17. The Gallery of Gazes #2
“Sterling.” Her voice belongs to a stranger three rooms away. She will not look at me. “The agreement was about my parents. It was about survival. Real things can break. They always do. We’re better as a lie that works than a truth that destroys us.”
The silence after it is absolute.
And then something in my chest closes, the way a door closes at the end of a shift, and I let it. I do not have room for this. I have room for the mission.
I let out a short, sharp laugh, the hollow one I use at the station when a call goes bad and the crew still has to get back in the rig.
I push off the wall and straighten my jacket with a jerky motion that feels like it belongs to somebody else, then focus on my cuffs, adjusting buttons that do not need adjusting.
“Right.” My voice comes back dry, an octave low. “The performance. Sorry, Sparkles. Method-acting a little hard. Got to stay in character if we’re winning the Oscar.”
I offer her a smile but it’s just equipment. For the first time in six years there is something jagged in me that will not tuck away, and I see a flicker in her eyes, regret, maybe, or just more fear, and I do not let it in.
“I’m going to find the bar,” I say. “Acting is thirsty work. Stay here. Enjoy the void. I’ll be back before your mother notices the leading man is missing.”
I walk away and I don’t look back.
The bar is at the far end of the gallery, a slab of white marble with a kid in a black vest working it. I ask for bourbon, neat, and he pours something that costs more than my boots. The first one goes down like it has somewhere to be. I order a second and hold it and look at nothing.
“Sterling.”
Robert Peterson sits down two stools over with the deliberateness of a man who has decided to be casual about something. He sets his own glass on the marble and turns it a quarter turn, lining the base up with a seam in the stone.
“Sir.”
“Robert. Please.” He watches the room for a while.
Out on the floor Carol is holding court, and somewhere behind her, in a dim corner in front of a blue painting, his daughter is standing alone.
“She always did disappear at these things. Even as a girl. Twenty minutes in and you’d find her behind a coat rack with a book. ”
“She’s not hiding,” I say. “She’s working.”
He looks at me.
“Look at the room,” I say. I do not particularly plan to say any of this.
The bourbon has loosened the bolts and the shift in my chest has done the rest. “The logo on the program. The type on the wall placards, the way it steps down from the artist’s name to the medium so your eye goes in the right order and you never notice you were told what to do.
The sign that got you from the lobby to the coat check without you having to ask anybody.
Somebody made all of that. Somebody sat with it for weeks and moved things a millimeter at a time until the room worked. ”
“I’m sure that’s true.”
“It’s true here.” I set the glass down. “It’s true at Station 99.
We’ve got exit signage in that building that a woman I’ve never met chose the color of, and I have crawled under smoke on my elbows and found a door because of it.
That’s not decoration, Robert. That’s someone deciding, in advance, in a quiet office, that a stranger is going to get out of a building. ”
Robert Peterson does not say anything. He turns his glass another quarter turn.
“You said aesthetic choices,” I say. “Earlier. Like it’s what she does instead of something serious.”
“I didn’t mean, ”
“I know you didn’t.” And I do know. That’s the thing about the Petersons.
There’s no malice anywhere in the house.
There is just a long, patient, decades-deep assumption, delivered warmly, at dinner, with the good napkins.
“But she heard it. She hears it every time. She’s been hearing it since she was nineteen and told you she wasn’t going to law school, and she’s built an entire career out of being so precise that nobody could ever call it frivolous, and it still hasn’t worked, because the problem was never the work. ”
The kid in the vest finds something to do at the other end of the bar.
“She won a national award last year,” Robert says eventually. “For a hotel. The, ah, the boutique one.”
“I know. I was there. You weren’t.”
It comes out flatter than I intend and I do not take it back.
He is quiet a long time. When he speaks again his voice has lost the boardroom in it. “Her mother and I worry that it isn’t stable.”
“Neither is running into buildings.”
“That’s different.”
“It really isn’t.” I pick the glass back up.
“You respect mine because it comes with a helmet. Hers comes with a laptop, so you think it’s a hobby that pays.
But she’s the one who gets up at five to fix something nobody will ever consciously see, and then does it again the next day, and nobody hands her a medal or claps when the truck goes by.
I’ve been doing this for six years, sir, and I have never once had to be that disciplined about anything. ”
Robert Peterson looks at me for a long moment over the rim of his wire frames. Whatever he is looking for, I am too tired and too far past caring to hide it.
“You’re very sure about her,” he says.
I could say a lot of things. Down at the other end of the gallery, in front of a painting about the silence of the universe, the woman I have just been told is better off as a lie is standing by herself.
“Yes,” I say. “I am.”
He nods slowly, finishes his drink, and stands. He puts a hand on my shoulder on the way past, the same gesture as an hour ago, and it does not feel the same at all.
“She’s lucky to have you,” he says.
I sit there with the bourbon after he goes, and the joke of it is so complete that I almost laugh out loud. I just made the best case of my life for a woman who told me twenty minutes ago that the truth would destroy us, and I made it to her father, in a bar, where she could not hear a word of it.
The silence of the universe, as it turns out, is much louder than the gallery owner’s bell.