“Kristina?” Allison calls through the closed door and knocks, yet again.
Still no reply.
Inside the apartment, Alicia Keys is singing “Fallin’ ”—again. So the music was—is—definitely coming from here.
Something is wrong.
That was her first thought when she woke up a little while ago—after sleeping for a solid seven hours—to find the sun streaming in the windows.
Something is wrong.
Her gaze happened to fall on the business card on her nightstand . . . the card that reads Two World Trade Center . . . and the horror of yesterday’s attack immediately washed over her.
Even as it all came back, she realized she could still hear the music coming from upstairs.
The same song—that’s what has her feeling so uneasy. If it were just a radio playing, she probably wouldn’t think twice. No one, however, plays the same damned song over and over again if everything is okay.
But everything is not okay—not here in New York City.
Allison knocks again, calls her friend’s name again.
Is Kristina in there? Is she pushing replay every time the song ends?
That doesn’t seem very likely—yet is it any more far-fetched than anything else that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours?
“Kristina! Come on, if you’re there, just tell me you’re okay!”
As she waits in vain for a reply, she goes over the last conversation she had with Kristina in the laundry room the other day, trying to figure out if there’s any chance she might have been in the towers yesterday, or on a plane.
Kristina mentioned she’d just started a long-term temp job. It’s in midtown, though—not downtown. Allison is certain of it, because Kristina commented on how crowded the uptown trains had been during rush hour all last week.
“I just hope it gets better,” she said, “because I can’t stand and hold on to a pole all the way to midtown and back every day. If I could at least get a seat . . .”
Allison, who takes the same subway line, shook her head. “I wouldn’t count on that.”
“Well, hopefully I’ll get back to waitressing soon. Or dancing—as soon as my leg heals and I can get back to auditioning. Because let me tell you, this rush hour subway schedule really bites.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Allison said with a grim smile.
At this particular moment, though, she would give anything to be on the subway, wedged shoulder to shoulder with hordes of fellow New Yorkers, riding to the office to begin a normal workday.
Instead, the city lies in smoldering ruins around her, thousands of its citizens murdered.
Is it possible Kristina Haines was among them?
She works in midtown, Allison reminds herself yet again. There’s no reason she’d have been in the World Trade Center. Still . . .
Allison tried calling her friend before she came up here, and she actually managed to get through. The line rang, anyway. But only once, and then the answering machine picked up.
“Kristina, it’s Allison,” she said. “I’m just calling to check in. You know, after . . . yesterday. Call me as soon as you get this and let me know that you’re safe.”
She hung up, wondering if Kristina had a cell phone, and how she could find the number.
She went through the motions of an ordinary day, taking a shower, blow-drying her hair and pulling it back into a rubber band. She dressed in her softest, most threadbare jeans and an old T-shirt, finding a measure of solace in pure physical comfort—the only kind to be found on this grim day.
In the kitchen, she made coffee, poured a cup—and then let it grow cold on the counter as she paced in bare, still-sore feet. She concluded that she wouldn’t be able to breathe easily until she knew that everything was okay upstairs.
Obviously, it isn’t okay.
Staring at Kristina’s closed door, she presses fisted fingers to her mouth, resting her chin on her palm, wondering what to do next.
Maybe she should go back down and get her key to Kristina’s apartment. But it would be wrong, wouldn’t it, to go barging in there?
Allison glances at the other closed doors in the hallway.
There are three apartments on every floor in the building. The tenants in apartment 5B moved out at the end of August and it’s still vacant. But maybe the elderly woman who lives in 5C will at least know whether Kristina was home yesterday afternoon or evening.
Allison goes down the hall and knocks on that door.
No one answers.
She knocks again, waits another minute, and gives up. The woman’s grown daughter visits every afternoon; she probably came yesterday and got her mother out of here. Especially if there was no power in the building.
A lot of people who live in the building probably stayed someplace else last night, put off by the barricades and the soldiers and the dust and debris and smoke.
So then what am I doing here? Allison wonders as she turns away from Kristina’s door.
The answer is simple. She has no place else to go.
Clearly, Kristina did. Maybe she left the music on before she left for work yesterday morning, and accidentally pressed the auto-replay button.
No—the power went out for a while after the attacks.
Well, maybe that triggered some kind of electronic problem with the CD player.
The CD player she said she didn’t even have.
For some reason, the thought keeps nagging at Allison, and she’s not sure why.
Aiming the remote at the television set, Jamie channel-surfs with one frustrated thumb click after another.
Wall-to-wall coverage of yesterday’s attack, and not just on the local stations. But none of the networks—not even the cable news—have been airing any of the graphic images anymore.
Yesterday, they showed it all. Yesterday, you saw raw footage of people dying right there in front of you, in real time, in real life—and then again, later, in endless recaps.
Today, though every channel is still playing and replaying the same scenes—the planes hitting the towers, the towers falling, the dust cloud chasing down and enveloping hundreds of people running for their lives—the blood and gore have been edited away, like a movie made suitable for a PG–13 audience.
Lame. That’s what it is.
Jamie wants to see it all again—the jumpers falling through the air, the bloody pulverization on the sidewalks, the body parts . . . death. How glorious it would be to see death again, right up close.
But not just on television.
I want to touch death again. I want to make it happen again.
Jamie’s hands itch with the urge to squeeze a knife handle, hard; fingers ache to dip into warm, sticky blood.
Jamie smeared it on the walls, the windows, even the ceiling. It was necessary to climb onto the bureau to accomplish that. From there, it was possible to see that tiny red droplets spattered all over the ceiling.
Her wounds had spurted blood that far. Impressive.
Even as a child, Jamie had wondered what it would be like to take a life. Practicing on Dumpster rats, and then stray cats—even a neighbor’s pet dog—that was satisfying, at the time. But it was nothing like this.
Even that first human kill a decade ago—that wasn’t nearly as satisfying as this had been. That happened so quickly; it wasn’t planned. And the second kill, a few weeks ago—it was planned, yes, but not like this.
Practice makes perfect.
Jamie smiles.
Making Kristina do things, and say things, and feel things . . . watching Kristina suffer . . . it was better, far better, than anything Jamie had ever imagined.
How long, with the city in chaos, will it be before anyone misses her?
That reminds me . . .
Jamie opens a drawer, pulls out a videotape, and puts it into the VCR.
It was pretty risky to backtrack to the scene of the crime last night to retrieve the surveillance camera footage, but it would have been even riskier not to. Thank goodness Jerry confessed what he’d done, or there would have been trouble. Huge trouble.
Now we’re safe.
Jamie begins fast-forwarding through the footage, zipping past hours’ worth of empty hallways, and then . . .
Movement.
Bingo. There’s Jerry, walking into the building, his key ring in hand . . .
There’s Jerry on the fifth floor, unlocking the door to Kristina’s apartment . . .
There’s Jerry, moments later, bolting from the apartment looking stricken. He races past the elevator to the stairwell . . .
There he is exiting on the first floor, and—
Wait a minute.
There’s something else.
Someone else.
Jamie’s eyes narrow on the figure waiting by the elevator. That’s Allison Taylor.
It’s obvious from the footage that Jerry doesn’t notice her.
But she definitely notices Jerry.
Back on her own floor, Allison glances at the MacKennas’ door.
Should she . . . ?
Yes. She should. It’s the right thing to do.
She forces herself to walk over to the door, hesitates again.
What if the news is bad?
But what if it’s not? At least she’ll have some peace of mind about something on this awful day.
And if it is bad news . . . she’ll have to hear it eventually. Might as well be now. Maybe there’s something she can do to help.
As she knocks, though, she finds herself hoping no one is home. That way, she’ll have done the right thing, but can avoid dealing with this right now.
She immediately hears a stirring of footsteps inside, though, and the door is thrown open.
Mack stands there, looking as though he’s aged a year since she saw him smoking on the stoop.
He’s wearing suit pants and a rumpled white dress shirt with the tie loosened around his neck—yesterday’s clothes, Allison guesses, and knows that’s not a good sign.
His face is drawn and pale. His green eyes are underscored with purple-black shadows, his cheeks and mouth with black stubble. His short dark hair is sticking up on top of his head in tufts. As if to demonstrate how it got that way, Mack shoves his splayed fingers into his hair and leaves them there for a moment, just standing there looking at her with his palm resting at the top of his forehead in a gesture of distracted dismay.
“I thought you might be . . . someone else,” he tells Allison.
Carrie. That’s what he thought. That’s what he hoped.
Okay. Now she knows. The news is not good.
She clears her throat, trying to figure out what to say.
All that comes to mind is I’m sorry, but that has a sense of finality that feels wrong—unless he’s heard for sure that his wife is among the casualties. If that were the case, he wouldn’t have opened the door with such expectancy, or looked so despondent when he saw who was—rather, who wasn’t—there.
“Do you want to come in?” he asks.
“Do you want . . . should I?”
He nods. “Sure. Please.”
The last word strikes a chord, and her heart goes out to him. She’d assumed he was just being polite when he asked her in, but maybe not. Maybe he doesn’t want to be here alone.
She crosses the threshold. He closes the door after her.
All this time living across the hall, and she’s never been inside this apartment. Mrs. Ogden kept to herself, and so far, so have the MacKennas.
The layout is the mirror image of Allison’s own place: a small entry area widens into a rectangular living room with a small kitchen alcove on one side and doors leading to a bedroom and bath on the other.
The furniture is IKEA bland—blond wood and beige upholstery, boxy lines. Allison’s eye goes right to the lone splash of color: a red belted trench coat draped over the back of one of the chairs at the small dining table. She’s seen Carrie wearing it on rainy days. She probably had it on Monday, the day before . . .
“I haven’t heard from her,” Mack says, and she turns her focus back to his weary face. “I keep wondering why. Some people she works with—she was on the 104th floor, I don’t know if you knew that—some of them called their husbands and wives. She didn’t call me.”
“Maybe she tried and couldn’t get through.” Allison speaks in a rush, wanting—needing—to give him hope.
Even false hope?
She ignores the disapproving voice in her head. “The local lines were all jammed up. Is there someone else who might have heard from her? Someone outside the city, maybe?”
He’s shaking his head before she finishes speaking. “She doesn’t have anyone else.”
That strikes her as an odd thing to say. Maybe he just means that Carrie is from New York City, and others she might have tried to reach would be here, with snarled phone lines.
But the phrasing—she doesn’t have anyone else—it just seems so definitive, almost as though Carrie has no one in the world but him.
Almost like me, Allison finds herself thinking. If I were in a life-or-death situation and needed to connect with someone, who would I call?
I wouldn’t call anyone—because I’m self-sufficient.
She’s been taking care of herself for years—even when her mother was alive. She never had anyone to lean on, or depend on.
“I keep wondering what it means that I didn’t hear from her,” Mack goes on. “Because she’s always been a caller, you know? She’ll call ten or twelve times a day. She likes to stay in touch.”
He’s thinking Carrie didn’t survive the initial blast long enough to make a call.
Maybe that was a blessing, Allison thinks, remembering what she witnessed yesterday on television—all those people trapped in a towering torture chamber, people who concluded that jumping to certain death was the most merciful way out.
Allison thinks of her mother—of the choice Brenda Taylor made, seven years ago.
For the first time, she experiences a glimmer of an emotion other than the anger and disgust and pity that always accompany the memory of her mother’s suicide.
Allison always thought of her as a coward, taking the easy way out. But maybe she was wrong. Maybe there is no easy way out.
“I made these . . .” Mack picks up a sheaf of paper and hands it to her.
She finds herself looking at a child’s drawing of a stick figure man and woman. Puzzled, she looks up at Mack, not sure what to make of it.
“Oh, that—Not that.” He snatches it away. “That’s—my friend’s daughter . . . she felt sorry for me, so . . . it’s, you know, supposed to be me and Carrie . . .” He trails off, swallows hard.
Her heart goes out to him.
She looks down at the paper now on top of the stack. It’s a photo of a woman beneath the bold black word “MISSING.”
“Do you think it looks enough like her?” Mack asks.
She knows the image is of Carrie, of course—her name, “CARRIE ROBINSON MACKENNA,” is right beneath it—but it obviously wasn’t taken recently. It doesn’t look much more like her than the little girl’s crayoned drawing, with its smiling mouth and lemon yellow hair.
But Allison assures Mack that the photo is fine, wondering if it even matters anyway.
If Carrie was at work on the 104th floor of the first tower that was hit, and the plane struck the building a few floors beneath her, then how would she have gotten out? The stairways must have been blocked by that massive fire. All those people jumping, falling . . . they wouldn’t have been doing that if there was any other way out.
“I have to go put up these fliers,” Mack says. “I already did a bunch last night—this morning, really—but then I thought I should come back home to see if she was here.”
“Maybe she was here earlier, and then she left and went looking for you.”
“No. She wasn’t home. If she had been, she would have changed her clothes, or . . .”
“Maybe she didn’t want to—”
“No,” Mack cuts in sharply, “if she’d been here while I was gone, I’d know it.”
“Maybe—” Seeing the look on his face, Allison clamps her mouth shut. She hates herself for needing to deny out loud what he must already know, and has maybe even accepted.
But, having stepped into the middle of a virtual stranger’s tragedy, she can’t seem to help herself. For some reason, she’s compelled to keep dangling useless lifelines before Mack—like tossing a length of sewing thread to a drowning man-overboard.
He takes a deep breath and says flatly, “Carrie left for work yesterday morning, and she never came home. Period.”
He’s trying to convince himself of that, Allison finds herself thinking, as much as he’s trying to convince me.
God knows it’s probably true, and yet . . .
It’s almost as though he’s trying to make this harder on himself, even, than it has to be.
She remembers yet again how he was sitting alone outside the other night, seemingly troubled. Maybe he’d had a fight with his wife. Maybe he’s feeling guilty now, on top of everything else.
Whatever the case, he’s on the verge of falling apart, poor man.
She feels oddly tempted to reach out and put her arms around him.
You can’t do that. You barely know the guy.
Does it even matter, though, at a time like this?
In a crisis of this magnitude, the usual boundaries come down—it’s like she and Mack are shipwrecked, with nowhere else to go and no one else to count on.
Allison reaches toward him, yet can’t quite bring herself to touch him. Instead, she holds out her hand, palm up. “Listen . . . why don’t you give me some of those fliers? I can take them out and put them up in the neighborhood.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to.” For all she knows, he’s completely cut off from his usual support system. “Do you have anyone else . . . helping you? Friends? Family?”
“My friend Ben was with me all yesterday and last night, but he had to go home and get some sleep. My sister called a few times, but she lives out in Jersey. She said she’d come into the city, but . . .”
“You should let her. I’m sure she wants to be with you.”
Mack shakes his head. “She’s a single mom, and her kids are scared—so is she, I think. She’s better off at home.”
“Is she your only family?”
“She’s the only one I’m really close to anymore.” He yawns deeply, covering his mouth with his hand. “Sorry.”
“Did you sleep at all last night?” Even as she asks the question, Allison remembers what he said about having insomnia.
If he couldn’t sleep before all this, how is he ever going to sleep again?
“No, but I’m fine. I just made coffee.” Mack gestures toward the kitchen.
From here, Allison can see the clean, empty glass carafe sitting on the coffeemaker’s burner. A can of grounds is out on the counter, a silver measuring scoop and stack of white paper filters beside it.
“I don’t think you did,” she tells Mack.
“What?”
“I don’t think you made the coffee.”
He distractedly follows her gaze. Again, his fingers rake through his hair, and his palm comes to rest on his forehead. “I could have sworn . . . I’m losing my mind. I keep forgetting things.”
“That’s understandable. You’re exhausted.”
“Story of my life.”
“Maybe, but . . .”
“I know. This is different. I can’t believe this is happening.”
For a moment, they’re both silent.
“Listen, I’m pretty sure I actually did make coffee a little while ago . . .” Allison offers Mack a tight smile, and is gratified when he returns it. “Why don’t you come across the hall and have some? Then you can come back here and rest and I’ll go hang up fliers for you.”
“But what about . . . don’t you have someplace else to be? Work, or something else you have to do?”
She shakes her head. “Not today. Today is . . . the city is at a standstill.”
“But you don’t have to—”
“Look, it’s fine. Please just let me help you. And you know, I heard yesterday . . . there are people in hospitals all over the city, and in Jersey . . . maybe Carrie—”
“I know. I’ve been checking. I’ll keep checking. Maybe.”
He picks up his keys and cell phone and follows her across the hall.
“Are you limping?” he asks.
“It’s just blisters on my feet. I’m fine.”
As Allison unlocks her door, she remembers why she left her apartment in the first place. Turning to Mack, she asks, “You haven’t heard from Kristina, have you? From upstairs?”
“No. Why?”
Remembering her suspicion that there might have been something going on between Mack and Kristina, she chooses her words carefully. “She’s not . . . around.”
If he’d been involved with Kristina, surely he’d already have checked in on her, but clearly, this is news to him.
Allison watches him digest the information. He looks troubled—but not distressed.
“She works in midtown, though,” she quickly adds. “I’m sure she’s fine.”
She isn’t sure of anything, but Mack’s wife is missing and that’s all he needs to worry about.
Mr. Reiss usually calls in the mornings to tell Jerry which buildings he needs to visit that day and what to do when he gets there.
Today, he didn’t call.
Jerry waited a long time, wondering what to do. He kept thinking about this burned-out bulb in the third floor hallway of the four-story building on Greenwich Street. He decided he should just come and fix it.
Now, standing on a stepladder, he feels a sense of accomplishment. He untwists the broken bulb, stashes it in his tool belt pouch.
At least there are some things in this world that can be fixed right now.
When he thinks of the mess they made downtown . . .
Who’s going to clean it all up?
How is it ever going to be the same?
It’s not. It’s not going to be the same.
When he got on the subway at Times Square to come down here, the train took a long time to arrive and when it did, it was almost empty. It made a couple of stops, then came to a complete halt, and there was an announcement Jerry couldn’t understand. That’s how it always is on the subway. You can’t hear what they’re saying.
Some people left the car, but Jerry stayed there until a policeman came and told him to get off.
“But I have to go to work.”
“You’ll have to walk from here,” the policeman said. “This is the last stop today.”
You always have to do what the police tell you to do. That’s the law. Mama taught Jerry that years ago.
So Jerry got out, and he walked.
At Fourteenth Street, there were more policemen, and soldiers, too, with guns. They wouldn’t let him go past at first.
“We need your ID,” they kept saying, but Jerry didn’t know what that was. They kept asking questions he didn’t know how to answer, and he got confused and scared.
Finally, he started crying. “I’m going to be late for work, and I’m going to be in trouble.”
“Just let him go through. Can’t you see he’s a retard?” one of the soldiers said. “He’s not going to hurt anything.”
Retard—Jerry’s heard that word before. The kids used to call him that in school, and they hurt him almost as badly as Mama did. With their words, though, not their hands.
“I’m not a retard,” Jerry muttered as he walked all those blocks down to Greenwich Street. “I’m not a retard.”
He’s smart. He knows how to get around the city and how to find his way to work and back. He learned a long time ago to always look for the twin towers to get his bearings when he comes out of the subway. Wherever they are, that’s downtown. South.
When the subway is up and running again, how is he ever going to figure out which way to go when he comes out onto the street?
Now he’ll never know which way to turn. He’s going to get lost.
But he shouldn’t think about that now. He shouldn’t think about anything that makes him feel sad or bad.
Maybe he should turn off the music. He’s wearing his Walkman, playing the CD that has his favorite song, the one that reminds him of Kristina.
Now that she’s gone, it makes him a little sad. He still likes hearing it, though, especially now that he knows she loved him back. She said so.
That’s why it’s such a shame that Kristina had to die.
But she was so mean to him—she’d made him cry, and Jamie said she had to be punished for that.
Jamie was right.
Mama always said the same thing. She would say that if you do something wrong—especially something that causes someone else to suffer—then you have to pay the price.
Jerry sighs. It’s always been that way. It was like that long before Jamie came—which was the same day Mama left.
One morning, he woke up and she was gone, and Jamie was there. He hasn’t seen Mama since.
Jamie reminded Jerry that Mama had decided to move away.
“Remember, Jerry? She told you she wanted to go live far, far away from here. Across the ocean. Remember?”
Jerry didn’t remember, at first. But Jamie kept reminding him of it, until finally he remembered. Mama had moved away, and she had arranged for Jamie to come take care of him. Yes. That’s right. That’s how it happened. He just forgot.
As he looks down to grab the new light bulb he carefully balanced on the nearest rung, he’s startled to see someone standing at the foot of the ladder.
Grabbing the light bulb just before it falls, he manages to steady himself and the ladder. He rips off his headphones and looks down again.
The person is a woman, and she says, “I’m so sorry!”
In the shadowy hall, she looks like Kristina.
Well, maybe not her face. But she does have curly hair, kind of like Kristina, though hers is a reddish color. She’s a bit heavier-set, and she has large breasts. He can see the curve of them from here—can see right down inside her V-necked T-shirt.
“Are you the maintenance man?” she asks, then mutters, “Of course you’re the maintenance man. Why else would you be standing on a ladder fixing a light?”
Is she talking to Jerry? “I don’t know,” he says, just in case.
“You don’t know if you’re the maintenance man?”
“No, I am. But you asked why else I would be—”
“Oh, right.” She nods her head really fast, and Jerry, with interest, watches her breasts jiggle. “Never mind. What’s your name?”
“Jerry.”
“Jerry. I’m Marianne. I just moved into the back apartment on the second floor. When you’re done with that, can you please come down? I have a couple of things I need help with.”
“What things?”
“One of the windows is stuck, and I need to get it open because they just redid the floors and the fumes are pretty bad. And there’s something wrong with my stove. I think the pilot light is out, and I’m afraid I’m going to blow up the whole building—”
She catches herself. Clapping a hand over her mouth, she blocks Jerry’s view inside her shirt.
“I keep forgetting,” she says, after a few seconds, uncovering her mouth, opening up the view again. “About . . . you know. What happened yesterday.”
“It’s terrible. It’s a mess. It’s sad.”
“Did you . . . know anyone?”
“Anyone . . . ?”
She hesitates, rephrases the question. “Is everyone you know okay?”
“No,” Jerry tells her desolately, thinking about Kristina.
“I’m sorry.”
He nods. He’s sorry, too. So sorry. He feels bad it has to be this way.
And that’s strange because Jamie’s the one who did the punishing. Not Jerry. And Jamie doesn’t feel bad at all.
“No one talks to you that way,” Jamie told Jerry this morning. “No one treats you that way, giving you the finger. No one makes you cry. She got what she deserved, after the way she treated you.”
Jamie is right, Jerry thinks as he threads the new light bulb into the socket.
Kristina got what she deserved. But Jerry is going to miss her.
He gives the bulb a final twist and suddenly, the hallway is illuminated.
He looks down to see Marianne still standing there. Wow—she’s pretty. Even prettier than he thought.
“So can you come down to my place after this?” Marianne asks, smiling up at him. She has a nice smile.
“Sure I can,” Jerry tells her, and pushes Kristina from his mind like a visitor who’s overstayed her welcome.
“Kitty?” Vic calls, stepping into the house. “Kitty, I’m home.”
He hears her running footsteps overhead. “Up here, Vic!”
She appears at the top of the stairs—beautiful, familiar Kitty. She’s wearing a navy sweat suit that bags on her slender frame, and glasses instead of contact lenses. Her short, dark hair could stand to be combed, and she’s makeup-free—unusual for the middle of a weekday afternoon.
It isn’t like his wife to look so thrown together. The last thirty hours have taken their toll.
She flies down the steps and into his arms.
Given everything he’s done and seen over the years, it takes a lot to break him down. But right now, as he holds his wife tightly against him, Vic is on the verge of tears. There’s a cannonball of an ache in his throat, and swallowing only makes it worse. He doesn’t dare try to speak just yet.
Kitty pulls back to look up at his face—damage assessment.
But of course he’s fine, physically. He was in his office at FBI headquarters nearly forty miles southwest of Washington—and the Pentagon in Arlington—when yesterday’s events unfolded.
“Have you eaten? Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“No, you haven’t eaten, or no, you aren’t hungry?”
“No to both.” He’s just spent a grueling twenty-four hours poring over flight manifests and working to create profiles of the hijackers. Food is the furthest thing from his mind—along with sleep. He has a feeling it’s going to be a while before he has time for either.
“I only have a minute,” he tells Kitty. “I just have to grab a couple of things, and I wanted to see you before I go.”
She nods. Though they’ve only spoken sporadically since yesterday—basically just long enough for her to assure him that she and all four of the kids are safely accounted for—she’s been an FBI spouse long enough to know that he won’t be hanging around Quantico—much less their townhouse—any time in the near future.
“Florida?” she asks, obviously having kept tabs on the investigation. They’ve tracked several of the hijackers to flight schools down south.
“New York.”
“New York.” She takes a deep breath, exhales through puffed cheeks. “Any word on John or Rocky?”
Vic shakes his head, tries to swallow past the cannonball in his throat. Rocky’s wife answered Vic’s e-mail yesterday afternoon saying that he was safe. But O’Neill was reportedly at his post in the World Trade Center when the building came crashing down.
“Rocky wasn’t down there, but John’s missing,” Vic tells Kitty thickly. “I talked to him on the phone Monday night. Did I tell you that?”
“No. What did he say?”
Vic thinks back to that last conversation; remembering how they talked about Vic having just turned fifty, and John facing the same milestone in just a few months.
He didn’t make it.
O’Neill’s death hasn’t been confirmed, and his body might never be found, but a telltale emptiness swept through Vic yesterday morning when he watched the towers fall. He knew in that moment that his friend was gone—and in the next, as the room full of FBI agents exploded into a fresh frenzy, that he couldn’t afford the luxury of grieving the loss.
The work has to come first right now. Hell, the work always comes first.
What if, God forbid, it had been his wife or his kids in those buildings or on those planes? Would he be expected to compartmentalize his feelings and carry on?
Probably.
And I’d do it.
Annabelle did.
No one had even been aware until yesterday that she had a fiancé. An army major who worked at the Pentagon, he’s now gravely injured at the Burn Center at Washington Hospital Center.
Annabelle has been stoic and efficient as always.
“Vic?” Kitty touches his sleeve, and he looks at her, caught off guard, again, by her uncharacteristic washed-out appearance.
They’ve been together for thirty years. Most of the time, he’s convinced she knows what he’s thinking. Sometimes, he hopes that she doesn’t.
“I have to go,” he tells her gruffly.
“I know you do. Please be careful.”
She says it every time he leaves.
“Don’t worry,” he always replies.
Not this time. This time, the cannonball is clogging Vic’s throat so he just nods, and goes upstairs to get his things.
Despite two cups of black coffee—Allison brews it good and strong, just the way he likes it—Mack is starting to fade quickly. Sitting on her couch in front of the endless breaking news reports, holding the sandwich she insisted on making for him, he tries to restrain another deep yawn.
“You should sleep.”
He looks up to see her watching him, again sitting in the chair opposite the couch. Like a butterfly, she tends to alight for a minute or two, then flutters off again to accomplish some other task: making the sandwich, refilling his cup, watering her lone plant, washing out the coffee carafe . . .
Maybe she’s uncomfortable having him here. Or maybe she just likes to stay busy—one of those people with a lot of nervous energy to burn.
She’s so different from Carrie, who always spent so much of her time at home sitting, very still, lost in thought.
When they first met, that made Mack uncomfortable. He’d struggle to think of things to say, trying to draw her out. Sometimes he was rewarded; most of the time, he was not.
Eventually, he learned to just let her be, but he never stopped wishing there was a way to make his wife more . . . less . . .
Hell, he doesn’t even know what he ever wanted from Carrie.
But yesterday morning, when he was lying there pretending to be asleep, and she was getting ready to leave for work, he realized what he didn’t want.
He didn’t want to talk her into becoming the mother of his child. Even if he could get her to change her mind about what she’d said . . .
It wouldn’t be right.
She was not equipped—not at this stage in her life, anyway—to devote herself wholly to another human being. Not Mack himself, and not a baby.
Every child deserves a mother who will provide unconditional love and nurturing. He won’t provide his own child with anything less.
“Why don’t you just put your feet up and lean back for a while?”
Allison’s voice drags Mack’s thoughts away from Carrie.
He’s grateful for that. He doesn’t want to keep remembering what happened with his wife yesterday morning.
Allison turns off the television. “I’m sorry, but . . . I can’t watch any more of this. They’re not saying anything new right now, and they keep showing . . .”
“I know.” He shrugs. “I feel immune to it now.”
They both fall silent.
“Do you hear that?” Allison asks after a moment.
“Hear what?”
“The music coming from upstairs. I forgot about it, but now that the TV is off, I can hear it again.”
He listens and nods, hearing faint strains of an Alicia Keys ballad.
Allison frowns. “I hope she’s okay—Kristina, I mean.”
“I hope so t— Wait a minute. She told me about a million times that she doesn’t even have a CD player.”
“She told me the same thing.”
“Why would she say that if it wasn’t true?”
“Who knows? Maybe she’s a compulsive liar.”
“Or maybe the music is coming from the television.”
“Same song over and over?”
“Okay, maybe she went out and bought herself a CD player,” Mack says reasonably, and sets the sandwich plate on the coffee table between a stack of fashion magazines and a stack of flyers.
He can’t bear to look at Carrie’s face staring up at him from beneath the word “MISSING.” He turns his head to avoid it and finds himself locking gazes with Allison.
“I’ll go put those up,” she tells him. “You can go lie down, or just stay here if you don’t want to be . . . you know, there.”
“You don’t have to put them up,” he says, “and I don’t mind being . . . there.”
But the truth is, he does. He doesn’t want to be home, alone, thinking about what happened to Carrie.
It’s strange to be here though, too, isn’t it? Just sitting here in unfamiliar surroundings on a weekday afternoon with this barefoot blonde who popped up out of nowhere, offering to help . . .
He’d chatted with Allison in passing around the building. She was hard to miss, with her striking looks and lanky build made taller by the high-heeled shoes she was always wearing.
Only the other night, though, when he was sitting outside and she stepped out of that cab, did they have a real conversation. He can’t even remember much of what they talked about, but he knows he connected with her on some level.
Oh hell. Maybe he was flirting. He’d had a drink—two—and he was pissed at his wife, and—
And let’s face it, Allison is beautiful.
But of course he wasn’t going to do anything about that.
He still isn’t. He’s just here because . . .
“Any port in a storm.”
He looks at Allison in surprise, wondering if she somehow read his mind. “What?”
“Haven’t you ever heard that saying? Any port in a storm,” she repeats. “It means when you’re in real trouble, you accept the help you’re given, even if it’s not what you’d have chosen.”
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:
William A. Kenyon, employed by Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods, last seen on 88th floor of South Tower. If you have any information at all please call wife Stephanie at 718–555–2171.
Wife Stephanie.
Nausea churns Allison’s stomach.
Why don’t you give me a call and we’ll go out sometime? he’d asked that night in the cab.
She’d been pretty sure he wasn’t her own Mr. Right—but it didn’t occur to her that he might already be someone else’s.
She looks again at the wedding photo, rereads the text below it. If you have any information at all . . .
For a brief, crazy moment, Allison considers calling Stephanie. She wouldn’t tell her the whole truth . . .
No, she’d just say that Stephanie’s husband had done a good deed and given her a ride downtown on what will most likely turn out to have been his last night on earth. She’d paint him as a Good Samaritan who took pity on a perfect stranger . . .
But maybe Stephanie wouldn’t see it that way. Maybe she’d see it for what it really was—a married man bending over backward for a blonde in a short skirt.
Call me . . . Maybe I’ll let you buy me a drink.
Rest in peace, Bill, she thinks, turning away from the poster and Stephanie’s phone number. Your wife has enough pain to deal with. I hope she never finds out what kind of man she really married.
She rounds the corner and is startled to see that the people who are out on the sidewalks are all standing still, facing south toward the World Trade Center wreckage. Turning to look in that direction, she sees the red flashing lights of a police motorcycle escort coming up the avenue. It’s moving slowly, in somber silence, leading a large truck—a refrigerated sixteen-wheeler.
“Bodies,” she hears a bystander murmur, as others sob audibly and someone speculates that the truck is heading to the morgue.
Shaken, Allison watches it pass.
Then she goes back to traveling the bleak streets of this war-torn foreign city, putting up posters on every available surface, fitting them in like puzzle pieces among the others.
MISSING . . . HUSBAND . . . WIFE . . . FATHER . . . MOTHER . . . SON . . . DAUGHTER . . . BROTHER . . . SISTER . . .
So many lives shattered, Allison thinks again, so many people gone forever.
Yesterday, she was so sure she didn’t know any of them personally.
Today, she found out that she did—to varying degrees.
William Kenyon.
Carrie Robinson MacKenna.
What about Kristina Haines? Where is she?
If she still isn’t answering the phone or the door by the time I get back home, Allison decides, I’m going to use her key and let myself in.