CHAPTER FIVE
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MARY
The east hall of the Perch runs the length of the floor and ends in a gray steel door, and I was within ten feet of it when somebody said my name.
“Miss Mary Warren.”
Yelena Baranova stood outside my room with folded towels against her hip. Behind her both closet doors were open, pushed back to the wall.
“That’s me,” I said. “You found her.”
She put the towels on the bed and went down the hall. Out over the mainland the sky had gone the brown-black of sugar past amber, and the west windows were brass.
Everything on the rail was a twenty.
I took a coat down before I had decided to. Gray wool, and the shoulder seam sat where a shoulder seam belongs, and the cuff came to my wrist and not two inches up it. Then a shirt, a green dress, jeans cut for a body with a shelf on it, all over my arm before I understood I was hurrying.
Nothing had been let out. Nothing had been taken in. No chalk line at a hem, no second color of thread along a seam, and I have unpicked enough of my own clothes to know it.
Every tag was cut out. Every one, at the seam, neat, the kind of cut a person makes with small scissors. Somebody had sat in here and done it and carried the trash out.
Yelena came back with a laundry basket and folded at the foot of the bed as though the room were empty.
“Who ordered these?” I said. “Yelena. Who ordered them?”
She folded a towel in three.
“I’m going to keep talking, because that’s what I do,” I said. “Somebody sat down with a pair of nail scissors and took the tags out of every piece of clothing in that closet. I’d like to know whose.”
She started the next towel.
“Was it a woman? You could blink.”
The basket moved a foot along the bed and she went with it.
“Somebody knows the width of my foot,” I said. “That’s the part I keep coming back to. You can guess a size twenty off a photograph. Nobody guesses the width of a foot, and there are shoes under that rail that fit me across the instep.”
She squared the corners of a pillowcase.
“I’d take the store. I’m not proud about it. Give me the name of a store and I’ll leave you alone for the rest of your natural life.”
When she spoke she said it to the towel in her hands.
“That isn’t mine to tell you.”
“Okay. Great. Wonderful talk, I feel very oriented.”
She carried the basket out and the door made no sound. My room has no lock. A plate sits over the hole where a thumb turn used to be, four screws, painted to match.
Fear came later. What came first was heat behind my sternum and my hands going fast along the rail. Twenty-nine years old and somebody had bought me a closet of clothes that fit, and I was glad, and that was the one thing in the room I could not look at straight.
I hung the coat back up and shut both doors. My own shoes were not under the bed where I left them.
I found them under the new pairs on the closet rack. Somebody had cleaned the white rims, but the heels were still worn crooked in exactly my way. I put them beside the bedroom door, laces loose.
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Nicolas’s elevator lobby is up three steps. There is a card slot beside the button. I pressed the button and nothing moved. I pressed it again and held it until a small light came on by the slot, orange, the color of a light that means no.
“You and I are going to have a problem,” I said to the panel.
Nicolas had refused me a card in the garage. The panel was merely repeating him.
The service door is off Yelena’s galley. I waited until the laundry was running and turned the handle both ways. Locked, and no keyhole on my side, which I looked at for a while.
That left the fire door at the dead end of the east hall, a bar at hip height painted the same gray as the frame. I put both hands on it and pushed. It opened.
No alarm. Concrete landing, stairwell air ten degrees colder than the house, and the floor number painted on the block wall. Rain had started somewhere below me.
My heart went hard enough to feel in my jaw.
Fifty-one floors of stairs. Twenty-five minutes to Calle Ocho if a car took me.
Two point four million dollars of my brother’s debt with my name under it, a stapled contract in a drawer I had not opened, and Danny somewhere out in this city, and I had to get to him myself or lose him to whatever these men decided on a Tuesday.
“Okay,” I said to the stairwell, and it came back at me twice.
I stood there until the door swung back onto my shoulder. Then I let it close.
It was not the stairs that kept me. Somebody else does the deciding here now, and the part of me that has done it alone since I was sixteen went quiet and would not start up again.
I hated myself the whole length of that hall, past the study, past Rian’s door, and nobody was in it to see me do it, which was worse.
At seven I ate at the island, standing. Yelena set a plate at my elbow and said nothing about my feet. I tried to wash it and she took it out of my hands.
By midnight there was a second stool at the island. Pale ash, unmatched, its feet not quite square to the walnut one.
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The rain quit around one. By two the glass was beaded, the clouds ran east in fast orange strips, and I was at the island in one of the new shirts because I was not sleeping in the room Nicolas gave me.
The elevator came up. Rian came out one-handed under a white bakery box, my grandmother’s hand-painted sign on the lid.
Rian set it on the stone in front of me and opened it.
“Where did you get these?”
“Your shop. Nobody came for them.”
“The Delgados?” I asked.
“You had a deposit in the drawer. It went back to them. We paid another bakery to finish the order.”
“You could have let me finish it.”
“Yeah,” Rian said. “We could.”
He did not call it even. I took a pastry out of the box because I was hungry, and because at least nobody was standing at a party waiting for me.
They were two days cold. The guava had gone to dark jelly and the syrup was tacky. I ate one standing, with my fingers.
“There were four hundred finished and four hundred still to bake in that shop,” I said. “I lost two nights and both my hands on that job, and now what’s left of it is sitting in a box on a counter I’m not allowed to leave.”
“You’re allowed to leave the building.”
“Am I.”
“You’re allowed to leave with somebody.”
“That’s a different sentence.” I licked my thumb. “You know it’s a different sentence, or you wouldn’t have taken the second run at it.”
“Yeah.”
“You drove across town to bring me my own pastry.”
“I brought the box,” Rian said. “The pastry came with it.”
“That’s almost the nicest thing anybody’s done for me all week.”
“It wasn’t a kindness.”
“It was. You practiced it in the elevator.”
Rian looked at the box like it had informed on him.
“Did you break in?”
“Your back door doesn’t lock. It hasn’t locked in—”
Rian shut his mouth in the middle of the word and took a pastelito out of the box.
“I tried your elevator today,” I said.
“I know.”
“How do you know that?”
“There’s a screen downstairs. It lights up when somebody leans on a button for eleven seconds.”
“So there’s a card,” I said.
Rian ate what he was holding, which took a while.
“There’s a card. You don’t have one.”
“Who gets one? Yelena’s got one. The man in the lobby has one. Somebody in this building decided which of us is a person who leaves, and nobody thought to write that down for me.”
“Nicolas has one made or he doesn’t. That’s the whole mechanism, and I’m not going to dress it up so it goes down easier.”
I put a whole one in my mouth, the correct way to eat them, and said nothing about the door at the end of the hall.
“That oven of yours,” Rian said. “The big one at the back. It’s dead, right?”
“It’s been dead six years, and a thermostat isn’t bringing it back.”
“I’ll have a guy put a new thermostat in it Monday.”
“It’s not the thermostat,” I said.
“It’s always the thermostat.”
I had my mouth full and did not wait to empty it.
“It’s a deck oven older than your mother and the stone’s cracked, so what you’d have on Monday is a very accurate dead oven.”
“Cracked how.”
“Corner to corner. You can lay a dollar bill in it. The heat goes out through the crack, the back of the floor runs a hundred degrees cold, and everything on the left comes out raw while everything on the right burns. A thermostat doesn’t have an opinion about any of that.”
Rian put the half he was holding on the lid and did not pick it up.
“Fine.”
That was the whole word. Rian turned the second stool so it faced the room, sat down on the one with its back to the elevator, and looked at the glass.
“You’re going to sulk about an oven.”
“I’m not sulking.”
“You’ve got the face of a man doing long division,” I said.
“I’ve been in kitchens. Nobody’s ever talked to me in one like that.”
“Then you’ve been in the wrong kitchens, and I’d like their names so I know where not to work.”
Rian let that one go by. I sat on the stool he had turned and ate another one.
“Can I ask you something you won’t answer?”
“You’ll ask it anyway, so go on.”
“How much does the cage let a guy like Danny lose in a night?”
Rian answered before he finished chewing, which is the only reason I think he did.
“Not that. Nowhere near that. Nobody lets a kid like him get past—”
“Past what?”
“Ask Nicolas.”
Rian’s mouth shut and stayed shut. I have never once gotten anything out of a man by asking him twice.
I got off the stool to run water over my fingers. When I turned around Rian was at the end of the island, and he put both hands flat on the black stone either side of my hips, and stopped.
Everything in me went tight under the cotton, high and obvious, right where he could see it, and I did not fold my arms over myself.
The stone was warm at the small of my back. My thighs pressed the cabinet doors and the ache set in low and heavy and loud enough that I lost the end of my sentence.
Rian is six feet four and I had to tip my head back to see his face. Heat came off his chest through his cotton and mine. He smelled like soap and rain and hot upholstery, and his hands stayed where he had put them, off line across the knuckles.
“Stop talking for a second,” Rian said.
“I wasn’t talking.”
“You were going to in a second.”
Rian’s mouth came down to an inch above mine and stopped there, the way Nicolas’s had stopped over mine on the terrace the night before.
“You talk when you’re scared. It’s the worst thing about you and I’ve been standing here eleven minutes.”
“I’m not scared, I’m—”
“I’m not touching you tonight. Don’t make it a thing.”
Rian’s hands never came off that counter, not one time, and I could feel every place they were not. Under us the pool filter changed pitch.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to say a thing now, because that is how I’m built, and then you can go.”
“Say it.”
“Does the pakhan know you’re in his kitchen at two in the morning eating stolen pastry?”
Rian laughed. One bark of it, out before he could get a hand on it, and his whole face went furious with itself for the sound.
“It’s my kitchen too.”
Rian took his hands off the stone. He was in the elevator before I had my breath back, he did not say goodnight, and the doors closed on him looking at the floor.
My body was still saying yes to a room he had left. The box sat open on the island with four left in it and the sugar going soft at the edges.
I was still standing at the island with sugar on my fingers when the elevator opened behind me and Nicolas walked in wearing his coat.