“So handsome,” she said in the tone of a college girl hired to watch a child for four hours. The top of a hotel keycard had been slid into place. The name on it: The Prescott.
She straightened and smiled. He clapped the wallet shut and stuffed it into his slacks again.
“I think so, too,” he said in reply to her compliment. “But how would I ever really know? Everyone thinks that about their kids.”
He rescued the cigarette and sucked on the end one more time. He laughed gently, puffing out white smoke like a dragon. “Hey, I was thinking.” He dropped the stub and crushed it under the sole of his black leather shoe. “Could you do me a favor?”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
31-MAR
Rosalita sat on the edge of Salomon’s bed. A Spider-Man bedspread was tucked beneath his armpits and he smelled like the yellow Johnson & Johnson soap she’d been using in his baths since he was a baby. “Did you finish your workbook problems?” Rosalita forced herself to use English because he’d need English more than he would need Spanish. It hurt her, this invisible communication barrier already cropping up between them.
He nodded, his thick eyelashes like curtains drawing over the crown of his cheeks. When he was a toddler, her uncle and his wife laughed and said it was a good thing that Salomon came out of her, otherwise she might not believe that he was hers. But Rosalita saw herself marked on Salomon in dozens of tiny but important ways. The flat spots on the ridges of his ears. His tolerance for extremely spicy foods. His allergic reaction to scented soaps.
She patted the solid lump of his chest. “Did you get all the answers right?”
He nodded again and she gave him a hard look in return. “Yes,” he said, out loud. Sometimes she had to coax out the words that the hearing loss he’d been born with had tried to steal from him, words they’d fought hard to dig up from deep inside her sweet boy.
In the end, it had not been so painful to ask Salomon’s father for the money to pay for her son’s speech therapy and then for the expensive hearing aid. Rosalita was proud, but she measured her actions against only one question: What was best for Salomon? And so she asked then and she would ask again, once Salomon got into the private school program. Which he would, she told herself. Because it was her goal as much—if not more—than his.
It amazed Rosalita to watch her little boy’s hands scrawling words quickly across a page, to see that he knew American history and could do fractions. Rosalita wasn’t stupid, but she’d never learned to read or write English as well as she would have liked. Before the office building job, Rosalita had cleaned the houses of women who tended to send last minute text messages about where they’d left the broom or to ask if she could let the dog out and she was always embarrassed by the crude messages she sent in return, knowing they weren’t right, but also not knowing how to fix them. She’d completed middle school in Mexico before moving across the border and nearly finished high school here in the U.S. She still loved to read. But those had become such small pieces of her that she knew the people in the office building where she worked would never be able to see them, not even if they had a microscope.
“I have something to show you.” Salomon’s body wriggled underneath the covers as he dug for some buried treasure hidden at his feet. “Ms. Ardie gave this to me.” Then he was grinning and holding out his palm and in it rested a shiny gold-and-blue pin. “She said an airplane captain wears it and that I can have it.”
Rosalita’s cheeks flushed and she ran the back of her hand across her hairline.
“I might be a pilot one day,” he said. “And then the good thing will be that I’ll already have this badge.”
“Perhaps,” she said, placidly. She’d never been on a plane. Ardie Valdez had been on one so frequently she didn’t need to save the wing pin for her own son.
And what did it matter? This was what she told herself because it was sensible and true. There was no competition. Though the meaner part of her conscience couldn’t help but add that the reason there was no competition was because Ardie Valdez was already so far ahead.
And now a piece of the office and of Ardie lived in her house. A small thing. And yet, small things had broken her before.
“Or maybe even someone that builds airplanes.” Her voice turned suddenly tired, as though she were returning home after third shift instead of leaving for it. “But only”—she dragged the covers up to his chin—“if you study hard. Give that to me,” she said. “I don’t want you poking yourself in your sleep.”
He pushed it into her hand. It was only a piece of junk. Weightless. But it made her boy smile and that was what scared her.
The mattress sighed with the release of her weight. She flipped off the switch, leaving only the glow of the moon-shaped nightlight in the corner. With his good ear pressed into the pillow, she knew he didn’t hear her when she whispered, “Te amo, Salomon.”
* * *
Rosalita drove to work and parked in the lot across the street from the Truviv building. The cleaning staff wasn’t allowed to park inside the office garage, despite the fact that it was nearly empty at this time of night. The distance kept the cleaners from walking out with anything that wasn’t nailed down.
After collecting their cart of cleaning supplies, Rosalita and Crystal rode the elevator up the building’s spine and onto an office floor so devoid of life, she felt that she’d landed on the moon. Detecting the women’s movements, the lights flickered on with a spitting crackle followed by the low-grade hum of fluorescent bulbs.
Crystal’s baggy socks sulked around her ankles as she walked over to the empty receptionist’s desk and fished through the candy bowl with raggedy nails. Rosalita swatted her hand away. “What?” Crystal snatched her hand to her chest.
“Those aren’t for us,” Rosalita said, returning to the cart where her clipboard hung.
“What, like they count them?” Crystal eyed the bowl hungrily.
“They might.”
Crystal dropped the issue.
Rosalita began to work the floor with clinical efficiency. When she cleaned the east bathroom, she slipped her hand into her pocket while Crystal bent over a toilet bowl inside one of the stalls and pulled out Salomon’s wing pin, then dropped it into the paper towel bin before changing the bag. She told herself she measured her actions by only one question: What was best for Salomon? She told herself that, but she also knew how to lie.
And so they continued along the fifteenth floor. Hours passed differently in the middle of the night. The simultaneous thrill and depression that came from being awake when everyone else was asleep. The sharpness of the light against the dark. The way time became only a construct and yet also the only thing that Rosalita could think about. It still reminded her of the days after Salomon’s birth, when she held him to her breast as she gazed into the television, deep into the darkness, when nothing worth watching was ever on. And in the morning, she would call her sister and catalogue the night’s events in minute detail—how much Salomon ate, how many hours he slept, how many hours she slept—as if this minutia needed to be documented, witnessed. And she knew that the memory of those nights would never leave her body until the day she died.
It felt like a lifetime ago that Rosalita had climbed into the web of motherhood and allowed it to stick, to weave itself into her hair in shades of gray, to crawl beneath her skin where it turned to blue and purple spider veins, to draw a shiny, taut line just above her pubic bone. Since then, the cobweb had only grown in complexity, the needs of her life only enmeshing her deeper and deeper into the silk strands until one day she might at last be gobbled up.
Alongside her, Crystal still wasn’t exactly proficient but was improving and she kept the cart organized enough so that Rosalita could speed through her rounds. At this point, Rosalita was sure Crystal was pregnant by the way her fingers rested idly on her stomach and when they did, Rosalita could just make out the small mound protruding there. Probably a boy, because Crystal was skin and bones ever
ywhere except for her belly. That was how Rosalita had been, too. And her body remembered this also by the pearly riverbeds that crawled along her sides and out from her belly button like a sun. It remembered.
Rosalita emptied the shredder and the wastepaper basket in the offices of Sloane Glover and Ardie Valdez and a new employee—Katherine Bell. When she reached the end of the hall, the corner office was closed, lights off. She knocked twice and entered.
The mistake was obvious. A yelp, quickly stifled. A rough huff of air. Rosalita caught sight of a woman with dark, short hair staring, open mouthed, at her in the strip of light cast over her from the cracked-open door, eyes wide and shining in the dark like a raccoon exposed in the beam of a flashlight. Rosalita lost her breath in a gasp that made hardly any sound at all. And then the moments that followed were quiet, too. So quiet that the only noises were those of skin against skin and fabric and gulps and a man coughing and saliva and hair and—
Rosalita backed out of the office, jamming her shoulder so painfully against the edge of the frame she could see the colors of the bruise that would form stamped against the inside of her eyelids as she blinked back tears. A short cry caught in her chest as her back bowed and she clutched at her arm. Tingles raced electric bolts down to her elbow. Her mind tilted into a spin of double vision that churned her stomach. She had just enough sense to close the door.
Crystal stood from behind the cart, holding a bottle of Windex like a gun. “Are you okay?”
Rosalita’s internal organs stampeded for her throat. “We’re skipping the corner office tonight.”
“Why?” Crystal stared through the door as if she might see what Rosalita had seen.
Rosalita swallowed. Her shoulder hurt. “Someone’s in there.”
“But you said—”
“Not tonight.” Rosalita half expected the door to fling open, but so far, it hadn’t. Her face felt feverish. She didn’t look at Crystal. “I have to use the restroom,” she said. “Go ahead and take care of this line of offices.”
Rosalita’s ears rang. She stretched her hand out, letting her fingers follow along the wall for balance and direction. It led her to the restroom. The lights beamed on in one click, too bright and demanding. She leaned over the faucet, pushing her weight onto the white porcelain. Sweat glimmered between the dark roots of her hair and beneath the follicles of her eyebrows.
She stood, almost panting. Her brown eyes were pools of mud reflected back to her. She splashed her face with cool water and let the rivulets run down to drip from the tip of her nose and her chin. Then she squeezed her eyes shut against her own reflection and wiped the beads from her eyelashes. Her body, she knew, had always had the better memory.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
31-MAR
Sloane had returned home from Target, where she’d purchased a birthday present for Ardie’s son, Michael, an hour ago. The party was tomorrow. Saturday. It had snuck up on her, all tucked innocently as it was on her calendar right after a hellish Friday and, well, here it was. Now, the night before the birthday party hardly seemed the appropriate time to tell Ardie. She tried to draft the text message in her head as if it were a work email: Ardie, I have something to tell you, could we have a quick word?
She could pick up the phone. She wasn’t a teenager. But she wasn’t exactly sure that was a good idea, either. Sloane really was the worst for procrastinating, wasn’t she?
She had a Dilemma on her hands and, to cope, she’d been standing barefoot in the kitchen, eating her feelings, when the second moral quandary presented itself.
Abigail’s phone buzzed. That was how it began, anyway. And now, well—Sloane wasn’t being nosy, was she? She was being a good mother. Poking around was just as much a requirement as helping with homework. Anyone would agree with that. In fact, as Sloane thought about it she was sure she’d read it in an article somewhere. Snooping was Sloane’s love language.
Maybe it did deserve some rebranding, though. Curiosity. There, that sounded better. Just in case Derek ever asked how she came to be scrolling through Abigail’s cell phone. She would shrug and say, Oh, I don’t know, I was curious.
Derek was in their bedroom doing pull-ups from a bar he’d wedged into the doorframe. She could hear his big, manly breaths from her spot perched in the kitchen where last week he’d installed two light fixtures—French country chandeliers custom-made in the Luberon—that now hung ostentatiously over the island, taunting Sloane with the knowledge of the accompanying credit card statement that would soon arrive in the mailbox. Not that she could talk, having just “invested” in a pair of Clizia Mesh Manolo Blahniks, the sight of which nearly brought her straight to climax. But still. Before she’d gotten married, her mother had told her that for any marriage to work, both partners needed to share similar attitudes toward money. Consequently, Sloane had taken her and Derek’s mutually expensive tastes as a sign of their compatibility. Years later, her parents were divorced and she’d discovered that what mutually expensive tastes amounted to was two people spending her paychecks at an alarmingly fast clip instead of just the one.
Abigail’s phone vibrated facedown on the countertop again, spinning a quarter inch. It was ten-thirty at night. Who was texting Abigail?
Then it occurred to her: She was Abigail’s mom, not some jealous girlfriend. She didn’t have to wonder, she could just check. One moral quandary solved and just like that her concern over speaking to Ardie before tomorrow’s party faded to background stress.
She punched Abigail’s passcode into the phone and navigated to the green-and-white messaging icon. There they were. Three new messages neatly lined up on the left side of the screen.
Sloane devoured them whole:
Grady Reed
Everyone knows you ran and told your mom on us. We didn’t even do anything. Not cool. We wouldn’t have talked to you if we knew you were a tattletale.
Steve Lightner
Yeah. My dad says that we can’t have you at the boy-girl party at my place now because you tattle and are too sensitive.
Grady Reed
Sorry BLABIGAIL.
Sloane slammed the phone down on the granite with a grunt of carnal anger. “You all right in there?” Derek called from the other room.
“Fine. I’m fine. Sorry.” The decision not to respond with what she’d found on Abigail’s phone was swift and instinctive. Unfair, probably. Immoral? Maybe. Abigail was his child, too. Equal parts. Though she did feel that, in the event of a tiebreaker, surely Abigail was just a tiny bit more hers, what with the gestating inside of her for nine months and what have you. Derek certainly didn’t have a flabby kangaroo pouch underneath his belly button. Still, in a perfect world, she ought to be able to invite him along in her parental fury.
But no. She couldn’t risk her husband’s propensity towards reasonableness. Her daughter was being harassed. Obviously. And Grady Reed had brought Sloane Glover’s name into it. He’d said “mom” and “mom” meant Sloane. Not Derek. No, she absolutely couldn’t risk being talked down from a ledge. She was angry. She should be angry. Anger was actually the only reasonable way to feel at the moment.
Her daughter’s social status was teetering precariously. Isla Lombardi wouldn’t even talk to Abigail anymore and apparently that was important because Isla Lombardi had divided the girls in the class into Cool and Not and Abigail hadn’t made the cut. Hence those first nasty text messages—bitch, cunt, slut. Only the Nots received them. Isla’s mother—a marketing director in Irving—had been trying to sell the school on the idea that Isla and her friends were exhibiting some form of new-generation feminism—girls being opinionated, forceful, and outspoken. They simply weren’t fitting into the likable female character narrative and therefore shouldn’t be punished. Sloane hoped Isla’s mother got her hand caught in a garbage disposal, so maybe Sloane was exhibiting some new-generation feminism, too.
When Sloane turned the phone over, a hairline crack snaked across the glass screen. She closed her eyes, bre
athing heavily, until she felt the color in her cheeks fade.
“Derek.” She padded into their bedroom, where her husband was crunching, shirtless, on the Persian rug, God bless him. “I got an email.” Like anything else, lying was a skill that improved with practice and Sloane had some experience in deceiving her husband. She wasn’t proud of it. But this was for Derek’s own protection. Saving him from how the sausage got made, so to speak, and so, if anything, Sloane should be applauded for bearing the burden of their shared lives. Some might say that she was even a little heroic. “I have a bit more work to do tonight. I’ll be upstairs in the office.” He bared his teeth as he hissed air out on an upward crunch. It looked painful. Sloane wondered if the two of them—Sloane and Derek—were in a game of chicken to see who would let themselves go first. She prayed that he would.
“Okay. I’m going to bed soon. Can you check that the doors are locked on your way up?” She nodded. “Sure you don’t want to…” He made eyes in the direction of their California King–sized mattress. “… first?”
“Quite,” she said. Given that Derek had the body of a twenty-five-year-old, Sloane should probably worry about her husband’s fidelity, but for whatever reason, she didn’t. How would you feel, honestly, if you found out Derek had been prowling around? Grace once asked her. Like shit, she’d responded. But then I’d get over it. And in her core, she believed that to be true.
In any event, she couldn’t fake heavy sex breathing and maintain her current level of rage at the same time. So she escaped upstairs, her indignation set to boil.
At her computer, she used the built-in mouse to navigate to her remote desktop, where she pulled up a template on Truviv letterhead and dashed out the school board superintendent’s name in the address line. Sloane had been circling around an idea ever since Abigail had received the first text messages calling her those names.
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