A Window Opens: A Novel (17 page)

“Mom, I’m not getting hysterical. I’m just—” My eye fell on the framed family picture on my desk: me and Nicholas and the kids in Maine, with the sun setting behind us. It was the rare one where we’re all looking at the camera, smiling genuine smiles, wearing clean shirts.

The last time I’d been through this with my dad, I’d only had one baby. Now I had three kids—big kids, who adored their grandfather and would want answers I might not have. I thought of them, passing around Buzz and holding it to their smooth throats. “How do you make it work, Pop?” Oliver had just written an essay about how my dad was his most inspiring person. “He wears his voice on a string around his neck. Sometimes he lets me wear it, but not while I ride my bike.”

I also had this new job. I wanted my chance to shine. I felt ashamed of wanting something beyond my dad’s good health, but wasn’t I entitled to both?

“Mom?”

“Alice?”

“How’s Dad?”

She sighed, the wind of information taken out of her sails. “Well. He came straight home and typed up the announcements for the church bulletin. Now he’s on the computer ordering from his seed catalogs. You know how he is.”

Of course. Actions before words. It was the Jesuit way.

“Mom?”

“Alice?”

“Did you tell Will?”

“I told Mary. Will was out on a boat without his phone.” That must have been nice, I thought, ungenerously.

“What did she say?”

“She said we have nothing to go on until the scans come back. Scar tissue is a bitch, she said. We should be cautiously optimistic.”

My two least favorite words in the medical vocabulary, a fancy way of saying “I have no idea.”

“And how long until we get the scans back?”

“Five to seven business days.”

“Is there any way to—”

“Dr. Davis will get the information to us as soon as he humanly can. He’s on our team, remember.”

When we hung up the phone, I realized Matthew had returned to his side of the office. I had no idea what he’d heard. I rolled slowly back from my desk, grabbed the key from the hook in the hallway, and walked downstairs to the bathroom on the floor below ours. While a stranger brushed her teeth, I locked myself in a stall, closed the lid of the toilet, lifted up my feet and sat there for ten numb minutes. I didn’t cry; I just stared at the mint-green metal wall, my mind blank. Then I went back upstairs for a presentation about metadata. Then I went downstairs again, walked over to the front steps of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and called Nicholas. As soon as I heard his gentle voice, I started to cry.

O
ur kids were at home with Jessie, who had arrived with her sewing kit, ready to stitch a hole chewed by Cornelius in Mr. Pibbles, Georgie’s beloved stuffed stingray. She’d whistled when I came down the stairs in a new dress from Garnet Hill. It was gray lace with subtle black leather trim; she was the only one who’d noticed its debut.

Now Nicholas and I were at the Appian Way, at a dinner hosted by Volunteer Lawyers for Justice. It was the kind of restaurant where all the tables wore fluffy white skirts, gathered at the top with elastic, and the butter pats adhered to tiny white squares of cardboard. The sauce on top of our side orders of spaghetti was billed as “Jersey’s Best Sundae Gravy.”

“As in
ice cream
sundae? Or day-of-the-week Sunday?” I whispered as we sat through the first of six speeches by local business people.

“Stop. These are restaurant folk, not editors.”

“Nicholas?”

“What?”

“Can I ask you one more question?”

“Yes.” He looked crisp in his white shirt and striped tie, like a young politician spit-shined for his first stump speech. He held up two fingers to a passing waiter. “Two Sam Adams, please.”

“Oh, not for me, I’m fine with wine.”

“Too late. Guess I’ll just have to drink both.” He’d already had a Brooklyn Lager before we left the house.

A tiny lightbulb went on in my head and I quickly flicked it off.

This was the first time the two of us had been out, alone, in months, and I didn’t want to ruin it by nagging Nicholas about how much he was drinking. He’d always been a beer-on-weekends kind of guy; these days, he was tossing back a six-pack a night. The fact that he consumed these beverages over the course of several hours didn’t help matters, especially since happy hour commenced before I even left my office. Taking out the recycling was now officially Nicholas’s job. I no longer joined him in the basement for the sorting, even though I’d always enjoyed our peaceful chats over the thrum of the dryer.

Think of something else; think of something else; think of something else.

“Hey, Nicholas, are there actually any lawyers who
aren’t
for justice?”

“Come on, Alice, just go with it. These people are the keys to my business development.”

We were interrupted by a thick-necked man who stopped by our table and stuck out his beefsteak hand for Nicholas to shake. “Nick Bauer, right? Dom Mercadante.” (I never call my husband Nick; nobody does.)

“Dom, nice to meet you. This is my wife, Alice Pearse.”

I smiled winningly. “Hi, Dom!”

“Hey, so Nick, you were recommended to me by an old basketball buddy—you’re renting office space from him?”

“Glen. Of course. He can
play
.” Nicholas took a long swill from his beer, grabbing my hand under the table at the same time. That was sweet, at least.

“Yeah, well, he thought you might be able to help out with a situation I’ve got coming up. My brother, Phil, he’s in some hot water on a lease over there in Filament. Opened this deli a while back—great location, top-notch mozzarella, but the parking’s a bitch.” Dom turned in my direction. “I apologize for my French.”

“No need to apologize. I’m fluent myself.”

“Glad we have that in common. So, I guess what I’m saying is, my brother has missed his last few rent payments and I’m a little worried he won’t be able to cover his costs. He may need to think about filing for bankruptcy. Think you can help?”

Usually Nicholas worked on matters with many more zeroes in the dollar figures, but he didn’t hesitate: “I’d love to.” He was building a client list, slowly but surely.

On the way out to the parking lot, I grabbed the keys.

•  •  •

Since the days were getting longer, Susanna and I met up halfway between our houses to walk the dogs after dinner. This was my favorite time to stroll around Filament. The tulips were out and the high school lacrosse team wrapped up practice with a huddle and a cheer—“Go Brights!”—which echoed throughout the neighborhood.

We talked about everything and nothing: when Margot and Audrey would get cell phones; where we should take our husbands for their joint birthday dinner; whether I should follow up with the mom who let Oliver play a violent video game at her house.

“What would you
say
, exactly?” I could tell Susanna was skeptical.

“I’d just let her know that I’d appreciate it if she didn’t expose my son to that crap.” We paused to let Cornelius and Susanna’s dachshund, Hotdog, sniff a pair of trash cans on the curb.

“Alice. Really? Do you want to be that mom?”

“Probably not. But I’m really annoyed. The object of the game was to blow up buildings. They’re only eight years old!”

“Me, I’d probably take the passive-aggressive approach. I’d just not
let Ollie go there again. Her kid can come to your house and be bored to tears by all your wooden toys.”

I laughed. “Good strategy. Different subject: how are things at the store? You haven’t mentioned.”

She sighed and crossed her arms like it was cold, even though it wasn’t. “Honestly? Not great. I had to ask one of my full-time people to go part-time. I’m hoping things will pick up again now that the weather is warm. Oh, and I started selling Ugly Dolls. So that’s something.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. Rashida and the Environmental Team were squarely against any merchandise that would junk up our simple aesthetic, especially toys. We wouldn’t sell cards, bookmarks, or fancy notebooks either. “Well, isn’t it about time for us to get a No Guilt Book Club on the calendar? That always brings in business, right?”

“Yeah. We’ll see.”

A train went by, empty except for a few commuters standing in the aisle, waiting to get off.

“In other not-so-great news, my dad’s appointment didn’t go very well.”

Susanna stopped in her tracks. “Tell me.”

•  •  •

I took the day off for Margot’s fifth-grade graduation—a blisteringly hot affair where I was annoyed with my mom for wearing an oversized straw hat. Did she think this was the Kentucky Derby? I snapped at her for all kinds of minor infractions, then quickly downed two glasses of wine at lunch at the Highlawn Pavilion, the same restaurant where my parents had taken me for dinner after my high school graduation.

I knew why I was annoyed at her: my dad stayed home.

Me:
Dad, we missed you today. Hope you got some rest.

Dad:
I did. Also got some basil and sage in the ground, so we have that to look forward to.

Me:
Did you get those articles I sent you? About the clinical trial at MD Anderson?

Dad:
Which articles?

Me:
The ones from The Lancet, JAMA?

Dad:
Yes. Good to have additional info.

Me:
What did you think?

Dad:
Hey, did you see those pics Will posted? Are those kids getting big or what? LOL.

On GatheringPlace, the tally of my accumulated vacation days inched along at a snail’s pace, in halves and quarters inside an icon reminiscent of a digital clock circa 1983. My current time-off balance didn’t permit me to take two personal days in quick succession, so I found myself in a company-wide meeting—known as TownGreen— on the day Margot and Oliver were released from school for the summer.

In the past, the last day of school had been one of my favorites. I invited the kids’ classes over to our house for Popsicles in the backyard, and I stood around chatting with the teachers while the kids played basketball and blew bubbles and politely shook Cornelius’s paw. I’m not a fun mom, but this was the one fun thing I did.

Now, at the very moment when I knew my kids were lined up at the ice cream truck for bomb pops, I was in a stark white conference room with a cactus terrarium in the middle of the table. The New York office was being beamed in via video to a cool blue conference room in Cleveland, where a rented popcorn machine lent a festive air to the gathering. We could barely hear anything on our end over the popping and crunching on theirs.

“Hi, team!” Genevieve slid into the chair next to mine and leaned over so her shoulder brushed against mine. Then she whispered, “Brace yourself. This one will be a
huge
snooze.”

“Really?” I glanced around the table to see if anyone was listening, but the other Scrollers were either reading e-mail or chatting loudly with
colleagues in the Cleveland office. “I thought TownGreen was supposed to be like a big pep rally?”

“Ha! You’re still a newbie, aren’t you? An interminable lecture is more like it.”

I struggled to arrange my face in the correct expression: appreciative of Genevieve’s humor while mindful of the fact that I was her direct report. I also didn’t want to look too buddy-buddy with her in front of Mariana, who joked that I was Genevieve’s favorite. (Was
that
why she’d never followed up on the drinks plan she mentioned on my first day?)

The first item on the TownGreen agenda: communicating the Scroll way. The message: keep interoffice e-mails terse, with as much information as possible in the subject line. If you could, in fact, contain all the relevant details in the subject line, it should then be punctuated with [EOM], which stood for “end of message.” This SOP (standard operating procedure) would spare your recipient the fraction of a second it took to open the e-mail.

When the Communications Team finished their presentation, the Environmental Team took over. The speaker was Rashida’s manager, to whom she reported on a “dotted line.” This woman smoothed her parted-in-the-middle hair behind her ears, clasped her hands together, and bowed slightly in the direction of the crowd. “Namaste, y’all. We’re here to talk about mindfulness in the arena of office supplies.” She paused while everyone clapped. “Going forward, we’re launching a campaign known internally as ThinkFirst. The idea being, before we soil a tree-based product with ink, we should ask ourselves, ‘Is this necessary?’ ”

Ellen, the Purchasing Manager, whispered to Genevieve, “By tree-based product, does she mean paper?”

Genevieve smile-smirked, an expression I now recognized as her trademark. “I believe so.”

Rashida kept her eyes on her laptop, fingers flying on the keyboard. I knew she was answering e-mail, as everyone did in meetings. If you
walked away from your computer for an hour, you’d be snowed under with corporate announcements and missives from Cleveland, each accompanied by a little red exclamation point. The trick was to absorb the scattershot immediately upon its arrival.

The ThinkFirst campaign extended to all office supplies. In an effort to reduce our environmental footprint, we would now file trouble tickets to requisition file folders, notepads, and Post-its—but these little luxuries would only be available in small batches. And there would be no more ballpoint pens; for those unavoidable occasions where it was necessary to put pen to paper, we would be issued fountain pens with replenishable ink cartridges. All Scroll copy machines would be programmed to turn off after reaching a weekly ceiling of paper output. Ditto for laser printers. “Send attachments! Read on the screen! Isn’t that what we’re all about here at Scroll, anyway?”

Rashida’s boss kept getting interrupted by raucous applause, which was accompanied by a few stray whistles from the back of the room. Finally, she held up a hand with a ring on every finger. “In conclusion, the average office worker uses at least ten thousand pieces of copy paper every year. We know that paper takes up over twenty-five percent of Ohio’s garbage each year. Can you imagine what that figure might be for New York City?” Her eye flicked to the camera linking our two states, at least for the moment. “You guys, let’s start bringing these numbers down. Now. The world will thank us. The world is watching.”