Nightwatcher (8 page)

Nothing matters anymore.

I want to do it again.

I want to make the choice again.

I want to watch someone else die.

I want to feel someone die.

I want to make someone die.

Yes. It can happen again.

It can happen—it
will
happen—whenever, wherever, to whomever Jamie chooses.

But right now, it’s time to rest.

W
ith a deep sigh, Jerry sinks his aching head back against the pillow.

There have been many long, terrible days in his life, but this was by far the longest, and the most terrible.

He’s lived in New York City all his life. This is his home. And now . . .

Look what they did.

He closes his eyes, squeezing hard, but he can’t shut out the terrible scenes he encountered today. Smoke, and fire, and firemen dying, and all those people jumping out the windows, falling through the sky . . .

Fallin’
.

The song, his song, still echoes through his head.

It was playing in the background just a little while ago when at last,
at
last
, Kristina said the words he’s been waiting so long to hear.

Not the part about being sorry for saying no when he asked her out. That was nice to know, of course—that she hadn’t meant to hurt him.

But it was the rest of what she said that resonated with him.

He could hear the heartfelt passion in her voice; passion that made her words quaver and her pitch much higher than usual.

“Jerry, I love you!” she told him. “I’ve always loved you, and . . . and . . . and I always will. I just wanted you to know that. Okay? Okay? Oh God . . .”

She was crying, he realized. Was it because she was upset that she had hurt him when she’d turned down their date? Or because of all that had gone on today in the city, their city, the city where they’d fallen in love?

Or was she simply so overwhelmed by her feelings for him that she was sobbing with joy?

He doesn’t know. It doesn’t matter.

“I love you, too,” he told Kristina, over and over, until Jamie said it was time to say good-bye.

But maybe that wasn’t a good idea. Maybe he shouldn’t have listened to Jamie.

Maybe he should go see if Kristina’s okay. Because the more he thinks about it, the more certain he is that she’s not.

A
llison was at the Liz Lange fashion show when it all began to unfold this morning. Someone said that a plane had just crashed into the World Trade Center, and a buzz of confusion rippled through the Bryant Park tent, but the show went on as planned.

As gorgeous pregnant models strutted the catwalk in designer outfits, Allison put the plane crash out of her head and focused on the task at hand.

Afterward, alarmed by the smoke rising in the blue sky over lower Manhattan, she tried to call the office from her cell and couldn’t get through.

“Don’t bother,” a scurrying stylist called to her. “The phones are down!”

Unsettled by the growing sense of panic on the street around her, she made her way back to her office as fast as she could walk in a pair of pointy Christian Louboutin stilettos.

The lobby security post, usually manned by a joyful Rastafarian named Henry, was eerily deserted.

Upstairs, she found everyone in her department glued to a conference room television, where the alarming truth was made clear at last.

“How many people were in there?” she asked Luis, a production editor and her closest friend at work.

“Tens of thousands.”

“How many died?”

Luis shook his head. She saw that he was holding an orange plastic prescription bottle, tapping it like a maraca against the open palm of his other hand.

Seeing her looking at it, he passed it to her, a silent offering.

“What is it?” She was already twisting off the white safety cap, noticing—and not caring—that the label bore an unfamiliar name.

“Xanax. My sister’s shrink prescribes it for her but she doesn’t take it that often so she gives it to me.”

“You carry it around with you every day?”

“I keep it in my desk drawer. I thought this job was stressful but—” Luis’s brown eyes flicked to the television screen, with its doomsday images. He murmured something in Spanish, then said, “Go ahead—take it, Allison. It’ll calm you down.”

She knew, only too well, what Xanax does. She knew because it was one of the many drugs her mother used to take back in the grim old days in Centerfield.

Centerfield—if she were there right now, she wondered, would she feel safe?

Was there anyplace in the world where she would ever be able to feel safe again?

Allison—who grew up seeing what drugs, even prescription drugs, can do to a person, and swore she’d never touch them—swallowed two Xanax.

That made it better, but she still wasn’t insulated from the horror—not by any means.

Trapped in her midtown office building—well aware that any one of the landmarks around her could be a target—she could only watch the ruins burn, on TV and out the window. The subways weren’t running, the bridges and tunnels were closed. Manhattan island was truly cut off from the rest of the world.

Someone told Allison that Helene, the magazine’s formidable art director, had earlier received a hysterical phone call from her sister, trapped on a high floor of one of the towers. Allison couldn’t wrap her fuzzy head around the fact that sophisticated, intimidating Helene had reportedly lost her composure when the tower collapsed, sobbing openly before her husband showed up to escort her off to wherever the families of the victims were gathering.

It seemed everyone in the company was connected, by varying degrees, to someone who worked in the twin towers or for the FDNY or NYPD. Everyone but Allison.

She wasn’t from this area; she didn’t have a firefighter uncle or a cousin in food service at Windows on the World or a high school boyfriend who worked at a trading desk.

While she had lived in the city long enough to have made a network of friends, those relationships weren’t close enough—or meaningful enough—or maybe it was just the Xanax—for her to be frantic over their whereabouts today. Operating under the assumption that none of them would have reason, in the course of a Tuesday morning, to have been down at the World Trade Center, she was pretty sure they were all safe.

And if she was wrong about that . . .

I don’t want to know
was her initial reaction.
Not yet. Not today.

The phones were down, but e-mail was working, and she found several worried inquiries in her in-box. There were repeated e-mails from her brother, a few from friends, and even one from Justin, her ex. As she typed out reassuring replies, she thought about all the people whose queries to loved ones in New York would remain forever unanswered.

When, mid-afternoon, word came that the commuter trains were running again out of Grand Central and Penn Station, some of Allison’s suburban colleagues left the office. Presumably, they made it home to their leafy bedroom communities in Westchester and Long Island, Connecticut and New Jersey, away from the death and the danger.

Allison stayed on, huddled in the conference room with Luis and a couple of others who lived in lower Manhattan and beyond.

No one spoke of trying to get home until well after the sun had gone down, and even then, it took a long time for anyone to actually venture out there.

“Are you leaving?” people would ask Allison, who at some point that evening had swallowed a couple more Xanax tablets to maintain the numbness.

“I’m going to wait a little longer,” she told her coworkers as, one by one, they slipped away into the strange, terrible night.

She was going to wait . . . for what? She had no idea. For another attack? For some kind of all-clear? For daybreak?

Only when everyone else had gone did Allison realize that she had no desire to spend the night alone in a strange place. The news was reporting that there were pockets of downtown neighborhoods where the power had been restored. Hers was reportedly one of them. She forced herself to go.

Out on the street, she immediately spotted a cluster of camouflage-clad, machine gun–carrying National Guard soldiers. That was when it hit her: no matter where she spent this dreadful night—in her office or in her apartment—she would be alone in a strange place.

She took a cab as far south as she could—to a roadblock at Union Square. She got out of the cab, tossed the driver a twenty-dollar bill without asking for change, and watched him speed away.

Feeling like she’d wandered onto the set of a World War II movie, she approached the soldiers and police manning the barricade.

“I live down there,” she said.

“Do you have ID?”

She handed over her New York driver’s license, grateful she’d even bothered to get one. No one drives in New York City; it’s been years since she got behind a steering wheel. But she was eager, when she first moved here, to sever her connection to Nebraska and become an official New Yorker. Thank goodness she’d endured the endless wait at the DMV on that long-ago day.

“Okay—you’re clear,” the national guardsman told her, after checking her address on the license. He waved her past the barricade.

She faltered. “But . . . what do I do?”

“You’re clear,” he repeated. “You can go home.”

“How?”

He looked down at her feet, and she got the point. There was no other way.

She started walking. Breathing smoke and dust and jet fuel fumes, she searched for the comfort of familiarity, but found nothing. Life as she knew it was over.

After the first block, she stopped to lean against a pole and take off her shoes. She removed one, set down her foot to balance on it while she took off the other, and found herself stepping on a shard of glass.

It was most likely a piece of a beer bottle. But as she picked the glass out of her flesh, a cavalry of refrigerated trucks rattled past her on their way downtown. In that moment, the horrible reality hit her all over again and she immediately put the shoe back on.

God only knew how far the wreckage of buildings and airplanes—and human remains—had scattered.

As she limped all those blocks, her skin rubbed raw against the unforgiving leather straps.

Now she’s home, her heels and toes blistered and bleeding.

In some perverse way, she welcomes the pain. Physical suffering—she can deal with that. Physical pain—that can heal.

But the other pain, the pain inflicted by catastrophic loss—that pain is seared deeply into her soul. The Xanax may be a balm, but it’s only temporary. She’ll make sure of that. She can’t—she won’t let herself—go down that self-destructive road. Not after what drugs did to her mother.

Memories are good for nothin’. . .

Right.

Just over twenty-four hours ago, she stood in this very spot on the street in front of her building, doing exactly what she’s doing right now: hunting through her purse for the keys to her apartment.

Her neighbor Mack was here. She told him about the glorious Marc Jacobs party—the last hurrah, it now seems, in a city that believed itself immune to the afflictions of the great unwashed.

God only knows if Mack is even alive tonight—rather, this morning, because it’s well past midnight now. And his wife, what about her? Carrie worked down there.

Cantor Fitzgerald. That’s the name of her company. Allison recognized it as soon as she heard it on the news earlier. A reporter said the firm occupied the top floors of the north tower.

Was Carrie there?

Did she make it out alive?

Numb with exhaustion, Allison pushes the troubling question from her mind.

She robotically unlocks the front door, crosses the threshold into the vestibule, closes the door behind her. Pausing at the row of mailboxes, she can’t imagine there might be anything in her box that hasn’t been rendered obsolete.

Magazines, sales fliers, department store credit card bills . . . it’s all so meaningless. The things that mattered most to Allison when she left this morning for the Liz Lange fashion show seem utterly insignificant now.

As she moves past the mailboxes toward the elevator, Allison hears a sound at the far end of the hall.

A door opens.

Someone comes out of the stairwell.

In the murky light, she can just make out a human shadow. Who would be lurking around the halls at this hour, on this night?

Jerry? The burglar? Insomnia-stricken Mack?

Her first guess was correct.

She watches Jerry step briefly into the splash of light from a hallway bulb before disappearing into an alcove where the door to the back alley is located. A moment later, she hears the door open quietly, and then close.

Allison presses the up button.

Several stories above, the elevator grinds into motion. She rests her forehead against the wall, waiting for it to come and carry her home.

Chapter Four

S
tanding in the dimly lit corridor outside his office, Mack watches the copy machine rhythmically spit one flier after another into the mounting stack in the tray. Carrie’s face stares up at him from the pile, frozen in an unnatural smile. Mack snapped the picture last spring, at his family’s annual Saint Patrick’s Day party, not long after they started infertility treatments.

Large gatherings are always somewhat uncomfortable for Carrie, who told him early on in their relationship that she wasn’t used to big families.

“That’s too bad,” Mack said easily, “because I have one.”

“That’s too bad,” she returned, and he remembers thinking that she was teasing.

She wasn’t.

She married him anyway, just a few months after they met. He proposed on a whim. They eloped—the only way she’d do it. She didn’t want a big family wedding like his sister and cousins, or even a small church wedding in Jersey, at his hometown parish. Anyway, his mother was dying; a big wedding, even if Mack wanted one, would have to wait until after she was gone. And after she was gone . . . what would be the point?