Chapter 20
By the time she reached the harbor walk, she had most of Monday planned.
The nine-fifteen conference would have to move.
She’d need to tell Petra, who would take it well, and then send three follow-ups before midnight.
There was the document list to send and the statement Dinah wanted ready for the reporter, plus a dozen smaller tasks to do after.
Somewhere in the middle of recalling the list came the thought that none of it would be hers to handle much longer. She set it down and kept walking.
The peonies and sweet peas had bloomed along the harbor walk all at once the week before, four blocks of them, thick and slightly ridiculous. She noticed them about as much as she noticed the crosswalk signal.
She'd had a bagel at eight that morning and nothing since.
She noticed it about as much as the weather, a fact about someone else.
The air had gone heavy and still, the dry spell finally about to break.
Millie would have made her eat before a day like this one.
The thought arrived and she moved past it, onto the note for Harriet's office and the Thursday reshuffle, up the steps under the maple tree and through the front door and up the stairs to her own.
She got the key in on the second try. Inside, she set the bag down on the floor by the boxes and reached for the next thing to do, but there wasn't one.
She stood in her own foyer in her coat with the lamp off and the room dark blue at the edges, and in the quiet where the next task should have been she heard her own voice, from six-thirty that evening, perfectly clearly.
Of course, ma'am.
She'd said it to Cordelia in a room full of people, and Cordelia had nodded and turned back to the schedule without a break in her voice. She sighed as she took off her coat and hung it up on the hook by the door.
In the kitchen, she poured a glass of water she didn't drink and opened her laptop. The note from Cordelia was already there, waiting for her, sent to eleven people not too long after she had left the office. It was only four paragraphs, but it was good, factual. Cordelia had said what the day had actually been instead of calling it a challenge, and she didn’t use the word team.
There was a line about Veronica and a line about how Dinah said the right thing and near the bottom, in a list with four other names, it said, Wren, who caught the sentence nobody else did.
She had been here before.
Vivian Park was the first, when she was twenty-three.
She had spent four years of knowing what Vivian wanted before Vivian herself did, had a phone that was never off, and an apartment she'd picked for convenience.
When Millie had died, Vivian sent lilies and a card that was signed with her full name.
Helena Marsh came three years after that, a novelist who needed someone to manage everything so she could write.
Two years of it. In the end, the book got finished, and it sold well.
Wren's name appeared in the acknowledgments, wedged between the copy editor and the woman who ran the fellowship office.
Then the consultancy, where she'd run the office for two partners who said, “we don't know what we'd do without you,” so often it stopped meaning anything to her. When Wren gave her two-weeks’ notice, neither of them asked her why.
And then, Millie. She put both hands flat on the counter.
Eighteen months of it. She'd moved north, given up the lease, and learned which nurse to ask for.
Near the end, Millie couldn't work the pill organizer open anymore, and Wren had done it for her every morning.
Millie had watched her hands and said, “what would I do without you,” and meant it.
And it felt good. It always felt good. That was the worst of it.
She'd made herself necessary to her grandmother too.
It was the only way she knew how to love anybody. And Millie had let her.
It was an ugly thing to think about a woman who had died nearly a year ago. She waited for it to fall apart the way unfair thoughts usually did, but it didn't.
And under it, the part that had taken this long for her to realize was that none of them had really known her. Vivian hadn't, neither had Helena. The partners knew her hours, but that was about it.
On the other hand, Cordelia knew how she took her coffee. She knew Millie's name. She'd seen Wren asleep and seen her come apart. She knew the version of her that nobody at work would recognize. Cordelia knew her.
And yet, despite all that, today, Cordelia had looked right at her for nine hours and had only seen an assistant.
A capable one, to be sure, but just the nearest set of hands to help out to avoid a crisis.
It could have been anyone sitting in that chair, and Cordelia would have treated them the same.
Being invisible to a stranger was one thing. But this was Cordelia, and she had still looked right through her and only saw her for what she could do professionally. She opened a blank email and wrote her resignation. It took eleven minutes, most of it spent on the second sentence.
The professional voice came easily, even now.
She gave her two weeks’ notice and said she was grateful for the opportunity, keeping the tone polite and impersonal.
When she went to give a reason, she stopped.
There wasn't one she could type. “You know me and you looked through me anyway” was true, but it wasn’t a thing you put in a letter. She left the space blank.
She read it once. It was good. Of course it was good. She was good at this. She saved it to drafts, sat still for a moment, and then went to get her keys.
The purple door was propped open a hand's width, the same it always was when the ovens had been running, and the bell gave its one clear note as Wren pushed through.
The place had mostly cleared out. Two women sat at the far end of the long table, their heads bent over a laptop together, and nobody claimed the armchairs yet.
Lavender stood behind the bar drying glasses, wearing a dove-gray cardigan with the sleeves shoved up past her elbows and her silver rings catching the glint from the lights.
She looked up as the door swung shut and had Wren read by the time she reached a stool.
Lavender didn't ask her anything. She took down the squat dark bottle, poured the whiskey into a short glass, and set it on the bar. Then she went away and came back with a plate of bread and butter and put that down next to it.
"Food first," Lavender said, and moved off down the bar.
Wren ate the bread and sipped the whiskey.
She wasn't hungry and hadn't been all day, but by the second piece her jaw had let go of something it had been holding since morning.
Rain came down the front window in sheets, and one of the women at the table laughed at whatever was on the screen.
For the first time in days, there was no one in the room who needed anything from her. It should have felt freeing.
The doorbell chimed again about ten minutes later. She didn't turn around. A wet umbrella came past her shoulder and Remy Hale-Dalisay dropped onto the next stool, hair dark at the ends from the rain, and blew out a breath.
"It is absolutely coming down out there."
“What made you brave the storm to come here?”
“You, actually.” Remy pushed her hair back. "I tried your street first, which is deranged, I know. I don't even have your address. Walked up and down it like I was delivering something. Then I thought, no, she'll be here. And here you are."
Lavender set a glass of white wine in front of Remy without being asked. Remy said thanks and turned it by the stem.
"I heard today was bad," she said.
"It was long."
"Yeah." Remy looked at the bar. "Okay. I'm going to say something. I rehearsed it in the rain for forty minutes and it kind of became a little loopy, so it's going to come out worse than the version in my head."
"They usually do."
"My mother does something." She turned the gold ring on her middle finger, once.
"Under enough pressure, she disappears inside herself.
She's there and the work gets done—the work gets done beautifully—but there's nobody home.
You can stand right in front of her and she'll look at you, but none of it reaches her. Not really."
Wren held the tulip-shaped whiskey glass but didn't drink from it.
"She's done it since I was little. After my mama died, it stopped being once in a while." Remy kept her voice level. "I was twenty. I lost one mother in April and the other one somewhere around June, except the second one still showed up to dinner every Sunday."
"Remy…"
"No, I know. I'm getting there." She drank some wine and set it down. "My mama had a name for it. She used to call it the executive coma."
Wren put the glass down carefully.
"Which sounds insane when I say it out loud.
" Remy's mouth moved, not quite a smile.
"It was a joke. She'd say it at breakfast. ‘She's in the executive coma, she'll be back Thursday.’ And she could joke about it, because she could snap her out of it.
I never figured out how she did it. She'd put a hand on the back of my mom's neck at the sink, and my mother would come back into her own body like somebody turning on a lamp.
" She stopped. "Then my mama died, and there was nobody left who could do that so it just kept going.
Eight years. That's not a dip, Wren. That's just how she lives now. "
Rain ran down the window. Wren turned her wrist over on the bar and pressed her thumb between the tendons below the worn leather band of Millie's watch.
She'd known by four that afternoon. Standing in the doorway with the call sheet while Cordelia pushed a meeting fifteen minutes and never looked up, she'd known it in her stomach before she had the words.
What she hadn't known was that this had lasted for eight years and her late wife had loved her enough to give it a name and reached through the fog to pull her out of it.
"I wanted you to have the name for it. Because when it happens and you don't know what it is, you think it's about you."
"That’s exactly what I thought it was."
"Yeah." Remy looked at her straight on and didn't soften it. "Okay. I want to ask you something, and I know I've got no right to. You don't owe me anything. Don't quit over it."
Wren said nothing.
"I don't mean to stay forever. I don't know what's between you and her, and I'm not asking.
I just mean don't let her coping mechanism be the thing that decides whether you stay or leave.
" She twisted the ring again. "Because you don't know what I've watched since April.
She's there. She looks at people. She laughed at something Lauren said in a hallway in May, and I stood there afterward like an idiot because I hadn't heard her laugh like that in eight years.
" Her voice tipped and she pulled it back.
"That started when you turned up. I'm not putting anything on you; I don't even know what it is.
I'm telling you my mother came back to herself this spring, and I've been so careful not to say it out loud in case it spooked her away. "
"Remy…"
"I'm not telling you it's fine. It was never fine; I’ve had eight years of it not being fine.” She picked up the wine and set it down without drinking. “I’m asking as her daughter. That’s all this is. Someone you barely know, asking you not to disappear over a bad moment.”
The two women at the long table packed up their laptop and went out into the rain, sharing an umbrella. The bell chimed, and the room became quieter around them.
“I hear you,” Wren said.
“Okay.”
“I can’t promise anything. I don’t even know what I’m going to do yet.”
Remy nodded slowly and let her shoulders come down. For a second, she looked about nineteen, young and hopeful. “That’s fair. That’s more than fair.” She bumped her shoulder into Wren’s and left it there a moment, then reached over and stole a piece of bread off Wren’s plate.
They sat. Neither of them said anything more about it, and neither of them left for a while.
Wren was home by twenty past eleven. The rain had thinned to a drizzle by then, and the peonies along the harbor walk hung bent under the wet of it. She left the overhead light off and sat down in the green chair with her coat over the arm. The phone rang at half past.
"There you are," Lillian said. "I called at three and got your voicemail, which you have not once let happen. I've spent all afternoon deciding whether to be worried or annoyed."
"I was at the office. Bad day at work."
"Mm." Lillian let it sit. A chair creaked somewhere on her end. "How bad?"
"Fairly."
"All right, little bird."
Wren shut her eyes. It still caught her, that name, in Lillian's voice and not her grandmother’s, and she sat with the phone to her ear.
"You'll tell me when you're ready," Lillian said. "I'm not going anywhere. I'm eighty-two, and I've got nothing but time and a stack of overdue library books."
"I will."
"Good. And remember to eat something."
"I did, actually."
"Well then." A pause, and then something close to a laugh. "Goodnight, little bird."
The call ended. Wren sat in the dark with the phone in her lap and the drizzle sliding down the window.
She stared at Cordelia’s number until the phone screen darkened, and she didn’t turn it on again.
After a while, she reached behind her and pulled Millie's afghan down off the back of the chair, spread it over her knees, and left the resignation letter where it was, unsent.