Sleepwalker (5 page)

Beautiful days like this one are rare here in Albany. Maybe the blue skies and sunshine are a good omen for what lies ahead.

The photos were clipped from media accounts during the trial, and later painstakingly laminated to keep them from yellowing and tearing.

Ordinarily, they’re tucked away in a big box, along with some of Jamie’s old clothing. The box is kept in the crawl space beneath the rented duplex; a crawl space that—come to think of it—might just come in handy for other things in the weeks ahead.

But don’t get ahead of yourself. You don’t know yet how you’re going to do what has to be done, you only know that it’s time to begin.

Now the box, with clothes inside, sits open on the floor beside the table littered with photographs of Rocky Manzillo and Allison MacKenna.

And what about the prison guard on duty that night on the cell block, the one who should have been watching over Jerry, making sure he didn’t harm himself?

No photos of him; no idea who he is.

But it won’t be hard to find out.

Meanwhile . . .

The faces staring up from the table seem expectant, as if they’re waiting for their fates to be decided.

“You’re going to
pay
!” With a furious shove, Jamie sends the table over onto its side, where it teeters, then falls flat on the top with a resounding bang.

Almost immediately, there’s a thumping sound overhead.

The dour old man who rents the apartment upstairs, the man who complains about the slightest thing, is banging on the floor—the ceiling—with something, probably his stupid old shoe.

He’s never going to let this go by without further confrontation.

Dammit, dammit, dam—

Then again . . .

Hmm.

Maybe a confrontation with the old son of a bitch is just the thing to get the ball rolling again after all these years.

“D
addy?”

Startled, Mack looks up from the paint can he’s been staring at for, what . . . five minutes now? Ten?

His older daughter is standing in the doorway of the sunroom.

Hudson has long, straight blond hair that people always assume she got from her mother, unaware that Allison’s natural hair color is brunette. Their daughter’s fair coloring comes from Mack’s mother’s side of the family—though he himself has dark hair—and so do the light green eyes that are a mirror image of his.

But that’s where the resemblance to her dad stops. Hudson has elfin features, a sprinkling of freckles, and is small for her age. She also has an air of precocious confidence she didn’t inherit from either of her parents.

“I don’t know where she gets it,” Allison frequently says, shaking her head over something their firstborn has said or done.

Mack has a pretty good idea. His own mother, Maggie, had the same strong-willed flash in her Irish eyes that he so often sees in Hudson’s.

But of course, Allison wouldn’t recognize it because she never knew his mother, who died the year before they met.

His first wife met her a few times. That was enough for a terminally ill Maggie MacKenna to decide Carrie was wrong for her son.

You were right, Mom. You were so right.

Back then, though, I kept thinking that if you just got to know Carrie, just got to know what she had been through in the past . . .

But Mack never had the chance to bridge the gap between the two women in his life, and he never got the chance to tell his mother that he regretted not having talked to her before he eloped with Carrie after a whirlwind courtship. His mother died a few months later.

Now, looking back, he knows it’s no accident that after preserving his bachelorhood well into his thirties, he quite literally married the first woman who came along on the very day he got the shocking news that Mom had just six months to live. He was in no frame of mind, at that time, to begin a relationship, let alone take marriage vows.

He also understands now that he avoided discussing Carrie with Maggie because he was afraid his mother would tell him he was making the wrong choice. He didn’t want to hear that, didn’t want to face it. Somewhere deep down inside, terrified of the looming loss, he was attempting to replace a mother with a wife.

No, not even just a wife—a family. He and Carrie started trying to get pregnant right away, even before they’d exchanged vows and rings. Why waste time, they asked each other. Life was too short.

That was for damned sure.

Later, Mack would look back and wonder what might have happened if only he’d asked Maggie’s advice before eloping; if only she’d noticed he was faltering and reached out . . .

But that wasn’t their style, either of them. They were descended from a proud, unflinching clan who’d fled the poorhouses and famine of mid-nineteenth-century Galway in search of a better life in America. Their legacy: everything they’d struggled to earn—food, money, time, privacy—was far too precious to squander. Thus, Mack was raised with plenty of love, but in a family that, above all, got things done, without benefit of much soul-searching or heart-to-heart discussion.

Maggie MacKenna faced her own death as she’d faced every other challenge life had tossed her way: with grim acceptance. Mack didn’t realize until later, looking back, that he’d adopted the exact same attitude with his first marriage, determined to make the best of it.

Things are so different the second time around. How he wishes his mother had had the chance to meet Allison. Maggie would have loved her; probably would have declared that he and Allison were as right for each other as two peas in a pod, a favorite saying of hers.

Although lately . . .

It’s not that anything’s wrong between them. It’s just that they haven’t had time for each other, what with his job, the kids, all the little details involved in daily life—and they’re both always so exhausted. . . .

“Shouldn’t you have some paint on that wall by now?” Again, his daughter’s voice jars Mack back to the moment. He looks up to see Hudson gazing around the room at the stepladder, paint cans, tray, brushes, rollers, tape, drop cloths draped over the furniture and across the slate floor tiles.

“I’m about to get started,” he tells her. “It just takes a long time to do the prep work.”

Longer than it should, today, Mack realizes, noticing the angle of the sunlight falling through the glass. He rubs the burning spot between his shoulder blades. He’s operating on an hour’s sleep—so what else is new?—and his weary brain keeps drifting to the past. To Jerry Thompson, and Kristina Haines, and . . .

Carrie.

Always Carrie.

She’s been dead ten years now, but dammit, she’s going to haunt him forever.

“I can’t wait to see how the color looks on the wall,” Hudson chatters on. “I’m the one who chose it, remember?”

“How could I forget?” He smiles, thinking back to that day in the paint store. He was leaning toward plain old white, and Allison was trying to talk him into a mossy green, and then along came Hudson, the artist in the family, waving a paper swatch in a creamy shade called Buttered Popcorn.

“It should be a happy color like this,” she declared, and she was right. It should be, and it will be.

Happy
.

Absolutely.

A happy color for a happy family in a Happy House.

That’s what the Realtor called this center hall Colonial on Orchard Terrace when she pulled them up to the curb out front six years ago.

“This is a Happy House,” she proclaimed, and Allison, in the front seat of the Mercedes, turned to exchange glances with Mack, sitting in the back.

A Happy House, they’d figured out by that time, was most likely Realtor-speak for
Something is wrong with it
.

After all, the woman had called a Victorian with a leaky roof a “historic architectural masterpiece” and a raised ranch with a moldy first floor a “trove of possibility.”

This house—the Happy House, built in the 1920s, white with dark green shutters—certainly had curb appeal—and a million-dollar-plus price tag.

Allison later pointed out that the same house in Nebraska would have cost five figures instead of seven.

“But you’re paying for location. This is Westchester County, New York. Do you want to live in Nebraska?”

“You know the answer to that.”

Yes. He sure did. She didn’t even want to
visit
Nebraska.

Meanwhile, it turned out they’d bought at the peak of the market, before the economic downturn that sent real estate prices plummeting. Plummeting, as in they could probably get nine hundred thousand for the house if they had to sell it now. Of course, they don’t—and they won’t.

“I think this is my dream house,” Allison whispered to Mack that first day, as the Realtor led them along a brick walk past tall shrubs and stately old trees covered in English ivy that also climbed a white trellis and black wrought-iron lamppost.

Inside, the rooms were inviting, flooded with light. A formal dining room lay to the left of the entry hall with its curved staircase, and a formal living room to the right; fireplaces in both. Off the living room, the charmed sunroom had built-in shelves and cupboards. Across the back of the house, a large kitchen opened to a great room overlooking a sunken brick patio.

Upstairs, there were three family bedrooms, a small study, a hall bath, and the master suite, which took up half the second floor and stretched from the front of the house to the back.

Aesthetics aside, it is truly a Happy House, and that’s what Mack and Allison have called it ever since. There’s just a nice vibe here. Good energy.

“That’s because the owners didn’t get divorced or die or go bankrupt like some of the other houses we looked at,” Allison said, before they made their offer.

No, the sellers had raised three children here, now grown, and were retiring to play golf in Florida.

Someday, that will be me and Allison
, Mack thinks.

Yes, when the kids are grown—and Allison has learned to golf—and his career is behind him, that’s exactly what they’ll do. Move away, head to someplace warm and sunny, where the living is easy and reminders of the past—not
this
past, but the one that came before—are easily forgotten.

Mack can hear the
Sesame Street
theme song playing on TV in the living room. Maddy is singing along, “
Sunny day, sweepin’ the . . . clouds away . . .”

Yes, that’s it. That’s exactly it.

In the background, Allison clatters breakfast dishes in the kitchen. The baby is in there with her, banging something on his plastic high chair tray. From outside, he can hear a lawnmower, a barking dog, chirping birds.

Mack glances at the roll of blue painter’s tape on the floor, then at the baseboards and crown moldings and three walls of this room that are virtually made of paned glass. Taping off the trim is going to take hours. But maybe he can at least paint part of the wall first, so that Hudson can see it and he can feel as though he’s accomplished something.

“Okay,” he tells her, picking up a screwdriver to pry the lid off the nearest paint can, “just give me a little while to get started and you can come back in and see how it looks.”

Hudson looks at her watch—a gift she requested for her last birthday and wears daily. “But I have to go right now.”

“Go where?”

“Daddy! Where do you think? School!”

“What? Oh—right. Guess I lost track of time. You know, maybe
I
need to start wearing a watch around the house on my days off. That, or we need a couple more clocks around here. What do you think?”

“I think you should probably stop talking and start
doing
,” Hudson says, and he grins. That’s one of Allison’s favorite phrases.

“Good idea. And when you get home this afternoon, the room will be all finished. How does that sound?”

“All finished?” Hudson looks dubiously from him to the paint can to the walls. “I don’t think so, but good luck.”

He watches her skip off, then mutters, “Yeah, I don’t think so, either.”

Why did he have to make such a big deal about getting it done this week?

Because you felt guilty taking off work just because you couldn’t deal with all the hoopla in the city.

He’s never been able to deal with it. That’s why every year, right after Labor Day, he and Allison and the kids have always taken their second annual vacation: not to the Jersey Shore, but to Disney World.

Ah, yes, the happiest place on earth. An amusement park can’t completely erase the nightmarish memories of 9/11, but it helps.

They were forced to skip the trip this year, though. Not because Mack couldn’t get away—which was questionable—and not because J.J. doesn’t travel well—which he doesn’t—but because Hudson started elementary school this past week. Pulling her out of her Montessori preschool was never a problem, but other moms had warned Allison that the local school district frowns upon illegal absence.

“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 . . .