The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel (26 page)

Except she couldn’t figure this robot out.

The robot, she decided, was fucking with her. Playing games with her. Hurting her, sure, beating the shit out of her, well, not quite, not yet.

But still.

It was a goddamn megarobot or whatever, so why wasn’t it beating the shit out of her? Why wasn’t it going in for the kill? It pained her to think this, but she thought it might have even been pulling its punches, giving it to her easy.

Rose had gotten in her shots, too. The antique, heavy register smashed down on its head. The knitting needle shoved into its ankle gear that, for a second, had made the robot limp, but then the needle was shoved out somehow, hard enough to stick into the wall, and the thing repaired itself right in front of her.

It was fast and it was smart and it was strong but she was learning, moment by moment, catching on to its rhythms, picking up on its tells. But. Rose had a sinking feeling that all of this was a game to the robot, that every punch she landed, every small bit of damage she inflicted on that thing, only made it stronger, as if whatever fueled it fed on the kinetic energy of each impact.

She stood up. The robot held bunches of yarn in its robot fists.
It was saying something, she could tell by the movement of its nonrobot lips, but there was a ringing in her ear and she couldn’t hear much above that.

Maybe it was testing her.

God, she thought. This better not be another fucking test.

Her nose was bleeding. Her left eye was swelling up and soon she wouldn’t be able to see out of it, not well enough to fight, anyway.

If this is another test . . . , she thought, and for a second, at the idea of someone else throwing some unbeatable monster at her as a way to test her, she wanted to give up.

She was so done with being tested.

Henry and Emma and Jonathan and that guy for that job in Spain.

It would go like this: She would figure out some way to beat this robot or get past it, or there would be some kind of switch or mechanism and if she found that and threw it or clipped it or punched it, this robot would come to a shuddering halt and then some asshole in an expensive suit that on him would look incredibly cheap would step out from the shadows, slow-clapping or maybe not. Maybe instead of the slow clap of grudging respect, she’d get a snarky bit of, “I was beginning to worry you might not ever figure that one out.” But either way, there would be some dangerous job, some exorbitant payoff, some promises made. Promises, promises, promises. And her entire yarn and bead shoppe would have been crushed all to hell because some asshole with an outsized checkbook and a desire to rescue his dead wife from the bowels of hell, or who had called forth some demon
horde and had lost control of them, wanted to a) test his toy out and b) make sure she was still up to the work.

Except she wasn’t. Any yahoo in the shadows watching this fight go down would be able to see pretty easily that she was not up to the test, much less the job, whatever it turned out to be. She’d been fighting, what, fifteen minutes and already she was tired. Tired and out of practice. She’d become a creature of habit. Her life had become easy and predictable—work all day in her yarn and bead shoppe, dinner with Jason, back to his house for a bottle of wine or a six-pack of beer, where they’d watch some trash on the Learning Channel or the Food Network with her dog, and then she’d drift off to sleep on the couch and he’d wake her with a soft kiss on her lips and then down her neck and then they’d move things to the bedroom, or else he’d fall asleep, too—and that was how she liked it, had been what she looked forward to, the regularity of this, the simplicity of this, seven days a week.

And now she had to muster herself up for this?

And then the robot had her by the neck.

“Says here you offer classes,” the robot said, loud enough she could hear it over the ringing in her ear.

It held her pressed up against the corkboard wall near the bathroom in the back. It pulled the flyer off the corkboard. Rose had been trying to get people to take her knitting classes for a year now, but all the people who would have been interested in knitting already knew how to knit, or else they signed up for classes at that quilting shop on the other side of town. “What do you think?” it said in its voice that was still not a robot voice. Then the robot held its free hand in front of Rose’s face, wiggled its thick, shiny robot fingers at her. “Are these knitting hands?”

The humor, too.

Rose didn’t quite understand the humor, wouldn’t have expected that from a robot. Yet here it was, making a joke, maybe making fun of her, even.

The grip around her neck was loose enough that she could say something if she wanted, and she had the uncanny sense that the robot
was
expecting her to say something. As if the robot had made a joke and she was supposed to look fear and death in the eye and say, Fuck it, and offer her own witty remark in return.
She’d never been any good at that sort of thing, and she didn’t know what to say to the robot wiggling its fingers in her face, and so all she could resort to was what she knew.

“I have a number of different-sized knitting needles,” Rose told it. “I’m sure we can find something that would work.”

For a second, it looked like the robot was about to smile, and then it thrust her up with such force that she cracked her head against and then through the crappy drop-down ceiling tiles and she thought, not for the first time, about the original wood-beamed ceiling, and how she’d always wanted to tear away the tiles to expose those beams, and this reminded her of the director’s office and the nice beaming going on there.

Exposing those beams would have made this space so much nicer.

When she was ten, Rose’s daddy had taken her to the beach. It was strange. Even Rose knew at ten how strange it was. He shook her awake while it was still dark, held his finger up to his mouth to quiet her down, and then smiled a smile that usually meant he was drunk, but this morning she couldn’t smell any of the drink on him, which made his smile even more worrisome.

He wrapped his arms underneath her and started lifting her out of bed, but she was too big for him to lift out of bed that way and her legs tangled up in the covers. He struggled for a second and then he dropped her halfway out of the bed, and she landed half-assed on the side of the bed, the rest of her ass sliding off her mattress and landing hard on the hard floor, along with her wrist and ankle and everything else. She twisted her ankle but didn’t sprain it. Her wrist stung. Tears welled up in her eyes, but her daddy didn’t notice, had started into a fit of giggling that he was working to tamp down, clamping his mouth shut with his left hand and waving at her with his right, as if she were about to burst out into giggles, too. Then he wiped his laughing tears and then he wiped her pained tears without asking her if she was all right, and then he stood her up on her feet and grabbed her hand and pulled her out front and loaded her into the car, all without
saying a word, and not until they’d passed the 7-Eleven, and then the Coca-Cola bottling plant, did he say, as if she already knew where he was taking her, as if they’d had this little trip planned for weeks: “You excited for the beach, sweet pea?”

When they got to the beach and he pulled out the bag he’d packed for the day, she half-expected him to have brought her old bathing suit, the one that didn’t fit her anymore, or to have forgotten to bring a bathing suit for her at all. The other half of her, though, didn’t so much as expect but hope that maybe he’d bought her a brand-new bathing suit, like the bikini she’d seen in Target a few weekends ago, the aqua-blue one with the white piping and the ruffly top.

She should have known which half was going to be the right half.

“You’re just a kid,” he said. “No one cares if you’re out in the water in just your clothes.”

What he had brought with him were a couple of inner tubes, a big, thick black one for him, and a smaller light-blue one for her. His plan was for them to sit in their respective inner tubes and let the surf and the waves do all the work. Tubing down the coast, he called it. More exciting than tubing down the river.

“Let those other chumps fight against the waves by swimming, or sit on the sand and bake in the sun,” he said.

“Let those other chumps bore themselves to death inching down a swampy river,” he said.

Except there weren’t any other chumps. Not on the beach or in the surf. She doubted there were any chumps floating down the river, either, wherever the river was. It was October in Texas, and
the beach was empty and the water cold and choppy. If she squinted, Rose thought she could see a squall forming out over the gulf in the distance.

We’re the chumps, she wanted to say.

You’re the chump, she really wanted to say.

Then, as she took the inner tube he held out for her, she sighed. I’m the chump.

They were supposed to anchor the tubes to the shore with a thick length of rope tied to a tree or shrub or the front bumper of the car, which her daddy would park right up at the edge of the shoreline, otherwise the current would draw them farther and farther down the coast. When she asked him about the rope, she saw in his eyes a flicker, the briefest look of Ah, shit, I forgot the rope, but he recovered quick enough and said, “You’re old enough. I thought you’d like to try it the big-girl way.”

He handed her a pair of goggles, to keep the salt spray out of her eyes, and a snorkel, just in case. In case of what, she didn’t want to consider. He threw a diver’s mask over his own face, and then a Houston Astros pith helmet on his head, the kind with the cup holders and straws meant for cans of beer, but instead of beer, her father had sloshy, melting frozen margaritas he’d poured into old Bud Light cans, the idea being that salt water, which would ruin a beer, only made a frozen margarita taste better.

At first, she was surprised to find herself having fun. The waves pulled her out and threw her back to the shore like they were rough-and-tumble friends. Sometimes she was swooped to shore under a bubbling, ruffling breaker, and sometimes she was lifted high on the crest of a wave, felt her tummy flop in on itself. The
water was cold but even in October the air was hot and humid and the contrast felt warm and shivery, and against her better judgment, she found herself screaming and laughing and giggling with her father, who had finished the first set of margaritas-in-a-can and was working on finishing his second set. Where he kept them, she didn’t know and never found out.

It was unexpected fun, which made it somehow even more fun, the kind of fun you had when you got away with something, but then the storm she’d seen in the distance fell onto them in a rush, and the waves, already heavy and forceful and on the verge of mean, crashed over them with real purpose. Rose became anxious. Gallons of salt water sloshed into her nose and mouth. They had moved farther and farther down the shoreline so that she couldn’t see where they’d parked the car anymore. She tried to catch her daddy’s attention, but he didn’t care about the heavy rain, the rough waters. He thought it was all hilarious good fun, and he was drunk. Then a wave picked her up and then threw her down on the beach, where she landed face-first, cutting her skin just under her right eye against the blunt plastic of her goggles. Her cheek felt bruised and her whole body hurt and she stood up shakily and watched her daddy waving at her, yelling, “You’re all right, pumpkin. I’ll meet you back at the car.” Except the car was locked and the rain was coming down hard and fast and she sat behind the car, leaned against the back bumper, where the wind and rain didn’t hit her as hard, though they still hit her, and still pretty hard. Her father didn’t come back for another hour, deep into his drunk and missing his own inner tube and pith helmet. He didn’t see her, maybe, or had forgotten all about her, had
jostled the driver’s-side door open and jumped into the seat and started the car all before she could even stand herself up—cold and tired and sore. It took minutes of her pounding on the passenger window before he realized she was still there, the doors were still locked. She refused to speak to him the whole way home, but he was too drunk to notice or care. Typically him: sober enough to drive home, too drunk to notice his daughter. By the time he dropped her off at her mother’s, the storm had passed and he blew her a kiss and gave her a smile and a wave as if they’d just finished a picture-perfect daddy-daughter day, and then he was gone.

After she’d come back to this town, after Morocco, after Spain, her father had found out and came back into town and made her sit down for lunch with him. Her mother had been dead for a few years by then, and her sister, Stacey, had become a sorry excuse, living in that old house of their mother’s, the place unchanged down to the goose-themed wallpaper in the kitchen. Their father had moved off some thirty miles north where he’d found a woman who liked him enough to not care just how little he did. He looked old and haggard and small, which at once pleased and depressed her. He didn’t ask where she’d been, what she had done to herself, why or how she’d left, or where she’d gone. He told her that someone—maybe someone she had known back in high school—once stopped him on his way out of the post office to tell him she’d seen Rose pole dancing at a strip club in Oklahoma, which made him laugh and say, “My Rose? With a job? I think you’re mistaken.” He laughed telling her this. And then when the bill came, he waited for her to pay for lunch, didn’t
even pretend to reach for his wallet, and then they shook hands, and even before she’d grabbed her purse, he’d gone.

Maybe he’d wanted something from her but had gotten cold feet and decided not to ask, or maybe he had some lingering sense of obligation to her as her father, but either way, she never saw him again after that.

Her father hadn’t been the only one to fail to ask her what had happened to her so long ago. No one seemed to know that she had gone, had been whisked away so many years ago, or they had known she’d gone somewhere but had assumed she’d gone to some normal kind of place in the normal kind of way. College or junior college or to a slightly larger town, maybe, to find a slightly better kind of life. No one who saw her as she maneuvered again through her small hometown, which had changed so little, could even muster surprise that she had come back, but instead made automatic assumptions that she had gotten married and came back to raise her family, or that she’d come back looking to get married before it was too late, or that she’d gotten a job teaching at the elementary school, or was going to be working at the courthouse as a paralegal or an assistant. How they formed such specific ideas about why she was back and what she was doing, she didn’t know, but nobody seemed surprised, and when she told them she hadn’t decided what she was going to do yet, they gave her a sweet, poor-thing look and patted her gently on her arm and told her, “You’ll find something, I’m sure.” And then they’d ask her about church and make sure to invite her to theirs.

Even Stacey hadn’t been that surprised when Rose knocked
on the door. Rose sat on the couch and waited for fifteen, twenty minutes, listened to Stacey complain about the house; about their mother’s death and all the hassle that accompanied it; about their father, who had shown up not even two days after the funeral trying to make some kind of sinister claim on this house; listened to her go on about all of this before Stacey finally, sighing heavily, asked, “So what’s been up with you?

“We just figured you went off to live with Dad,” she said when Rose asked if they hadn’t gone looking for her, hadn’t even noticed that she’d gone.

“But I didn’t,” Rose said. “Did you even ask Dad?”

Stacey shrugged.

“I went away. I was taken away,” Rose said. Kidnapped, she almost said. Changed.

Stacey shrugged her heavy shoulders again. “And now you’re back, so what? You look fine.”

“Honestly,” her old friend Patty said when she saw her, “at first we kind of assumed that you’d been raped and murdered by that guy, what was his name? And we were about to say something about it, but then your sister told us your mom kicked you out of the house and sent you to live with your daddy.”

She had met Patty for lunch near the end of her first week back home, when she was just beginning to think about staying. Patty hadn’t stopped growing until long after Rose had left, had grown into a tall, broad-shouldered woman who wore her shiny black hair in a shoulder-length bob with bangs.

“You should definitely go see Gina,” Patty had said. “It would kill her to see you, still so thin.” And then, after hardly any time
at all, they ran out of things to say and ate their lunches quietly but for the soft grunting sounds Patty made while she ate, and then it was time for Patty to go, shopping to do, dinner to make, laundry to fold, and she gave Rose a hug and told her how nice it was to see her again, and then she was gone, and for the first time, standing outside on the square watching the tall, hulking frame of Patty lumber down the street, for the first time in what seemed like a very long time, Rose knew what she wanted to do.

Or maybe
want
was too strong a word, or the wrong word altogether. She knew what she needed to do.

She needed to come back home. She’d left too soon, left before she’d been ready, and since leaving home, her life had gone off the rails. She’d cut a man in half, for Christ’s sake. And had done other things, sure, but there’s not much left after having done that. And she felt on the run, always unsettled and on the move. But coming home. Starting over. That would fix everything.