Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(33)
He finds himself smiling faintly. “So are you the port? Or is your couch the port?”
“The couch is the port for you right now. Go ahead, lie down and rest for a while.”
Carrie wouldn’t have liked this, he finds himself thinking. She always felt threatened by other women, though he’d never given her reason to think he might stray.
He wouldn’t. Of course not. But sometimes, when he looks at other women, talks to other women, he wonders what his life might be like had he made a different choice.
Kristina Haines—with her dark curls and brash personality—reminds him of his college girlfriend, Sheryl. Whenever he’s talking to Kristina—which is quite often, because he’s always running into her around the building and she’s quite the sparkling conversationalist—he thinks about Sheryl, wondering about the road not taken.
Now, with Allison, Mack finds himself doing the same thing, God help him. Carrie’s the one he should be focused on right now. After what happened . . .
What kind of man am I? How am I ever going to live with myself?
Allison picks up the sheaf of flyers from the table. “I’m going to go put some bandages on my blisters, find some comfortable shoes, and go out and take care of these.” If Carrie were here, she’d be sizing up Allison, wondering why she’s being so nice.
But if Carrie were here . . .
Then I wouldn’t be.
No, Mack wouldn’t be here with Allison, letting her feed him and help him.
He keeps protesting, but the truth is, he needs her. Well, he needs someone—and right now, she’s the only one around. It’s that simple.
Out on the street, carrying the flyers and a roll of masking tape, Allison takes a deep breath.
Her lungs fill with putrid air; air that reeks of smoke and metallic industrial fumes laced with the stench of burning rubber—like a spatula that’s melted against the dishwasher’s heating coil—and, perhaps, with burning flesh.
She doesn’t know what that smells like. But all those people who died yesterday disappeared into thin air . . . this air. The air Allison is breathing.
Trying to shut out macabre thoughts about microscopic particles that might be invading her lungs, she begins walking down the deserted block. There are parked cars along the curb, but there’s no traffic; there are no pedestrians; there is no distant rumbling of a subway train passing underground.
In the distance, she can hear sirens, and it occurs to her that they might have nothing to do with what happened yesterday. It’s too late for that. But the world is still turning; people are out there living and dying the way they always have been.
But maybe Allison was wrong yesterday. Maybe the optimistic young woman who had just spent a magical evening at an opulent fashion designer party is gone forever. She didn’t burn alive in the jet fuel fireball or disintegrate in the mountain of debris when the towers collapsed, but like all the other lost souls—hundreds? thousands?—Allison Taylor, the Allison she used to be, did not survive the attacks.
Nor did New York itself—her New York, a glittering playground for beautiful people. It’s as if the city—her city—has been transformed into the dust-layered, debris-strewn landscape of a distant planet, populated by wide-eyed, shell-shocked mortals.
She sees more and more of them as she walks a couple of blocks over to Broadway and turns north. People are out on the streets, but they aren’t in a perpetual hurry, as New Yorkers tend to be. They’re wandering, loitering, standing, staring.
Staring at the smoke still rising from lower Manhattan; staring into the pages of the New York Post, with its black headline that reads ACT OF WAR; staring at the faces that gaze out from a litter of missing flyers like the one Allison is holding.
They’re everywhere, the fliers. Hanging on buildings and poles and the blue plywood walls that shield construction sites. Hanging, some laminated and some not, around the necks of people themselves, like miniature sandwich boards.
Allison walks over to a shuttered deli whose fluted gray metal security gate is papered in flyers. She tapes Carrie’s among them, then steps back to look at the tragic patchwork of names and faces.
Hearing a sob beside her, she turns to see a middle-aged Hispanic woman struggling to reach an empty spot high on the gate. In her hand is a homemade poster with a grainy photo of a smiling young man. It’s written entirely in Spanish, but Allison took enough Spanish in school to recognize a couple of the words.
Mi hijo querido.
My dear son.
“Here,” Allison says gently, “let me help you.”
The woman looks up, her face etched in sorrow and bewilderment.
Allison gestures, and the woman, registering grateful comprehension, hands over the poster.
Standing on her tiptoes, Allison tapes it high on the gate, between a photo of a tanned, smiling twenty-odd-year-old woman grinning and brandishing a margarita, and a close-up of a proud new daddy gazing down at a swaddled newborn.
So many lives shattered, so many people gone forever.
“Gracias,” the crying woman tells Allison.
“Lo siento.”
I’m sorry.
With a heavy heart, she starts to turn away from the wall—then turns back, having just caught a jarring glimpse of a familiar face in one of the posters.
It takes her a few moments to locate it again—a wedding portrait: glowing bride, grinning groom. He’s the one Allison vaguely recognizes, but she doesn’t place him until she reads the print below the photo: