Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(72)

He looks down at the jar she offers, then up at her face.

“It’s chicken soup,” she hurriedly goes on. “I don’t know if you have any food in the house, or if you’ve eaten, or if you’re hungry, but . . .”

Shut up, Allison. You’re rambling.

She stops talking and looks at him, wishing she knew him well enough to know what he might be thinking behind that opaque gaze.

“Thank you,” he says, and takes the jar. “Do you want to come in?”

“I don’t want to bother you.”

“It’s okay. I was just . . .” He rakes a hand through his hair. “Oh, hell, I don’t even know what I was doing. Come in.”

Walking into the apartment, she experiences a flicker of misgiving, remembering what happened to Kristina.

But then, she no longer has any doubts about Mack, does she? He’s ensnared in his own tragedy; he doesn’t deserve a shred of suspicion.

The apartment looks exactly the same as it did when she was here yesterday, right down to the red coat still hanging over the back of a chair where Carrie presumably left it.

Seeing her glancing at it, Mack says, “I should probably hang that up, shouldn’t I? Or . . . figure out what to do with it?”

What is she supposed to say to that?

She watches him pick it up and stare at it for a moment. Then he puts it back on the chair. “I’ll do something with this later. God knows what. What do you do?”

She shrugs helplessly.

When her mother died, the church ladies came and bundled up all her clothes and sent them to charity. That’s what you do, they said. Give them to someone who needed them.

I needed them, Allison remembers thinking, one day when she was sitting on the floor in her mother’s empty closet and crying. It wasn’t that her mother had anything she would have worn—not in public, anyway. But she could have slept wrapped in one of her mother’s shapeless sweaters, smelling her mother’s scent in the yarn embrace.

No one ever gave her the chance. She was seventeen. Everything was handled for her.

Mack is a grown man. He can do this himself, in his own way, whenever he’s ready.

“Have a seat,” he says, gesturing vaguely toward the living room furniture.

She sits on the couch and tries to think of something to say.

He puts the soup on the kitchen counter and comes into the living room, looking out the window and then perching on the arm of the couch. But only for a moment, and then he is up again, restless.

“Do you want something to eat or drink?” he asks.

“No, I’m fine, but why don’t you sit down and eat some soup? It’s still hot.”

“I will. Just not right now. I’m not really hungry.”

“Are you sure? Have you eaten today?”

“I . . . I don’t even know. I can’t remember. I know that sounds crazy, but . . .” He shakes his head. “Everything is crazy, you know?”

“I know.”

If she knew him better, she would make him sit down at the dining room table and she would pour the soup into a bowl and hand him a spoon.

But it’s not her place to do that. It’s probably not even her place to be here.

“I brought her hairbrush down there, to the Armory, and her toothbrush,” he says abruptly.

“I . . . I’m sorry.”

“I had to take a number and wait on a folding chair for them to call it. There were so many people there . . . some didn’t talk at all, some were crying, hysterical. I was number 1448. I keep looking for meaning in that, you know? But there isn’t any. In the number, or . . . any of it.”

Oh God. This is tragic.

He goes on, staring into space, almost as if he needs to recap it for himself more than for her, “They were calling ten numbers at a time. When they called mine, they took us downstairs. They read off the names of people who were injured at the hospitals.” He shrugs, not bothering to state the obvious: Carrie’s name was not among them.

“Then I had to fill out a twelve-page report. I had to write down anything that might help them . . . you know, identify her body. They wanted to know if we have kids, you know, for DNA—or if she has parents, or siblings . . .”

“She doesn’t?”

“No. Just me. I mean, we were trying to have kids, but . . .”

“I’m so sorry,” Allison repeats, struggling not to blink and let the pooling tears escape her eyes. He isn’t crying. How can she start?

“It wasn’t so bad, really. I mean, in a way it was horrible, but in another way . . . I was doing something. Something for her. You know?”

She thinks about the day the church lady bought her the Ralph Lauren dress, about how her mother would have loved to have seen her in it.

This is nothing like that, but . . .

Grief.

Yes. She knows grief.

“I know what you mean,” she tells him, surreptitiously wiping her cheek. A tear is rolling down it. Dammit.

“You do? Did you lose . . . someone?”

“Not, you know, on Tuesday. A long time ago, though. When I was a kid. My mom.”

“I lost mine, too—just last year, not when I was a kid. That had to be hard for you.”

“Yeah.”

“The thing I keep thinking about—with my mom—is that she didn’t like Carrie.”