Chapter 7
Elena
Three weeks into this job, and I’ve developed what I’m choosing to call a system.
It’s not a real system. It’s survival with better lighting.
But I’ve been awake since four-thirty this morning helping Nadia load peonies into a van on a street that smelled like wet concrete and diesel, I’ve answered somewhere around twenty phone calls from people who could not care less about my wellbeing, and I’ve eaten two granola bars over the course of eight hours, so I’m calling it a system and I’m allowing myself to feel good about it.
The basics: I show up. I dress with intention, which is a generous way of saying I spend ten minutes every morning choosing whatever has the best shot at making Patrick Aldera look at me for longer than a second.
He mostly doesn’t. But optimism is free, and I have very little else going for me at seven AM.
I answer the phones. I manage the calendar with the confidence of someone who understands what she’s managing, which is mostly an act, but a convincing one.
Patrick has not fired me, which means either I’m better at this than I think or he’s stopped expecting competence and is simply grateful for warm-body continuity.
My first paycheck came through on a Friday.
Real money, sitting in my account with Aldera’s name attached, and I stared at it long enough that Nadia came over to see what I was looking at.
It covers exactly one month of my share of the rent and leaves enough for groceries if I’m not precious about it.
I’m not going to count what it doesn’t cover.
I’ve been counting what money doesn’t cover since I was eight years old, and it has never once made more money appear, so I’ve decided, deliberately and with full awareness, to stop.
Patrick, for his part, has built something very like a wall between us.
After The Incident on the couch—capitals, no elaboration, my nervous system can’t sustain a full replay—I assumed I’d come in the next morning and find HR standing at my desk with a box and a prepared statement.
He didn’t do that. He came in, went directly to his office, closed the door, and resumed being himself: controlled, elegant, precise, completely unknowable.
He speaks to me the bare minimum required to keep his life running.
Yes. No. Put him through. Move the Thursday call.
If I walk into his office with something he needs, he takes it without looking up.
He does not reference what happened on the couch.
He does not ask how I am. He does not look at me for more than a second at a time.
I think I frightened him more than I frightened myself, which is saying something, because I frightened myself considerably.
It has happened before. Not often, and not in a long time, but it has happened.
Just never in front of anyone. Never in front of someone like him, which makes it worse in a specific way I can’t fully explain, this beautiful, controlled, unknowable man who is also my boss, which means there is no version of it that isn’t catastrophic.
That’s what I was thinking in the ten seconds after I came back to myself: not what woke me up, not the images still dissolving at the edges of my vision, but that he was there. That he saw it.
What woke me up wasn’t just his hand on my shoulder. It was where his hand on my shoulder sent me.
The first foster home. I was eight. Nadia was twelve.
The father and his son, I don’t say their names, not to anyone, not even in my head anymore, they came in the middle of the night.
They were careful about it. Quiet. They made sure not to disturb Nadia’s side of the room, stepping around the cots with the particular deliberateness of people who had thought about this.
They took me to the backyard. The grass was wet.
The fence had a latch that clicked too loudly, so they left it ajar.
And then they beat me until I passed out.
I don’t remember the last part—just the grass and the fence and then nothing.
I woke up in my bed. I don’t know how I got there.
My ribs were broken, three of them, though I didn’t know the number until much later.
My face was something I couldn’t look at directly.
Everything hurt in the deep, total way that makes you very still, not from bravery but because movement costs too much.
I didn’t make a sound. I lay there in the dark, completely silent, because I was certain that if they heard me awake, they would come back.
They did come back. To pack our things into two garbage bags and leave them by the front door.
They told the social worker I had escaped.
Run away. That Nadia had gone with me. That was the story, and it held, because I didn’t want to tell the truth.
It was my fault, and I felt terrible that Nadia had to face the consequences.
We went to the next foster home. Then the one after that. Nadia slept in the cot next to mine in every single one and never once asked me what happened that night, because she already knew.
I’m not telling Patrick any of that. I’m not telling anyone.
I’m just explaining, to myself, alone, in the privacy of my own head, why a hand on my shoulder in a quiet office on a Tuesday afternoon sent me somewhere I didn’t want to go.
Why I woke up crying in front of a man who was trying to help me and couldn’t be anything other than what I am, which is a person whose body keeps a record of things her brain has tried very hard to file away.
The fact that he hasn’t talked to me since that day should feel like mercy. It feels like standing outside in January with my nose against a warm window.
I’ve found ways to cope with his silence.
The computer at my desk has become a conversational partner.
In my head, his name is Bernard. Bernard and I have an excellent working relationship: he gives me information without sighing, never implies I should have a better grasp of the email system, and holds all my bookmarked audition pages without comment.
I’ve found three open calls so far that don’t conflict with the nine-to-five, which is three more than I had last week.
I close those tabs the moment I hear Patrick’s door handle.
There’s also the peace lily. The one I found dying.
I have been talking to every morning while I pretend to make progress on the email inbox that currently reads four thousand, two hundred, and something unread, which, at this point, is less a task and more a geological feature.
The lily is improving. The leaves are less gray at the edges.
Less resigned. I’m choosing to take this personally, as a compliment.
And then there is Patrick.
This is the part of the system I have not managed to manage.
I think about him all the time. I’ve tried not to.
I’ve applied real effort to the project and failed because imagination doesn’t care about effort.
The imagination is a feral, self-sustaining thing.
Give it one real detail, the particular way he removes his jacket when it gets late, folding it over the back of his chair with the same two precise movements every time, and it will build a cathedral out of it.
It will furnish the cathedral. It will put him in the cathedral and give him things to say, do, and feel while I’m not watching.
I’ve imagined him brushing his teeth. Would he be fast and military about it, done in under two minutes, efficient even in private?
Or slow, half-awake, elbow on the counter, taking his time in the one part of the morning that doesn’t require performance?
I’ve given him a morning playlist he’d never admit to.
I’ve given him a preferred breakfast and a complicated relationship with it.
I’ve given him brothers somewhere, or one brother, somebody he checks in with in a way that’s brief and genuine and nothing like how he talks to anyone here.
I’ve given him an inner monologue that’s considerably more generous than the one he shows the office.
In this version, he wonders if he’s being too hard on people.
He wonders if the woman at the desk outside his door can tell he notices her.
I’m aware. I’m completely aware of what I’m doing, and I’m doing it anyway, because it’s technically free and it keeps me from staring at the inbox and spiraling.
Here is what the imaginary Patrick has given me, practically speaking: a reason to dress carefully in the morning.
A reason to bring a cookie on Tuesdays, to ask if he slept well with exactly enough casual brightness that it reads as ordinary friendliness rather than the intelligence-gathering operation it actually is.
He answers, and I count this as a win. Not warmly.
Fine. Yes, it was fine. But he answers, and sometimes in the half-second after an answer, when he looks at me before looking away, I think, privately, with full awareness, this might be completely fabricated, that he doesn’t mind the questions as much as he wants to.
That the answers are small things he’s handing over on purpose.
In my head, obviously, he’s dying to tell me everything. He lies awake at night thinking of things to say. In my head, I’m the most interesting person he’s encountered in years.