Crossroads
Chapter thirty-four
Mandy
The smell of fresh latex paint and industrial carpet cleaner ought to feel like a victory.
It ought to smell like the end of a long, smoking nightmare.
Instead, standing in the middle of this living room at nine in the morning with my hair still smelling of somebody else’s fire, it just smells like someone else’s life.
I got in at two. I did not sleep. At some point around four I stopped pretending to and sat on the floor with my back against the sofa and my laptop open on my knees, and I read the offer from the studio in New York for the twelfth time, and then I started writing.
Not a reply. A list.
It is on the back of an envelope from the insurance company, because that was what was within reach, and it is four lines long, and I have crossed out and rewritten every one of them at least twice.
It has been sitting on the counter ever since, face up, where I have to look at it every time I go past.
Bowie sits by the door, his brown and orange tail twitching with rhythmic suspicion.
He doesn’t recognize the floorboards. He’s spent the last few weeks pacing the wide drafty expanses of Sterling’s loft, conquering the heights of industrial bookshelves and annexing the territory of a firefighter’s heart.
Now he looks around this cramped one-bedroom and produces a vocalization that is unmistakably a review.
He’s looking for the specific drafty corner of the warehouse.
Or maybe he’s just waiting for a man in a department hoodie to come through the door with a handful of expensive treats and a joke I don’t deserve.
The offer has been sitting in my inbox for two weeks like a ticking clock, and the clock runs out today.
A prestigious firm, the kind of place where people say synergy and disruption without irony.
Six figures. A corner office in a city where the air doesn’t taste like the man I’ve spent six years trying not to love.
It’s the clean start my parents have always pushed for. It’s the independence I told myself was the only goal that mattered when I was trying to outrun the shadow of Derek’s control. So why does it look like a floor plan for a very expensive, very lonely cage?
I take it to Kayla at eleven, because I am not brave enough to do this without at least one person having seen it first.
The Inked Teacup is in the lull between the morning rush and lunch, and she is restocking the loose-leaf jars behind the counter with the grim efficiency of a woman who has been on her feet since five. She takes one look at me, puts down the scoop, and pours two cups without asking.
“You look like you slept in a hedge.”
“There was a fire at the Hilton.”
“I heard about the fire at the Hilton. It was on the news at seven, and you were not in any of the footage, which I checked, twice, like a normal person.” She sits down. “Talk.”
I put the envelope on the table between the mugs and slide it across.
She reads it. It takes her about nine seconds, because it is four lines.
Then she reads it again, more slowly, and when she looks up her eyes have gone bright and she is doing a very poor job of pretending otherwise.
“Mands.”
“Is it insane?”
“It’s completely insane,” she says. “They’re a hundred and forty people on Lafayette Street with a waiting list. You’re one designer in a rental with a cat. You have absolutely no leverage whatsoever.” She taps line three with her fingernail. “This one especially. This one is genuinely outrageous.”
“So I should take it out.”
“Don’t you dare take it out.” She pushes the envelope back across the table at me.
“Do you know how long I sat on the idea of this place before I did it? Eleven months. I had the money in an account and a lease I could have signed and I sat on it for eleven months, because as long as it was an idea it couldn’t fail.
” She wraps both hands around her mug. “Ask for the outrageous thing, Mandy. The worst that happens is they say no and you’re exactly where you are now, which, no offence, is in a rental with a cat. ”
***
I drive out to Blanchard afterwards, which I have not done once since the morning of the fire.
I park across the street and just look at it.
The building is a blackened shell, cordoned off with yellow tape flickering in the rising wind.
I look up at the second floor. The window frames are charred skeletons, open to the weather.
That’s where it happened. That’s where the person I used to be, the one who lived for perfect alignment and parental approval and the quiet suffocating stability of men like Derek, went up in smoke.
The gas leak didn’t just take my furniture.
It took out the lie I’d been telling myself about what I needed and who I had to be to deserve it.
I’ve spent weeks trying to rebuild that woman, hunting for her in paint swatches and New York job offers, and she is ash.
She’s been gone since the moment Sterling Hayes picked me up off a curb and called me Sparkles.
Rain starts tapping the windshield, a slow rhythm matching the heavy pulse in my throat.
I reach for the battered sketchbook on the passenger seat.
My hands aren’t steady as I go through the pages.
The whole evolution of me is there in graphite.
Hurried sketches of the firehouse. Detailed studies of the way Sterling’s brow goes when he’s reading a maintenance log.
The way his hands look, strong and scarred and infinitely careful, while he’s making coffee.
I find a blank page near the back and draw two paths.
On the left I sketch the New York skyline.
I draw it the way I see it now, all sharp aggressive angles and cold glass, a silhouette of success that looks beautiful from thirty thousand feet and offers nowhere to sit down.
It’s clean. It’s certain. It’s a life where I’ll never have to think about a twenty-four-hour shift or the smell of smoke, and where I’ll also never have to risk being actually seen.
On the right I draw a single heavy door.
The door to Sterling’s warehouse. It isn’t perfect.
I draw the scuffs at the bottom where the boots hit it.
I draw the handle that’s a little loose, the one he keeps meaning to tighten and never does.
It’s the door I recognize as home. Not because of the building, but because of the man on the other side of it, the man who makes better coffee than my mother and who treats my ambition as a strength rather than a symptom to be managed.
I stare at the page until the ink bleeds a little in the humidity of the car.
I’ve spent my whole life keeping one foot out the door, treating every relationship like a lease I could break if the risk of heartbreak got too high.
Then I used the phrase fake dating like a shield, a way to have the intimacy I wanted without ever admitting I was terrified of losing it.
But the fire taught me that everything is temporary. Everything can burn on a single Tuesday morning. The only thing that stays is the person who grabs your cat and your laptop and tells you to run, and then spends the next three months making sure you never feel the cold.
I don’t want the clean start. I want the messy, loud, terrifyingly real life in Chicago. I want an arrangement with no expiration date on it. I want to be the girl who stays.
***
I make the call at two o’clock from my own kitchen table, because I decided somewhere on the drive back that if I am going to say these things out loud I am going to say them standing in the middle of the life I am asking to keep.
Her name is Diane Okafor and she is the creative director and she has been extremely gracious in eleven emails that I have not answered. She comes up on the screen against a wall of exposed brick with a headset on and a coffee she has clearly forgotten about.
“Mandy. Finally.” She’s smiling. She has no idea. “I was starting to think you’d emigrated.”
“I’m sorry about the delay.”
“Don’t be. Everyone takes a fortnight.” She pulls the coffee toward her. “So. Tell me what you need to hear and let’s get you on a plane.”
And here is where my throat closes, because there is a version of the next ninety seconds where I say something pleasant and non-committal and ask about relocation packages, and I can feel that version sitting right there, fully formed, entirely available.
I put my hand flat on the envelope.
“I’m not going to relocate,” I say.
The pause that follows is about a second long and seems like it lasts a week.
“Okay,” Diane says. Her voice hasn’t changed but her face has, very slightly. “Say more.”
“I want to work with you. I’ve wanted to work with you since I saw the Merrow rebrand in my second year and I have a folder on my laptop that is embarrassing in its thoroughness.
” My voice is doing something wobbly at the edges and I keep going anyway.
“But I’m not moving to New York. My life is in Chicago.
So, what I’d like to propose is that I come on as a consultant rather than staff.
I keep my own studio here. I keep my own clients, which I know is the part you’re going to have a problem with.
And I fly out once a quarter for anything that genuinely has to happen in a room. ”
Silence.
Diane sets the coffee down. She takes the headset off, which I have learned over four years of client calls is almost never good.
“You understand this is the associate creative director role,” she says. “On the Whitlock account. That is not a consultancy.”
“I know.”
“We have people who have been at that firm nine years waiting for it.”
“I know that too.”
“Then help me out, because I have to walk into a room at four o’clock and explain this to two partners.” She leans back. “Why would we do that?”
And this is the part I did not write on the envelope, because I did not know it until my mouth is already open.
“Because you didn’t come to me for a New Yorker,” I say.
“You’ve got eleven hundred of those in a two-mile radius.
You came to me because you saw the Halberd work and the distillery identity and the thing I did for the community kitchen on Ashland, and every single one of those was made here, by somebody who lives here.
If you move me to Lafayette Street and put me in a room with the same forty people who look at the same things, you get a slightly worse version of what you already have.
If you leave me where I am, you get the thing you actually wanted. ”
I stop. My heart is going like a bird in a box.
Diane doesn’t say anything for four seconds, which I count.
“Say the studio part again,” she says.
“I keep my own studio.”
“Do you have one?”
And there it is. The actual question. The one that is going to sink this, because the honest answer is that I have a laptop, a rented one-bedroom that smells of paint, and a cat who does not respect furniture.
“Not yet,” I say.
I do not embellish it. I don’t say I’m in the process of, or I’m looking at spaces, or any of the four cushioning phrases that arrive in my mouth uninvited.
I have spent my entire adult life padding the truth so nobody has to catch it, and I sit in my kitchen with my hands shaking and I let two words go out flat and unaccompanied.
Diane starts laughing.
“Oh, thank God,” she says. “I thought you were about to tell me you had a whole team.”
“I have a cat.”
“Everyone has a cat.” She puts the headset back on, which is the single best thing that has happened to me in nine days.
“Right. Here’s what I’m taking into that room at four.
Consultant, not staff. Chicago. You keep your book, and before you argue, we’ll want first refusal on anything in our sectors and I’m not moving on that.
Quarterly, on us, and I mean actual travel, not a bus. ”
“That’s,”
“I haven’t finished.” She’s typing. “If we’re going to have a person in Chicago, then I don’t want a freelancer with a laptop in a rented flat.
I want an address I can put on the website.
So I’m going to ask for a fit-out budget and a twelve-month underwrite on a storefront lease, and you are going to find me a space and send me photographs of it, and if it’s got a window I can put a name on, so much the better. ”
I cannot speak.
“Mandy.”
“Sorry. Yes. Sorry.” I am crying, which is unprofessional and entirely beyond my control. “Diane, I hadn’t asked for that.”
“I’m aware. That’s why you’re getting it.” A shrug, on a screen, eight hundred miles away. “You asked for the thing you actually wanted instead of the thing you thought you could get away with asking for. Do you know how rarely that happens? I’ll call you tomorrow. Go and have a drink.”
The call ends and I sit in my kitchen looking at a black rectangle with my own blotchy face in it.
The weight that has been sitting on my chest since the morning of the fire, the pressure to perform, to be the perfect daughter, the successful designer, doesn’t lift. It evaporates.
I am not going to New York. I am also not turning it down and calling that a sacrifice.
I have gone and got a version of it that fits inside my actual life, and I did it on a Tuesday afternoon at my own kitchen table with a cat asleep on the chair opposite, and nobody handed it to me and nobody arranged it for me and there is not one single person on this earth I have to be grateful to for it.
It is mine. That’s the whole thing. It’s just mine.
And there is exactly one person I want to tell.
I get as far as the car keys.
Then I stand in my own hallway with the keys in my hand and I think about a man in a doorway on Michigan Avenue counting people out of a stairwell at one in the morning, and I think about his sister saying he’ll want a shower and eleven hours and he’ll be no use to anyone until tomorrow afternoon.
So I put the keys back on the hook.
Tomorrow, then. Tomorrow I will drive to the loft and I will knock on that ridiculous industrial door and I will say all of it, out loud, with nothing to hide behind and nothing arranged in advance and no script and no notebook.
I feed the cat. I go to bed at nine o’clock and I sleep for eleven hours like somebody put me down.
I do not get to go to him tomorrow.
Because at ten past eight the next morning, somebody knocks on my door.