Audrey's Door Part 17

She dropped the hula girl. Black hair and lithe body. A bikini top, like the one she'd lost to the floor of 14B. The lamp thudded as it landed on the red s.h.a.g carpet. In her mind, it wasn't carpet but red ants. They swarmed, sweet and insane.

She looked at the hula girl's flesh-colored skin and imagined it was Jayne. Idiot Jayne, who thought an orca was a dinosaur. Beirut, a band. Indians from Iran. Blithely happy Jayne, whose job at L'Oreal was probably forty-year-old copy girl. Of course she could stay up late getting drunk, dating grandpas, and hanging out in c.o.ke bars; n.o.body gave a s.h.i.+t whether she showed up at all. Infuriating Jayne, who didn't know she ought to be miserable.

The hall was quiet. Not a sound. The overhead light blinked and buzzed like a locust. She looked at the bra.s.s letters behind her: 14B.

She knew it was wrong, but the compulsion was strong. Fragile gra.s.s skirt. Little fingernails painted red. Idiot dimpled smile, just like those monstrous children. In her mind, the red-carpeted hallway glittered like an artery, coursing with blood.

She looked down at the lamp and saw herself do it. Played the image over and over again until it became inevitable, like a thing already done. Finally, she stomped on the ceramic girl with both feet.

m.u.f.fled by the carpet, the sound was delicate, like eggsh.e.l.ls cracking, or Jayne's bones. One! Two! Three! Four! And Audrey makes five! One! Two! Three! Four! And Audrey makes five! She did it again and again. Imagined Jayne's face beneath her feet, cut up and marred by ceramic shards. She did it again and again. Imagined Jayne's face beneath her feet, cut up and marred by ceramic shards.

Dumb Jayne, who would accidentally stumble into the better life that Audrey had been scratching for with both hands. A year from now she'd be running down the aisle with the old guy while redheaded bridesmaids in tacky pink taffeta threw rice. Strolling into never-never land, where f.u.c.king bluebirds chirped. And Audrey would remain trapped here in 14B, watching television in the dark.

As she stomped, she remembered a tub. Keith! Olivia! Kurt! Deirdre! But that wasn't the right order, was it? No, first had gone Keith, then Kurt, last Olivia, who, in her terror, had squeezed the baby too tight, so that by the time it got to the water, it was already still.

...How did she know that? No matter; the truth is the point. Olivia. Clara. Jayne. Betty. Jill. These needy b.i.t.c.hes always squeezed too tight.

She smashed again. Again. Again. Until the wires separated, and hula girl's face became flecks of flesh-colored sand.

The sound didn't carry, soft as a secret. You'd never know what was happening unless you were out here, watching. During her time with Saraub, she'd missed her secrets. At least now that it was over with him, she could stop pretending that she was happy, or even that she'd ever loved him. That love was anything more than a lie people needed to believe, to keep from slitting their own throats. The world was idiots and dope fiends, and if you weren't one, you'd better be the other.

The lamp sliced the soles of her shoes, but she kept going. Ground her feet so that they bled. Didn't bother pulling out the shards from her wounds. The pain was evidence of her devotion. A gift to The Breviary.

When she was done, she looked down at the mess. A red, dusty paste with wires running through it, and a broken lampshade. She imagined Jayne coming home and finding it, and for a moment, her senses returned. "Oh," she moaned in quick remorse, and bent down to lift the shards, but quickly reconsidered.

Twittish Jayne and her dependence on the kindness of strangers. Someone ought to teach her to stop knocking. "f.u.c.k you, Jayne," she shouted down the hall, then punched the elevator b.u.t.ton. Feet bleeding, she slammed the iron gate and headed down.

If she had glimpsed along the hall, or stopped panting long enough to hear the tenants' emphysemic wheezing, she might have reconsidered her course of action. Checked herself into a mental hospital, or called the police. Perhaps even joined Saraub in Was.h.i.+ngton. But she did not look, or see the cold eyes behind shut doors all down the fourteenth floor, that watched through the man-made slits of their skin.

After the elevator descended, the tenants opened their doors and began to clap.

26.

Some People Burn Their Own Wings Monday morning, at the same time that Audrey's phone buzzed in her pocket, Saraub Ramesh looked out the window of an American Airlines 767. His camera a.s.sistant Tom Wilson squeezed into the seat next to him, packed tight as compressed styrofoam. They were parked on a Dulles runway, headed back to JFK. The Eastern Seaboard was about to get hit with Hurricane Erebus, reportedly the worst storm of the season. Right now, raindrops smacked against his small, round window, and the skies above were black. Takeoff had been delayed thirty minutes so far, and they were waiting for an announcement from the captain about whether they'd be lifting off at all.

This. .h.i.tch in the weather wasn't surprising. Since Bob Stern had countersigned the contracts to acquire Maginot Lines, Maginot Lines, nothing had gone right. Not the movie, or his subjects, or his cameraman, or even Audrey Lucas, the first and only woman to whom he'd offered his heart. The ring scratched inside his right trouser pocket. He wasn't sure where else to put it, and it wasn't beneath Wilson to steal it. So in his pocket it stayed. When Audrey had dropped it on the table of that greasy spoon in Lincoln, he'd been surprised by how small it was. Lighter than he'd remembered, too. He'd wondered whether she'd have parted with it so easily if the stone had been bigger than half a carat, and the band had been platinum instead of sterling silver. He'd also wondered whether he should throw it in her face. nothing had gone right. Not the movie, or his subjects, or his cameraman, or even Audrey Lucas, the first and only woman to whom he'd offered his heart. The ring scratched inside his right trouser pocket. He wasn't sure where else to put it, and it wasn't beneath Wilson to steal it. So in his pocket it stayed. When Audrey had dropped it on the table of that greasy spoon in Lincoln, he'd been surprised by how small it was. Lighter than he'd remembered, too. He'd wondered whether she'd have parted with it so easily if the stone had been bigger than half a carat, and the band had been platinum instead of sterling silver. He'd also wondered whether he should throw it in her face.

Daniel's advice now played in his head: You're Jell-O, dude. If you showed a little backbone, you wouldn't have these problems. Kick her to the curb, and she'll come crawling back. Better yet, get somebody younger who New York hasn't beaten down. You're Jell-O, dude. If you showed a little backbone, you wouldn't have these problems. Kick her to the curb, and she'll come crawling back. Better yet, get somebody younger who New York hasn't beaten down.

That's why he'd left her at the Super 8 Friday morning. Returning that ring had pushed him past his limit. He'd feuded with his family over her, eaten spinach for her, even let her arrange his pint gla.s.ses into crazy-a.s.s pyramids on the kitchen table for her, but every time he'd surrendered, she'd demanded more. She'd trashed welcome mats, hidden comic books, shut doors as soon as he got home because she said she'd needed time alone. The weirdest part was the stuff she'd moved small fractions of inches when he wasn't looking. A found-art tin-can vase recentered. A desk s.h.i.+fted slightly to the right. The coffee mugs moved behind the pint gla.s.ses, instead of up front like the week before. At first he'd thought he was going crazy. Then he'd thought she'd been waging a covert pa.s.sive-aggressive war, only it was so pa.s.sive he hadn't even noticed. It was only recently that he'd understood that it was a compulsion for perfection. She was a girl who cared more about appearances than substance. Right then, he should have realized that they were doomed.

Sure, things had started good. They'd been a team. Nick and Nora without the dog. But by the time she'd moved into his apartment, she'd already started treating everything he did with contempt, from shaking hands with strangers too enthusiastically ("Don't be so eager to please!"), to his slumped posture ("Stand tall!"), to the way he was always winded by the time they got to the landing to their third-floor walk-up ("You'd better not keel over!"). Over time that contempt had translated into more closed doors, and more cleaning, and finally, packed bags. Sometimes he'd caught the contempt in her eyes as she'd frowned at him and understood that she was searching for reasons to leave. And how do you fight someone who doesn't want want to love you anymore? to love you anymore?

So, yeah, you have to go after what you want. Yeah, love is all about patience. But maybe it was time he cashed in his chips and started over. He'd settle for lukewarm affection, even smiling but humorless Tonia, his former betrothed, so long as he didn't have to be anybody's doormat ever again.

Just then, the plane began to roll along the runway. Outside, everything was gray, like the rain wasn't clear, but diluted black. Large metal cages in the air. It made no sense to him that these planes didn't come cras.h.i.+ng to the ground.

"What are your panties in a bunch about?" Wilson asked.

"Everything," Saraub answered.

"What I don't understand is how you didn't see this coming," Wilson answered.

At first Saraub thought he was talking about Audrey. I didn't I didn't want want to see it, to see it, he almost answered, but then he understood that Wilson was talking about he almost answered, but then he understood that Wilson was talking about Maginot Lines. Maginot Lines.

Most of the calls had come over the weekend, pretty much as soon as he'd accepted Suns.h.i.+ne Studio's deal. The head of public relations at the World Bank, Internal Affairs at Servitus, a member of the House from Oregon, two farmers outside Buffalo, even the spokesman for the EPA. As if they'd been coached, they each said the same thing: they'd decided to withdraw their support for the movie. If he insisted on running their likeness in his film or promotional materials, they'd sue.

At first he'd argued-permission is permission, you can't rescind it. Then he'd pleaded, because no matter what contracts they'd signed, if they wanted, they could tie the movie up in the courts for years. Finally, after call number eighteen, which he'd taken while literally lying between the starched sheets of the Comfort Inn's double bed, he'd given up. By this morning, more than half his interviews had backed out, and out of the ones who'd stayed, only three were worth keeping. Not enough for a movie. Not even enough for a commercial.

"I don't get people," Saraub said, not so much to Wilson, as to the back of the seat ahead of him. "Some of these guys contacted me. They wanted to talk. They thought they were doing the right thing. What could change that?"

Wilson shrugged, and Saraub could tell that a part of him was enjoying this because it proved his cynicism. "Some a.s.shole you don't know from a hole in the wall, but whose boss is one of the main targets of your movie, buys your movie. Two days later half the people in the movie drop out. This is not rocket science. They used all your notes to contact your subjects and showed them some green."

"I can't believe they'd go to the trouble," Saraub said.

"You fight city hall, city hall buries you," Wilson said, then took a slug from the canary yellow Rheingold Beer can he'd filched from the service tray upon boarding the plane. It smelled bad, and Saraub decided that there were greater sins than taking up too much room in a seat; you could be Wilson.

"Three years of my life, all for nothing. I can't believe this is happening," he said. He wasn't just thinking of the movie, but of Audrey, and his white picket fence dreams that he'd been so foolish to dream.

Wilson half snorted, half laughed. The sound was too loud for public, and the woman in the row ahead turned around and glared. "Don't play innocent. You p.i.s.sed on 'em! Of course they came after you. You want the government to start regulating multinationals, and you're p.i.s.sing off the coal lobby, the oil lobby, and the big farmers who get subsidized irrigation while you're at it. Servitus has fifty legal eagles on the payroll to deal with guys like you."

"But it's not like any of the footage is a revelation. Everybody knows we're drilling faster than makes sense," Saraub said.

Wilson shook his head. "Hear no evil. See no evil. If n.o.body has to think about it, it's not happening. This is America, kiddo. Not Calcutta."

Saraub frowned. The baby boomer generation; how quickly they'd turned. "It's not right," he said. "I'm not letting them get away with it, either. I'm running the footage as is. I don't care what they do." Even as he said it, he knew the threat was empty: he was screwed.

Wilson burped again. He'd been out drinking last night, and was still half in the bag. With the five o'clock shadow and oil-stained denim tuxedo he was sporting, he looked a lot like Ted Kaczynski, which explained why, for once, it was the white guy, and not Saraub, who'd been interrogated and searched at the gate before boarding. If you hate firing people so much, you should just hand him a pink piece of paper the next time he shows up to work drunk, If you hate firing people so much, you should just hand him a pink piece of paper the next time he shows up to work drunk, Audrey had once teased. Audrey had once teased. Let him figure it out. Let him figure it out.

"Hey! Maybe it's got nothing to do with the movie. They just don't like you," Wilson said.

"Thanks," Saraub answered.

"A lot of you not to like." Wilson chuckled in a mean way and didn't bother to hide that he meant it mean.

Saraub sighed, thought about answering, then decided to look out the window instead. Four Air Canada 727s lumbered gracelessly through the storm and down the runway like dinosaur birds.

He could have hired a studio man two years ago, but instead he'd gone with Wilson, who didn't need to be told when to move in for a close-up and intuitively understood the effects of light and shade. On the other hand, there was a reason Wilson had gone from Hollywood movies to television commercials to now, the lowest of the low, doc.u.mentaries. He was often late and always high.

On Sat.u.r.day, Wilson had shown up late to the Hart Building on Senate Row, and they'd almost missed the McCaffrey interview. He'd said his flight got delayed, but the truth was, he'd stopped at a few bars along the way.

To save money, he and Wilson shared hotel rooms. Because of that, Saraub had gotten to know Wilson a lot better than he'd have liked. His old-man stink after eating Chinese food was deadly. Worse, he smoked a joint every night to fall asleep. For the most part, Saraub kept his mouth shut and his eye on the prize. So long as the movie progressed, Wilson could order a team of smack-shooting trannie hookers dressed like clowns if he wanted. But last night, while he'd been trying to sleep, Wilson lit up. The sweet smell had itched his throat until it swelled, and he'd had a hard time breathing. With the movie spinning toward oblivion, and Audrey on his mind, he'd snapped. "Open a window while you smoke that, or I swear to G.o.d I'll knock your teeth in," he'd yelled into the dark room. Then added, "And thanks for asking me all those times, if I minded. Because I do. I mind." Then he'd rolled over and pretended to sleep.

Old-man legs poking through crusty boxers and yellowed unders.h.i.+rt, skinny Wilson had stumbled in the dark toward the window and tried to open it. But they'd been on a high floor, so of course, it stayed locked. After looking at the joint for a second or two, he snuffed it, threw on some clothes, left the room, and didn't come back until the morning. Saraub tried to sleep, but couldn't. In the grand scheme of things, he'd overreacted a little. No big deal. Problem was, he hadn't been exaggerating. If Wilson hadn't stubbed that joint, Saraub really might have gotten up and knocked him b.l.o.o.d.y. That was a little scary.

In the quiet of the empty room, he'd curled his hands into fists and punched the mattress, all the while wondering if Audrey had been right to be frightened of him, which had only made him punch the mattress harder.

"Come on, you're a big guy. You know that," Wilson now said by way of apology.

"Sure," Saraub answered. Another plane in front of them lifted off. Its wings teetered from side to side, and for a moment it looked like it might flip. Instead, it caught its balance and soared. He marveled. How did they manage?

The silence stretched, and Saraub decided to make peace for the sake of tomorrow's final Manhattan shoot. Sure, there probably wasn't much reason to keep going, but he might as well finish what he'd started. "Sorry I snapped at you last night. Where did you go, anyway?" Saraub asked.

"Do you really care?" Wilson snapped back.

"Of course."

"No. I don't think you do," Wilson answered.

Saraub looked at the back of the seat. They'd inched closer to the runway and were now third in line. Lightning streaked across the sky and made everything bright, and then dark again. Rain poured in translucent sheets across the gla.s.s. He knew he was supposed to apologize. After that, Wilson's ego would be soothed and the shoot could resume. They'd finish the last interview and call it a day. That was how they'd always worked together. Wilson handed him bulls.h.i.+t, and he ate it all up for the good of the film. But this ring in his pocket was cutting his thigh, and after what he'd been through with Audrey, and now Maginot Lines, Maginot Lines, he was done with giving people what they wanted. "You're right. I don't give a s.h.i.+t," he said. he was done with giving people what they wanted. "You're right. I don't give a s.h.i.+t," he said.

The air turned to shards of gla.s.s, cutting and tense. Wilson's eyes burned holes of rage into the seat ahead of him.

"f.u.c.k you," Wilson said.

Saraub crossed his legs, opened his mouth, closed his mouth. Rain pelted the circular window. Seeking a diversion, he opened his laptop and played the latest D.C. footage. Squinted at the screen and tried to make his vision small, so he didn't have to look at Wilson.

The interview had turned out pretty well, though McCaffrey, the senior senator of West Virginia, sweated a lot, which never looked good on film. Saraub rolled the clip about twenty minutes in. Blue-eyed McCaffrey was wet as a noodle. "The problem," the senator said, "is that regulating these companies starts to look like choosing flowers over bread."

"But bread is a flower," Saraub answered from behind the camera. "A grain. I just saw it in Nebraska. It grows out of the ground. We kill the ground, and it won't grow. We won't be able to eat."

McCaffrey nodded. "That's the other problem-no one is thinking about this in the long term. We're selling our resources to the highest bidders, and in twenty years, we'll look back and slap our foreheads at the idiocy of something like that-look at South Africa and Iraq, for G.o.d's sake-but right now, because we see no serious consequences to our actions, or maybe because we've somehow lost our own survival instincts, we keep doing it."

McCaffrey looked directly into the camera when he said this. "We want to compete with the big guns like China. But they say in another ten years, the annual death toll in China from smog will reach three million. And the thing is, what they breathe, we breathe. The world spins, you know? Why can't anybody ever recognize that the world spins?"

A s.h.i.+ver ran down Saraub's spine, and he shut the laptop. The footage was good. No doubt. Which in its way amplified his heartbreak. His movie was dead. He couldn't do this all over again. He was thirty-five years old, single, a slob. Nothing to show for his hard work except a dirty studio apartment. He sighed. For the first time in his life, the turkeys had him down.

Next to him, Wilson finally spoke. His voice was ragged with fury, and Saraub noticed that his eyes weren't quite focused. The left pupil lazed farther toward his brow than the right. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that booze eventually gives you brain damage. "That McCaffrey guy should climb up on his cross already. There are winners, and there are losers, and he's just mad he's on the wrong side."

Saraub met Wilson's bloodshot eyes. "And what are you? A winner, or a loser?"

Wilson didn't answer for a second or two, because his downhill slide had begun thirty years ago, and his kids and two ex-wives didn't talk to him, and the apartment he rented in Jersey City was full of roaches, and Saraub was the only person this year to give him a job, and by now, it was pity, because his work was s.h.i.+t. "You don't know your a.s.s from your elbow. And these white wetback hicks from West Virginia you think it's your job to protect are a bunch of n.o.bodies," Wilson said. "Worry about your own backyard. Worry about me."

Tears of rage filled Saraub's eyes. "What are you bothering getting up in the morning for, if you really believe that? Don't you see where this is headed? Pretty soon the country'll be bankrupt-we won't be a country. You think the rich'll be happy about the trade they made when there's nothing left, and their kids are sick from the factory fumes, because the EPA got disbanded? n.o.body wants this, and everybody knows it's happening, we just don't know how to stop it. That's how change happens-people like us, forcing it. We have to try, or else Rome falls. That's the whole point of being alive. Like this plane, or the Empire State Building-it's so stupid to build something like that, when chances are, it'll fall. It's so stupid to try to fly when your feet work just fine. But we keep doing things like that. We change our cultures, our lives, even our biology because change is how we survive. If we give up all that, just because it's stupid, we're not human anymore. We're animals.

"It's not about those farmers, or the people in West Virginia, who keep lobbying for more digging, even though they're dying of emphysema. Or the power companies that burn less efficiently every year because they say they can't afford to build new plants, even though the hurricanes keep getting worse, and we're growing tropical mold in Mississippi. It's about us."

"You don't know s.h.i.+t," Wilson spit.

The plane picked up speed. Wilson's grin twisted into a thin line. He crushed the can and burped again.

"You're killing yourself, and I don't like you enough to watch," Saraub said. The words surprised him, but he was glad. It was a relief to finally say it.

"So point your pretty little eyes someplace else," Wilson whispered. He lifted his crushed beer, then remembered it was empty. So he put it in the seat pocket in front of him. A nickel tip for the stewardess. Surely she'd be grateful.

Saraub realized then that he should have fired Wilson long ago. He should have confronted Audrey, too. But he'd waited too long, and both situations had gotten out of hand. The plane rolled faster. Next to him, Wilson closed his eyes and dozed, or pretended to doze. The plane nosed up into the sky. Air bubbled beneath the hull, making him momentarily light, and he marveled at the miracle of the Wright brothers, as unlikely as civilization in the presence of barbarians. The engagement ring in his pocket pressed against his thigh. A hard, cold thing. Out the window, the rainy city of Was.h.i.+ngton got small. They ascended above the black clouds into more black. He couldn't see anything, even though it was morning.

Suddenly, the plane jittered. He gripped the seat rest hard. The nose smashed against a hot-air front, and dropped. Fast. The overhead baggage compartments rattled open. Reading lights along the rows went dark, and emergency lights flickered throughout the cabin, an hysterical orange. Stowed things speared down the aisles and rained on heads; a red duffel bag, small suitcases with wheels, a Twisted Sister poster, some moron's pet parakeet in a tiny cage. It was too frightened to chirp. He reached out to rescue it, but by the time his fingers were in the aisle, it was gone.

The plane kept falling. His skin stretched into a plastic grin like he was on a spinning amus.e.m.e.nt-park cyclone. One hundred miles an hour? Two hundred? The longer they free-fell, the faster they'd go, and there was no sense jumping without a parachute. The force of acceleration slammed the breath from his lungs. With each pa.s.sing quarter second-who would have imagined time could pa.s.s so excruciatingly-he begged the plane to right itself, but it did not.

The matchbox cars and tiny houses got big again, and the plane dove nose first toward land. His mind spun through images in brief thousandths of seconds that did not register in his conscious state: the time he'd stolen twenty dollars off his dad's dresser and lied about it. The first girl he'd screwed; a hooker named Vanity that his uncle hired as his high-school graduation present. Maginot Lines. Maginot Lines. If he got out of this, he'd make the best movie he could, and if that didn't work, he'd make another movie. Because there's never a good reason to give up what you love when life is this short. If he got out of this, he'd make the best movie he could, and if that didn't work, he'd make another movie. Because there's never a good reason to give up what you love when life is this short.

His mind glimpsed still images of all the people in his life. His mother and sisters-who would take care of them? And then, it stopped skipping around, and settled on Audrey Lucas. He realized how lucky he'd been to have found someone to love.

The plane kept falling. Wilson startled awake, and turned to Saraub with an expression of bug-eyed terror. Something warm down below, as Wilson p.i.s.sed his denim tuxedo. "Wha-" his mouth opened to say as the plane continued to drop.

Wilson's urine heated the seat, the caged bird tried to fly, and Saraub thought about the note he should have left in Lincoln, just in case what had happened between them on that good night had not been a farewell, but another chance. Come home, Come home, the note should have read. the note should have read. You're the love of my life. You're the love of my life.

27.

Islands Collide Off to work. Hi-Ho!

The hurricane turned day into night. Wind tore through the canyons between buildings and blew Audrey Lucas along the fissure-riddled concrete sidewalks. Leaking rain and packed commuters in merino suits lent an animal scent to the subway. Slowly, people separated from her like they were the sea, and she was Moses. The floor where she stood was red, and she thought the train was a living thing, bleeding and in pain, then realized it was the soles of her own feet, broken by the hula girl. They dried as the car wormed its way downtown, so that by Times Square, she'd stopped bleeding.

At Union Square, the Valium kicked in. The lithium, too. The people around her did not look or come any closer. She felt a little like the wounded chicken, waiting for the rest of the pack to peck her to death.

By the time she got to the office, the jet lag and pills had hardened her legs like cement. She had to hold the sides of walls as she walked for balance. When she pressed the keypad numbers and opened the door, Bethy jumped out from behind the reception desk and hugged her. "We are SO sad for you!" she said.

The thing in Audrey's stomach squirmed. It gnawed, chewing her soft tissue with sharp teeth. Pretty Bethy Astor with her rosy cheeks, pencil skirt, and two-thousand-dollar black Prada purse. Bird-brained Bethy, whose untested heart was cold as a stone. She went to charity b.a.l.l.s for made-up afflictions like Shaking Leg Syndrome, but she'd never taken a subway, nor given a panhandler change. After a company-wide meeting, she'd announced, "Homeless people should just die instead of wasting everybody's taxes." Half her audience had smiled with glee because she'd expressed what they were too sophisticated to say.

A glory tour of Bethy's most asinine declarations: "Black men are lazy. They like white women better because it raises their social status. Also, we're SO much prettier" "Women shouldn't work past thirty, because after that, their eggs rot, and their kids wind up r.e.t.a.r.ded" "Men turn gay when their mothers are too needy" "Jews steal every time you turn your back. They start wars, too. Not in my my daddy's golf club. Christians only!" daddy's golf club. Christians only!"

The worst part, Bethy wasn't capable of independent thought, which meant she was parroting somebody else. Her parents, or her private-school teachers, or her buddies eating half portabella sandwiches and finely chopped salads after a couple of sets of tennis at the Westchester Country Club, or the dips.h.i.+t executives here at Vesuvius, who smiled in your country-b.u.mpkin face, like you and your Indian boyfriend were the lone exceptions to their contempt for everything that was different.

Bethy let go and noticed Audrey's oversized sweat suit and gla.s.ses. "What an interesting new look," she said. "Did you sew that yourself?"

"No, I didn't," Audrey answered. She imagined poking Bethy's eyes out. The juice would run down her face. Not so pretty then, sweetheart. Daddy'll have to buy some Venetian gla.s.s, Sandy Duncan style. Then she blinked and tried to chase the image away. Big brown eyes, and Audrey's thumbs, digging in deep. As easy as making a fist. The sound would be a quick, meaty pop. Fluid would splatter while she screamed. The image subsided like drying tears, and she wondered numbly what mean, petty thing had crawled inside her, sowing poison.

"Do you need anything?" Bethy asked.

"How about a raise? Think you can swing that from your trust fund, Bethy? Because I could use a dentist," she said. Bethy squinted in confusion like she had ice-cream brain freeze, and Audrey walked on.

At her desk, she found a bouquet of white lilies. A couple of the smaller buds were still closed, but two had opened to full bloom. Someone had cut the stems on a diagonal to keep them fresh, then placed them in a square, water-filled crystal vase. She'd never been given flowers before, nor owned a piece of crystal. It was heavier than she'd expected. The note attached read: "Sorry, kiddo. Chin up.-Jill." Next to the lilies were two cards. One, a picture of a poodle without caption from the head of human resources. The inside read: Darling. Let me know if there's anything I can do. Yours always, Collier.

The second note was a Hallmark sympathy card. The outside was carnations, and in black letters the inside read: "Sorry for your loss." Every member of the 59th Street team had signed it. Street team had signed it.