Jamie was right.
Mama always said the same thing. She would say that if you do something wrong—especially something that causes someone else to suffer—then you have to pay the price.
Jerry sighs. It’s always been that way. It was like that long before Jamie came—which was the same day Mama left.
One morning, he woke up and she was gone, and Jamie was there. He hasn’t seen Mama since.
Jamie reminded Jerry that Mama had decided to move away.
“Remember, Jerry? She told you she wanted to go live far, far away from here. Across the ocean. Remember?”
Jerry didn’t remember, at first. But Jamie kept reminding him of it, until finally he remembered. Mama had moved away, and she had arranged for Jamie to come take care of him. Yes. That’s right. That’s how it happened. He just forgot.
As he looks down to grab the new light bulb he carefully balanced on the nearest rung, he’s startled to see someone standing at the foot of the ladder.
Grabbing the light bulb just before it falls, he manages to steady himself and the ladder. He rips off his headphones and looks down again.
The person is a woman, and she says, “I’m so sorry!”
In the shadowy hall, she looks like Kristina.
Well, maybe not her face. But she does have curly hair, kind of like Kristina, though hers is a reddish color. She’s a bit heavier-set, and she has large breasts. He can see the curve of them from here—can see right down inside her V-necked T-shirt.
“Are you the maintenance man?” she asks, then mutters, “Of course you’re the maintenance man. Why else would you be standing on a ladder fixing a light?”
Is she talking to Jerry? “I don’t know,” he says, just in case.
“You don’t know if you’re the maintenance man?”
“No, I am. But you asked why else I would be—”
“Oh, right.” She nods her head really fast, and Jerry, with interest, watches her breasts jiggle. “Never mind. What’s your name?”
“Jerry.”
“Jerry. I’m Marianne. I just moved into the back apartment on the second floor. When you’re done with that, can you please come down? I have a couple of things I need help with.”
“What things?”
“One of the windows is stuck, and I need to get it open because they just redid the floors and the fumes are pretty bad. And there’s something wrong with my stove. I think the pilot light is out, and I’m afraid I’m going to blow up the whole building—”
She catches herself. Clapping a hand over her mouth, she blocks Jerry’s view inside her shirt.
“I keep forgetting,” she says, after a few seconds, uncovering her mouth, opening up the view again. “About . . . you know. What happened yesterday.”
“It’s terrible. It’s a mess. It’s sad.”
“Did you . . . know anyone?”
“Anyone . . . ?”
She hesitates, rephrases the question. “Is everyone you know okay?”
“No,” Jerry tells her desolately, thinking about Kristina.
“I’m sorry.”
He nods. He’s sorry, too. So sorry. He feels bad it has to be this way.
And that’s strange because Jamie’s the one who did the punishing. Not Jerry. And Jamie doesn’t feel bad at all.
“No one talks to you that way,” Jamie told Jerry this morning. “No one treats you that way, giving you the finger. No one makes you cry. She got what she deserved, after the way she treated you.”
Jamie is right, Jerry thinks as he threads the new light bulb into the socket.
Kristina got what she deserved. But Jerry is going to miss her.
He gives the bulb a final twist and suddenly, the hallway is illuminated.
He looks down to see Marianne still standing there. Wow—she’s pretty. Even prettier than he thought.
“So can you come down to my place after this?” Marianne asks, smiling up at him. She has a nice smile.
“Sure I can,” Jerry tells her, and pushes Kristina from his mind like a visitor who’s overstayed her welcome.
“Kitty?” Vic calls, stepping into the house. “Kitty, I’m home.”
He hears her running footsteps overhead. “Up here, Vic!”
She appears at the top of the stairs—beautiful, familiar Kitty. She’s wearing a navy sweat suit that bags on her slender frame, and glasses instead of contact lenses. Her short, dark hair could stand to be combed, and she’s makeup-free—unusual for the middle of a weekday afternoon.
It isn’t like his wife to look so thrown together. The last thirty hours have taken their toll.
She flies down the steps and into his arms.
Given everything he’s done and seen over the years, it takes a lot to break him down. But right now, as he holds his wife tightly against him, Vic is on the verge of tears. There’s a cannonball of an ache in his throat, and swallowing only makes it worse. He doesn’t dare try to speak just yet.
Kitty pulls back to look up at his face—damage assessment.
But of course he’s fine, physically. He was in his office at FBI headquarters nearly forty miles southwest of Washington—and the Pentagon in Arlington—when yesterday’s events unfolded.
“Have you eaten? Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“No, you haven’t eaten, or no, you aren’t hungry?”
“No to both.” He’s just spent a grueling twenty-four hours poring over flight manifests and working to create profiles of the hijackers. Food is the furthest thing from his mind—along with sleep. He has a feeling it’s going to be a while before he has time for either.
“I only have a minute,” he tells Kitty. “I just have to grab a couple of things, and I wanted to see you before I go.”
She nods. Though they’ve only spoken sporadically since yesterday—basically just long enough for her to assure him that she and all four of the kids are safely accounted for—she’s been an FBI spouse long enough to know that he won’t be hanging around Quantico—much less their townhouse—any time in the near future.
“Florida?” she asks, obviously having kept tabs on the investigation. They’ve tracked several of the hijackers to flight schools down south.
“New York.”
“New York.” She takes a deep breath, exhales through puffed cheeks. “Any word on John or Rocky?”
Vic shakes his head, tries to swallow past the cannonball in his throat. Rocky’s wife answered Vic’s e-mail yesterday afternoon saying that he was safe. But O’Neill was reportedly at his post in the World Trade Center when the building came crashing down.
“Rocky wasn’t down there, but John’s missing,” Vic tells Kitty thickly. “I talked to him on the phone Monday night. Did I tell you that?”
“No. What did he say?”
Vic thinks back to that last conversation; remembering how they talked about Vic having just turned fifty, and John facing the same milestone in just a few months.
He didn’t make it.
O’Neill’s death hasn’t been confirmed, and his body might never be found, but a telltale emptiness swept through Vic yesterday morning when he watched the towers fall. He knew in that moment that his friend was gone—and in the next, as the room full of FBI agents exploded into a fresh frenzy, that he couldn’t afford the luxury of grieving the loss.
The work has to come first right now. Hell, the work always comes first.
What if, God forbid, it had been his wife or his kids in those buildings or on those planes? Would he be expected to compartmentalize his feelings and carry on?
Probably.
And I’d do it.
Annabelle did.
No one had even been aware until yesterday that she had a fiancé. An army major who worked at the Pentagon, he’s now gravely injured at the Burn Cen
ter at Washington Hospital Center.
Annabelle has been stoic and efficient as always.
“Vic?” Kitty touches his sleeve, and he looks at her, caught off guard, again, by her uncharacteristic washed-out appearance.
They’ve been together for thirty years. Most of the time, he’s convinced she knows what he’s thinking. Sometimes, he hopes that she doesn’t.
“I have to go,” he tells her gruffly.
“I know you do. Please be careful.”
She says it every time he leaves.
“Don’t worry,” he always replies.
Not this time. This time, the cannonball is clogging Vic’s throat so he just nods, and goes upstairs to get his things.
Despite two cups of black coffee—Allison brews it good and strong, just the way he likes it—Mack is starting to fade quickly. Sitting on her couch in front of the endless breaking news reports, holding the sandwich she insisted on making for him, he tries to restrain another deep yawn.
“You should sleep.”
He looks up to see her watching him, again sitting in the chair opposite the couch. Like a butterfly, she tends to alight for a minute or two, then flutters off again to accomplish some other task: making the sandwich, refilling his cup, watering her lone plant, washing out the coffee carafe . . .
Maybe she’s uncomfortable having him here. Or maybe she just likes to stay busy—one of those people with a lot of nervous energy to burn.
She’s so different from Carrie, who always spent so much of her time at home sitting, very still, lost in thought.
When they first met, that made Mack uncomfortable. He’d struggle to think of things to say, trying to draw her out. Sometimes he was rewarded; most of the time, he was not.
Eventually, he learned to just let her be, but he never stopped wishing there was a way to make his wife more . . . less . . .
Hell, he doesn’t even know what he ever wanted from Carrie.
But yesterday morning, when he was lying there pretending to be asleep, and she was getting ready to leave for work, he realized what he didn’t want.
He didn’t want to talk her into becoming the mother of his child. Even if he could get her to change her mind about what she’d said . . .
It wouldn’t be right.
She was not equipped—not at this stage in her life, anyway—to devote herself wholly to another human being. Not Mack himself, and not a baby.
Every child deserves a mother who will provide unconditional love and nurturing. He won’t provide his own child with anything less.
“Why don’t you just put your feet up and lean back for a while?”
Allison’s voice drags Mack’s thoughts away from Carrie.
He’s grateful for that. He doesn’t want to keep remembering what happened with his wife yesterday morning.
Allison turns off the television. “I’m sorry, but . . . I can’t watch any more of this. They’re not saying anything new right now, and they keep showing . . .”
“I know.” He shrugs. “I feel immune to it now.”
They both fall silent.
“Do you hear that?” Allison asks after a moment.
“Hear what?”
“The music coming from upstairs. I forgot about it, but now that the TV is off, I can hear it again.”
He listens and nods, hearing faint strains of an Alicia Keys ballad.
Allison frowns. “I hope she’s okay—Kristina, I mean.”
“I hope so t— Wait a minute. She told me about a million times that she doesn’t even have a CD player.”
“She told me the same thing.”
“Why would she say that if it wasn’t true?”
“Who knows? Maybe she’s a compulsive liar.”
“Or maybe the music is coming from the television.”
“Same song over and over?”
“Okay, maybe she went out and bought herself a CD player,” Mack says reasonably, and sets the sandwich plate on the coffee table between a stack of fashion magazines and a stack of flyers.
He can’t bear to look at Carrie’s face staring up at him from beneath the word “MISSING.” He turns his head to avoid it and finds himself locking gazes with Allison.
“I’ll go put those up,” she tells him. “You can go lie down, or just stay here if you don’t want to be . . . you know, there.”
“You don’t have to put them up,” he says, “and I don’t mind being . . . there.”
But the truth is, he does. He doesn’t want to be home, alone, thinking about what happened to Carrie.
It’s strange to be here though, too, isn’t it? Just sitting here in unfamiliar surroundings on a weekday afternoon with this barefoot blonde who popped up out of nowhere, offering to help . . .
He’d chatted with Allison in passing around the building. She was hard to miss, with her striking looks and lanky build made taller by the high-heeled shoes she was always wearing.
Only the other night, though, when he was sitting outside and she stepped out of that cab, did they have a real conversation. He can’t even remember much of what they talked about, but he knows he connected with her on some level.
Oh hell. Maybe he was flirting. He’d had a drink—two—and he was pissed at his wife, and—
And let’s face it, Allison is beautiful.
But of course he wasn’t going to do anything about that.
He still isn’t. He’s just here because . . .
“Any port in a storm.”
He looks at Allison in surprise, wondering if she somehow read his mind. “What?”
“Haven’t you ever heard that saying? Any port in a storm,” she repeats. “It means when you’re in real trouble, you accept the help you’re given, even if it’s not what you’d have chosen.”
He finds himself smiling faintly. “So are you the port? Or is your couch the port?”
“The couch is the port for you right now. Go ahead, lie down and rest for a while.”
Carrie wouldn’t have liked this, he finds himself thinking. She always felt threatened by other women, though he’d never given her reason to think he might stray.
He wouldn’t. Of course not. But sometimes, when he looks at other women, talks to other women, he wonders what his life might be like had he made a different choice.
Kristina Haines—with her dark curls and brash personality—reminds him of his college girlfriend, Sheryl. Whenever he’s talking to Kristina—which is quite often, because he’s always running into her around the building and she’s quite the sparkling conversationalist—he thinks about Sheryl, wondering about the road not taken.
Now, with Allison, Mack finds himself doing the same thing, God help him. Carrie’s the one he should be focused on right now. After what happened . . .
What kind of man am I? How am I ever going to live with myself?
Allison picks up the sheaf of flyers from the table. “I’m going to go put some bandages on my blisters, find some comfortable shoes, and go out and take care of these.” If Carrie were here, she’d be sizing up Allison, wondering why she’s being so nice.
But if Carrie were here . . .
Then I wouldn’t be.
No, Mack wouldn’t be here with Allison, letting her feed him and help him.
He keeps protesting, but the truth is, he needs her. Well, he needs someone—and right now, she’s the only one around. It’s that simple.
Out on the street, carrying the flyers and a roll of masking tape, Allison takes a deep breath.
Her lungs fill with putrid air; air that reeks of smoke and metallic industrial fumes laced with the stench of burning rubber—like a spatula that’s melted against the dishwasher’s heating coil—and, perhaps, with burning flesh.
She doesn’t know what that smells like. But all those people who died yesterday
disappeared into thin air . . . this air. The air Allison is breathing.
Trying to shut out macabre thoughts about microscopic particles that might be invading her lungs, she begins walking down the deserted block. There are parked cars along the curb, but there’s no traffic; there are no pedestrians; there is no distant rumbling of a subway train passing underground.
In the distance, she can hear sirens, and it occurs to her that they might have nothing to do with what happened yesterday. It’s too late for that. But the world is still turning; people are out there living and dying the way they always have been.
But maybe Allison was wrong yesterday. Maybe the optimistic young woman who had just spent a magical evening at an opulent fashion designer party is gone forever. She didn’t burn alive in the jet fuel fireball or disintegrate in the mountain of debris when the towers collapsed, but like all the other lost souls—hundreds? thousands?—Allison Taylor, the Allison she used to be, did not survive the attacks.
Nor did New York itself—her New York, a glittering playground for beautiful people. It’s as if the city—her city—has been transformed into the dust-layered, debris-strewn landscape of a distant planet, populated by wide-eyed, shell-shocked mortals.
She sees more and more of them as she walks a couple of blocks over to Broadway and turns north. People are out on the streets, but they aren’t in a perpetual hurry, as New Yorkers tend to be. They’re wandering, loitering, standing, staring.
Staring at the smoke still rising from lower Manhattan; staring into the pages of the New York Post, with its black headline that reads ACT OF WAR; staring at the faces that gaze out from a litter of missing flyers like the one Allison is holding.
They’re everywhere, the fliers. Hanging on buildings and poles and the blue plywood walls that shield construction sites. Hanging, some laminated and some not, around the necks of people themselves, like miniature sandwich boards.
Allison walks over to a shuttered deli whose fluted gray metal security gate is papered in flyers. She tapes Carrie’s among them, then steps back to look at the tragic patchwork of names and faces.
Hearing a sob beside her, she turns to see a middle-aged Hispanic woman struggling to reach an empty spot high on the gate. In her hand is a homemade poster with a grainy photo of a smiling young man. It’s written entirely in Spanish, but Allison took enough Spanish in school to recognize a couple of the words.
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