Sleepwalker (9 page)

She’s changed from jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers to sweats and slippers. It’s harder and harder to recall the fashionista he first met ten years ago—but that’s fine with him. She was a little too glamorous, he thought when they first started dating, and that intimidated him. He was, after all, a middle-class kid from Jersey.

Little did he know, back then, that Allison was a welfare kid from the Midwest.

“Sorry,” she says, “I didn’t mean to scare you. I got the kids down. What are you doing?”

He shrugs. “Just checking out the color. It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

“The paint?” She smiles. “It looks great. Hudson was right. It
is
a happy shade, you know?”

“Yeah.” Mack had been hoping, when he detoured into the sunroom on his way from the living room to the kitchen with an empty glass, that some of this golden happiness would seep into him. But standing here, all he feels is the same monochromatic melancholy that flooded him around Labor Day and refuses to recede.

It will, though, eventually. It always does.

For now, he’ll just have to live with it.

“We need to get those back up tomorrow,” Allison gestures at the corner where he’d piled the window shades before he started painting.

“I don’t know . . . don’t you think it’s kind of nice to have them uncovered? It lets the sun in.”

“During the day. But right now . . .” She indicates the three walls of exposed glass. “Anyone can see in.”

“Only if they happen to be standing in our yard. It’s not like there’s a clear view from the street.”

That’s one reason this house was so appealing to them when they bought it, having grown weary of the lack of privacy when they lived in the city. Here, dense, tall hedgerows effectively screen the borders of the property.

Catching sight of the expression on his wife’s face, Mack sighs. “What?”

She shrugs.

He sighs again.

“The thing is, Mack . . . I mean, you just never know who might be out there looking in.”

“Well, I do know that if they’re out there, they shouldn’t be. It’s private property.”

She just looks at him.

Okay. So she learned the hard way when Jerry Thompson invaded her bedroom that private property isn’t always a safe haven.

Ordinarily, he’d offer her some kind of reassurance. Right now, though, he just doesn’t have it in him. He’s utterly depleted. Sleepless night after sleepless night will do that to a person.

“I really want the shades back up,” she says. “Please?”

“Right
now
?”

The last thing he feels like doing right now is installing—or even discussing—window shades. All he wants is to climb into bed and put this emotionally grueling week behind him.

Such a simple concept: a nightly reprieve from the rigors of this world.

For him, a frustratingly elusive one.

“You can’t keep going like this,” Dr. Cuthbert cautioned him the other day, “without eventually paying a terrible price.”

The physician then ran through a litany of potential problems created by sleep deprivation, from crankiness to a weakened immune system to what might happen to his family—or someone else’s—if he continues to get behind the wheel in a state of chronic exhaustion.

“Would you drive your children if you’d had a couple of drinks, James?”

He bristled. “Never. And please call me Mack.” No one—not even his mother—has ever called him by his given name.

“Mack, drowsy driving causes over one hundred thousand traffic accidents every year. I could show you horrific photos of accident scenes where—”

“That’s okay,” Mack cut in. “I believe you. That’s why I’m here. I’ve been doing all the things you suggested and nothing works. I need something else, some kind of serious help with this.”

As he had early on, Dr. Cuthbert recommended the kind of help that comes in an orange prescription bottle.

Mack still wasn’t crazy about the idea.

“Why are you so opposed to pharmaceutical intervention?” the doctor asked.

There were two reasons, and he didn’t really want to get into the first one: that Allison’s wariness about any kind of medication—thanks to her mother’s deadly habit—has rubbed off on him over the years.

He did tell the doctor his other reservation: that after trying various over-the-counter sleep aids in the past, he always woke up feeling like his brain was swathed in cotton batting, and the grogginess lasted well into the next day.

“This medication isn’t like that,” Dr. Cuthbert promised. “You’ll wake up feeling refreshed.”

Mack fervently hopes so. But just in case, he’s held off taking it until a night—like tonight—when he doesn’t have to set an early alarm.

“Mack.” Allison touches his arm, and he looks up to see her watching him, her blue eyes concerned. “Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m fine.” He doesn’t shake her hand off, exactly, but he does move his arm to rub his burning eyes with his thumb and forefingers.

Translation:
I’m not fine, and I don’t want to be touched.

To her credit, she doesn’t hold it against him, just takes a thoughtful sip of her iced tea.

The best thing about Allison—
one
of the best things—is that she always instinctively gives him plenty of space when he needs it. That, and she doesn’t call him an asshole when he probably deserves it.

“Here—give me your glass,” she says. “I’m about to start the dishwasher. What was in it?”

“Water. Why?”

“Because you can’t mix alcohol with Dormipram, and I know you’re planning to take it tonight. I just wanted to make sure.”

“It was just water,” he says again, piqued at the implication, which is . . . ?

What? It’s not like she made any accusation.

Still, he’s feeling defensive.

“Sometimes you have a bourbon on Friday night,” she points out.

That’s true; it’s something he looks forward to after a hard week at work.

“So?”

He wants to bite his tongue the moment that word rolls off it.

Carrie used to say it all the time, in just that tone.
So?
So?
He couldn’t stand it when she did that, and he’s always made a point never to do it himself.

Then why am I saying it now?

Probably because he’s had Carrie on the brain, thanks to all the reminders, and maybe he’s channeling bad energy—
her
bad energy.

Never speak ill of the dead
, his Irish grandmother used to say—but she never mentioned that it was wrong to merely
think
ill of them.

Mack attempts—somewhat unsuccessfully—to soften his tone. “What’s wrong with having a bourbon once in a while? You drink diet iced tea every night. That’s not great for you, either.”

No, and it pisses him off that she can glibly ingest caffeine—
which, hello, happens to be a drug!—
right before bed and then sleep like a baby.

“Nothing, Mack. I didn’t say anything was wrong with a bourbon.”

To be fair to her, not only did she not say it, but she really didn’t imply it, either.

“The reason I didn’t have a drink tonight,” he goes on, not in the mood for fair, “is that I have to take the damned medicine that the damned doctor you made me see is making me take even though we all know it’s not going to help. Okay?”

He can feel his wife’s eyes on him, as if she’s gauging the pissy-ness of his mood to determine the wisdom of engaging him in further conversation.

“Okay,” Allison says after a moment. “Why don’t you just go up to bed now and take it?”

“
Now?
It’s early.”

“It’s past nine.”

“That’s early for me.”

“There’s nothing wrong with going to bed early, Mack. Trust me—people do it all the time.” She smiles gently at him.

He softens. Allison is a good wife. He loves her. He hates himself for acting this way.

He’s just worn out by everything . . .
everyone
.

People. They’re the problem. He’s been surrounded all day, from the moment he boarded the overcrowded commuter train to the city this morning, to this evening when he walked in the door and was instantly bombarded by his daughters, who were bouncing off the walls.

“They’re on a sugar high,” Allison informed him above the girls’ excited chatter. “I had lunch with Randi today and she sent me home with gigantic cookies for the girls. I didn’t want to take them, but, well you know how big-hearted Randi is . . . and how insistent. ‘
No ahguments
,’ ” she added in a perfect imitation of Randi’s New York accent—and favorite catchphrase. “Anyway, I didn’t realize they’d eaten almost all of them until it was too late. Sorry. They’re really wired.”

In the old days, Mack might have welcomed the household chaos, but tonight, he was too exhausted—mentally, physically, emotionally—to do much more than paste a smile on his face for his daughters’ sake.

They were so excited about school, and this weekend’s street fair, and Hudson had to sing the song she’d learned in music class, and Maddy, not to be outdone, wanted to read aloud to him . . .

Then the baby bumped his head on a sharp corner and started screaming, and the pasta Allison was cooking boiled over on the stove, and the phone rang a few times, and through it all, Mack’s patience wore increasingly thin.

Dinner was a harried affair, as were bath time, story time, bedtime . . .

Mack usually volunteers to tuck in the kids on weekends, but tonight, he made himself scarce and was grateful when Allison carted them all up the stairs.

Yeah. She’s pretty amazing.

But he’s too exhausted to tell her so, or that he’s sorry for being so grouchy, or that he loves her, or to even muster a smile. All he can do is yawn.

“Mack! Please. Go!”

He goes.

Chapter Four

S
tepping out of the shower, humming softly, Cora Nowak reaches for a towel. Her thoughts are on the cold beer that’s waiting for her in the fridge, and today’s episode of her favorite soap, recorded, as always, on the DVR.

She grabs a bath towel and vigorously rubs it over her dyed-black hair before wrapping it around herself sarong style. Opening the bathroom door, she’s hit with a chilly gust.

Wow—time to shut the windows. She opened a couple of them, just a few inches, after Chuck left for work. She’s always liked to let in the fresh breeze at night after breathing stale office air all day at work, but Chuck doesn’t think it’s safe to do that anymore, with the neighborhood going downhill so quickly.

“Anyone could cut the screen and come right in,” he tells Cora. “You have to keep the windows closed and locked when you’re alone at night.”

It’s so cute, the way he worries about her.

The truth is, she’s one tough cookie. She grew up in a neighborhood as rough as this one has become—even rougher—and she knows how to take care of herself. She never goes to bed with the windows open, and anyway, what Chuck doesn’t know can’t hurt him.

Shivering, she pads down the short hall to the bedroom and reaches inside the door to flick on the light—then remembers she left the shade up before she went in for her shower.

If she turns on the light, she’ll be effectively treating anyone who passes by to a peep show. Grinning at the thought of it, she walks through the darkened room to pull down the shade.

What the . . . ?

She stops short.

The shade
is
down . . . and the window is closed.

But . . . that’s strange. She could have sworn she left—

Hearing a floorboard creak behind her, Cora gasps and whirls around.

In the pool of light spilling in from the hall stands a hulking stranger.

In that first frantic instant, taking in the long hair and the clothes, Cora thinks it’s a woman.

But then the figure steps closer and she realizes with shock that the hair is a wig. It sits slightly askew atop garishly made-up masculine features.

It’s the creepiest spectacle she’s ever seen, yet she forces herself to stand her ground as he advances, her thoughts racing wildly.

She’ll get herself out of this.

She will.

She always does.

After all, she’s a tough coo—

A
fter climbing the stairs, Mack stops at Madison’s closed bedroom door.

He opens it a crack. Bathed in the glow of her nightlight, she’s already sound asleep, curled on her side, her long blond hair tousled on her pillowcase.

He steals over to her bed, kisses her head gently, and whispers, “Good night, sweetie.”

His middle child inherited her mother’s fine features and a little-girl face that’s softer and rounder and fuller than her sister’s. Where Hudson seems old and wise beyond her years, Maddy gives off a sweet naïveté that sometimes makes Mack—and, he knows, Allison as well—fear for her out in the big, bad world.

Ironic, because they named her after the avenue associated with the cutthroat advertising industry. Back when she was born, though, his career had yet to consume him. Business was booming, he was content, and since they’d already named their firstborn after the Manhattan street where they lived when they met, it seemed appropriate to follow suit with their second child. Plus, Mack thought it would be nice if both the girls’ names ended in “son,” like their mom’s.

By the time they were expecting J.J., they were over place names for their children. A sonogram had revealed the baby’s gender, and for various reasons, most of them Mack’s, they couldn’t agree on anything suitable for a boy that ended in “son.”

“Jameson,” Allison suggested one morning as she flossed her teeth and Mack lathered his face with shaving cream.

“Nah. Too close to James.”

“That’s the point. James’s . . . son.”

“No. People will confuse him with me.”

She texted him that afternoon:
I’ve got it. Emerson
.

He texted back moments later:
That’s a girl name.

A few days later, she greeted him at the door with, “Jackson. It’s perfect. It’s rugged, and manly, and—”

“And about ten people at work have kids named Jackson.”

“How about Anson?” Allison suggested that night in bed, baby name book propped on her rounded belly.

“The kids will call him Potsie.”

“What?”

“Potsie. From the TV show
Happy Days
. The actor who played him was named Anson.”

“Only you would ever possibly know that in a million years.” Allison shook her head with a laugh. “I give up on the ‘sons.’ He’s going to
be
our son. That’s enough.”

She ultimately convinced Mack that the baby should be named after him. Fittingly, J.J. is the spitting image of his daddy. Mini-Mack, Allison sometimes calls him.

Down the hall in J.J.’s room, he finds his son lying on his back in his crib, snoring softly, his little finger stuck in the corner of his mouth and the blankets kicked off.

He looks so angelic asleep that Mack has to remind himself what a handful J.J. can be—particularly when he’s overtired.

Like father, like son
, he thinks, tiptoeing out without a kiss. He doesn’t want to risk disturbing J.J., and anyway, he can’t bend low enough over the bars of the crib.

Peeking into Hudson’s room, he assumes that she, too, is out like a light. But her eyes snap open before he’s taken two steps across the pink carpet.

“What are you doing, Daddy?” she asks in a loud voice that’s not the least bit groggy.

“Shh, just tucking you in.”

“Mommy already did that.”

“Tonight, you get two tuck-ins. How lucky are you?”

She smiles. “I’m the luckiest.”

That’s their little ritual, one they’ve had for months now, every time something nice happens.

How lucky are you? I’m the luckiest.

Tonight, Mack adds a new twist.

“No, you aren’t,” he tells Hudson, and at the predictable furrowing of her blond eyebrows, he quickly adds, “
I
am. Because I get to be your dad.”

The frown is instantly replaced by a grin. Hudson snuggles contentedly into her quilt as he bends over to kiss her good night.

“I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you too, Huddy.”

Back out in the hallway, he can hear Allison down in the kitchen loading the dishwasher. She’ll probably be coming upstairs soon. She’s never exactly been a night owl, but she goes to bed earlier than ever thanks to J.J., who rises every morning long before a rooster would ever think to crow.

With a twinge of guilt, Mack hopes his wife will linger downstairs awhile longer tonight.

If she comes up, she’s going to want to know what’s wrong with me, and I’m not good at talking about my feelings. I really just want to be alone right now.

In the master bedroom, he closes the door behind him and strips down to his boxer shorts. Then he goes into the adjoining bathroom and looks at the prescription bottle.

“ ‘Take one tablet at bedtime with plenty of water,’ ” he reads aloud. “Yeah. Here goes nothing.”

He swallows a white capsule, returns to the bedroom, climbs into bed, and turns off the light.

Okay, Dormipram . . . hurry up and do your thing.

As he waits for drowsiness to overtake him, he replays the events of the evening, wondering if the kids picked up on his moodiness earlier. Probably.

But I couldn’t help it. I felt so overwhelmed by everyone and everything. I just needed a few seconds to myself. Is that so wrong?

Funny. In another lifetime—the one that came to a crashing halt more than a decade ago—it was just the opposite. Mack had more than his share of solitude and often craved human companionship. He was far lonelier during his first marriage than he’d ever been in his single life.

Carrie was not, as he felt obliged to apologetically explain to his family and friends, a “people person.” She wanted—
needed
—no one but Mack.

As a red-blooded man with a nurturing soul, he was touched—all right, flattered—by the fact that a fiercely independent woman like Carrie Robinson had chosen to let him into her life.

It was obvious to him from the moment they met that she kept the rest of the world at bay. At the time, he had no idea why. He only knew that, as a man, he was as drawn to Carrie as he had been to stray puppies and kittens as a boy, and to the emotionally bruised children he met through his volunteer work with the Big Brother organization in his early twenties.

He wanted to take her in, look after her, make up for the pain she had endured.

The pain . . .

Sometimes he still thinks about that—about Carrie’s past. He thinks about it, and he wonders, God forgive him, if the things she told him were even true.

He managed to keep her secret to himself for the duration of their marriage. But at the very end, when he realized she’d been lost in the burning rubble downtown, his willpower cracked. He told his best friend, Ben, the truth about Carrie.

A few years ago, over a couple of beers, Ben confessed that he had in turn confided Carrie’s secret to his wife—and that Randi hadn’t bought it.

“What do you mean?” Mack was taken aback, not that Ben hadn’t kept the confidence, but that he—rather, Randi—would question the integrity in what Mack had revealed.

Ben took a deep breath. “Look, this has been bothering me for a long time, and I’ve wanted to say something to you, but it always seemed too soon. Now you have Allison and the girls and you’ve moved on and I guess it doesn’t seem to matter as much . . .”

“What are you trying to say, Ben?”

“When I mentioned to Randi that you’d told me that Carrie spent her childhood in the witness protection program, she basically said that was bullshit.”

“What, she actually thought I’d
lie
to you about something like that?”

“No.”

“What?” Then, reading the expression on Ben’s face, he suddenly got it. “Oh.”

Randi—and apparently Ben, too—had concluded that
Carrie
had lied about it—to Mack.

“You’ve got to admit, it sounded far-fetched,” Ben said, and hastily added, “But I’m not saying it wasn’t true.”

Maybe not—but suddenly, he had Mack thinking it.

I guess it doesn’t seem to matter as much
, Ben had said.

He was dead wrong.

For some reason, it does matter to Mack. It matters that he’ll never know the truth about Carrie’s past, if that wasn’t it.

It’s not as though he can go back and look into a trail that’s gone cold, because there never was a trail in the first place. The few details Carrie had provided were murky. She had said—or had she implied, or had he just assumed?—that there was a mob connection; that her father had seen or said or done something he shouldn’t have. If Carrie knew what that had been, she wasn’t willing to elaborate.

And if she knew what her real name had been, or where she’d lived before her family was swept into oblivion, she wasn’t sharing that, either. Not even with her husband. She simply told him that she was so young when it happened that she didn’t remember who she or her parents had once been.

“I never asked,” she said in response to Mack’s gentle probing for the details. “What did it matter? All I knew was that I had a normal, familiar life, and then one day, I didn’t.”

Yeah. That happens. Mack certainly gets it now, if he didn’t back then.

He just wishes he had pressed Carrie for more information. But at the time, he was so relieved that there was a logical—relatively speaking—explanation for her impenetrable walls that it never occurred to him she might have made up the whole story.

Even now, all these years later . . .

Most of the time, he believes what Carrie told him.

But once in a while, ever since Ben planted the seed of doubt, he wonders. That’s all. He’s just curious. It doesn’t make a difference in his life today one way or another.

“If it bothers you that much,” Allison said when he told her about Ben’s comment and its lingering effect, “then maybe you should see what you can find out. You know—try to trace her path before you met her.”

“It doesn’t bother me
that
much. Anyway, Carrie’s parents died years ago,” he pointed out, “and she had no one else.”

“No one else that she was
aware
of. Or . . . that
you
were aware of. You never know . . . she might have had a whole family someplace, wondering what ever happened to her. Maybe they deserve to know.”

“Maybe they’re better off if they don’t,” he pointed out darkly, and that was that.

Now, lying here in the dark thinking about it all again, he finds himself wondering how he would even go about it if he wanted to find out who Carrie really was.

It’s not like he can just call up the government office in charge of the witness protection program and ask them to come clean. That’s the whole point: the people who go into the program disappear forever. Carrie and her parents had, in effect, died the day they disappeared from their old lives, and they were reborn on the day they resurfaced under their new identities.

But even then . . .

She never told Mack much about that life, either. Her parents were gone by the time he met her, and she said it was too painful to talk about her childhood. She mentioned having lived for a while in the Midwest, and he could occasionally hear it in her accent, so he knew that, at least, was the truth. But she never said where, exactly. On the few occasions he dared to ask, she shut down.

Who could blame her? She’d lived a difficult life, and she didn’t want to rehash it. He accepted that.

But that, of course, was before he met—and married—Allison.

She, too, had grown up in the Midwest and lived a difficult life. While she didn’t want to rehash it, she did share it with him. Because that’s what you do in a relationship, right? It’s only natural to tell each other about the individual journeys that led to the point where your lives converged. It helps you to understand where the other person is coming from.