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
Stepping 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—
After 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 Huds
on’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.
But Carrie was in the witness protection program, Mack reminds himself. That’s not the same thing as just having a troubled childhood.
It would be natural for someone who had lived her formative years essentially in hiding to continue to act as though she had something to hide.
But what if . . .
What if . . .
The thought flies from Mack’s head like an inadvertently released helium balloon.
He yawns, realizing that his brain is fuzzy and his limbs and spine have melded into the Tempur-Pedic mattress.
He yawns again.
Hmm . . .
Maybe the Dormipram is actually going to work.
With the house quiet and everyone—including Mack—upstairs in bed, Allison finally found a chance to get online and run Jerry Thompson’s name through a search engine. It’s something she’s been tempted to do for the last couple of days, but she just hasn’t had time.
Really? You’ve had time for other things. Reading two chapters in this month’s book club selection, sorting through the baby’s dresser to get rid of clothes he’s outgrown, having lunch with Randi. . .
All right, so maybe she was trying to avoid the ugly subject.
Maybe she thought that if she ignored what had happened, Jerry would just leave her life once and for all. But somehow, with his death, he’s come alive again in her head.
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