Sleepwalker (6 page)

By late last week, though, with the city awash in commemoration and fresh terror threats, he realized that wasn’t going to happen. There was no escaping the memories . . . not even at home in the suburbs at night.

No, especially not at night.

That’s how it’s always been for him. When the rest of the world is asleep, Mack lies awake in bed or prowls restlessly through the wee hours, torturing himself with could haves, should haves, would haves.

Especially lately.

Why can’t you just get over it once and for all? You’ve put all that behind you, moved on. You love Allison in a way that you never loved Carrie.

That, Mack thinks grimly, is part of the problem.

Whenever he thinks he’s past the guilt, something comes along to dredge it up again. Why does he let it eat away at him? He has a great life now. Crazy sometimes, exhausting, but happy. Happy family, Happy House . . . paid for by his first wife’s death.

Jaunty music is still playing in the next room.

Sunny day
 . . .

Yes. It is sunny today: it’s a beautiful Tuesday morning in September.

Just like . . .

No
.

Mack picks up a paint stirrer. He’d better get busy.

“W
hat the hell is going on down there?” Roger Krock calls from the top of the steps, not really expecting the first floor tenant to answer him.

Sure enough, all is silent below . . .
now
.

But a minute ago, there was such a loud banging noise that Roger nearly fell off the kitchen chair he was standing on. At his age, a fall from that height could easily snap a bone.

Who would look after him then?

He’s eighty years old, living alone, long retired from his janitorial job at the state capitol building a few miles away, with pensions from that and from the navy. Not much to spend his money on, though, so he adds it to the cash he’s been stashing away for years, though he’s not sure who will even inherit it when his time comes.

His brother has been gone for nearly five years, his sister for seven, and he lost his wife way back in ’96.

It’s not like he has kids and grandkids to lean on in his so-called golden years. No, he and Alice were childless. They didn’t want or expect it to be that way—they were hoping to raise a big family—but things were different back then.

If God didn’t want you to have children, you didn’t get to have them. Period. There was none of this nonsense with test tubes and women carrying other women’s babies and being injected with octuplets and whatever the hell else goes on in this day and age. People adopting from foreign countries, and all those Hollywood movie stars not even bothering to get married . . .

The world is going to hell in a handcart as far as Roger is concerned.

Anyway, being all alone in the world the way he is, he can’t afford to have any broken bones.

Yeah, and it’s not like that inconsiderate tenant downstairs ever thinks to look in on him, even when the weather is bad—which it was more often than not this past winter. His neighbor is a good thirty, forty years younger than Roger, but he doesn’t even bother to shovel the front steps and walk when it snows. He just waits for the landlord to come around and do it, and half the time that’s not until a day later.

Meals on Wheels can’t deliver when they can’t get up to the door. That means Roger resorted to canned beans on quite a few stormy days, all because of his lazy neighbor.

And now I almost fell off my damned chair because of him slamming something around down there. Well, I’m going to go down and give that jerk a piece of my mind.

Roger leaves the chair right where it is, beneath the trap door he’d just opened. He’ll get back to that later.

The trap door leads to the low attic tucked beneath the roof. This apartment comes with access to the storage area there; the one downstairs gets the basement crawl space.

The attic is better, as far as Roger is concerned. It’s a lot drier up there. God only knows what the underground dampness would do to the cash he has stashed away, much less to his magazine collection.

He’s been collecting since he was in Guantanamo sixty years ago; some of those vintage issues of
Hustler
and
Penthouse
are worth a fortune. Not that he’d sell them off, unless he absolutely had to part with them. But it’s nice to know that he has his own little nest egg up there. Of course, Alice never knew the trove existed.

If she had ever found out . . .

Roger shudders to think of her reaction.

But she never did, and now that he’s all alone, he sometimes feels like those old magazines are his only pleasure in life. Yes, and if he breaks a leg, God only knows when he’d be able to get to them again.

Grumbling to himself, he goes out into the hall, leaving the door propped open, and hits the light switch.

Nothing happens.

The damned overhead bulb is burned out again. It’s bright as a Havana beach outside, but you’d never know it if you were stuck in the hallway of this dark old building.

Depressing, that’s what it is. But Roger has lived here for years, and though he can afford to move, at his age, he doesn’t like change. Hell, he’s never liked change.

The neighborhood has gone downhill over the past decade or two, and the house has changed ownership a few times. The latest landlord doesn’t keep up with things the way the others have, but at least he hasn’t raised the rent.

Clinging to the banister, Roger clumps slowly down the steep, creaky flight of stairs, making sure his shoes land good and hard on every tread.

On the first floor, he crosses the small, shadowy vestibule and knocks on the apartment door marked 1.

No answer.

He knocks again.

“Coming,” a faint, muffled voice calls.

Footsteps inside. Odd—they sound like heels tapping on hardwoods, reminding him, with a familiar pang, of Alice.

The door opens.

Roger is taken aback—and pleasantly surprised—to see a woman standing there in the dimly lit entry hall. She’s tall, taller than Roger, who’s almost six foot, and she’s stacked, too—he can see that in the tight sweater she’s wearing.

“Yes?” she asks, in a low, husky voice.

Roger seems to have forgotten why he’s here. He seems to have forgotten how to speak, too.

“I—you—where—ah—”

“Do you want to come in?” she asks.

Roger does. He can’t seem to find his tongue to tell her, but words don’t seem necessary, because she opens the door wide.

He crosses the threshold, and she closes it behind him. Hearing her slide the dead bolt, he feels a tightening in his groin, realizing what’s about to happen. It’s been so long since he’s been intimate with a woman—for the last few years of Alice’s life she was so sick, wasting away . . .

It isn’t until he’s followed her into the next room—a room with windows, and light, where he can see her—that he realizes he was wrong about what’s going to happen.

He was wrong about a lot of things.

She’s not a woman after all.

She’s a man, and she—
he
—is holding a butcher knife.

W
ith the baby down for his nap, two more loads of laundry spinning in the washer and dryer, and Madison settled at the kitchen table with a peanut butter sandwich and a Berenstain Bears book, Allison heads for the sunroom at last.

She’s been meaning to check in on Mack all morning, but one thing led to another and she never got the chance.

Now she finds him standing on a ladder pressing a length of blue tape along the bottom edge of the crown molding. There’s a splotch of yellowish paint on one wall, but that’s it.

“How’s it going?” she asks him, and he jumps, startled. “Sorry . . . don’t fall.”

“It’s going,” he says with a shrug.

“Want some lunch? I can make you a sandwich.”

“Nah . . . I’ve got to get this finished. The taping is taking forever.”

“I can help.” She wouldn’t mind doing something constructive to take her mind off the news of Jerry Thompson’s suicide. She’s been troubled by it all morning.

“I don’t need help.”

“Mack . . .” Allison stands at the foot of the ladder. “Come on down. You can paint and I’ll finish taping.”

“I’ve got it.”

“But I have some time, and—”

“I said I’ve got it!”

Uh-oh. Major bad mood alert.

“Okay, fine.” Allison turns to go.

“Allie—”

She turns back.

Mack climbs down the ladder and rubs the spot between his shoulders. Once again, he didn’t bother to shave, and his green eyes are underscored with black circles.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I didn’t get much sleep again last night, and . . .”

“I figured.” She takes the roll of blue tape he hands her. “You need to go see Dr. Cuthbert again.”

“Not until November. I have an appointment on the twenty-fifth, remember?”

She remembers. That’s the Friday after Thanksgiving, and she’s the one who scheduled it for him, well in advance. Mack’s office is closed that day, and since the doctor only sees patients on weekdays, there aren’t many dates that work.

She’d suggested that he simply call in sick one day, and his response, predictably, was “I’m not going to lie and say I’m sick when I’m not.”

No, lying—even the kind of white lie that everyone tells—just doesn’t mesh with his moral code. Usually, that’s a quality she admires in Mack, so different from her own father, whose whole life was a lie. But sometimes, her husband’s sense of honor makes things a lot more challenging than they have to be.

“I mean you should see Dr. Cuthbert sooner than that,” Allison tells him now. “You’re home this week, and—”

“Why do I need to see him sooner? I did everything he said to do. I stopped drinking coffee after noon, I bought the Tempur-Pedic mattress that cost a fortune, I—”

“I know, but none of that seems to be enough. You can’t go on like this, not sleeping at night, grouchy during the day . . .”

“It’s been this way all my life, Allie. You know that. I’m sorry I’m grouchy.”

“I’m just worried about you.”

“I’m okay. Some days—nights—are worse than others, but I’ll live.”

“There’s no reason to for you to suffer, Mack.”

Something flashes in his eyes, and then is gone. She recognizes the expression, though.

Guilt.

“Maybe you don’t want to help yourself,” she hears herself suggesting. “Maybe you’re still trying to punish yourself.”

“For what?”

“For Carrie going off to work and dying on the very morning you told her you wanted a divorce.”

The words are harsh, but true. How many times has she heard him utter them himself?

She knows his story; knows that ten years ago on a rainy Monday night in September, Carrie told Mack she was putting an end to her infertility treatments, no longer interested in trying to conceive a child.

Mack was devastated.

The next morning, he told her their marriage was over. She walked out, and he never saw her again.

That’s a hefty burden for anyone to live with. Is it any wonder he can’t sleep at night?

“I had insomnia long before that happened, Allison,” he says evenly.

“I know, but it’s worse than ever.”

“It’ll get better. This is the anniversary. When everything dies down—”

“But you and I both know that it’s never going to go away.”

There was always something, it seemed, to bring back the pain.

A few years ago, it had been the death in Iraq of a young soldier named Marcus. Mack had mentored him years ago through his volunteer work with the Big Brother organization, and they’d stayed in touch over the years, though Allison had never met him. Mack took the news that he’d been killed pretty hard.

She had thought he might finally find some measure of closure last spring, when the mastermind behind his wife’s murder was killed in Pakistan. But Bin Laden’s death only seemed to unexpectedly dredge up the pain again, at a time when Mack was totally unprepared for it.

Looking back, Allison knows that was when Mack’s latest bout with insomnia began.

It only got worse last month when a freak earthquake struck the East Coast. Exactly like the terrorist attack just shy of ten years earlier, it hit out of nowhere on a sunny summer Tuesday. In the midst of a sales call on a high floor of the Empire State Building, Mack had—like countless other Manhattanites—flashed back to September 11. For a nerve-rattling couple of minutes, he was sure the skyscraper beneath his feet had been hit by a plane, or a bomb.

Long after he knew what had really happened, he was up all night, still shell-shocked.

“I don’t know why I can’t get it out of my head,” he told Allison. “It was just . . . I don’t know. Maybe if it hadn’t been a Tuesday. I hate Tuesdays.”

It wasn’t the first time he’d said that over the years, prone to noticing the bad things that happened on that particular day of the week. Allison had long since given up trying to convince him that just as many bad things—and good things—happened on other days of the week, but Mack didn’t buy it.

He’d met Carrie on a Tuesday, he said, and his mother had died on a Tuesday, and of course, so had Carrie . . .

And now this, today—Jerry Thompson all over the news. Dead.

“You need help, Mack,” she tells him. “You need to take care of yourself and get some rest, or the stress is going to kill you. If you won’t see Dr. Cuthbert about the sleep issues, then maybe we can find a psychiatrist—”

“No,” he cuts in quickly. “No way. I don’t need a shrink. I don’t have time for a shrink. I can’t sleep, okay? That’s my only problem.”

“It’s a big problem. You need to make an appointment to see Dr. Cuthbert again. Look, I’ll go call him right now and see if he can get you in this week—later today, or tomorrow, while you’re home.”

Mack just looks at her.

But he’s considering it. She can see it. He’s almost reached his breaking point.

She reaches out and touches him on the arm. “Come on. I love you. Let me help you. Do it for me. Okay?”

He shrugs. “Okay.”

H
unched over beneath the low ceiling of the crawl space, Jamie throws one last shovelful of dirt over the spot.