The Craving (22 page)

“Why?”

“Because that’s what daddies do sometimes. They go away.”

“I want to play with Daddy today. He promised he’d take me to a playground.”

Alison could tell he was on the verge of a meltdown, and after everything that had happened so far today, she was on the verge of a meltdown herself. Maybe what she needed was some time on her own. The last thing she wanted to do was blow up at Jeremy and make the situation even worse.

“How about Christina? Do you want to play with her?”

Jeremy liked Christina. Well, not as much as his old full-time babysitter, Margaret, whom they’d had to fire after Simon lost his job, but he always had fun with her.

But Jeremy wouldn’t let go of what he wanted that easily. “Why not Daddy?”

“Because Daddy’s busy today.”

The finality in Alison’s tone sealed the deal, because Jeremy acquiesced, saying, “Okay, I’ll play with Christina.”

Alison didn’t know if Christina was even available today. She texted her—though she lived right across the hall, texting always seemed less intrusive than ringing a doorbell—and Christina texted right back that she was available. Alison, afraid that Simon might come home, asked if she could drop Jeremy off at her place—“My place is a total mess”—and she said that would be fine.

About ten minutes later, Alison dropped Jeremy off. Christina was twenty-three, slender, with short blond hair. She had graduated from NYU over a year ago and lived with her parents, to whom Simon and Alison said hi on the elevator but that was about it. Alison wasn’t sure of her parents’ names—maybe the mother was Felice, but that could’ve been totally wrong. Anyway, Maybe Felice and Whatever the Dad’s Name Was weren’t home.

Alison explained to Christina that she was going out for the day and would be back around dinnertime.

“Is Simon coming home then too?”

Alison felt awkward and wasn’t sure how to answer, especially with Jeremy right there.

“No, Simon won’t be home until later,” Alison said. “Much later.”

Leaving the building, heading toward Broadway—maybe she’d go shopping or see a movie—she replayed the exchange with Christina. Why was Christina asking when Simon was coming home anyway? Maybe the question wasn’t so abnormal, but she usually didn’t ask specifically about Simon, and when did she start calling him Simon? Didn’t she use to call him Mr. Burns?

Suddenly Alison was enraged again; was it possible Christina and Simon were having an affair? It was so cliché for a man to screw the babysitter, but clichés were clichés for a reason. Fighting off an image of Simon and Christina in bed, her skinny little chicken legs wrapped around his body as he was thrusting into her, Alison muttered, “Skinny little slut.”

Okay, okay, she knew she had to dial it down; her imagination was taking a giant leap. She didn’t even have circumstantial evidence that they were having an affair. She’d never seen them flirting, and Simon had never shown any interest. But maybe he was just great at hiding it from her. After all, he definitely seemed secretive lately, so
maybe Christina was the big secret. They had plenty of opportunity to see each other, what with Alison working full-time. Maybe they screwed during Jeremy’s naptime. While it was hard to imagine Simon stooping that low, she never would have imagined him locking himself in the bathroom and acting like a werewolf, so how could she rule out any perverse behavior? As for Christina, Alison had never thought of her as the husband-stealing type, but come to think of it she’d had older boyfriends. Hadn’t she been dating that guy last year who looked like he was about thirty? At thirty-nine, maybe Simon wasn’t so far out of her range.

Alison was on her cell, waiting for a call to connect. She’d made the call with little thought. She was just tired of feeling manipulated and used and wanted to somehow get back in control.

“Hey, Alison,” Dr. Vijay Rana said.

Vijay was a client of Alison’s, a gynecologist who had an office in midtown but lived on the Upper West Side, in Morningside Heights, near Columbia University. They’d gone out to dinner a couple of times, and to see a show once, which wasn’t unusual because part of Alison’s job was to schmooze with her doctor clients. But over the last couple of weeks they’d become friendly outside work and had gotten together once for coffee. Vijay had told Alison all about his recent divorce, and she’d let him in a bit about her problems with Simon. She knew she was crossing a line, getting personal, but she didn’t have many close friends in the city, and Vijay had a naturally supportive personality. Alison always felt better, more relaxed, after spending time with him. Maybe he wasn’t a great-looking guy—he was a little dorky actually with his thick glasses and the way he always wore his shirts with the top button buttoned—but he was extremely nice and supportive and Alison thought his wife was crazy for divorcing him. He said his wife had complained that he was a
workaholic. Was that seriously her main problem? Let her marry a guy with lycanthropic disorder and she’d find out what real problems were like.

“Sorry to call you on a Sunday,” she said. “I know you’re probably busy.”

“Not busy at all actually,” he said. “I was just here relaxing, watching the end of the marathon. Did you hear about the fireman?”

Alison remembered calling Simon into the living room to see the fireman on TV, right before he went berserk in the bathroom.

“Yeah, I saw,” Alison said.

“It’s unbelievable,” he said. “He never ran in a marathon before, his friends said he’d never even been a recreational runner until recently, and he finished ninth in the New York City Marathon. He must be some freak of nature.”

“Can we meet for coffee?” Alison hadn’t meant to blurt that out. “Sorry,” she said. “I mean I know it’s out of the blue—”

“That’s fine,” he said. “I’d love to meet. Are you in the area?”

“I’m heading toward Broadway.”

“I have an idea; how about you meet me at my place, then we head out from here?”

Going to a client’s apartment? Was this a good idea?

“Sounds great,” she said.

He gave her directions to his place on Riverside Drive. She expected that as a successful physician he’d have a killer apartment, but she didn’t know that he lived in a penthouse of the nicest building on the block.

When she got out of the elevator, he was waiting in the hallway in front of the open door to his apartment, smiling widely. He didn’t look as geeky as he did in a work setting. He had dimples, nice black wavy hair.

“Hey, Alison, it’s great to see you.” He kissed her on the cheek. “Please come in.”

“Thank you.”

It was such a relief to be in the company of a normal man, who wasn’t raging and trying to break down bathroom walls.

“Can I get you something? Coffee? Cappuccino? Is it too early for wine?”

“Wine sounds great.”

“Chardonnay okay?”

“Chardonnay’s perfect.”

Alison went toward the terrace and looked through glass doors at the incredible panoramic view of New Jersey. In the reflection, she watched Vijay, pouring the wine. Classical music was playing; it sounded like Tchaikovsky.

“You can sit on the couch,” he said.

Alison sat on the plush white sofa. When Vijay came in he sat next to her when he could have sat across from her on the chairs. She felt he was pushing the boundaries of their relationship, definitely coming on to her a little, but she didn’t care.

She knew she’d made the right decision coming here.

A
s Simon left the bar, it set in that he had nowhere to go. After calling the police on him, Alison probably wasn’t ready for him to come home to make up. He figured she’d need a cooling-off period, maybe a day or two, before she’d even be willing to talk, and the cops were probably looking for him too. She’d probably told them that he was mentally ill, had some kind of breakdown, was potentially dangerous. What if they arrested him, ran medical tests, took blood, discovered what he was? Hopefully what Charlie had said was true, that their wolves’ blood was undetectable, but Simon couldn’t take the risk.

Keep moving.
That was his overriding desire, the impulse that seemed most important at the moment and that would somehow make everything okay.

Okay, so he was moving, but now he had to figure out which
direction to head in. He went downtown, all the way to Soho, but he didn’t want to get too close to where Michael lived, in Tribeca, or too close to the playground in Battery Park, so he headed to the Lower East Side, to near the Williamsburg Bridge, but now he wasn’t far from the brewery in Brooklyn—it was right across the river. So he jogged uptown alongside the FDR Drive, which was nice for a while because there was a cool steady breeze against his face and not too many people around—but then, approaching the Thirty-fourth Street heliport, he detected the scent of cops—at least two of them—up ahead. While he seriously doubted a domestic complaint had caused a citywide manhunt for him, he didn’t want to take any chances. So he headed back west, toward midtown, but the more polluted air and busy streets made him feel even more trapped and hopeless. He wasn’t in a city, he was in a maze, a caged maze, and every direction he headed led to another wall.

He couldn’t take the congestion any more so he went uptown, avoiding the UN, and then veered back toward the East River, uptown along the promenade. He really wanted to leave the city, to find real space in the country. Being away from people, from all people, would be the ultimate escape. He considered doing it, just running north, through the Bronx, to Westchester, until he found some woods. Ah, freedom.

There was really only one thing keeping him in New York right now—his family. Even if Alison wanted to kick him out permanently, he had to be close to Jeremy, to protect him. He didn’t know what he had to protect him from, but this was how he felt.

At around East Eighty-third Street, he entered Carl Schurz Park. It wasn’t exactly like being in the wild, but it was better than midtown. At least there were trees and it was somewhat of a reprieve from the odors and noises of the city. Carl Schurz was a smallish park, about the width of a city block and only about ten blocks long. He
avoided the playground and basketball courts and went into the less populated middle of the park. It was late afternoon and there were still plenty of people and dogs around, but Simon found a woodsy area that was somewhat sheltered.

He remained in the park for a few hours, jogging back and forth, almost constantly moving. Near dusk, hunger set in and he headed over to York Avenue in search of his next meal. Naturally he gravitated toward meat, so he wound up at a bagel store and ordered two pounds of roast beef and two pounds of corned beef. He took the meat back with him to the park and ate while leaning against a tree. Gobbling up the lunch meat, surrounded by trees, was a very safe, familiar experience. While Simon was aware that this behavior wasn’t normal, he didn’t know how to change it. He was who he was.

Into the last slice of corned beef—chewing it slowly to savor the taste—he felt his cell vibrate in his front pocket. He took out the phone—one new message. Was Alison trying to get in touch? Did she want him to come back home?

Already imagining opening the front door, Jeremy leaping into his arms and saying, “I love you, Daddy”—the scent of the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo seemed so real—he opened the text. The letdown set in when he saw the text was from Dave, an old college friend:

Dave was a pasty white guy from Westchester but had talked in a pseudo-ghetto way since college, and this habit had carried over into his texting.

Upset that the text hadn’t been from Alison, Simon gobbled up the last of the corned beef. He wanted to call her, see how she and Jeremy were doing, but he wasn’t sure it was the best idea. He knew
his wife, how emotional she got. She needed a cooling-off period before she’d be willing to have a normal conversation. So instead he decided to text her:

He sent the note, but it only made him feel worse. Could he really promise she’d ever understand? And he knew she wouldn’t respond. She could get stubborn when she thought she was right about something. How had his life gotten to this point? He understood the steps—losing his job, meeting the guys in the park, drinking the beer, becoming half wolf, then a full wolf—but none of that seemed to explain why he was letting his animal-like urges and impulses control his life. What kind of husband was he? What kind of father was he? He’d thought getting fired was the ultimate failure of his life, but this was so much worse.

He had to move again. Movement was the answer. Movement would make everything better.

He paced back and forth in the park until it got dark, and then he returned to the streets. He was hungry and needed another meal, but he also wanted more space to roam and, as it was a Sunday evening, the city streets were emptying out and it didn’t feel nearly as claustrophobic and oppressive. After a pit stop for a few bunless burgers at Burger King on Eighty-sixth, he continued walking. He preferred the side streets, so he zigzagged downtown, going along a side street to Second Avenue, then back toward Third along another. This made the trip downtown much more time consuming than it would’ve normally been, but it wasn’t about time, it was about movement. He was terrified of staying still.