His mom. Not him.
She was relieved—for his sake, she told herself, and not for hers, because after two more blocks, she was never going to see him again anyway.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “That must be hard.”
“Yeah. We just found out. The doctors say that nothing more can be done for her—they’ve run out of treatments, and so . . . she gets hospice. And I get to read this book to try to make it a little easier—at least, on me. I don’t see how anyone’s going to make it any easier on her. She’s in a lot of pain, and nobody seems to be able to help with that.”
“I’m so sorry. Really.”
“Thanks. Me too. Really.”
No wonder his eyes were so sad. No wonder he wasn’t in the mood to go out for drinks with his friends. No wonder he’d decided to go home, instead, to Jersey—to see his mom.
“Have you ever lost anyone?”
His question might have caught her off guard, but her answer was instantaneous:
“Yes.”
Maybe not in the way he meant, but loss was loss. Loss was devastating, no matter how it happened. Whether it struck out of nowhere like a sucker punch or crept in slowly and loomed with the inevitability of a funnel cloud on the prairie horizon, it was devastating. Anyone in its wake would be left raw and angry and alone, forever changed, forever fearful, forever haunted by nightmares . . .
Dream catcher, or not.
“You know what’s funny? Not funny ha-ha, but funny strange?”
“No, what?” she asked.
“When I was a kid, I used to watch all these old reruns on TV—My Three Sons, Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Bonanza—did you watch any of those shows?”
“Yes.” Growing up, she’d loved to escape into television. Even those ancient reruns. Especially those, actually, with their wholesome families and happy siblings.
The Patty Duke Show was her favorite, about identical cousins. She knew the theme song by heart, with its lyrics about a pair of matching bookends being different as night and day.
“Those shows were all about mothers who’d died and left their boys behind to be raised by their fathers. And I’d worry—nothing against my father, but I’d worry that something would happen to my mother, and I’d pray to God that she’d stick around long enough for me to grow up,” he said, maybe more to himself than to Carrie.
Praying that someone would stick around . . . ha. She knew firsthand that didn’t work.
“And she did stick around, and now I’m grown up, so I guess—” He broke off, cleared his throat. “But the thing is, I’m not ready to lose her. Are you ever? I mean, when you think about it, who can ever be ready for the worst to happen?”
She wanted to tell him that the worst could happen and even after it had, you’d still be left with the sense, forever after, that it could somehow happen again even though, of course, that was impossible.
When someone you loved was wrenched from your life, you’d lost them. You couldn’t lose them again.
But you can lose someone else, Carrie reminded herself, if you let yourself care about someone else.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m unloading all this on you.”
“You need someone to talk to.”
He tilted his head, then nodded. “You’re right. I guess it is that simple. And you’re a good listener. Women—they tend to be chatty, and interrupt, and fill all the space they possibly can. At least, most women I know. Like my sister, and . . . and a friend of mine. Ex-friend,” he added, and she got the sense that he might have just escaped a relationship with the kind of female he’d just described.
“But you,” he went on, “you wait until someone is finished speaking, and you don’t jump right in to blurt out the first thing on your mind, either. You absorb it before you comment.”
As she weighed his words, he pointed at her, grinning. “See? You’re doing it now. It’s nice to talk to someone who doesn’t just want to hear her own voice. Although . . .”
“What?” she asked, when he’d trailed into silence, wearing a wry expression.
“I guess that’s kind of ironic for me to say, since I’ve been talking your ear off for miles. You probably can’t wait to get rid of me, right?”
“Right,” she said, like she was teasing, but she half meant it. The sooner they went in opposite directions, the sooner things would be back to normal for Carrie. No more sparks of longing for things she couldn’t have.
Yet there was that other part of her that didn’t mean it at all; the wistful, foolish, lonely part that was reluctant to “get rid of him,” as he put it.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I’m getting on my own nerves tonight, too. Good thing I changed my mind about going to McSorley’s. My friends wouldn’t have been up for listening to all this—that’s for sure.”
“Maybe you need some new friends.”
“Nah, I’ve known these guys for years. It’s just me. It’s just . . . tonight . . .”
She nodded. She got it.
Tonight was different for him.
It was different for her, too.
What she didn’t realize then was that things weren’t ever going to go back to the way they were. Things had changed. For the better, she would soon come to believe.
Allison shivered—again—and Luis interrupted his lament about the latest snakeskin trend to say, “If you’re that cold, put on your coat! Who cares if it’s ugly?”
Ugly?
She sighed inwardly. Leave it to Luis.
“I’m not cold—”
“Then why are you shivering?”
“—and this coat”—she gestured with the fake-fur-collared Escada slung over the crook of her arm—“is not ugly!”
“It’s hideous.”
“It is not!”
“The poor dear is delusional,” he murmured to an imaginary companion. To Allison, he said, unconvincingly, “All right. It’s not hideous.”
“It’s not!”
“That’s what I said.”
“But you didn’t mean it.”
“Calm down, Sass.” He’d been calling her that—an abbreviated version of Sasquatch—since they left the building.
Affectionately, of course. Everything Luis did was offered with utmost affection. Even trashing the gorgeous designer coat she’d gotten for a song at a Saks end-of-season sale.
But right now, she wasn’t in the mood.
“Stop calling me Sass.”
“Sorry.” He put an arm around her shoulder. “Apology accepted?”
Why did she always find it impossible to stay peeved at Luis? “Apology accepted.”
“And if you’re cold, put on that . . . um . . . attractive . . . coat of yours.”
“I’m not cold. I told you.”
“Then why are you shivering?”
“I have no idea. I just feel funny.”
“Are you getting sick?”
“Maybe.”
The malaise had swept over her about fifteen minutes ago with the grim, all-consuming persistence of a physical illness that takes hold in an instant, accompanied by that familiar sinking feeling of grim inevitability. With a stomach bug, it was the realization that you were about to spend the better part of the next twenty-four hours on your knees.
With this chill, there was a similar feeling of foreboding; that same sensation that something unpleasant was about to happen to her.
But of course, it wasn’t true.
Unless this was some kind of weird premonition, and she was about to be hit by a crosstown bus.
She hugged herself, shivering again.
“Maybe you shouldn’t be going to class if you’re sick.”
Luis, she noticed, had removed his arm from her shoulders, considerably widening the berth between them as they walked on down Fifth Avenue toward the next intersection.
“Don’t worry. I’m not sick.”
“Then what are you? Scared?”
She hesitated.
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
Luis shot her a rare, serious glance as they stopped at the crosswalk to wait for the light at Thirty-fourth Street. “What’s wrong, Allison?”
“I just feel like something bad is going to happen.”
She expected a return quip from him, but after taking a good look at her expression, he said only, “I hope you’re wrong.”
So do I, she thought, and tilted her head back, closing her eyes briefly.
When she opened them again, she saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center, twinkling in the distance, and found herself thinking of her father.
He’d always told her to pay attention to her instincts.
Yeah, well, what did he know?
Ha. Everything about everything, if you asked him.
“He just likes to hear himself talk,” Mom used to say, rolling her eyes whenever he launched into one of his long-winded, advice-laden monologues.
And yet, ironically, when his words might have mattered the most—the day he picked up and left—he opted for silence. Not a word of explanation; no indication where he was going, or why, or how they were supposed to pay the bills and keep their heads above water without him. Not a spoken word at all, though he wrote seven of them on the scrap of paper Allison and her mother found on the kitchen table on that final morning: Can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. Good-bye.
Mom held her lighter to the paper, recklessly tossed it into the sink, and left the room. Seeing a lick of flame edging toward the curtains above the faucet, Allison had turned on the tap. Later, she’d wonder why she’d even bothered. She might as well have just let it burn—take the whole damned house with it—rather than wait for foreclosure to claim the roof over their heads, the one thing Mom had hoped to salvage from the marriage.
“Why did he do it?” she asked her mother, and herself, and—of course—Winona, the imaginary sister who came to live in Allison’s head the day her father left.
It was ironic that Allison had woken up that morning from a happy dream about having a sister, and had taken it to mean that her parents were going to have another baby. In fact, she was headed into the kitchen to tell her mother about it when she found the note saying that her father was gone.
Why? Why? Why did he do it?
Even Winona couldn’t tell her why a man would just turn his back on his wife and child one day out of the blue, leaving them destitute. Even Winona didn’t know how he could have transformed overnight from father of the year to heartless monster.
Okay—he’d been neither of those things in reality. But Allison had spent the first decade of her life loving him and the second decade hating him; in her mind, the paradox was, for too many years, the primary source of her pain. How did someone go from loving you one day to leaving you the next? How did you guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again, with the next person you allowed yourself to love, and trust?
What about her father? Did he have regrets? Was he out there somewhere even now, wondering what had ever happened to them after he left? Or didn’t he care?
Of course he didn’t care, Allison reminded herself. And I don’t care, either. Not anymore. Not in a long time. Not about him.
Yet even now, on a weirdly warm March evening in New York City, hundreds of miles—as far as she knew—and a lifetime away from her father, Allison couldn’t help but think of him anyway.
Was that why she was feeling chilled to the bone?
Once in a while, she’d catch a flicker of something—the smell of a certain aftershave, or a few notes of an old song—that stirred a long-buried memory. Sometimes, she knew right away what it was, other times, she’d find herself feeling ill at ease before she even put her finger on the cause.
Channel surfing on a recent stormy Saturday, she came across the movie Toy Story. Something about it made her vaguely uneasy, but she didn’t understand why until she realized that the Woody character was voiced by Tom Hanks—the actor who’d starred years earlier in Big, a movie she’d watched with her father on that last day, before he took off.
Tonight, she had the same inexplicably unsettled feeling, though it was tinged with foreboding. What had triggered it? An overheard snippet of conversation, a passing face that reminded her of his?
Or what if—
No. The possibility was too outlandish to even consider.
There were eight million people in this city. Even if her father happened to be here on vacation or on business or something, what were the odds that she’d run into him on the street?
Actually . . .
If you ruled out the boroughs and all the areas where tourists and visiting businessmen weren’t likely to go, you’d come down to a couple of relatively condensed Manhattan neighborhoods.
This was one of them.
Allison had to at least wonder whether, if she were anywhere in the vicinity of her own flesh and blood, some deep-seated, primal awareness might take hold.
And so, as she and Luis walked on down Fifth Avenue, she found herself scanning the faces in the crowd, looking for him in the faces of strangers. After he left, her mother had burned every photo of him, relegating his image to an increasingly dim corner of Allison’s memory.
He’d be older now—perhaps gray or balding. Would she even recognize him? If he was here somewhere, she didn’t see him, and at last, the feeling of dread began to subside.
In this part of town, the blocks just west of Fifth Avenue were wider than the crosstown blocks east of the avenue. To Carrie, it always seemed to take forever to walk along Forty-second Street to reach the intersection with Sixth. Tonight, though, covering that same distance with Mack, she felt as though they’d covered that stretch in no time.
When the “Don’t Walk” turned to “Walk” just as they reached it, meaning they didn’t have to stop, she felt a pang of regret—which was ironic, because ordinarily when that happened, she’d welcome the efficiency of not having to stop and wait.
She hated to wait. For anything.
She’d grown up waiting. For him.
For all the things she had been promised; things that never came to pass.
“You know I’m trying to spend more time with you,” Daddy had said. “I’m doing my best. Bear with me. Be patient . . .”
You’re full of shit, Daddy, she wanted to tell him—but not, of course, at first. Back then, she listened to him, believed him, and tried to do what he asked her to do.
Be patient . . .
I was patient! And you—you were full of shit!
Can I say it now, finally? I’ve been waiting a long time to tell you.
Of course, it was too late for that.
But not for everything.
Tonight, at long last, she had patience. Tonight, she wouldn’t have minded lingering at the crosswalk for a minute, prolonging the completion of her journey to the subway station at Times Square, where she would part ways with Mack.
“So I guess,” he said as they crossed the wide avenue, “it’s pointless of me to ask for your phone number then?”
Carrie’s heart skipped a beat. Unable to think of a light, flirtatious response, she said, “You can have my number if you want it.”
“Do you have a business card?”
When she shook her head, he reached into his bag again. He pulled out a pen and, after a bit of hunting, a manila folder to write on. It was full of papers, and it struck her that she didn’t even know what he did for a living.
Yet she knew that his mother was dying.
She also knew, crazy as it seemed, that there was something about this stranger that had made her feel safe even before she found out his name.
She knew, too, that she wanted to see him again—the first time she’d ever met anyone and cared whether he was just passing through her life, or might possibly make a repeat entrance.
That was more than enough reason to give him her real phone number. Well, just her work number.
Despite her connection with him, she felt protective of her c
ell number, and of her home number, too. The walls she’d built around herself were designed to keep people out; to keep herself hidden away from those who might pry. They weren’t going to come down easily—if ever.
Mack wasn’t prying, though.
He was too caught up in his own problems to pry. Maybe that was part of the appeal. Maybe that was why she found herself fervently willing him to call her when he jotted down her number and said that he would.
“Do you have a card?” she asked, and he reached into his pocket and handed one to her.
She saw that he worked in midtown, in television advertising sales.
For some reason, that made her think of Allison.
Remembering why she was here in New York, she put his card into her pocket and picked up her pace, seeing the Times Square subway station up ahead.
Mack, too, seemed to have fallen back into his own reality, silent as they covered the final block.
“Well . . . it was nice bumping into you,” he said lightly.
“You too.”
“Thanks for listening.”
What was she supposed to say to that?
You’re welcome?
Thanks for talking?
Better to not say anything at all.
Except, of course, good night.
Which she did.
As she descended the subway stairs, she forced herself not to look back over her shoulder. She had a feeling he’d already moved on, but she suspected she was meant to see him again.
See that? Daddy’s voice seemed to say, triumphantly. If you hadn’t listened to my advice—and your own instincts—you never would have met him.
Yes. Now if those same instincts could just lead her to Allison, she could set things straight—whatever that entailed—and get on with her life.
Rather, actually have a life. Build a life of her own . . .
Or, perhaps, with someone else.
A smile played at her lips as she fed her subway token into the closest turnstile.
Chapter Five
Ordinarily, McSorley’s wasn’t Mack’s idea of an appropriate restaurant for a first date. La Grenouille was much more fitting, or Daniel; maybe even Le Cirque.
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