Audrey’s Door (10 page)

A
shooting spree in Times Square closed off Broadway, extending gridlock all the way into Harlem, so she took her chances and headed for the subway. On her ride, the #1 train slammed to a stop at Columbus Circle. Audrey clung to the metal strap in the ceiling with both hands while a middle-aged Dutch tourist in an “I
NY” T-shirt and Mickey Mouse backpack stumbled down the aisle with his arms outstretched, like he was racing toward his long-lost true love, lederhosen-clad Minnie.

Before impact, he squeezed his deli coffee cup. Its lid saucered into the air. As he plunged into her chest, he crushed the cup between them. She swung from the strap while he held her shoulders for balance. The good news: The coffee was lukewarm and didn’t burn. The bad news: where to begin? Her shirt was sopping wet, and by the time she got to the office, it was 11:10.

As soon as she walked through the door, Bethy Astor
popped out from behind her narrow reception podium like a restaurant hostess, and announced in a loud whisper, “You’re in so much trouble. Jill shit a brick. She shit two bricks. It’s shit-brick-splatter all over the walls.” The sun shone bright through the windows, so Bethy’s auburn hair looked like it was on fire. Devil Bethy. Slightly less annoying than regular Bethy.

“That bad?” Audrey asked. Her shirt from the coffee spill on the subway was wet and cold. Sticky, too. Figured Mr. Mickey Mouse was a three tablespoons of sugar kind of guy.

Bethy leaped across her desk so that half her body dangled. She was a friendly, nervous girl just out of college who couldn’t transfer callers without disconnecting them. Like most of the people who worked here, she wore thousand-dollar suits and her blood was blue. Also like most people here, she’d gotten her job through connections. “Sooo bad,” Bethy exclaimed with both hands on her heart, like it might break if she didn’t hold it together.

Audrey sighed. Something squirmed in her gut like acid indigestion, only more, well, squirmy. What kind of a cutesy name is Bethy, anyway?

“And the thing is, I like you, Audrey!” Bethy said, like she was auditioning to perform Audrey’s eulogy at the annual Luck Strike Smokehouse company retreat. “If they boot you, I’m gonna put Ex-Lax in that bitch’s coffee.”

Audrey took a deep breath. “Well, for that it might be worth it.”

Jill Sidenschwandt was Audrey’s supervisor, and one of only nine other women in the eighty-person office. Jill had entered the business back when architecture had still been a boys’ club, so even though she’d given Vesuvius thirty years of hard work, she’d never made partner. She was bitter about that. Or maybe she was just generally bitter, Audrey couldn’t tell.

Since Jill’s fourth kid got diagnosed with leukemia, she’d stopped working the same long hours as the rest of the 59
^th
Street team. Instead, she’d been delegating, and leaving Audrey in charge. But Audrey was bad at delegating, and besides, she didn’t have the job title to back her up. As a result, some parts of the project were in great shape, others, a mess. And Jill hadn’t been paying enough attention to know the messes from the successes.

The meeting was a status report on the 59
^th
Street, Parkside Plaza Project. Six months ago, a Ukrainian man with two hundred pounds of urea nitrate strapped to his back got past security. The metal detectors hadn’t sounded, and, remarkably, the guards hadn’t questioned the note he’d written on the sign-in sheet: “End Servitus Tyranny.” On the elevator, the terrorist had unstrapped the bomb from his waist and held it in his hands. A Good Samaritan had strong-armed him to the roof. During the struggle, the bomb detonated. Twenty midmorning smokers were killed up there, and another eighty-four died on the top floor when the ceiling fell. If not for the Samaritan, mortalities would have been in the thousands. It took the FBI almost two months to identify his remains: Richardo Monge, an illegal immigrant from Costa Rica who operated the street-level bagel cart. He’d been in the middle of a coffee delivery when he’d seen the bomb and saved the building.

Allied Incorporated American Banking (AIAB), which held a one-hundred-year lease on the 59
^th
Street property, had picked Vesuvius to rebuild the gutted floors and erect a rooftop memorial for those who’d died. Jill was team leader because, before her son got sick, she’d asked for more responsibility. If her team design saw completion, the firm’s founders had promised to finally make her a partner.

Silk blouse sopping wet, Audrey raced to her workstation cubicle, where Jill stood with crossed arms.

“You’re late. We’re all waiting,” she said. Her skin looked pale blue, like her blood had been replaced with black and blue ink, and if you touched her, she’d bruise.

“I’m so sorry,” Audrey panted.

Jill was tall and slender, but big-boned. Her uniform was loose-fitting pantsuits and fussy silk blouses that tied into bows at the neck, like an ERA poster from 1972. “I just finished going over floors forty-seven through fifty in the boardroom, but not the roof. That’s up to you.”

“What?” Audrey panted. As project manager, it was Jill’s job to give presentations.

“I decided you should do it,” she said. Her voice cracked, but only if you were listening for it. Audrey knew then what had happened. Jill hadn’t bothered looking at the plans over the weekend. Instead, she’d come in early and expected Audrey to brief her. When Audrey hadn’t shown, she’d panicked and decided that somebody had to take the fall, and it wasn’t going to be the lady with the chemo bills.

“Hurry up!” Jill said, her arms still crossed.

Audrey took three long breaths to collect herself. This was bad. She wasn’t prepared. She squeezed her hands into fists and let go. Tried to think of a bright side, could come up with only one: she no longer smelled like pee. It was something, at least. “Okay,” she said, and started toward the conference room.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Jill answered. “You can’t go in there looking like that.” She pointed her chin at Audrey’s chest.

Audrey followed Jill’s gaze. The blood rushed to her face, hot and uncomfortable. She was reminded of her dream, and the coveralls. Her mother’s red-stained hands, and the girl she used to be, because the wet, spilled coffee had rendered her blouse see-through. Her sexy Victoria’s Secret nylon bra, which had been
a handy, albeit impractical choice this morning, wasn’t thick enough to contain the damage. Through the wet was the very obvious outline of nipples.

Jill frowned in disgust.

Audrey looked down at the pink hills of her skin. It wasn’t cute. It wasn’t sexy. It was white trash, and she wondered, not for the first time, whether she belonged in this nice, clean office among civilized people. She folded her arms across her chest, and remembered depressed teenage days of unbrushed hair and soiled clothes that she’d worn, again and again. What was happening to her? Alone again after all this time, was she falling apart?

“Here,” Jill said, taking off her blue cashmere suit jacket that reeked of rubbing alcohol and vitamins, and plopping it over Audrey’s shoulders.

Audrey pulled it tight around her chest, pressing the brass buttons through their holes. In that second and that second only, she loved Jill Sidenschwandt. “Thank you,” she said.

Jill lifted Audrey’s chin in her cold hands. Her bloodshot eyes were wet, either from exhaustion or weeping. “Pull yourself together and stop making me feel sorry for you. I’m not getting fired over this. Do you understand? You can do this. I believe in you. I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t.”

Audrey nodded. “Thanks. Yes. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry.”

Jill held on for a second longer than necessary, and Audrey couldn’t tell if the gesture was friendly or hostile. “I’m sorry if you’ve got troubles,” she said. Her tone was dismissive, like because Audrey didn’t have a family to care for, she wasn’t entitled to bad days. Her kid wasn’t dying, and she had no real responsibilities or attachments, so what was the problem?

Audrey looked at her ballet flats. The thing that had recently invaded her stomach writhed in acid bile.
What the hell did Jill know about her personal troubles? Unlike every other fat cat around here, she’d never shown up to work crying, or fought on the phone with a lousy husband who couldn’t remember to buy the milk. She’d never whined about idiot kids who didn’t study hard enough, or forced people to look at professional photos of her terrier poodles (whoodles!). Crazy, yes. But Jill was out of line: she’d never bitched about it.

“You don’t need to worry about my troubles or my performance. I’ve never given you cause in either department,” she said, then picked the plans up off her desk, pushed through double oak doors, and stormed the Vesuvius boardroom.

About twenty men in suits were waiting at the long conference table. Its window gave a cityscape view of downtown Manhattan. In the distance were construction holes, the circle line, and Lady Liberty.

Jill took her seat with the rest of the nine-member Parkside Plaza team. On the opposite, windowed side of the long, Japanese teak table were Vesuvius’ founding brothers, Randolph and Mortimer Pozzolana. Flanking the Pozzolanas were the hierarchy of nondesigners, from accounting, to vice president of operations, to manager of public relations. Basically, this room represented everybody who was anybody at Vesuvius. She’d kept them waiting, and they did not look happy. Audrey gulped. For the fiftieth time this year she thought:
I really ought to own a suit. I also ought to start wearing lipstick.

“I’m so sorry I’m late,” she said.

“Audrey’s doctor’s appointment ran longer than she expected,” Jill chimed in.

Audrey nodded. “Right.”

Scritch-scratch! Scritch-scratch!

She headed for the empty seat near Jill, but Ran
dolph Pozzolana, the friendlier, younger partner who referred to his twenty-eight-year-old wife as “my-old-lady-number-three” shook his head. “Other side. Use the podium.” His voice was matter-of-fact, but polite, like a British Navy captain who’s aware that the boat is sinking, but sees no reason to shed good manners. She realized then that he knew. Everybody knew that something was up, and
somebody
was going down.
Jill
had sold her out.

She walked the long gallows. When she got to the podium, she surveyed the rest of the team, but none offered an encouraging smile. She had the least real-work experience at Vesuvius, but Jill had made her second-in-command. Because of that, Audrey Lucas was nobody’s favorite new girl. She stood at the front of the room. Swallowed, hard. The air expanded inside her chest like a reverse burp and left her breathless. This was her first job outside a greasy spoon. Other than telling truckers and Omaha art-school crankheads to keep their mitts to themselves, she’d never given a speech or even raised her voice before. She was fairly sure she’d be bad at it.

Scritch-scratch! Scritch-scratch!

Was someone cleaning the windows outside?

The faces peering at her looked alien, as if she were viewing them from upside down. She took a breath. At least she wasn’t sleepwalking in The Breviary right now, or fighting with Saraub. In its way, this office was a relief. She tried to remember that.

The faces kept watching, so she squeezed her hands into fists and closed her eyes. Pretended the room was empty of people and perfectly symmetrical. Opened her eyes again, but tried to keep the image there, of black nothing. She could still see, but the trick calmed her enough to continue.

“Sorry to hold you up. I love this project!” she said. She tried to sound excited, but the effect was more used-Hyundai salesman: unctuous and just the wrong side
of smart. Mortimer frowned. So did Jill. David Galea, who brought Cokes to her cubicle when she worked through lunch, looked down at his notepad like he was embarrassed for her.

She unrolled the plans. Lots of lines on oversized white paper.

Scriiiittccch!

What was that? The sound was dull and had give, like shell dragged against concrete: it rattled, leaving pieces of itself behind.

“Hydroponics are environmentally friendly, and the running water buffers plane and traffic noise pollution. The design of the future.” She continued, talking to a room she’d decided to pretend was empty.

“These plans were made by Manny in design, and he did a great job, but I should remind you all that they’re rough,” she announced as she handed out the five-by-seven replicas of the latest design, ten to each side. The hands that took the papers were disembodied. Unrelated. Papers rustled as they were passed, like phantoms.

SCRITCH!-SCRAAAAATTCCCH!

Who the heck was making that sound?

“I don’t like the colors—orange is for hazard signs, not plants, and those grid lines will be gone when we present this to the client.” Her voice trembled as she spoke.

Someone at the far end of the long table wrapped his fingernails against the wood—she couldn’t see whom. She unrolled the master plans with her hands. The details were marked with light ink and hard to distinguish from the blue paper and small graph boxes. She didn’t remember what they represented. That sound, so distracting: