Nightwatcher

by Wendy Corsi Staub

  Mi hijo querido.

  My dear son.

  “Here,” Allison says gently, “let me help you.”

  The woman looks up, her face etched in sorrow and bewilderment.

  Allison gestures, and the woman, registering grateful comprehension, hands over the poster.

  Standing on her tiptoes, Allison tapes it high on the gate, between a photo of a tanned, smiling twenty-odd-year-old woman grinning and brandishing a margarita, and a close-up of a proud new daddy gazing down at a swaddled newborn.

  So many lives shattered, so many people gone forever.

  “Gracias,” the crying woman tells Allison.

  “Lo siento.”

  I’m sorry.

  With a heavy heart, she starts to turn away from the wall—then turns back, having just caught a jarring glimpse of a familiar face in one of the posters.

  It takes her a few moments to locate it again—a wedding portrait: glowing bride, grinning groom. He’s the one Allison vaguely recognizes, but she doesn’t place him until she reads the print below the photo:

  William A. Kenyon, employed by Keefe, Bruyette, & Woods, last seen on 88th floor of South Tower. If you have any information at all please call wife Stephanie at 718–555–2171.

  Wife Stephanie.

  Nausea churns Allison’s stomach.

  Why don’t you give me a call and we’ll go out sometime? he’d asked that night in the cab.

  She’d been pretty sure he wasn’t her own Mr. Right—but it didn’t occur to her that he might already be someone else’s.

  She looks again at the wedding photo, rereads the text below it. If you have any information at all . . .

  For a brief, crazy moment, Allison considers calling Stephanie. She wouldn’t tell her the whole truth . . .

  No, she’d just say that Stephanie’s husband had done a good deed and given her a ride downtown on what will most likely turn out to have been his last night on earth. She’d paint him as a Good Samaritan who took pity on a perfect stranger . . .

  But maybe Stephanie wouldn’t see it that way. Maybe she’d see it for what it really was—a married man bending over backward for a blonde in a short skirt.

  Call me . . . Maybe I’ll let you buy me a drink.

  Rest in peace, Bill, she thinks, turning away from the poster and Stephanie’s phone number. Your wife has enough pain to deal with. I hope she never finds out what kind of man she really married.

  She rounds the corner and is startled to see that the people who are out on the sidewalks are all standing still, facing south toward the World Trade Center wreckage. Turning to look in that direction, she sees the red flashing lights of a police motorcycle escort coming up the avenue. It’s moving slowly, in somber silence, leading a large truck—a refrigerated sixteen-wheeler.

  “Bodies,” she hears a bystander murmur, as others sob audibly and someone speculates that the truck is heading to the morgue.

  Shaken, Allison watches it pass.

  Then she goes back to traveling the bleak streets of this war-torn foreign city, putting up posters on every available surface, fitting them in like puzzle pieces among the others.

  MISSING . . . HUSBAND . . . WIFE . . . FATHER . . . MOTHER . . . SON . . . DAUGHTER . . . BROTHER . . . SISTER . . .

  So many lives shattered, Allison thinks again, so many people gone forever.

  Yesterday, she was so sure she didn’t know any of them personally.

  Today, she found out that she did—to varying degrees.

  William Kenyon.

  Carrie Robinson MacKenna.

  What about Kristina Haines? Where is she?

  If she still isn’t answering the phone or the door by the time I get back home, Allison decides, I’m going to use her key and let myself in.

  Chapter Six

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come?” Lynn asks, and Mack clenches the cell phone hard against his ear, frustrated.

  Lynn doesn’t really want to be here, in the city. He knows it, and so does she. But her guilt—big sister guilt, Catholic guilt—forces her to keep telling him she’ll be glad to get into her Volvo wagon and drive into the city to be with him in his time of need.

  “I’m positive,” he tells his sister yet again as he gets off the couch—Allison’s couch.

  He’d taken his shoes off and put his feet up, as she’d suggested before she left, but he hadn’t planned on actually falling asleep here. The next thing he knew, his ringing cell phone woke him.

  “You shouldn’t be alone, Mack.”

  “I’m fine. Listen, you’ve got the kids to take care of. You don’t need—”

  “Dan would come over and stay with them,” she cuts in. “He’s not working today. All of his patients canceled their appointments. ”

  “All of them?”

  “Do you know how many people are missing from there, Mack?”

  There, of course, is Middletown, New Jersey, where Mack’s former brother-in-law is a dentist.

  And no, he doesn’t know how many people are missing from that particular place, but before he can reply, his sister murmurs, “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “For even bringing that up. Right now, I know, the only missing person who counts is Carrie.”

  Carrie. Jaw clenched, Mack paces across the living room in his socks. As Lynn talks on, doing her best to find hope where they both know there is none, he finds himself craving a cigarette.

  Yes, he quit for Carrie’s—and their future child’s—sake, but when the pressure is on at work—or at home—he indulges in a pack of Marlboros.

  The truth, though, is that there’s not much pleasure in it anymore. Psychologically, he might still crave the experience, but physically, he’s lost his taste for tar and nicotine. It’s kind of sad, really. On some level he always thought of smoking as an old girlfriend waiting in the wings—something he could go back to, if he got really desperate.

  Well, you don’t get much more desperate than this, pal.

  Mack busies his thoughts with random details—anything so that he doesn’t have to think about cigarettes, or about his wife, about what happened to her.

  He notes the view of the street from Allison’s window, notes the significant amount of natural light in this apartment as opposed to his own apartment across the hall, notes the cozy, stylish decor straight out of a Pottery Barn catalog. He admires the richly textured fabrics in warm colors and the expertly distressed wooden furniture with contemporary Mission lines.

  There are distinct decorative touches, too—baskets, candles, a vase of fresh flowers, albeit a bit wilted. On an end table, several oversized hardcover art books are held upright between a pair of granite bookends. The nearby bookshelf is crowded with an eclectic mix of titles from recent best-sellers to the familiar vintage butter-colored spines of the Little House on the Prairie books he remembers Lynn reading when she was a girl.

  As she drones on in his ear, he looks around for framed photographs. You’d expect to find them scattered in a room like this, but there are none.

  Well, the same is true in his own place. Naturally, Carrie has no snapshots of family or old friends, and she doesn’t want Mack’s on display, either. When they were first married, he stuck a snapshot of Marcus, the boy he’d once mentored through the Big Brother program, under a magnet on the fridge.

  Marcus was in the army now, stationed in Europe, and he’d sent a smiling picture of himself wearing army fatigues. One day, Mack noticed that it had disappeared from the fridge. When he asked Carrie about it, she said she’d put it away.

  “It’s my kitchen, too,” she said. “I don’t want a total stranger looking at me every time I walk in there.”

  Last year, after Mom died, when he and his sister cleaned out their parents’ house to put it on the market, Lynn took pretty mu
ch everything that had value—sentimental, or otherwise. She offered Mack every treasure they unearthed, but he kept shaking his head, saying there was no room in his tiny Manhattan apartment for any of it.

  Not the cherry armoire made by Great-Uncle Paddy, or the lace curtains his parents had brought back from their first trip to Ireland, or his mother’s antique bone china.

  Certainly not the cherished, aging family dogs, Champ and Bruiser—the tail end, as it were, in a series of strays and rescues soft-hearted Mack brought home over the years.

  Carrie didn’t like dogs.

  Well, she claimed she was allergic, but Mack never saw evidence of that. He noticed that on the rare occasions they visited Lynn, whose canine menagerie now includes Champ and Bruiser, Carrie didn’t sneeze or wheeze. She just recoiled.

  “Are you sure you don’t want anything?” Lynn kept asking him that last day in Hoboken, and in the end he impulsively salvaged a stack of vintage ancestral photos from the wallpapered dining room wall.

  “What are you going to do with those?” Carrie asked when he brought them home.

  “Put them up?” Seeing her expression, he said, “No? Not put them up?”

  “Not put them up.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know—I don’t want them around.”

  “But why not?” It was a typical discussion for them—her stubbornly ruling something out, him trying to make sense of her reasoning.

  “I don’t know . . . They’re strangers. I’d feel like they were watching me.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t help it.”

  “Is it that you don’t have any pictures of your own?”

  “No! Maybe it just seems too . . . you know, personal, to put all that stuff out there for anyone to see.”

  She was talking about the pictures, he knew—but Mack didn’t miss the metaphor.

  “Carrie was so strong, Mack,” Lynn is saying, and he’s jolted back into the conversation. “If there was a way out of there, she would have found it.”

  “You’re the second person who’s said that to me today.”

  “Said what?”

  “How strong Carrie is.” He clears his throat. “But some of that is just a front, you know, to hide her weaknesses.”

  There’s a moment of silence on the other end of the line. “What weaknesses?”

  Mack stops pacing. Maybe it’s time to come clean—with Lynn, anyway—about Carrie Robinson’s troubled past.

  But before he can say another word, he hears a jingling of keys at the door. Allison must be back.

  “I have to go,” he tells Lynn as he hurriedly returns to the couch and sits. The furtive reaction is instinctive; he’s not sure where it comes from. Maybe he doesn’t want her to think he was snooping around her apartment.

  “Wait,” Lynn protests. “Just tell me what you mean about—”

  “Later.”

  “But—”

  “I’ll call you back in a little while.” He hangs up just as Allison opens the door.

  Seeing him with the phone in his hand, she asks expectantly, “Any news?”

  “No. That was my sister. Everything is status quo.”

  She doesn’t look surprised. She isn’t expecting him to get any news, he realizes—not good news, maybe not even bad news. Nothing definitive. Not for a long time.

  He thinks about the jet fuel that incinerated the top of Carrie’s building and everything—everyone—it encountered. He thinks of the massive destruction downtown. It’s going to take weeks for them to dig through it. Months, more likely. Maybe even years.

  The families with missing loved ones are going to have a long wait before anyone confirms anything . . . but surely the truth is painfully clear.

  “I checked the hospitals while I was out there,” Allison tells him. Her mood is noticeably more subdued; he wonders how bad it was, out on the streets today. He doesn’t want to know. Not yet.

  “Which hospitals?” he asks.

  “Saint Vincent’s, NYU Medical, Bellevue . . .”

  “She’s not in any of them. I checked yesterday and I called earlier. I know they’ve identified most of the survivors who were admitted, and . . . the ones who didn’t pull through, too. None of the ones who haven’t been identified match Carrie’s description, so . . .”

  “That doesn’t mean—”

  “I know.” He closes his eyes. “I know.”

  “At Saint Vincent’s, they told me that they just opened a crisis center for Cantor Fitzgerald employees.”

  Mack nods. A company representative called his cell phone to tell him about it a few hours ago, right after Allison left. The woman said that Howard Lutnik, the head of the company, was expected to speak to the families there sometime this afternoon. He was out of the building yesterday morning, and so he survived.

  How, Mack wonders, is he going to face all those people whose loved ones didn’t?

  “It’s at the Pierre Hotel,” Allison says, and then pauses.

  Sitting there with his eyes closed, he can feel her watching him. He can’t bring himself to meet her gaze.

  “Maybe you should go,” she says.

  “I will. Just not . . . yet.”

  Feeling Allison’s movement, Mack opens his eyes and sees her across the room, opening a desk drawer. After a moment of hunting through the contents, she closes it and opens the next one down.

  “Oh—there it is.” She pulls something out.

  “What is it?”

  “The key to Kristina’s apartment. I’m going to go up and check on her.”

  When Marianne Apostolos asked the maintenance man to come into her apartment, she figured it would be a quick, straightforward process. He’d come in, he’d get the window unstuck, he’d fix the stove, he’d get out.

  Nope. It took this guy forever to open the living room window, which had apparently been painted shut just before she moved in. He’s been tinkering in the kitchen for a couple of hours now, and she’s beginning to think either he’s stalling, or he has no idea what the hell he’s doing with the stove. He did seem a little slow—mentally slow, that is—when she spoke to him.

  Or maybe he’s just upset. Earlier, when she asked him if everyone he knew was okay in the aftermath of the attacks, he said no. He’s probably distracted by his loss. Who wouldn’t be?

  She’s got to give him credit for at least showing up for work on a day when most people—Marianne herself included—didn’t bother. As an administrative assistant for a market research firm, she’s not exactly essential personnel.

  She’s spent the day in her new, unfamiliar surroundings, trying to keep busy unpacking moving boxes, keeping an anxious eye on the clock as the afternoon wore on. She promised her mother she’d come over for dinner, because of course Ma doesn’t want to be alone one minute longer than is necessary. She never does, but especially not tonight. She’s freaking out about what happened yesterday.

  Yeah—who isn’t?

  Marianne is doing her best to keep her mind off things, but it’s not easy. Especially when the fighter jets buzz overhead and the faint smell of smoke is drifting in through the open windows.

  She can’t even close them, because the super had the hardwood floors refinished over the weekend before she moved in, and the place still reeks of varnish. It’s better to risk breathing in a hint of smoke from the burning ruins downtown than to asphyxiate on polyurethane fumes, right? Even if it is a constant reminder of what’s going on in this city.

  At least she doesn’t have cable installed yet, so she isn’t tempted to park herself in front of the television news. Which is exactly what her mother is doing.

  Ma keeps calling to cry about what happened, and to wonder what the world is coming to, and to tell Marianne to be careful.

 
“I’m always careful, Ma,” Marianne tells her. “I’ve been on my own since I was eighteen, and I know how to take care of myself.”

  Funny—for years, she thought her mother did, too. After all, the woman had raised five kids, worked full-time as a seamstress at Bond’s, and always kept things running smoothly in the same three-bedroom Broome Street apartment where she’s lived for more than half a century now.

  But after Pop died last year, Marianne discovered that her mother is virtually helpless on her own. That’s why she gave up her own apartment on the Upper West Side, to be closer—but not too close—to Ma, who expects her to come running for every little thing, as well as three check-in phone calls a day.

  “Why do I have to call you so much, Ma?” Marianne asks—often.

  The answer is always the same. “You need to make sure I didn’t fall and kill myself. If I ever don’t answer, you come right over here and let yourself in with your key.”

  “What if you’re just in the bathroom?” Marianne couldn’t resist asking.

  “Better safe than sorry. That’s why you have my key, and now I have yours.”

  Why, Marianne wonders, did I let her talk me into giving her the spare to this new place?

  All she needs is for her mother to come over and let herself in without warning.

  Ma doesn’t know about Rae, of course. She’s always asking when Marianne is going to find a nice husband and settle down.

  Marianne used to toy with the idea of coming out to her family, but the older she gets, the more she wonders why she’d put herself—and them—through the heartache. They wouldn’t accept her lifestyle, and that would hurt a lot more than it hurts her to keep certain things to herself.

  “Listen, if you’re so afraid of falling and killing yourself, Ma, you should stay off the stepladder,” Marianne advised her. “No one your age needs to worry about dusting the ceiling.”

  She was wasting her breath, of course. Cobwebs are her mother’s worst enemy.

  “Why don’t you just move back in with her?” George, the youngest of Marianne’s four older brothers, asked, clueless about Marianne’s lifestyle—certain aspects of it, anyway, that she might not want to share with their religious mother, anyway.