Chapter 32 Connie #2
“Yes, sir.” Connie thought of Sam alone at home, penned inside her gate in the bedroom as the sun set, checked on only sporadically by the next-door neighbor, and felt such a deep ache in her chest that it closed up her throat, made her unable to speak for a second.
She was missing so much. Already, she had started to forget the feeling of Sam as an infant in her arms, the rhythm of rocking her warm little body, the way her baby skin smelled like sweet milk.
Last night, when she was up late cooking in the kitchen, Sam had run out of the bedroom in tears and latched on to her legs without a word, and Connie had sat down on the carpet and hugged her close and hummed to her until Sam fell back asleep in her arms. Lately, with all of Connie’s overtime work, Sam had been having more of these nightmares.
After putting Sam back down for bed, Connie had let herself have a good cry, wondering why survival had to mean she couldn’t be here for her daughter.
Maclan gave her a thoughtful look. “I’m in charge of all the floors here. Did you know that your work not only ranks consistently at the top for your floor, but all the floors?”
Connie heart lifted at his praise. “Thank you.”
“It’s earned,” he told her. Then he straightened and pushed away from the counter. “Keep it up.”
Several months later, on another night when Connie was working late and only a few other workers dotted the floor, a young assistant came up to her and told her that Maclan would like a word with her.
Connie stripped the gloves off her hands, removed her protective coat and hung it over her chair, and followed the man to the elevators.
They rode four floors up, to the top of the building, where he led her to an office at the end of the hall.
Inside, she saw filing cabinets and bookshelves lining one wall, an office desk positioned against another.
A row of windows lined the third, and through them, Connie could see an unobstructed view of Angel City’s skyline, the clock against the Times building illuminated in anticipation of nightfall, the ups and downs of skyscraper silhouettes dotted with lights, and central to them all, the Winged Towers, now completed, their scalloped tops shrouded by low clouds.
Maclan looked up from his desk with a smile. “Another late night, Connie,” he said. He waved her over to sit across from him. “It must be hard, with your two-year-old.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, thinking of Sam waiting for her. She needed to hurry. Sam was probably hungry by now and starting to whimper. “But we manage well enough.”
Maclan nodded. “I won’t keep you late, then. I know your floor’s been talking for a while about the need for a manager to run quality assurance.”
“Yes, sir,” Connie said, but her heart was beating faster now. She tried to keep her excitement tempered, because who knew if this meeting was for a promotion, but her hands pressed together in her lap anyway.
“I apologize for the delay,” he said. “Was waiting on approval of a new budget by headquarters before I could make the promotions. But I’m sure you’re not surprised that I’ve called you in here.”
Connie allowed a bit of a smile to emerge on her face.
She didn’t dare say it aloud until he did, but she imagined the raise all the same, the numbers in her bank account.
An extra five hundred dollars a month would help her afford real childcare for Sam so that she wasn’t leaving her alone for hours at a time.
It would let her rest a little easier, knowing she was no longer breaking the law, no longer putting her baby in danger.
It would give her a week of vacation days, an extra week of time with her daughter.
He studied her face, seemingly bemused by her growing anticipation. “Tell me about your life before you came here. What were you doing?”
She hesitated, her thoughts distracted momentarily by memories of a time she’d prefer to forget. “Not much,” she said humbly. “I was married, briefly, back in China. I did some odd jobs before I became pregnant.”
“What were your odd jobs?”
She shook her head. “Secretarial work,” she said, struggling to answer. “I sat several times for a calendar.”
“A calendar.” Maclan smiled. “A model?”
She smiled back, a little more nervously this time. “I wouldn’t call it that.”
“I can see why.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. “Thank you, sir.”
He drew it out a little longer, tormenting her, before he said, “Normally, I reserve manager promotions for workers that have been with us for longer than a year. You understand why, of course?”
“Yes, sir.”
“If I promote someone so new to a senior position, the others feel slighted, and I have a discontented group of employees on my hands. But you work really hard, and I’ve been impressed with you. So there’s something bigger I’d like to offer you.”
Something about his words was starting to make her uncomfortable. But Connie stayed put in her chair and nodded.
“As you might already know, we are owned by a corporate group called Lumines. All the chemicals and compounds sorted at our factory are made for a more specialized group of workers at headquarters. Chemicals of the highest grade—what we specialize in producing—are required in order to produce the purest forms of sand. But the real work happens off-site, at a building outside the city. We need a manager there. It is very exacting, very demanding work. You seem capable of it.” Maclan rose from his chair and walked around to her side, where he leaned against the desk and looked down at her.
She tried to keep her eyes steady on his, but he towered over her now, and she struggled to keep her head tilted up.
“What kind of work?” she asked.
“Alchemy,” he answered.
She didn’t know what that was, but she nodded silently anyway, and he smiled.
“Alchemy’s quite straightforward,” he continued.
“You’ll learn more about it, should you come on board.
As a manager there, you would need to not only oversee production but coordinate directly with headquarters.
” He leaned a little closer to her now. She was too nervous to move away.
“I can only submit one candidate, but if you’re willing, I think you’d do well. ”
He put a hand on her shoulder. Connie stiffened as she felt his fingers squeeze gently. Willing. Then she knew in a flash what he meant, and felt an immediate twinge of shame at her hesitation to turn him down.
Because she wanted it, a little bit.
“How,” she asked hoarsely, unable to resist asking, “much does it pay?”
His good-natured smile held. “The kind of money that will change your life.”
Could it be possible? Should she agree, she might at last find herself holding a ticket to the kind of future she had been promised here, a path into the dream that she held for herself and for her daughter.
She had always told herself to be ready for the moment when it came.
And maybe it had come; it was right here, offering her a chance—in exchange for a cost.
A cost. And she remembered the world she had stepped away from in the hopes that she was going toward something better. This could not possibly be it.
The sky outside was turning dark. She needed to get home to Sam.
The thought of Sam strengthened her resolve at last. She started to shake her head at Maclan, still reluctant to turn him down. “Can I,” she asked, “can I think about it?”
Now an impatient light came into his eyes. “What’s there to think about? I know you’ve been anticipating a promotion for months.”
She swallowed. Something still didn’t feel quite right, like she hadn’t exactly gotten his permission yet to refuse.
“It’s just that, it’s so late in the day?
” she said, her voice tilting up anxiously, turning her sentences into questions.
“I don’t know how much longer I can be away from my daughter? ”
She brought Sam up intentionally, remembering that Maclan also had a daughter, and looked at his face, hoping to find that camaraderie that might come with the shared experience of parenthood.
“Well,” he said, still towering over her, his voice turning disappointed. “I don’t have a lot of time to assign this promotion. There are other candidates waiting.”
He was leaning too close to her chair. Now she felt a true twinge of danger at being alone with him in here.
She decided to stand up, her body prickling with a rising panic.
“Thank you, sir,” she said. Somehow, her voice stayed calm.
“I need to get home to my daughter now, but I’ll think on it and let you know, first thing in the morning. ”
She didn’t wait for him to answer this time.
She just murmured her thanks a few more times, smiling with her face tilted down at the desk so that she didn’t have to look him in the eye anymore.
He didn’t say anything. She took the opportunity to turn around and head toward the door.
There were still some people working on all the floors—she knew the assistant was probably still outside, in the office next door, and would hear anything she said.
Or shouted. She let this fact soothe her, calm her fluttering heart.
She reached the door. Her hand closed on the knob and turned.
Except it wouldn’t open.
“If you knew alchemy,” he said, “you’d know how to change that back.”
She tugged again. When it still didn’t open, she looked down, and realized in confusion that she was tugging not on a metal doorknob but on a knob of wood fused with the door, and that the door itself was a just a slab of wood fused to the wall.
When she turned around, she saw Maclan approaching her, trailing one of his hands along the wall.
She gathered her courage. “I’ll call the police,” she said, her voice trembling.
Maclan looked amused by her threat. “It’s difficult to convict an impossible crime, isn’t it?
” he said. As he drew nearer to her, his other hand made a subtle gesture in the air.
“But you’re right.” His words sounded funny this time, as if encased inside a bubble, like any sound they made now would be contained within the few feet separating them. “We don’t want to cause a commotion.”
Afterward, when she’d managed to stop shaking, she went home and found Sam alone in their bedroom, still inside the baby gate with all of her toys, wailing with hunger.
Connie made Sam dinner, calmed her down, held her quietly and fed her, then bathed her and got her ready for bed.
They read a book together. Sam said something delightful, and Connie summoned every reserve of joy in her body to smile for her little girl, trying not to think about why she was a bad mother, why everything had to be so hard.
She curled her wounded body up in a ball around her daughter’s and hummed their favorite song.
When Sam fell asleep and Connie finally got a moment to tend to herself, she rose and went to the shower, taking as long as she could, biting her fist so hard that it bled, scrubbing away the residue of him until the water ran cold.
The next day, she went back to work, because the rent didn’t care what had happened to her, it was still due on Friday.
At some point, the assistant came up to the woman at the opposite station with a small white envelope.
Connie listened as the woman read out loud the letter of congratulations, signed by Maclan, offering her the position of floor manager.
Scattered applause followed from the rest of the floor. Connie clapped along.
She worked for two more weeks before she submitted her resignation letter.
She did it carefully, wording it in ways that only praised Maclan’s support of her, saying that she appreciated deeply the way he had lauded her hard work and that she had been lucky to have such a thoughtful supervisor. She wished him all the best.
Then she handed the letter to the assistant and left work. She didn’t return on Monday.
For a while, she lived in fear. Maybe she’d angered Maclan, leaving like that.
He had made something quite clear to her that night: if she ever spoke publicly about what happened, he would kill her.
And given what she’d witnessed him do, the sorcery he’d done to the door, the way he’d altered the air in the room so that her cries went unheard—what else could he do to her? To Sam?
Alchemy, he’d called it. Alchemy, a myth, except she’d experienced it firsthand, knew how it could hurt her.
Besides, even if she did speak out, who could she tell? Who would even believe her? No one else in the building would have heard a sound come from Maclan’s office. As he had said, the police can’t convict an impossible crime.
She worried until she gave herself headaches.
She tossed with nightmares, dreaming of cruel hands and cold eyes.
Would Maclan even let her just quit like this?
She didn’t know what kind of retribution he might seek, whether he might come looking for her, and for weeks after she quit she imagined a knock at her door and seeing him through the peephole.
But he didn’t show up. And after a while, she realized that he didn’t care to go looking for her because he’d already gotten what he wanted from her. She wasn’t worth the effort. In a few more months, maybe he wouldn’t remember her at all.
She applied for other jobs. She tried not to think about the factory anymore.
In the end, she got a job at Mandarin Palace Chinese Food and started again from the bottom.
And there, at the bottom, she made a quiet promise to herself, that her daughter would not end up in the same kind of room that she had ended up in, that no amount of money or prestige would be worth that cost. She promised that, for any price, for any sacrifice, no matter what that might mean, no matter what she had to do, she would keep Sam safe.