“Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” Lynn asks, and Mack clenches the cell phone hard against his ear, frustrated.
Lynn doesn’t really want to be here, in the city. He knows it, and so does she. But her guilt—big sister guilt, Catholic guilt—forces her to keep telling him she’ll be glad to get into her Volvo wagon and drive into the city to be with him in his time of need.
“I’m positive,” he tells his sister yet again as he gets off the couch—Allison’s couch.
He’d taken his shoes off and put his feet up, as she’d suggested before she left, but he hadn’t planned on actually falling asleep here. The next thing he knew, his ringing cell phone woke him.
“You shouldn’t be alone, Mack.”
“I’m fine. Listen, you’ve got the kids to take care of. You don’t need—”
“Dan would come over and stay with them,” she cuts in. “He’s not working today. All of his patients canceled their appointments. ”
“All of them?”
“Do you know how many people are missing from there, Mack?”
There, of course, is Middletown, New Jersey, where Mack’s former brother-in-law is a dentist.
And no, he doesn’t know how many people are missing from that particular place, but before he can reply, his sister murmurs, “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“For even bringing that up. Right now, I know, the only missing person who counts is Carrie.”
Carrie. Jaw clenched, Mack paces across the living room in his socks. As Lynn talks on, doing her best to find hope where they both know there is none, he finds himself craving a cigarette.
Yes, he quit for Carrie’s—and their future child’s—sake, but when the pressure is on at work—or at home—he indulges in a pack of Marlboros.
The truth, though, is that there’s not much pleasure in it anymore. Psychologically, he might still crave the experience, but physically, he’s lost his taste for tar and nicotine. It’s kind of sad, really. On some level he always thought of smoking as an old girlfriend waiting in the wings—something he could go back to, if he got really desperate.
Well, you don’t get much more desperate than this, pal.
Mack busies his thoughts with random details—anything so that he doesn’t have to think about cigarettes, or about his wife, about what happened to her.
He notes the view of the street from Allison’s window, notes the significant amount of natural light in this apartment as opposed to his own apartment across the hall, notes the cozy, stylish decor straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog. He admires the richly textured fabrics in warm colors and the expertly distressed wooden furniture with contemporary Mission lines.
There are distinct decorative touches, too—baskets, candles, a vase of fresh flowers, albeit a bit wilted. On an end table, several oversized hardcover art books are held upright between a pair of granite bookends. The nearby bookshelf is crowded with an eclectic mix of titles from recent best-sellers to the familiar vintage butter-colored spines of the Little House on the Prairie books he remembers Lynn reading when she was a girl.
As she drones on in his ear, he looks around for framed photographs. You’d expect to find them scattered in a room like this, but there are none.
Well, the same is true in his own place. Naturally, Carrie has no snapshots of family or old friends, and she doesn’t want Mack’s on display, either. When they were first married, he stuck a snapshot of Marcus, the boy he’d once mentored through the Big Brother program, under a magnet on the fridge.
Marcus was in the army now, stationed in Europe, and he’d sent a smiling picture of himself wearing army fatigues. One day, Mack noticed that it had disappeared from the fridge. When he asked Carrie about it, she said she’d put it away.
“It’s my kitchen, too,” she said. “I don’t want a total stranger looking at me every time I walk in there.”
Last year, after Mom died, when he and his sister cleaned out their parents’ house to put it on the market, Lynn took pretty much everything that had value—sentimental, or otherwise. She offered Mack every treasure they unearthed, but he kept shaking his head, saying there was no room in his tiny Manhattan apartment for any of it.
Not the cherry armoire made by Great-Uncle Paddy, or the lace curtains his parents had brought back from their first trip to Ireland, or his mother’s antique bone china.
Certainly not the cherished, aging family dogs, Champ and Bruiser—the tail end, as it were, in a series of strays and rescues soft-hearted Mack brought home over the years.
Carrie didn’t like dogs.
Well, she claimed she was allergic, but Mack never saw evidence of that. He noticed that on the rare occasions they visited Lynn, whose canine menagerie now includes Champ and Bruiser, Carrie didn’t sneeze or wheeze. She just recoiled.
“Are you sure you don’t want anything?” Lynn kept asking him that last day in Hoboken, and in the end he impulsively salvaged a stack of vintage ancestral photos from the wallpapered dining room wall.
“What are you going to do with those?” Carrie asked when he brought them home.
“Put them up?” Seeing her expression, he said, “No? Not put them up?”
“Not put them up.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know—I don’t want them around.”
“But why not?” It was a typical discussion for them—her stubbornly ruling something out, him trying to make sense of her reasoning.
“I don’t know . . . They’re strangers. I’d feel like they were watching me.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Maybe. But I can’t help it.”
“Is it that you don’t have any pictures of your own?”
“No! Maybe it just seems too . . . you know, personal, to put all that stuff out there for anyone to see.”
She was talking about the pictures, he knew—but Mack didn’t miss the metaphor.
“Carrie was so strong, Mack,” Lynn is saying, and he’s jolted back into the conversation. “If there was a way out of there, she would have found it.”
“You’re the second person who’s said that to me today.”
“Said what?”
“How strong Carrie is.” He clears his throat. “But some of that is just a front, you know, to hide her weaknesses.”
There’s a moment of silence on the other end of the line. “What weaknesses?”
Mack stops pacing. Maybe it’s time to come clean—with Lynn, anyway—about Carrie Robinson’s troubled past.
But before he can say another word, he hears a jingling of keys at the door. Allison must be back.
“I have to go,” he tells Lynn as he hurriedly returns to the couch and sits. The furtive reaction is instinctive; he’s not sure where it comes from. Maybe he doesn’t want her to think he was snooping around her apartment.
“Wait,” Lynn protests. “Just tell me what you mean about—”
“Later.”
“But—”
“I’ll call you back in a little while.” He hangs up just as Allison opens the door.
Seeing him with the phone in his hand, she asks expectantly, “Any news?”
“No. That was my sister. Everything is status quo.”
She doesn’t look surprised. She isn’t expecting him to get any news, he realizes—not good news, maybe not even bad news. Nothing definitive. Not for a long time.
He thinks about the jet fuel that incinerated the top of Carrie’s building and everything—everyone—it encountered. He thinks of the massive destruction downtown. It’s going to take weeks for them to dig through it. Months, more likely. Maybe even years.
The families with missing loved ones are going to have a long wait before anyone confirms anything . . . but surely the truth is painfully clear.
“I checked the hospitals while I was out there,” Allison tells him. Her mood is noticeably more subdued; he wonders how bad it was, out on the streets today. He doesn’t want to know. Not yet.
“Which hospitals?” he asks.
“Saint Vincent’s, NYU Medical, Bellevue . . .”
“She’s not in any of them. I checked yesterday and I called earlier. I know they’ve identified most of the survivors who were admitted, and . . . the ones who didn’t pull through, too. None of the ones who haven’t been identified match Carrie’s description, so . . .”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“I know.” He closes his eyes. “I know.”
“At Saint Vincent’s, they told me that they just opened a crisis center for Cantor Fitzgerald employees.”
Mack nods. A company representative called his cell phone to tell him about it a few hours ago, right after Allison left. The woman said that Howard Lutnik, the head of the company, was expected to speak to the families there sometime this afternoon. He was out of the building yesterday morning, and so he survived.
How, Mack wonders, is he going to face all those people whose loved ones didn’t?
“It’s at the Pierre Hotel,” Allison says, and then pauses.
Sitting there with his eyes closed, he can feel her watching him. He can’t bring himself to meet her gaze.
“Maybe you should go,” she says.
“I will. Just not . . . yet.”
Feeling Allison’s movement, Mack opens his eyes and sees her across the room, opening a desk drawer. After a moment of hunting through the contents, she closes it and opens the next one down.
“Oh—there it is.” She pulls something out.
“What is it?”
“The key to Kristina’s apartment. I’m going to go up and check on her.”
When Marianne Apostolos asked the maintenance man to come into her apartment, she figured it would be a quick, straightforward process. He’d come in, he’d get the window unstuck, he’d fix the stove, he’d get out.
Nope. It took this guy forever to open the living room window, which had apparently been painted shut just before she moved in. He’s been tinkering in the kitchen for a couple of hours now, and she’s beginning to think either he’s stalling, or he has no idea what the hell he’s doing with the stove. He did seem a little slow—mentally slow, that is—when she spoke to him.
Or maybe he’s just upset. Earlier, when she asked him if everyone he knew was okay in the aftermath of the attacks, he said no. He’s probably distracted by his loss. Who wouldn’t be?
She’s got to give him credit for at least showing up for work on a day when most people—Marianne herself included—didn’t bother. As an administrative assistant for a market research firm, she’s not exactly essential personnel.
She’s spent the day in her new, unfamiliar surroundings, trying to keep busy unpacking moving boxes, keeping an anxious eye on the clock as the afternoon wore on. She promised her mother she’d come over for dinner, because of course Ma doesn’t want to be alone one minute longer than is necessary. She never does, but especially not tonight. She’s freaking out about what happened yesterday.
Yeah—who isn’t?
Marianne is doing her best to keep her mind off things, but it’s not easy. Especially when the fighter jets buzz overhead and the faint smell of smoke is drifting in through the open windows.
She can’t even close them, because the super had the hardwood floors refinished over the weekend before she moved in, and the place still reeks of varnish. It’s better to risk breathing in a hint of smoke from the burning ruins downtown than to asphyxiate on polyurethane fumes, right? Even if it is a constant reminder of what’s going on in this city.
At least she doesn’t have cable installed yet, so she isn’t tempted to park herself in front of the television news. Which is exactly what her mother is doing.
Ma keeps calling to cry about what happened, and to wonder what the world is coming to, and to tell Marianne to be careful.
“I’m always careful, Ma,” Marianne tells her. “I’ve been on my own since I was eighteen, and I know how to take care of myself.”
Funny—for years, she thought her mother did, too. After all, the woman had raised five kids, worked full-time as a seamstress at Bond’s, and always kept things running smoothly in the same three-bedroom Broome Street apartment where she’s lived for more than half a century now.
But after Pop died last year, Marianne discovered that her mother is virtually helpless on her own. That’s why she gave up her own apartment on the Upper West Side, to be closer—but not too close—to Ma, who expects her to come running for every little thing, as well as three check-in phone calls a day.
“Why do I have to call you so much, Ma?” Marianne asks—often.
The answer is always the same. “You need to make sure I didn’t fall and kill myself. If I ever don’t answer, you come right over here and let yourself in with your key.”
“What if you’re just in the bathroom?” Marianne couldn’t resist asking.
“Better safe than sorry. That’s why you have my key, and now I have yours.”
Why, Marianne wonders, did I let her talk me into giving her the spare to this new place?
All she needs is for her mother to come over and let herself in without warning.
Ma doesn’t know about Rae, of course. She’s always asking when Marianne is going to find a nice husband and settle down.
Marianne used to toy with the idea of coming out to her family, but the older she gets, the more she wonders why she’d put herself—and them—through the heartache. They wouldn’t accept her lifestyle, and that would hurt a lot more than it hurts her to keep certain things to herself.
“Listen, if you’re so afraid of falling and killing yourself, Ma, you should stay off the stepladder,” Marianne advised her. “No one your age needs to worry about dusting the ceiling.”
She was wasting her breath, of course. Cobwebs are her mother’s worst enemy.
“Why don’t you just move back in with her?” George, the youngest of Marianne’s four older brothers, asked, clueless about Marianne’s lifestyle—certain aspects of it, anyway, that she might not want to share with their religious mother, anyway.
“Why don’t you move back in with her?” Marianne shot back.
But of course, Ma would never let that happen, even if George were willing. She’s always talking about how busy Marianne’s older brothers are with their jobs, their wives, their kids. George and Marianne are both single, but as the only daughter, Marianne is the one who’s expected to look out for her mother.
So, on September first, she moved out of her old place, dumped all her belongings in this new one, and then left with her girlfriend, Rae, on the weeklong cruise they’d planned for months. Early Sunday morning, as they sailed back into New York Harbor, a fellow passenger snapped a photo of the two of them on deck with the twin towers against a pink-streaked dawn sky in the background.
The next morning, Marianne brought the film to the one-hour development place near her office as Rae flew off to Denver on a business trip. She’s there now, stranded indefinitely—but at least she’s safe.
Marianne keeps looking at the photograph of her and Rae at sunrise just four days ago, the twin towers standing in the background like proud sentinels guarding the home port.
What if Rae’s flight had been for Tuesday morning instead of Monday? What if she’d been going from Newark to California instead of to Denver? What if, when she flies home, her flight is hijacked?
“Don’t worry,” Rae said when they spoke on the phone this morning. “I’ll be fine. Nothing’s going on here. I’m just worried about you in New York. Be safe. If anything ever happened to you . . .”
“Nothing is going to happen to me,” Marianne promised her.
She sighs, using a box cutter to slit the packing tape on the bottom of the carton she just emptied. This one was full of books she’s never had the time to read and will most certainly never have the time to read now that she’s doubled her commute to her uptown office, but she carted them all to the new apartment anyway.
After flattening the box, she adds it to the growing stack on the living room floor, then sticks her head into the kitchen.
The large-boned hulk of a maintenance guy is kneeling in front of the open oven door. He’s not tinkering, not even moving a muscle, just seems to be staring off into space.
Maybe he’s thinking about whoever it is that he lost yesterday.
She clears her throat, and still, he doesn’t move. She steps closer and realizes he’s wearing headphones. They’re attached to a Walkman clipped to his belt, and she can hear music coming from them.
She reaches out and touches his shoulder. He jumps, then sees her and pulls off the headphones.
“Sorry,” she says. “Didn’t mean to scare you again. I keep doing that to you, don’t I.”
“It’s okay, Marianne.”
Marianne?
Maybe she did introduce herself earlier, but it seems a little jarring that not only does he remember her name—she doesn’t remember his—but he actually used it. That just feels . . . overly familiar.
Or maybe you’re just overly touchy because he’s a man. And you’re not into men, and sometimes it bugs you when they’re into you. Right?
Whatever. “Um,” she says, “I have to be someplace by five, so . . .”
“I’m almost done.”
“Are you sure?”
He nods vigorously.
She checks the clock on the stove above him. Oh, crap. “Listen, I have to go get ready right now, or I’m never going to get out of here on time, and then my mother will think something horrible happened to me.”
“What? Why would she think that?”
Taken aback by his wide-eyed dismay, Marianne shrugs. “She always thinks that.”
“But why?”
He’s like a child, she realizes, suddenly feeling sorry for him. The world must be a hard place for a guy like this. A boy in a man’s body.
“Never mind. It’s just my mother. It’s how she is. Aren’t they all?”
He greets her forced smile with a troubled expression, and she wonders why the heck she’s bothering to do all this talking.
Because even though you feel sorry for him, there’s something about him that makes you nervous, that’s why.
“I’m going to go get ready. Just finish up and let yourself out, okay?” She doesn’t wait for a reply.
In the bedroom, Marianne closes the door, then, as an afterthought, presses the lock button in the middle of the knob.
It pops right out again.
Dammit—she never noticed the lock didn’t work when the Realtor took her through the apartment.
Maybe she should mention it to the maintenance guy while he’s here . . .
But then, he’s the reason she’s locking the door.
Forget it. She lives alone; she’ll never have any reason to use the lock after this. The sooner that guy gets out of here, the better.
She quickly sheds her T-shirt and jeans, changing into another T-shirt and a fresh pair of jeans. After running a brush through her hair and shoving her feet into a pair of sneakers, she grabs her shoulder bag and hurries over to the bedroom door. Throwing it open, she finds herself face-to-face with the maintenance man.
Marianne lets out a little scream. “What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry, Marianne.”
“What are you doing?” she repeats.
“I’m finished. I fixed it for you.”
“Good. Great. I told you to go ahead and let yourself out when you were done.”
“Oh.”
He doesn’t move. Obviously, he wants something.
Her heart is racing. What if . . . ?
Oh! A tip. That must be it. For a second there, she almost thought he was going to make a pass at her.
She reaches into her bag, fishes a couple of dollars from her wallet, holds them out to him. “Here,” she says. “Thank you.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a tip.” Isn’t that what you were waiting for?
He looks at it, then at her, bewildered.
What the . . . ?
“Thank you,” he says after a moment, taking the money and putting it into his pocket. But he continues to stand there.
“Look, I really have to go.”
“Do you like music?”
“Excuse me?”
“Do you like music?” He’s fumbling with his Walkman. He pops the cover, ejects the CD, and holds it out to her. “Here.”
“What is it?”
“Music. Here.”
She starts to shake her head, but he’s thrust the CD into her hand. “You’ll like it. It’s good.”
“You don’t have to—”
“I want you to have it. Okay?”
“But—”
“It’s a present. From me.”
She forces a smile. “That’s very sweet . . .” His name . . . what’s his name?
He knows yours.
Yes, and that troubles her.
“Cake,” he blurts. “Do you like cake?”
“I don’t know what you mean . . .”
“I want to have cake with you.”
It’s not a sly euphemism—not with this guy—but he is making a pass. Clumsily, and she doesn’t want to hurt him.
“That’s sweet, but . . .” She gives a little shake of her head. Ordinarily, she would just hint that she’s not interested in men, but she’s not sure he’d even grasp that concept.
“Or something else,” he goes on in a rush. “It doesn’t have to be cake. What do you like? I like hot chocolate. Do you?”
“I . . . I don’t . . .”
“What do you like?” he asks again. Demands, really, and not only is she running out of patience, but he’s setting her nerves on edge.
She glances instinctively at the apartment beyond his massive shoulders. Still not entirely familiar with the layout and traffic pattern, she wonders if she could make a break for it if she had to get away from him.
“I’m sorry,” she tells him, “I really have to go now. My mother is waiting, and worrying . . .”
“Why?”
Oh geez. “I told you—she worries. I have to go.”
“Wait . . .”
Please let me go. Maybe her trepidation is off-base, but she can’t help feeling vaguely threatened.
“Do you want to go out on a date, Marianne? Please?”
She takes a deep breath. As gently as possible, she tells him, “No. I . . . can’t.”
He just looks at her, and the pain in his gray eyes makes her more sad than anxious.
“Please . . . ?” he asks in a small, pitiful voice.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s just—”
He turns abruptly and bolts before she can attempt the explanation he wouldn’t have understood anyway. She watches him open the door and disappear into the hall. She can hear his footsteps fading away.
Shaken, she goes over to close the door, and the footsteps stop abruptly. Realizing he’s somewhere down the hall, she closes the door and dead-bolts it.
She’s not going anywhere right now. No way. Not with him lurking out there.
Conscious of Mack’s eyes on her as he sticks his feet into his shoes, Allison dials Kristina’s number again. This time—having spent the afternoon breathing the stench of death in the midst of all those grieving New Yorkers—she doesn’t really expect an answer.
Hearing a click on the other end of the line, though, she has a moment of false hope—then realizes it’s a recorded voice.
“Hi, you’ve reached Kristina. Leave a message and I’ll get right back to you.”
“Hey, are you there? It’s Allison, from downstairs. Call me when you get this.” She hangs up the phone.
“Maybe she’s screening,” Mack suggests.
“I don’t think so. I left a message yesterday. If she’s there, then she would have at least called me back after she got it, to tell me she’s okay.”
“Are you sure about that?”
Allison shrugs. It’s not as though she and Kristina are close friends—certainly not close enough for her to predict Kristina’s reaction in these circumstances. But when things like this happen, you check in on your neighbors, right? Like she did with Mack.
“Well, I haven’t heard footsteps up there,” she tells him, “so I don’t think she’s home, but if she is . . .” She toys with Kristina’s key. “I just want to know she’s okay.”
“If you let yourself into her apartment and she’s not there, you still won’t have an answer.”
“No, but I might be able to tell if she came back yesterday afternoon before she left. Then I’ll know she’s all right.”
“Yeah, well, what if she didn’t come back? That doesn’t mean something happened to her.”
“I know. But she must have been back, because the power was out most of the day, and someone turned the music on.”
It’s the music that’s bothering her, really. It’s just out of the ordinary. She can’t help but picture Kristina, all alone up there, playing the same song over and over in a catatonic stupor brought on by yesterday’s horrific events.
That’s better than thinking she might actually be a victim, of course. But still—
“Maybe there was an electrical surge,” Mack says, tying his sneakers, “and the CD player went into some crazy looping cycle on its own.”
Right. The CD player Kristina suddenly acquired since Sunday afternoon.
“I thought of that,” Allison tells him. “At least I can turn it off so that I can sleep tonight.”
Not that she didn’t manage to sleep last night in spite of the music—and the day’s drama.
But she’d had all that Xanax in her system. It probably knocked her out. Tonight, that won’t be the case.
She shouldn’t be talking about sleep, though—or the lack thereof—with Mack.
Heading for the door, she tells him, “I’m going to go up. You can hang out here for as long as you want.”
“Thanks, but I need to get back home.”
He follows her out. It probably should be an awkward moment, as they linger for a moment in the hallway between the doors to their respective apartments. Somehow, it isn’t. They might have been virtual strangers less than forty-eight hours ago, but now they’re friends. Friends who have been through hell together—and have yet to come back.
“Thanks for everything.”
“You’re welcome.”
Mack unlocks the door, and Allison starts away, then turns back to call, “Let me know if you need anything later.”
“I won’t.”
“You won’t let me know? Or you won’t need anything?”
Maybe he didn’t hear the question; maybe he did and chooses to ignore it. Without answering, he disappears into his apartment and closes the door behind him.
She takes the stairs up to the fifth floor and knocks on Kristina’s door.
Nothing but music from the other side.
“Kristina?”
No answer.
Allison puts the key into the lock.
“Kristina, I’m coming in,” she calls. “I have your keys, remember? If you’re there, and you don’t want me to come in, just tell me.”
Silence.
Allison turns the key, turns the knob, pushes the door open.
“Kristina? Are you in there? Kristina?”
She forces herself to cross the threshold. A few steps in, she can see that the bedroom door is open.
“Kristina?” she calls, walking toward it. “It’s Allison.”
She stops short.
And screams.