After he unpacked, there was a knock at the door. A bellman handed him his package.
Aleks tipped the young man, locked and chained the door. He flipped on the television – it seemed to be some sort of show where people were locked in a house with each other, people who seemed to hate each other – and opened the box. Everything was intact. He removed the pair of passports, the cash, the Barhydt from its bubble-wrap cocoon.
After a shower, he dressed for the day, then took the elevator to the roof.
Although far from the tallest building in sight, the view was nonetheless exhilarating. He had been in a number of cities, but was never inclined to follow the tourist route, visiting the observation decks of the Eiffel Tower or the Triumph-Palace in Moscow or Frankfurt’s Commerzbank Tower. The view from above did not interest him. It was the view into a man’s eyes that told him everything he needed to know.
Stepping to the edge of the roof, a rush of warm air greeted him. Below the traffic on Park Avenue hummed. To the left was the massive Grand Central Station, a legendary place about which he had read and heard his whole life. So far, New York seemed rife with legend.
He glanced around the rooftop and, seeing he was alone, opened his flute case, lifted the instrument to his lips, and began to play “Mereschitsja” from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Kashchey the Immortal, pianissimo at first, then building to a crescendo. The notes lifted into the morning air, and drifted over the rooftops. When finished, he returned the instrument to its leather case, glanced around the rooftop once more. He was still alone. He took out the Barhydt, touched the razor-sharp tip of the blade to his right forefinger. A glossy drop of blood appeared.
Aleks tilted his finger just as the breeze died down. The drop of blood fell toward the street, disappearing into the rushing city below, forever marking this place as one with him. It was his ritual, to stain the battlefield with his blood. He knew that, in this place, some were going to die. He owed them this, to mingle his blood with theirs.
“I will find you, my hearts,” he said, closing the knife. “I am here.”
The Stop amp; Shop on Tall Pines Boulevard was crowded with locals stocking up for the long weekend. As always, the girls insisted on pushing the cart. They lined up, each grabbing a portion of the handle and, as Abby watched them roll down the produce aisle, she realized that it wasn’t so long ago that they couldn’t even move the cart a foot without help. Now they did it with ease.
Abby clicked off the items on her list, with Charlotte and Emily on point, gathering things from the lower shelves.
As they waited at the deli counter, Abby noticed that both girls were humming a song, a song that sounded vaguely familiar. Was it a classical theme? Was it on the audiobooks they were listening to? She couldn’t put her finger on the tune, but it sounded so melancholy, so wistful, that she suddenly felt a chilly shiver of disquiet. It seemed a portent to something, although she had no idea what.
Abby shifted her attention to the Muzak. It wasn’t anything classical. It was an instrumental version of an old Billy Joel song.
“What are you guys singing?” Abby asked.
The girls stared up at her, and for a moment they looked as if they were disengaged from the present, as if they were not in a store at all, but rather rapt by another moment. They both shrugged.
“Did you guys hear it on the radio or on your iPods?”
They both shook their heads. A moment later they seemed to snap out of whatever mini-trance they were in.
“Can we get macaroni and cheese?” Charlotte asked, suddenly brightening. She wasn’t talking about the Kraft variety. She was talking about the prepared kind. This store had an amazing prepared food section, and offered a three-cheddar ziti. Lately, it seemed, Abby was taking full advantage of the prepared food counters. She wanted to cook for her family every night – she really did – but it was so much easier to buy it already made.
“Sure,” Abby said. “Em? Mac and cheese okay?”
Emily just shrugged. The girls were so different in many ways. Charlotte was the schemer. Emily floated.
They got their cereal (Captain Crunch for Charlotte, Cheerios for Emily); their peanut butter (smooth and crunchy respectively), their bread (they both agreed on multigrain for some reason; Michael thought it tasted like tree bark).
While they waited in line, Abby cruised the tabloids.
“Can we get Peppermint Patties?” Emily asked.
Abby wanted to say no. But how could she resist all four of the prettiest blue eyes in the world? Sometimes the magic was too strong to resist.
“Okay,” Abby said. “But just one each. And you can’t eat them until after dinner tonight. Okay?”
“Okay,” in tandem. They took off for the candy aisle. A minute later they returned. Emily carried the goods. She put them in the cart. There were three Peppermint Patties.
Again with the three, Abby thought.
“Sweetie, I said one each,” Abby said. She picked up one of the candy bars. “Did you bring this one for me?”
No answer.
“Okay, let’s get one more,” Abby said. “One for Daddy. Then we’ll have enough for all of us.”
It seemed like this was getting to be a standard routine and speech. It wasn’t like the girls were leaving out Michael in the equation. Abby had watched them interact with other kids many times. They were always generous with whatever they had to share. This was an early lesson from both her and Michael.
On the other hand, the girls were only four. She couldn’t expect them to be math wizards yet.
The Eden Falls Free Library was a small, ivy-laced brick building near the river, a Mid-Hudson design that also was home to the Crane County Community Theater.
Despite the fact that the girls were getting somewhat proficient at the computer, Abby was scared to death of leaving them alone online. So, at least once a week, time permitting, she took them to an honest-to-God, brick- and-mortar library. She had spent a great deal of time at the Hyde Park Library as a girl, and she would not deny the experience to the girls. There was something about the feel and smell and heft of books that no computer monitor could supply. Neither Charlotte nor Emily ever wanted to go. An hour later, neither wanted to leave.
As the girls settled into the children’s section, Abby heard an EMS siren approaching the library. As a trained RN, it caught her attention. It had always been so. From the time she was a child, she had been expected to go to medical school, to follow in her father’s footsteps and become a surgeon. Dr Charles Reed knew his son Wallace did not have the discipline or temperament for heart surgery, or even the rigors of residency, but felt his only daughter did.
Abby had gotten as far as her freshman year in pre-med at Columbia when, one night, on an icy sidewalk in the East Village, she slipped and broke her wrist. While being treated in the emergency room at New York- Presbyterian Hospital, she watched the ER nurses in action, and knew that this was what she wanted to do, to work the front lines of medical care. Part of her had to admit that she knew it would get under her father’s skin, but when she switched over to the Columbia School of Nursing, she knew she had made the right decision. It took Charles Reed most of the ensuing thirteen or so years to get over it, if he ever did.
As the EMS ambulance passed the library, Abby flashed on the night, five years earlier, when she met Michael.
She had been on for almost twelve hours that day. The ER wasn’t busier than usual – that night there had been only one gunshot victim, along with a handful of domestics, including one that had ended in the husband, a fifty-nine-year old man who apparently had received a Westinghouse steam iron to the side of his head for saying to his wife, as a prelude to sex: “Yo, fatso, get with it.”
At midnight an EMS arrived at the door. As they wheeled in the unconscious patient, the paramedic looked into Abby’s eyes, his post 9/11 thousand-yard stare in place.
“Bomb,” the paramedic said softly.
All kinds of things raced through Abby’s mind. All of it terrifying. Her first thought was that the city had been attacked again, and this was just the first of the victims. She wondered how bad it was going to get. As the other two nurses on duty prepped a room, Abby stepped into the waiting room. She flipped the television channel to CNN. Two guys yelling at each other about the mortgage crisis. No attack.
When she stepped into the triage room, she saw him.
