Sleepwalker Page 3

  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.

  Allison and Mack became two more New Yorkers trying to pick up the pieces of shattered lives that September. Two more New Yorkers drawn together by unspeakable tragedy . . .

  And somehow, we fell in love.

  But not right away. No, that would have been wrong. Though Mack had confessed to Allison that his marriage to Carrie was crumbling before she died, he had a lot of grief and guilt to work through before he was ready to move on.

  Earlier that year, Allison had endured a bitter breakup with Justin, a biologist, for whom she’d fallen hard. Bruised, regretting that she’d let someone into her life despite having promised herself that she never would, she wasn’t interested in another relationship. Ever.

  She was there for Mack when he needed her; when he didn’t, she steered clear for her own sake as well as his. She knew she was attracted to him long before anything romantic happened between them, but it felt wrong.

  Then one December night more than a year later, he kissed her—and suddenly, it felt right.

  She tries not to look back at the tragic circumstances that brought them together.

  Sometimes, though, she just can’t help it.

  She stares at the televised photo of Sullivan Correctional Facility, where Jerry Thompson is serving a life sentence. Why is the media dredging all this up again? Is it just another dismal footnote on the heels of the wall-to-wall retrospective September 11 coverage?

  Or is it something much more ominous?

  How many nights has she lain awake—thanks, in part, to her husband’s chronic tossing and turning—and imagined what would happen if Jerry were to somehow escape from the maximum security prison? How many times has she imagined him creeping into her bedroom the way he did the others?

  The great irony in all of this is that she never would have believed—even though she saw him at the murder scene that night—that he was capable of murder. She didn’t know him well, but her gut instinct told her he was innocent.

  Then he confessed.

  So much for my gut instinct.

  That same undependable gut instinct had also made her wary of Mack in the beginning. She’d actually entertained the fleeting notion that he might have been having an affair with Kristina, and that he’d killed her in a fit of violent passion or passionate violence or . . .

  God only knows what I was thinking. But I couldn’t have been more wrong about Mack.

  Or about Jerry.

  He’s a cold-blooded murderer, and now he’s back in the news. Why? Did he break out of prison?

  But there’s a witness notification program. She would have been told immediately if Jerry were back out on the street.

  Then again, no system is foolproof.

  She looks at Mack, watching the screen intently, and asks, “What if—”

  “Shh, wait, listen!”

  Allison clamps her mouth shut.

  “This past weekend marked ten years not just since the worst terror attack in our nation’s history,” the reporter is saying, “but ten years since Jerry Thompson’s murderous rampage through a scarred, burning city. Sometime in the wee hours of September 12, however—perhaps to exactly the hour, the very minute, that he murdered aspiring Broadway dancer Kristina Haines ten years ago—Jerry Thompson took his own life.”

  Allison clasps a hand over her mouth, her blue eyes wide.

  Again, she looks at Mack. This time, he meets her gaze, nods slowly.

  “He’s dead.” For some reason, she finds it necessary to say it aloud.

  “Yeah.” Mack’s expression is so relieved that she knows she wasn’t the only one who’s always worried that Jerry might escape one day and come after her again.

  But they don’t have to worry anymore. Thank God. Thank God.

  It’s over at last.

  And so it begins . . . again.

  The need—the overpowering need, consuming every waking moment, every thought, every breath . . .

  The need is back. And so is Jamie.

  After all these years.

  Ten, to be exact.

  Funny how it happens. One morning, you wake up and everything is great, and then the next . . .

  Wait a minute, great? Your life was never great.

  All right, no, it wasn’t.

  But it was manageable.

  For almost ten years now you’ve been functioning, going to work, paying bills, taking meds, and Jamie was nowhere to be found. . .

  Then, out of nowhere, came the news that Jerry was dead.

  Dead, and you had to find out on television.

  Well, what did you expect? No one even knows you exist—not in Jerry’s world, anyway.

  If it weren’t for the media, you wouldn’t even have a clue what happened to Jerry after you left him there that night ten years ago, helpless and alone, with his mother’s stinking corpse in the bedroom and the cops closing in.

  But what were you supposed to do? You tried to make him run, too. He wouldn’t budge. He wouldn’t go with you. You had no choice but to leave him there.

  You didn’t even go far. Just took the train north to Albany—a safe distance, but close enough to keep tabs on the trial.

  Serial killers are big news. The Nightwatcher trial was covered blow-by-blow in the newspapers, on the radio, on the TV news.

  When it was over, Jerry went to prison for crimes he’d confessed to committing.

  But you knew better.

  You knew he wasn’t guilty—because you knew who was.

  You knew that Jamie’s soul had taken over your body and killed those four people, including her own mother—hers and Jerry’s.

  Yet you let Jerry take the fall.

  But what were you supposed to do? Come forward and admit that you thought you might have done it? That someone else—your own dead daughter—was living inside of you, making you do terrible things? That you had let your own son take the fall?

  No. No way. You’d have been
hauled off to the loony bin for the rest of your life, just like your crazy old man was when you were a kid.

  It’s just like that Old Testament quote, the one that’s resonated for so many years.

  There’s not much to do when you’re stuck behind bars; sometimes, you read the Bible they give you. Sometimes, you actually learn something from it.

  The sins of the father shall be visited upon the son.

  Those words couldn’t be more true.

  You paid for the sins of your father—and now your son is paying for yours.

  After Jerry was convicted—well, it wasn’t easy to live with the anger. The guilt. The injustice of it all.

  Things got a little crazy . . .

  You got a little crazy. A lot crazy—and it wasn’t the first time.

  Suddenly, Jerry wasn’t the only one behind bars.

  For me, though, it was just for aggravated assault. Nothing so bad.

  No one had died . . . this time.

  During that last jail sentence, Dr. Patricia Brady came into the picture. And at last, everything changed.

  For the first time ever, someone was willing to listen. Dr. Brady was young, new at her job, so eager to help . . .

  She didn’t know the whole story, of course.

  She knew nothing about the twins, Jamie and Jerry, whose teenage father, Samuel Shields, walked away from their pregnant mother many years ago, denying that they were his.

  Denial is so easy until you get your first glimpse of a fourteen-year-old child and see your own face looking back at you.

  Dr. Brady knew the rest, though—about the childhood beatings by a mentally ill father, and all the years in and out of juvy and then jail, and one state pen after another. . . .

  She said that all those bad things that happened could be partly due to illness. Not physical, but mental illness. She said it runs in families. If your father has it, chances are you might, too.

  She said that when people are mentally ill, they can’t help what they do, because they’re only following the commands of the voices that never stop talking, never, never, never, never, never . . .

  Dr. Brady said the medicine would make the voices go away.

  “All of them? Even Jamie’s?”