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
Standing 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?
So it was just the two of them, Mack and Carrie, spur of the moment in a far-off town with a justice of the peace.
Later, he realized that his judgment had been clouded by grief over his mother’s illness, both when he proposed to Carrie, and when he agreed to elope.
He should have known it would break his mother’s heart to learn, after the fact, that her only son—yes, a grown son, but still—had run off and married a girl she barely knew. Hell, a girl Mack himself barely knew.
As a result, in the scant time she had left, Maggie MacKenna never warmed up to her new daughter-in-law. She wasn’t unkind to Carrie, but she didn’t embrace her the way she had various friends—or even stray cats—Mack and his sister, Lynn, had brought home over the years. Nor did she immediately consider Carrie one of the family as she had Lynn’s ex-husband, Dan. Even after his sister separated from her ex—headed for an amicable divorce, as she likes to say, and she and Dan are living proof that such a thing exists—Dan remained more a part of Maggie MacKenna’s family than Carrie ever would be.
Mack always thought it was mostly the elopement that upset his mother, but after Maggie died last fall, Lynn revealed that their mother didn’t think Carrie was right for him.
“Mom called her a cold fish,” his sister said matter-of-factly one day as they sorted through mementos in their childhood home back in Hoboken, preparing to move their father into an assisted-living facility. “She said she would have talked you out of marrying her if you’d let her know in advance.”
Those words made him cringe—though he probably always knew on some level how his mother felt about his wife. But hearing the truth especially bothered him because it was too late to change his mother’s mind—or to share with her some of the things about Carrie she didn’t know. Things Carrie had made him swear never to tell anyone. Things that, if he’d dared break that promise to Carrie, might have made his mother feel differently about her.
But Mom is dead, and Dad—who always deferred to his wife anyway—is in his own little world now, slowly losing his mind to Alzheimer’s.<
br />
To her credit, easygoing, talkative Lynn doesn’t need reasons to like anyone. On the few occasions Carrie visited her home, Lynn tried to make her feel welcome.
Still, Mack remembers the March day the photo was taken as being particularly uncomfortable, because it was spent surrounded by his sister’s kids, all their cousins, and various relatives amid the easy, happy chaos of effortlessly established families.
Okay, maybe that’s not quite accurate; maybe parenthood is never achieved effortlessly. Particularly when the future holds amicable divorce.
But at the party, Lynn, a teacher, laughed about how she and Dan timed all three of her pregnancies so that she could deliver in March or April for optimum maternity leave. And their cousin Belinda wryly referred to her own youngest children—newborn twins—as “oops” babies. And all Mack could think was that it wasn’t fair, and he knew Carrie was thinking the same thing.
His wife’s melancholy state is clearly evident in the photograph taken that day. Carrie’s mouth is dutifully bent into a smile but her blue eyes are grim. Her brown hair falls limply past the green carnation Great-Aunt Nita had pinned to her lapel without asking. Carrie’s face looks pasty, wearing too much makeup in an effort to conceal her dark circles and blemishes—hormonal effects on her ordinarily clear complexion.
The infertility drugs have since caused considerable bloating to her face and a considerable weight gain. She’s been complaining about it, but until now, Mack hadn’t realized just how drastic the change has been.
Would anyone even recognize his missing wife from this photo?
Possibly. But he chose it only because it’s the one shot of her that fits the bill.
“You need to use a good close-up on your missing persons flier,” he was told by someone—a cop? an orderly? a FEMA volunteer?—over at NYU Medical Center. That was where Mack—along with hundreds of other distraught New Yorkers—converged this afternoon upon hearing that the hospital had received hundreds of injured victims, many without ID or even the clothes on their backs, burned beyond recognition. “For all you know,” a kindly Red Cross worker told Mack, “your wife could be among them. She could be unconscious. Unidentified.”
All day, rumors were flying among the frantic families of the missing. Everyone talked about dazed, dust-covered Trade Center employees wandering the streets in shock, some suffering from amnesia. Carrie could be one of them, people kept telling Mack. Or she could be buried alive in the wreckage. The rescuers were digging feverishly, trying to get to the trapped survivors—surely there were trapped survivors.
Realizing the paper tray is about to overflow, Mack removes the stack of fliers to make room for more. The paper is hot to the touch.
Hot.
Fire.
He puts the fliers aside and thinks of the flames that engulfed the building where his wife works.
Worked. The building is gone.
Carrie is gone.
Gone . . . gone . . . gone . . . gone . . .
The mantra runs through Mack’s brain in perfect rhythm with the copy machine.
Allison half expected to find her one-bedroom apartment buried beneath a layer of dust and debris, the windows blown out and smoke billowing in from the night.
Somehow, though, other than the blinking display on the microwave’s digital clock, everything was just as she left it this morning.
This morning, less than twenty-four hours ago—in another lifetime.
She wandered through the rooms, checking, though, just to be sure.
She gazed at the coffee cup sitting in the kitchen sink, its milky beige dregs dried in the bottom.
She drifted into the bathroom and saw the hairspray, brushes, and makeup cluttering the bathroom sink.
In the bedroom, shoes were strewn across the floor in front of her closet, having been hurriedly tugged on in her frenzied, last-minute effort to find the perfect designer heels to wear to the fashion shows. She’d model them before the mirror and then kick them off in frustration, grabbing another pair.
The woman who left here wearing designer stilettos with a four-and-a-half-inch heel never dreamed she’d be hobbling home through a war zone.
On an end table in the catalog-perfect living room, the answering machine light was flashing. There were several new messages. Three were from her brother; he left them before Allison sent him an e-mail from the office telling him she was safe.
Brett’s voice sounded increasingly worried, and in the final message Allison could hear Cindy Lou-Who in the background, shouting something about one of the towers collapsing.
The other messages were from a scant handful of friends. College friends, and New York friends, but none from Centerfield. No one back there would have her number, or care enough to track it down and check on her. Tammy Connolly, the one hometown friend who might have cared, left town long before Allison ever set her sights on New York City, and would have no idea she’s living here.
All of the messages had come in during the first hours after the attacks, before the power went out. As Allison reset the machine, she found herself idly wondering if anyone tried to call while it was out of commission and then worried when they couldn’t get through.
It would have been nice to think that there are lots of people out there who care about her.
Now, as Allison heads wearily back into her bedroom to change her clothes, she thinks about the walls she began constructing back in her childhood; walls she hasn’t been overly anxious to dismantle as an adult.
Maybe it’s time to start taking them down, start letting people in.
She sinks wearily onto the edge of the big mahogany sleigh bed, takes off the shoes at last, and hesitates, eyeing the wastebasket beneath the bedside table, wondering if she should just . . .
Uh-uh. No way.
For one thing, that would be wasteful. You don’t throw away a perfectly good, extremely expensive pair of shoes.
For another, throwing them away would be like giving up. It would mean she can’t imagine a scenario where she’d ever wear those beautiful shoes again.
Anything is possible. That’s your philosophy, remember?
She carries the shoes to her closet, pulls out the box they came in, tucks them inside wrapped in layers of tissue, and returns it to the shelf. Then she does the same with the pairs she picks up from the floor, all frivolous sandals with impossibly high stiletto heels.
She can’t imagine setting foot outside her apartment in anything but running shoes—or maybe combat boots—but life might get back to normal someday.
It always has, right? No matter how bad things have been. Every time she’s hit rock bottom, she’s told herself that there’s no place to go but up.
This is different, though, whispers the little voice in her head, piping up like the frightened child she never wanted to be—never allowed herself to be.
This is different from waking up one morning to learn that her father had abandoned his family, different from coming home from school to find her mother unconscious, having OD’d—again.
As far as Allison was concerned, whatever happened back in Centerfield was never anybody’s business but her own.
But this—what happened today—this happened to millions of people. It happened to everyone, really.
We’re all in it together, Allison thinks, and somehow, somewhere deep down inside, she finds comfort in the idea of camaraderie.
She thinks about her coworkers, her friends, her neighbors . . .
Kristina. Is Kristina okay?
And Mack, and his wife . . .
But it’s too late—too early—to call anyone.
Allison wearily slips out of her dress.
She’s about to toss it over the footboard of her bed. Instead, she finds a hanger, drapes the dress over it, and returns it to the closet, where it can wait until the day whe
n fashion matters again.
“Mack?”
Startled, he whirls around to see Ben Weber, the director of advertising sales. He’s Mack’s boss—and one of his closest friends.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you,” Ben says. “Any news?”
“No. Where have you been?” Mack absently notes that Ben is no longer wearing the dark suit he had on earlier. He’s changed into jeans, a Yankees cap, and a hooded Cornell sweatshirt.
“I went home to see Randi and Lexi, remember?”
Mack doesn’t remember—but he nods anyway.
He thinks back to everything that led up to this surreal act—his being here, at his deserted workplace in the middle of the night, printing out a missing persons flier for Carrie—and it’s like waking up and trying to remember the details of a nightmare.
He forces his mind back, back, all the way back to the Tuesday morning alarm clock after a restless couple of hours’ sleep. He remembers hitting the snooze button, then pretending to go back to sleep as Carrie moved around the bedroom getting ready for work, slamming things moodily.
He was going to be late, but he knew that if he got up while she was still there, he’d have to acknowledge what she’d said last night—that she was finished. That she didn’t want a baby after all.
He couldn’t deal with that—with her—that morning.
Something clicked in Mack’s brain as he lay there, avoiding his wife. It was as though he’d been looking at his life through a blurry binocular lens for months, and then all at once, things became clear.
He finally knew what he had to do.
And he did it. He did it quickly, impulsively, before he could lose his nerve.
And he didn’t regret it when it was over.
He got dressed, got to work, and just as he was getting ready to go out on his first sales call of the day, Ben burst into his office and told him about the plane hitting Carrie’s building. It was as if someone had abruptly jerked the focus dial in his brain, and everything was fuzzy again.
Still is.
Now, trying to piece together the rest of his day, Mack is dimly aware that Ben was by his side for the duration. Ben walked with him from NYU Medical to Saint Vincent’s Hospital to Bellevue. Ben helped him negotiate chaotic seas of frantic people searching fruitlessly for loved ones at the hospitals and triage centers set up at Chelsea Piers, the Staten Island Ferry terminal, Stuyvesant High School. Ben asked all the right questions, the questions Mack couldn’t seem to articulate, and he gave out information to all the right people.
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