“I forgot to put in fresh ones,” Sarah said.
“It’s okay.” Jeff glanced around, spotting a suitable store behind them. “I’ll go in there and get fresh batteries. You stay right here, don’t go anywhere.”
“All right,” Sarah said. She and Cole began inspecting the jewelry, statues, artwork and T-shirts on a vendor’s cart. Jeff stepped toward the store but was stopped.
“Sir, could you spare any change for a veteran?”
A man with bushy dark hair and a beard flecked with bits of something white held up a hand in a dirty worn cyclist’s glove. He was in a wheelchair and missing his right leg. He wore torn jeans, a filthy John Lennon T-shirt and a tattered raincoat. His chair was reinforced with metal coat hangers and had a U.S. flag affixed to it. Jeff looked into his leathery weatherworn face, his brown eyes, and figured him to be in his early thirties. Guys who’d served deserved better, Jeff thought.
“How’d you lose the leg?”
“IED in Afghanistan. I ain’t had a decent meal in days, sir.”
Jeff thrust his hand into his pocket and pulled out two crumpled fives.
“Here.”
The man stared at the cash.
“Thank you. God bless you and your beautiful family, there, sir.”
Jeff went to the store-Metro Manhattan Gifts and Things.
It had a narrow storefront of soot-streaked stone and a large window cluttered with a galaxy of tacky items. Discounts on jewelry, T-shirts and posters were listed on the chalkboard sign outside.
Inside, rock music throbbed from a radio station. The walls were jammed with T-shirts, ball caps, trinkets, posters, knickknacks. A young man was on a ladder, pulling down a cardboard box overflowing with scarves for two women. Racks filled with chips, chocolate bars and snack cakes bordered one side of the store, next to coolers filled with soda, juices and water.
Compact video recorders, cell phones and other electronics covered the wall behind the counter near the cash. A mounted security camera watched from above. Jeff took his place in line behind half a dozen customers.
As he waited, he saw Sarah and Cole through the window, browsing at the cart. They looked happy and the image sent his mind racing back to that last moment of perfection. Back to that time when he’d sat in his truck in their driveway and watched Sarah with Cole and their baby daughter, Lee Ann, through the window.
The last time they were happy.
And now he’d brought his family here, to the brink of disintegration.
Kransky the Shrink had been right; they couldn’t just overcome the blow of Lee Ann’s death. They had to adapt to it and allow each other to deal with it in their own way.
Throughout their ordeal Cole had been the rock of the family. He’d accepted that God had made his baby sister an angel and took her to heaven first to wait for them. Cole just got on with being a kid and continued obsessing about seeing New York City, the way most kids obsessed about seeing Disney World.
In this way Cole was the calm, healing force, holding them all together against the threat of destruction.
And the threat was not Sarah.
After all this time, Jeff realized that he’d failed to accept how Sarah dealt with her own grief and guilt. She blamed herself for being three hundred and forty miles away when their baby died. Jeff blamed himself for being in the next room asleep. He had been so numbed and blinded by his anger, his guilt, that he let it give way to paranoia, thinking wrongly that Sarah had turned to another man for comfort.
He’d let it all reach the point where it was tearing them apart.
Standing in line, waiting to buy batteries, it dawned on him. Maybe it had started when he felt Sarah’s arm around him, tight. But when the truth hit, it hit him like a freight train. Sarah was not cheating on him. She did not hate him. What he was doing was wrong. The last thing he wanted was to separate. He agreed with Sarah, when their baby girl died they went out of their minds with grief. They’d both been consumed with guilt and anger over losing her.
He replayed Sarah’s plea.
She was right.
They’d been through enough.
Suddenly Jeff felt like a man waking up.
It was his turn at the counter and the clerk at the register, a girl in her twenties with a diamond stud in her left nostril, fuchsia streaks in her dyed white hair and tattoos on her arms, smiled as she chewed gum and bobbed her head to an old David Bowie song.
“I need some batteries.”
“What size?”
“Double A, I think. Wait, let me check, sorry.”
Horn blasts from the street competed with the music inside as Jeff opened the battery compartment. It took him three attempts. The clerk snapped her gum and eyed the other customers while she waited.
Patience in New York came at a premium.
“Yes, double A,” he said. “Better give me three of those four packs.”
She slapped them on the counter.
“Here you go.”
Jeff paid.
He returned to the street ready to tell Sarah that he’d come to his senses. This trip would change everything.
He went to the vendor’s cart but they weren’t there.
He looked up and down the street.
No sign of Sarah and Cole.
Jeff hurried after him, ready to scold Sarah for vanishing, but he stopped cold. The boy was not Cole.
Jeff took immediate stock of the surroundings.
No sign of Sarah and Cole.
He hurried out and rushed into the next business, a crowded deli where he again took swift inventory. Again, he found no trace of his wife and son. He moved on, searching in vain. He stood on the sidewalk and scoured the storefronts across the street-but it was futile.
Jeff could not find Sarah and Cole.
Then, above all the crowds, the traffic, the noise and confusion, he heard the first high-pitched ring in the back of his mind. It shot to his gut where disbelief battled his fear that maybe something was wrong.
5
Jeff scanned the crowds, threading his way a few yards in one direction, then a few yards in another.
