Chapter 2
The freight elevator stopped on the thirty-third floor, and Mave pushed the cart out, guiding it along the back corridor — past the printer room, past the paper storage room, until she reached the final door, the one without a nameplate.
She closed it behind her.
Inside the supply room there was only a steel cabinet, a sink, and a patch of floor barely large enough for one person to sit. She lowered herself there, her back against the cabinet, her hands resting on her knees, and she didn’t cry. She had passed beyond the crying stage a long time ago. Tears were for people who still believed someone might hear them.
She took off her gloves and placed them on the floor beside her, then pulled a small hardbound notebook with worn corners from the pocket of her apron.
The notebook had been with her for years. It had come into being because of her voice. Whenever she spoke for more than three sentences, her throat began to burn as though she had swallowed sand. So whatever she couldn’t say, she wrote.
Inside were brief lines written to herself, the names of a few people who had treated her kindly, and the birthday of someone who was no longer alive.
She turned to the first blank page and sat looking at it for a while. Then she began to write.
She didn’t write how she felt. She wrote the date. She wrote the time — 9:02. She wrote which door she had entered through, which direction she had pushed the cart, and who had received the first cup. She drew a long rectangle for the table, then marked six seats, and beside each one she wrote down a distinguishing detail about the person who had been sitting there, because she didn’t know their names. The man with the silver-framed glasses. The man who always kept his cup on the left. The man at the head of the table. Silver hair, square-cased watch.
She recorded the exact order of every sentence she could still remember, adding nothing, leaving nothing out, offering no comment. She wrote down those three words, too, placing them inside quotation marks, then noted beside them the approximate time when they had been spoken. She recorded the six arms rising, and she wrote down where she had been standing when it happened.
Two of her fingers had curled stiffly, making the pen slip again and again, so she had to hold it with her whole palm, and her handwriting tilted and stumbled like a child’s. But she wrote everything.
She had no plan. No lawyer would ever read these lines. There was no one to give them to, and she hadn’t thought that far ahead. She was simply doing what they had taught her during the years when she still sat in nursing lectures — the thing a second-year student had been reminded of so many times that it had become instinct. When something unusual happened, the first thing to do wasn’t panic. The first thing was to record the time. Record it as soon as possible, because the human memory begins repairing the truth within the very first hour.
She had left school long ago, and she had never worn that uniform for even a single day. But some things, once taught, stayed in the hands rather than the mind — and the hands didn’t need to understand what was happening before they began doing their work.
When she finished, she read it through once. Then she closed the notebook, slipped it back into her apron pocket, put on her gloves, and stood. She washed her face at the sink in the corner, smoothed her hair, and checked that the badge on her collar was sitting straight.
At eleven o’clock she pushed the cart back into the freight elevator and pressed the button for the thirty-fourth floor, because it was time for the mid-morning refreshment service, because today was Tuesday, and because she needed this job more than she needed her pride.
The conference room door was still open. Only three people remained inside. She pushed the cart in, followed the same route around the table as before, and began pouring.
One man looked up at her. He looked longer than usual — longer than all the other times put together — and there was something on his face she had never seen on that floor before. She set the cup in front of him, adjusted it so the handle faced outward, then moved to the next place.
The tea flowed into the cup in a thin, straight, steady stream, without spilling a single drop. This time, her hand didn’t tremble.
At three o’clock that afternoon, when her shift gave her a break lasting forty minutes, Mave took the stairs up to the fourteenth floor, where the human resources office was located. She had rehearsed what she needed to say in her mind, practicing until she had made it as brief as possible, because she knew she could speak only that much before her voice began to break.
The woman seated at the reception desk had heard only half a sentence when she raised a hand to stop her. Not out of rudeness, but because she had understood the problem before Mave had even finished explaining it. She asked for Mave’s name, typed it into the computer, then turned the screen slightly so Mave could see it. There was no one named Mave Dunlevy in the personnel system for that building.
The woman pressed a few more keys, then explained in the even voice of someone who had to repeat the same thing several times each week. The dining department was operated by an outside contractor. Mave’s employment contract belonged to a staffing company headquartered across the river in New Jersey, and every complaint, every problem, everything concerning her had to go through them.
Mave asked what happened if the incident had taken place here.
The woman looked at her for a moment, and it seemed she wanted to say something kind, but couldn’t find the words. So in the end she simply wrote the contractor’s telephone number on a small slip of paper and pushed it across the counter. She said Mave had an access badge for the building. She spent ten hours there every day. But on paper, she was a visitor.
Mave took the slip, folded it, thanked her, and left.
She called the number from a public telephone in the basement. The operator asked for her name. Mave gave it, and the operator told her to spell it. She spelled it in her rough, hoarse voice, slowly, one letter at a time. The operator told her to spell it again. She did. The third time, the person on the other end said there was a problem with the connection and hung up.
Mave stood there for a while with the receiver in her hand, listening to the long, steady tone, then set it down.
On her way back to the thirty-third floor, she crossed the main lobby. Beside the row of elevators, someone had just hung the annual recognition list — printed on heavy paper, sealed behind glass in a frame with the company logo in the upper corner. Several people stood reading it, pointing at names and laughing together.
Mave stopped behind them, waited until the crowd had thinned, then stepped closer. She read the entire thing. She didn’t merely glance over it; she truly read it, from the first name at the top left to the final name at the bottom right, moving from column to column through nearly two thousand names belonging to the people who worked in that building. She read slowly, because she wanted to be certain.
Her name wasn’t there.
She wasn’t saddened by it. She had known before she stepped closer, and a person couldn’t be saddened by something she had already known. But she remained there a little longer, and she began thinking about something else. She searched the board a second time — not for her own name, but for two others.
The woman who cleaned the windows on the thirtieth floor, who nodded to Mave every morning when they passed each other going in opposite directions through the back corridor, and who had once told her about the grandchild she had in fifth grade. And the morning deliveryman, who always held the freight elevator door whenever he saw Mave pushing her cart from a distance — the only person in the building who greeted her with a nod and a good morning instead of snapping his fingers.
She read the entire board one more time. Neither name was there.
May you like
Mave took the notebook from her apron pocket, opened it to the page she had written that morning, moved down to a new line, and wrote both names. Anna Desmond. She added nothing beside them. She didn’t know why she was writing them down.
Then she closed the notebook, slipped it back into her pocket, and headed toward the freight elevator so she wouldn’t be late for the afternoon shift.
