Shadowkiller by Wendy Corsi Staub Page B

know.”
    Luis shot her a rare, serious glance as they stopped at the crosswalk to wait for the light at Thirty-fourth Street. “What’s wrong, Allison?”
    â€œI just feel like something bad is going to happen.”
    She expected a return quip from him, but after taking a good look at her expression, he said only, “I hope you’re wrong.”
    So do I , she thought, and tilted her head back, closing her eyes briefly.
    When she opened them again, she saw the twin towers of the World Trade Center, twinkling in the distance, and found herself thinking of her father.
    He’d always told her to pay attention to her instincts.
    Yeah, well, what did he know?
    Ha. Everything about everything, if you asked him.
    â€œHe just likes to hear himself talk,” Mom used to say, rolling her eyes whenever he launched into one of his long-winded, advice-laden monologues.
    And yet, ironically, when his words might have mattered the most—the day he picked up and left—he opted for silence. Not a word of explanation; no indication where he was going, or why, or how they were supposed to pay the bills and keep their heads above water without him. Not a spoken word at all, though he wrote seven of them on the scrap of paper Allison and her mother found on the kitchen table on that final morning: Can’t do this anymore. I’m sorry. Good-bye.
    Mom held her lighter to the paper, recklessly tossed it into the sink, and left the room. Seeing a lick of flame edging toward the curtains above the faucet, Allison had turned on the tap. Later, she’d wonder why she’d even bothered. She might as well have just let it burn—take the whole damned house with it—rather than wait for foreclosure to claim the roof over their heads, the one thing Mom had hoped to salvage from the marriage.
    â€œWhy did he do it?” she asked her mother, and herself, and—of course—Winona, the imaginary sister who came to live in Allison’s head the day her father left.
    It was ironic that Allison had woken up that morning from a happy dream about having a sister, and had taken it to mean that her parents were going to have another baby. In fact, she was headed into the kitchen to tell her mother about it when she found the note saying that her father was gone.
    Why? Why? Why did he do it?
    Even Winona couldn’t tell her why a man would just turn his back on his wife and child one day out of the blue, leaving them destitute. Even Winona didn’t know how he could have transformed overnight from father of the year to heartless monster.
    Okay—he’d been neither of those things in reality. But Allison had spent the first decade of her life loving him and the second decade hating him; in her mind, the paradox was, for too many years, the primary source of her pain. How did someone go from loving you one day to leaving you the next? How did you guarantee that it wouldn’t happen again, with the next person you allowed yourself to love, and trust?
    What about her father? Did he have regrets? Was he out there somewhere even now, wondering what had ever happened to them after he left? Or didn’t he care?
    Of course he didn’t care , Allison reminded herself. And I don’t care, either. Not anymore. Not in a long time. Not about him.
    Yet even now, on a weirdly warm March evening in New York City, hundreds of miles—as far as she knew—and a lifetime away from her father, Allison couldn’t help but think of him anyway.
    Was that why she was feeling chilled to the bone?
    Once in a while, she’d catch a flicker of something—the smell of a certain aftershave, or a few notes of an old song—that stirred a long-buried memory. Sometimes, she knew right away what it was, other times, she’d find herself feeling ill at ease before she even put her finger on the cause.
    Channel surfing on a recent stormy Saturday, she came across the movie Toy Story.