A Window Opens: A Novel (39 page)

•  •  •

Ann had given security a heads-up about my arrival, so they didn’t eye me with the suspicion and derision I remembered from orientation. This time they only requested two forms of ID alongside my blue employee
card, which they advised me to wear around my neck on a lanyard they handed over surreptitiously. The lanyard was bright yellow, with 100% Wacky stitched around it in navy thread. The security guy and I both knew that I wasn’t supposed to have one of these since I hadn’t participated in the requisite battery of wacky tests at MainStreet’s annual Down-Home BlockParty. This small act of generosity could very well have cost the man his job.

Ann told me to go straight to SodaFountain for my meeting with Greg. She said this with a straight face—she said everything with a straight face—and I was too nervous to smirk, as I normally did when the nostalgic names of Scroll conference rooms came up in casual conversation. SodaFountain, HardwareStore, CobblerShoppe.

When I arrived at SodaFountain, a guy in a hoodie was scribbling on the whiteboard with a squeaky red marker and everyone else at the table was tapping away at their laptops. Greg glanced up laconically from his spot by the dog treat buffet. He was wearing a T-shirt that said “MainStreet: Old is the New New.”

“Hey, we’re just wrapping up here. Everyone, you know Aileen Pearse from Scroll New York. Aileen, this is everyone.”

“Actually, it’s Alice. Hi, everyone.” Seriously? Given Greg’s prominence in my middle-of-the-night stress sessions, it was unfathomable to me that he still didn’t know my name.

One by one the Scrollers filed out of SodaFountain, until I was alone with Greg. I smoothed my dress underneath me as I sat down, painfully aware of how short it was and noticing his quick flick of a glance at my legs. The room went completely silent, vacuum-sealed like a can of tuna when the last person out closed the door behind him. With my eyes closed, I might have mistaken this room for a church, instead of a drop-tile-ceilinged conference room on a bustling corporate campus in the middle of a midsized city on the banks of a Great Lake.

“So.” Greg lifted his heather-blue hood onto his head, leaned back in his chair, and folded his hands under his chin in the manner of a student awaiting instruction.

“Well, thanks for meeting with me. It’s good to be here. I’m always amazed by how short a trip—”

He glanced quickly at his wrist, where there was no watch. “Genevieve said you wanted to talk to me about an idea?”

“Yes. I’ve been thinking about the possibility of offering at-home book parties in conjunction with Scroll’s rollout across the country. We can train a team of tastemakers to select the best titles each season, and then dispatch them to sell these books at pop-up literary salons hosted by individuals in their network. Like the Pampered Chef with a cultured twist.”

“Huh.” Greg looked skeptical at best. “Keep going.”

“My thinking is, women, wine, and books are a proven formula. Under this model, we bring the books to the women. We narrow the choices. They can sit back on the couch and relax while our Book Lady plays matchmaker—”

“Why should these moms trust this Book Lady?”

“She’s one of them, for starters. She’s from their community, a friend of a friend maybe, so she knows which books will go over well in her world. Picking a book can be overwhelming for busy women. The Book Lady narrows the field, and she can sell you an e-book or a carbon-based—”

“No carbon-based. Has Genevieve not debriefed you on our Paper Is Poison initiative? Beyond biodegradable napkins, we’re not going to have a shred of paper in our stores. Ever. We won’t even take cash.”

“That wouldn’t be a problem in my model. Less for the Book Lady to lug around.”

Greg shifted in his white chair, indicating the end of this part of the conversation by switching the leg he crossed over another, ankle to knee. “The human touch can be costly, Alice. I’ll take this under advisement, but before we spitball anymore, I’d like an update on where you are with the Joystick initiative. I’d like to re-message the publishing community as soon as possible, and I’m going to need your enthusiasm to do that.”

I cleared my throat and sat up straight in my chair, so my back wasn’t even touching its white webbing. “Greg, I’m going to be honest with you. I’m not enthusiastic. Actually, I think the whole thing is a really bad idea.”

Greg rolled his eyes. “Genevieve tells me you’ve had some issues with the content you’ve been asked to vet?”

“Yes.”

“And . . . can you tell me a little bit more about that?”

I glanced quickly at the whiteboard, where the word “EXELL” [sic] was written in green dry-erase marker. “Well, I find the games offensive and in bad taste.”

Greg placed his whole palm over his face and massaged it like he was thinking long and hard. But with all my practice testing kids on spelling words, I recognized this move as a stall tactic. He gestured with his hand,
Get on with it.

“You could say my problem is three-pronged.” (I thought the prongs might win me some points.) “First, I don’t think my skills as a reader and as an editor are well utilized when I’m choosing video games to sell in our stores. Second, I don’t think we should scrap our original mission, to create a peaceful lounge where people can read and buy books. Parents need a break from Romper Room.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“You said there were three prongs. What’s the third?”

I took a deep breath. “The third prong is the content of the video games. I don’t feel good about that either.”

Greg shrugged laconically. He furrowed his brow, exaggeratedly quizzical. “Come on, Alice, these are just games. All in good fun.”

“I get that, but—I don’t feel good about selling games where kids blow up buildings or kill each other.”

I opened my notebook and pulled a piece of paper from its front pocket. Knowing how important it was to have data points and hard evidence to back up my claim, I’d copied and pasted sales figures and descriptions of Joystick’s thirty top-selling games onto this paper. Now I unfolded it and started to read to Greg. “Here’s their number one best seller:
Urban Bomber
. ‘The object of the game is to steer a 747 loaded with explosives into as many tall buildings as possible before getting shot down
by military helicopters. The more buildings you topple, the more casualties you rack up. The more casualties you rack up—’ ”

“I get the idea, thanks. But Alice, if these are the games kids want to play, we need to address that desire as a retailer.” He smirked. “We’re a business, remember. How are we going to make big bucks? That’s what I want to know.”

I knew what Genevieve would say. I could hear her voice all the way in Cleveland, urging me to remain neutral. But in this instance, with so much at stake, that approach seemed like yet another attempt at trying to be something I wasn’t.

There was another voice in my head, louder than Genevieve’s, and it belonged to my dad, who had lost his voice and struggled mightily to find it again. I pictured him in the early days after his laryngectomy, remembered how he moved his lips to speak and no words came out. Not a sound. Watching him get yanked back to the new normal had been devastating. Again and again and again.

You have a voice. Use it.

“Greg, I don’t have an answer to your question. I feel like I was hired to be an architect and now you’re asking me to be a plumber. From a business standpoint, I guess I understand why you want to sell video games, but from a human perspective, I don’t think I’m the right person to curate the selection or to sell this pivot to the public. From a maternal perspective, what would I tell my kids if their jobs took such an unexpected—and, I’ll be honest, offensive—turn? I’d tell them to speak up.”

I sat back in my chair and took a sip of antioxidant water from a biodegradable cup made of reclaimed plastic. I felt for Georgie’s hair clip in my pocket. The room was quiet again.

Happy birthday, Dad.

Outside, two Scroll employees threw a Frisbee in the courtyard while a golden retriever puppy ran back and forth between them, frantically trying to catch the plastic disc in his mouth.

Greg still reclined in his chair, frozen again in a relaxed pose but alight with tension and disapproval and annoyance. Like a paper clip snapped
out of shape, his small mouth reorganized itself into a cool smile. “Well, then. You’re a valuable member of our team, Alice. I hope you find a way to make this work.”

•  •  •

I walked back to Ann’s cubicle, feeling a little bit proud and a little bit mortified and mostly just really, really hungry. At
You
, I had been a team player. I got along well with others. I did as I was told. Now the stakes were higher. I’d given up too much on the home front to spend my waking hours putting guns (even virtual ones) into the hands of kids. I hadn’t carried my five-month-old through the rubble on 9/11 to do this for a living.

I remembered the rows of lawyers at my dad’s funeral. Former friends, stars of his favorite stories, filing out of the church in silence. Work was important, but it wasn’t everything.

Before I rounded the corner to Ann’s desk, I stopped in the empty hallway to yank up my tattered, disobedient tights, which felt like they might forfeit altogether and land in a disgraced pool around my ankles.

“Whose groovy purple suitcase is that?” Through a little cut-out in the wall, I saw a guy leaning into Ann’s desk in the universal stance of a man talking to a woman at work: bent in half at the waist, face propped on hands propped on elbows.

“That’s Alice’s. She’s just out for the day from New York.” Ann’s voice was curt, as always.

“Really? Looks like she’s planning to move in. This thing is a steamer trunk!”

Laughter all around.

“What can I say? She’s a mom.”

More laughing.

“Obviously.”

What can I say? She’s a mom.

Margot had personally introduced me to each zippered compartment, showing me where to store my shampoo and how to pack an extra pair of shoes, soles out, so they wouldn’t get the rest of my clothes dirty.

My eyes prickled.

Why yes, I thought. I
am
a mom.

•  •  •

The hotel was garden-variety airport chic, decorated in subtle oatmeal hues and featuring one of those ingenious shower rods that bow out to give you more space while you bathe. I ordered an early dinner from room service—caprese salad and penne à la vodka, which arrived on a little doily soaked in oil. After I finished eating, I called Nicholas, hoping to catch him before he headed out on the town for the night. After five rings, my call went to voice mail.

Then I checked my work e-mails. Among the sixty-seven metrics reports and OOTO notices and announcements from GatheringPlace and expense reimbursement queries was the message I had been expecting from Genevieve. She kept it simple; I had to hand it to her for that.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Please drop a 1:1 on my calendar so we can discuss your meeting with Greg. If it’s important to you to have a job that is 100% aligned with your sense of self, we should talk about the fit.

That night, I slept well for the first time in months.

My alarm went off at 5:15 a.m. I pressed snooze twice and ended up in a mad dash to get to the airport on time. When I boarded the plane, I snapped at the Continental gate attendant, who seemed puzzled by the disparity between my driver’s license photo and the woman standing before him (“It was taken a long time ago, okay?”), and then I spilled coffee all over my jeans as soon as we were in the air. The sense of peace I’d felt the night before had been supplanted by a terrible unease. How would I get out of this mess?

CLE → EWR.

T
he train from Newark arrived in Filament at 8:32 a.m. I’d been in constant contact with Jessie by text, so she knew what time to expect me. What I did not expect, when I climbed off the train, was to see Oliver running down Flower Street toward the station, coat unzipped and flying like a cape behind him, hell-bent on meeting me before I made it down the path to North Edison.

I watched him from half a block away, as if I were watching a movie about somebody else’s lanky, sweet, freckled boy: pausing for the slightest second on the corner of North Edison, looking to the right, only to the right but not the left—the street was two-way, now, remember?—and then stepping into the street without seeing the green Ford Flex muscling its way toward him at top speed from the other side of the school.

The car was going too fast; Oliver was going too fast.

Once again, I opened my mouth and made noise.

In a split second, his life flashed before me: a newborn baby, red and wailing in a Plexiglas bassinet at NYU hospital while the sun rose over the East River and nurses listened to his freshly minted heart; the
black-felt cat costume he wore on his first birthday; his bossy commands at bedtime: Sing my song, Kiss my lips (“Tiss my whips”); Oliver in preschool, racing into the gym at the end of the day, into the crowd of waiting adults, his face bright with joy; cheek to the floor, giving a chubby plastic dump truck the universal boy
vroom
sound; a gentle, dimpled hand resting in the middle of Georgie’s back, teaching her how to dive; Ollie on the beach in Maine, emerging from the water at Cedar Beach to place gray rock after gray rock in a red bucket, each one a beloved addition to a collection curated according to standards only he understood; Oliver scoring a goal at a lacrosse game; Oliver opening his eyes in the morning and looking at me for a second like he had never seen me before; Oliver waiting by the bench in front of the school, alone.

Sweet prince. Baby bird. Little fish. Blue-eyed boy.

All the names; all the days, hours, minutes, and seconds.

I thought,
This
is infinity.

•  •  •

Oliver stood frozen in the middle of the road like a mannequin boy wearing a Filament Brights cap and a black and red winter coat from a bargain basement sale at an expensive ski store. Look closely and you could see the dirt on the cuffs and along the zipper from slide tackling on frozen ground. He’s a boy who plays outside every day, wearing away the grass on every inch of the front yard, no matter how cold it is. He never stops moving. And yet, there he was, at a standstill, watching with a kind of shocked curiosity to see if the Flex would stop in time.