Sleepwalker (3 page)

“But I . . . I can’t fly a plane into a—”

“You don’t have to.” Doobie’s voice is low. So low only Jerry can hear it. “There are other ways to get there, you know? There are easy ways to get yourself out of here, Jerry.”

Jerry
.

Not Slow Boy.

“I could help you,” Doobie says. “I’m your friend. You know that, don’t you?”

Jerry swallows hard, suddenly feeling like he wants to cry. A friend—he hasn’t had a friend in a long time.

He thinks of Jamie . . .

No. Jamie wasn’t your friend. Jamie was your sister, and she died when you were kids. She didn’t come back to you all those years later, like you thought. That wasn’t real.

“Jerry,” Doobie is saying, and Jerry blinks and looks up at him.

“What?”

“We’ll talk about this later, okay? After the lights go out. I’ll help you. Okay?”

Jerry doesn’t even remember what they were talking about, but he doesn’t want to tell Doobie that, so he says, “Okay.”

Chapter Two

Glenhaven Park, Westchester County, New York

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

“M
ommy!”

“Shh!” Allison hurries to the foot of the stairs and looks up to see her older daughter leaning over the railing at the top. “Daddy’s still sleeping, honey, and I don’t want—”

“No, he’s not.” Mack appears behind their daughter, having just come out of the master bedroom, looking like he just rolled out of bed. Unshaven, barefoot, and wearing only a pair of boxer shorts, he tells Allison, “I sent her to come get you.”

“Why?”

“Daddy wants you to watch TV with him,” Hudson informs Allison matter-of-factly, and turns briskly away as if to announce,
My work here is done
.

A moment later, the door to her bedroom closes, and Allison knows that the world’s most efficient six-year-old has resumed getting ready for school, even though the bus won’t be here for over an hour.

Allison scoops up J.J. as he crawls rapidly past her.

“Al,” Mack says from the top of the stairs, above J.J.’s bellowed protest. “Come up here.”

“Gee, honey, as much as I’d love to lie around in bed and watch TV with you”—Allison lifts the wriggling baby’s pajama-clad butt to her nose, sniffs, makes a face—“he needs to be changed, and I’m heating the griddle for pancakes, and—”

“That stuff can wait. You have to see this.”

“See what?” Something about his tone makes her doubt that it’s just one of the commercial spots on his network, which is usually the case when he summons her to the television.

“Come up and I’ll show you.”

“Everything okay?”

“Just come here,” Mack tells her. “I have the TV paused.”

Ah, the beauty of the bedroom DVR. After Mack got the new job, he went out and bought three new plasma televisions and TiVos for all of them—one for the living room; one, still sitting in a box, designated for the about-to-be-painted sunroom; and one for the master bedroom.

Allison initially protested. “Dr. Cuthbert”—he’s the sleep specialist Mack recently started seeing at her insistence—“said you’re supposed to use the room only for sleeping and sex, remember?”

“Well, lately, I haven’t been using it for either of those things, so . . .”

Point taken. She’s been too tired at night for anything more strenuous than falling asleep.

“Anyway, the bedroom TV is for you,” Mack told her at the time. “This way, you can tape all those reality shows you like to watch up here, and I won’t have to sit through them downstairs.”

That sounded good in theory. But Mack’s the one who spent the whole day yesterday in front of the bedroom TV, moping around and channel surfing when he was supposed to be painting.

She didn’t nag him about it, though. She knew he hadn’t slept a wink the night before. When she got up with the baby before six, she found her husband still on the couch, watching another old comedy—but not laughing.

“Why don’t you go up to bed?” she suggested.

“Because I won’t be able to fall asleep. What’s the point?”

“The girls will be down here soon, and if they see you, they’ll want to play. If you’re not in the mood, you’d better make yourself scarce.”

He did.

It was a little better this morning. When he climbed into bed, she stirred enough to see that the bedside clock read 4:30, and when she got up an hour later, he was snoring.

Now, Allison starts up the stairs with J.J. balanced on her hip. He squirms, not happy to have been interrupted on his journey across the hardwoods, undoubtedly toward some kind of mischief. But he quickly switches gears, deciding to indulge his favorite new habit: pulling his mother’s long hair.

She hasn’t had time yet this morning to pull it back into a ponytail, her daily hairstyle these days—not because it’s flattering, by any means, but to spare herself endless tugging by J.J.’s chubby fingers, perpetually wet from teething drool.

He delights in pulling his sisters’ hair, too, leaving them much less eager to “babysit” their little brother lately.

It’s just as well. When he was immobile, the girls loved to keep an eye on him as he lounged in his bouncy seat or swing while Allison bustled around the house. Now she wouldn’t dare leave them alone in a room with J.J.-the-human-monkey.

Hudson, six, and Madison, almost four, were much more laid back at this age. Either that, or Allison has simply forgotten how challenging it is to keep a baby-on-the-move out of trouble. J.J.’s had too many close calls for comfort. Just yesterday, she found him pulling on a cord, Mack’s heavy desktop computer teetering just above his fragile little head. She caught it just in time.

“You’re a handful, you know that, J.J.? And you’ve
got
a handful. Ouch!”

The baby affectionately tightens his grip, laughing in such delight that Allison can’t help but smile through her grimace.

Sometimes she wonders whether this child would even exist had Mack been promoted last January instead of this past one.

On New Year’s Day 2010, they’d started discussing having a third child, torn between expanding their family and upsetting the already delicate balance. Their daughters were just becoming old enough to be more flexible and portable; less needy. Neither Allison nor Mack relished the idea of going back to diapers and schedules and wee-hour feedings.

In the end, they realized that parenthood has been the most rewarding thing in their world, and their desire for another child to love won out. By April, she was expecting.

The third pregnancy was more exhausting than the others had been. She had morning sickness all day, every day, for the entire nine months—boy hormones, predicted her closest friend, Randi Weber. Neither Allison nor Mack wanted to know the baby’s gender in advance, though. Everyone assumed they were “trying for a son,” but that wasn’t the case. They’d have been just as happy with another daughter, as long as the baby was healthy.

Please let this baby be healthy
, Allison prayed frequently throughout the pregnancy, worried that her life was already too good to be true.

The baby
was
healthy—though the breech delivery was excruciating. But it quickly became apparent that J.J. was a colicky infant. Now, on the verge of toddlerhood, he remains far more demanding than his sisters ever were.

It’s all worthwhile, of course, every exhausting maternal moment, but still . . .

Between the baby and the girls’ needs and Mack’s new job and the ever-challenging treadmill of life in suburban New York, Allison sometimes finds herself thinking,
It isn’t supposed to be like this
.

But of course, that isn’t really true. This is exactly how it’s supposed to be; it was part of her master plan in another lifetime. She’d not only longed to one day become a wife and mother, but she’d hungered for the breakneck velocity of New York, with its vast population of ever-striving overachievers, a welcome world away from the lazy pace and status-quo lifestyle of her rural Midwestern hometown.

Her dream became reality: she transformed herself from impoverished Nebraska schoolgirl to Manhattan fashion editor with dozens of pairs of Christian Louboutins in her closet.

But after the September 11 attacks, the things that had once mattered so much—the designer status symbols she had coveted all her life and worked so hard to eventually own—seemed frivolous.

Not only that, but she realized that she lived in a city that lay squarely in terrorism’s crosshairs. She felt as though she were taking her life in her hands every time she rode the elevator up to her office, or got on a subway, or even walked down the street.

Yes, she considered moving away in those months following the attacks. Even now, it bothers her to admit that, even to herself. After all she had survived in her childhood, she almost let fear get the better of her as an adult.

In the end, it came down to the same choice she’d faced all her life.

You can run scared, or you can dig deep for inner strength, hold your head high, and fight for what you deserve.

She’d stayed in New York, and thank goodness for that. If she hadn’t, she wouldn’t be—

“Al?” Mack calls from the bedroom. “You coming?”

“I’m coming, I’m coming.” She reaches the second floor and detours down to Hudson’s room to make sure she’s getting ready for school. She needn’t have bothered. The bed is neatly made—her daughter takes care of that the moment she climbs out of it—and Hudson is sitting on it, busy transferring things from her well-organized desk to her open backpack.

Looking into the room next door, Allison sees Madison curled up on her rumpled purple bedspread with one of her favorite books, a dog-eared copy of
Tikki Tikki Tembo
that had once belonged to—and been equally cherished by—Allison. Twirling a long strand of honey-colored hair around her index finger, Maddy is so lost in the pages she doesn’t notice her mom in the doorway.

A faint smile plays at Allison’s lips as she heads back down the hall, thinking about her budding bookworm. Maddy was thrilled to start a Monday-Wednesday-Friday preschool program last week, and the teacher was impressed that she was already reading.

The conversation reminded Allison of one she’d once overheard between Mrs. Barnes, her own kindergarten teacher, and her mother.

“Allison is already reading, Mrs. Taylor. It’s really quite impressive. Did you teach her at home?”

Naturally, her mother took credit for it—but in truth, it had been Allison’s father who taught her to read. He was the one who had bought her that cherished copy of
Tikki Tikki Tembo
and all the other books she’d loved; the one who read her bedtime stories and had her sound out the words on the pages.

Allison’s smile fades, as it always does when unwelcome memories of her father drift back to her.

But he’s completely forgotten the moment she crosses the threshold into the master bedroom and sees the image frozen on the television screen.

It’s not a television commercial, as she expected.

It’s a face. A mug shot. One she’s seen many times.

“What’s going on?” she asks Mack, heart pounding.

“I was watching the news, and—here, just sit down.” Her husband, sitting on the foot of the unmade bed, pats the mattress beside him. “I rewound it to the beginning of the story.”

She sits.

J.J. emits an ear-splitting objection.

“Shh, sweetie.” She bounces him a little on her knee, already wobbly-weak from the mug shot shock.

But J.J. has fixated on the BlackBerry that is a regular fixture in Mack’s hand. He covets it, and Allison’s iPhone, too—not that they ever let him get his sticky little fingers on their electronic devices if they can help it.

J.J. wails and strains for Mack’s BlackBerry, which Mack quickly tucks out of his son’s view. He reaches toward the pair of yesterday’s jeans that are dangling from the bedpost, pulls his key ring from the pocket, and jingles it. “Here, J.J., look! J.J.!”

Delighted, J.J. reaches for it, the BlackBerry instantly forgotten.

Hoping he’ll be kept occupied for a minute, maybe even two, Allison sets him down in a rectangle of sunlight that falls across the rug at her feet. She gently pats the tufts of fine dark hair that cover his head and he babbles happily, inspecting the keys.

“Are you ready for this?” Mack is poised with the remote aimed at the television.

“I don’t know . . . am I?”

No reply from Mack. He simply presses play.

“They called him the Nightwatcher,” a female reporter’s voiceover begins, and a chill runs down Allison’s spine.

It’s not as if she hasn’t thought about him every day for the past ten years, about her own role in putting him behind bars, but still . . .

“In the waning hours of September 11, 2001, as the shell-shocked citizens of New York City were grappling with the horrific terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, a serial killer was launching a deadly spree. By the time the NYPD arrested handyman Jerry Thompson a few days later, four people, including Thompson’s own mother, lay dead.”

The mug shot gives way to footage of Jerry Thompson being led in handcuffs up the steps of the courthouse.

“During the trial, the defense team argued that he was mentally impaired due in part to a childhood brain injury inflicted by the defendant’s own twin sister, Jamie Thompson—who in a bizarre twist was killed in an apparent random mugging in December 1991, just days after she attacked her brother.”

The scene shifts to show a school portrait of an eighth-grade girl with pigtails, her crooked front teeth revealed by a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

Allison knows the terrible story: how one night, Jamie Thompson snapped and attacked her brother with a cast-iron skillet. As the ambulance and police rushed to the scene, Jamie ran away—not seen again until her stabbed, mutilated body was found in an alleyway a few days later.

When Allison thinks about a girl that age trying to survive alone on the mean city streets . . . well, is it any wonder she didn’t?

One tragedy triggered another, and so the dominoes began to topple.

“The jury rejected the insanity defense,” the reporter continues, “convicting Thompson on four counts of second-degree murder.”

The scene has shifted again, showing footage of a handcuffed Jerry Thompson being led down the courthouse steps past a media mob.

Allison wasn’t there the day the verdict came in. She had done her part, testifying when she was called as a key witness, but she had no interest in reporting daily to the trial of her friend Kristina’s murderer.

No, she was trying to lose herself in other things: working as a fashion editor at
7th Avenue
magazine, hunting for a new apartment far from the shadow of the fallen towers and her murdered friend, establishing a friendship with the newly widowed Mack.

Carrie had been in her office high in the south tower when the first plane struck below her floor. She never had a chance.

Nor did Kristina, who was most likely sound asleep that very night when Jerry crept into her apartment—dressed as a woman, believing he was his alter ego, his dead sister, Jamie—and slaughtered her in her bed.