The Big Dream (24 page)

I do not have a respiratory tract infection. I have a crust on the inside corners of my eyes and my nose is red from blowing with stiff white toilet paper at work, but my breathing is fine through
my mouth. I think of my mother's gritty rasp under her plastic mask, the faint crackle of plastic mattress when I sit on the bed, the cheerful blonde bachelorette on TV, the warmth of my sister's arm and thigh leaning in next to me. A violent sneeze rips through my skull, and I twist my face into my wet sleeve just in time.

Back in the parking lot, my eyes watering, the pizza box still scorches my hands but the rest of me is freezing. I get into the car and dial; Desi picks up on the third ring.

“Where are you? I'm hungry. The nurse said Mom can have pizza, if she feels up to it.”

“I have a cold.”

“Oh. Sorry. But Mom's got lung cancer, right?” There's some noise in the background – I hope she's laughing. “So go get the pizza and get over here.” More muttering. “Mom says actually, just come and we'll order in. They'll deliver to the lobby. I didn't know that.”

“I
got
the pizza. I'm here. Well, I'm in the parking lot. But I'm
sick.
Germy?” Sleet drums on the car roof. “Mom's immune system is compromised, not to mention the rest of the people in the hospital. They're not going to let a germy person in.”

“You're in the parking lot? With the pizza?”

I tip my head back. There is a lot of lighting out here. Everything gleams bright as day, but spookier. “Yeah, in the purple zone. Can you come down now?”

A thunk and murmuring. “Yeah, just let me put my shoes on.”

“I'll flash my lights when – ” Click. I tip my head back to face the ceiling, the pizza still hot on my thighs. When we were kids, Desi and I never fought; we just didn't interact at all, slid by each other. In the kitchen reaching for granola bars or in the bathroom reaching for tampons, her arm would be there too, and I would hand her the plastic-wrapped whatever, and she would say thank you, and go back to her room, or outside, or where I didn't know.

She taps on the window, then tries the door and gets in, icewater dripping from her thin blonde hair. She leans over the
gearshift and peers at me in the reflected glare. “It's bright but weird out here; I can't really see you. Are you all that sick?”

“Want to risk it? She sounds like a garbage truck idling as it is.”

She stares forward. “She's a bit better today.”

“Really?”

“Ah, probably not. But she laughed a lot during
Ellen
.”

“That's something. And she'll like the pizza.”

“Yeah.”

“Take it on up to her. You're missing
The Bachelorette.
She can never keep them all straight.” I hold up the box, but she doesn't take it, or glance at me.

“I'll go in a second. It's sorta peaceful out here. The rain on the roof is like a white noise machine.”

I can feel a sneeze starting in behind my sinuses, and whip my head around before it bursts out. I wipe my nose on the shoulder of my raincoat and I turn back.

“Ok, ok, you are sick.”

“I think the pizza's still ok. I mean, it's in the box.”

“Sure.” She pulls it into her lap, still staring at the wet windshield.

“Are
you
ok?”

“Sure.”

“You're here all day every day. Maybe you should take a break.”

She shrugs, and the cheap shiny vinyl of her coat makes a crinkling noise against the seat. “What else is a sabbatical for? I'll have to go back to work in the spring.”

I think about the spring, when it won't be so dangerous to drive after dark, and that dark will come later, and I'll have to start organizing the interviews for the summer interns, and my mother will probably be dead. “And work is a break?”

“As much as anything, isn't it?”

I shrug. My coat doesn't crinkle. It's cashmere.

She doesn't speak, and when I turn, her face is right in front of mine. “I don't think I should take the germ pizza. I'll order
another. Anyway, you need dinner too.” She looks at me hard before sliding out of the car. By the time I get home, the pizza is cold.

I could simply email the customer service supervisor and ask her the names of her staff. Her name is Suyin Li – that file is where it should be, in the Departmental Supervisors folder. But Kat already hates me, as do the cleaners, my bosses, the orderlies who mop at the hospital, and probably others I don't even know about. In a week or so, when I ask Suyin Li to pass her scripts and quota sheets to the new team in Chennai, she will too, and I'm in no hurry. So I go into the file room. Most people's hire files are kept on paper, too, though the online ones are what's updated.

It is a relief to cough unheard – the filing cabinets don't jerk away or reach for hand santizer, like the people in my meetings this morning. We were listening to staffing requests we can't honour – no $90,000 web designer for
Dream Car,
no consultant fees for the branding team. But I need to take middle management's concerns seriously, make people feel heard, value all stakeholders. And I do, with Kat grudgingly taking notes in the corner – and then I hold up a copy of their departmental budget.

I've always liked this dark, windowless file room. I've worked here too long; I shouldn't be saying
always.
And it's a pretty pathetic thing to love – Kat and her predecessors have left the files jumbled, some shedding pages from being jammed into the cabinet upside-down. But after an hour, I do miraculously find the file of that big black guy because his security badge photo slipped out. He is Wayne LaPorte. He came on a temp contract, but was made full-time. So he'll be owed termination pay. His resume is in the file; we went to the same high school, fifteen years apart.

Somewhere outside the file room, five p.m. passes. I just keep searching, because where have I got to go? Eventually I go back to my desk, open the performance evaluation spreadsheets, and enter Wayne LaPorte's employee number. And there's Wayne – his history of service and sick days, his not-quite-excellent performance evaluation, his three 50-cents/hour raises in the last two years. All seems correct except the employment category, which is somehow “Customer” instead of “Customer Service Representative.”

I try entering
Customer
in the search category field, and it's the jackpot. All my lost customer service representatives – Danvir, William, Kyla, Susan, half-a-dozen more. All “Customers.” Like lost friends found.

There is a rustle, then a bang, then a male voice shouting. He sounds sort of Italian today. I start to stand. I don't want to cause another vacuum-cleaning emergency. Then the phone rings. The real one.

“What's going on?”

“Nothing. I just want you to pick up Booster Juice on the way.”

“I'm
sick
. I have a cold. Remember yesterday?” I look at the bin of crumpled Post-its, then look at the doorway. Still clear.

“Are you home?”

“No, still at work.”

“I thought you were sick?”

I flop back in my chair. “I have a cold that makes me too germy for the hospital. I'm not dying or anything.”

We're both silent for a moment, probably both thinking about how inappropriate that was. The cleaning woman comes in just as Desi says, “She liked having us both here, watching TV, eating supper. It was like we're little kids after school.”

“I don't – ” I think about whether it's all right to complain about your childhood when your mother is dying. I see the wastebasket rising silently beside me. The cleaning-woman's full-time
job used to be my Saturday morning chore. “I don't remember all that many warm after-school chats. Didn't we mainly watch
Golden Girls
reruns and eat marshmallows while we waited for her to come home from work?”

“Sometimes
WKRP in Cinncinnati.
And sometimes she'd make proper snacks.”

“And those were good shows, anyway.”

“Right. It's not like we had miserable childhoods.”

“I never thought that. I never thought much about it at all. Are you in the hall?”

“Of course. What kind of daughter do you think I am?”

“What kind of daughter do you think
I
am, Desi? I'd be there if I could.”

There is a pause. “What are you working on?”

A longer pause. At least the cleaner has gone into the hall now. “Layoffs.”

“Seriously? A lot?”

“I said I was a good daughter, not a good VP.”

“If it makes you feel any better, I'm not a good prof.”

“You probably are. You were a good babysitter. It's the same skill set, right?”

“Yeah, basically. But I was never that good. You were just young.”

“So were you.”

“Sorry, Belinda. I should go back.”

“Well. Tell her I said hi.”

“Ok. Good night. Feel better.”

I am staggering down the hallway in my coat when the cleaning lady comes out of an office carrying another wastebin. She screams something down the hall the other way, at no one I can see, then dumps the garbage in her cart.

My breath is a snotty wheeze, loud enough that she looks up from the Coke cans and apple cores. “Yes? Another problem?”

I didn't even realize our relationship was like this now: the frown lines, the wastebin frozen in mid-air, the gaze darting in search for her invisible colleague: resignation, but also rage.

“No, no problem.”

She stares at me – I have to walk away for this to be over. So I do. I call over my shoulder, “No problem at all. You're doing a fine job.” She is still staring.

After the bend in the hallway, I lean against the wall, feeling short of breath. I tip my head back, inhale, and when I level my gaze, Kat is staring at me. Her cube being in the hall is a building services decision that I don't even try to parse, but she's there amidst her posters of bands I don't recognize and pictures of kittens. She takes out one earbud, then the other – a show of respect.

“You should go, Kat – it's pretty late. Whatever it is will wait.”

She pokes her skinny fingers under her glasses and rubs her eyes, hard. “I can't find them. I don't know how they could possibly be filed, I can't work it out.”

“The customer service reps?”

Kat yanks her hands down, maybe scared that there's something else to look for. “You asked me to find them.”

She's wearing a sharp-collared, bright orange blouse, a heavy silver necklace, smokey eyeshadow. All this to look pretty – she's so pretty – and the only person she sees all day is me, for 90 seconds. And then she has to go back to her cube in the hallway.

“I found them, just now. They were misfiled under
Customer
, for some reason.”

I smile but Kat doesn't, and her thin orange shoulders do not relax. “Misfiled?”

How can I be intimidating when my mascara is smeared by sneeze-tears? “Weird, eh?”

Her shoulders wriggle. “Yeah, it is. I don't know how – ”

“Go home, Kat. Tomorrow, something else will go wrong.”

She goes almost limp with relief, and reaches immediately for the small leather pouch hanging on the wall beside her. “Thanks,
Belinda. Really, thanks for helping me. Maybe tonight will be good after all.” She gives me a brief open-mouthed grin. She must reserve it for silly friends, puppies, flirtatious waiters – I've never seen it before.