Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(14)
“In kindergarten?” Mack rolled his eyes when she told him.
“I don’t know . . . everyone says it’s a bad idea to kick off her entire school career on the wrong foot.”
“I think it’s a bad idea to listen to what everyone says. People around here can be so uptight. Just ignore them.”
“That’s easy for you to say. You get to go off to the city every day and leave me to figure out how to raise these kids in a place where no one is ever satisfied and nothing is ever enough.”
“Want to trade?”
He saw her weigh her response. Whatever she wanted to say—she didn’t say it. Typical Allison. She’d told him once that she’d learned, during her hard-knocks childhood, that saying the first thing that comes to mind often leads to trouble. Anyway, she knows that Mack isn’t away from home by choice. If it were up to him, they’d probably be living barefoot on a deserted island, just the five of them, insulated from the rest of the world and the terrible things that happen in it.
When Mack couldn’t escape New York this year with his family over September 11, he thought he’d be capable of making the best of things. It was just a day on the calendar, after all. Maybe he could just put that out of his mind; treat it like any other day and try to forget . . . forget . . .
By late last week, though, with the city awash in commemoration and fresh terror threats, he realized that wasn’t going to happen. There was no escaping the memories . . . not even at home in the suburbs at night.
No, especially not at night.
That’s how it’s always been for him. When the rest of the world is asleep, Mack lies awake in bed or prowls restlessly through the wee hours, torturing himself with could haves, should haves, would haves.
Especially lately.
Why can’t you just get over it once and for all? You’ve put all that behind you, moved on. You love Allison in a way that you never loved Carrie.
That, Mack thinks grimly, is part of the problem.
Whenever he thinks he’s past the guilt, something comes along to dredge it up again. Why does he let it eat away at him? He has a great life now. Crazy sometimes, exhausting, but happy. Happy family, Happy House . . . paid for by his first wife’s death.
Jaunty music is still playing in the next room.
Sunny day . . .
Yes. It is sunny today: it’s a beautiful Tuesday morning in September.
Just like . . .
No.
Mack picks up a paint stirrer. He’d better get busy.
“What the hell is going on down there?” Roger Krock calls from the top of the steps, not really expecting the first floor tenant to answer him.
Sure enough, all is silent below . . . now.
But a minute ago, there was such a loud banging noise that Roger nearly fell off the kitchen chair he was standing on. At his age, a fall from that height could easily snap a bone.
Who would look after him then?
He’s eighty years old, living alone, long retired from his janitorial job at the state capitol building a few miles away, with pensions from that and from the navy. Not much to spend his money on, though, so he adds it to the cash he’s been stashing away for years, though he’s not sure who will even inherit it when his time comes.
His brother has been gone for nearly five years, his sister for seven, and he lost his wife way back in ’96.
It’s not like he has kids and grandkids to lean on in his so-called golden years. No, he and Alice were childless. They didn’t want or expect it to be that way—they were hoping to raise a big family—but things were different back then.
If God didn’t want you to have children, you didn’t get to have them. Period. There was none of this nonsense with test tubes and women carrying other women’s babies and being injected with octuplets and whatever the hell else goes on in this day and age. People adopting from foreign countries, and all those Hollywood movie stars not even bothering to get married . . .
The world is going to hell in a handcart as far as Roger is concerned.
Anyway, being all alone in the world the way he is, he can’t afford to have any broken bones.
Yeah, and it’s not like that inconsiderate tenant downstairs ever thinks to look in on him, even when the weather is bad—which it was more often than not this past winter. His neighbor is a good thirty, forty years younger than Roger, but he doesn’t even bother to shovel the front steps and walk when it snows. He just waits for the landlord to come around and do it, and half the time that’s not until a day later.
Meals on Wheels can’t deliver when they can’t get up to the door. That means Roger resorted to canned beans on quite a few stormy days, all because of his lazy neighbor.
And now I almost fell off my damned chair because of him slamming something around down there. Well, I’m going to go down and give that jerk a piece of my mind.
Roger leaves the chair right where it is, beneath the trap door he’d just opened. He’ll get back to that later.
The trap door leads to the low attic tucked beneath the roof. This apartment comes with access to the storage area there; the one downstairs gets the basement crawl space.
The attic is better, as far as Roger is concerned. It’s a lot drier up there. God only knows what the underground dampness would do to the cash he has stashed away, much less to his magazine collection.
He’s been collecting since he was in Guantanamo sixty years ago; some of those vintage issues of Hustler and Penthouse are worth a fortune. Not that he’d sell them off, unless he absolutely had to part with them. But it’s nice to know that he has his own little nest egg up there. Of course, Alice never knew the trove existed.