CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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VICTORIA
“Tori, honey. Get in here before this door takes my arm off.”
Corinne Ashby had to shout it the whole width of the sidewalk.
Corinne used Tori as if the last six days had never happened.
Victoria Russo was what I signed on manifests, and it was what my grandmother called me when she was angry, Bex had given the short one back to me this week. Corinne had never stopped using it.
“You want me in there with you?” Marcus said.
“No.”
He did not start the engine and he did not reach for his door. He looked at the house instead, front window, side gate, the alley mouth past the parked cars, and I watched him put all of it somewhere he could find it again.
“You want me in there with you?”
“No.”
“Asking twice. That’s the deal.” He rolled the car forward and then backed it a length until Corinne’s front door sat square in the windshield. “I’ll be right here. Not near, not gone. Here.”
A patched man in the car across the street lifted two fingers off his steering wheel. Karim’s relief was in place. Marcus waited until I saw him.
Something in my chest let go without asking me, and my hand came off the door handle and back into my lap.
“She’s my dispatcher,” I said. “She’s a fifty-something woman with a kid and a bad knee. There’s nothing in that house.”
“Didn’t say there was.” He turned one of the rings on his left hand with his thumb, once around, and stopped. “You don’t have to tell me any of it, little courier. Not now, not later.”
“You’re not curious.”
“I’m the most curious man you’ll ever meet.” He put his eyes back on the door. “I’m just not owed.”
“It’s cold and it’s going to stay cold,” he said. “I’ve got the thermos, I’ve got the radio, I’m not bored and I’m not hungry.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know I don’t. That’s not what it’s for.” He didn’t look over. “She’s been in that door twice already. She’ll be out a third time.”
Under my sternum there was a pull that had been sitting there since Tuesday, and it got quieter whenever he stopped talking.
My body picked that minute to notice the width of his forearm on the wheel. I put my hand back on the handle.
I got out. The wind took the car door out of my hand and I had to haul it shut with both.
Corinne got an arm around me on the step and squeezed once, hard, the way she had squeezed me at the counter every Christmas for six years. She smelled like cigarettes and drugstore hairspray. The storm door banged behind us and she caught it and it banged again anyway.
Reading glasses hung on a beaded chain against her sweatshirt. On the hall table there was a cut-glass dish full of butterscotch in gold wrappers, and she picked it up and carried it with her, which meant she had put it there for me.
“Take one. Take two, I’ve got a whole bag.”
I took one. The wrapper was loud and my hands were still black in the creases from the anvil that morning, and she looked at that and did not ask.
My right hand closed on nothing, thumb rolling to where a hammer haft sits, because that was the last thing it had been taught. Somebody had stood behind me and put his hand over mine to fix the angle. I lost two seconds in that hallway.
“You didn’t have to drive over,” she said. “I’d have come to you.”
“You called the Forge landline and asked for me by name, Corinne. You’ve never called me anywhere but my cell.”
“No.” She shut the inside door and put her back against it. “I haven’t.”
The kitchen light was burning at a quarter past two in the afternoon. Coffee was already poured into two cups, and it had been on the burner long enough to go bitter and thick, and the whole room had the smell of it under the older scent of smoke in the curtains.
There were dinosaur drawings on the refrigerator, eight or nine of them, a stegosaurus with too many plates and a T. rex with a speech bubble.
On the windowsill over the sink there was a child’s inhaler with a strip of masking tape wrapped around it and a name on the tape in marker. I read it. I did not say it. Neither did she.
I sat down in the chair that let me see the hall, because I do not sit with my back to a door, and the vinyl on the seat was split and cold through my jeans.
Corinne sat down across from me and folded her hands on the table and did not touch her coffee.
“I did it. Nobody made me sign a thing. I did it with my own hand.”
“Did what, Corinne.”
She got up. She came back with a manila folder and slid a single sheet across the table to me, turned around so it faced me, the way she had handed me paper across a dispatch counter for six years.
I read it the way I read anything I am about to carry. Top right, the date. Consignor block. Destination block. Then the standing line for archival transfers, printed there by the form itself, with a single ruled stroke through it in blue ballpoint.
“Two couriers on an archival transfer. That’s the rule. I crossed it out, I initialed it, and I put your name in the box.”
Two letters in the margin, in blue, small and tight and pressed hard enough to emboss the back of the sheet.
“Those are your initials.”
“They are.”
My ears went hot. My hands lay open on the table on either side of that sheet, and somewhere behind my teeth I was counting the strokes of the pen and I could not have told you why.
“They had Teddy’s name written down. In a folder, in an office, with a man sitting behind it.”
She said it looking straight at me. She did not put a hand on her chest and she did not lean forward and she did not once say she was sorry.
“Spelled right,” she said. “First, middle, last. School, and the hours, and which door he comes out of.”
The wind got the storm door again out front and let it slam.
Through the front curtain there was the hood of Marcus’s car and the shine of the windshield. He had been looking at this door the whole time I was inside it, and I came up out of a slump I had not known I was in.
“He turned the page around so I could see it. He didn’t threaten me.
He never said one word you could take to anybody.
” She took her glasses off the chain and set them down.
“I went back to my desk after lunch and I amended the sheet and I sent the confirmation before three o’clock.
Nobody stood over me. That’s what I want on the table before anything else. ”
“You put me in a room with him.”
“I did.”
“You knew what I was carrying was insured for more than the building.”
“I knew it was a book, and I knew they wanted a Russo on the truck, and I told myself that was them being sentimental about an old client.” Her mouth moved. “I’ve told myself a lot of things in a year.”
“You could have put the night man on it. You could have put anybody on it and told them the client’s a crank.”
“They didn’t want anybody. That’s the whole thing, honey, that’s the part I can’t make smaller.
It wasn’t a job that needed a courier. It was a job that needed you.
” She pressed her thumbnail into the tabletop.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you I didn’t know that.
I knew it Tuesday morning and I sent you anyway. ”
“You sent me because—”
“Because I was told to.” She did not blink. “There’s no because that helps you, honey.”
“Say the rest of it.”
“There isn’t any rest of it. I’m not going to build you a reason. I put your name in the box.”
There was a gray sedan going up Fell Street, slow, and I noticed it because it had already gone down Fell Street while I was reading the routing sheet.
I wanted to put my hands around this woman’s throat and I wanted to put my coat over her shoulders and walk her out of her own house, and both of those were sitting in me at the same time, taking up the same space, neither one giving the other any room.
She had been shown her nine-year-old son’s name on a piece of paper by a man in an office. I have never had a child. I know exactly what I would have done and it is what she did.
“Their paper,” I said. “Marchetti and Ward gets a signed receipt back on every job. Every job.”
“Not from them.” She said it fast, like she had been waiting for somebody to ask her that for a long time. “All their paper comes back stamped. Not one signature on any of it, ever.”
“Not one.”
“Six years of files. A stamp with a little bird on it and a date wheel underneath. I used to think it was some big-company thing, legal wouldn’t let them sign, that kind of thing.”
“You don’t think that now.”
“I think there’s nobody in that building who can hold a pen,” she said, and then she laughed at herself, one note, and it didn’t go anywhere. “Listen to me. That’s not even a sentence.”
I thought about a man on the sixty-third floor who would not take a case out of my hands with his fingers, and my scalp tightened, and I put the candy in my mouth so I would have something to do with my face.
“Corinne. Listen to me before you give me anything else.” I put my finger on the ruled-out line.
“I’m going to take this sheet out of your house.
When I do, the people I’m with will keep somebody on this street, and put an escort on that school Monday morning, and they will not ask you first and they will not leave when you tell them to. ”
She was very still.
“That’s a claim on you and I’m making it anyway,” I said. “You don’t get to be polite about this. Your boy doesn’t come out of any door alone again until the man who wrote his name down is finished.”
“And what do they want.”
“What I want. Everything you kept.”
“And if I say no to the men on my street?”
“Then they’ll be on your street anyway and you’ll have said no.” I did not soften it. “I’m not making you an offer, Corinne. I’m telling you what’s going to be true by dark.”
Her chin went, once, and she got it back.
She got up so fast the chair legs shrieked on the linoleum. She reached over the refrigerator, over the drawings, and came down with a shoebox with a rubber band around it, and she held it against her chest for a second before she set it on the table between us.