her cell phone when he tried to reach her. That was before the telephone system buckled under the strain of all those people trying to reach loved ones in New York City; before the steel support beams buckled in the intense heat and the towers of terror came tumbling down . . .

“You’ve got to have hope, Mack.”

Feeling a hand on his arm, he looks up to see Ben watching him. Ben, with his wife at home cooking dinner, and his child tucked safely into her bed. Ben, who barely knows Carrie because she had no interest in getting to know him, or letting “outsiders” into their lives.

“She could be alive. She could be out there somewhere, just waiting for you to find her.”

“I know,” Mack tells Ben. “I have hope.”

It isn’t the first lie he’s told lately, and somehow, he’s certain it won’t be the last.