14. Chapter Fourteen
Penelope
The tea arrives in the mail on a Tuesday. It’s in a padded envelope, and I stand in my kitchen holding it for ten minutes without a single idea what to do next.
It cost fourteen dollars with shipping. That is not a number I have ever thought about in my life. I once bought a scarf in Milan that cost more than my car insurance, but my mom handed me her credit card and said to get something special.
I open the package and stare at it.
So.
How do I give it to him?
I could just hand it to him — no. He’d take it and think that he owes me something back.
I don’t want to play that game with him.
I know he’d say thank you in that flat voice he uses when he’s gone somewhere behind his own eyes.
I could leave it at his house. Also no. There are four other, very loud hockey players who live there.
I could tell him I bought two, and one was extra.
He knows the price of organic strawberries. He’d know exactly what I was doing.
I stare at it again. For the first time in my life, giving somebody something might be a hard thing to do.
In my house, gifts were a normal thing. They arrived from people with money at appointed times, and vice versa.
My mom buys me a new piece of clothing once a week.
I’m always getting something in the mail from her.
But Percy is different. He walks in the snow with no gloves. He’s quiet and observant. He’s not easy to crack.
So it’s solved. I don’t give it to him.
I put it in the cabinet, second shelf, next to my other tea.
And on Wednesday, when I sneak him into my room again, I make two mugs of it and set one at his elbow and sit on the stool next to him.
He drinks it and doesn’t mention that it tastes different than last time.
I bought a different blend. I read about eleven of them and picked the one with vanilla in it, because he told me the last one tasted like dirt and drank all of it anyway.
He drinks the whole thing. The next time he’s over, I make it again, and he drinks that too, and neither of us ever says a word about it.
On Friday, the weather has finally turned to early spring, so I take him to the Bellweather Hall before his hockey game.
It’s the oldest building on campus, and nobody uses the north wing because the classrooms are inconvenient and the radiators clang like something’s trapped inside them.
It’s my favorite building in Camden, and I have never brought anyone here.
It’s cold enough that the air hurts. His hands are shoved in his jacket pockets, and he has no hat, and he doesn’t appear to register the temperature at all, which I’ve stopped commenting on.
“What’s in it?” he asks on the steps.
“Nothing,” I answer.
Inside, the corridor runs a hundred feet with nothing in it but floorboards and light. I walk him to the middle and stop, and he stops.
“Look up.”
The ceiling steps in three planes, and above the third, the windows sit high in the wall, throwing light down the plaster so it comes at you sideways and soft, from above. Even now. Even at one in the afternoon in the first week of March.
He looks up for a long time.
“There’s no lights on,” he says.
“They’ve been broken for years.” I take him a little way down, to where the ceiling changes. “See how it lifts here. They didn’t have to do that. It’s a hallway. You walk through a hallway. It doesn’t need light like this.”
“So why’d they?”
“Because somebody in 1897 thought a hallway was worth doing well.” I put my hand flat against the plaster. “That’s a clerestory. Those windows up there. The whole point of one is you get light without anyone seeing in, and it comes from above, so it never glares. It just falls.”
“Clerestory,” he repeats.
He says it again under his breath. Then he walks. He goes twenty feet down the corridor and turns around slowly. His head comes up. He looks at the door we came in by. Then down the whole length of the hall to the far door. Then back up at the windows.
“It’s the doors,” he says.
I look at them.
“You can see both of them.” He’s still turning. “From anywhere in here. There’s nowhere in this hall you can’t see both ways out.”
He’s right. He is completely, precisely right, and I have never once seen it. Not in two years. Because every minute I’ve spent in this corridor, I spent looking at the light.
“Is that why it feels like this?” he asks.
“Maybe.” My voice does something. I clear my throat. “Probably. Yes.”
He nods and goes back to looking at the ceiling.
I stand in the middle of my favorite building and notice that he finds the exits before he finds the windows, and every instinct I have is to ask why, but I don’t.
He’d answer me. That’s what stops me. He’d answer me if I asked.
I show him the transom over the far door instead.
We’re in there for ninety minutes. It’s thirty degrees, and my hands ache, but I talk more than I mean to.
I tell him why the floorboards run the way they run.
I tell him about load and span, and why the wing is only one room deep, and how you can date a window from across a street if you know what proportion to look for.
He asks maybe four questions total, and not one of them is a question anybody has ever asked me.
Not whether it’s valuable. Not whether it’s famous.
He asks whether the men who built it knew it would still be standing.
He asks whether they signed it anywhere.
And somewhere in the middle of the hour, I catch myself gesturing with both hands, and my voice pitched high.
I’m showing off. I’ve never shown off in my life.
I was raised in a house where wanting to be seen was the vulgarest thing a person could do, and I am standing in a freezing corridor performing a building for an audience of one.
I take my hands down.
Then he says, “I have to get going, Penelope.”
Hearing my name from his voice shocks me back to reality. There’s a big piece of me that wants to see him play. Something moves in me that wants to ask if I can come. I don’t ask. I shove it down and smile.
“Have a good game, Percy.”
Then he’s off, and I stay there for about twenty minutes, looking up to watch the light.
That afternoon, I’m at Whitmore and they have me working on Chicago.
That’s what everyone calls it now. Chicago.
As though the city and the project are one object, which for me they will be.
Ashfield’s behind me, and now there’s a real ground-up, twenty-two thousand square feet on a corner in a city I don’t want to live in, and my sheets go into the set with my initials in the block.
And here’s the joke of it, which nobody would find funny but me.
The work is extraordinary. I love it. I sit down at one, and I look up, and it’s five, and I haven’t moved, and my hand aches, and something that was broken at ten this morning is solved.
Oliver hands me things above my grade and I do them and hand them back better, and every single day I walk into that building and do the one thing on earth I love.
I can’t even hate it properly. That’s the cruelty.
Four separate times this week, I think I’ll finally say it.
I don’t want Chicago. It gets as far as my teeth on Wednesday, when Oliver leans over my desk to look at the east elevation and says, “That’s good.
That’s going in the set.” He isn’t standing too close. He’s exactly the right distance away.
“Thank you,” I say.
My New Year’s Resolution list is still folded in the back of my sketchbook. I don’t need to be reminded of what it says. I know what it says.
My mother calls on Sunday morning.
“Penelope. Honey.”
I immediately know why she’s calling.
“Richard tells me you’re on the Chicago project. Two years. And a position waiting the spring you graduate.”
“Yes.”
“A junior architect at Whitmore before you’ve even graduated.” She laughs — warm, delighted, the warmest she’s been with me since I was a child. “Do you have any idea what people would do for that? Every dinner I go to, women ask me how my daughter did it.”
How my daughter did it.
“I know,” I say.
“And you didn’t want to go to that first dinner.” A pause I’m meant to fill. I don’t. “I told you it would be worth it. Didn’t I tell you?”
The sentence is right there on the tip of my tongue. It has been right there since December.
“You did,” I say. “Thank you, Mom.”
“Call me on Sunday.”
She hangs up.
I sit on the edge of my bed in my quiet apartment and hold the phone until the screen goes dark.
That night, Percy’s in the chair by the lamp with his tea going cold at his elbow and a book he took off my shelf without asking, because I told him to help himself.
I’m at my desk. I’ve been on the same drawing for two hours, and it isn’t for Whitmore.
At some point, he gets up and comes to stand behind my shoulder, which he has never done, and looks down at it for a while.
It’s a house. Low and long, sitting into a slope. There’s a courtyard through the middle so that no room in it is ever without two ways to see daylight, and a run of high windows on the north wall that would give flat, even, shadowless light all day.
“That’s the light thing,” he says. “From the hallway.”
“Clerestory.” I’m absurdly pleased. “Yes.”
He looks at it for a long time, hands behind his back.
“Who’s it for?”
“Nobody.”
He waits. And then I understand what he’s asking, which is not the question I have been answering my whole life. He wants to know who is going to live in it. What kind of person. Whose coat goes by the door.
“It’s not for anyone,” I say. “It’s a study.”
“Oh.”
“It’s just something random I’m working on.”
“Okay.” He says it easily and then goes back to the chair.
I sit with my pencil over the house I’ve been drawing, in one version or another, since I was sixteen.
I’ve drawn a hundred of them. Wide yards, good bones, light coming in exactly where I put it, and I have never once imagined a single human being inside any of them.
I’ve never drawn a chair pulled out from a table.
I’ve never drawn a coat hung by a door. There’s an entire neighborhood in my sketchbook, and nobody lives in it. I put the pencil down.
“Do you want more tea?”
“Yeah,” he says.
I grab our mugs and make us another cup.
Ivory’s suitcase is open on the living room floor on Thursday with half her clothes in it.
“Last minute trip to Cabo,” she says, holding up two identical swimsuits. “Drew’s family has a place. Everyone’s going. Sasha, Rylee, all of them. Which one?”
“The left.”
“You think?”
“Then the right.”
She groans and throws both in. “You’re sure you can’t come?”
“I have Chicago.”
“Over spring break?”
“Yeah, my mom wants me in the city for four days, and there’s a Whitmore thing I can’t get out of.” All true. I’ve been dreading it since February.
“God.” She flops backward onto the couch. “It’ll be so dead here. Everyone’s gone. Total ghost town.”
I go into my room and start folding things into a garment bag, and what Ivory said makes me smile.
Because I’ll be back on Sunday. I’ll spend four days in Chicago and then it’ll be me and this empty town.
Except it won’t be completely empty, will it?
Because in December, when the town emptied, there was a boy with a Christmas tree in a freezing house who made hot chocolate and gave me all of his marshmallows.
There was a fake fireplace on a television.
There was a morning I woke up on a couch, and it was Christmas, and nothing at all was expected of me.
The town will empty. And he’ll be here, and I’ll be here.
I fold a dress into the bag and think about the walk from Bellweather to the coffee place on Ninth, and about the alley off Tenth with the fire escape I’ve been wanting to show him.
I don’t tell him I’m leaving. I’m sure he’ll be working at the Camerie.