by Jason Letts
“Are you looking forward to Christmas then?” I asked, gesturing at it.
“It’s my absolute favorite day of the year,” she said, a glimmer of enthusiasm peeking through. “What about you?”
“I know it’ll be nice. I go to my sister’s. Her kid is two now, so that’ll be fun. They can be a little over-enthusiastic in a manic sort of way, but I think I’m ready for it,” I said.
She smiled and nodded before tilting her head closer to me.
“How’s that benefit of the doubt going?”
An urge hit me to tell her exactly how corrosive it had all been. It was turning me into a person I hated. I was usually outgoing and vivacious, and in other circumstances I would’ve lit a party like this up with witty banter and irresistible stories. But I restrained myself, not wanting to admit I’d been wrong.
“I’m not sure there was much benefit to it,” I said, drawing a told-you-so expression from Chelsea.
“At least next week is a short week because of the holiday, and then it’ll be nice knowing you.”
“I’m going to go get a drink,” I said.
On the way to the refreshments table, I passed Martin, Eduardo, and a few other guys I didn’t know. They were casual about it, all standing there with their drinks, but I could tell they were paying me a lot of looks.
As I ladled the punch into a cup, I reflected on how many times I’d had to suffer through unwanted attention like this. It took a lot more than this to get to me, even if I wished I didn’t need to deal with it at all.
“I read your product descriptions on the outdoor line. They were good.”
I glanced up at the unfamiliar voice and my eyes connected with Mr. Roche’s, who was standing there with his hand reaching into the pretzel bowl. He had no smirk or smile, not much expression at all. His brown hair arced across his forehead down to his eyebrows and stuck out in different directions around his ears.
“Thank you, Mr. Roche,” I said, turning my attention back to the punch, now slightly embarrassed by the way I’d been gazing at him.
“Please, call me Keenan.”
I braced myself for what was sure to come next, a comment on my appearance or an invitation somewhere. Only silence followed, and when I glanced up all I saw was his back as he was walking away. His back side was as intoxicating as his front, but the odd sense of relief I felt at having experienced an interaction that contained zero innuendo gave me even more pause.
I continued to watch him, blatantly now, as he joined a few other guys, who welcomed him into their small circle. It seemed like only a matter of time before he would stop and look back at me, but it never happened. The exchange we had didn’t matter to him. The way I looked didn’t matter to him. After praying for so many conversations to end this way, I was suddenly struck by a deep pang of disappointment in myself that I hadn’t had more of an effect on him.
It turned out I wasn’t in such a rush to leave. I hung around alone with my drink in my hand, sipping occasionally and keeping an eye on everyone but really mostly watching Keenan. After a few minutes even more lights were turned off and a projector turned on, illuminating a big rectangle on the wall.
“Can everybody hear me?” Keenan said. He drew some applause and raised his arm out magnanimously. “Take a moment and look around. Can you believe just a year ago this place was a derelict, shutdown sewing sweatshop? Now it’s one of the fastest-growing digital marketing outfits in the country. How did we get from there to here? I’ve got a one-word answer. You.”
Raising a finger, he signaled to someone by the projector, which began cycling through a series of images. They depicted the guys I’d been working around doing all sorts of things, from painting the walls and assembling the desks, to standing by presentations and hunching over computers. They were laughing and smiling all the while, not a whiff of tension, leering eyes, or even awkwardness to be found. Why hadn’t I been able to see this side of any of these guys?
Of course Keenan came up often. Seeing that big handsome face on the wall next to its endearing owner singing the praises of his staff sent a wave through me every time. There were a few shots of Chelsea as well. Toward the end, a shot of me flashed by when I was sitting next to Martin. I supposed it was nice I was included at all considering I’d barely been working here a week.
“But we can’t dwell on the past, though,” Keenan continued. “We have more work to do if we’re going to keep growing and realize our vision. What I wanted when I started this gig was a web where everyone could be included and feel comfortable, and I knew other companies would respond to that when it was combined with lightning-fast responsiveness and a slick operation. This is going to be an exciting year ahead of us as we assist some of the biggest brands and conglomerates in the world.
“Can we do this together? I’m going to be brutally honest. I need you more than ever, because I can’t do this alone. In case you’ve forgotten, I’m not the brilliant entrepreneur who always has a clever line to feed to a journalist. I’m not the genius they make me out to be. I’m the guy who has to have everything printed out for me because I don’t trust I’m seeing it right on a computer screen. I’m congenitally unable to get here before nine a.m. even though if any of you did that I’d hang you by your toes. The things I have to do are so far beyond me that it’s not even funny. Sometimes I feel helpless. Please, please help me. And let’s knock ’em dead.”
The crowd of coworkers laughed as Keenan confessed his hang-ups, but a very different emotion struck me. There was no use denying it. I was smitten.
CHAPTER 3
As we used to say when we were kids, my sister had “the life.” Handsome husband, gorgeous kid, and pretty house in the exurbs, it was too good to be true and Lindsay didn’t even know it. I used to think that nobody played the game of life for free, but then I realized she’d gotten a free pass on pretty much everything.
“I’m sorry I’m a little late,” I said when I arrived the following day around noon. “The starter on my car only works if I rub it gently in the exact right place.”
Lindsay, apron and oven mitts on, reached in and produced a tray of perfectly browned biscuits that belonged in a commercial. I visited at least once a month since they were barely an hour away from the city, and I seemed to always catch her effortlessly doing something motherly.
“Car trouble? You should take it back to the dealership and get it fixed.”
Like I said, she could be clueless, and not just about how it would take closing out my bank account to fix half the problems my car had. There was a fine line to walk between tugging her back to reality and making her cross.
“My car didn’t come from a dealership,” I said, hoping she could use her imagination to comprehend where beat-up Honda Accords came from.
“Oh, well wherever it came from they must be able to fix it,” she said, clearly not giving it a second thought.
Her two-year-old son Patrick was playing with some toy trains on a floor so spotless we could eat off it, but Lindsay called him over to the table anyway and deposited a biscuit next to some macaroni and cheese and steamed broccoli. She set the pan down on the shining slate-gray stone countertop. It was hard not to want to puncture the pristine fantasyland in front of me.
“Do you remember when all Mom and Dad used to give us for lunch was a roll of cookie dough?”
She laughed with an oven mitt pressed into her hip.
“They did some crazy things,” she said.
They did, but that wasn’t why the only thing in the house for us to eat was raw cookie dough. I hadn’t even been in their home for five minutes and I was already struggling not to blurt it all out.
“Everything OK in here? This looks delicious,” her husband, Jamie, said, sweeping into the room from elsewhere in the house. A man with a slight stature and unassuming nature, he knew to step in and head off any sort of a confrontation between us, but he was clueless in other ways. Reaching into the fridge, he pulled out a full gallon of milk a
nd peeled away the seal at the top.
“It didn’t happen again when you were out at the store, did it?” Lindsay asked. I turned my head to watch Jamie pour himself a tall glass.
“Actually, it did. I couldn’t believe it,” he said.
“It’s not an accident that you keep picking up gallons of milk that cost more than all the others. They’re doing it on purpose. You should just buy milk from somewhere other than the gas station where they know you,” she said.
Jamie shrugged and started breaking up Patrick’s biscuit into small bites.
“If the register says the milk is five bucks, what is there to do?”
“Wow, Patrick is eating so well,” I said, feeling like it was my turn to butt in and find a way to change the subject.
“He is. You should see him crack open a lobster claw,” Lindsay said, beaming. My eyes widened.
“How are things with you?” Jamie asked me. I took a quick bite to give myself time to think. I somehow had to skim down that I was working at a place where I was subjected to such a storm of sexual harassment that I was secretly trying to run a sting operation over it while developing feelings for a boss who was cute like a tiger but had a reputation for having terrifying fangs.
“I got a new job,” I said, drawing warm smiles from the two other adults at the table. Patrick didn’t care.
“That’s terrific. Congratulations,” Jamie said, patting me on the shoulder so lightly that I didn’t feel it and wasn’t sure if he actually made contact.
“Yeah, thank you. I’m not sure it’ll work out, though.” I neglected to mention that my job security basically rested on whether or not I slept with anyone in the next seven days and since I wasn’t planning to I was pretty much gone.
“Don’t say that. Some positive thinking goes a long way. If you believe it’ll be great, it will be.”
“It also helps if you ignore that you’re doing three peoples’ jobs,” Lindsay added, draping her arms around her husband’s neck from behind.
Apart from trying to open each other’s eyes to the parts of life we were ignoring, the weekend was exactly as refreshing as I’d hoped. We took Patrick out for some sledding on a tube at a local hillside. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed so hard after he and I went down the hill together and nearly wiped out on a bump near the bottom. His face lit up at the thrill of it like the entire world was organized just for his enjoyment.
That night my sister and I gave him a bath to shake off a chill from a little outdoor time in the yard, and he splashed and laughed to his heart’s content. Who had it better than kids?
“He must think life is perfect,” I said, marveling at this little boy who seemed to love everything.
“Maybe it’s a little too perfect for him. When we were at the play center yesterday, he pushed a girl clean off one of those play tree stumps. She landed on her back and was bawling. We did the parent thing where we made him say he was sorry to the girl, but you could tell he had no idea what any of it meant and was back to playing, oblivious to what had happened a minute later,” Lindsay explained.
I groaned for little Patrick. I knew he was barely a toddler and couldn’t really understand the concept of gender at all, but I couldn’t help projecting an adult perspective onto it.
“He’ll learn the proper way to respect girls soon enough,” I said.
My sister looked at me as we sat on the side of the tub.
“I mean, yeah, we’re working on that. I don’t think he can really comprehend the difference between girls and boys now,” she said, but that answer wasn’t good enough for me.
“It’s not something to be taken lightly. No one knows how it starts. If we don’t teach them properly as kids they’re not going to be any better as adults than the guys out there now.”
The look on her face became more incredulous. Even Patrick seemed to settle down and give me a funny look.
“Are you suggesting that my son is going to do something violent later on because of what he did yesterday? And what’s wrong with the guys who are out there today?”
“No, I’m not saying he’ll do anything,” I said, knowing that I wasn’t on good footing and was wading into my own issues. But on the other count, my sister had somehow dodged the worst of what was out there and had never been interested in believing what the rest of us went through. For a second the only sound was the hum of the bathroom vent. “Guys out there just don’t care to follow the rules. They do whatever they think they can get away with, and it doesn’t matter who gets broken or who dies in the process.”
My sister took on a hard, defensive look.
“If you’re talking about the thing that happened to you…”
“Don’t worry, you don’t have to cover your ears. I won’t try to shout it into them again,” I said, looking away to the sink counter where there were shallow buckets of sand labeled from all of the places they’d visited before they had Patrick. The Mediterranean, Japan, Australia, South Africa, Alaska. Even just having a beach-themed bathroom where the open door didn’t touch the toilet seemed lavish, let alone the reminders of obscene amounts of world travel.
“Enough already!” My sister’s voice rose. “If you’re going to elude to it every time you come here, the least you can do is not make me feel guilty for not wanting to hear every horrible detail. It burns me so deeply that something happened to you. I thought it was enough that I got the gist of it. You were attacked. I remember the bruises.”
“That’s hardly the gist of it. Being attacked could mean anything. You don’t know what happened to me.”
“Then fine. Tell me now and save us both from having to skirt around it every time you visit.”
I grimaced, not sure I could. It didn’t help that I wasn’t prepared. Parts of it were still hazy and dark in my memory where it was too painful to recall the things I’d seen while it was happening to me.
“You were already away at Penn and Dad was long gone,” I muttered. “It was the park by the river where I used to run. There was someone there. I don’t know if he knew that I ran that loop regularly and was waiting for me or if I just happened to go by when he decided he needed to have someone. All of a sudden there were footsteps behind me and loud breathing. I looked back and it was like a shadow closing in on me. I was already tired and couldn’t get away before he pulled me off the path and into the brush. I screamed but the sound vanished in the wind.
“The guy was middle aged with graying hair. His eyes were lifeless like he could’ve been sleepwalking. All I remember was him hitting me hard in the shoulder, holding my throat as he pulled at my clothes. He punched the side of my face and there was an explosion of light. I was breaking all over. I don’t even know. He held my arms down before clutching my throat. Struggling was no use…
“Then all of a sudden he was gone. My nose and mouth were bleeding. The waves crashed against the rocks. He left me to die there, but I just didn’t. It’s hard to say I was lucky about anything, but for whatever reason he didn’t have a knife or something to use on me. People tell me I got up and staggered back onto the path a few hours later and found someone, but I don’t remember any of it. Mostly what I remember is Mom being secretly angry that her pitiful insurance meant that it was going to cost a lot of money.”
My sister was quiet, her eyes gravitating to Patrick, who was pushing a toy boat around in the bath water. He had wrinkles on his fingers and toes now. I wondered if my sister would try to paper over my story, saying she’d listened and then trying to immediately sweep it under the rug. Or maybe she’d begin apologizing profusely. Finally, she whispered to me while looking at Patrick, “How can you ever talk to another man without remembering that?”
“I can’t.”
Her head lowered, she slowly cast her eyes on me. They were watering and her hands were shaking a little. Making her cry wasn’t what I had wanted, and having wanted her to know this part of me did little to assuage the guilt rushing in that I had made her listen aft
er holding out for so long. Maybe I would’ve been a better sister if I’d allowed her to stay in her bubble.
Christmas morning came soon enough, and even though I still regretted the way I told my sister it felt like some of the weight had been taken off my shoulders. Patrick still needed some help tearing open his presents, the wrapping paper becoming more appealing to him than what was actually inside. Finally Jamie brought in a large box that had both Lindsay and I curious.
“Go ahead and rip it open,” Jamie said, encouraging him and finally pulling off the paper himself. “Wow, yay! Best Christmas ever!”
Lindsay’s jaw hit the floor when she saw that the present was a brand-new Playstation game console.
“Why on Earth did you get him this? He’s not going to be able to use it,” she said.
“The woman working at the store said it would make a fantastic gift for a two year old. He might have to grow into it a little, but we’ll have it when he’s ready for it. Look, he likes it,” Jamie said, pointing to Patrick’s hand resting against the box.
“By the time he’s old enough this thing will be obsolete. They won’t still be making games for it. This five-hundred dollar device is just going to sit in a closet for the better part of a decade. Argh!”
I couldn’t help but laugh at her frustration, and other than that the day went off without a hitch. I’d gotten Patrick some dinosaur hand puppets, Lindsay a cooking mandolin, and Jamie a pair of knock-off Oakley sunglasses in the hopes that he’d wear them and appear less like a sucker. I received a Fitbit from Lindsay and Jamie, plus a huge hug from Patricksaurus.
The next day I made my way back to the city and then bright and early the following morning I was riding the subway in to Mouse Roar’s offices, wondering what exactly I was in store for. My phone was on and recording, ready for the next inevitable advance. A part of me hoped that one might come from Keenan himself, or that I’d at least have the chance to talk to him while acting more like myself, but even the possibility of that seemed remote. As I sat down at my workstation, I took a moment to cogitate over whether he had any idea his staff behaved the way they did.
