Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(47)
“I remember the days of trick-or-treating alone with the kids. I dreaded taking them out without Bob, but he was always on the road when they were this age. He still is—last week, Tokyo, this week, London . . .”
“That stinks,” Allison says. “You must be lonely.”
“Oh, but I’m not! Not at all. Don’t tell Bob,” she leans forward and says, in a conspiratorial whisper, “but I actually prefer to have him gone. As long as I have lights and heat, it’s nice to have the house to myself.”
Allison can’t imagine ever preferring to have Mack away from home. Yes, things change—but they aren’t going to change that much in her marriage.
Are you sure about that? With a little twinge of regret, she remembers the way she snapped at him on the phone a few minutes ago.
“Come on, Mommy, let’s go!” Hudson is already halfway down the walk, anxious to get back home and tear into her chocolate.
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” Harried, she bends to strap J.J. into his stroller again. “Thanks, Phyllis.”
“I know it can be crazy, Allison, chasing around after little ones, but time is going to fly by. Those three will be away at college before you know it, just like mine.”
Phyllis’s son, Ryan, is at Brown; her daughter, Laurel, is at Cornell. Scholastic, athletic, and extracurricular overachievers, both—par for the course in Glenhaven Park.
“Enjoy every minute of this, Allison,” her neighbor calls after her as she wheels the stroller down the path. “Trust me—you’re going to miss it when it’s over.”
Mothers of older kids are always talking about how quickly children grow up. It bothers Allison that they all seem so wistful for the good old days, as though it’s all downhill from here on in.
She glances back over her shoulder to see Phyllis still silhouetted in the doorway, looking out into the night. Jet black Marnie has appeared beside her, poised in profile with her feline back humped and her front paws extended toward her mistress.
It’s a sight Allison quickly forgets as she catches up to her children . . . but one she will forever remember, with a shudder, whenever she thinks of what happened to Phyllis and Marnie later on this Halloween night.
Mack expects Allison to be a bit frosty toward him when he gets home too late to even see the kids in their costumes, having just missed the 6:51 train after all. When he walks in the door, she’s upstairs wrangling the kids into bed. The house is cold and lit only by a few flickering candles that cast weird shadows on the walls. He goes right up, of course, and is immediately regaled with a recap of the evening’s activities by his sugar-fueled daughters.
Allison can’t get a word in edgewise if she wants to—and he can’t tell whether she wants to. The baby is overtired and cranky and she has her hands full.
“I left you some macaroni and cheese,” she calls from J.J.’s room after Mack has kissed everyone good night, changed into a double layer of sweats to keep warm, and is about to head back downstairs.
That’s a good sign.
He thanks her and goes down to look for it in the candlelit kitchen, hoping it’s the homemade kind she sometimes bakes in her big blue-and-white Corningware dish.
But it isn’t—of course not. It’s Kraft, from a box, sitting on the countertop in a Saran-wrapped plastic bowl. He forgot that the oven is useless without its electronic control panel. Only the gas stove burners are working.
He eats the mac and cheese cold with ketchup, standing at the counter. Then he finds a slightly wizened apple in a bowl on the counter, slices it, buries it in cinnamon and sugar, and carries it to the living room. An orange jar candle is burning on the coffee table, throwing off a tiny bit of light and a powerful pumpkin smell.
He crunches through a slice or two, caught up in his BlackBerry, which was fully charged when he left work but is already down a bar. In trying to tie up a few loose ends he left at the office, he succeeds only in complicating matters even further, and now he’s worried he’s going to run out of battery before anything is resolved.
This power outage is getting to him.
No, this job is getting to him.
Understatement. This job is killing me.
The fall programming schedule is under-delivering, not achieving the ratings estimates. The clients, furious and frustrated, are looking for make-goods, but there’s no inventory for that; the ad sales team has been scrambling for ways to avoid having to return cash to them in what has become a no-win situation . . .
Hearing footsteps on the stairs, he looks up from the e-mail he’s in the midst of painstakingly typing with his thumbs.
Through the archway, he can see Allison descending into the votive-lit hallway in her pajamas and a thick fleece robe. She looks like one of the girls, with her long hair hanging loose and her feet in fuzzy slippers—particularly when she stops to peruse the big candy bowl sitting on a table near the front door. After picking through it, she picks up the whole thing and pads into the kitchen with it.
A minute later, she’s back, still carrying the candy, along with a glass of diet iced tea.
“Trick or treat.” She offers the bowl to Mack.
“No, thanks. I’ve got an apple.”
She looks at the plate parked next to the candle on the coffee table. Even in this light, it’s obvious that the fruit slices are all but obscured by drifts of cinnamon sugar.