And there was plenty about Christine that he did love. She had a sense of humor that was smart, sarcastic, and sharp, and she placed no limits on whom she might attack. Milo loved to listen to her rant about the inequities in her office, the ineffectiveness of government officials, and the stupidity of her brother and his wife. Milo would sometimes come home to find her shouting at the television, enraged by something said by a talking head on MSNBC or a senator on C-SPAN or even the local weatherman.
It was quite a sight to see.
Yet she was equally passionate in a positive way about causes in which she believed. She spent a great deal of time volunteering for the Red Cross: organizing blood drives, educating people on the importance of blood donation, and donating her own blood every six weeks without fail. She also served as a Junior Achievement mentor in an impoverished Hartford school and spent several weekends a year building homes with the local Habitat for Humanity chapter.
Milo couldn’t help but find this dichotomy in her personality, the sarcastic shark and the compassionate caregiver, compelling.
But most of all, Christine had been the first woman to make him feel normal. Unlike the girls from high school or college or even his fellow nurses, Christine had met Milo with no preconceptions. No backstory. Their first date had been only their second meeting, so he had felt as if he wasn’t saddled with any preexisting conditions. He had not been thrown into an ocean of testosterone and forced to swim to the surface. When Milo had met Christine, there were no jocks, geniuses, or well-dressed future attorneys and stockbrokers standing to his left and right. It was simply Milo, solo and incomparable, and as such, she treated him like a man devoid of oddity and idiosyncrasy. And while this dearth of comparison may have helped his standing in Christine’s eyes, he suspected that it had actually done more for him. Absent competition, he found himself with a level of self-confidence that he had rarely possessed in the presence of a beautiful woman. It had allowed Milo to be at ease with Christine, and most important, it had allowed him to be as close to himself as he had ever been before.
Of course, as true to himself as he was with Christine, he knew that he still wasn’t even close, and though he suspected even then that this might eventually be a problem, he refused to acknowledge it. For once, he had found a woman with whom he could be happy, even if it came at a price.
As the two were exiting Central Park, turning the corner toward the conference center where Christine would leave Milo and proceed uptown to meet a college friend for a day of shopping, an ashen-faced woman stepped out from a taxi on the curb, turned to them, and said, “Did you hear? A second plane just hit the other tower?”
“Huh?”
“The World Trade Center. Both towers have been hit now.” The woman then pointed to the south, where a trail of smoke could already be seen drifting above the Manhattan skyline.
“I don’t understand,” Christine said, reaching for Milo’s hand. “What happened?”
“Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center. Look.” The woman pointed again, this time more impatiently, and as if on cue, the first of what would prove to be an endless wail of sirens that day suddenly filled the air.
“How could two planes hit the same building?” Christine asked, squeezing Milo’s hand now.
“They didn’t hit the same building. They hit both towers.” The woman was dressed like she meant business, a stereotypical New Yorker in a suit and heels, eyes shaded by a pair of Gucci sunglasses, but Milo could see that her hands were trembling as she forced them into her jacket.
A fire engine came roaring down Eighth Avenue, heading south. Milo, Christine, and their unnamed informant stood on the corner, staring at the red truck as it passed, filled with firefighters already in their helmets and gear. The driver blared a siren as the vehicle passed through the intersection, short blasts warning pedestrians that they no longer had rights to the crosswalk. Milo turned to ask the woman what kind of planes had hit the towers, but she was already halfway up the street, heading north.
“Let’s find out what’s happening,” Milo said, pulling his wife in the same direction.
They were standing inside a coffee shop, staring at the television mounted over the counter when the first tower fell. At least thirty people had crowded inside the tiny café in order to listen to the news coverage, but rarely was a word spoken as reporters described the scene and video footage from helicopters and adjacent buildings showed the buildings on fire and replays of the planes slamming into them again and again. News of the attack on the Pentagon had already been reported, and Milo could sense the fear that had gripped this band of impromptu onlookers.
Their country was under attack.
As the south tower began to collapse just before ten A.M., someone behind him shouted. “It’s falling. Jesus Christ Almighty, it’s falling!” Gasps, shouts, and a muffled scream filled the space as the building disappeared from the sky, replaced by an enormous cloud of smoke and ash. Christine buried her head into Milo’s chest and began to cry. A middle-aged woman standing beside Milo dropped to her knees in prayer. Several people pushed their way out of the shop, suddenly fearing for the safety of loved ones in the city. A man in a business suit advised everyone to head for Central Park. “It’s the only place where a building can’t fall on you!” he shouted as he pushed through the crowd and out onto the street. An older Jewish man sitting on a stool at the counter dropped his head into his hands and began to weep.
They remained in the shop until almost two P.M., eventually finding stools at the counter as the crowd began to disperse. The quiet and reverence of the first few hours of that morning was slowly replaced with the sharing of news as people came in and out of the coffee shop with stories to tell. An Indian cabdriver who helped transport police officers to Ground Zero. A high school English teacher who had watched the towers fall with his class on CNN before school was canceled for the day. A thin man in his twenties, white dust still trapped in his hair and goatee, who stumbled in around noon, the only eyewitness that Christine and Milo would meet that day. He had been four blocks from the World Trade Center when the south tower fell and couldn’t stop talking about the sound of the building as it collapsed. “It was just so fucking loud. Like you couldn’t even think, it was so loud. I can’t even describe it. Have you ever heard something so loud that you couldn’t even think straight? That’s what it was like. It was just so goddamn loud.”
Though the U-boat captain in Milo’s head was never loud per se (the only auditory component of his demands were the repetition of words and that damn song), Milo understood the concept of something in your head being so powerful and omnipotent that it prevented you from thinking straight.
Others came into the shop throughout the day, regulars who knew the waitresses by name and strangers looking for a cup of coffee and a place to watch the news. Some arrived bearing information that had already been reported on television while others carried rumors of additional impending attacks. A pipe bomb outside police headquarters, a truck bomb on the Brooklyn Bridge, and one more plane circling above Washington, searching for a target.
The day was especially difficult for Christine, who didn’t stop trembling until well into the evening. She had suffered from a serious case of claustrophobia since childhood, the result of being accidentally locked in a closet for more than six hours as a toddler, and though she loved the city, it always made her feel a little uneasy. “Too many people squeezed onto one tiny island,” she had told Milo more than once. Whenever the couple was visiting New York, they did their best to avoid Times Square and other places where large crowds gathered, and they never, ever took the subway. Even the lower level of Grand Central Station and the ten minutes that their Metro-North train traveled underground before emerging in the outskirts of the city could send Christine into a near panic.
The attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent bridge and road closings only served to heighten her sense of feeling closed in and trapped and so increa
sed the chance of a panic attack as well. Six hours after the second tower had fallen, Christine was still pale and sweaty, her dark hair matted against her forehead. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, and her grip on Milo’s hand, which she latched on to with every opportunity, was strong and unyielding, as if to let go would be to allow the panic to consume her. Her condition prior to one of these panic attacks reminded Milo of that of an improperly medicated patient. Jittery. Unfocused. Withdrawn.
Similar to how he reacted when one of his demands went unsatisfied for a long period of time.
Layered on top of Christine’s symptoms was fear. Not the claustrophobic fear that was the cause of the problem, but an added layer of fear of what others might think of her if she experienced an actual panic attack in public, which had happened on several occasions over the course of her life. As difficult as it was for Milo to understand, it seemed as if Christine worried more about the spectacle that she might create as a result of her panic attack rather than the cause of the panic attack itself. During the actual attack, this fear of embarrassment dissipated, dominated by actual claustrophobic fear, but prior to its onset and almost immediately afterward, the concern for her public image consumed her and probably made it exponentially more difficult to regain control. Despite the frequency of Milo’s assurances that her claustrophobia was not her fault, Christine would not listen, convinced her embarrassment and shame were justified.
Though Milo recognized the similarity between her condition and his own, as well as their similar feelings of shame and embarrassment, he also thought that the two conditions were entirely incongruous. Christine’s claustrophobia was a condition that people understood and accepted, akin to a fear of heights or public speaking. It did not result in the need to pop the pressure seal on a jelly jar or a similarly bizarre behavior; therefore the embarrassment that his wife felt was, in his mind, unwarranted and silly. Just like an epileptic has no reason to feel embarrassed about a seizure, a claustrophobic has no need to feel the same about an anxiety attack.
Milo’s condition, on the other hand, was not the kind that anyone would ever understand or accept. Therefore, his concern over keeping it hidden was legitimate.
Additionally, Christine’s admitted embarrassment over her condition had served to reinforce Milo’s need to keep the U-boat captain and his demands a secret from his wife. If she found a panic attack to be the greatest source of shame in her life, how would she feel if Milo described his need to smash a Weeble in a doorjamb, or his fixation on ice cubes as the two were having sex the day before? On those rare days when Milo began to wonder if telling Christine the truth about his life might bring them closer together, he thought about the shame that his wife felt over a legitimate psychological condition, and quickly decided otherwise.
Better to enjoy a tenuous, less than genuine relationship than none at all.
As the couple made their way back to their hotel on the Upper West Side later that afternoon, American flags had already begun to appear, hanging from the windows of apartment buildings. Cars and trucks covered in a thick gray dust could occasionally be seen moving through the streets, joining what little traffic there was.
Milo had been in the city many times in his life and had never heard such silence.
Though the buses were running and transporting New Yorkers free of charge that day, Milo and Christine walked the three dozen blocks back to their hotel. The streets weren’t entirely empty, but a hush had fallen over them.
It took them two days to get out of the city, and in that time Milo had seen the reaction of New Yorkers to the attacks evolve and had become consumed with the same blend of sorrow and anger and disbelief and patriotism that had filled so many American hearts. Milo loved Springsteen’s album The Rising, particularly its signature song, for all the truth and hope that it possessed. He had teared up the first time he heard it, playing over the radio in his car on his way to work, and to hear it playing now, less than a decade after the towers had fallen, serving as a background tune to help pass the time while customers debated a cereal choice or waited for a deli order, made him want to find the office from where this song was being broadcast and stop the irreverence immediately. It seemed as if the gods of commerce were attempting to turn the page on that tragic day by adding this song to the grocery store and elevator lexicon alongside Barry Manilow and Billy Joel, in much the same way that Milo felt like Christine was attempting to turn the page on their marriage, run away from it, move on as if those moments on that September morning and the vows they had later made on their wedding day had become little more than the dismissible background noise of one’s life.
Milo hated the man or woman who had added this song to their playlist, but he listened in reverence anyway, trying to diminish the diminishment of the song and its meaning.
Had he been wearing a hat, he would have removed it out of respect.
As Springsteen was singing the final verse of his song, Milo spotted Timothy Coger rounding the front of the aisle and heading his way. As he passed by, the large man lifted his meaty hand and offered a hearty “Good morning, Milo!” It managed to return a smile to Milo’s face.
Milo could always depend on the oddities of people like Mr. Coger to keep him happy. Amusing, unapologetic, and, most important, odd, these were the people in his life that helped him to feel normal. Timothy Coger, Edith Marchand, and even Arthur Friedman had all reached a point in their lives, and in their relationships with Milo, at which they could be themselves, as strange and bizarre as they may be. Arriving to the grocery store with him but pretending otherwise. Masturbating to Internet porn with the help of Viagra. Raking shag carpets in preparation for guests. Not all, but most of his clients had been willing to reveal secrets like these to Milo, and in turn, he never judged them for their oddities, knowing full well how difficult a secret is to bear, and of course having his own oddities with which to compare. Oftentimes his clients were the people whose company and friendship he valued the most, for he felt that these relationships were more honest than those he had with his wife and friends.
Though in truth, Timothy Coger wasn’t Milo’s choice of company at this particular moment. Freckles was still firmly on his mind, and after a night of fruitless research, he desperately wanted to review the situation with someone who might offer a varying perspective. Though he had known Timothy Coger for quite a while, he did not have the same kind of casual, friendly relationship as he did with a client like Arthur Friedman or Edith Marchand. Formality ruled the roost in the Coger household, so the unnecessary exchange of personal anecdotes and information did not occur.
There were others more willing to listen and dispense advice.
Milo had spent more than two hours researching online the previous evening, beginning with Freckles’s deceased friend, Mira. He had expected to find a bounty of information on the dead woman, particularly because of the way that Freckles had alluded to her friend’s death as less than ordinary, but regardless of his query, he could find nothing related to a recently or otherwise deceased woman named Mira formerly living in or around Connecticut.
His search on the name Sherry Ferroni, a.k.a. Ragamuffin, provided no matches whatsoever, which both surprised and frustrated Milo. Though he had never known anyone with the last name of Ferroni, it didn’t sound unusual enough to be absent from the Internet entirely. After reviewing the tape again and recording the names of the seven other girls that Freckles mentioned, he searched for information on them as well and was marginally more successful.
Searches on Melissa Davis, Kim Maynard, Meghan Phelps, and even Lisa Palumbo produced many results, too many in fact, but Milo was unable to connect any of these names to Harry Truman Middle School, the state of Connecticut, or even one another, and sorting through the hundreds of possible hits was nearly impossible. Searching with the names Charity Dumars and Annette Ryler produced no results (Milo was less surprised with these more unusual-sounding names), and though hits on the name Kristen Sloane were a
bundant, the number of ways in which the name could be spelled made it impossible for Milo to know which Kristen Sloane or Sloan or Slone once attended school with Freckles.
In all, trying to find information on the correct girl was like trying to find a suspected needle in a possible haystack.
Milo had no better luck researching Harry Truman Middle School. There were more than a dozen such schools in the United States (almost all including the letter S from Truman’s full name), stretching from California to Louisiana to Ohio, but there was no record of a Harry Truman Middle School or a Harry S. Truman Middle School anywhere in the Northeast, and neither could he find a Mrs. Walker employed at any of these schools. Milo wasn’t certain that Freckles had grown up in the Northeast or even east of the Mississippi for that matter, but her lack of any discernible accent and a gut feeling told him that she had. Either way, finding a dozen schools with the same name as Freckles’s middle school didn’t get him any closer to ascertaining her real name.
But Freckles’s mention of a ten o’clock fight had intrigued him a great deal (he actually replayed the tape three times to ensure that he hadn’t mistaken the word flight for fight) and sent him searching websites on women’s boxing, wrestling, kickboxing, karate, and other forms of hand-to-hand combat. Though Freckles did not appear to be the boxing or wrestling type, in either build or demeanor, one never knew. So he searched for almost an hour on these websites in hopes of finding a clue or lead.
None materialized.
He learned that women’s boxing had become more popular and mainstream in the past decade, with the World Boxing League, the North America Boxing League, and many statewide and regional tournaments dominating the scene. But looking at images of the female boxers, kickboxers, and wrestlers online showed clearly that Freckles was not built like a female fighter. Furthermore, he wasn’t even able to find a woman’s boxing or wrestling league anywhere in Connecticut.